The Bells of El Diablo

by Frank Leslie

  The Mexican stopped at the corner of the table between James and Vienna. He scowled down at James, his demeanor dark and rigid with coiled menace. On his hips were two big Walker Colts; another, larger knife was sheathed over his belly, the scrolled handle jutting up over his sternum. His brown, long-fingered hands were bunched at his sides.

  James drew on the cheroot and blew the smoke out. “Can I offer you a drink, amigo? Ain’t been down here long. Don’t have too many friends.”

  The Mexican wasn’t looking at James. He was looking at Vienna, his eyes glassy, heavy-lidded, and absolutely riveted on the woman, her thick raven hair swirling across her shoulders clad in the red-and-white-striped serape.

  The Mexican’s black eyes slid toward James. His right nostril flared slightly, his long jaws hardening, and then he turned back to Vienna and grabbed a fistful of her hair. Vienna grunted and glared up at the man, her gray eyes spitting defiant fire from beneath her straw sombrero.

  “This one I take!” the Mexican said, spitting the words out harshly and pulling the stiletto out of the table. He slid its nastily thin blade toward Vienna’s throat. “Or I cut!”

  James leaped to his feet. The Mexican released Vienna’s hair and swung her around to face James, the blade in his left hand angled toward James’s belly. Only, James’s own right hand was wrapped firmly around the Mexican’s knife wrist. The Mexican looked down at it, eyes winking in the lamplight, puzzled. As he tried to push the blade toward James, he made a deep-throated groaning sound. His wrist didn’t move. He hadn’t been prepared for the sudden, decisive reaction of the tall, dark, blue-eyed gringo, and he looked down in growing fury as James twisted his wrist back and sideways, making the little bones in the appendage pop and crack.

  The Mexican stepped back haltingly, and James followed, increasing the destructive pressure on his wrist, until the man’s back was pressed up against the opposite stone arch support of the one he’d been leaning against a few minutes ago.

  With an agonized cry, he released the stiletto. It clattered to the floor. Raging, he reached for one of the Walker Colts. It was in James’s hand first, and the tall Confederate hammered the butt against the Mexican’s right cheek.

  The Mexican flew sideways and hit the earthen floor with a thump. He groaned, body tensing, long legs crossing, then uncrossing. Making a deeply pained expression, he fell back against the floor, unconscious. Blood trickled from the three-inch gash in his cheek and around which the skin was purpling.

  Holding the Walker Colt butt-first in his fist, down low by his side, James looked around. The other Mexican males in the room remained where they’d been when the tall Mex had thrown the stiletto. They regarded him now dully, droopy-eyed, heads wobbling drunkenly on their shoulders. The little boy who’d been shucking corn stared at James, his eyes wide, lower jaw hanging. The old woman who ran the place was peeling potatoes into a skillet and regarding James with only a vague look of disapproval, apparently accustomed to such carryings-on and, likely, far worse.

  “Well, I’m glad you made us some more friends, Jimmy. Can’t have too many friends—that’s what I always say!” Crosseye heaved his burly bulk up from the table, adjusting the pistol hanging down his chest and the cartridge belt around his waist. “With that, maybe we should find somewhere else to hole up out of the wind.”

  They found such a place down a cross street nearby. It was marked HOTEL but it was merely a second story with straw pallets above a goat stable. The pallets were partitioned off from one another with ropes strung from ratty striped blankets, all smelling of must and goat.

  Behind the stable was a small living area where the young couple who ran the place lived with several children of all ages. One of the children, an infant, was crying as James tried to sleep on his own pallet sandwiched between Vienna and Crosseye, each separated from him by blanket curtains. Occasionally, the child’s cries were drowned by the moaning wind, but every time sleep reached up for James, the wind would die or the child would wail louder.

  Crosseye apparently had no such difficulty. To James’s right, the graybeard was snoring peacefully. That, too, would have kept James awake if he hadn’t grown accustomed to the raucous sawing long ago. To James’s left, there’d been no sounds for a time, and he’d thought Vienna must have gone to sleep, as well, but now he heard water being poured from a pitcher. Unable to sleep, she must have decided to wash.

