by Bruce Olds
Helpless at that point to do much by way of intervention but endeavor verbally to calm, comfort and console the unthinkably young, understandably hysterical victim—whose name, age, height and weight, hair and eye color and distinguishing birthmarks I am with-holding here out of a sense of common decency—while physically restraining her defiler (name DeJesus, rank corporal), it quickly became apparent that the soldado was so besotted that such fight as he was capable of summoning amounted to little more than a britches-around-the-ankles, headlong charge.
Following a moment or two of slapstick-like lurching about to regain his balance in order to steady himself for another lunge, when he launched himself at me yet again, he collided flush with the gnarled knob of my cosh, its impact—I heard the THWOCK!—catching his skull high across the temporal, its wafer-thin so-called squama. Upon which, not bothering to so much as crumple, he went down as if poleaxed, stove-in head rooster-tailing blood.
What happened next remains something I cannot account for even now, for it happened so precipitously, it had happened before I could fully grasp that it was happening even as it happened. As if out-of-nowhere, suddenly swarming down the lane I beheld as if in a nightdream a torchbearing crowd toting buckets of what proved to be hot pine pitch—the tar, I recall it occurring to me at the time, could only have been fetched off one of the ships anchored in the bay where I knew it was employed in the blacking of hemp rope and the caulking of bulkheads and hull seams.
Jostled by the mob, for it bore all the clamjamfry’d earmarks, rudely to the side, I could only watch as the inert, drunken wretch laid out flat as a fluke upon the ground was roughly stripped of each striation and stitch of his uniform, outer and under alike, which, tattered and torn, were then put to the torch. Still out cold, more naked than the wound from which he continued copiously to bleed, he was then by the bucket-toters slathered by intermittently replenished tarbrush scalp to sole even as others in their turn spat upon the body which had quickly become the object of a roundelay of well-aimed bootkicks that I confess to having found less appalling than apropos.
Still, none of it was very pretty, as justice can sometimes be. So basta ya, I recall thinking to myself. I believe I have seen quite enough. Seen too much. All of a bellyful. And so, peeling off, panthered out and away, on the walk back to my billet resolving, consequences be damned, that I would in the morning submit a formal written brief of complaint and protest to the commandante demanding not only that this DeJesus, should he survive, be turned over for criminal trial in civil court, but that henceforward those under his command either be ordered to absent themselves from the Quarter or that he immediately recognize our right to re-establish our armed Committee of Safety & Self-defense.
Now, with respect to El Commandante Bradburn, I had up to that point been content to bide my time while attending to what a lawyer in such a place as Anahuac typically found himself attending to: drawing up wills, writing mortgages, certifying and transferring land titles, taking depositions in estate matters, preparing powers of attorney, filing for collection of notes, composing petitions, warrants and subpoenas, other mundane mind-numbing paperasserie civil and suchlike &c. Heeding Austin’s counsel, my commerce with Bradburn hitherto had amounted to little more than the perfunctory tip of the hat in seldseen passing, typically while he was out gamboling his brace of fierce-looking dogs.
But this rape, I found myself thinking, was hardly some random, localized atrocity, an aberration that had occurred anomalously out of the misbegotten blue. No, it was, so I surmised, the result of a systemic failure. It was the wholly predictable culmination of an official policy, one that had been hatched years before within the hallowed chambers and hushed corridors of the country’s El Palacio Nacional, a policy arisen of Mexico City itself, one that tacitly or otherwise not only tolerated, but condoned and sanctioned such vile insult to all Texians if only by failing to enact, institute and enforce measures to deter where not prevent it, or, once it had occurred, hold the culprits legally accountable.
Because who at last on our behalf, we Texians’ behalf, was keeping such accounts, or cared enough to do so? All of which, every point, I fully intended to enumerate in the finest detail in my legal brief.
I am asleep or nearly, teetering on the verge, its brink, wee hour, deep night, about to drift, plunging swamped inside my nightshirt, sweating moonlight, when comes a rapping at my door that in truth is less a rapping at than a banging on followed by a bashing against as if in forewarning of a barging through, the lot punctuated by words barked over-loudly in a language that I by now understand too well: “¡Abierto, pendejo! ¡Cabrón! ¡Abrase en nombre del Commandante Bradburn!”
