His curiosity got the best of him as they reached the boardwalk, and he glanced over his shoulder, expecting to see the windmill come crashing down into the street.
Instead, he saw something he would never see again and yet would carry with him always—something he would remember in his loneliest, darkest moments, up until he lay alone in a dim, still room many years later, waiting for death.
The base of the windmill stood in the alley between the buildings, uprooted from its foundation. He only wondered how the windmill had come to be there for a half an instant.
As he watched with unbelieving eyes, the spindly beams of the windmill moved. They scuttled independently, like the legs of a crippled fly or a maimed spider, and, towering over the flapping shop awnings, it lurched out into the street. The splayed face turned jerkily like the head of a questing tin daisy peering up and down the street, seeking them. The blades flashed in the sun as they swiveled with a slow, tortuous squeaking sound and the ‘head’ regarded them. Then it was staggering unnaturally into the middle of the street in pursuit of them, the entire unwieldy structure pitching and shambling like an ungainly, animated milking stool.
The boy screamed as he had never known he could.
Then the gringo had him by the shirt front. He pitched him into the open doorway of the cantina, through the clacking doors. He fell to the floor, still screaming.
“Bring a bottle of liquor and the bung starter! Fast! Now!” he yelled.
The boy pulled himself up. He caught a glimpse of the windmill’s wooden legs stomping toward the cantina, quivering with each step, and he spun on his belly and got to his feet and ran for the bar, numbly noticing the blood on the floor from the last time the gringo had been in there.
He dove over the counter top and fell behind. He almost hugged his knees and buried his face and stayed there. Almost. He mumbled as he worked, trembling hands knocking over bottles and smashing whole shelves of liquor as they sought the bung starter. Prayers he had not said since he was very young rattled off so quickly the words made no sense, but they were empowered with a true and desperate desire to be heard and understood. To God and Jesus and Our Lady, and to all the saints.
He heard a gigantic crash and felt the building shudder. The bung starter fell from the shelf and landed at his feet. He gripped it one hand and a bottle of clear aguardiente in the other, then he staggered around the edge of the bar.
The gringo stood spraddle-legged in the doorway, as though he had just ducked inside. Filling up the whole entrance was the turning, groaning head of the wind mill. It was straining against the frame. The adobe was flaking from the wall. Cracks were appearing like lightning. The wind gusted in through the door like the thing’s raging breath, tearing away the curtains and sending the playing cards funneling across the room to scatter in every direction.
The bearded gringo had a shred of flying black fabric torn from his coat. He held out his hand and hollered for him to come.
The Rider took the bottle and bit the cork out, jamming the scrap of his coat sleeve into the neck. Then he began striking the bung starter, trying to light the makeshift fuse as the head of the animated windmill pushed further into the entrance, blades groaning and bending backwards, windows smashing, tables overturning.
It lit, into a lively, fluttering fire.
He turned to face the unnatural thing, hearing its shrill keening in his ears.
It was said that the angels had pursued the fugitive Lilith, the mother of all demons to the Red Sea, and spared her life only when she agreed to allow one hundred of her children to die every day.
Today was this one’s turn.
The Rider flung the bottle into the face of the windmill and it shattered, splashing liquid fire. The old wood of the tower frame quickly caught and spread down its length. It screamed, a sound like howling wind bending metal and The Rider backed up into the cantina, hands clamped to his ears.
The metal daisy face withdrew and the flaming tower spun in the middle of the street, flailing as the brittle wood blackened and began to collapse, shedding fiery beams and crackling as it shook itself to pieces.
The wind lessened almost immediately, and a fine rain of dust fell for a few seconds in a gentle cloud over everything, dwindling the fire and half-burying the broken windmill.
Nothing truly died, of course, but the shock of disincorporation was akin to death for a demon or any possessing spirit. Defeated on the physical plane, the violent entity would dissipate into the ether and return to whatever hellish wellspring had birthed it to gather its will. It would be a long time before it visited the earth again.
The Rider fell into one of the empty chairs.
The boy stood nearby, lips moving soundlessly.
“I told you not to look,” The Rider admonished him, gripping his own wrist and grimacing.
The boy reached for one of the clear bottles under the bar and poured the strong smelling liquid into a clean glass, spilling some all around with his shaking hand.
He had only ever tasted beer and hated it, but the hard clean burning of the aguardinte was not like beer. It spread across his raging stomach and made him pleasantly drowsy, so that it was not long before the blood on the floor and the crackling and popping of the windmill smoldering in the street did not bother him so much, and he felt he could speak without gibbering.
“They came from the desert,” he said.
The Rider looked up. He had bound up his wrist tightly with a bar towel and was opening and closing his fingers.
“The men with the guns,” said the boy. “We thought they were rurales come to water their horses. The big man and the black man were out front. The mayor and the marshal went to the cantina to talk to them, and the big man killed the mayor in the street with his sword…cut off his head.”
The boy looked into the street, and The Rider was unsure if it was the burning windmill or the rolling head he was seeing.
