by David Xavier
“That won’t save ya.”
The lawman stepped aside and faced the crowd. He spoke quickly.
“Salomon Pico you are sentenced to death by hanging for the murders of Virgil and George Blitters, and the attempted murder of the esteemed Doctor Harold McCarthy. Any last words?”
The criminal began to heave his breath in great suffocating cries under the hood, the fabric billowing in and out. The lawman looked to the deputy again. The deputy shrugged. The lawman stepped across the platform and leaned in close to the murderer.
“You ought not to have killed those men, Mexican.”
Facing the gallows, two of the bounty hunters looked on, faces in the crowd. One leaned his head forward and looked to the left and right.
“Ain’t he back yet?”
“Went to get his nose fixed last night. I ain’t seen him.”
The trapdoor opened with a great clack and the prisoner fell through. Few people in the crowd turned their faces, but all winced when the body bounced on the rope and ceased to twitch.
At a distance, Salomon Pico and Arturo Leyva watched the scene from between a couple of empty tents they’d crept up on. A body swaying on a rope, a lawman standing on the platform looking down through the trapdoor with his pocketwatch in hand. The crowd turning to leaving a few at a time.
“We’d better get on. Before they call for a second show.”
Salomon put his sombrero on. They turned in their crouch and walked low to their horses. Salomon could not open his legs wide but he managed to swing onto his pony. He tugged the pants at his groin.
“He wasn’t a short man? The man with the broken nose.”
“What?”
Salomon held his arms forward and looked at his exposed wrists.
“He wore his clothes too small.”
“Let’s get on. As soon as they lift that hood they’ll be riding out after you.”
Salomon looked back at the scene. “If they lift that hood. They might bury me without checking.”
Arturo nodded. “They will look. They only have the one hood.”
They ducked into the lawman’s empty tent before riding out into the soapweed and sage, the sand and joshua trees. Salomon pulled his holsters around his chest. He drew his pistolas a few times. Slow at first, then fast. He checked the pouches slung on either side and cursed.
“What?” Arturo said.
“What?”
“What was in the pouches?”
“Gold.”
“No fooling?”
“Just little ones.”
They rode along and after a while, Arturo nodded to the rifle tied at the side.
“Is that your rifle?”
“It is now. I was just hanged for killing the man it belonged to.”
“Looks like it’ll shoot through six men.”
Salomon nodded. “It’ll knock you back.”
They crossed creekbeds and followed arroyos, their horse hoofs echoing against the red walls. They went into the hills and forests and camped beneath the mammoth overhang of a giant redwood. They moved about in miniature at its base. Salomon held his palms to the trunk and looked up. He came down to their fire, his shadow growing big behind him. He looked back again.
“When do these stop growing?”
Arturo was on his knees. He spoke into the fire. “I don’t know. Awhile yet. One day, maybe they will grow so large that it will be quicker for man to cut through them than to go around.”
Salomon looked down at him. Arturo had grown large. He had a powerful weight to him, and he wore a large mustache. His face was drawn, the way men become with much more age, and there was a hollowing at his cheeks.
“You look different, my friend.”
“Maybe that’s why they have not found me. You have grown up yourself.”
“Are you still wanted?”
Arturo laughed. “I have made that list in a few towns.” He tossed his poking stick in the fire and crawled back, leaning against a log he’d brought over. “I never thought anyone would put you on one of those lists.”
Salomon stared into the fire. “I never thought so either.”
After a moment Arturo spoke. “I am sorry about Juana. And your son. If I were around I would have done everything I could have done to help. Including shooting those men for you. And that doctor.”
Salomon held a stick, flexing it.
“If I had been there to shoot the doctor,” Arturo said, “you would not be a sought after criminal.”
Salomon did not speak.
“What will you do now?”
“Get my cattle. Go south.”
“To do what? Go back to the life of a ranchero? A wanted ranchero.”
“They are buying cattle down there at twice the price the army bought them for.”
“You want to sell to the very men who killed your family?”
