The Forests of the Night - J P S Brown

by J P S Brown

  The bull was hot. The slope of the mountain was almost vertical. At a switchback he stopped and shook his horns, arming himself for another fight. Juan Vogel had made the turn on the switchback and was above the bull. He gave slack so the bull could follow his horse. An oak tree stood between the bull and Juan Vogel. Adán climbed to get ahead of the bull and entice him up the trail. He waved his hat under the bull's nose. At the same time Manuel Anaya spoke to the bull from too close behind him. The bull shied away from Adán, wheeled in the trail, saw Manuel Anaya, and charged him. When he hit the end of the slack reata he jerked Juan Vogel's horse off the trail. The horse plunged over the top of Adán and landed on his back below Adán. Adán looked up and Juan Vogel was in the oak tree holding the bull off Manuel with a wrap of his reata on a limb. Manuel ran down the hill without looking back.

  "¡Qué jodido!" You men should mark all the trees from here to Avena and saddle trees instead of horses for this sort of business," Adán laughed. He was sitting peacefully on a rock letting his legs dangle comfortably while the other beasts and men strained their lungs for air. "I swear, since you caught that bull, you've spent more time in the trees than you have in your saddles."

  "We've still got him. That is all that counts," Juan Vogel said. He stood down on the trail and took another wrap of the reata around the limb while Manuel caught the bay horse.

  "Why do you want him up at Avena?" Adán asked. "I thought you wanted to gather all your cattle at Gilaremos."

  "To gentle him. We're going to break his bones, fry his blood, pepper his meat, and eat him. By then he'll be gentle," Juan Vogel said resolutely.

  "In that case you'd better drink his bile too," Adán said.

  "You'll have to make yourselves as mad as he is to get a fang into him."

  "Tonight. This night we'll eat his liver," Juan Vogel said.

  "And in the morning we'll eat his tripe in a stew."

  Juan Vogel mounted his horse and dragged the bull up the trail. Adán let them go. He walked down to the ravine to look after Manuel's mule. The mule did not move when Adán walked up to him. The mule had being a mule in his favor if he was to survive this gutting. As a mule he had a good sense of self-preservation and he was not likely to panic now that his excitement was over. Adán did not unsaddle him. He wanted him to stay warm. He found his blanket, morral, and bule. He washed the mule's innards with clean water from his bule, put them back inside the belly and plugged the hole with a slab of jerky wrapped in a piece of moistened flour sack. He tied his blanket over the mule. This was all the help Adán could give until Juan Vogel and Manuel came back to sew him up. The jerky would keep the innards from falling out if the mule stayed quiet.

  Adán started for the hacienda at Limón in the dusk. He arrived there in the dark before the moon had risen.

  7

  At Limón Adán built a fire under the portal of the main building and took a swallow of mezcal while he warmed his supper. He was eating when the moon rose behind a tall mesquite tree in the corral.

  He felt uneasy looking at the dead mesquite in the moonlight. He wondered which limb had been the one his Tio Pascual had used to hang the verdugo, the executioner he caught after the revolution. The verdugo was a big Mayo Indian from the coast who had served as executioner both for Federals and for Revolutionaries, whichever side happened to be winning. He was on the wrong side when the war finished. Adán's Tio Pascual had been jefe de armas, chief of arms, for the revolutionary troop of the region. He caught the verdugo at Avena. He and the remainder of his troop had surprised El Verdugo when he walked out in the morning to relieve himself and had stolen him away from his partners, a squad of Federal troops leaving the region. Tio Pascual had no enmity left in him for the federals, but he felt El Verdugo had not quite finished his business in the Sierra, the business of his own hanging.

  Tio Pascual brought El Verdugo to Limón. A trooper asked Pascual what they were going to do with El Verdugo during the night. He wanted to know the safest place to hold the man. Tio Pascual said he didn't know but just to hang him from the mesquite where he would be safe while they decided. El Verdugo kneeled, begged and cried until they hung him in the tree by the neck. The next morning they resolved what should be done with him. They buried him.

