“I’m not sure he’s ever forgiven himself. It must have been ten years ago and Winter certainly has not forgotten. She already admired him—a young man with a patch on his eye and ambitions to be a lawman has appeal. I can’t say how one deed so rapidly elevated him to sainthood when a ‘Thank you’ would suffice for most of us, but, after he saved her life, he was the One. With the patience of Christ and steady optimism of the bear in her den through snow, Winter still awaits his proposal.
“Soon the cuatro branched out. They did finally ride after a bounty when two horse thieves made off with half a dozen livery mounts. What surprised everyone was, they got them. Recovered all the horses and brought the men in to hang.
“That was the first time you saw it. All mighty proud of themselves. But Raúl didn’t like it. He said it wasn’t right killing a man because he broke the law. Darío and Grip said they were doing their job. Everette said if Raúl wasn’t comfortable with the law of the land he needed to find another line of work.
“I heard this from Raúl. He came most nights to sit outside my window in the dark while I leaned out, supposed to be in bed asleep. He’d tell me all they’d been doing, about the arguments, the thrill of getting something accomplished. Not just playing at it.
“Next thing we knew, it seemed, they really were bounty hunters, known in the Territory. Of course, things changed at home also. Darío married and soon had the twins, Andrés and Araceli. Mateo was courting. They all seemed so old.
“Over years they rode all up and down and through this country: Texas and Kansas and Arizona and Colorado, through the Rockies and northwestern territories, earning their living by bringing in wanted men or recovering stolen property. They were known as La Manada de Lobos by then—The Wolf Pack. Calling anyone in the group Lobo. As in, ‘There’s a Lobo coming. Mind your manners.’ Older and more experienced men stayed out of their way.
“But they didn’t work together like they used to. Not many people knew trouble came on years before the break. They were always arguing about how and what and why they did their work. Everette would shoot a man on sight just thinking he might be the one they hunted. Darío said outlaws should be brought in alive to trial. Grip said circumstances mattered. He’d shoot a man trying to kill him, but not one running away or unarmed. Raúl ... I don’t think Raúl said much of anything. Though usually Darío and Grip were the quiet ones, in different ways: Darío thoughtful, a planner, a diplomático; while Grip was brooding and defensive, never forgetting a slight. But Raúl couldn’t stand bickering in the group. He would quiet down when unable to soothe nerves with jokes. He loved to dance, loved music. He used to write songs in his head on the trail, then sing to me when he got home.
“Un millón de estrellas en el camino no se puede comparar a los ojos de la mujer que deje atrás.”
A long pause as Rosalía gazes into space.
Ivy watches her, tense on her barrel, hardly aware she is holding her breath. A sense of oppression weighs on her.
After many seconds, Rosalía looks around and goes on.
“He proposed one warm night in August. My room was roasting. I leaned out the window with my arms on the ledge. Raúl got up from his place sitting in the dust and knelt to face me. We were not to make noise, but I had to stuff my sleeve into my mouth to keep from shouting my, ‘Yes!’
“He gave me a silver ring that belonged to his grandmother and told me he still had to ask my father so not to get too excited. I had to laugh. My family was desperate to marry me off. I never saw Papá so angry as when he found I had been out riding in trousers with the boys. His sight was already going by then and I had mostly been able to conceal the matter from him. He and my mother were eager for a husband to keep me under control. Of course, they didn’t know Raúl was the one who taught me to ride like him in my father’s old saddle, while my own brothers grudgingly taught me to shoot in bits and pieces over the years.
“The next morning, they were riding out after a famous train and bank gang—the Clallums. I didn’t mind saying goodbye with the thought that when next we met it would be time to plan the wedding. But I followed Grip and Darío to saddle their horses and tell them my news before Raúl could spoil it for me.
“I must have looked a fool—shaking, giddy—never so happy in my life. But I still wondered how they would take it. One of their best friends marrying their sister? I needn’t have worried. Darío said it was about time Raúl asked. Grip seemed relieved to think I’d leave them alone now.
