Wrath of God

by Jack Higgins

  The secret was to bring out the head slowly and steadily and I remembered the procedure exactly. I put my right arm beneath the child and got my forefinger into its mouth which meant I was now supporting it on my forearm.

  Next, I placed the forefinger of my left hand on the head to flex it and the index and ring fingers on the right and left shoulders respectively and started to exert traction. Slowly, very slowly, it began to move and yet the strength I had to exert was so considerable that sweat stood on my forehead in great drops.

  And then it was clear and safe in my hands although it became obvious at once that it was not breathing. The whole body was a rather unpleasant deep purple as if everything was locked up and waiting to move.

  I tried slapping it with no immediate result, so took a small piece of cotton Victoria passed me, cleared the mouth and nostrils of mucus and liquor. The heartbeat was strong, so there was nothing wrong there.

  Very gently, I blew into the tiny mouth. Quite suddenly, the child took a convulsive breath, then, most beautiful sound in all the world, it started to cry.

  For some reason Victoria was crying too, although she took the child from me competently enough and held him while I saw to the placenta and checked the woman’s own state now that it was all over.

  ‘A boy,’ I announced. ‘If anyone is interested.’

  Van Horne took the child which Victoria had wrapped carefully in a linen sheet and moved to the bedside. I didn’t hear what he said to Señora Moreno, but I know she started to cry again and said brokenly, ‘Just as you promised, father. Just as you promised.’

  He put the baby down beside her, opened the windows and went out on the terrace. All very dramatic and there was a satisfying outcry from the crowd in the street.

  I seemed rather unnecessary, which was fair enough, because that is exactly what I was. I got up, went to the door and opened it just as Moreno appeared with the womenfolk behind him. They pressed past me into the room, making the kind of sounds one would have expected and I left them to it and went along the corridor to my own room.

  God, but I was tired, more tired than I had been in years and yet strangely happy. For once I had given life instead of taking it, I suppose, although I was no longer able to think straight.

  I lay on the bed, staring up at the ceiling and the door opened and Victoria came in. She sat beside me and gently smoothed my brow, untying the knots one by one and very gradually I drifted into sleep.

  12

  I awakened to darkness, the pulsating beat of music. Guitars and maracas from the sound of it and someone was singing. I was alone, for there was no sign of Victoria, even when I swung my feet to the floor, found a match and lit the lamp. My boots were at the end of the bed. I pulled them on, went to the washstand in the corner, leaned over the bowl and emptied the earthenware jug of water over my head.

  Which made me feel a lot better. I found a towel, opened a window and went out on the terrace and stood there, breathing in the cool night air and drying myself at the same time. The light from the hotel windows spilled out across the street and showed me Victoria and Nachita sitting on the edge of the boardwalk opposite.

  ‘Victoria,’ I called softly and she looked up. ‘Why did you leave me? Come on up.’

  Her face was a pale blur indicating nothing. Nachita answered for her. ‘It is not permitted, señor.’

  ‘What in the hell are you talking about?’ I demanded. ‘Wait for me there. I’ll be right down.’

  I found a clean shirt, pulled it over my head and went downstairs. I didn’t bother going into the bar, but went straight out through the front door and plunged across the street without looking so that a couple of horsemen had to rein in to avoid hitting me.

  Victoria and Nachita rose to meet me and I took her by the arms. ‘What’s all this about?’

  Nachita said, ‘She was asked to leave the hotel, señor.’

  ‘That’s nonsense,’ I told him.

  ‘In Mojada it is not so bad.’ He shrugged. ‘I know places where an Indian, especially a Yaqui, would not be allowed in town limits.’

  And inside, the bastards were celebrating. The two horsemen had dismounted and were staring across at us. I recognized Jurado, but the other was a stranger to me. Jurado made some comment or other and laughed and then turned and went inside, closing the door behind him.

  It was very quiet, the music muted and far away and I was no longer tired, only angry in a sad sort of way and sorry for humanity, if you understand me.

