Damnation Road

by Max McCoy

  The man nodded.

  “If I sign it.”

  Gamble counted out another sixty dollars.

  “That’s eight months pay for a working man.”

  The doctor stared at the money, squinting against the cigarette smoke.

  “You must be desperate, to make such a vulgar gesture,” the doctor said, squinting against the cigarette smoke. “What kind of a doctor do you think I am?”

  Gamble shrugged.

  “Thought you might be a hundred and sixty dollar doctor,” he said, picking up his coat. “Appears I was wrong.”

  Gamble picked up the money.

  “Hold on.” The physician threw the cigarette on the floor and ground it out with heel. “Make that a year’s worth of wages and I’ll swear you’re not a day over thirty and that you had both your eyes when I examined you.”

  Gamble counted out two hundred and forty dollars.

  “Welcome to the Rough Riders,” the doctor said.

  1899

  ELEVEN

  It was only eight o’clock in the morning, but the wind was already growling like an animal. It came from beyond the southwestern horizon, picking up sand and dirt along the way, and scouring the land raw.

  Jacob Gamble sat in a galvanized washtub, his pink arms and legs dangling over the sides, his left hand gripping a brown bottle of beer, the brim of a battered brown campaign hat pulled low to keep the dust out of his eyes. The hat was misshapen, stained with sweat, torn at the crown, and had the crossed sabers cavalry insignia pinned to the front.

  Gamble took a swig of warm beer.

  “God, but this is an awful country.”

  The woman kneeling behind blew a strand of dark hair from her eyes and she used both hands to wring soap from a sponge. She was wearing only a man’s flannel shirt, unbuttoned, and with the sleeves rolled to her elbows. Her bare forearms gleamed with bathwater.

  “It’s not so bad,” she said, dragging the sponge languidly across his shoulders. “It’s peaceful, at least when the wind dies down just before dark. There’s nobody around to pester you. That’s why you came here, wasn’t it? So nobody would pester you?”

  “That’s what I said, so nobody would pester me. But I didn’t count on this damned blowing grit getting into everything. It even gets in the food. Hell, I think all my teeth are worn flat because of it.”

  She leaned down and kissed his shoulder.

  “Your teeth,” she said, “are still plenty sharp.”

  Gamble grunted and took another swig of beer.

  Driven by the wind, a tumbleweed rolled across the ground, not a dozen yards beyond the tub.

  “I hate those damned things,” Gamble said. “You never saw any in the old days. Then, about twenty years ago, you’d see one here and there—hung up in a fence, usually. Now, they’re everywhere.”

  “They seem normal to me.”

  “That’s because you grew up with them. But I grew up before Russian thistle won the West.”

  She scrubbed his lower back.

  “It’s going to be hotter than a two-dollar pistol today,” he said.

  “But it’s not now,” she said. “You promised to tell me about the war. When will you?”

  “What do you want to know? Like most wars, it began in April,” Gamble said. “It lasted about one hundred days, and when it was over, folks were dead. There were widows and orphans. We liberated Cuba and sunk the Spanish fleet in the Philippines and got Puerto Rico and some islands in the Pacific as spoils of war. We knocked over the Spaniard imperialists and have now become world-class imperialists ourselves.”

  “No,” the girl said. “Tell me about your part.”

  “I killed Spaniards,” he said. “Spaniards tried to kill me.”

  “Are you always this difficult?” the girl asked.

  “What’s your name, girl?”

  “Agnes,” she said. “You know my name.”

  “Ah, Agnes, forgive me,” Gamble said. “But yes, you will always find me at least this difficult, sometimes more. Ask anybody.”

  She frowned.

  “Did you have another nightmare?” she asked. “About your father?”

  “Ghost,” Gamble said. “No nightmare. Big difference.”

  “Well, I haven’t seen him.”

  “I would count that as a blessing.”

  He finished the beer.

  “Fetch me something to write with.”

  She dried her hands on the tail of the shirt, stood, and walked barelegged through the open door of the sod house behind them. She came back with a pencil, a pocketknife, and a ledger book.