“As Grip led Fuego—that was his red mustang at the time—from the pen, I caught his arm. Darío was already starting with El Cohete. Grip looked at me, almost laughing. I’m still a child to him. But I felt that twinge I always had in my stomach as they rode away for any exploits. And I did a terrible thing.... I told him—” Rosalía stops abruptly.
Ivy looks up from Volar’s dark flanks, shivering with flies, to Rosalía’s face.
Her eyes are shut, posture stiff. She takes a deep breath, swallows, another breath, and opens her eyes.
“I said, ‘Promise me you’ll look out for him. You won’t let anything awful happen to him.’
“He was still amused, of a mind to tease me, but he bowed his head, pretending to take me seriously, smiling all the time.”
Again she stops to take a long breath.
“‘I promise,’” she whispers at last, eyes shut. “That’s all he said. ‘I promise.’ Then he rode away and I ran to the south road to wave them off. Raúl blew me a kiss while the others laughed at him, Darío slapping him on the back.
“I never saw Raúl or Darío again. In a way, I never saw Grip again either....”
They sit quietly for a long time, voices from the Sunday gathering distant, almost inaudible, the horses chewing, flies buzzing.
Ivy remains tense, her own breaths shallow as she waits.
“They were only supposed to be away a few nights, a week at most,” Rosalía says, her voice careful, measured. “Down to Albuquerque where the Clallum Gang should have been holed up. Of course, one becomes delayed easily on the trail. But I knew it wasn’t right. Not after Raúl the night before they left. He would have ridden back to me, even if the others started a chase across the Territory.
“I begged Mateo to find them. He does not shoot well, but better than Íñigo. Mateo is doméstico, a family man. He respected them, never rode with them. He went, after I spent days trying to convince him, taking Íñigo.
“Two days out, they found Darío’s horse, El Cohete, in rocky country above the Rio, so starved he was trying to chew a mesquite tree. His saddle was soaked in blood, a rope running from the horn to Grip, unconscious on the ground. He had attempted to ride, tied on in case he fell. If they hadn’t seen El Cohete, they never would have found him.
“The horse had a bullet in his stifle and they thought Grip dead. He’d been shot in the thigh with a shotgun, above and below the knee with a revolver. Whoever did it must have been trying to kill his horse. And succeeded. He bound everything he could onto the wounds, but bled nearly to death, dirt and maggots packed under the skin, maybe helping to stop him bleeding out, I don’t know.
“They were able to wake him, asking where the others were, what happened. He said they were dead and get the dog: ‘Trae el perro, trae el perro.’ They thought him delusional. Saying his best friends and oldest brother were dead, himself near death, his horse gone, and he wanted them to bring a dog that wasn’t even his?
“Íñigo found a second rope running from El Cohete’s bloody stirrup across the rocky trail they must have come up. At the end of it, Yap-Rat lay with his ribs broken and in as terrible shape from hunger and thirst as the first two. Íñigo got that dog across his saddle and brought him in with the others. I don’t know how. I suppose he felt he had to if his brother’s horse and his friend’s dog were all Grip had left of them. But they didn’t think Grip would live. None of us did when we saw him.
“The doctor said at the very least he would not walk without a
cane. And it did take him the better part of six months to prove that prognosis wrong. Can’t see him limp now unless he’s trail-sore or more spent than usual. Íñigo says it was all to even him up down his right leg. Now he had an even good side and bad side—which is Grip all over anyway.
“Even early on, it wasn’t his leg which troubled us for long. He was starting to pull through, sitting up in bed. We could see he would make it. But he didn’t talk, didn’t even act like he knew we were in the room. Mamá sat with him as she had when he was a boy and woke crying, singing to him, never asking what happened.
“He’d been home some days when the men found Raúl, another day’s ride downriver from where they came to Grip. He was shot in the head, execution style. It didn’t seem there were other manmade wounds. It’s hard telling once carrion-eaters reach a body. The horses, also, Fuego and Fleet, Raúl’s mustang, were down there. And some men and horses from the gang the four hunted. They never found Darío. They didn’t find Everette either, though they looked, assuming him dead.
