City of Widows

by Loren D. Estleman

  In the saffron light of the lamp that had been burning in the front window for as long as I had been associated with the city, they looked even larger than they had the night before, their shadows stretching nearly as far as the boardwalk on the opposite side of the street. I couldn’t believe they were just cowboys. They had on last night’s clothes—I wouldn’t have given odds that they had ever had them off—with the addition of burlap serapes and dull brown sombreros that from the looks of them had held many a horse’s fill of water. Their stovepipe boots were caked with dust and from crown to heel the two men were the same dun color with nary an inch of exposed metal to catch the light. Even an Apache would have been hard put to spot them at any distance in the desert. A trio of well-fed sorrels were hitched nearby, loaded down with gear, including water bags and Mexican Winchesters on two of them and the ubiquitous machetes, slung from the saddle rings in special scabbards. The animals all bore the same brand, an inverted V inside a square tipped up on one corner.

  “Cuerno Diamante,” said the more garrulous of the pair when I asked about it. “Diamond Horn. It is the sign of Don Segundo as it was of his father and his father’s father, the crest of the Guerrero family, a gift from King Philip at the time of the great Armada.”

  “The Armada sank, I heard.”

  For answer he drew deeply on the cheroot and handed it to his partner. They were a sharing party. I swear that after one inhaled the other blew smoke.

  Presently Axtaca emerged from the building, carrying what looked like a bundle of sticks eighteen inches long bound in a rawhide wrap with symbols painted on it. He too had thrown a serape on over his peasant dress, but it was more elaborate than those of his fellows, embroidered with a fine design in dusky red that would nonetheless be invisible beyond a hundred yards. He wore no hat, only a plain bandanna around his head. Seeing him upright for the first time I realized he was no taller than I, long of waist but short in the legs and bowed unheroically at the knees, and I might have been reminded of an orangutan I’d seen in a medicine show in Helena but for the overall dignity of his bearing. Without a word or a glance in my direction he tied the bundle across the throat of the saddle belonging to the nearest of the three sorrels, the one that carried neither machete nor rifle, untied the reins, and stepped into leather. The less talkative of the two vaqueros threw away the cheroot and the pair followed his lead.

  Straddling the claybank, I thought I recognized the bundle as a distant relative of the medicine bags carried by some of the northern tribes. It was a talisman against mishap and, so far as I could determine, the closest thing to a weapon that Don Segundo’s foreman carried on his person. In that rough country he was either the bravest man I’d yet encountered, or the most arrogant.

  15

  IT WAS SEPTEMBER everywhere in America except along the Journey of Death. From the time the molten-copper sun cleared the San Andres, the air grew warmer by the minute. The tiny fiery blossoms that opened to drink the condensed moisture by dark and blazed in the early bright curled in on themselves under the mounting heat and vanished like the stain of breath on glass. My coat and my companions’ serapes came off early and went behind our saddles. Within minutes I felt the first pricking drops of sweat where my hat met my forehead. You don’t wipe away the first sweat of the day in the desert; you let it cover you in a transparent sheet like thin varnish. Another day, another layer, curing your hide in the salt of your own system until it was as scaly as a lizard’s back. You can build a house from the human bones you will find bleaching in the desert, but you won’t see a gila monster’s skeleton.

  I was traveling with a silent crew. The most open of the three would have been considered laconic in any company I had ridden with, and some of those would have made a monastery sound like Independence Day. He at least answered questions, although the pauses before his responses were long enough for me to forget what I had asked. The others were as stony as the buttes that appeared and began to multiply as we moved farther south, and he was too polite to reply to a comment not addressed to him directly. His name was Francisco. He took pains to point out that it was not to be shortened to Pancho, Saint Francis having some specific importance to his family whose nature I wasn’t able to draw out of him. As I’d suspected, the other vaquero was his brother, younger by ten months, called Carlos. The surname was a mix of Spanish and Indian I could neither pronounce nor remember. They had come to work for Don Segundo when the counterrevolution against Juárez failed, having fought for it with machetes, loyalty, and little else in some backwater of Mexico’s remotest province so wild it appeared as only a blank on the best maps. Miguel Axtaca had accompanied them, or rather they him, and it was clear from the outset that their pledge was to him and that he held a position in their regard somewhere between El Cristo and the old gods. They would no sooner depart from his course than two drops of water would leave the Bravo to start their own river.