  I raised her hands to my lips and said, ‘Wait for me here. I’ll get a jacket and walk back to the camp with you.’

  The door to the bar was open as I went through the hall and as I passed, I heard van Horne bellow, ‘Keogh, in here.’

  I paused in the doorway. I should think just about every man in the village was in there and most of them with drink taken. Four musicians were banging away briskly in the corner.

  Van Horne and Janos were at a table, jammed up tight against the bar and the Hungarian raised his glass. ‘To the hero of the hour. Join us, sir, I insist.’

  I stood at the bar beside them, Jurado and his friend behind me which was important in view of what happened. Moreno was dispensing free drinks, himself half drunk. Van Horne glanced up at me. ‘You don’t look pleased, Keogh, what’s wrong?’

  ‘I understand they threw Victoria out when I was asleep.’

  He shrugged. ‘A custom of the country. She’s chosen her side, Keogh, and the plain fact is that the average Mexican can’t stand Indians.’

  ‘Especially Yaqui,’ Janos put in. ‘Incredibly cruel people, Keogh. When I served with that federal punitive expedition we had a colonel called Cubero who’d bought himself a harem of five Yaqui women. Women, I say. As I remember, the eldest was only fifteen. A hundred pesos each.’

  ‘And you call the Yaqui cruel?’ I said.

  ‘They ambushed him with a patrol in the mountains one day.’ Janos was as drunk as I had seen him and spoke rather slowly as a consequence. ‘God knows what they’d done to him before they finished him off, but when we found him, he had an eyeball in the palm of each hand and his private parts had been stuffed between his teeth.’

  ‘What do you expect me to do, vomit?’ I demanded. ‘I’d say he got what he deserved at a hundred pesos each for little girls.’

  Moreno leaned across the bar, grinning foolishly. ‘Heh, Señor Keogh, we have decided to name the boy for Father van Horne. A good idea, you agree?’

  ‘I think it’s bloody marvellous.’ I turned to van Horne. ‘Another van Horne miracle, is that how it turned out?’

  His smile died, something close to pain in his eyes and Moreno touched my arm. ‘You will drink with me, señor?’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ve made other arrangements.’

  He seemed genuinely bewildered. ‘But I don’t understand, señor.’

  I had not buttoned my shirt and the silver amulet Victoria had given me swung free. Jurado reached across and took it in his fingers. ‘It is very simple, Moreno. Señor Keogh prefers other company to ours. Darker meat.’ He laughed coarsely. ‘Is it true what they say about Yaqui women?’ He followed this with probably the most obscene suggestion I had heard in my life.

  I think I knew then that he was there to make trouble. Not particularly with me, but I had come easily to hand, so to speak. Van Horne started to get up and I shoved him back into his chair.

  ‘I’d be very happy to drink with you,’ I said to Moreno. ‘In a moment.’

  As I turned and walked out, Jurado laughed. ‘Ah, the little one runs to avoid messing his pants.’ One or two of the drunks laughed dutifully.

  Victoria and Nachita crossed the street to meet me. I said, ‘I’ve been invited to have a drink before I go.’

  She knew what was in my mind, I saw it in her eyes and so did Nachita. He said, ‘There is nothing to be gained from this, señor, they would spit on us.’

  A strange thing happened then. I went very cold, very c
alm, fire in my belly and when I spoke, the voice came from somewhere outside me and the sound of it would have frightened Finn Cuchulain himself.

  ‘You will listen to me now,’ I said. ‘I am Emmet Keogh of Stradballa and afraid of no man on this earth. We will go now and God will go with us. I will see justice done and if I must break a head or two in the process, then well enough.’

  The blackness was in me then as it had been in my father, so they tell me. The violence there had been no escaping, that had sent my mother to an early grave. I turned without another word and they followed and when I reached the door, I kicked it open and went in like a strong wind. The silence had to be heard to be believed when they saw what stood behind me.

  I walked to the bar, put my hands on the edge and confronted poor foolish Moreno, mouth agape. ‘I’ll have that drink now.’

