Winter Rain

by Terry C. Johnston

  “I aim to find the comancheros first.”

  “Look, I told you!” snapped the Irishman. “You come to the wrong place looking for help.”

  “Just the name of one,” Hook asked, slipping out from beneath the fat one’s fleshy arm.

  He drank, then dragged the dribble from his chin. “What do you see there, American? Look carefully and tell me.”

  Hook studied the street throbbing with the comings and goings of all sorts of poor. Occasionally a vaquero rode by, resplendent in dress and horse trappings, forcing his way through the crowds of peons by his sheer presence. Only now did Jonah see a carriage roll by, matched fours pulling along the landed aristocracy of Mexico.

  “There—that one,” Jonah said eagerly. “He’s a rich man. Bound to know some comancheros who trade into Texas, into Indian Territory.”

  “Him?” the Irishman asked, pointing with a slosh of his cup. A pair of Mexicans entered the cantina, forced to duck beneath the Irishman’s outstretched arm. “You see a rich man there, no?”

  “He will know the names of some comancheros—is that what you’re telling me?”

  The mottled cheeks were flushed with the blush of tequila. “You have been looking in the wrong place, Mr. Hook. Looking for the wrong men.”

  In angry confusion Jonah watched the Irishman turn away from the doorway and stumble back to ease himself into the chair once more. He dashed back to the table himself, slamming his two palms down on it as he sat.

  “I’m here in Chihuahua—where the comancheros trade from, goddammit. Don’t drink my tequila, then play a riddle on me … telling us I’ve been looking the wrong place for the wrong folks.”

  “See at the bar?” he asked, leaning in close to Jonah.

  Hook turned, finding some vaqueros with their arms laced around several women in their blousy skirts and shiny high-heeled shoes that clacked along the plank floor. Near them were more well-dressed men. He grew weary of the game. “Them? That rich-looking bunch. You’re telling me they’re comanchero traders?”

  “No. Not the obvious, my dear Mr. Hook. The others. There. See? And there. Look carefully and behold. And over there too.”

  Jonah shook his head. It made no sense. Every man the drunk pointed out was as poor a dirt farmer or craftsman as a man would care to meet. Not a successful comanchero. Not like the vaqueros dressed so exquisitely as they drank with the whores at the bar.

  “C’mon, Two Sleep,” he said with disgust and frustration as he rose.

  “We go?”

  “We’re going. This bastard’s drunk our tequila and spit back nothing in return. Hope you wake with your head pounding like a carpenter’s hammer.”

  With a slap the Irishman dropped his soft, empty hand over Jonah’s wrist, pinning it to the table. “Listen, you fool—I am telling you everything you need to know short of what actually became of your boys.”

  Slowly Hook disentangled himself. “You ain’t told me shit.”

  He chuckled, wagging his big head, the flaming hair disheveled and uncombed for the better part of his three-day drunk. “Go back north to find out about your boys, Mr. Hook. Talk to the comancheros.”

  “I come here to Chihuahua to talk to the comancheros.”

  “That’s what I been trying to tell you!” he snorted, upending Hook’s bottle to refill his cup. “There’s no comancheros here.”

  Jonah squinted. “They’re up north?”

  With a nod the man answered, “North is where they trade. North is where they work.”

  “So who the hell are those fancy-dressed fellas you pointed out to me?”

  “Them—they’re called ricos.”

  “Rich men.”

  “Right. Their kind are the money men. They run the operations out of Chihuahua. That’s all they do—never soiling their hands with work. Maybe once in a while one of them will want to amuse himself and take a long vacation, ride north with a caravan, joining his hired vaqueros and the comanchero traders for a diversion one trading season or another.”

  He squeezed it in his mind. Had he been looking all this time—month after month, season after season—for the wrong sort of man? Looking for him in the wrong place?

  Jonah sensed his heart hammering with self-anger ready to boil over in tears of helpless rage. “You’re telling me there’s no comancheros here? They’re back up north?”

  “Ricos, not comancheros. Not here.”