  Soft splashing sounds continued to emanate through the curtain, as well as the light sucking of a sponge being squeezed. They somehow drowned out Crosseye’s long, luxurious snores and the wind’s caterwauling. James lay on his back, hands behind his head, squeezing his eyes closed and fighting the images that kept shaping themselves behind his retinas.

  His loins burned. He gritted his teeth and was about to roll over onto his belly and bury his head in his saddle when the curtain to his left suddenly drew back.

  Vienna pulled a hand away from the curtain and sat back down on her pallet. She wasn’t wearing a blouse but only her denim trousers. They were unbuttoned. She turned sideways to him, drew her knees up, and wrapped her bare arms around them. Before her was a rusty tin washbasin and a clay pot of water. A sponge lay beside the basin.

  Vienna shook her hair back from her face. Her voice was husky as she said, “Would you like to finish for me, James?”

  He stared at her firm shoulders and long, slender arms. He could see half a pale, full breast beneath her arm, mashed against her upraised right knee. Despite the hammering in his chest and the searing agony of lust in his loins, James hesitated, vaguely repelled by the offer.

  His mind swirled until his head ached, and then he found himself climbing to his feet, staring down at her stonily, his broad chest rising and falling heavily as he kicked out of his boots. He unbuttoned his shirt, tossed it down on his saddle. In a minute, the rest of his clothes were there, as well—pants, long-handles, red neckerchief, socks.

  He moved to her stiffly, his goatish male need for her fairly dripping off him, and sat down behind her. He wrapped his arms around her, around her knees, and nuzzled her neck, intoxicated by the touch of her smooth skin, by the smell of her, the caress of her silky hair on his cheek. She turned her head, and his lips found hers, hot, wet, and pliant. Her tongue was waiting for his at the edge of her mouth, and as he mashed his lips against hers, her tongue retreated, teasing, before jutting forward to entangle itself with his.

  He pulled away from her but kept his head very close to hers, their lips almost touching, and cupped her breasts in his hands. He lowered his head, ran his lips down her neck and her right breast, and stopped. He slid his eyes toward her cleavage at the top of which lay a small tattoo in the shape of a bucking bronc, tail curled upward.

  James stared at the horse above her heaving breasts. “Oh, that,” Vienna said, running her hands through his hair, her voice pitched with passion. “Just ignore it, James. That’s from a life I’ve left behind.”

  She thrust her breasts against him, and he continued moving his head down, kissing his way down the upturned orb to the jutting nipple.

  “James,” she whispered later, half groaning, a single tear rolling down her cheek when they collapsed together, spent. “I’m in love with you, James.”

  Something tugged on James’s big toe.

  Instantly, he was awake to find his Griswold already in his hand, his thumb ratcheting the hammer back. He was on his back, Vienna curled against him, her head on his chest. He looked up, focusing his sleep-bleary eyes, to see the boy from the cantina lurch back against the blanket curtain behind him, throw his hands straight up above his head, and yell a terrified Spanish plea.

  Vienna gasped and jerked her head up from James’s chest, clutching one of the blankets they’d shared against the stormy chill to her naked bosoms. James looked around, listening, hearing only Crosseye grumbling on the other side of James’s own now-vacant sleeping crib to his right. The kid was alone.

  James depressed the Griswold’s hammer
and lowered the weapon, his ear tips warming with self-consciousness. He glanced at Vienna looking incredulously up at the boy, her hair mussed, shoulders bare, and then he returned his own grumpy gaze to the kid. “What the hell, boy?”

  The kid pressed a finger to his lips and turned his head as though listening, wondering if his own scream had been heard in the living area below the hotel. Finally, he turned sideways, canted his head, beckoning to James—an oddly adult gesture in one so young, probably not over ten—then pushed back out the blanket curtain.

  “What in tarnation?” came Crosseye’s sleep-gravelly voice from James’s right. The oldster was stomping into his boots. “Jimmy, what’s poppin’ over there, blame it!”

  James pushed off his elbows and heels and slipped back into his own sleeping area to see Crosseye poking his shaggy head through the curtain on the opposite side. The old man’s sleep-bleary eyes raked him up and down, puzzled by the younger man’s nakedness.

