All Things Left Wild

by James Wade

  “Follow me,” Charlotte said. “We can lose them in the canyons if we get off the road. They’ll probably quit the chase by the end of the day.”

  “If they don’t?”

  “If they don’t, we’ll head through the mountains and into Fort Davis. There’ll be army there. But they won’t go that far anyway.”

  “How do you know?” Randall asked.

  “It’s going to snow,” Charlotte said, looking up. She put her horse down a slope covered in sotol and its razor leaves and Tad followed with the child at his back.

  “You coming?” she asked as Randall sat his horse in the middle of the road and watched the riders grow nearer.

  “You all go on ahead. I’ll meet you in the mountains above Fort Davis.”

  “What?”

  “They’ll follow my tracks, and it’ll make it harder to know that you left off. Mara can make it.”

  Before she could protest, Charlotte watched him turn the big Arabian in a full circle in the road and take off down the other side of the hill.

  “Let’s go,” she told the boys, giving one last look in the direction he’d gone.

  * * *

  So this is courage, Randall thought, the wind combing back his hair as he held his hat over his sore and aching stomach to keep it from flying away. Mara breathed steady from her nostrils and kept an impressive pace for nearly eight miles before slowing. Even at a curtailed gallop Randall still believed he was putting distance between himself and the men hunting him. His only hope was that they had continued along the road and not seen where his companions had abandoned it.

  The first water crossing he came to was a tributary of the northern Pecos and without hesitating he put Mara into the current three feet deep and rode alongside the river’s offshoot to cover his tracks. The water narrowed and eventually gave out near the northern base of the Davis Mountains. He put the horse onto the banks and led her across rocks and avoided the sand until the ground turned to grass and he gave her back her head and together they ascended switchbacks and game trails leading into the mountain pass.

  An hour into the climb he stopped and dismounted and looked back toward the water and he waited there until near nightfall and no one appeared. As the last of the day’s light faded into the growing darkness he felt the first snowflake of winter on his face.

  27

  The barracks were just that. Long, empty hallway-like structures of cut linden, roofed with tin, and by the time I arrived the air was steeped in the smell of cologne and musk as the men excitedly talked among themselves about the pending fiesta.

  Other men began to arrive and stable their horses and they ranged from musicians to businessmen to the young ranch hands Señor Guerrero permitted to attend. A group of fresh-faced young men passed by with their chins out and chests flared. They removed their hats and used the palms of their hands to slick down their hair before covering it again.

  “It’s their clothes that gives them away,” a man named Averitt whispered to me. “It sure as hell ain’t their pride.”

  The girls came down and each took two men about their arms and they led us back up the hill and to the courtyard, where we sat and were served a feast of goat and chicken and peppered peas. Tequila was poured and consumed and poured again and Jimmy made it a point to loudly announce his disdain for “Mexican bathwater,” and he drank only from the whiskey bottle he’d acquired in Perry Springs.

  The sun began to set and the light turned red the sky and the paper lanterns marked the courtyard with the colors of a day made dusk and when the band played it was to the tune of celebration. The men drank away the massacre as I was sure they had done before. Some flirted and danced, but many simply drank and me among them.

  Sophia’s fingertips found my arm briefly as she passed by and when she did not look back I followed her and we drifted to one of many fires and stood alongside the young vaqueros and their slicked hair.

  “You see now,” she said, looking into the fire.

  Her hair was pinned back with colorful birds, and obsidian earrings shone black against her skin. She wore a long black skirt and a ruffled white blouse. When the soft gusts of the coming winter wind crossed through the courtyard, her well-ridden boots emerged from the flowing skirt and she was both the symbol and reality of beautiful strength.

  “I do,” I told her.

  “Will you stay?”

  “No.”

  “When will you go?” she asked.

  “When you come with me.”

  She did not answer for a long time and instead we stood and listened to the boys goad and harass one another about sexual things they knew nothing of but hoped to someday.

  “You must go to the mountains and wait for the snow,” she said.

  “What? No. I’m getting out of here, tonight. You coming with me?”

  “We’ll be caught.”

  “No we won’t.”

  “And then you’ll get killed.”

  “Not if we don’t get caught. Listen, Grimes has done promised you to that old man. They’re gonna make you stay here and be part of his little harem—do God knows what.”

  “I know.”

  “You know?”

  “Do you think it will be easier to slip away from a band of outlaws or one old man?”

  I sighed.

  “Alright,” I said.

  She looked around.

  “You must go with the Lobos. Go to the village in the mountains. Let time pass. When the first snows come, we will meet in the hills above Perry Springs.”

  “How will I find you?”

  “When the time comes,” she said, ignoring my question, “tell them you are a hunter.”

  Then she turned and was gone and the vaqueros laughed and maybe it was at me.