  “Back up north, goddammit?” Jonah growled.

  He licked the drops of tequila from the red hairs of his mustache. “Yeah. Chihuahua is where you’ll come when you find out which rico train brought your boys in. Here is where you’ll come to get some idea where the boys were taken once they were brought down here. Until then, you got to go back north and find some answers.”

  “Back … back to El Paso?”

  With a wag of his big head, the Irishman said, “No. Out there. To the northeast is the trail you need to take. It’s wide and well beaten. Used every autumn trading season for years. Centuries, likely.”

  “Northeast?”

  “To Portrillo and beyond the river.”

  “Beyond the river, you say? Texas.”

  “Texas.”

  So now Jonah drank in this dark, smoky hovel of a cantina in a village he thought the locals called Vieja. Another one of the miserable, stinking jacales squatting somewhere north of the Rio Grande.

  With Two Sleep he crossed back into the States at a place called Presidio, angling north by east from there, staying clear of the mountains that hugged the distant skyline here, there, and on almost every side of their line of march. It was a hostile land peopled with too few gringos and too many Mexicans, where a growing population of Texans were protected as best they could be upriver by Fort Quitman on the west, by Fort Davis to the north and Fort Stockton on farther east of there, outposts strung so far apart in that long, desperately thin line of frontier defense the army had been establishing ever since the end of the South’s bid for independence from the Union.

  “You got the right idea,” the old man declared to Jonah. “But your line’s off some.”

  At a settlement called Marfa a bartender had suggested that Hook scare up one of John Bell Hood’s faithful—an old Confederate soldier who might be able to help point the two sojourners in some likely direction or another. For reasons he could not explain, Jonah trusted the old man more than he had trusted most others come across in the years since leaving Shad Sweete and Fort Laramie behind. It came hard for Jonah Hook to trust others. So much already lay crushed and trampled inside him. Hard anymore to trust, to hope.

  The old soldier dragged out a rumpled map with few lines scratched across its dark surface, a parchment given a rich buckskin patina of time and smoke and the grease of many fires.

  “There,” Jonah said again. “I draw a line from Chihuahua north by east,” and he slowly traced his fingernail northeast across the Rio Grande the way he and Two Sleep had come, heading on east into the open ground east of Fort Davis and west of Camp Hudson and Fort McKavett.

  “Like I said—appears your thinking is on the right track when you head out from Chihuahua. But trick now is you gotta think like a comanchero, friend. Think like someone going north to trade with the Comanch’.”

  Jonah’s eyes studied the map, smarting in the dim light and the smoke of cheap tobacco, the smudge of tallow candles that gave this cold, stinking, low-roofed room its only glow of life. The far northern edge of the old Confederate’s map had the words Indian Territory scratched across it in bold letters, while the tracings of rivers were barely more evident than the many wrinkles aging the old parchment.

  “I come this far from the plains because I was told that the comancheros trade outta New Mexico. Went down there the long way from Fort Laramie, wandered around and found out I needed to head south to Chihuahua. That was where I was told to come back north, into Texas.”

  “And here you are,” the old man said softly, his rheumy eyes lit with the candles
’ glow and the cheap aguardiente. “When’d you leave that north country? Fort Laramie, you said?”

  “Right,” he answered. “End of summer, sixty-eight.”

  Jonah watched the old man’s eyes flick from him to the Shoshone and back again, widening in pure wonder as he whistled low. “You got any idea what month and year it be, son?”

  With a shrug Jonah replied, “Didn’t keep track. S’pose it never mattered. Why?”

  “Man has a job to do—he just does it, right?” He wagged his head in amazement. “Got the patience of the Eternal Himself, you do. Why, don’t you have any idea you been wandering over four year, friend?”

  In ways, it felt like more than four years. In another way, Jonah was just as certain the old man was having sport with him. “Four years. You’re crazed, mister. It can’t be seventy-two.”

  “No, friend, it ain’t.”

  Jonah grinned, smiling at Two Sleep. “See? Told you. Knew you was having fun with me.”