I quickly lost count of how many days I spent stripped naked and staked strap-by-shackle facedown to the floor of, of all things, a brick kiln. Beehive kiln. Brick beehive kiln. Surviving the while on little but boiled frijoles, moldy pan, feculent cod chunks and rancid, fever-ridden agua spoonfed me by my guards.
Fifty days? Sixty? At least 50. Possibly 60. Probably 60. Fifty to 60 days confined in chains, unclothed, prostrate inside a darkened, low-ceilinged, dust-choked room, a damn athanor not much larger than a larder infested with mosquitoes the size of scorpions and scorpions the size of manta rays.
The kiln, or horno, horno de ladrillo, was located just south of the fort, all but camouflaged on one side by rushes, reeds, willows, ferns and cat-tails, and on the other by cane, hemp, bamboo, raffia, sisal, and, I might have sworn, rattan and jute. Actually, there were two such kilns, an unmatched pair, the larger of which the Mexicans designated Hidalgo, the smaller Moreno. I occupied the latter, but both were favored with a single, loaded, inward-facing cannon.
It was summer. I sweltered.
By turning my head, I remember, I could with some contorted rubbernecking just glimpse the cannon out the kiln door. Its blackened iron bristled with sweat.
I am permitted to micturate and defecate twice daily using a crude chamber pot more akin to a slops bucket. Lidless. Scarce leakproof. Emptied only when having begun to overspill across the floor. I am permitted to neither shower nor bathe. I am not permitted to shave. I am provided with chicle to chew instead of tobacco, which, the latter—unclean, sumpy, repulsive habit—I eschew chewing in any case.
I am permitted to sleep through the night slackened some if not entirely unchained. I am permitted un tramo, a stretch, 15 minutes in the morning, another 30 in the evening—gracias, muchas gracias—to uncramp my cramped muscles. I am permitted no reading or writing materials. I am permitted to sing, to whistle, to rave as it may please me to do so, however theatrically.
Once a week, I believe upon the Sabbath, I am raised by rope pulleys above ground in the center of the kiln space and my genitals and arse are not ungently washed: jostle, tug, outspread, rub. This occurs, I either remember or am imagining or remember myself imagining, at the dandling hands of anonymous, silent women of a certain age.
It is a regimen of sorts, a routine. Funny what one clings to, comes to count upon in such a situation for a measure of predictability, some semblance of order. In time, little else to do, I become so proficient at distinguishing among the several rats that overscatter my cell at night, that I am able to identify each by their signature repertoire of bwips, pips, peeps, chirrups, chirps, churrs, squeaks, shrieks and screeches, hisses, foofs, chatters and chitters, whines, grunts, clicks and bruxes. My hearing, fine-tuned now to the music of rats, the scat of rats, and the rest of me to the rat-quickened dance of my entrails.
Because otherwise all you have is time. The vacancy and vastness of time. Which quickly becomes the enemy. Always vast, always vacant. And this vast vacancy weighs. Weighs more each day as it accrues and accumulates, seems to replicate, self-propagate, in any event to mount until the sheer heaviness of it begins to crush—spirit, soul, sanity alike. I resolve not to let it crush me. Not that I am uncrushable, not at all, but if I am to be crushed, I much prefer that I be crushed upon my own terms, insofar as I may avail mys
elf of them.
That night, the night of my arrest, I had been seized by force of arms from my room while still half-asleep, unshod and clad in nought but my sodden nightshirt, in advance of being hauled—absent warrant, statement of charges or word of explanation—before El Jefe, before Bradburn.
Toothpicking absently at the seams of his unnaturally white incisors with a manicured forenail, he sat slouched if not unsmartly uniformed behind his headquarters desk flanked by his matching pair of perros. His dogs. Bandogs. Presa Canarios. 250 pounds of verdrino brindled, direwolfish beastdog, their hornless heads massive as oxen.
An abbreviated version of what then ensued, might go, have gone, now goes (more or less in English):
“Travers, is it?”
“Travis.”
“Yes. I believe I may have heard of you. Lawyer. Un abogado.”
