Larry McMurtry - Comanche Moon

by Comanche Moon

  "I ain't a professor, they've got some of them at Harvard," he had said.

  "Whip 'em and get home, sir," he advised, showing Inish to the door. That he had actually risen from his chair and walked Inish to the door was, Inish knew, a great compliment--there was, after all, a butler to show visitors in and out. The compliment, no doubt, was inspired by the historian's fond memories of his mother.

  "I'd leave that Oglethorpe girl down in Georgia, if I were you," the old man said, as he stood in the door, looking out on the Boston he could not see. "She won't do much harm if she's in Georgia--the Oglethorpe smell don't carry that far." But it was a meaty smell, not the memory of the old, crabbed historian, that had awakened Inish Scull from his chilly sleep in the Yellow Canyon. What he smelled was meat cooking.

  He didn't take in the smell with every breath, but, intermittently, every few minutes, when there would be a certain shift in the wind, then came the smell.

  Scull cautiously looked around. The land was broken and humpy. Perhaps someone else was camped behind one of the humps, cooking a deer or a pig.

  And yet, a fire would have meant smoke, and he saw no smoke.

  It's dream meat, he told himself. I'm dreaming of venison and pork because I'm rumbling hungry. I'm so hungry I'm dreaming smells.

  His only food the day before had been three doves--he had crept up on them in the early morning dimness and knocked them off their roost with a stick. He had seared the fat birds over a small fire and had eaten them before full daylight came. He knew he was in the domain of the old killer, Ahumado, and didn't want to be shooting his gun, not for a few days. Nor, ordinarily, did Inish Scull mind fasting.

  He had seen men killed in battle because fear and dread caused them to lose control of their stomachs or their bowels. In the time of battle a fighting man needed to stay empty, in his view; there would be time enough for feasting once the battle had been fought.

  Still, he was human, and could not be fully immune to the smell of cooking meat. Then he saw movement to the west. In a moment a coyote came in sight, its ears pricked up, going toward the ridges to the south. The coyote was moving purposely; perhaps it smelled the cooking meat too. Perhaps, after all, it was a not a dream smell that had brought him awake in the Yellow Canyon.

  Scull decided he might as well follow the coyote--it had a better nose than he did and would lead him to the meat, if there was meat.

  He walked for two hours, keeping the coyote just in sight. For long stretches he lost the meat smell entirely, but then, faintly, if the wind shifted to the south, he would smell it again. Between one gray ridge and the next he lost the coyote completely. The country rose slightly; he was crossing a mesa, or tableland, almost bare of vegetation.

  From being intermittent, the smell became constant, so constant that Scull could say with conviction that it was not a deer or a pig that was being cooked: it was a horse. He had eaten horse often in his trekking in the West and didn't think he could be mistaken. Somewhere nearby horsemeat was cooking--but why would the smell carry nearly a dozen miles, to the canyon where he had slept?

  Then Scull began to notice tracks, many tracks. He was crossing the route of a considerable migration--there were a few horse tracks, but most of the migrating people were on foot. Some were barefoot, some wore moccasins. There were even dog tracks --x was as if a village had decided to move itself across the empty tableland.

  Then Scull saw the smoke, which seemed to be rising out of the ground, a mile or more ahead. The smoke rose as if from a hidden fire. He didn't know what to make of it, but he did know that he had begun to feel exposed. He was in plain sight on a bare mesa where a hundred people or more had just passed. Scull looked around quickly, hoping for a ridge, a hump of dirt, or patch of sage--anything that could conceal him, even a hole he could hide in until darkness fell, but there was nothing. Besides, he was marching in stout boots and his tread would stand out like a road sign to anyone with an eye for tracks.

  Scull turned and hurried back toward the last cover, doing his best to erase or at least blur his track as he went. Suddenly he felt more exposed than he ever had, in all his years of soldiering; a kind of panic seized him, an overwhelming need to hide until dark came. Then he could come back and unravel the mystery of the smoke and the smell of cooking meat.