  With a shrug of his shoulder, the old man explained. “It ain’t seventy-two. It’s winter of 1873. Already two months gone past the new year.”

  For a long moment he stared down at his hands, in a way wishing he hadn’t come to know that so much time had slipped under him wandering through the land of the Mormons before he plodded back and forth through season after season begging for and scratching out information in New Mexico, time fooled away before they ever wandered south to Chihuahua. All that time had stacked up solid as cordwood behind him, one piece at a time. He hadn’t noticed because there had always been another village to visit, another trail rumored to hold promise. In the end every day, week, month, and year had come at him and flowed on past in such small, unobserved pieces. So much of his life, and he hadn’t noticed it gone.

  Of a sudden Jonah’s thoughts turned on something peculiar: that he would turn thirty-six this approaching summer. And owning up to that only meant that Gritta had grown much, much older too. Some ten years’ worth of older from the time Jonah had last held her against him.

  And the boys. They weren’t really boys no more. Grown into men without him.

  As much as he wanted to cry or lash out and hit something, someone, Jonah stoically turned back to the old soldier. Then gazed back down at the map, his heart thrumming in his ears, his breath come shallow like the flight of moth’s wings. “All right, old soldier. You want me think like a comanchero.”

  The old man wiped some tobacco juice out of his gray chin whiskers before he asked, “Lookee there and tell me where you gonna go to trade, friend?”

  Jonah’s eyes rose to the Shoshone’s, then slowly moved over to the old man’s. “I’m gonna go where the Injuns are.”

  “Good! But—not just any Injuns.”

  “The Comanche.”

  There was that gap-toothed smile of triumph. “Doggedy—now you got it!”

  With a slash of a grin, feeling the hot hammer of blood at his ears, Jonah gazed back down at that old, faded map in the candlelight. “All right. Show me where the comancheros go to trade with the Comanche.”

  Without a word the wrinkled one licked his lips in the glow and wispy faint smoke of those tallow candles, then dragged his long fingernail across the parchment … slowly up from Chihuahua, across the Rio Grande west of Presidio, ever on as his fingertip neatly split the seventy-odd miles of wilderness lying between forts Quitman and Davis.

  Jonah looked up and asked, “What’s out there?”

  26

  Spring 1873

  THERE WASN’T MUCH out there.

  Like the old soldier told him, “Jackrabbits and desert. A few Mex squatters. And the Pecos River. North of there—ever’thing—the hull durn country belongs to the Comanch’.”

  Into the bitter cold of winter’s last gasp on the southern plains they plunged, crossing low mountains, peeling their way over rough country like all that they had pierced coming to Comancheria. This was a waterless chaparral where only the creosote brush and spear grass grew to break up the harsh monotony of the rise and fall of a sinister land. That, and the cactus. Always the cactus.

  Reluctantly winter relinquished its brief hold on this southern land—making for a muddy time of things.

  Over Jonah’s head the low roof leaked, drops of cold mud smacking the back of his neck as he scooped the refried beans, what he had come to call Mexican strawberries, from the earthen bowl with the crude iron spoon. Across from Jonah sat the Indian, smearing a load of the refritos into a swab of tortilla that Two Sleep stuffed into the side of his mouth. The Shoshone called fewer teeth his own nowadays than he had four and a half years before, beside the red desert country where the two had first met. In their time together he had been forced to let Jonah pull three of them from one side alone. Two yanked from the other. It was crude, hard work with the small field pliers Hook packed along for gun repair: messy, bloody work, and damned painful too. But after a day or so of walking around with a small swab of his shirttail stuffed down in the bloody hole, the Shoshone had never failed to smile again, poking his tongue through the new gap, the glaze of pain finally gone from his eyes, that singular ache of a rotting tooth now nothing but a dimming memory.

  Some three years wandering among the Mex had taught Hook what he needed of their simple language, absorbing enough of a smattering of verbs and nouns and idioms that allowed him to learn even more as the seasons turned, ever turned.

  Most every day it never failed to amaze him that these dirt-poor people had stayed in this unforgiving country, nailed down in this land of sunburned offerings, blessed with little shade and even less sweet water.