  By midday I had begun to think fondly of the winter I had spent in a dugout in the Rockies trapped under twenty feet of snow, wondering if I would have enough toes left to walk out when the thaw came. The sun was a white coin nailed to a naked sky, and when the hot wind gusted I felt the glue that held my joints together drying out and cracking. Even the claybank hung its vain head. I stopped twice to give it water from my cupped hand and to take some for myself, but the others kept riding without touching their water bags. I’d heard tales of Apaches and their mounts subsisting on sun and dust and nothing else and had charged them to the same kind of frontier storytelling that had grangers in windy Wyoming feeding their chickens buckshot to keep them from blowing away, but here were three men who could outparch any of those mythical Indians. I hadn’t felt this far out of my class since the day I tracked a white scalphunter into a railroad owners’ banquet in Denver.

  When night came we camped south of Las Cruces, where the others watered at last, built a small fire for warmth, and handed around twists of jerked beef. They didn’t offer me any and I didn’t ask. From the outset it was clear I was just someone who happened to be going in the same direction they were, and if I expired for lack of provisions or water, the occurrence had no more to do with them than the czar’s assassination. I opened a tin, ate sardines, drank the juice, and wished for coffee.

  The next day was more of the same, with the addition of a few new flat spots on my body thanks to a night spent on the hard earth. If I was adjusting to the heat, that heat was yesterday’s; we were nearing the border now and the oven of Chihuahua. Already the scenery looked alien, dotted with plants and bushes I had no name for and corrugated like a brown ocean frozen in mid-roll. And I felt something undefined, an inner caution born of being foreign and alone.

  I noticed a change in my companions as well, but in the opposite direction. As we continued south, some of the tension seemed to go out of their posture and they began to look around, not so much in the way of a small party expecting trouble as of travelers noting the changes and samenesses in country they called home. Now they talked among themselves in that boundary mix of Spanish, English, and Indian, and once one of them laughed, a deep open male guffaw that said as clearly as if I understood the language that some mention had been made of a woman. I knew then, from my position not only outside their circle but outside the great vast space that their circle now encompassed, something of how these three men and all their kind felt when they crossed the border heading north.

  Somewhere during that trip—I think it was the third day, shortly after we broke camp at the base of a dead volcano still steeped in the stench of sulfur—I turned over another year. I wondered how many other forty-year-old men were still traversing unknown territory on horses that hated them in the company of men who would never be their friends. It seemed that by the halfway point a fellow should have more to his name than he can carry away in two hands.

  That afternoon we struck Indian.

  There had been signs, although no more than one would expect of a people who drifted along the gr
ound like chaff, leaving little behind to prove they existed: a thread of smoke scratching a faded exclamation point against naked sky, a wrinkle of movement atop a distant butte. It was a big country but not as empty as it looked, and they had been there long enough to know when something as unnatural as Man interrupted the pattern of its days. Tiny fleeting impressions of activity, and then they were there, fifteen of them strung out in a ragged line across an open space without sufficient cover nearby to conceal a moccasin. It was a trick I’d have given much to learn, but I suspected it wasn’t something that can be taught, only known.

  Of course they were Apaches, as ugly and toadlike as the terrain they ruled. Naked but for breechclouts, they sat hollow-hipped pintos and carried Springfield rifles with the barrels upright, some of them trailing feathers from the ends. It was a lot of firepower in one place for a tribe with nothing worth trading. This was no ordinary raiding party, I decided, but an escort of some kind. As unobstrusively as possible I reached behind my saddle and loosened the Winchester in its scabbard.

  There was no movement on their side except for their mounts’ nervous heads and the wind stirring their hair, unfettered and without decoration. A mile above them an eagle—I hoped superstitiously it wasn’t a vulture—hung suspended from its broad wings, painted there. The three Mexicans conferred. Then Miguel Axtaca kneed his sorrel forward. In one hand he held his reins high while he lifted the other with the palm out to show he had no weapon. He’d advanced ten feet when one of the Springfields spoke.

