by Jory Sherman
“Shut up, Peebo.”
Anson stopped his horse a few strides farther on to let the queasiness in his stomach pass. Still the bile threatened to rise up in his gullet and strangle him or spew forth. Peebo waited patiently alongside, listening, his ear cocked to pick up any sound.
Anson gripped the saddlehorn tight and took deep breaths until his stomach settled. He tried to think of something other than the man he had shot, but he couldn’t make the image of the man’s dead body vanish.
“I guess you don’t never get used to it,” Anson said, a few moments later.
Peebo said nothing.
“Damn you, Peebo. Don’t you have nothin’ to say?”
“You told me to keep my mouth shut.”
“There are times when you talk too much, that’s all.”
Still, Peebo kept silent.
The image of Anson’s mother, Caroline, crept into his consciousness, unbidden. Anson thought of her lying there in her bed, in death, and it was not like that dead man on the road. He could smell the scent of the cloying perfume that had drenched her room and her bed, and that was just as gagging to him as the odor of the dead Mexican. It was not natural, that overpowering smell of perfume, but it was better than the other. But he could not keep from connecting the two deaths in his mind and it bothered him that he would think of his mother at such a time and in such a context.
“And there are times when you don’t say enough,” Anson said.
Peebo did not respond. He pretended not to hear and that irritated Anson even more than his tar-baby silence.
“Don’t it bother you none?” Anson asked.
“What?”
“That goddamned smell.”
“What smell is that?”
“You know damned well what smell I mean.”
“No, I reckon I don’t.”
“I ought to pop you one.”
“Go ahead. If it’ll make you feel any better.”
“I feel just fine, Peebo Elves.”
“When you use both my names like that, I know you’re pissed off.”
“I’m not pissed off.”
“Well, you want to pop me?”
“I asked you a question, damn it.”
“I forgot what it was.”
“That dead man. That one I killed. He stank to high heaven.”
“I didn’t notice it none in particular.”
“Be damned if you didn’t.”
“Well, son, when a man dies sudden, everything inside him lets go. I mean everything.”
“It’s god-awful.”
“Mine must have gone without lunch. He didn’t smell hardly at all. Maybe a little piss smell.”
“You’re being a little too smarty now, Peebo.”
“Well, you asked me and I done told you.”
“It don’t bother you? That smell?”
“I try not to let it.”
“You must have a stuffed-up nose,” Anson said.
“Look, Anson, if you’re going to kill a man, you got to expect he ain’t goin’ to be pretty to look at, and he might stink up things some. You got to put it all out of your mind.”
“It’s hard.”
“No it ain’t.”
“How do you do it?”
“Son, I don’t look at their faces and I hold my breath when I come up on anything that’s dead, no matter whether it be critter or human.”
“You’ve seen a lot of dead men?”
“I’ve seen a lot of dead things. Likely you have, too.”
Anson’s irritation sprang up. He wondered if Peebo was talking about his mother. “What in hell do you mean by that?”
“Hold on, son. Don’t you go shootin’ the messenger. I just meant things die—people, critters big and small. You, me, everybody. You go to thinkin’ about it too much, you’ll go plumb loco.”
Peebo was right, Anson decided; he had made too much of it. He was only curious about how Peebo could just ride on by those dead men and not be affected by them. The sight of them tore things inside him, tangled up his mind like twine in a sticker patch.
“I reckon I let it get to me, all right.”
“It’ll pass, son.”
But Anson wondered. He had buried his grief when his mother had died, held all his emotions inside him like a balled-up fist. And now he grieved for her, but it was a quiet, slow grieving, like a sadness that was just out of reach, a sadness that had no shape or form and could not be defined in simple words or handled with simple thoughts. The grieving was filled with a grayness like an autumn sky, a bleakness that was like the sad bare trees in winter, a fleeting scent in his nostrils like the brief smell of a crushed rose.
There was a big hole in his life where his mother had been, a vacancy that he knew could never be filled, and that was sad, too, because he missed her, missed hearing her voice and seeing her lean over his bed to wake him on dark mornings when the earth was still and the cock had not yet crowed. He even missed hearing her argue with his father, for that was her life, too, and his, and the longing in him deepened in that soft moment of reflection and he had to struggle to keep from weeping with the memory of her and the terrible moment when he had known, finally, that she was dead, the life and love gone from her body and nothing left of her but the clothes in her wardrobe and the jewelry in her jewel box, the books she had read to him, lying on a table, and the faint sound of her feet on the hardwood floors still lingering somehow among the creakings and mysterious stirrings in the silent and sleeping house.
“Anson?” Peebo said. “You okay?”
Anson shook his head to clear it, bring himself back to the moment. “Yeah, I’m okay.”
“Do you still want to chase after them other Mexicans?”
“I think we ought to. They might not be expecting us.”
“Lead on out, then.”
Anson spoke to his horse and turned it.
They had not ridden a hundred yards when they heard the sharp crack of a rifle up ahead of them.
“Uh-oh,” Peebo said.
“What the hell…”
Then they heard the crackle of more rifles firing, and Anson was the first to see the blue-orange muzzle-flashes.
