Borderlands

by James Carlos Blake

  “For goodness’ sake, Sebastián!” she chided me. “Mamá has made the trip a half-dozen times, accompanied only by the driver and an old man with a rusty gun who sleeps on the coach roof most of the way. Am I less able than my mother? With attendants at my side and your pistoleros all around the coach?”

  She gave me that look of hers—sidewise, half-smiling. “Do you think,” she said in a stage whisper, widening her eyes in mock fright, “the Yaquis might get me?”

  No one had seen a Yaqui Indian on La Luna Plata in years, not since the rurales had tracked down the last of the renegades. A few had escaped into the mountains and would hide there forever; the rest had been killed or sent to the henequen plantations in the Yucatán. But mothers still threatened wayward children with the warning, “If you don’t behave, the Yaquis will get you.”

  The truth of the matter was that I did not want her to go because I knew I would miss her terribly. But it was the foolish sentiment of a lovesick boy, and I would have felt worse than foolish to speak it. My father’s old warning rang in my head like a bell. Against such sentimental impulses of the heart, he would have admonished me to stand hard.

  And so I gave consent. And on an early pink morning in May, I stood in the main courtyard and returned her farewell waves as her coach—escorted by six armed horsemen—rolled out the front gate. I smiled and smiled, but I already missed her so much my chest felt as empty as an open grave.

  We exchanged several letters a week through relays of dispatch riders. She reported that all was well at La Querencia. She felt strong and her mother and the midwives were taking good care of her. She wrote of the stark beauty of La Luna Plata’s western reaches—of the blazing whiteness of its vista and the dazzling blue depths of its desert sky. She wrote of the brilliant flowers and tall green willows along the Río Magdalena, all the lovelier for their contrast with the rough, surrounding landscape of pale rock and sand. I had seen it all myself since childhood, of course, but never before so clearly as through her wondering eyes.

  “But sometimes the wind blows hot and hard,” she wrote, “and affects the spirit strangely. At such times I miss you so terribly my heart hurts.” In her final letter she wrote: “It’s a son, my love, I know it is. He has spoken to me in the night, when we comfort one another with our thoughts of you.”

  One morning the mail rider didn’t show up. I sent men to search for him, thinking his mount might have quit him somewhere in the wild country. By the following afternoon, none of them had returned. I kept watch on the western horizon from an upper window of the house, but I was tired after a sleepless night and dozed off in my chair.

  When I opened my eyes it was almost dusk, and a horseman—one of the searchers I’d sent—was at the courtyard gate, speaking in obvious agitation to the hacienda foreman and several guards. I bolted downstairs, but when he saw me running toward him, he reined his mount around and gave it the spurs. I raced across the courtyard, yelling, “Stop him!” The guards worked the levers of their carbines but seemed uncertain of what to do, and the foreman shook his head at them and gestured for them to lower their weapons.

  I was breathless with fury as I reached the gate. “Damn you!” I shouted at them. I pointed at the fleeing rider and ordered, “Shoot that horse! Shoot it!”

  The guards again raised their rifles, but the foreman again made a gesture against my order. “There is no need, Don Sebastián,” he said.

  I grabbed him by the shirtfront and raised my fist to strike him—but the look on his face stayed my hand. His eyes were full of terrible news. “He feared you would punish him,” the foreman said. “For being the one to tell you what has happened at La Querencia.”

  And so he told me.

  We set out at a gallop under a thin yellow moon and rode straight through the night and all the next day, and through the night after that, using up one horse after another from the string of reserve mounts we trailed behind us. We paused but once, to refill our canteens at the way-station. Those who slept did so in the saddle.

  On the second sunrise we caught sight of a thin plume of smoke in the distance, and I howled once and dug in my spurs. An hour later we arrived at the blackened ruins of La Querencia.

  A small band of rurales was grouped around a campfire. On a low rise behind them lay a line of bodies covered with blankets. Captain Reynaldo Ochoa nodded to me as I dismounted, then led the way to the arrayed dead, his big spurs chinking. He said he had not yet buried the corpses because he knew I would want to see them for myself. I quickly went down the line, snatching away blankets and raising hordes of flies. Most of them were servants and their children. The six guards I’d sent with her were among them. And her maids. And her mother. But she was not.