  The barrel came down, the butt went up to the Indian’s shoulder, white smoke puffed from the muzzle and slid sideways with the wind. Something tugged at the dry earth several yards in front of Axtaca’s horse. He drew rein, Francisco and Carlos hoisted their carbines and worked the levers. Six or seven days later the sound of the shot reached us, a hollow plop like a frog jumping into a pond. Axtaca dropped his hand and pushed the palm back, stopping the others from returning fire. It had been a warning shot.

  At the end of another week the Apache mounted at the center of the line raised one hand and made a sign. After a moment Axtaca responded. Then—it had to be for my benefit—he spoke his first words of English since the night we had met in the Mare’s Nest.

  “He wants all of us to come.”

  A pause. The vaqueros lowered their Winchesters.

  Once, in Dakota Territory, I’d ridden ninety miles with a Cheyenne arrowhead between my shoulder blades to Yankton and the nearest doctor. The arrowhead was poisoned with toad spume and human manure and I lay for three weeks in delirium. From start to finish the experience wasn’t as long as the half-mile we crossed that afternoon. The Apaches made no move to shorten the distance, remaining as impassive as foothills.

  When we were about fifty feet apart the Indian in the center barked. A linguist might have made something of the guttural syllable, but it was the closest approximation to the sound a big dog makes when its hackles are standing as I had ever heard from a fellow human. Its meaning was clear enough and we stopped.

  During the conversation that ensued, carried on entirely between Miguel Axtaca and the Apache who seemed to be in charge in a language completely unrelated to the one the Aztec had been using for days, I had plenty of opportunity to study the other side. They were all males and mostly young, one or two barely old enough to have passed whatever test for manhood that tribe observed, and in general they were lean almost to the point of emaciation, their rib cages standing out like umbrella staves beneath burnished flesh. Here was a predatory people, half-starved like wolves and therefore dangerous. Many were scarred—one in fact had come close to having his head split open from the way the new hair stood out like quills from a crescent of fresh pink skin on the right side of his head, as wide as the spread fingers of a man’s hand. Despite their alien features, the broad flat faces, slit eyes, sharp noses, and mouths like razor cuts, there was about them that grim weary faithless air of the veteran killer that I had breathed in more places than I could count, from Shiloh to Adobe Walls to the massacre at Sand Creek. It observes neither race nor creed and jumps all the barriers between.

  All of this and a good deal more was present in their leader. He was easily the oldest of the band, nearly three times the age of its youngest member, with iron gray in his relatively short hair and deep creases crosshatching every square inch of his face. His eyes, small and close-set, smoldered steadily in the deep shadows of his brow like embers in a cave. There was no decency in them, nothing that passed for mercy, no capacity for any emotion but hate. Somewhere I have a photograph that was taken of him much later at Fort Sill, and after forty years the raw hostility in those eyes has not lessened; it spans the decades like a scar on the land. At the time I had barely heard his name, but its four syllables have come to sum up my experiences in the Great Southwest of 1881 in a way that no whole book or paragraph could.

  At one point during the conversation, the Apache gestured toward the medicine bag tied across the pommel of Axtaca’s saddle. Don Segundo’s foreman touched it with the ends of his thick fingers and said something in a tone softer than any I had heard him use previously. On the other side, the harsh flame in the eyes belonging to the granite head altered, then became pitiless once again. The head nodded slightly. More talk followed, punctuated by hand signs on both sides. At length the line of Indians turned, collapsing upon itself like a cotton clothesline, and moved off toward the east. Not one of the riders looked back.

  “What did he say to them?” I asked Francisco. I was sure some trick was involved. The Apaches knew no prayer but Death to the Enemy, and they had no enemy they despised worse than Mexicans. Since 1840 the State of Chihuahua had issued a bounty of one hundred dollars for each male Apache scalp and fifty for each female.

  Francisco rearranged his thick shoulders. “I do not speak Apache.”