  Scull hurried back, scrubbing out his tracks as best he could, as he walked--the last ridge had been rocky; he felt sure he could dig under one of them and stay safely hid until dark.

  Then he saw the old man, coming toward him along his own track. The minute he saw him he remembered something Famous Shoes had said.

  "Ahumado is always behind you," Famous Shoes had told him. "Don't look for him in front.

  When he wants you he will appear, and he will be behind you." The memory came too late. The Black Vaquero was following the plain track left by his boots. The old man seemed to be alone, but Scull knew his men had to be somewhere nearby.

  The old man had not lived to a great age by being a fool.

  Scull decided he would just keep walking, with his head down, pretending he hadn't seen Ahumado, until he was in rifle range.

  He shot best from a prone position. When the distance was narrowed sufficiently he would just drop to the ground and fire. With one well-placed shot he could eliminate the Black Vaquero, the old bandit who had harassed the settlers of the border as ferociously as Buffalo Hump had the settlers along the northern rivers.

  Of course, the pistoleros would probably run him down and kill him, but then it was not the Scull way to die at home. His brother had been yanked off a whaling ship in the Hebrides and drowned. His Uncle Fortescue had drunk poisoned kvass in Circassia, and his father had been attempting to ice-skate on the frozen Minnesota River when he was overwhelmed by a band of Cree Indians. The Sculls died vividly, but never at home.

  Scull had only a hundred yards to walk before he was in rifle range of Ahumado. He didn't mean to risk a long shot, either. The one hundred yards might take him three minutes; then he would have to decide between certain martyrdom and very uncertain diplomacy. If he chose to risk the diplomacy he would have to live until Ahumado chose to let him die, which might be after days of torture. It was a choice his forebears had not had to make. His brother hadn't meant to get jerked out of the whaleboat, his Uncle Fortescue had no idea the kvass was poisoned, and his father had merely been skating when the Cree hacked him down.

  Scull walked on; Ahumado came in range; Scull didn't shoot.

  Too curious about that smoke, he told himself.

  Maybe he'll consider me such a fine catch that he'll ask me to dinner.

  Then he saw, to Ahumado's right, four small dark men. To his left a tall man on a paint horse had appeared. The Black Vaquero, indeed, had not been alone.

  For a moment, Scull wavered. Only six men opposed him. Ahumado carried no weapon--the only gunman was the skinny man on the paint horse; he could shoot him, grab the horse, and run. His fighting spirit rose. He was about to level his rifle when he glanced over his shoulder and saw, to his amazement, that four more of the dark men were just behind him, within thirty yards. They had risen as if from the earth and they carried bolos, the short rawhide thongs with rocks at each end that Mexicans threw at the legs of cattle or deer, to entwine them and bring them down.

  Scull did not level his rifle; he knew he had waited too long. Now it would have to be diplomacy. The fact that the dark men had simply appeared was disturbing. He had looked the terrain over carefully and seen no one; but there they were and the die was cast.

  Ahumado came to within ten feet of Scull before he stopped.

  "Well, hello from Harvard," Scull said.

  "I'm Captain Scull." "You have come just in time, Captain," the old man said.

  The man on the paint horse rode up behind him. He had a blinking eye. The dark men stood back, silent as rocks.

  "Just in time for what, sir?" Scull asked.

  "To help us eat your horse," Ahumado informed him. "Th
at's what we are cooking, over there in our pit." "Hector?" Scull said. "Bible and sword, you must have a big pit." "Yes, we have a big pit," Ahumado said.

  "We have been cooking him for three days. I think he is about cooked. If you will hand this man your rifle we can go eat him." The tall pistolero rode close.

  Scull handed him the rifle. With the dark men walking behind him, Inish Scull followed Ahumado toward the rising smoke.

  Scull stood on the edge of the crater, astonished first by the crater itself and then by what he saw in it. From rim to rim the crater must be a mile across, he judged. Below him, at the bottom of it, were the hundred or more people whose tracks he had seen--men and women, young and old.