“One day, he must have been back weeks by then, I went in to sit with Grip, not expecting him to say anything. But he looked at me. Really looked and saw me for the first time. The fever was gone.
“He was still a long time before he said, ‘I’m sorry.’
“And I began to understand what I had done.”
Rosalía slides off the saddle tree, shaking dust and horsehair from her skirt. With hay falling from his mouth, Volar turns to her. She runs her fingers through his black mane, gazing at the horse as she speaks.
“Grip has an overwrought sense of justice and loyalty. He is the most difficult man to reason with I ever saw. You cannot reason or explain when the other person is always completely right, completely honorable: the moralista. If you disagree, you’re loco—at best.
“You’d think I’d have the sense to give up trying after all these years. Maybe I’m just the only person in this city as stubborn as him.”
She pauses, combing through Volar’s forelock with both hands. “What happened yesterday ... was a reminder of what’s wrong here. All that should and should not be in our lives.
“He wouldn’t say anything more to me for months. Wouldn’t look at me. He’s never told me a thing about what happened that day. Not one word. But he talked to Mateo and Sarita, Darío’s wife.
“I know now worse trouble than Raúl admitted to me stirred through the four. Darío and Everette came to blows in a saloon in Arizona, though I don’t know what it was about. And Everette left them for times to ride with a new bunch gravitating toward him—disbanded shootist groups and the like. Everette said they knew their work, good for this kind of thing. But he wasn’t just hunting outlaws anymore. He wanted the bounties, the rewards, the notoriety. When this spilled into other activities, he’d take what he could find.
“It turned out, when they encountered the robber band on their last ride together along the river, Everette sympathized. Did he follow them? Did he actually shoot at the other three himself? I don’t know. But he rode away after shooting stopped and Grip has been trying to kill the man ever since.
“He took so long convalescing, Everette was out of the county, away east in Texas, growing a new prestige of his own. By the time he rode back through New Mexico, he had a reputation signed in blood from San Antonio to Silver City. To spit in the wound, he rode with the same name attached to his gang: La Manada de Lobos, while Everette himself is known as Lobo from Colorado to the border—a name they used to share. He’s the most wanted man in this part of the world and, accordingly, the hardest to catch.
“Sarita asked Grip to keep the horse—she had no use for him and he had only ever been friendly to Darío—and Grip’s leg did slowly heal. By the end of winter, he had word La Manada de Lobos was back in the Territory. He packed, tied a rope around the dog’s neck, and rode away with little more than food, a bedroll, and two revolvers. No one rides alone after a band known to number at least six. Mateo went after him, told him to come home, don’t be loco, let it go. But Mateo is not as stubborn as I or as temerario as Grip. He returned a few days later alone.
“We did not see Grip again for most of a year. Sure we’d lost another brother.
“When he found us that autumn we breathed a collective sigh. Surely it was over. The dog followed now without being tied, though there was still no love lost between those two, and Grip and the horse looked as well as could be expected. All alive, at any rate.
“I’ve begged him to stop until I run out of words in two languages. Mateo has, Mamá has, Winter has. She’s terrified every time he rides away—especially since we gave him so much trouble he no longer announces departures or says goodbye. He has been away so much and for so long over the past two years, he only rents a loft—scarcely that—above the farrier’s stable while he is in town and otherwise drifts like a wild mustang. Any of us would give him a place to stay, but I expect that would be too easy, too comfortable, for Grip to stomach.
“He tried riding with others for a spell. Picking up bounty hunters for partners. But he found each so wanting he gave them up. If I understand correctly, he even shot a man he rode with when the cabrón whipped his own horse bloody, not desisting even at Grip’s encouragement, in an effort to make the animal climb a bank too steep for it.
“Mostly, I don’t think he had such difficulty with them. Only ... dislikes most people. He’s an exceptional judge of character: of a man’s intentions, the meaning behind the smile or words. One of his few skills he does not pride himself on. I’m not sure he realizes how good he is. He can tell if a man is lying in a second—assumes everyone around him can as well. He knows what move another will make before he makes it.
