by David Xavier
Beneath the pouch of gold, he had left one more thing. Wrapped in a dish towel was the large dragoon’s pistola. Marisela Valderez held the pistola dangling by the grip. She turned at Vicente’s voice. He was standing in his bedroom doorway.
“I can show you how to use it.”
Arturo left Salomon’s his horse at the stables, and he and Marquez slept in the hills overlooking Santa Maria, where they could see the glowing hovels and moving shadows, and any riders coming in and out. Salomon rode out alone, a single ride on those rolling valleys. His men came down from the hills and joined him at a trot.
“Who is this man upon Salomon’s pony?” Arturo smiled. “You have cleaned up, Sal. You no longer smell like a horse’s ass.”
“You could have used a bath yourself.”
“I could have. But I needed a woman’s warmth first. Marquez did too.”
“Yes I did.”
“And some men came asking questions. Asking about you. About us. We had to leave before they got too wise.”
They rode back along the hills north of Santa Maria with turned heads to the hogbacks, ridged and waved, seeming to rise and fall black and fringed white on the horizon like the breaching backs of prehistoric whales. Their horses trotted upon the desert shards, passing the bones of animals half blown to dust, their ribs emerging from the eroding sands and sheltering scurried rodent tracks like the empty cages of some desert observer. They rode through sage and ragweed, and under swaying pines that dropped their needles one by one in their path. The pines thinned out and strung themselves singlefile up a ridge until one tree led the way, like a messiah and its followers, and the riders found themselves in sands again.
Along the ridge rose the dust of a caravan, building into a rolling storm born of itself. The first rider appeared carrying a short flag of some nation or creed unknown, and more riders appeared along with boxed stagewagons and sets, and riders in colored clothing like that of outcasts, and magician buggies driven by men in strange hats, and the trains of mules and horses of an army yet they carried no weapons and dressed in no uniforms, growing larger as the length of them snaked over the ridge unending, lifting tiny tornadoes in their wake. Marquez nudged Arturo.
“Gypsies.”
“So?”
Marquez grinned and bit three times to make a clicking sound.
“Well, what the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means there are women with them. Women who make their money on gentlemen like you and me who are gracious and accepting of their wicked ways and do not judge them but only share our wealth with them.”
Arturo looked back to the gypsy train.
“Oh.”
Salomon went on with the packhorses behind him. We will catch up with you in a day or two, Marquez and Arturo told him as they kicked into a run and called back. A week if all goes well. Salomon rode through the wavy heat and sand and scrub, over green hills of ragged spongeweed and oak groves. He splashed through shallow creeks and let the great Comanche animal beneath him loll in the water, and he dismounted and put his belly to the earth to watch the desert blossoms turn with the sun while his pony rolled in the dusty twilight, beneath the looks of the other horses. Great desert lizards loitered on rocks, their heads twitching and throats pulsing, and rattlesnakes slid sideways, leaving wide wakes.
There was no sign of Tsunipu in the canyon shadows, nor atop the canyon walls where they had camped many nights before. Salomon picketed the horses on a lead rope between a joshua and a scrub oak, and he walked to the canyon edge where the walls stopped and overlooked El Camino Real. The slanting sunrays threw shadows of vegetation and animal alike, so that a scattering of grass blades cast the look of great forest trunks, and a trotting coyote, neat of foot, puppeted the high arched legs of a great fairytale beast.
Salomon took one of the horses to gather the dead limbs of sage and tree. He built a fire so large he had to picket the horses further back and throw branches atop the fire from a distance. Night fell around the desert in all places but at Salomon’s feet, where his bonfire kept daylight near and made nervous shadows of fixed objects. He stared into the heart of the flames and heat, sweat crawling down his face like a man fevered by some demon’s possession, with no hope of exorcism and none sought. His eyes went in and out in his head like darkened coals and burning flames, and he lifted his head to the stars and turned in place to where they looked branded into the night just out of reach by some vaquero’s iron, and here he found that even God’s hand slipped when creating the night. For what perfect creator’s hand could scatter the stars so indiscriminately in great bunches here and in sparse distribution there as the eye scanned? It could not be so, for even the tired hand of God could not be so careless in his creation as he was in the lives of his people, his Juana and child, and perhaps the sky did burn at one time with an even amount of stars, but one by one they burned out when God turned his back on man, and they would continue to die away until the night was black all around and God’s interest in man would end in one quick hand clasped about the earth.