  “They took her,” Ochoa said. He was rolling a cigarette, affecting casualness but watching me warily. “Her and some of the other young women.”

  I took a step toward him and my face must have been something to see—he dropped the cigarette and put his hand to his saber hilt and took a step back. “Juan Rojas, Don Sebastián,” he said. “It was him and his boys. The stable boy got away and rode to our post at Tres Palmas. We got here as fast as we could, but …” He gestured vaguely toward the bodies.

  I tasted blood and realized I was biting my tongue to keep from howling. I forced myself to breathe deeply, to think clearly. My head was filled with images of Delgadina—of my little son curled inside of her. I spat blood and asked how he knew it was Rojas.

  “Because one of them told us,” he said, smiling for the first time. “Your boys did all right before they went down. They killed seven of the pricks and shot two others so bad they got left behind.” He pointed to a flock of buzzards alighting behind a rocky rise. “I had the dead ones thrown in the arroyo back there,” he said. “Let the scavengers have them. My boys don’t dig graves for killers of children.”

  “Where are they?” I said. “The ones wounded—where?”

  One was a survivor no more, he said. A couple of the rurales recognized him as a wanted violator of young girls in southern Sonora and couldn’t be restrained from dealing with him on the spot. He was now with his friends in the arroyo. The other bandit said he knew the rurales were going to kill him, too, so why tell them anything. “He wanted to die like a tough guy—you know, with his mouth shut,” Ochoa said. “My half-breed Apache persuaded him to change his mind. He’s a very good persuader. In fifteen minutes he had the fellow jabbering like a parrot. The only reason the whoreson is still alive is I knew you’d want to talk to him.”

  “Where?” I said.

  I followed him back toward the group of men at the fire, feeling the blood pounding in my temples. The prisoner was sitting with his hands tied behind him, propped against a cactus stump and staring dully into the fire. He had a tourniquet around a badly wounded leg. His other foot was a bootless, black-and-red chunk of charred meat. Ochoa kicked his wounded leg and said, “Hey, prick, the patrón wants to talk to you.”

  His face remained empty of all expression as he answered my questions. Yes, it had been Rojas. No, they hadn’t planned it, they didn’t even know this place was out here. They’d come across it simply by chance. Yes, they’d taken some of the women. Rojas thought they might be worth ransom, or be valuable as hostages if the rurales should catch up to them—both possibilities depending on who their fathers or husbands might be.

  In response to my next question, he grinned and said, “Molested?” as if he found the word amusing. “Damn right they’ll be molested. Rojas himself will molest each one till her nose bleeds!”

  I kicked him in the mouth so hard I was afraid I’d broken his neck. Ochoa tugged on his ears to revive him and pulled him back to a sitting position. Speaking in a thickened voice through raw bloated lips, he said yes, they’d headed west, toward the sea, but whether they would turn north or south he didn’t know. He thought maybe there were ten or eleven of them left, he wasn’t sure. He was sure they had taken four women.

  When I wa
s satisfied the prisoner had given me all the information he could, I told Ochoa to see that he was given his fill of water and that his tourniquet was sufficiently tight. I did not want him to pass out from thirst or bleed to death. I wanted him taken to the arroyo and staked down naked among the dead.

  Ochoa glanced toward the buzzards and vultures flapping heavily into the arroyo and gave a small snort of unmistakable disdain—as if he found my mode of punishment too elaborate, too much an excess of the rich. The rurales preferred to shoot a man and be done with it. Impudent mestizo bastard! His barbarous Indian ancestors cut the beating hearts out of sacrificial victims—women as well as men—and then ate their flesh. He would take exception to my means of executing this filthy vermin who’d ridden with the kidnapper of my wife? I dared him with my eyes to speak his objection, but he only shrugged and turned to relay my order to his men.