The stick snapped in his hands and he blinked. Salomon glanced over, his face still held toward the fire. “I’m not like you, Arturo.”
“Our names are on the same lists, remember.” Arturo leaned forward, his face taking the firelight. “You are like me now.”
Later that night as the fire burned to coals, Salomon spoke into the night, “No, I’m not.”
Arturo lifted his head. “What?”
“I’m not like you.”
In the morning they rode on, day and night through that dry and rippled land, collecting scattered cattle, all with the Pico brand scorched in their hides. They watered at Roca Tanques, the clear pools among the sandstone fingers rising in the flatland desert like the tip of ancient buried ruins. Salomon sat with his pistolas in his lap, his boots off and feet in the water, ankles showing beneath high pants.
They rode on, two riders and a dozen skittish cattle, and came upon a fresh campsite, the blackened remains of cut branches. Arturo was off his horse and kneeling at the camp’s edge, touching the prints in the dirt and moving on his heels in a squat.
“You see this?”
“Yes. How many?”
“Three men. Four. But four or five pack mules. They’re riding heavy.”
The tracks led through a clearing. The riders had made several stops short distances from each other, where they would track off into an outcropping and test the soil before carrying on. Their path went on towards a sandy gulch where water once flowed, rocks high on both sides. Arturo rode in without stopping and Salomon followed, leaving their small herd of wanderers at the opening of the gulch. It was midday when Arturo rode into the camp with a smile, Salomon behind him.
The men stood unarmed from a campfire as the two came near. One of the men stood with the fire at his back. Yards beyond the camp the pack mules stepped about on a rope. Their packs were stripped from their backs and set against the rock wall. Sticking from one of the packs was a rifle in a scabbard. Against the stones near the fire leaned a shotgun with the barrel cut down. A shovel stuck from the dirt nearby.
The two desperados sat their horses side by side. A bird’s rippled shadow raced along the sand from gulch entrance to exit, yet no man looked up.
“What do you want? Speak up, Mexicans. Hey, say something.”
Arturo spoke. “I want your gold.”
He pulled his pistola and shot the first man, sending him heels up and pitching over the fire. One man shrank to a crouch and went for the short shotgun, looking back and forth from the bandit’s face and his shot partner’s as he moved, pawing for the shotgun with one hand. The other man went for the mules.
Arturo dismounted and tore the shovel from the earth, swinging it crossways from shoulder to hip, catching the man’s skull and dropping him in a heap by the fire. He looked to the mules. The last American was steps away from grabbing the rifle. Arturo shouted to Salomon and Salomon kicked his horse forward. He called to the man to stop but the man did not. He pulled a pistola and called out again. Arturo shouted once more as the American swung the rifle barrel around, and Salomon fired, sending the man to rest backward among the
throne of mule packs.
Salomon collapsed in heavy breathing to sit about the fire coals, as if hours had passed since they had appeared before these men. But these men were here and gone within seconds, and Arturo was up rolling the dead man off the packs and sorting through bags of gold dust and holding gold nuggets to the sun.
It was still midday and there was a hunk of meat skewered and sizzling above the embers. The American bodies lay around. The first man to take a bullet lay sprawled with one hand in the coals. Salomon kicked dust at the burning fingers and finally picked it up around the sleeve and tossed it over its owner’s chest. When Arturo came down Salomon was slumped staring down between his own feet. Arturo tossed him some clothing.
“Those should fit, if you don’t mind wearing dead man’s clothes.”
Salomon looked at the clothing for a moment and moved his shoulder. The clothes dropped. Arturo picked at the cooked meat, pulling his fingers back and sucking them before trying again at a piece. He tossed a small bag at Salomon’s feet. Salomon looked up.
“They were amateur at best, but there’s enough gold packed away with the mules to buy a small herd. To buy a small spread and start your rancho. To buy whatever supplies you need.”
Arturo took up the shotgun and sat with it across his lap. He turned it over in his hands, checking the load and working the hammer.