“Looks like…” Peebo started to say, when a lead ball whistled past the two men, so close it set the hairs on their necks to bristling.
“Get the hell off the road,” Anson said, and wheeled his horse toward the woods on his left.
The firing stopped as men reloaded their rifles. Anson slid from the saddle, cocking his rifle. He let his horse stand free as he ducked and scrambled toward the nearest mesquite tree. Peebo ran his horse into the woods and came up behind Anson.
“What do you figure?”
“Damned if I can figure it. Those men up there are sure as hell shooting at something.”
“Well, we’d better fish or cut bait.”
Anson started skulking toward the sound of the rifle fire, the orange images of the last muzzle-flame still burning as a glowing afterimage in his brain.
He saw the hulk of a dead horse lying in the center of the road. He knew it was dead because it was not moving, and something next to it was. He stopped and tried to make out what was moving, staring hard into the dark as if to shred it and bring light upon the object. Seconds later he saw a hat in bare silhouette, scarcely visible, and then what he took to be a rifle slid across the pommel of the saddle. As he stared, the rifle steadied on something off in the woods and the rifle barked, spewed flame from its muzzle. From the woods a split second later, another rifle spat with a noise like a breaking branch and he saw the muzzle flash. He heard the ball thunk into the horse and the hat disappeared.
Anson got down on his belly and crawled toward the fallen horse and the man lying prone behind it. He could hear the clack of a powder horn on metal and, later, the hollow metallic sound of a ramrod sliding down the barrel.
“Timo?” Anson called, then hugged the ground. He was close to the horse now and, with one eye, he looke
d for movement. Two rifles fired at him from his side of the road and he heard the hiss of a ball as it sped by, and the harsh, scything sound of the other ball spewing through the grass next to him.
The man next to the horse turned and trained his rifle in Anson’s direction.
“Over here,” Timo shouted, and Anson marked the place where he had seen answering fire moments before. Anson kept his eye on the man next to the horse, hoping he could not be seen if he did not move.
The man raised up to look for Anson, but Anson could not bring his rifle up without being seen. He held his breath as his gut knotted with fear.
The man behind the horse carcass rose up slightly, took direct aim at Anson. Anson had started to roll away when he heard a hammer strike the frizzen, followed by a puffing sound and an explosion. He heard the ball whistle over his head and saw the Mexican in the road twist upward for a moment, then fall sideways. Anson looked around to see Peebo reloading his rifle.
“Damned good shot,” Anson said.
“He looked a lot like a turkey, I thought.”
“Where are the others who were shooting at me?”
“Up yonder. I think they had that dead horse staked out, let that bastard in the road draw all the fire.”
“Pretty smart.”
“Damned smart. Was that Timo what hollered?”
“Yeah. He’s over on the other side of the road.”
“Thought he was supposed to light a shuck.”
“Matteo’s men must have caught up to him.”
“Reckon he’s by hisself?”
“I don’t know. I could walk over there and ask him.”
“You do that, son.”
It was quiet for a few moments. Peebo finished reloading his rifle and crawled up next to Anson. They both lay there and listened for several moments. Neither heard anything worth commenting about and then they saw someone crawling across the road. Peebo lifted his rifle to his shoulder. Anson grabbed the barrel and pulled it down.
“That might be Timo,” Anson said.
“Yeah, could be. Let me keep a bead on him, will you? Just in case.”
“Don’t shoot him until…”
“Until I see the whites of his eyes?”
“Don’t get smart, Peebo. I’ll know if it’s Timo soon enough.”
Peebo brought his rifle back up and followed the man’s progress with the end of the barrel. A rifle cracked the air up ahead and the man on the road froze.
“They’ve spotted him,” Anson said.
“Looks like.”
“Wait, here he comes, crawling pretty fast.”
“Can’t tell who it is,” Peebo said.
The man came closer and Anson let out a sigh of relief. “It’s Timo.”
There were no more shots and Timo kept coming, using his elbows to pull him forward, cradling his rifle in his arms. There were no more shots as he reached the side of the road.
“Do not shoot the rifle,” Timo said, when he had crawled within earshot. “Do not shoot.”
“I am not going to shoot you,” Anson said.
“No, do not shoot at those men who are by the road.”
“Why?”
“Because they will see the fire from the barrel and shoot you.”
Timo stopped crawling. He panted for several seconds.
“Are the others all dead?” Anson asked.
“No, only one, I think. The others have gone back to the rancho.”
“Why did you stay here?”
“They shot my horse. The horse, she is dead. She is in the selva. The woods.”
“Did the others leave you behind?”
“No, I told them to go. Don Anson, we have killed all their horses, the horses of the men of Matteo. They have to use the feet and they do not go. They try to kill me.”
“We can’t just stay here, Timo,” Anson said. “We’ve got to either shoot it out with Matteo’s men or get to the other side of the road and ride to the plain.”
“I know. We can kill them, I think. Look, Don Anson, there are men on the road. They wait to see the rifle make the fire. Then they shoot, eh? So, we make them come here. Then we shoot them.”
“Why would they come here?”
“I will tell them that we wish to surrender.”