  “Who are you writing?” Agnes asked.

  “The governor of New York.”

  “You are so full of jokes,” Agnes said.

  “Yes, I am a fellow of infinite jest,” Gamble said, sharpening the pencil with the pocket knife. “I am about to write a Republican for a favor, and isn’t that a hoot.”

  Gamble opened the ledger book to a blank page, moistened the pencil lead with his tongue, and began to write.

  Colonel, Sir,

  Perhaps you remember me, Jacob Dunbar. I was with Company L of the Rough Riders in Cuba, from Las Guasimas to the end of the campaign ...

  Gamble paused.

  Thinking of Cuba gave Gamble an odd feeling. It was as far from the war he had experienced as a boy in Missouri as anything he could imagine. It was equal parts carnival, theater, and abattoir. The night after the landing, on a tropical beach, scoured by the blindingly white searchlights from the warships, they had built scores of campfires on the sand to dry their wet clothes and to cook up an early breakfast of bacon and coffee. Platoons of nude men were running into the surf, laughing and joking.

  While the Rough Riders had drilled with their newly issued .30-caliber Krag-Jørgensen bolt-action carbines, none had yet fired them—the ammunition for the rifles did not arrive until they had reached Cuba. Some had been allowed to keep trusted personal weapons, especially the .30-40 Winchester which would fire the government rounds. Also on the beach sat a weird-looking contraption called a “dynamite gun” which had a narrow fourteen-foot barrel with an air cylinder slung beneath it; it used compressed air to lob a five-pound package of high explosives less than 900 yards—a shorter distance than the Krags could propel their bullets. Meanwhile, thousands of other troops were being offloaded from the transports, including regular and colored regiments, and there was a shortage of small boats—and the surf was running high. One boatload of colored soldiers capsized, and two of them—laden down with their gear—had drowned. For the Rough Riders, the landing was the crowning chaos that had followed weeks of chaos, from hasty training at San Antonio to a confused boarding of troop ships at Tampa. Because of the lack of adequate transport, the regiment’s mounts had been left behind and the Rough Riders had arrived in Cuba without their horses.

  Before arriving in Texas, Gamble had removed the eye patch and begun wearing smoke-colored glasses in wire frames that looped behind the ears, making it difficult for others to spot the milky and blind right eye. When asked, he said the colored glasses had been prescribed by a doctor for an eye condition—granulated eyelids. Wasn’t that what Jesse James was said to have suffered? At San Antonio, because of his ability to persuade the rowdier elements with the territorial company to accept a modicum of army discipline, he had been made sergeant by the company commander. The commander, Captain Allyn Capron Jr., a fifth-generation career soldier whose grandfather had been killed during the war with Mexico, was blond, blue-eyed, and square cut, and worried that the war would be over before the territorial volunteers would have a chance to fight. Capron left behind a wife at Fort Sill, and his father—who was an artillery officer in the regular army—was also bound for Cuba.

  During training, Capron had suspended the tradition of saber practice and instead made the volunteers prove their riding and shooting skills. Capron had allowed Gamble to keep his Winchester Model 1897 shotgun, after witnessing Gamble turning a success
ion of watermelons to pink mist with it from the back of a horse. Although Gamble was a competent rider, with deadly aim, he did not relish the exercise as much as the other volunteers; he considered horses a thousand pounds of unpredictable, and when the horses were delayed and did not make the transport ship at Tampa, he was secretly relieved.

  He had always done his best fighting on foot.

  The day after the landing near Daquiri, the Rough Riders were marched through to Siboney, where they made camp in heavy rain. In the morning, they were ordered to join with regular troops and Cuban rebels to advance inland and engage the Spanish, who were retreating from the shelling from the white-sided American warships. The jungle was thick and the men were forced to move single file down the path, with Company L near the front. Four miles north, at a fork in the trail called Las Guasimas, the column found the Spanish.

  The Spanish were about to abandon their entrenched position and fall back to Santiago, but the appearance of Cuban insurgents and the Americans made them dig in. They opened up from the jungle with their Mausers, which fired a 7mm smokeless round, making it impossible to spot the location of the Spanish gunmen. Many of the regular Army soldiers carried the old trapdoor Springfields, which shot black powder, creating a puff of white smoke that immediately gave away their position.

