by David Xavier
“They’re here for someone,” Salomon said.
The orchard keeper turned his back but halted at the cavalryman’s order. The cavalryman jutted his chin to the stone cottage, his lips moving only slightly. The orchard keeper shook his head and tossed his final words over his shoulder to the man and moved to go indoors, but the second horseman moved forward and pinned the orchard keeper to the wall with an arm behind his back. The other man moved toward the cottage.
Salomon moved to the cupboard and grabbed his paper cartridges and flints. Marisela gasped. In two steps Salomon moved to the cottage corner and knelt over his cornhusk mattress. “Get my horse saddled.”
“You don’t own a saddle.”
Salomon turned. His eyes fell to the floor and crawled back up to look at her. “Well, all the better.”
Marisela left the wall and went out back, leaving the door open. She spoke softly to the Comanche pony and whispered around for Vicente.
In the cottage Salomon tossed his blankets aside and grabbed the holstered pistolas wrapped in leather straps. He went to the loose stone in the wall, wiggled it free, and retrieved a jingling pouch of coins from within. He wrapped the pouch with the cartridges and pistolas in the blanket and tucked the bundle under an arm.
The cavalryman shouted outside and Salomon turned. He stood slowly. In the wavy windowglass he could see the soldier’s back, and beyond the uniformed shoulder he could see Vicente running toward the cottage.
“Stop there or I’ll fire, boy.”
But Vicente continued without response to the order as a deaf would, his attention was on the stone house and the detained orchard keeper now on his knees with a pistol shoving his head at an angle.
The cavalryman in the window crouched and drew his pistol. Salomon scanned the counters and table and grabbed a clay bowl. As the cavalryman cocked his pistol the window shattered behind him and the bowl glanced between his shoulders. The cavalryman spun low.
In the field, Vicente stopped with his hands raised, his eyes wide. The soldier fired at the cottage and the door splintered. He waited on one knee.
The cottage door swung open and Salomon came at the soldier in a sprint. The soldier dropped his pistol and put his hand to the knife sheath at his belt. Salomon planted a foot and kicked, catching the soldier under the chin. Pieces like white kernels flew from his mouth as he pitched backward with his arms thrown high.
“Vicente.”
Vicente broke his attention from the sprawled cavalryman.
“Go.”
He went running. Salomon looked to the stone house. The other soldier was still there with his gun to the base of the keeper’s skull. Salomon raised his arms.
“Hey!”
The soldier leveled his pistol with clenched teeth and Salomon went running low. The gun went off and the cottage wall splintered behind him.
Marisela came on horseback and Salomon caught her round the waist and swung a leg over. Vicente mounted and had the rangy dun in a run, and he followed the pony through the orchard fields. Salomon leaned with a hand outheld to snag a hanging grapefruit on the way out.
“I thought your cousin paid your reward,” Marisela said.
“He did.”
“Then why don’t they mind that?”
“They mind it when he is near.”
“Where are we going?”
“Where he is near.”
They rode the fields and hills and avoided the roads. By sunset they had made the outskirts of Los Angeles. The building walls lay below them lighted from within by lanterns. A shepherdboy led several goats along a skirting path. Town windows flickered with warmth and laughs echoed within, yet they sat watching and made no approach past the woodline.
“I could eat,” Vicente said. “You know what I could go for right now?”
Salomon looked over.
“One of those goddamn oranges I’ve had a million of.”
“Son,” Marisela reached out and tugged his ear. “Watch your mouth.”
Vicente shouldered his ear free. “I could.”
Salomon reached in his shirt and pulled the grapefruit. He circled it in his palm once, then tossed it. Vicente began peeling. He put the slices one after another to his mouth like a beggar, pausing only to catch his breath.
They camped in the hills and built their fire against a boulder. Any rising smoke filtered through the sugar pines that assembled about like stone columns.
Vicente woke shivering in the night. The fire was still burning as if it had been recently stoked. After turning about for some time he sat upright and pulled his boots on. He held still and nothing moved. He stepped across the firelight with the glint of a blade in his hands, his shadow thrown tiptoeing against the forest trunks. At the boulder’s edge he looked back once more to the sleeping shapes by the fire’s edge.
“Where are you going?”
Vicente turned. Salomon was sitting upon a stone with his hands about his knees. The faint light could scarcely chase the shadow from his face.
“What are you doing?” Vicente said.
“Watching.”
“I’m freezing.”
“I can’t build the fire any higher.”
Vicente looked to the village below. “I’m more hungry than cold.”
Salomon sat up and rubbed his thighs. “So am I.”
He stirred the fire and touched Marisela’s hand. She held him for a moment then fell back to sleep. They went together toward the village in darkness. They crouched against the first building, an office of sorts. They crept forward and stopped at the rustle of movement. A stray dog ran from under the porch with his tail tucked.
“Scared the hell out of me.”
“I saw a few goats earlier,” Salomon said.
“You expect to take one?”
“I do at that.”
They moved forward.
“Wait.”
Salomon turned. Vicente was holding back.
“I don’t feel right taking someone’s goat.”
“I don’t either,” Salomon said. “But I don’t feel right going hungry either.”