But it would not be that night, for even an almighty hand would burn itself on that night, no matter how quickly it snuffed the candle wick of the earth, and Salomon danced his shadow over the ground the way a crazed man does when no other eyes are there to see it, or when those eyes are only those of animals, and he raised his arms so the shadows crossed the red eyes of the horses, switching them on and off from black to red as he swayed.
When he awoke on his backside he found the flames had settled to embers and the sun was up, rising high enough already to bring out the sweat on a man who camped above the mornings.
It was a morning like this one, after a night where firelight kept the darkness away, another one alone on that canyontop with only unreasoning eyes to judge him foolish, when a trio of riders approached in the distance without the companionship of shadows. The sunrise, although bent to give its light, could not make enough of these riders to set proof of their existence beside them. Salomon stood in plain sight above the earth, his toes at the edge of the rock wall as grains of sand rolled past his boots and floated upon the breeze as dust. Two of the riders halted and the lead rider separated himself, turning his horse sideways, a tiny figure in the sun. They stood looking against each other that way until the rider nudged his horse forward and stopped again, still out of range of features. A silver glare on the right side of the rider’s chest caught the sun and blotted him out entirely for a moment. The rider continued, followed by the two riders.
Salomon checked his pistola loads and thumbed more paper cartridges into his holster loops. He mounted his Comanche pony in a leapfrog jump and rode the windy descending trail to the canyon floor where sound echoed up the walls, the wind whistled or roared through some channels and not at all through others, and direction became senseless in the many turns and dead-end passages.
He sat his horse and waited for the riders to appear but they did not. The walls remained silent, the entrance remained empty. The apron of clean red sand spilling into the gravel of the desert floor remained windsmoothed of footprints.
A hawk’s shadow crossed the sliver of sky and shrieked down. Salomon bent sideways to look. Against the red wall behind him, he caught the reflection of a lawman’s star in his peripheral, and he turned to see the rider afoot, leveling his rifle. Salomon kicked his pony and rode low as the gap erupted behind him and the bullet droned off the rocks ahead of him in a burst of red powder. He turned a corner and rode right between the two mounted followers, who circled in confusion and fear as the bandit pounded around the corner, raising their pistols but not firing. One of them dropped his pistol and rode out the way he came, into the desert and far from the canyon. The other soon followed.
Salomon ducked into a narrow breach and rode its course, his horse thumping beneath him. He paused once to raise his pistolas at the opening behind him but nothing came to chase apart from the rumble of the lawman’s aftershot.
The narr
ows circled and emptied into a larger passage. He sat in the crossroads listening in the cool and dry air for a long time before moving out. He crossed and recrossed the main trail, meandering through slender gaps hardly the width of a horse. At one point he paused and held his pistola at an opening as hoofs thumped the sand nearby. But the rider never appeared and the hoofs began to fade. He rode through the opening with his pistola outstretched and his finger on the trigger, and yet no rider existed there, only the faint sound of hoofs muffled in the sand.
They came upon each other by surprise, appearing moments later at a switchback in silence. So sudden and unexpected that both just stared a moment, thinking the other was a new man come to the scene. The lawman had his rifle ready in the other direction, and as he swung it Salomon’s way, he slid from his saddle on the far side of his horse as Salomon fired against the rocks. The lawman shot blindly from his backside in the sand as his horse cleared away, firing where he thought Salomon would be.
Amid a rain of chipped rock and smoke, Salomon fired again with his other hand as his own horse startled and ran beneath him. He disappeared behind a bend, where he shucked the paper cartridges and reloaded. He turned back immediately and kicked his horse, coming back upon the lawman in a full run, both pistolas held out, riding his pony low with only his legs to grip the unsaddled body.
The American was not running. He was not fleeing afoot, nor chasing to remount his horse. Salomon came back around to see a smoky figure kneeling with his rifle at his shoulder. They fired simultaneously, filling the canyon to a bitter choke of powder. Salomon blanked and came to as he hit the ground, his ribs burning and his pony a few steps away in the smoke. He still held his pistolas, dangling as he ran with arms like empty sleeves. He slung an arm over his pony’s back and ran alongside her, going until his ribs would not allow him another step without shutting the brain off to the pain and to the world together. Around a turn he reloaded with numb fingers in one hand.
The canyon quieted. Gunsmoke hung between the walls, drifting idly until it drifted far enough to where a slight breeze could take it along in a thin string. Salomon scanned the rocks overhead. He put his head down and pinched his shirt away. His ribs had been grazed, or hit and exited, he could not tell. Blood was seeping and soaking dark his pants. He leaned against the redrocks and sank to the fine sand.