“They took the marshal’s guns and they locked him in the jail. One of the men found the telegraph operator. He was trying to wire for help. He killed him, and they cut the wires. We all hoped that the message had gone through....”
“Where are all the others?” The Rider pressed, pulling on his shoes. “Dead?”
“Working in the mine. In the gold mine.”
The town had a gold mine. Probably it was newly discovered. That was why the little hamlet looked on the verge of prosperity. The unfinished manor house, so out of place on the border, the clean buildings. They had foolishly advertised their good fortune like a woman wearing diamonds in an alley, and the first band of renegades that had come along had taken it.
Scarchilli was an admittedly industrious bandit, forcing the townspeople to work the mine. With the help of the black sorcerer to turn aside unwary travelers with the wind demon, they could have stayed in the town as long as they wanted, eating and drinking their fill, then finally leaving with sacks of gold when they were through.
It was quite an accomplishment, keeping an entire town hostage with only ten or twenty men, armed or no. Freeing them would be difficult, especially if Scarchilli kept the children or the women in some central place to insure the mens’ obedience.
“Where are the women and the children?”
“I told you, señor. In the mine.”
He works them all?
“When do they take the people out of the mine then for the night?”
“They do not leave,” the boy said. “They work until they are dead.”
The Rider stood and went to the door. The sorcerer waited in the big house. But he was ill-equipped to face him without even his enchanted pistol, still shoved through Scarchilli’s waistband.
“You’d better find another hiding place,” he said. “They might come looking for me.”
“Señor!” the boy started, gripping his sleeve.
The Rider turned.
“In the jail are some of the marshal’s guns still. He keeps the key to the rifle rack on a little h
ook behind the door, and there are bullets in his desk. Maybe the banditos have not got them.”
The Rider nodded.
“Thank you.”
“Señor.”
The Rider paused again at the doorway.
“My papa whose cantina this is. Maybe he is not dead yet. He is called Eladio. He is...”
“I know,” said The Rider. “In the mine.”
* * * *
The business in the cantina with the two Mexicans had been more a matter of wits and advantage than the sort of strict gun prowess touted by men who killed for a living. The Rider had practiced drawing quickly, but doubted he could be relied upon to hit anything beyond a few feet. Long years of reading by candlelight had rendered him nearsighted.
Of course, he had learned to kill.
He was not the sort of man to dwell on the war, as so many men on the frontier were. Nearly twenty years later, men still died by the relativity of their birthplace to the Mason-Dixon Line.
The Rider’s participation in the war had been his ultimate reason for breaking with his enclave. The rebbes hadn’t understood his willingness to fight in a conflict that did not directly concern their isolated commune. In their eyes, it had been a war of industry versus agriculture, a conflict of opposing political ideologies, both entirely too Christian for their tastes. At the very least, it was a war to free the unfortunate schvartzes. And while this had been a noble endeavor, in their opinion it was not enough to warrant his breaking from his mystic studies.
The Rider had tried to tell them of the forces he had observed massing heaven and in the Yenne Velt which so mirrored their own—that the opposing forces of the Rebellion were both divinely and infernally inspired. Was it not written in the Bereshit Raba that ‘both heaven and earth are balanced by each other?’ ‘As above, so below.’ There was a correspondence to be perceived in all levels of the universe. There had been more at stake than the emancipation of slaves or the preservation of agricultural economics, although these were empirical symptoms of the greater universal War. The Rebellion, like a satellite conflict localized in the mortal world, had sprung from a greater border war, and the borders were between Heaven and Hell.
They had called him blasphemer, and refused to believe that God or the Adversary would take a direct interest in the wars of men. Blind foolishness. Hadn’t God Himself felled the walls of Jericho? Hadn’t He invigorated Samson against the Philistines, and sent fire and death on the Egyptians? Why these righteous men of faith had readily accepted these doctrines and been so hard hearted against the idea that God favored one army of Christians over another, he hadn’t been able to understand.
The rebbes had even suggested he had worn the blue so that he could fulfill some ungodly bloodlust fostered in his soul by the forbidden teachings of his master, Adon. For this he had been barred from their company. They had long sought an excuse to expel him. He had given it to them at last when he enlisted in Ford’s Independent Company in Colorado.
The war had taught him that men could think themselves righteous and be not so, just as it had taught him to kill. But unlike the lessons of the Merkabah, he had never truly taken to the latter. Anticipation or aftermath, it still caused his hands to shake, his palms to sweat, as if it were the first time he’d held a rifle.
This time was no different.
The rifle he held now was a Henry repeater. He had found it, and the box of cartridges, in the jail where the boy had told him they would be. It was cool in his hands, but he knew with a dozen armed men to face, it would soon be hot to the touch.
The mine was a mile out of town, driven into the base of the rocky hills, a crude cave blasted wide enough for two men to walk abreast.
Two men stood there now, in the aperture, lighting lamps against the setting sun, their rifles leaned against the stone wall. The Rider recognized them as two of the men who had presided over his would-be execution at the windmill. They had been anxious to go. Now, they seemed fearful to stay. They kept whispering to each other, and looking to the dark sky.