  Axtaca turned in his saddle and fixed his obsidian gaze on me. He had neither looked at me nor acknowledged my existence since San Sábado. In that desert glare his face looked like something shaped by erosion.

  “I lived with the Chiricahua Apaches from the time I was six until I turned fourteen,” he said. “I am the only man not a Chiricahua who is allowed to display their symbol upon my traps. I know the secret name of God. Geronimo is a Chiricahua. All these things I told him and he wished me good medicine on my journey.”

  “That was Geronimo?”

  “It is the name by which the Mexicans and the Americans know him. I addressed him by his warrior name, which your norteamericano tongue could never manage.” He pitied me that.

  “I thought he’d be taller,” I said.

  16

  WITH TWO HOURS of light remaining we passed a longhorn skull polished white and set on a flat piece of shale. The Diamond Horn brand had been burned into its forehead above letters in faded red paint reading PROHIBIDA LA ENTRADA. It was the only indication that we had entered the region acknowledged by two governments to belong to Don Segundo del Guerrero, the White Lion of Chihuahua. Here and there across that rocky plain, knots of surly beeves stood around munching the short tough grass that did nothing to fill out their hollow hips and exposed ribs.

  Another hour went by before we came within sight of ranch headquarters, an adobe oblong with a thatched roof and the long veranda unique to the Spanish gentry, as if shade itself were the special property of the wealthy. But for that it might have been any one of a thousand such structures you saw down there and scarcely noted. Whatever pretensions the old man might have inherited from his noble ancestors had apparently been leeched from him by the dirty stuff of revolution.

  We dismounted before the porch and tied up at the rail. My legs felt as stiff as uncured leather. One of those yellow dogs of indeterminate breed that proliferate in that country lifted its chin from its paws on an ancient glider, growled, and went back to sleep. Its coat was tattered with mange and glittered with flies.

  The front door was opened by a bell-shaped woman in a print blouse and a dark skirt whos
e hem swept the floor. Her gray hair was caught with combs behind her head, tight enough to pull the creases out of her face, which held no expression. I assumed she was the housekeeper, but at sight of her the two vaqueros removed their hats and Miguel Axtaca addressed her as Señora Guerrero. On further study I realized too that she was a good deal younger than she at first appeared. That raw land was full of women whose youth had been burned away by the struggle to survive both the climate and the force of their men’s character.

  After a brief exchange in Spanish, and with barely a glance at me, she stood aside and we entered. Francisco and Carlos paused to cross themselves before an impressive carved wooden crucifix mounted on the wall opposite the door, but Axtaca went on through the shallow room and out the open door on the other side.

  It was a pleasant room, running nearly the length of the house and elegantly furnished in contrast to the building’s exterior. There were bright rugs on the oiled floor, tasteful religious paintings in ornate frames, camelback sofas upholstered in wine-colored velvet, and silver everywhere, twinkling in the late-afternoon light sliding through the small curtained windows. The place was well ventilated and noticeably cooler than the veranda. That was its chief luxury and the thing that spoke loudest of the old don’s position in the community.

  Outside, a shot rang out.

  The vaqueros and I caught up with the foreman on a back porch as long as the one in front just as another report sounded. There, a very old man in a wicker wheelchair with a Hopi rug spread across his lap sat at a long bench facing the open plain. In spite of the heat he had on a heavy brick-colored sweater with a shawl collar and all its buttons fastened and a straw hat that had seen all its best years, sunlight dappling his face through gaping holes in the broad floppy brim. His hair was white, startlingly so against the deep brown of his skin, curling over his collar, and he wore the spade-shaped Castilian beard and a pair of those elaborate moustaches that required suspension in a special hammock when their owners slept; trimmed, waxed, and coiled at the ends. His long hands were spotted and clawlike, but the fingers were dextrous as he laid a rifle with a long brass barrel on the bench and accepted another from the man standing at his side. There were eight rifles lined up on the bench, including three Hawkens, a Sharps, a pair of large-bore Remingtons, a Springfield, and a foreign make I couldn’t identify. They were all single-shot and long-range. Sharpshooter’s guns.