“Who in the hell cuts the barrel off a gun like this?”
Salomon did not answer.
“Look at the barrel,” Arturo said. “Look. What sort of man does this?”
Salomon stood and grabbed the dead man by the shoulders and dragged him away. He set him resting near the rock wall, and rolled him to face it. He was about to do the same for the man Arturo had hit with the shovel, but when he grabbed his shoulders the man’s head dropped, bouncing on his neck, and spilled. Salomon fell back and kicked himself away. Arturo laughed. Salomon looked over and spoke from his back.
“What’s wrong with you?”
Arturo brought his head up and spat. “Let’s go, my friend. Let the wolves have their pickings.”
They led out with the five weighted mules, the American horses, and their ragtag herd of cattle. Arturo wore the short shotgun at his back, slung across his body by a leather strap the owner had fashioned. They rode under sun and moon, watering at a creek and staking the mules and horses. Their herd had grown the closer they got to the rancho, and the cattle roamed about in the darkness. Salomon stood out in the grass with one foot in front of the other, looking way out on the dark band of creek.
“We keep following this creek. We should be there by midday tomorrow.”
“You know what they named this creek?”
Salomon came back in toward the campfire. “What?”
“They named it Haven Creek.”
Salomon did not speak. Arturo looked up. “Who named it that?” Salomon said.
He shrugged. “Americans. Coming over.”
Salomon woke with the moon still out and readied the mules, taking no care to be quiet. Arturo looked up every so often and buried his face, until the camp was broke around him and the mules strung on a rope. He tossed his blankets aside and sat rubbing his face like a huge child as Salomon led out.
They came upon the adobe hacienda under the oak shade that afternoon. Salomon let his small herd scatter. The house had hid itself again behind vines. The bunkhouse was quiet, no sign of his vaqueros. The corrals and stables lay empty of anything but stirring dust. The garden that Juana once cultivated, where little José Dolores once crawled, had withered and blown dead, the rows now half-filled with driven sand.
The graves remained lumped and undisturbed, far from the house, behind their own picket fence the vaqueros had made for them. Salomon dismounted and approached slowly, stepping over the fence. Pulling his sombrero off, he went down on one knee and touched Juana’s grave. Arturo sat his horse. Salomon’s shoulders heaved and his breathing became hoarse. He stayed that way for a long time, but when he stood again Arturo saw his face was dry, his eyes hooded and dark.
Salomon went to the hacienda. He pushed open the door and stood inside. It held the dull smell of use. Particles drifted in the bars of sunlight leaning against the windows. People had been inside. They had dined at the table and used the fireplace. They had slept in the beds. Salomon rolled an old newspaper.
Arturo led the horses and mules to the stables and began to strip their saddles and packs, but he stopped when he saw a black cloud rise above the hacienda. The mules kicked and stamped, and Arturo ran from the stables. Salomon was facing the hacienda in the yard with a torch held low. He did not shield his face from the heat, but let it burn in his eyes, and Arturo stopped when Salomon turned them upon him.
“Keep them saddled,” he shouted. “We’re moving on. There’s going to be no haven here for anybody. My family will rest undisturbed.”
They watched on horseback from a distance as the flames reached as high as a buzzard stalks, and ash drifted over the yard in a swath of black where the breeze tossed it. They sat watching until the flames died to small flags waving from the ruins, and the remains burned white as ivory. Salomon turned his horse and kicked it into a run, shouting and waving an arm as he rode in a wide arc to gather his cattle.
They drove the small herd through wind and rain, through dust. They drove across flatland and through hills and sparse grass. One of the mules rolled on a talus descent and limped along lame. Salomon stripped it of its load and dropped it with a bullet to the skull.
When they reached Santa Maria they drove the herd, now a herd of thirty, through the streets followed by the pack mules carrying dust. Salomon looked around while Arturo held his head low, beneath his hat brim.
“Are you wanted here or something?”
Arturo gave him a glance. “I don’t know.”