  “You mind if I have a moment?” James snapped.

  As if he suddenly understood, Crosseye’s big cheeks above his beard flushed and a grin tugged at his mouth corners as he pulled his head back through the blanket. James dressed quickly, then carried his boots and rifle out to where the kid stood in front of Crosseye, whispering in Spanish and gesturing wildly with his hands, pointing out the small, sashed window in the adobe wall at the far end of the little sleeping area.

  The wind continued to blow sand against the hotel’s walls and rattle the thin, cracked windows in their frames.

  “What is it, kid?” James said, squatting so his head was level with the shaver’s.

  The boy looked out from under a neatly cut shelf of straight blue-black bangs, made a frustrated expression, shaking his head. A thin white scar slanted across his nose. He began walking toward the stairs that led down to the goat pen, beckoning.

  James looked at Crosseye, who returned the favor. “Trap?” the older man said.

  James looked at the kid who stood over the open stone stairs, beckoning and prattling on in Spanish. Somewhere in the tangle of incoherent Spanish, the words “Apache Jack” jumped out like a zebra in a herd of whitetail deer.

  James glanced at Crosseye and then at Vienna, who stood to his right, buttoning her blouse and staring wide-eyed at the little boy by the stairs. Quickly, James set his rifle against the wall, removed his shell belt and holsters from where he’d hung them on his shoulder, and wrapped the belt and twin .36’s around his waist.

  When the others were ready, the three of them leaving their bedrolls in their respective cribs but all donning their hardware, including Vienna, who wore a .36 Remington for the cross draw on her slender hips, they followed the boy down the crumbling stone stairs and into the stock pen below.

  The goats brayed and scurried away, hooves thudding softly on the manure-and-straw-strewn floor of the stable. The boy ran toward a small wooden door in the east wall. “Apache Jack,” he whispered, opening the door, peeking cautiously out, then regarding the three gringos behind him, and beckoning. “Apache Jack—vamos!”

  Chapter 21

  “Viene esta manera!”

  The boy beckoned again as he ran across the narrow side street obscured by blowing dirt, sand, and tumbleweeds. James, Crosseye, and Vienna followed, looking both ways up and down the cluttered, abandoned street. James wondered who the kid was watching for.

  The old woman from the cantina?

  He got an answer to the question a few minutes later when they were angling amongst the scattered hovels toward the town’s far southwestern edge, on the far side of the massive stone wave standing sentinel over the village. The boy stopped running suddenly, looked toward a trail following a near arroyo, then motioned for the others to hurry. A minute later, the kid, James, Crosseye, and Vienna were hunkered down against the bank of the arroyo, staring through the spindly brush at the lip of it toward the trail.

  Horseback riders were moving along the trace, entering the town from the desert on James’s left. As they came nearer, all five riders hunkering low over their horses’ necks against the wind, James saw that they were clad in dove gray uniforms with high black boots with silver spurs, heavy pistols holstered on their hips or thighs. One wore a leather-billed forage cap, long, curly brown hair blowing out around the cap in the wind. The other men’s gray felt sombreros buffeted down their backs by their chin thongs. One rider was holding aloft a wind-torn, powder blue guidon depicting a buffeting golden eagle with spread wings.

  James had seen the guidon before, as well as such uniforms as the riders were wearing. Mexican rurales. Rural Mexican policemen. Being foreigners here, and on Mexican soil for admittedly nefarious reasons, he and the others had swung clear of them. The boy seemed to think it important to swing clear, as well, as he waited until the riders had passed his and his three charges’ position before clambering up out of the arroyo and dashing across the trail and into open desert.

  “Where in the hell we goin’?” Crosseye groused, breathing hard. “If I woulda known we was walkin’ this far, I’d have ridden my hoss!”

  “Looks like we’re there,” James said, following the boy from about ten yards back and seeing a blocky sandstone church rise before him.

  A ruined stone wall surrounded the church and the long, L-shaped adobe brick building behind it. The boy led his party across another shallow arroyo and then across a cart trail that angled toward the church from Cordura, and around the church’s front corner toward the shabby addition flanking it. Beyond the addition were stock pens, a garden with irrigated ditches, and a sprawling cemetery.