  Gamble was near the front of the line when the bullets began rippling the jungle around him. He clutched the Model 97 and threw himself in the foliage beside the trail. Ahead, a Cuban scout and a Rough Rider sergeant named Hamilton Fish lay dead. Capron came running up from behind, a revolver in his hand.

  “Captain!” Gamble shouted. “Get down!”

  Capron appeared not to hear him. Running, he fired three shots from his revolver into the jungle hillside ahead, then he paused and turned.

  “Let’s go, men!” Capron shouted. “This is the moment we have been waiting for!”

  Just then a bullet struck Capron in the thigh, and he dropped to the ground. He struggled to get up, and then another bullet struck him in the chest. The captain fell on his side on the path, his revolver beside him.

  “Damn it to hell,” Gamble said.

  He threw off his bedroll and haversack, slung the shotgun over his back, and ran forward in a crouch. He grasped the back of Capron’s collar and dragged him off the trail, to the protection of a boulder.

  Gamble ripped open Capron’s tunic, sending buttons flying. There was a dark hole in his left chest, oozing blood. He clamped his right hand over the wound.

  “Surgeon!” Gamble shouted.

  “It’s nothing,” Capron said, a pink froth staining his blond mustache.

  “Be still,” Gamble said. “You’re hit right good. Surgeon!”

  The firing became more intense, and Gamble unlimbered the shotgun and held it at the ready.

  “Advance,” the captain croaked. “We’ve got the Spaniards on the run. We must press our advantage.”

  “The Spanish occupy the high ground and they have us pinned down,” Gamble said, pressing his kerchief against the wound.

  “Are you refusing an order?” Capron rasped.

  “Damn right I am,” Gamble said. “Sir.”

  There was a flash of color on the trail ahead, and Gamble saw for a moment the distinctive blue and white striped rayadillo fabric of a Spanish uniform. He took up the Model 97, thrust its barrel over the rock, and fired. If the buckshot hit anything, there was no sign.

  “Surgeon!” Gamble called again.

  “What’s happening?” Capron asked.

  “Nothing good,” Gamble said. There were moans from both sides of the trail from wounded Rough Riders.

  A lieutenant came rushing up the trail and dropped in beside Gamble and Capron.

  “Thomas,” Capron said, smiling.

  “We’ve got to get you back to the dressing station, sir.”

  “I want to see it out,” Capron said. “I want to see it all.”

  “You will,” Thomas said.

  “The sergeant rushed forward and pulled me from the line of fire,” Capron said. “He deserves a commendation. Remind me later to put that in my report.”

  “I will,” Thomas said.

  The heat and humidity were oppressive. Sweat ran down Gamble’s chest, and he stripped off his shirt and threw it aside, but kept his canteen and his cartridge belt.

  “Orders?” he asked.

  “The colonel believes the Spanish are holed up in an old distillery up ahead,” Thomas said. “A ruined rock building. We must advance along this path and take it.”

  “Advance?” Gamble asked. “They’re likely to cut us to pieces.”

  “That’s right,” Thomas said. “Advance. Gather some men.”

  “Yes, sir,” Gamble said.

  Again he set off down the trail, but this time the rattle of the Mausers seemed farther away. As he went forward, he motioned for others to follow, and bare-chested soldiers emerged cautiously from the jungle. Fifty yards down the path, they came upon a Rough Rider, dead, flung on his back beside the path, his head shattered, a pool of dark blood soaking the rocks and leaves, his Krag rifle beside him. Crawling over his chest and face were a undulating cluster of land crabs, their legs and pincers in constant motion, their purple-red bodies shockingly obscene against the young man’s white flesh.

  One of the soldiers began brushing the crabs away with the butt of his rifle, but Gamble put a hand on his shoulder.

  “There’s no helping him now,” Gamble said. “Come on, we don’t want to give the Spanish a chance to make any more of us into crab food.”