A sharp whistlecall came down the rock corridor, and the lawman’s horse came charging across in front of him, a black streak through the pale red. Salomon held one pistola up, the other resting at his side, and pulled the hammer back, floating the pistolbarrel as the horse ran by, but he did not fire. Instead, he shouted and the horse planted its legs and shied. Salomon shouted again so the horse ran off the way it came. He held his breathing while the hoofs faded.
He lifted his chin and squinted skyward. A cloudless seam of bright blue overhead. He touched the cartridge loops in his holster straps and his lips moved as his fingers crawled. With his pistolas on his lap, he held his hands out and flexed his fingers. The lawman called out, a voice between the walls, not losing any strength, as if he were just on the other side of the bend.
“Salomon Pico. You are a wanted man in San Francisco. And in other cities. You are under arrest for more crimes than I would like to go into right now. You will come peaceably, or I will shoot you graveyard dead here and now. Salomon?”
“I am here. Your deputies are not. You are alone, sheriff.”
The sheriff did not answer for a moment. At last, his voice came again, “Well, what’ll it be? Will you lay down your guns and come to trial?”
“I will not.”
He got to his feet and squatted there on springy ankles, his pistolas raised by his ears. His pony stood still a few feet away. He whispered to her and spat, and went along the backside of the rockwall, crouched and sneered. There was a stretch of silence, then the sheriff continued to call out.
Salomon followed the rockwall to where it came down at a sharp angle and was climbable, a stairway to the sky. He took silent steps up the angle, leaving red footprints from one boot on the hot, slanted rock like the path of a one-legged climber. The sheriff’s voice went quiet and Salomon paused in a crouch. He set one pistola on his lap and wiped a palm down his face before moving forward. He approached the rock edge and found the sheriff there below, working his way up a nook in the rocks. He was looking up at him.
Salomon stood and steadied his pistola. The sheriff dropped from the wall and rolled, grabbing his rifle from the sand where it fell and scrambling away from the pistolshot. Salomon went after him in a run, jumping from one rock to another on the canyon roof, following overhead, a leaping figure against the sky. He fired his second round straight down and the rock walls echoed a shouted curse.
The sheriff fled behind every rock that offered itself, every gap that opened up. Salomon reloaded and fired down at every flicker of movement, appearing over every new hiding spot with guns pointed. The sheriff managed few returned shots, squeezing into crevices that offered an upward ambush to a peeking head, and moving away after his position was spoiled.
Drenched in sweat and blood, his mouth too dry to swallow, he began to shoot at sounds. Stones came hurling over boulders at him. Sunspots appeared in the corners of his eyes and he scrambled away. He swung his rifle barrel at floating blackness in his vision and fired aimlessly at silence. This ghost bandit spoke on all sides of him, on the sand floor beside him one moment, against the sky the next. Tumbled rocks clicked down the walls behind him as he ran from gap to gap, floundering, bloodlet steps in the sand and a mumbled jibbering, lost in the sandstone echoes.
The walls stayed soundless for hours, only to repeat single rifleshots endlessly after they sounded. The sheriff’s rifle muzzle soon flashed in the shadows and then the dusk, until there were no rounds left to reload. He huddled himself wounded in a corner and pointed the shivering rifle at any shadow the night had left to give.
Salomon had chased long into the evening, rolling large rocks from the walls or throwing small ones to bounce from wall to wall. If he caught a glimpse of movement, he fired, until he had only stones to throw.
In the pitch-blackness of the narrows, with the absence of starlight but from directly above, like holes punched in a black blanket, Salomon rode bleeding and dry through the silence. He came upon the sheriff trembling in a rounded cavity that gave no outlet. The rock wall was smeared dark by bleeding hands that had tried for an escape.
The sheriff cocked his rifle and pulled the trigger again and again. He threw it spinning at this haunting figure plodding at him from the night. He cried out and curled beneath the shelter of his own arms, the white of one eye looking out between fingers. The bandit stood his horse there at a distance, dark droplets appearing upon the sand beneath him in the vague light. The sheriff became still, the groans and tormented whimpers of a man confronted by a demon were silenced. He emerged from his own hands and arms like an imbecile. He held his breath waiting, and still the figure did not move before him.
They stood there for too long, and the American screamed out with his hands on either side against the wall behind him. The bandit raised one hand in the dark and held it there before turning to ride off, his hand still raised as he disappeared, hoofs pounding drumlike in those desert canyons.
Keep reading – Salomon Part Three
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This book is a work of fiction. All people and places are fictional and any resemblance to any person, alive or dead, is a coincidence.
Copyright 2015 by David Xavier Pico
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David Xavier, Salomon 2