  I half turned, leaning against the bar, back to van Horne and Janos, facing Jurado and his friend. Victoria stood a yard or two away and smiled when I looked at her. I raised my fingers to my lips and kissed them. There was a gasp from someone in the crowd. I saw Nachita’s fingers ready in the lever of his old Winchester.

  Moreno put a bottle on the bar, his good whisky, and one glass. I said, ‘You are forgetting my friends.’

  There was a look of agony on his face. Poor devil, he didn’t know what to do next. Jurado solved the situation for him. His great hand wrapped itself round the neck of the bottle. ‘No,’ he said.

  That close, the smell of him, his gross body, was quite overpowering. I said, ‘Did anyone ever tell you that you stink, my friend?’

  There was genuine amazement in his eyes, shock that someone dare insult him so before everyone there. Especially a man so much smaller than himself.

  He released the bottle in a kind of reflex gesture and I picked it up and smashed it across the side of his head. As he cried out, staggering back, I wrenched the pistol from his holster and tossed it to van Horne.

  Jurado started to turn, blood on his face and I grabbed the nearest chair and smashed it across the great head and shoulders. Once, twice and then again, breaking it apart.

  He fell on his knees and stayed there for a while, then got up and stood looking at me, one hand wiping blood away mechanically.

  ‘All right then, you bastard,’ I said, dropping into a fighting crouch. ‘Let’s be having you.’

  My grandfather, they tell me, might have been a contender for the heavyweight crown had he so chosen and in his youth, had gone the distance with the great Bob Fitzsimmons himself.

  From my earliest years at school, my small size earned me more kicks than halfpence. For some time this went undetected for I have always been considered close by nature, and then an ambush by a couple of tinker’s boys one fine evening sent me home with a face like raw meat.

  Mickeen Bawn Keogh examined that face, his grey eyes cold and rather frightening in spite of the smile on his face. ‘Two of them, did you say, avic?’ He nodded. ‘Then it is time I took you in hand and long overdue.’

  Whereupon he took off his jacket, led me out into the yard and gave me my first lesson in the noble art and no holds barred.

  So, I was only five and a half feet and weighed barely ten stone, but I could punch every pound of it as Raul Jurado found to his cost that night.

  He came in with a roar, I feinted with my left and smashed my right fist into his mouth, splitting the lips so that blood spurted. I followed it with a left below the breast that sounded like the crack of a whip when bone met bone.

  Footwork, timing and hitting, that was the secret and in that first couple of minutes I gave him neither quarter nor peace, circling around, evading his ponderous blows with ease, feinting and jabbing, in and away again.

  The crowd scattered, most of them scrambling for the door and there was a press of faces at the windows outside. Janos still sat at the table, hands folded on the knob of his stick, face shining with sweat, but van Horne was standing now, Jurado’s pistol in his right hand.

  I suppose I got careless, forgetting the rawhide quirt dangling from Jurado’s wrist. I danced in to belt him again and he slashed out blindly, the rawhide curling around my face, drawing an involuntary cry of agony from me.

  Worst of all, when he pulled, I had no choice but to lurch towards him and he delivered a stunning blow to my forehead that sent me back towards the bar. His friend stuck out a foot, putting me flat on my back.

  I rolled away as Jurado came in fast, boot raised to crush my face. I grabbed for that foot, twisted and he fell heavily across me. We rolled here and there between the tables trying to have each other’s eyes out and when we stopped, I was on top.

  He got his knee into me before I could do any damage and threw me backwards with a powerful kick. As I scrambled up, he rose to meet me, his face a mask of blood and I was not afraid. As I circled, I saw Victoria by the door, teeth bared like any she-cat, Nachita holding her arm.

  Jurado was going to kill me now, it was in his face. His hands came up, hooked into claws and he charged like a bull. I threw a chair into his path that put him on his knees and kicked him in the side of the head.

  He stayed there on his hands and knees for the second time that night, and his friend at the bar, thinking, I suppose, that I would finish him off, pulled out his pistol. He was fast, but not fast enough. Two feet of steel flashed from the Hungarian’s stick, blurred in motion. Jurado’s friend dropped his pistol with a cry, blood spurting as he grabbed his wrist.