“We saw it those years ago when he first arrived. He missed nothing, despite being half-blind. Always watching, ready to react to avoid danger, waiting for the next blow. He did, after all, learn something from his first father which he can put to use.
“One of many reasons Everette’s betrayal bit so deep, I suppose. A man who is never fooled, for once so wrong it costs lives.
“So he rode alone, though he still collected bounties on anyone he happened across with a price on his head. He only needed enough to pay occasional room and board, then he discovered Sarita and the twins in poor shape when he returned from that first year gone. Though widows are esteemed here, she refused help from Darío’s family and has none of her own in town, trying to live on savings and washing. Now he earns all he can to take her. He’ll scarcely speak to her, can hardly stand looking at the children, they remind him so of Darío, but he takes her what he earns and she says nothing about it—though there’s not another soul she would take a penny from which she did not feel she earned. They understand each other’s pride. She’s a frugal woman, one of the wealthiest people in Santa Fé by now.
“He last returned from ... I don’t know where ... this spring. He heard La Manada de Lobos headed toward the city and he was going to wait them out. Everette had been through before. He always seemed to know when Grip was following and he could double back if he needed a stop in town. We had real lawmen then, a marshal and sheriff, so Everette wouldn’t linger or bring in his gang. But I’d seen him, talked to him myself. Even now I am not sure if I want Grip to find him and get it over, or never find him and keep up this life. It is difficult to see a close encounter between Grip and the gang in which Grip is not killed—though he has managed it over the years already.
“This May, we had word from a farmer east of the city that his neighbor spotted the gang moving north. Grip was ready to sneak after him the next morning, I felt sure. And I would follow. I’d gone after him before, though Mamá and Papá didn’t know the nature of the trips. He listened to me no better than Mateo. Still, I knew he was safer riding with me about, even as he cursed me. He didn’t want to risk leading me into trouble.
“The night he took a last drink at El Rio before heading out at dawn, he overheard a small group planning to hunt La Manada de
Lobos for the bounty. He’d abandoned riding in company, but a few warm bodies to take lead off was too fine an opportunity to pass up. Besides, there’d been all sorts of stories about Plague reaching New Mexico and this bunch included a girl claiming she could keep him safe from the sickness.”
Rosalía looks up from her horse to meet Ivy’s eyes. “It is what we call la mano de Dios,” she murmurs. “The hand of God.” She leans her forehead against Volar’s face, a hand stroking each cheek.
Ivy still waits, but Rosalía says no more.
What promise did he make to his dying mother? What happened to the vanished Darío? Why is that ugly yellow cur so important? What about Sam telling her Grip was trying to leave Santa Fé? If Rosalía knew him so well, why had she fired past him to interrupt Adair Gordon’s aim? Perhaps she would have been doing Grip a favor to let the ABCs shoot him.
Ivy opens her mouth around a million questions heaped in her throat, trying to remember each gaping rift in this long tale with its unsatisfactory ending, and hears gunshots.
Forty-Fifth
Blood Red
Rosalía grabs the top rail and swings over the corral fence like a squirrel, skirts flying.
Gaping, Ivy dashes for the gate, then runs after her, past adobe homes for the road beyond.
Shots persist as she goes—rifles as well as revolvers by the sound of it, not constant, but a steady pounding of cracks and bursts. Past the startled Sunday lunch group, Ivy finds the road ahead dustier than ever, with many others having just run in the same direction.
She cuts through backlots, choking, trying to fan her face and hold up skirts at the same time, the wound in her side stinging with sharp pain and her subsided headache leaping back to her temples with a vengeance. How did Rosalía take off like that?
She races along heaps of beams and poles for the wall at the city’s south edge, all abandoned on a Sunday, before she slows to a fast walk, holding her side.
Lightfall Three: Luck, Lost, Lady (Lightfall, Book 3) Page 11