“That’s correct.”
“No, cabrón, it is not correct. You have no license. You practice illicitly. Without credential. Had I the authority, you may believe that all of your hell-spawned ilk, all you escoria subversio del bien común, all you scum subversive of the common good would long since have….Well, another subject for another day perhaps. For now, while I am under no compunction to do so, permit me to tell you, cornstalker, why you are here. You are here because actions beget consequences, violent actions beget violent consequences, and violent actions committed by interloping gringos against native-born members of this country’s military beget—well, be assured, you shortly shall apprehend.”
A globe much the circumferential size of a medicine ball, slightly smaller, perched upon his desktop. Appearing to contemplate its wheelygigging as if desiring to send it whirlybirding round and roundabout, he chose instead to leave it unspun in its mounting, a silent static rebuke to every earthen orbit. Then, leaning further in, he glanced wistfully, such was my impression, at the spheroid still frozen stockstill in place. As he did so, he sledded the right angle of his cocked elbow far-to-near across the desk while addressing the ceiling as if it contained constellations.
“What needs to be impressed upon you, canebreaker, indelibly impressed, is that nothing that happens here is permitted to happen save by my leave. Nothing occurs here save at my behest. Nothing exists here save by my sufferance. Nothing coheres here save by my consent. Nothing, nothing at all survives here save by my decree. This universe, Travers, mi regimen y dominio is mine, all mine, mine alone. I am its axis mundi. I am my own sun and about it I revolve—(here he did indeed send the globe spinning)—sworn to its heavenly, sacred defense.”
I recall being surprisingly calm, my temper held, altogether tranquilo.
“¿Y estupro?”
“Eh? ¿Qué? What’s that?”
“You say that nothing happens here save by your leave? Fine. So then permit me to ask, does what happens by your leave include rape?”
At this, he visibly reddened, face, ears, neck, and when he next spoke, he did so with words sprayed with spittle the remnants of which, settling, soon caked white at the corners of his mouth.
“What it does not include, cabrón, is the likes of you taking it upon yourself to beat a Mexican soldier, a professional soldier sworn to uphold the laws of the Supreme Government, to defend with his life the honor and integrity of Madre México. What it does not include is caning one of my men, my command, comatoso.”
How he had come into possession of this information, how he was able to pin the initial blow on me, I was never to learn. Spies, perhaps. Or informants.
“And your evidence?”
“That is none of your concern. What is your concern is that you now find yourself in un mundo la mierda, a world of shit. What is your concern is how an insurgente, an insurrecto such as yourself, once having been bound over to a military tribunal on the charge of treason, the penalty for which is plain, intends to face the everlasting wrath of his Maker.”
This, I recall thinking to myself, was all so laughably predictable. And then, I did indeed laugh. And then, he was shouting.
“We are done here. Guards, take him away. Remove him from my sight. ¡Fuera de aqui! Out! ¡Ahora! Deliver him to Lieutenant Montero. En los hornos. At the kilns. Deliver him to The Keeper of the Kilns.”
Insurgent, he had called me. Insurrectionist. Enemy of the state. Subversive to the common good. And do you know? Perhaps I was. Perhaps by that point, that is precisely what I was. Perhaps that was what everything I had seen and heard and experienced over the past several months had left me little choice but to become.
Because Bradburn? All said and done? Bradburn was the least of it. Bradburn may have been an insufferable ass, a petty tyrant, he may have rapped a few knuckles, split a lip, blackened an eye, loosened a tooth or two, he may have threatened bastinado, but Bradburn, for all his obvious defects of character, was not depraved. He may, as Austin had intimated, have had no business commanding a garrison, much less one the ranks of which were weeviled with perverts and prison convicts, he may have been a perfect incompetent, but he was no deviant. He wasn’t pathological. He did not prey sexually upon the powerless and imprisoned.
The brick-kilned.
His lieutenant, Manuel Miguel Montero, on the other hand…
Not every night, but over the course of my two month confinement often enough, this man who was less than a man, other than a man, would slip into the kiln under cover of darkness. Masked. Always masked. A masked man. Ritually masked. A mask of pliable black leather that smelled of leather. A black leather helmet mask that covered his face and head save eyes, nostrils, and mouth. But I knew. I knew it was him. He made no secret of his identity. To the contrary. He would whisper it in my ear.