  Tio Pascual had not meant to frighten El Verdugo or to torture him with fear. He only meant to soften the shock and seriousness of death by saying what he said and executing the man immediately. We all have to die, it just happened to be the time for Mayo verdugo. As a professional executioner who loved his job, El Verdugo should have been the last man to miss the good humor of Pascual.

  Maybe El Verdugo had come back to haunt Limón as El Yoco. Why not? Indians believed the devil took the form of a jaguar to demand tithes of the living. Indians had sacrificed lives to him because of this fear of him.

  Adán leaned against a post close to the fire and folded his arms over his knees. He missed his blanket but felt more secure knowing Manuel's mule was warm. He did not lie down because the fire would attract scorpions and centipedes. He looked once at the sky to tell the weather, closed his eyes, and was asleep.

  In the long night under the clear moon he was awakened by a cold wind whining in the portal and swirling fine dust over him. For some time during his first sleep he had been hearing the sound of breathing. He thought the sound came from inside the house. He realized the breathing had become hoarser since he first became aware of it on the edge of his sleeping. The breathing was ragged and was so close he felt he would soon even be able to smell it. The breathing stopped. Adán, fully awake now, could hear no breathing but his own. He felt he must have dreamed the breathing. He still smelled the breath of the dream, the breath of El Yoco. A ghost must have a breath that smelled of putretied blood like the cave of El Yoco smelled. He rose and replenished the fire. He rolled a cigarette for company. He seldom smoked. He used tobacco to keep away hunger, or loneliness, to calm his excitement when he was hunting, or when he wanted to remember Lucrecia's warm hearth. Adán heard a rhythmic sound of footsteps. The sound came from the high loft of the house where traps, tack, plows, distillers, yokes, and packsaddles were stored. The step sounded the length of the loft, stopped and dragged as though turning around, and then began again after a soft, hoarse sigh. Adán felt his goose flesh rise. The loft was long. Another pause, a sigh, and the hackles on his neck stiffened. He smiled and looked at the tip of his cigarette. He squatted, unmoving, by the fire.

  "Onk!" Adán heard. The sound was a gentle, chesty intake of painful breath. "Yiiiiiiiiii--onk!" he heard again. The light of the fire played on the door. The latch was hanging open. Lock and hasp had been broken. He stirred the fire. He opened the door and stepped back. The eyes of Adán's burro reflected fire from the room. The burro rubbed against a loose upright pole which stood in the center of the room to hold sagging boards of the attic floor. The pole had been nailed to the boards but no longer supported them. It swung from the boards like a broken leg and the top of the pole had made the stepping noise with the attic boards as the burro made it swing. The burro's shoulders, neck, loin, and hips were covered with long, deep, parallel slices as though a butcher had ridden him while he carved him with a long knife to mark him for the cuts of meat he preferred. El Yoco had done the carving. He must have made one pass over the burro and let him go as evidence of the violence he could do to any man or beast who thought he could loiter near a trail El Yoco was using.

  Adán drove the burro down the hill to water. Someone had nearly caused the burro to die of hunger and thirst when he had gone away and left the door of the hacienda open. The burro had gone in for shade or sanctuary and the door had closed on him. The burro drank at the spring and walked into the lime grove. Adán went back to his fire.

  He found the burro dead in the morning. "Pobrecito!"

  Adán said. "Amaneciste muerto. Your dawning was with death today." He went back to the portal and made coffee. He inspected the inside of the room the burro had been in, saw that
valuable articles were missing, secured the door so it would stay closed, drank his coffee, and left Limón.

  He followed the jaguar's track all day without getting far from the small cave where El Yoco had licked his wounds. El Yoco only meandered from cool stream to cool shade that day. He had not left tracks that lined out and were easy to follow. He had made many tracks in the places he had stayed and then he had doubled back, crossed and recrossed his own tracks, and covered his trail effectively with his own tracks.

  At sunset Adán topped a pass that dominated the high mesa of Avena. The center of the mesa was a flat-bottomed bowl. The Vogel hacienda was in the center and surrounded by plowed fields and orchards. A side of the bowl above the hacienda was occupied by the homes of the hacienda vaqueros and a public square, a fountain, and a community building. Adán walked down to the hacienda to rest and to get some of the fresh beef of the brown bull.

