After a long hard walk they were prodded onto horseback and with riders to the right and left of them they rode hard from the scene of the battle. How far they rode or in what direction he could not keep his calculation. His lungs ached for breath and agonizing pain stabbed at his temples and the fire in his feet burned into his legs. The land sloped gently upward and he knew they were climbing, but that was all. They could be climbing anywhere, in any direction. The trail leveled for a time and then became steeper yet. His mind’s exertion was fully directed at not passing out and falling from the horse, because to have fallen from the horse without sight, there would be no way to turn, to reach, to catch the ground, to not land on his head and break his neck. So he clung to the saddle horn and a fistful of mane and reasoned if he fell he’d hold to these, even if his arms were to break.
Then, after what seemed forever, they were stopped and dismounted. He stepped gingerly because he could not now feel his feet and his legs were simply the posts his body was perched upon. When the gunnysack was lifted from his head the first light he saw was the fading light of dusk, the dark light before darkness, the light before the silver shine of the stars. He became aware of a ringing in his ears, but then it stopped. Then there was another sound and at first he could not figure out what it was and then he understood it to be a baby crying. Then there was the clinking of bridles and a mule brayed and then all sound rushed in and he could hear again.
They were in some mountain notch, the place of a secluded encampment with no sign of a way in or out. There was water and grass and growing on the periphery were stunted pine and live oak.
There were several dozen of them and they were a motley band of soldiers, women and children. They were all ages and their features ranged from brown-skinned Indian to blue-eyed Spanish. Some few rode richly furnished mounts while for others a sheepskin tied to the horse’s back was enough.
The women were preparing the evening meal. They wore green and blue dresses with red sashes tied about their waists and shawls they wore over their shoulders and sometimes their heads. They were unloading mules that were packed with firewood, kettles and sacks of beans and corn and braided chilies.
These women, he wondered, how many of their sons, brothers, lovers, husbands had he killed this day?
Soon there were fires burning and they hung cuts of meat from the newly slaughtered beeves on iron spits where the slabs of beef smoked and roasted. A large copper boiler shined in the firelight. In that they’d make their frijoles. The corn they ground by hand they mixed with lard. Soon there were yellow stacks of tortillas piling up beside the hot kettles. There would be beef, frijoles and parched corn, and tortillas baked on fires in ovens fashioned from oil cans.
There were some riders who never dismounted and had their tortillas and frijoles and beef handed up to them. These were the Dorados—the chosen men who died so willingly, and this evening there were some fewer than who started the day. He admired them as warriors. They were rare to surrender and as impractical as it might seem, they were willing to die for their honor.
The grueling ride had been difficult for Preston. He was much weakened and near to shattered. With his first step he collapsed on the ground where he still lay. He appeared obsessed with his missing finger as he could not seem to avert his eyes. He cradled that hand in his other as if a small wounded other.
Napoleon thought to say something to Preston as he was his commander and they were comrades and fellow countrymen, but he could not help the anger he felt. So it was Preston who spoke first.
“We are in a suffering condition,” he said, clasping his wounded, blood-caked hand to his chest.
“Stop sniveling,” Napoleon said. “You will shame them.” He carefully let himself to the ground close to Preston.
“What do they want?”
“We will find out what they want when they want us to know.”
From where he lay he watched men pitching shovels into the dry dusty earth. He at first thought they were digging graves, but it made no sense. If they wanted graves dug they’d have them dig their own graves and he’d seen enough of the countryside to know that graves were rarely afforded the executed. The desiccating sun and wind and the carrion eaters made short enough work of the shot and hanged. He listened intently to what they were saying, but he could not tell the language they were talking. He was not sure who they were or where their loyalties lay in this many-sided civil war.
As to the digging, his wonderings were answered for him when the pit was not so deep and they began dragging ammunition boxes from it and then a cache of rifles, a machine gun, and cartridge strips. They pulled wooden crates from where they’d been buried and they were marked with the same black letters as so many of the crates delivered south and stockpiled in the depot at expedition headquarters.
The crates of rifles and the machine gun and the ammunition retrieved, Napoleon and Preston were ushered to the edge and made to get inside the pit left by the digging. Then the young cowboy who’d attempted to parley before the battle approached them. He assumed from the start the boy was one of the Americans hired as dynamiters, machine-gun operators, soldiers of fortune.
“What are they singing about?” he asked the boy.
“Love, hunger, leaving home. What else is there?” the boy said, squatting at the edge of the pit.
“Not much, I guess.”
“She wants to know if either of you is a dynamiter. They need one. Theirs was killed.” Then he said, “She wants to know if you’re one?”
“She who?”
“The one what runs this outfit.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t know anything about the stuff.”
“Have it your way,” the boy said.
It was then Preston found his legs, rose to his full height, and said, “Would they consider a ransom?”
The boy gave him a funny look and then made a low humming sound in his throat.
“Listen,” Preston proposed, taking out his wallet. “Tell them if it’s money they want?”