Nearby, a large remuda of horses slept within a makeshift corral of brambles and rope. It could have been all the horses in the town, and the bandits’ besides.
He wished he could call forth one of the little whirlwinds now to send them running, but he was no magician.
His wrist throbbed. The boy had bound it tightly, but he could barely feel his fingers on his left hand. He could move it, with difficulty. At least it wasn’t broken. If he managed to kill these two with his rifle, he might be able to kill a couple more as they ran out of the mine. Scarchilli would not come out though, and the next gunshots heard would probably mean the death of the townspeople inside.
He needed a way in. He needed to free the people inside, or else kill Scarchilli and the bandits before they could turn on the kidnapped workers.
Slowly, on quiet feet, he began to make his way around the low hill toward the entrance. The war had taught him how to kill, yes.
It had taught him other lessons as well.
* * * *
Hector Scarchilli bit into a hard biscuit and spat the stale mess onto the dirt floor.
Miguel turned to look at him, glanced at the wet shreds of bread and smiled.
“How much longer till we can leave this goddamned town?” Scarchilli muttered.
“I guess that depends on how rich you want us all to be, jefe,” Miguel shrugged.
Scarchilli nodded. He had promised his men they would all be rich enough to never have to work again. Banditry was work. Killing was work, and to hell with any son of a bitch who claimed otherwise. There was a stupid notion among the campesinos and the holy padres and the viejas that banditos were shiftless and lazy. Goddamn! Had they ever spent weeks in the deep desert with rurales and bounty killers on their trail? Had they ever truly thirsted? So badly one felt as if their soul itself were drying up and their brain was cracking beneath the hot skull like baked clay?
How many of these soft bellied bastards would suffer such a thirst or hunger and then be strong enough to resist riding into a town that housed a cool, clear well or whose air hung with the smell of warm tortillas and yet hid fifty murderous pistolas in the shade?
How many of them were man enough to leave behind a life of certainty for the crazy life, where not even the trustworthiness of one’s own comrades or the coming of a new day was guaranteed without paying the price of lead and powder?
The life of a bandit was hard; the life of a chief of bandits, even more so. One had to inspire love and fear in the wolves beneath, or be torn apart at the first opportunity.
He promised his men an end to this life. A return to sweethearts and mothers, and homes long left behind in a trail of blood and dust. All for a deal with that black devil out of hell. It hadn’t seemed a bad deal. All the gold from the new mine at Polvo Arrido in exchange for an equal share and two women Kelly would select himself from among the town. He had taken the mayor’s daughter and a straw haired girl who worked in the eatery. The only other demand he’d made was to live alone in the big house.
Now, Scarchilli was not as sure as he had been. He weighed that soft bellied life against the dread that grew daily in his soul. He was a man who had been, for many years, neighborly with death, and had done deeds worthy of a place of honor in the lowest country of hell. Always he had reasoned that men were animals anyway, not capable of right or wrong, only deserving of survival if they earned it through strength or action. A wolf killed sheep to sustain itself.
The magic of the black man made him look over his shoulder. He had never feared death, or what came after, before he had seen Kelly’s powers, and what it had done to the people of this town.
“How much gold does a man need, Miguel, when you weigh it against his soul?” Scarchilli mused, patting the gilded pistol he had taken from the bearded gringo. The stones on the handle of this trinket alone could keep him alive for years in his hometown, and probably buy him the alcalde’s office as well.
Mi
guel listened to the monotonous ringing of tools for a moment longer. The room where the men gathered was quiet but for the snoring of the drunk and the slowing melody of sleepy Diego strumming a ballad idly on his guitarra as he too began to doze in the corner. Each echo of metal on rock was a beat of time whose rhythm challenged the idleness of the dying music.
“Without the storm…you want to break our deal with El Crepusculo?” Miguel murmured.
The evil storm had broken at some point before nightfall. They had come up from looking over the people in the mines and noticed the stillness. It was strange after living with the wind for so long. But they had heard Kelly’s drums pounding from town, and none of them wanted to go near the big house when the drums were beating.
“I don’t think that black bastard cares for gold,” Scarchilli said, coming to stand beside him.
“What then?”
“I don’t know, paisano.” He listened to the unending clinking in the tunnel. “I don’t know what he wants. He’s like a hungry dog for it, whatever it is. Pero, whatever it is, I don’t want him to take it from me. Maybe he is the Devil. Maybe it’s all of our souls he wants to take.” He nodded out to the dark tunnel. “Like he took theirs’.”
“Some of the men think the way you do,” Miguel said. He did not say if he was one of those men. “Others see only the sacks filled with gold, fatter every day. You promised them each a fortune to bear home.”
“Fiero and Sucio are dead,” Scarchilli said, stepping over one of his sleeping men and plucking a half empty bottle of tequila from the crook of the man’s arm. “That’s two less fortunes to make.”
Merkabah Rider: Tales of a High Planes Drifter Page 11