  We set out to the west shortly before sunset, following the route taken by the rurales Ochoa had dispatched in pursuit of Rojas before my arrival. His orders to them had been to split up if they reached the coast without having spotted him. One bunch would go north to the village of San Andrés, the other head downcountry to Puerto Lobos. Rojas would have to go to one place or the other. There was nothing else in any direction but desert or the Sea of Cortez.

  At dawn we arrived at a rocky escarpment within sight of the sea and stopped to rest the horses. “Here’s where my boys split up,” Ochoa said. “Which direction do you want, Don Sebastián?” I went south with six rurales and he went north with the other five.

  There are no words to describe what I was feeling as we rode. Every phrase I fashion has the sodden impact of banality. Every description I attempt sounds like cliché from some foolish romance. Nothing, nothing ever said by anyone anywhere can convey what I was feeling. Christ, what pathetic things words are! Their insufficiency is as smothering as a lack of air. The congestion of wrath and anguish throbbing in my veins could never be expressed by words. It could only be felt. It could only be dealt with.

  Late that afternoon, we met a half-dozen of Ochoa’s advance rurales on their way back from Puerto Lobos. No one had seen riders anywhere in the vicinity. Rojas had to have gone north, to San Andrés. The advance rurales led a string of fresh mounts, having expected to meet some of their comrades coming from La Querencia to assist them. We switched our saddles to the extra horses and galloped off to the north.

  As we rode hard to catch up to him, Ochoa met with the other rurales he’d sent ahead. They’d been waiting for him a mile south of San Andrés. Scouts had confirmed that Rojas and his men were in the village and unaware of the rurales’ nearness. Ochoa didn’t want to lose the advantage of surprise, so he didn’t wait for the rest of us to get there before he attacked. But even though the bandits were caught off guard, they put up a fierce fight, killing two rurales and wounding several more. Ochoa’s boys killed six and took two prisoners. The only one to escape was Rojas himself, who had abandoned his men in the middle of the fight and ridden away into the open desert.

  All this I learned from Ochoa when we reached San Andrés, after he answered my first breathless question, after I learned Delgadina was dead.

  She had been found tied to a bed in the small back room of a cantina. “Mistreated” was the word Ochoa used. She’d been mistreated but was still alive when he found her. From the look of things she had miscarried only shortly before.

  “I told her you were on your way to her,” he said. “And she heard me, Don Sebastián. She smiled. She tried to hold on, to wait for you, but she could not.” He had ordered some women to remove her to another room and clean her before I arrived. He took me there.

  When I saw her, I felt my soul leave me like something on wings. I put my fingers on her face, but it was like trying to touch a star, like trying to dry your eyes at the bottom of the sea. I insisted on seeing the room where she’d been found, and there I saw the bloody mattress, the thick red stain that had been my son.

  I wanted the two captured bandits burned alive, but Ochoa said it was too late, they had been shot while trying to escape. I whirled on him in a rage, but he held his ground and said, “They did not steal her, Don Sebastián. They did not touch her. That I know. For them a bullet was proper and just.”

  “Damn you!” I shouted. “You dare to tell me what is proper—what is just?”

  His eyes flashed with anger but he quickly got them under control. “I already sent some of my boys after him,” he said. “We’ll get the bastard, Don Sebastián. Sooner or later. You’ll see.”

  I was trembling with the urge to strike him, but I was afraid that if I hit him even once I would not stop until I’d killed him. At that moment I was afraid even to curse him: I feared that if I opened my mouth I would start howling and never stop.

  I took Delgadina back to La Luna Plata and buried her in the sprawling flower garden behind the main house. I dug the grave myself. I called for a priest to pray over her only because she would have wanted it, but when he tried to commiserate with me afterward, I told him to go to hell.