“I wish we were back at the orchards.”
“Come on.”
The goats were away from the nearest adobe in an open lean-to. They rose clanging from their nestings as the men came near, Vicente in the lead. The shepherdboy stepped from the shadows, straw hanging from his blanket wrappings.
“Don’t come closer.”
They held still. Vicente said, “Who’s there?”
“Get away or I’ll cut you open.”
“Alright. We’re just looking for something to eat is all.”
“You take one of my goats and I’ll hunt you down and cut you open.”
“Why you’re nothing but a bucktoothed kid.”
The shepherdboy drew a knife and stepped forward. Vicente retreated with his hands raised. “Alright. We’re leaving. Your goats are skinny.”
In the morning Vicente sat on an open rock awaiting the first rays of sunrise. He sat clutching his knees brooding beneath his sombrero. Salomon went to him and lifted the hatbrim.
“Is that you under there?”
Vicente pushed his hand away. “I’m hungrier now than ever.”
“Can you still shoot with that thing?”
Vicente looked at the dragoon’s pistola at his belt. He looked up, tilting his head way back. “I can hit what I can see.”
“Then let’s go see something.”
“I’m glad that boy was there. I’d rather go hungry than steal. I would have hated myself for taking something that was not mine.”
Salomon nodded.
“You didn’t always feel that way,” Vicente said.
“I didn’t always feel a lot of ways.” Salomon looked out to where the sun was about to show. “When a man gets the chance to reinvent himself, he is a fool not to take it. Even if it takes him away from comfort. Especially if it takes him from comfort. If it means starting over.”
“H
ow many times are we going to have to start over?”
Salomon looked to Marisela by the fire. She was on her haunches poking the flames. When she lifted her eyes to him, he said, “As many as it takes.”
They set out parallel to the road south chewing berries. To their right the coast sprawled to white. Vicente rode ahead with his head turned to the staggered mountains at their left. He turned in his saddle.
“You didn’t bury any gold out here, did you?”
Salomon shook his head.
They rode on among gray hills strewn with shattered sandstone plates and dotted with short piñon, hills that looked poured out from above. They dismounted in creek waters and the three of them bent like animals and put their faces to the waters trickling smooth over stones bald as skulls. The Comanche pony shied and blew. Salomon looked back on one knee.
“We’ll leave some for you.”
They drank and washed their faces in cold breaths, and Salomon held Marisela’s fingertips high as she tapped a toe in the water, her skirts gathered in one hand. The two were silent with each other, smiling as if harboring a secret between them, and she put her face to his shoulder and he snuck his mouth to her neck. He reached for the pony and the pony sidled and blew.
“What’s got you upset?”
He helped Marisela upon the pony and swung up behind her. They looked back and Vicente was still on his knees at water’s edge, his rangy dun sulking in the sun behind him.
“Don’t drink too much.”
Vicente sat back among the grass shoots and wiped a sleeve across his mouth. “I’m filling up. Haven’t seen game to hunt since this morning.” He bent down again.
“You’ll regret it in a few hours.”
“I won’t regret it now,” he bubbled into the water.
“It’ll send you to squat at every bush we pass.”
Vicente kept his head down.
“We won’t wait for you if you do this to yourself. I’ll have no pity.”
Vicente raised a hand but did not rise from drinking.
Salomon dropped and shook his head. Vicente was slurping water back. Salomon looked southward and exhaled.
“Sal.” Marisela shook Salomon.
“He won’t listen.”
“Salomon.” She shook him again and he turned.
Behind Vicente three indians draped in serapes, their hair clicking in beads, came afoot in knee-high moccasins. Animalskin bundles and woven baskets sealed in pitch balanced over their shoulders on aspen poles stripped and shaved. They had appeared close without warning, as if they had been there before them and fled to hiding.
The rangy dun blew and sidestepped and Vicente slung water when he turned. He stood and his hands floated at his hips.
“Hold it,” Salomon said. “Hold it. They are Fernandeños.”
Vicente grabbed the dun’s halter and stilled him. The Fernandeños came close and stood unmoving. They did not appear to be warriors, these men, though they were young, and they stood small in their drapings, their gaunt faces and bony knuckles.
One of them spoke to the others in a language rarely spoken, and the others nodded. He spoke again but in a voice raised, and from the brush emerged women and children in numbers Salomon had to count. Altogether there were a dozen, and they were dressed in mission clothing and had the lost looks of refugees in their eyes.
One woman took her hand from an infant’s mouth and it commenced to cry with full lungs. The man spoke to the woman and she looked at him and cradled her child close, but he spoke again and tossed a hand forward. The woman hesitated, then walked toward the three in a ceremonial way, her eyes unflinching from Marisela on horseback. Vicente stepped aside and the woman passed him with the suffering child. They looked down at her as she lifted the limp baby, the eyes swollen in pustules. The mother mouthed a tearful plea.
“Mari,” Salomon said. “Don’t touch that child.”