  They pressed on, steadily trading shots with the enemy, who always seemed just ahead. Other troops came up, and after an hour and a half they came to a series of shallow breastworks and an old stone building, all deserted, but littered with piles of 7mm shell casings. The Spanish had been falling back toward the village of Santiago from the moment the Rough Riders had set foot upon the path. Even though the U.S. forces suffered seventy dead and wounded (including Lieutenant Thomas and a correspondent for The New York Journal ), compared to less than a dozen for the Spanish, the engagement was declared an American success.

  The next morning, a man in his middle fifties wearing an artillery officer’s uniform sought Gamble out. He found him napping, with his back against a stone wall.

  “I’m Captain Capron,” he said. “Allyn Capron Sr., actually. I am told that you were with my son yesterday when he ... well, when he died.”

  Gamble pulled on the smoke-colored glasses.

  “I was with him when he was hit,” Gamble said. “Not later, sir.”

  “Tell me about the boy’s death,” the man said, sitting down next to Gamble. “I’ve heard nothing definite. How many times was he shot?”

  “Twice. Once in the thigh, and the second time in the chest.”

  “He kept on, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Gamble said.

  “He didn’t quit?”

  “No,” Gamble said. “He made light of the wound and urged his men to advance.”

  “That’s good,” Capron said. “I knew he’d die right.”

  Gamble nodded.

  “Well, I suppose it will be my turn next,” the man said. “It will make the third of us. His grandfather was killed in Mexico. I hope I get off five good rounds at the bloody Spaniards, and I hope that when it is my turn to go, I die right as well.”

  “Your son was a fine soldier,” Gamble said. “The colonels say he was the finest soldier in the outfit, and I guess they should know.”

  The man smiled and put his hand on Gamble’s knee.

  “You don’t know what a comfort you have been,” he said. “Thank you, Sergeant. Now, is there anything I can do for you?”

  Gamble studied the man and decided to trust him.

  “Confidential?”

  The man nodded.

  “I was in some trouble in the territory,” he said. “Think you could put a word in for me with the authorities?”

  Allyn Capron
Sr. contracted typhoid a few days later and returned to Florida, where he died.

  You see, Colonel, my real name isn’t Dunbar, it’s Jacob Gamble. I had to change it after I got into some trouble at Guthrie, O.T., and it seemed proper that I used my mother’s maiden name. The thing is, Captain Capron Sr. had promised to help me ask for a pardon for my crimes from President McKinley, but of course there was no time to do that during the fighting in Cuba—and no point after. What I was hoping, Colonel, is that you might be able to pick up the promise the Captain had made me in Cuba. You can reach me in care of my friend and attorney, Temple Houston, Woodward, Oklahoma Territory.

  Gamble stared at what he had written, and then leaned his head back against the rim of the tub. The water had become warm. He pushed the hat back on his head and looked at the sky. High above, a turkey buzzard was wheeling.

  Since being mustered out at Guthrie last year, Gamble had been hiding out in No Man’s Land, that narrow strip between Texas and Kansas where there was no law and damned little of anything else.

  He looked at the sheet of paper again and, in a fit of anger, crumpled it into a ball and threw it. The wind caught it and carried it along the ground, like it was a tumbleweed. Agnes stepped out of the sod house and put her foot on it.

  “Why’d you do that?” she asked, picking the paper up from the ground. She unfolded it and read what Gamble had written.

  “Jacob, you must mail this,” she said.

  “There’s not a post office within thirty miles.”

  “The Rock Island is laying tracks south from Liberal,” she said. “I’m sure they’re past Sanford Switch by now, maybe even all the way to Texas line. The switch is only twenty miles from here. You can walk it.”

  “That’s optimism,” Gamble said.

  “Climb out of that tub,” she said. “Shave your face and comb your hair. Your clothes are washed and ironed. I’ll pack your other things.”

  “Sounds like you’re trying to get rid of me.”

  “You’ve been planning your escape for weeks,” she said. “You might as well go ahead. Oh, don’t give me that look. It’s better to talk about it. This way, you don’t have to lie to me.”