“Estoy Montero,” he would whisper. Or, rather, whinny, nasally whinny, whinny so near deep into my ear that the hot, fecal stank of his pulque-soaked breath would dizzy me.
“¿Usted nunca olividara, eh gringo? Cómo vives usted siempre recordara mi nombre.” In other words: “I am Montero. You will never forget it, eh gringo? As long as you live, you will always remember my name.”
He just liked wearing this mask, apparently. Perhaps he wore it in the event that he was caught in the act. Or perhaps he believed that it concealed his identity from his papist god. Perhaps he just liked the way it smelled. Who knows? I never understood that part of it, frankly.
Also, a fact meriting mention, he never failed to tote with him this whippet-thin, flexible cane whip. And a knotted ball gag of cotton batting.
Well, you can imagine. Perhaps you cannot imagine. Perhaps you prefer not to imagine. The pawing and fondling and licking, earlobe and neck-nipping, the probing and inserting and penetrating and so forth, followed by the whipping—which typically left me much reddened and extravasated but uncloven of flesh, for he clearly had done this before, many times before—was a bit much, if nothing I could not bear. Nothing that could not be borne. Or so I told myself in-between muffled screams.
I was defenseless, of course. Could do nothing to defend myself. Maneuver or move self-defensively. Move at all. Twisting, writhing, bucking, thrashing—all equally pointless. As was asking why or saying no or cursing or crying out. I could not cry out. I was gagged.
In time, one learns what one circumstantially must to survive. One learns to cease resisting without submitting. To relax but not surrender. To accommodate but not reconcile. To keep oneself to oneself for oneself. That hardened core of interiority that at bottom, at floor, remains capable, available, of being kept.
Hardly a laughing matter, though Montero was himself a warbler, quite the giggler, much given to giddy outbursts of be-spritzed and girlish giggling. High-pitched, girly giggling. I can still hear it. And the stank of him. I can smell it still. His reek. And feel it. The wet of him upon my backside.
When I consider it now, it seems not only a dream, but an implausible dream. If it hadn’t happened, happened to me, if I didn’t know better, I would not believe it myself. But it did. It did happen. Just as I have described it. This truth, sordid tr
uth, a truth, as the truth so often is, that is unaccountable. Unaccountable and arbitrary and impossible.
And nonetheless, true.
What happened next, although as I was still kilned at the time I remain to this day somewhat hazy as to details, was my rescue, followed by my release and eventual repatriation.
Initially, I assumed that it could only have been Austin who somehow had succeeded in persuasively pulling enough of the right diplomatic strings to win my freedom, but this proved not the case at all. No, apparently, so I was to learn later, what had in fact occurred was that a veritable riot of armed Texians from Austin’s colony numbering some 300 strong and led by one Robert McAlpin Williamson, had surrounded and laid siege to the fort, the presidio, until Bradburn was compelled not only to relent, to capitulate, but to take to the bush, hightail it under cover of darkness from the vicinity altogether. Those boys had wanted his head on a pike and, had they been able to run him to ground, would have had it.
Despite my best efforts, the fate of his beastdogs, I was, regrettably, never to determine.
During my imprisonment, I had resolved that should I somehow escape or by some other means be freed—not that I counted upon the likelihood of such a miracle occurring—I would leave Anahuac and return to San Felipe, throw in my lot, such as it might be, alongside Austin, seek my fortune for good or ill there. I badly needed to get away from the place. I could not remain. I hadn’t the heart Paddy did. Mine was too gouged.
First though, first and last, so I vowed to myself, I was bound and honor-bound, should the occasion arise, to see, however long it might take, to the tying, everlasting tying, of a certain still dangling, lunatic loose end.
The garrote, procured in the event from the saddlepouch of one of my liberators, was a hank of stiff, slender twist rope of some 18, 20 inches. Shorter than a romal, longer than a quirt, I had artfully knobbed it at just the right irregular intervals with rough, tight knots, hard as pebbles.