But she was already off the pony and gathering the infant to her, speaking in a soft tone like a prayer. She knelt with the child at the water’s edge and dipped her hand. The other Fernandeños gathered behind and peered over her shoulders. Marisela moved the infant’s hair to the side with wet fingers, and she cleansed the child’s eyes. The wailing ceased with each touch. With light fingers she opened the eyelids. The eyes were marbled red, two bloodmoons rolling back.
“Marisela. There is nothing we can do for that child they have not done al–”
Marisela stopped him with a look. She dabbed her cool fingers along the infant’s cheeks and neck and whispered comforts. The indians moved in closer. They crowded her. The man touched Marisela’s arm with both hands and urged her to continue her doctoring.
“I have nothing to give her,” she told him. Her voice broke and her eyes filled. “What you have done already is more than anything I can do.”
They put their hands on Marisela’s shoulders, on her elbows, reaching over each other until their fluttering hands covered her in pleas. Vicente shouted above the beggings but they continued. Marisela cried out and Salomon dropped from horseback and went to her among the outstretched arms as if wading into a pool. When he gathered her up she no longer held the child. He held her in her own sobs now as he kicked upon his pony and shouted, slapping away the grasps at their clothing. The pony lurched into a run, leaving behind the outheld hands and doomed faces.
They ran until dusk erased their chasing shadows, Salomon holding Marisela’s wilted body, and Vicente following to the hills.
They camped and Vicente went into the brush with his knife. Marisela sat alone turned from the fire with her eyes down, her arms embraced in chills. Her thin undergarments hung from her shoulders like bedsheets. Her clothing was draped over sticks by the fire. Salomon came from the creek wringing more clothing. He arranged them to dry with the others.
“Did you see her eyes?”
Salomon said he did not.
“They were inflamed in their sockets. She was probably blind. I don’t know what they wanted me to do.”
“They were out of cures,” Salomon said.
“That child will die screaming.”
Salomon stared into the fire.
“How can God allow such things to happen?”
“God can only influence this world,” Salomon said. “It is up to man what is allowed and what is not.”
Marisela looked over and Salomon continued. “He can send the winds, he can change the waves. He can lead us as best as he can. But this earth is mans to control.”
“The Fernandeños are peaceful people.”
“They have been dying for hundreds of years. Soon they will be gone forever, just as the people who came before them. They should have started wandering when the first child died of sickness. How many years must God give warnings before man will listen? Man decides how and when his people will live and die. Yet we call out to him to change the spinning of the earth, to master our lives. We say he is with us, around us, and yet have you seen his power absent the world of pain? We are told to seek him, but have you experienced his presence?”
“You are losing your faith.”
“I believe very much. I have seen the power of his absence, which is why I still kneel to pray instead of walking this world alone. I am as terrified of him as I am anxious to seek him. But, if I were to believe that God controls everything on earth, children dying in his hands when he can cure them with a touch, then I would also believe that he is as evil as all the souls who claw their way through hell. Only the foolish nod and say these things are his will.”
Marisela leaned forward in the firelight, her eyes on Salomon. She did not speak. He glanced to her and back to the fire. “I have seen too much.”
They rode the green hills south. Vicente stood his horse beneath a hanging limb and plucked at the branches. He caught up to Salomon and Marisela with a handful of walnuts.
“The Fernandeños are gatherers,” Vicente said, discarding a shell and putting a hand to his mouth. “Look at this land. T
hey are fishermen. We cannot go a mile without crossing water. Why were they starving?”
“They were not starving.”
Vicente looked at him. “Skinny as they were back there, you can’t tell me they eat until full every night.”
“They were fleeing. They were sick.”
“Yeah, well I’m sick of fleeing.”
Marisela fixed him with a look and he turned away and mouthed a curse. Salomon was silent for a time, looking off in the distance. Vicente pressed forward, the rangy dun nodding ahead.
“Is that horse deaf?”
Vicente turned an eyebrow to Salomon then looked at the dun. “I don’t think so.”
“The Fernandeños.”
“She sensed them,” Vicente said.
“When they were close enough to mount her.”
“She can sense what she needs to.”
“That dun has no sense at all that I can tell.”
“Maybe not.”
They rode a greencapped ridge and kept to the leeside. Then down and rode the low spots.
“I thought you were going to use your pistola back there.”
Vicente nodded.
“You showed restraint,” Salomon said. “They were not dangerous.” He bounced with the movements of the walking pony. He looked off in the distance for a moment then looked at Vicente again and his forehead creased. “Why didn’t you use your pistola at the orchards? The horse soldiers.”
“I would have had to have thrown it. It has not been loaded in years.”
Salomon held steady eyes on Vicente, then grinned away and laughed. “But you can still hit what you see.”
“Yes, if I can see it.”
“I had a rifle once I could hit a wolf running at three hundred yards.”
“Where is that rifle?”
Salomon scratched his cheek. “I don’t know.”
He pulled up and threw a leg over his pony’s neck and hopped down. He walked out a ways in the blowing grass, fixing with his pistolas as he walked. He looked back. Vicente was still mounted alongside Marisela, both blinking.
“Get over here.”
Salomon pointed out a thin aspen trunk. “The thin one there.” He cocked the pistola and fired a moment later. The smoke cleared and the aspen trunk was white and splintered.