Stupidly, Preston did not understand they would have his money whether he gave it to them or not, have it in whatever way they wanted to have it.
He told Preston to shut up and then to the boy, “You look kind of pale for this climate. What’s your game?”
“I ain’t going to ask you to live,” the boy said. “Show them you know dynamite and you might be able to make it out of here.”
“What about him?”
“I think they got other business with him.”
“You mean you want me to show you,” Napoleon said, daubing at his powder-grimed face. “That’s your game, ain’t it. You let your mouth write a check your ass can’t cash.”
“You shut your trap, you old peckerhead.”
“You’re supposed to be the dynamiter, only you don’t know how.”
“They’re going to kill you.”
“If they do, I don’t think I’ll be the only one they kill,” he said, and with that the boy righted himself and stalked away.
Soon after that they were brought from the shallow pit and their hands tied behind their backs and they were made to kneel in the dirt. In defiance he lay down on his side and closed his eyes and his action became enough reason for Preston to topple beside him.
There came a distant commotion from the far side of the encampment, a marshalling of force and then it came on and was a kind of pageantry he’d rarely seen.
A white horse bearing a woman rider at a bridling gait hove up to the place where they lay. She wore her hair in a long black braid, a black fitted skirt and a white shirtwaist with a pearl gray suede vest. She wore a soft gray felt hat with an ostrich plume, pink-tinted glasses, and a pistol in a belt filled with ammunition. A braided leather quirt dangled from her wrist.
This was one of the recurring women riders he’d seen through the field glasses. He could see that she was an accomplished horsewoman and the horse bearing her was perhaps the finest he’d ever seen. The horse stoo
d sixteen hands with a massive chest. It had a slightly convex face and large oval eyes. It wore a broad forehead and carried a long heavy neck, an abundant mane, and a thick low-set tail. Its saddle was embroidered with silver and there were silver cheek plates in the form of conchas on the harness. The horse was further adorned with a silvered face piece and breastplate. The tapaderas covering the stirrups were intricately silvered as well. It was an Andalusian, a purebred Spanish horse.
The woman’s dress and manners and beauty, as well as the horse’s, were high born. Napoleon took her to be from the wealthiest class and existing at a distance from the world, a distance that went beyond money and possession. In this land there were haciendas as big as a million acres. These were people with their own private kingdoms, their own private countries, and their own private armies.
Two Yaqui rode beside her in full war paint. They rode matched golden duns with tiger eyes. They were hard beasts with dead eyes in their faces, the horses and the Yaquis. The Yaqui were tall and broad shouldered and they wore two bandoleers around their waists and two more across their naked chests. Riderless ponies dallied behind them with rotting heads impaled on the saddle horns. The heads wore long hair and in death their faces were crumpled with pain and their mouths shriveled and unmistakable smiles. Close by there was another woman who rode with them. This must have been the other woman he’d seen. Except this woman was a window manikin held upright in the saddle by a thin frame of steel. She too rode a fine white horse and was dressed similarly to the actual woman, a slant parasol puppeting above her head.
There was another who rode behind her. He wore a broad sombrero, silver-studded trousers, and a goatskin jacket. He was the one with the .45, its grips inlaid with mother-of-pearl and there were others in her party, their mounts gaunt, rough animals, with visible ribs and hip bones, but they were armed to the teeth and possessed the air of assassins. These other men had no politics. They were in loyal service only to the woman.
The boy came to them again.
“This is against the law,” Preston said. It was a fatal part of his character not to bend at times, not to be pushed around.
“You want me tell her that?” the boy said.
“Yes,” he said.
The boy went to her side and spoke to her. Then he returned to where they kneeled.
“She says she is the law,” the boy said.
Before Preston could respond, the woman gave a signal and two men approached and dragged Napoleon and Preston onto their knees and roughly blindfolded them. He could hear Preston beside him, protesting his treatment. Then he felt the muzzle of a gun barrel at the back of his head. He tried to imagine another world where none of this was happening, but he could not. Preston went silent and there was silence at the ground and in the air. Then there was the sound of two triggers being cocked, one and then the other.
When the threat of death became imminent, Napoleon, like some men, extended an invitation. He felt daring, even hungry for it. He fell in love with the thought of it and wanted it as much as he wanted to live.
He could hear Preston again. He was whimpering.
Napoleon waited for his life to pass before him, not because he was afraid but because he was curious what it had all been about and also because he expected it. He expected the parade of his life, its events in quick succession to pass through his mind as complete and silent as a whisper. He felt the muzzle drag against his scalp, the result of a hard trigger or a weak hand.
“It’s all right,” he told the gunman. “Don’t be nervous.”
The muzzle shook and waggled as two-handed the man pulled the revolver’s trigger. He wanted to reassure him.
“Do a good job,” he said, waiting, anticipating.
Time crawled by. He could hardly breathe. There was a wind and dry dust lifted and was carried in the darkly moving air. He consigned himself to death, endured his wait. He thought of his brother, his father, his mother. Then he became aware of a sound rising up from his chest, the sound of a cry. He made the one sound as if drawn from his throat and then no more.