  They were all waiting. The smoke rose from a pit in the center of the crater, Hector, whose head was missing, had been cooked standing up, in his skin.

  The old man, Ahumado, had scarcely looked at Scull since his surrender. His eyelids drooped so low that it was hard to see his eyes. Men had shovelled away the bed of coals that had covered the pit for three days. The coals were scattered in heaps around the pit--many of them still glowed red.

  "We have never cooked a horse this big," Ahumado remarked.

  "He appears to be thoroughly charred," Scull observed. "You might as well let the feast begin." He felt chagrined. The old man treated his arrival as casually as if he had received a letter announcing the date and arrival time. He had walked into Mexico, convinced that he was proceeding with extreme stealth, and yet Ahumado had read his approach so precisely that he had finished cooking Hector in time for Scull to say grace, if he wanted to.

  Now the need he had always had to be as far as he could get from Boston--not just Boston the place but Boston as way of being--had landed him in a crater in Mexico, where a hundred dark people were waiting to eat his horse.

  Ahumado made a gesture and the squatting, waiting people rose like a swarm and crowded into the pit around the smoking horse. Knives flashed, many knives. Strips of skin were ripped off, exposing the dark flesh, which soon dripped blood from a hundred cuts. Some who had no knives tore at the meat with their fingers.

  "They are hungry but your horse will fill them up," Ahumado said. "We will go down now. I have saved the best part for you, Captain Scull." "This is a big crater," Scull said, as they were walking down. "I wonder what made it?" "A great rock--Jaguar threw it from the sky," Ahumado said. "He threw it long ago, before there were people." "I expect we'd call it a meteor, up at Harvard College," Scull said.

  Then he saw four men shovelling coals out of another, smaller pit. This pit was modest, only a few scoops of coals in it. When the coals were scattered the men lifted something out of it on two long sticks, something that steamed and smoked, although wrapped in heavy sacking. They carried their burden over to a large flat rock and sat it down. Ahumado took out a knife, walked over, and began to cut the sacking away.

  "Now this is a treat, Captain," Tudwal said. "You'd do best to eat hearty before we put you in the cage." "I will, sir, I've never lacked appetite," Scull assured him. "I ate my own pig, as a boy, and now I expect I'll eat my horse." He did not inquire about the cage he was going to be put in.

  Ahumado cut away the last of the sacking: Hector's steaming head stared at him from the flat rock. Smoke came from his eyes. The top of his skull had been neatly removed, so that his brains would cook.

  "Now there's a noble head, if I ever saw one," Scull said, as he approached.

  "Hector and I harried many a foe. I had expected to ride him back north, when the great war comes, but it's not to be. You were his Achilles, Se@nor Ahumado." Now the dark men carried machetes. Ahumado gestured for them to move back a few steps.

  Scull glanced back at the larger pit.

  Hector was rapidly being consumed. The dark people in the pit looked as if they had been in a rain of blood.

  So it must have been when the cavemen ate the mastodons, Scull thought.

  Then he turned back, pulled out his knife, and began to cut bites of meat from the cheeks of his great horse.

  Once Inish Scull was securely shut in the cage of mesquite branches, Tudwal reached in and offered to cut the thongs that bound his hands and feet. Scull had been stripped naked too.

  Both the binding and the stripping were indignities he didn't appreciate, though he maintained a cheerful demeanor throughout.

  "Stick your feet over near the bars and I'll cut you loose," Tudwal offered. "Then I'll do your hands. You won't be able to catch no pigeons with your hands tied like that. You'd starve in ten days, which ain't what he has in mind. When he hangs a man in a cage he expects him to last awhile." "I have never cared much for squab," Scull said. "I suppose I can learn to like it, if there's nothing else." "A Mexican we hung off this cliff caught an eagle once," Tudwal said. "But the eagle got the best of him--pecked out one of his eyes." "I notice you blink, sir--what happened?" Scull said. "A sparrow get you?" "Nothing. I was just born ablinking," Tudwal said.