  Juan Vogel, in his leggings, his spurs jutting behind him, was on his knees using an iron bar to break hard-packed ground around some young peach trees in the patio. Vaqueros were sitting on a rock wall watching him. Don Panchito Flores Valenzuela was breaking the tight clods with a rock. Miguelito, a small Guarijía Indian, was leading a burro bearing a canvas bota of water from the well for the trees.

  The gored mule and the bay horse were eating corn in a trough made from a hollowed log outside the rock wall. Adán stopped and leaned on the wall to watch them eat and to examine the mule. The two animals ate with respect for one another. The mule's belly had been sewn and he was eating slowly, keeping his eyes closed in contentment as though his guts didn't hurt him at all. His eating was a good sign that Adán's first aid for gored mules was working. Juan Vogel's bay horse was eating with great relish and method. He was a real eating machine. He did not lift his head from the trough. The tough front edges of his lips picked portions of corn and mixed them with saliva. His back teeth ground com softened by saliva. Hard corn frothing with saliva rolled from the corners of his mouth back to the trough to be picked up again and passed to the jaw teeth for further grinding.

  Adán laid his morral, bule, and rifle on top of the wall before anyone noticed him. He climbed into the patio.

  "Good evening," he said.

  "Good evening," the men on the wall answered before they knew who had spoken. The vaqueros were surprised to see Adán. They showed this by not smiling or changing their expressions in greeting. They looked at his bule, morral, and rifle and then began, in the style of the serrano, to watch his every move with admiration and curiosity, in the way a crowd watches a flashy player the first moments he enters a sporting game.

  Adán stood before each man in turn and shook his hand, though he had been working with some of them only a few days before. He turned away from the last man, walked across the patio, and shook Juan Vogel's hand.

  "Don Adán, El Señor Cazador, " Don Panchito Flores Valenzuela greeted him. He was calling Adán "Lord Hunter" in seriousness. He had been calling Adán "Lord Hunter" for years and it no longer embarrassed anyone.

  "Here, Lord Hunter," Juan Vogel said, rising stiffly from his knees and handing the bar to Adán. "Break up the packed tracks around this last little tree. My back is tired."

  "Why not?" Adán said, taking the bar and kneeling.

  "I've been breaking wind for nothing all day. Maybe my farts will help move an iron bar."

  "I have your blanket, cousin," Juan Vogel said. "I think the mule will heal."

  "I only came in to get some meat and tell Manuelito not to search for my burro anymore."

  "Manuelito has been searching for the burro and hoping he would come in."

  "The burro is dead. El Yoco sliced him up like a slab of bacon and let him go. The burro went all the way over the mountain and down to Limón to die. He was in the house. Someone broke in and left the door open. It shut on the burro. I discovered him and let him out last night, but he was dead when I found him this morning."

  "We have a human cebado ravening the Sierra now," Juan Vogel said. "A murder was committed here yesterday morning."

  'Si, Don Adán," Don Panchito said. "Chombe Servín killed Casimiro Delatorre as he came down the trail from Las Tunas yesterday."

  "Killed him? Why?" Adán asked.

  "No one knows," Don Panchito said. "Chombe was working in the orchard for me. He shot Casimiro from behind a quince tree as Casimiro came down the hill singing a song."

  "I think that Chombe would kill for no reason except he was armed and something moved and sang," Juan Vogel said, lighting a cigarette. "Most men are stupid when they are armed. The heavier the weapon, the denser the brain."

  "¡Ah, Dios!" Adán said. "I knew Chombe didn't have brains in that tiny squeezed head, but I didn't think he was a killer."

  "¡Pues, lo venadió," Juan Vogel said. "He ambushed him like you would a deer. He used his father's .30 carbine."

  "How do you know it was Chombe?"

  "I almost saw him do it," Don Panchito said. "He came here early in the morning and asked me for work. I sent him down to rebuild the rock wall and I watched him. He carried the .30 to the orchard with him. He aimed the rifle at everything that moved. He was unhappy. I saw Casimiro coming down the trail. He was hurrying and singing, the way he has always done. I went inside and heard the shot. I thought Chombe might have shot a deer in the orchard. The deer he shot was Casimiro. I saw Chombe run across the field. He ran through the gap at the bottom where women were washing clothes. The women came by here pale as church statues. One of them, Dona Chayo, saw him do it."