  From the darkness of the yard I watched Mr. Guerrero sit his wheelchair under the porch lanterns. Men approached to pay their respects, and after a handshake and a few short words the bull of a woman from earlier chased them off with a glare. She stood like a twisted guardian angel behind his chair, scowling at the festivities until Grimes came and slipped a hand across her lower back and whispered into her ear and upon hearing his words her face turned to a mock and playful horror and then she giggled as she perhaps had as a young girl and Grimes smiled and took the handles of the wheelchair and leaned down to talk to the old man as he pushed him toward a group of men in fine suits and expensive boots.

  * * *

  I had never before tried tobacco, but that night I smoked. A young vaquero offered out a sack, and from it I pinched what I believed was a healthy amount between my thumb and fingers and, using my body to shield the wind, I sprinkled it into paper and rolled.

  The young doctor passed by and I offered a seat, which he took. I also offered a share of my smoke, which he declined, but in good time he produced his own cigarette and we sat, the two of us, and watched the flickering lights and the burning wood and the music drifted across the yard and out into the places unseen and carried with it fragrance of a regret not yet known.

  “You don’t like it here,” he said and was not asking.

  I did not speak.

  “I don’t like it here,” he continued. “I believe, or I did, in the cause. I believed in Grimes’s words.”

  “And his actions?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “They are . . . murderous.”

  “And yet you stay.”

  “And yet I stay.”

  For a time we did not speak and when that time came to an end, the young doctor tossed the last of his paper into the fire.

  “It is murderous men who shape empires. Alexander, Caesar, George Washington, even Lincoln had to be willing to spill the blood of a nation so it might heal stronger. But Grimes is not well, it’s true. He is a sick man and his sickness lies in the mind. For this I have no procedure.
There is no bone to set nor wound to tend. I am afraid his wound, whatever it may be, was suffered long ago and cannot be so easily mended.”

  I nodded.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe it ain’t no wound a’tall. Maybe some men just choose to be how they are and that’s the way of it.”

  “Maybe,” the doctor conceded. “But that has not been my experience. I believe even the most evil man could have been good, had things only turned more in his favor.”

  I thought of my brother.

  “In any case,” he continued, “I came here to save lives, not take them.”

  He paused and pulled from his pocket another cigarette.

  “I could have practiced medicine anywhere, you see. I came here and I did not like what I saw, nor do I like what I see now: the killing, the kidnapping.”

  He emancipated a charred stick from the fire and used its glowing end to light his smoke before condemning it again and watching for a while as it was consumed by the flame.

  “Let me ask you, Doc. What happened to the girl’s mother?”

  “It’s difficult to explain.”

  “Try.”

  “Señor Guerrero did not approve of his daughter’s choice of husband. Some Mexican gambler from a border town down south.” The man pulled on his cigarette. “So, as sort of an insurance policy on their arrangement, he let Grimes have her.”

  “Guerrero is Sophia’s grandfather?”

  The doctor nodded.

  “Anyway, for some reason—maybe the daily dose of laudanum he gave her—the woman fell in love with Grimes. Problem was, Grimes never cared about the woman in the first place. His eyes were on her daughter the whole time.”

  “Sophia?”

  “That’s right. So one day the woman takes a mysterious fever, not like anything I’ve ever seen. The next day she’s dead. Of course, now he has to wait for the old man to die too. No way is Guerrero going to let Grimes marry Sophia. He’d send an army stop him.”

  “But he’s leaving her here. Why would he do that?” I asked.

  “He knows the old man will protect her. Being his blood and all. Then, once he dies, or maybe once Grimes gets his little mountain utopia set up, Grimes will come back for her.”

  We both paused to ponder the strange ways in which the world turns.

  “There is a man I knew from my school days,” the doctor said at last. “He is a Texas Ranger. I have his address in San Antonio.”

  I stopped him there.

  “Sounds like one hell of a mutiny of the open seas,” I said, raising my brow.

  “Can I count on you, Caleb, when the time comes?”

  “I don’t know what you’ve got planned, and to be honest, I don’t give two shits.”

  “If you love the girl, this is the only way to be with her.”

  “You got some sand even telling me all this,” I snapped, “and it damn well better not end up getting me killed. Now get the hell away from here and don’t ever speak to me again.”

  “Well then,” he said, rising and flustered. “I’ll leave you to it.”

  “I think it’s best you do.”

  “I hope I can at least count on your discretion in this matter,” he said in a hushed tone.

  “Go on, Doc,” I told him and looked back to the fire.

  28

  The first of the snow had turned to mud and Randall followed the tracks through the Davis Mountains. He found his party alive and well and watering at a stock tank near a sheep trail. For a time they were able to manage the mountains in the light snow, but soon it was too deep and falling too heavy and with Fort Davis still a day’s ride, they needed shelter. They sat their horses atop a rise in the earth and looked out. The blizzard, fostered by the winds that had come down from the northwest, was the first of the season and though they’d seen it coming for well on two hours they passed neither town nor dwelling and they huddled together the four of them and the horses and looked down into the valley, where smoke rose up from a lone chimney.