  Even then, Jurado surprised me by the sheer bull-strength of him. He came in low, his shoulder sending me back against the wall. His foot slipped or I think he might have had me. As I straightened, he lurched forward again. I ducked under his arm, twisted a shoulder inwards and sent him over my hip through the window in a savage cross-buttock.

  The crowd scattered in a snowstorm of flying glass and I scrambled over the sill and arrived on the terrace in time to put my boot in his face as he tried to get up, sending him back into the street.

  He lay there on his back and I suddenly found it necessary to hang on to one of the veranda posts. I turned, leaning against it, and found Victoria on the edge of the crowd four or five yards away.

  Her face seemed very pale, the eyes enormous. I smiled, or thought I did, though my face must have looked a sight and then, dear God above us, a miracle happened.

  Her eyes filled with horror, her face shattered like a mirror breaking, the mouth opened wide in what should have been a soundless scream. Instead, she cried my name.

  ‘Emm-et!’ Broken in the centre, yet quite unmistakable.

  I turned and swung to one side as Jurado lunged in, a knife in one hand. In the same moment, Nachita appeared from the darkness behind him and flung his own knife underhand so that it thudded into the boardwalk at my feet.

  By God, but the power was in me then. Such release as I have never known to hear my name spoken by the one person who mattered most. She told me much later, that when I went down into the street to meet him, knife in hand, the look on my face was terrible to see.

  Jurado must have agreed for he threw his own knife away from him and staggered into the darkness.

  I swung round, challenging that sea of faces, yellow in the lamplight, fear on most of them and then van Horne stepped down and put a hand to my chest as if to stop me falling. His voice seemed to come from under the earth itself, remote, far away, but in any case, there was only one person I wished to see at that moment.

  For some reason she was crying. Now why would that be? And then I remembered. I said gently, ‘My name? What’s my name?’

  But there was nothing to fear for the spell was broken. ‘Emmet,’ she said. ‘Emmet.’

  ‘We will go now,’ I said. ‘Before I fall down and disgrace us all in the face of the world.’

  She took one arm, Nachita the other and we left them there and went to our own place.

  They got me to the camp and into the tent and I lay there in the cool darkness and let the night wash over me
. After a while, Victoria came back with a bowl of water and a cloth. She started gently to wipe my face.

  I was tired, my head adrift from my shoulders, but I was still conscious enough to need reassuring and took her by the wrists. ‘Speak to me – anything. Just let me hear your voice.’

  There was a hesitation I could almost feel and then slowly, hesitantly, each word separate, the voice rather remote and more than a little hoarse, she added, ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘Not another word,’ I answered and started to laugh weakly, and then the darkness really did close in on me.

  I awakened to firelight flickering on the canvas walls of the tent and to voices. It took me a moment or so, not only to think back to reality, but to realize that one of them was van Horne.

  I crawled out through the entrance, so stiff and sore that it was past belief and found the three of them sitting by the fire drinking coffee. Nachita saw me first and van Horne and Victoria turned in the same moment.

  She was beside me in a flash, helping me stand. ‘You should be resting.’

  There was still that faintly unreal flavour to her speech. Van Horne said, ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Like a very old hound dog.’

  ‘That was quite a performance. You can use yourself.’ My Enfield in its holster was lying beside him and he picked it up. ‘I noticed you’d left this in your room. Thought you might be needing it.’ There was more to it than that, of course. Had to be.

  ‘Where’s Janos?’

  ‘Oh, he decided to have an early night.’

  My head still felt swollen and somehow disembodied and I was having difficulty in thinking straight and that would not do at all.

  ‘I need to clear my head,’ I said. ‘And there’s only one way I’m going to do that in a hurry. I won’t be long.’

  The moon was full, the cottonwoods a maze of light and shadow and beyond, the waterfall was silver in the moonlight as it cascaded over rocks.