A boy followed close behind, leaping catlike along the boardwalks and hiding behind posts and sidewalls. He looked much like Salomon did as a boy and Salomon smiled to himself as the boy snuck along beside them. He swung his arm and pointed to the boy with his thumb up, and whispered the noise of a gunshot. The boy stopped in midstride, his sneaking spoiled. He hesitated before turning to run, and when he did his mother was there behind him. She spoke a word to the boy and took him by the arm, and during this, Salomon watched her and saw her green eyes on dark skin. She returned his look briefly before disappearing around a corner.
At the Land and Grant offices, Salomon slid from his horse as the cattle gathered around and blocked the street. He took two pouches of gold dust from one of the mules and walked inside. Arturo sat horseback and watched the cattle and mules.
A short man with round glasses hooked around his ears sat slumped over papers at a single desk in the room. Salomon put one pouch of gold dust on the desk.
“I want to buy some land.”
The man looked up from his papers and poked the bag once. He spoke into his papers. “I do not deal in gold or dust.”
“It is all I have.”
“You will have to go to the bank and trust in Pueblo de Los Angeles and get that traded first. That is as useless to me as a bag of sand. How am I to divvy up the value?” He shook his head. “Every man with their first bag of dust thinks they are impressive.”
“I am a ranchero.”
The man set the papers down and peeled his glasses off. He looked up. “I know it. You no more mined that gold from rock and creek than I did.”
Salomon stood still. The man looked at him without blinking. At last he cracked a smile and spoke with his hands. “Rancheros are smarter than that. Rancheros have more gold than any prospector, unless they hit a jackpot.”
Salomon breathed again. “I’m not looking for much. I want good land. That I can raise more cattle on.”
He pulled the second pouch of dust from his waistband and placed it beside the first.
“And you keep the excess.”
The man pointed to the wall where hung a map with marks and shadings. �
��Take your pick. There is not an acre south of Salinas that is not good for cattle. They’ll get so fat you cannot move them.”
Outside, Arturo was trotting a stray back to the herd. Salomon walked out with a land deed held high.
“I hope you are ready to be rich.”
They started with a small spread south of Santa Maria, the Rancho Los Alamos. Salomon could ride from one end of the property to the other in a few short days. They slept under the stars and built a thatch-roofed mud hut so small they could hear each other sleep. The remaining gold dust, a few light pouches, they hid in an old tree stump blackened by lightning. They sat their horses and looked over the scattered herd.
“We won’t get rich off this ragged bunch.”
“No.”
“And I don’t know the first thing about being a ranchero, Sal. The first time you send me out to buy cattle I’ll come back with a proud herd of goats.”
Salomon looked at him. “I had better go with you then.”
They left their herd and rode south with the few pouches of dust. They stopped only to water and rest their horses, and night and day switched over their slumped backs without a change in their progress.
They came to a small village where children ran naked among huts made of woven sticks and sod where figures cut the light inside. Firepits dotted the ground and lined the way between larger shelters of cut straw which stood like hollowed mounds. Against the hillside were dugout dwellings. Women stood in the sun and stripped a hanging carcass, and girls placed bread on a woven mat near the kiln. Men sat across from each other with their arms over their knees where they gave quick gestures as they spoke in counsel. They were Chumash indians, reduced in numbers by recent sickness.
As the riders approached, a small boy came out of hiding. His hair grew long except on the front of his skull where it had been clipped close and stuck up stiff. He was naked apart for a small hide pocket tied at his waist. From it he drew a knife made of chipped stone and swapped it back and forth between hands under hooded eyes. Arturo smiled and pulled his knife, the coarse metal blade a foot long, dull on the flat sides but glinting sunlight where it held its edge. He hefted it and flipped it blade over grip once. The boy held still and watched with his mouth slightly parted and hands slowly fading to his sides. Arturo put the knife away. Four Chumash warriors had assembled and stood stonefaced behind the boy, holding spears and clubs of whalebone. Salomon gestured to trade.