  And then I waited. I could do nothing else. Ochoa had his rurales roaming everywhere in search of Juan Rojas, and he had sworn that when they caught him they would deliver him to me. But I lived with an unremitting fear that Rojas might die before they could catch him. He might even choose death to being taken alive. If he resisted arrest, Ochoa’s boys would surely shoot him. Or he might get killed in a drunken brawl in some cantina or whorehouse. He could be thrown from his horse and break his neck. A jealous woman might stab him in his sleep. He might be captured by the army and stood against a wall, or caught by Texas Rangers and hanged from the nearest tree. He could be bitten by a Gila monster or a rattlesnake. He could drown while trying to ford a river, or be swallowed by quicksand. He could get a sickness and die in bed. There were so many ways he might die before I could get my hands on him—and some of them such that I would never even know he was dead—that I chewed my lips bloody resisting the urge to howl. My fists rarely unclenched. I spent hours every day pacing from one top-floor window to another, my throat so tight it felt snared in a noose.

  Two weeks passed, and then four, and I thought of nothing but Juan Rojas and the vengeance I would wreak on him for having trespassed so grievously against me. When I was not pacing I was working in the cellar, making special preparations for him. He had robbed me of Delgadina and my unborn son—of my life, if not my breath—and the sole purpose of my continued existence was to make him suffer for his sin. For the first time since boyhood I prayed. I apologized to God for all the blasphemies of my life. I beseeched Him for a single concession and promised I would never ask another: I pleaded with Him to deliver Juan Rojas to me alive. I prayed and prepared for him and I paced, my jaws clenched against the ceaseless urge to howl. And I waited.

  Late one afternoon, nearly two months after Delgadina’s death, one of my vaqueros came back from a visit to the whorehouse in San Lorenzo with the news that Juan Rojas was in jail at the rurales’ outpost in Tres Palmas.

  All the whores had been talking about it, he said. They’d heard the story of the arrest from a rurales sergeant the night before, one of Ochoa’s men. The sergeant said the rurales had been tipped off by a barkeeper from Sahuaro who’d been sentenced to thirty days in jail for watering his tequila. The barkeep had been in the jail only a week when he heard that his wife had run away to Sonoita with a friend of his, and he was enraged. For more than a month he had been permitting this friend, who was in trouble with the law, to hide in the back room of his cantina, and this was how the friend repaid his kindness—by stealing his wife. On learning of this treachery done to him, the barkeeper in turn betrayed the friend to the rurales. The friend was of course Juan Rojas.

  The rurales had gone to Sonoita and entered the pueblo after nightfall. They searched stealthily from place to place, carbines ready, and found him in a cantina, singing to himself with his head on the bar. Although Ochoa had repeatedly assured me that when hi
s boys found him they would do everything possible to capture him alive, I knew the rurales never took chances with their quarry. If he’d made the least show of resistance, they would have shot him a hundred times. The sergeant told the whores he himself eased up behind Rojas and clubbed him in the back of the head with his carbine. He hit him so hard that Rojas didn’t wake up until Sonoita was thirty miles behind them. Chained hand and foot, he made the journey to Tres Palmas in a goat cart. He had now been in jail, my man said, for nearly a week.

  It was after midnight when I arrived in Tres Palmas, my horse blowing hard and dripping lather. I had insisted on coming alone, had shouted down my importunate foreman’s pleas to take an escort with me. I had been wild with exultation and, I admit, not thinking clearly. I had bellowed some half-witted foolishness about the moment being mine, and I would share it with no one. I told the foreman I would kill any man who tried to follow me. But the hard ride through the cold desert night had cleared my mind sufficiently to regret not bringing an escort. It had finally occurred to me that Ochoa had violated his pledge to bring Rojas to me—and, for whatever reason, might yet be disinclined to hand him over.

  Tres Palmas was little more than a scattering of adobe buildings on either side of a sandy windblown street blazing whitely under a full moon. I tethered the foundered horse in front of the jail and slipped my carbine from its scabbard, worked a round into the chamber, and went inside.

  The windowless room was dimly lighted, the air thick with cigarette smoke and fumes from the lanterns on the walls. Ochoa and a couple of his boys were sitting at a table, playing cards and sharing a bottle of tequila. Nobody seemed surprised to see me—or very pleased. Directly behind them, the door of the only cell was shut, but I could make out the indistinct form of someone standing close to the bars. I held the rifle loosely at my hip, the muzzle jutting vaguely in the table’s direction.