  The trio of Confederates followed the boy to a stout door beneath a brush arbor. Wind-whipped paper lanterns hung beneath the arbor, and a clay water pot called an ojo in these parts lay shattered on the cracked flagstones near the door. The boy rapped the heel of a hand on the door and shouted something. After a few seconds, the door opened, and a young woman in a nun’s habit poked her head out. While the boy spoke to the young, fair-skinned nun in Spanish, she regarded the three dusty visitors warily, curiously, before nodding once curtly and pulling her head back inside.

  The boy beckoned as he moved through the door, remembering to doff his straw sombrero and hold it against his chest. James and Crosseye removed their hats, and Vienna tossed her sombrero back off her head, letting it hang from her neck by its chin thong.

  Inside a dark entrance hall lit by one small window near the door, the nun glanced at each of her visitors in turn while the boy stood respectfully to one side, head tilted back, a small rooster tail swaying at the crown of his head as he looked around at the nun and his three incredulous charges peppered liberally with dust and grit from the windstorm. From deep in the bowels of the building, a scream sounded.

  A man’s scream, at once raspy and guttural and filled with primal fear. The agonized lament lifted gooseflesh between James’s shoulder blades, but neither the nun nor Pablo reacted.

  “Pablo says you’ve come to see Apache Jack,” the nun said in a heavy Irish brogue. “Is this true?”

  Vienna spat sand from her lips, brushed it from her eyebrows. “He’s here?”

  “What is your business with Jack?”

  The scream came again, garbled by distance, as though the screamer was a long ways away, in another part of the building. It was answered by an angry shout, as though the screamer was being admonished.

  “His brother sent us,” Vienna said.

  “And who is Jack’s brother?”

  “Jefferson Davis.”

  The nun absorbed the response without expression aside from the merest hint of a flush rising in her pale cheeks as she stared directly at Vienna. Then she ran her still-skeptical eyes across James and Crosseye standing near the boy before she swung around, the black skirt of her habit giving a sibilant rustle.

  “Follow me.”

  The nun led the party through the entrance hall. She turned right and followed a long, dingy corridor paneled in pine, her sandals slapping on
the grime-encrusted flagstones. The hem of her skirt lifted wisps of dust in her wake.

  The screams continued, as did the shouting, though more distantly now. Doors lay along each side of the hall. Most were open. Near some of these doors, or between them, ghostly figures stood ensconced in pale light and shadow. Some of the figures were men, some women, all dressed in the plain cotton garb and shabby ponchos of the Mexican peon, though some appeared to be American. They were of all ages. Some were missing limbs or were otherwise disfigured—there was a hunchback and someone suffering the ravages of leprosy. But in most that James passed, he saw in their eyes the dark shimmering light or hollow, vaguely terrified casts of insanity.

  What haunted James even more than the twisted figures around him was the possibility that he’d come all this way only to visit a madman with a crazy, made-up story of the devil’s gold. As he walked, following the nun and the boy, James glanced at Crosseye and Vienna in turn, and he almost chuckled at the dark humor of the possibility of their journey ending here, in a Mexican madhouse.

  Well, it was fitting, wasn’t it? The world on the eastern side of the Mississippi was mad, so it only stood to figure that the one west of it would be, too. The whole damn world, in fact. There was no escaping it.

  Near the end of the long hall, the nun stopped before a door that stood partway open. Voices emanated from inside as did the clink of a glass. The nun glanced at James.

  A crispness entered her voice. “Wait here.”

  She pushed through the door and immediately cut into loud, fluent Spanish. From the hall behind her, James saw a thick figure nearly lurch out of his boots and swing wide of the woman, who turned to continue directing her tirade his way, as he made his way to the door, sort of hop-skipping, limping. James saw that one of the big man’s bare feet was much larger than the other, and that the ankle bulged hideously. The man, clad in white pajama bottoms and a long, dark brown serape tied at the waist with a rope, bounded past James and the others and went skip-hopping down the hall in the direction from which James’s party had come.