  The insult, as Scull had feared, didn't register.

  "But you weren't born in Mexico," Scull said. "You sound to me like a man who was probably born in Cincinnati or thereabouts." Tudwal was startled. How did the man know that?

  He had, in fact, been born on the Kentucky River, not far from Cincinnati.

  "You're right, Captain--but how'd you know that?" Tudwal asked.

  "I suppose it's your mellow tone," Scull said. He smiled at the man, hoping to lull him into a moment of inattention. The cliff they were about to lower him over seemed to fall away for a mile. Once they lowered him his fate would be sealed. He would hang there in space, with half of Mexico to look at, until he froze or starved. He didn't relish hanging there for days or weeks, surviving on the occasional bird he could yank through the bars. Ahumado, an old Mayan come north to prey on ignorant people, white and brown, had not proved susceptible to Harvard charm; but Tudwal, the blinking man, did not seem overly intelligent. If he kept talking he might yet fool him into making a mistake. He had obediently held his feet near the bars and Tudwal had freed his ankles.

  His wrists came next, and there lay the opportunity.

  Tudwal looked puzzled when Scull mentioned the mellow tone. Actually, the man had a nasal voice with little mellowness in it.

  "Yes sir, I've been sung to often by Ohio maidens--some of them may not quite have been maidens at the time. The whores in the fine town of Cincinnati have lullabied me to sleep many times.

  Have you heard this old tune, sir?" He struck up the old ballad of Barbara Allen:

  In London town where I was born There was a fair maid dwelling ...

  Tudwal nodded. Someone far back in his life had once sung that song, a grandmother or an aunt, he was not sure. He forgot, for a moment, that Captain Scull was about to be dangled to his death. The song took him away, into memory, into thoughts of his mother and his sister, when he had led a gentler life.

  As Scull sang he held his hands close to the bars so that Tudwal could cut the rawhide thongs. He sang softly, so that Tudwal would lean forward as he cut. The moment the bonds parted Scull grabbed Tudwal's wrist and whacked it so hard against the mesquite bars that he broke it.

  The knife fell into the cage: he had one weapon. Then he caught Tudwal by the throat and pulled him close enough to the cage that he could reach with the other hand and yank the man's Colt pistol out of its holster. Now he had two weapons. He would have preferred to conserve bullets by strangling Tudwal, but the man was too strong. Before Scull could get his other hand on Tudwal's throat he twisted away, forcing Scull to shoot him dead, the sound echoing through the Yellow Canyon.

  The four dark men who had been waiting to lower the cage immediately took their machetes and trotted away. Ahumado was still back at the crater, where the feast was being held, waiting on his blanket; he would have heard the shot.

  "There, you Cincinnati fool, I warbled you to death," Scull said.

  His situation had improved dramatically. He had a knife and a gun, and five bullets
. On the other hand he was in a flimsy cage, on top of a five-hundred-foot cliff, and he was naked.

  The bindings that held the mesquite cage together were hardened rawhide. Scull began to hack at them but the knife was dull and the rawhide hard as iron. Tudwal's horse stood near. If he could cut himself free he might have a chance, but the rawhide was so resistant and the knife so dull that it might take an hour to free himself--and he didn't have an hour.

  "You goddamned fool, why didn't you sharpen your knife?" Scull said. "Not only did you have a Cincinnati voice, you had a goddamned weak Kentucky brain." It annoyed him. He had worked a miracle, killed his captor, and yet he wasn't free.

  Then, with a moment to breathe, he remembered another of Papa Franklin's fine sayings: "Haste makes waste." He looked more closely at the jointure of the wrappings. He didn't need to hack the cage apart--if he could just break the wrappings at one corner of the cage he could squeeze out and run. He still had five bullets; it seemed good policy to sacrifice one or two of them to free himself. He immediately tested the decision and was well pleased with the result: two bullets and the wrappings blew apart, and he squeezed through and stood up.