“That won’t work.”
“It will work. They told me. They say if I surrender they will not shoot me. They say they will let me go if I throw them the rifle.”
“So? If we throw down our rifles, Timo, they will shoot us dead.”
“I know. We will throw the mesquite stick. We will tell them it is the rifles,” said Timo.
“Peebo?” Anson said.
“I don’t think it will work no more’n pourin’ coal oil on a campfire.”
“What do you think we ought to do? It’s darker’n the inside of a coal pit out here,” said Anson.
“Moon’ll be up soon.”
“So Matteo’s men won’t need rifle-flashes to see us. We’re outnumbered.”
Timo stopped panting. He crawled around the other side of Anson, closer to the trees. He started picking at his clothes.
“What are you doing, Timo?” Anson asked.
“I pick the cactus from the clothes.”
Peebo suppressed a titter.
“Well, Peebo,” Anson said, “any ideas?”
“We could cut into the woods here and head on back.”
“We could get lost, too. The mesquite on this side of the road runs a good two or three miles wide to the west and some ten miles north.”
“Yeah. Not good.”
“We could get behind them, maybe,” Anson said.
“No,” Timo said. “They sit in a circle and there is one man, he is in the tree. He took the machete and cut the limbs. He can see all of the road. He can see much.”
“Shit,” Anson said.
“We shoot that bird first,” Peebo said.
“How?”
“Maybe I could crawl over to that dead horse yonder and get him to shoot at me. Then I’d know where the son of a bitch was and drop him outta that tree.”
“He’d shoot you before you got halfway across the road,” Anson said. “I’m not going to risk it.”
“I’d be the one to risk it.”
“No,” Anson said.
“There is another way, I think,” Timo said.
Peebo and Anson turned their heads to look at Timo. He was still prone on the ground, clutching his rifle.
“What way?”
“I will go in the mesquite and shoot the man in the tree.”
“You mean, go through the mesquite here and crawl around behind? But you said they were in a circle. They could hear you coming. They would shoot you the minute you got close enough to see the man in the tree.”
“That is true,” Timo admitted.
Anson looked up the road. Beyond the dead horse it appeared deserted. He thought of Matteo’s men up there, all sitting in a circle. And one man sitting on top of a mesquite tree, the branches cut away. He looked back at his horse, and at Peebo’s. Two horses, three men. Going against a half-dozen or so of Matteo’s. All of them sitting there, waiting. Their rifles loaded, their eyes peering into the dark. All listening for the slightest sound. He supposed that he, Peebo, and Timo could all make a dash across the road and then ride to the plain. They’d probably draw fire, but they might make it. Might.
Anson sighed, looked up the road again.
Maybe, he thought, there was another way—one with less risk. Was it better to run? Or was it better to attack? They were outgunned. Matteo’s men had pistols, and so did he and Peebo.
“You got a pistol, Timo?”
“Yes, I have the pistol.”
“Loaded?”
“It has the six balls in the cylinder, yes.”
“What are you thinking, son?” Peebo asked.
“Firepower,” Anson said.
“You aim to just walk up there and blast away with our six-shooters?”
“No,” Anson said. “I’m just trying to think of every contingency.”
“‘Contingency.’ By Jesus, there’s a six-bit word. What in hell does it mean?”
“Possible things that might happen if we jump those men up yonder.”
“Well, I’ll tell you one damned contin—one damned possibility. We’ll get our asses shot off.”
“Maybe not,” Anson said. He looked at Timo. “How far away are Matteo’s men?”
“They are not fifty paces from the dead horse in the road. And you can not see them. They are behind the trees and they have cut the wood and they make the walls.”
“Breastworks?” Anson asked. He had read of such barriers in books.
“I do not know,” Timo said. “They stack the wood and they hide like chickens behind the wood.”
“Not wood, Timo. Just cut branches. They have leaves, do they not?”
“Yes, they cut the branches; they pile them up, I think.”
“So, not breastworks, just concealment.”
“Son, you goin’ to just jaw all night? What the hell difference does it make? If we can’t see them, we can’t shoot them. But they sure as hell can shoot us.”
“Exactly,” Anson said. “But if they can’t see us, they can’t kill us, can they?”
Peebo let out a long breath he had been holding in his lungs. “You got an idea, son?”
Anson said nothing. But a plan was beginning to form in his mind.
Before he could speak, though, one of Matteo’s men fired at them. He saw the flash and ducked, from instinct. He heard the whiff of the lead ball as it passed harmlessly overhead. Then he heard the man who had shot at them move to another position.
It grew very still, but in that instant Anson made up his mind. He knew what they must do and he prayed it would work. He looked up at the sky and a sinking feeling came over him. Just topping the trees to the north, he saw it, the moon, rising like a giant glowing eye in the sky. In moments it would shed its light on the road and on their position off to the side.
If he was going to act, he thought, now was the time.
34
REYNAUD HEARD THE crackle of rifle fire and his finger on the trigger of his rifle tightened as he watched Obispo pull his horse to a stop in front of him. Obispo turned in the saddle.
“There is shooting,” Obispo said.
“I hear it.”