  They held their hats on their heads so as to not lose them in the gusts and they squinted in the cold and hollered to one another even though they were feet apart.

  “Must be a hard man to set up in this country,” Randall said.

  “Must be a goddamn fool,” Charlotte replied.

  “Don’t much matter which it is,” Tad told them. “We got to see about getting outta this storm.”

  “Alive,” the child said.

  “Yea, alive would be good, Pumpkin,” Tad said, nodding.

  “You name that boy Pumpkin?” Randall asked him.

  “I reckoned he oughta have one.”

  “Pumpkin?”

  “It’s as good a name as any, and we sure as hell know he likes it enough.”

  “You named him after your horse?”

  “Nossir, I didn’t. I named the horse after a pumpkin, like how Miss Ashby used to put out on the porch during the harvest season.”

  “So?”

  “Well, I guess I’m trying to say that must be what the boy’s named after too. Not the horse.”

  “But you got two Pumpkins, so how are they gonna know which one you’re talking to?”

  “I’d imagine the horse will know it’s his name when I’m saying it in relation to horse things.”

  “Horse things?”

  “Yessir.”

  “And the boy?”

  “He don’t know nothing in the first place. What are you getting all worked up about?”

  “I’m not the one getting worked up. I just asked a question.”

  “You asked a few of ’em,” Tad said. “C’mon, lets get down out of this cold and see if this crazy fella has more charity than he does sense. Let’s go, Pumpkin.”

  Both horse and child perked their ears.

  * * *

  They put the horses on the slick path and moved down the ridge and into the wet, white fields and the horses sank five inches with every step and the child held out his hand to gather the snow but each flake captured melted in his palm and the pain on his face spoke of a hypocrisy which he did not yet understand.

  Tad leaned his head and opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue and let the snow fall onto it. The child did the same and all grief was forgiven.

  No one came to the porch in greeting and there was no light burning from within, but they agreed the smoke from the chimney meant someone was inside.

  Randall dismounted and walked up the wooden steps and knocked the snow and mud from his boot on the top of the last step and the door opened before he reached it.

  “I expect y’all need a place to hole up until this shit storm blows over,” the woman said. She wore a long nightgown and a fur coat over it and after she spoke she turned and went back inside and left the door open.

  She stopped a few feet from the threshold and looked back.

  “Are y’all simple or some other such shit keeps you from understanding things? Hurry up before all the goddamn heat goes out of the goddamn house.”

  “The boy is,” Tad said.

  The woman stared at him.

  “Well, that’s just wonderful. What’s your excuse?”

  * * *

  Randall took the horses around to the barn and was surprised to find a half-dozen pigs, several chickens, and two other horses already occupying the hay-covered grounds. The horses shared a single stable, and he walked his own mounts through the rest of the animals and tied them loosely to two posts near the back wall. There were sacks of feed, a shelf piled with home-canned pickles and okra, and a workbench littered with wood shavings. There were steel traps, jars of bait rub, and from the rafters hung tanned hides of spectacular variety. A collection of deer and elk antlers lay on top of one another near the water trough and Randall counted at least four gloves, each of a different pair, in
various positions on the ground. A low fire burned in a makeshift pit cut from a steel drum and Randall added wood to it from the stack outside and the pigs followed him back and forth and back again hoping for food.

  He raised up his shirt and examined his belly and the wound was red and pink and along the edges a dark blue but there was nothing seeping and the last of the blood had dried days before and he considered all of this to be proper and promising, though he could not say for sure.

  He twisted from one side to the other and what hurt he felt was of a sore nature and not the sharp, painful type. And it was not lost on him the notion of his grandfather’s deeds versus those of the native people who saved his life and at this thought he dropped his shirt back down and put on his coat and left the barn.

  Inside the cabin the woman labored over a table as water boiled on the stove. The stove itself was iron and the design of the iron was elegant, as if this stove were meant to be in some great hall but had been lost to its purpose and instead wandered the desert and ended up here and could never go back. The base held up by clawed footing was adorned with swirling steel and the fleur-de-lis and from within the red-orange glow of the fire could be seen through the gap where the door met the frame. The top of the stove flared out and there was space for four pots or pans though the woman only bothered with one and had for some time as the other cast-iron rings were rusted over from neglect. The umbilical piping rose up to and through the ceiling and it had been the smoke from this stove which had led them there in the first place and Randall stood staring at it and the woman noticed and stared back at him in turn.

  “Can I help you? Is there something wrong with the way I’m boiling this water?”

  “No, ma’am, not at all. Thank you for the hospitality.”

  The woman scoffed.

  “Hospitality,” she repeated and scoffed again.

  She turned back to the table and gathered up herbs and parsed them out into five piles and picked up each pile and placed it in the bottom of its own cup and then took the pot from the stove and poured hot water into the cups one by one and as she did so she leaned down to smell the steam as it rose up and with each cup she smelled she nodded and seemed satisfied.