  "Why did he come to Avena, anyway? Doesn't he live with his parents at Macarena? He was minding their store when I saw him last," Adán said.

  "He stole his father's money and horse and left," Juan Vogel said. "We spoke to his father by telephone. He's probably the one who broke into the house at Limón. Which room was the burro in?"

  "In the middle room."

  "Did you see my machete and provisions, cousin?"

  "No, but I thought you might have sent for them from Gilaremos."

  "Chombe probably has them."

  "His father will have to pay for the objects that have been stolen," Don Panchito said.

  "¿Qué va pugar? What would he pay?" Vogel said cynically. "The man is bad pay when he has honorable debts. He'll never recognize a debt of Chombe's. Besides that, this will cost him his ranch and cattle, his goats, mines, and his marijuana crops, and he still won't keep Chombe from jail. The law is going to ruin him. Chombe will be sent away for twenty or twenty-five years at all cost. He has no defense, but his father will have to pay for a trial and for the loss of a life with hard money."

  "¡Válgame! Bless me!" Adán said softly, expelling his breath as he stood up. He leaned the heavy bar against the side of the building. Its duty had been performed in the saving of a peach tree and it was too heavy to hold with news of murder.

  "Adán, you must have barely missed seeing Chombe yesterday," Juan Vogel said. "He might have played the sniper with you too."

  "What could that masturbator have done to me? I've known him all his scanty life. If I had seen him and known what he did I'd have taken him to the authorities in Chinipas. He would have to obey me."

  "Did you see any cattle?" Juan Vogel asked. "If you keep following El Yoco, you're going to be seeing a lot of country we don't see."

  "He's shown me no cattle. With the brown bull you brought in yesterday you probably cleaned the Limón and Teguaraco regions. How was the meat of the mean brown bull?"

  "He was fat. We still have plenty of his menudos left for supper. His innards, brains, heart, liver, and cods were tender enough. I doubt we could have chewed his steaks. Every step he took up the mountain from Teguaraco was rancorous. The sun is gentling him now. The meat is salted and hanging on the clothesline."

  "We'll eat soon," Don Panchito said. "Come in for coffee and a strong drink. You've worked hard today. Miguelito!" he called. "Bring one more bota of water for the house after you water this tree."


  Adán and Juan Vogel walked across the portal. Juan Vogel dragged his spurs tiredly. Don Panchito brought a cachimba, a lamp fashioned from a can. The lid had a small hole in the center. The can was filled with oil and a wick inserted in the top. The cachimba gave off a thick upright flame that poked black smoke at the ceiling.

  Dona Chayo, Manuel Anaya's wife, was in the kitchen to serve Adán and Juan Vogel their supper. Don Panchito's huaraches slapped and shuffled against the smooth earthen floor. He brought tin cups and a demijohn of mezcal. He shoved the cups clumsily onto the table and handed the jug to Juan Vogel.

  "Serve yourselves, please," he said. "I would do it, but my sight is tender and nearly useless at night."

  "You should see the doctor, Panchito. Go to Rio Alamos when the airplane comes back for Julio," Juan Vogel said. "Maybe I should. Maybe I should stay in Rio Alamos and find new work to occupy me. My vision is no longer adequate for these mountains. Some night I'll roll off a hill and break a leg. I hurt a leg a few nights ago because I couldn't see my way."

  "At least you should see a doctor. After one hundred and ten years of good vision it seems strange your eyes should fail you now. An inspection of your eyes is in order, I would think."

  Juan Vogel turned a completely unscrutable face toward Adán.

  "My eyes are only sore. I see well in the daytime and in the early morning before dawn. The Elm caused by the soreness bothers me only at night. Don't believe my tenderness of sight is caused by my age."

  "Of course not, Don Panchito. Nor do I believe your lack of the attention of a good doctor, your winters of sleeping on a pallet on the floor of the commissary, your months without bathing, your meager diet, your habit of never using a coat, or heating the place in which you sleep could cause you any infirmity. No doctor can improve on your health since none that I know would believe a man could live one hundred and ten years the way you do."