  Water—that was the one thing worth more than gold in this country. Most of what the two horsemen and their stock had been forced to drink across the slow whirl of the seasons had been squeezed from the drying, death-laced water holes and muddy seeps they ran across on their travels. And whenever the pair found themselves in a mud-and-wattle settlement like this very one, Jonah had come to count himself fortunate that the milky water proved thin enough to drink. His prayer had been answered long ago: the earth-colored fluid so predominate in this land no longer troubled his bowels the way it had when first they had begun their sojourn into this land of the sun long, long ago.

  A long time back he had tried the Mexicans’ beer—thick as syrup but shy on flavor. So still he drank the tequila, the Mexicans’ pulque, as much as he hated it. And here in this cantina, as in practically every jacal where they had stopped across the years, there was little but that fermented juice of the agave to drink, its sour and ropy taste barely softened by the warm, earth-rich water a man used to chase the cactus juice, to mellow the racy sting of the green chiles set before him at every meal, hot as a spoonful of red ants.

  The hanging lamps cast a light the color of a dull tropical orange over everything, especially the deep-brown hide stretched over the back of Jonah’s hands busy above his bowl. From the corner table arose a quick spate of muffled laughter as men gambled with a greasy deck of flare-red pasteboards. Smoke from their cigarillos hung in wispy spiders’ veils just below the lamplight.

  His nostrils came alive, flaring slightly as Jonah smelled her—even before he actually heard her, before he felt her arm rope loosely over his shoulder. The peculiar odor of these cantina women, ripe with the fragrance of pomegranate and penole meant to mask the stench of unwashed flesh, bean wind, and the previous customer, had long ago become as recognizable as the smell of his own horse. Back came the memory of that first of these dark-skinned whores he had taken in a squalid little settlement they reached in New Mexico, he grown so anxious for her that there in the dark corner of that low-roofed hovel, out of the firelight, Jonah had let her unbutton his canvas britches and tantalize him, stroking his hot and swollen flesh until he exploded in her hand. Like music he had been starved from hearing in so long—the music of a woman’s laughter—the whore had laughed at his eagerness as she led the gringo back to a dark room where she showed him to a chair, worked him once more
into readiness with her tongue and lips, then sat down upon him.

  Gazing up now at this new one in the flickering light shed by the tallow candle that dripped and sputtered in its pool of heady grease at the center of his table, Jonah discovered his lips and the end of his tongue already gone mushy, numbing from the potent cactus juice. Something in his mind made him wonder if this whore was really as good-looking as the tequila made him think she was. Bending low over him, she tantalized him, brushing his shoulder with one of her breasts, her fingers raking through his long hair as she luringly moved the breast past his cheek before settling in the chair at the corner of Hook’s table.

  Immediately his eyes fell to her loose blouse, hidden partially beneath the folds of a coarse woollen shawl she had knotted against the depth of her cleavage. In the way she thrust those breasts at him, she made it plain that there was nothing else beneath the blouse, nothing but her brown flesh that rose and fell with her every breath as she poured herself a drink from Hook’s bottle.

  “Help yourself,” he said with a wry grin, already sensing his hands on those breasts, willing his lips to suck at their warm aureoles.

  There was something playful around her big eyes. Jonah supposed it was the fact that she wanted him, had abandoned the Mex at the bar and came over to show the gringo that she wanted him. She seemed so young, though, so likely that look in her eye was only something practiced, for someone so young would not really know how to share herself with a man. He tugged down the last shred of woman-loneliness left in him, hungering to recognize those small, furtive changes in a woman’s face when she draws close to the one she wants to sink her claws in, if only for a night, if only for an hour, if only for as long as it will take the man to seize his satisfaction.

  When he spoke his English, she looked at him quizzically, the cup stopped at her chin. “Señor?”

  He hadn’t meant to say it in English. “Don’t matter. Drink up.” Jonah took his cup from the table and clacked it against hers, motioning for Two Sleep to toast with them.