He waited and waited for his life to be ended, but it was not and then there was the snap of a dry fire, the steel hammer collapsing on an empty cylinder. It was then his belly burned with what felt like boiling water. A roar went up and there was laughter all around and loud cheers.
He knew to smile and he could do no other than to let his head go back on his neck and laugh with them. It was a dirty joke but a joke nonetheless.
The man behind him clapped his ears viciously. It was as if his body had been struck by lightning instead of flattened hands. He could not hear and he could feel as his body was stripped naked.
The woman sat her horse and watched as they were hung from a live oak by their wrists and beaten with a heavy wet rope until he had little feeling left, his flesh so shocked there was only the thud of dull impact. She smoked a cigar while they were beaten. He could smell the drifting smoke and when he could smell it no longer that was the end of their beating and they were cut down.
13
PRESTON WAS LYING on the ground beside him. He was crying in a ragged, tortured, unstoppable way. His tears were burning down his face and choking in his throat. His body convulsed with each wracking sob.
Napoleon lay beside him, dry with the source of pain his own body had become.
Was this the same night of the strange morning of the night before? The morning they rode across the land while the sun was flat on the earth line?
He spoke to the sobbing man harshly, quietly.
“Shut up, god dammit,” Napoleon said quietly. “Quit your bawling. You are killing yourself,” he told the nerve-shattered man.
“I can’t help it,” Preston said.
“They won’t pity you,” he told him. “You are embarrassing them and yourself and they’ll hate you for it and then they’ll have to kill you.”
“I don’t want to die.”
“It ain’t your call,” he said, and then his own pain-ridden mind thought, You poor gone bastard. But why did he care? There were so many things he did not care about anymore.
And then in his next thought, I still got a chance. You always had a chance until you were dead. The thought was involuntary and he did not like having it. It was best to not think at all and to let the mind that resided within the mind do the necessary thinking that led to action and then he could think about what he’d done later.
Against the night’s darkness the white flames of the cook fires flagged in the wind. He lay bound and naked and contorted in that high place and was as if cast to an outer rim of a cold, waterless world. Shapes crossed before the cook fires and the fires disappeared and then the fires appeared again. How silent and beautiful the scene of the crackling fires. The civilization of the fires was as if the only civilization on the land and he was cast from it into a world starkly terrible.
They were being watched over by little boys, barely able to hold the shotgun they passed on with each changing shift. The little boys wore sandals and white cotton britches knotted with rope at the waist. They wore blankets and castoffs and all manner of headgear. One of the boys wore magenta-colored socks with his sandals.
There were hard flowers. What kind they were he did not know. The little boy who wore the magenta socks picked a handful after he handed the shotgun to the next little boy.
A man he’d not seen before came forward. He wore a broad-brimmed black sombrero, a red blanket serape against the cold night and striped pants worn tight. His face was pitted with pox scars. He had one good eye and the other was sealed behind a closed lid. The man moved with the ease of a predator and as if he possessed an ability to see in the dark, his movements subterranean. He threw back his serape. Underneath he wore a brown suede jacket with silver embroidery and in his hand was a knife, thin bladed with a white jigged-bone handle and nickel silver bolsters. Napoleon watched the man sidle up to Preston, who was naked and shivering in the cold, his hands tied behind his back with
twisted rawhide. The man held the knife loosely in his hand. Napoleon could feel his crotch shrinking as the man took Preston by his long hair, pulled back his head, and raised the knife.
When the knife descended Preston’s body convulsed. His limbs flapped. He let back his head as if complicit in his own maiming and then he moaned.
The work of a knife is quiet. The moment was suspended as if a universal suspiration of all encompassed time and then his screams rose up and split the darkness and were piercing to hear as if unloosed was a bright dramatic and horrible pageantry. As sound after sound was torn from Preston’s lungs something like the taste of copper pennies filled Napoleon’s mouth and his eyes rolled up in his head. There was nothing he could do to help Preston. He surged against his bindings, quaking rigid in every joint, and then his body went slack. It was useless. The one with the lost eye stepped away from the bent figure and he watched as Preston’s eye blood watered the sand.
“I’m dying,” Preston said. “I’m dying.”
He could only imagine the desperate terror in Preston’s heart, or had he passed through the terror and now he was on the other side where he was being cared for, the long-standing promise made to the suffering by the loving Christian god?
“Not yet, god dammit. Not yet,” Napoleon said.
“I am going to live.”
“You can make it,” he said, but he didn’t think it.
Preston bent up painfully into a sitting position and then he stood. There was only blood where his eyes used to be.
“How bad is it,” he asked before he could stop himself.
“I can still see you,” Preston whispered, his nerves sending false signals to his brain, and it made Napoleon regret even more asking the question. “I can still see you,” Preston cried.
Napoleon closed his own eyes and on the inside of his eyelids there was a dancing light, liquid red at first, as if seeing blood through water and then yellow and then white.
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