by David Xavier
“I would rather sleep in an empty stall,” Vicente said. Which he did, staying on that pile of fresh straw in the stables instead of sharing a room with his newly married mother.
The first morning in the room Salomon washed his face and buttoned his shirt while Marisela lay under the sheets stretching an arm above her head. She smiled at her husband, but then she sat up quickly with the sheets clutched at her neck and the smile was gone.
“What? What is it?”
“You are wearing a pistola again.”
Salomon looked at his gunbelt. “It is military issued.” He sat on the bed and leaned in close. “It is just for show.”
He kissed her forehead and Marisela watched him leave, the door closing behind him without a sound. He squinted as he walked outside, the men in the courtyard walked on sunlit white dust as if they walked on nothing at all. His invitation inside the presidio walls did not go unnoticed.
“Salomon is just a scout,” Ramiro said. “Why does he get a mattress and we have to sleep on cots?”
“Because he has a wife sleeping next to him,” Castro told him. “You get a woman to fall in love with you and I’ll get you a mattress to sleep on.”
“Plenty of women are in love with me.”
“I have yet to see one stand with you long enough to finish a drink.”
There were other wives at the presidio, and each received the same luxuries that they shared with their husbands. Marisela made friends among them quickly, as they each remarked of her beauty and touched her long hair.
“I rinse with hibiscus petals whenever I have the chance.”
Vicente continued to work the stables, rubbing down the horses and cleaning the floors. Salomon helped with the work when he was not sent out on scout patrols. On this day they moved along the stalls together, checking each of the horses for hoof splits.
“I should be riding alongside you,” Vicente said.
Salomon looked beneath the horse’s belly. “I know you should.”
Vicente dropped the hoof and went to the back leg. “I am a better shot than most of the men here.”
“I know that too.”
“If they sent me out, I would gather so many thieves and bandits the frontier would remain peaceful by my reputation alone.”
“That one I have trouble believing,” Salomon said.
Baja California did not suffer from gold bandits as its northern counterpart did. But like any newly expanding frontier, it struggled with crime of other sorts. Bandits hid in the lush roadside forests and ambushed farmers. They looted ranches and stole horses and cattle. Mission collection boxes were ransacked. Homes burned with no reason given.
It was José Castro’s responsibility to sweep over one hundred miles of his region from Cruces to Rodado, and the two hundred miles from shore to shore of Baja California, and keep the peace. It was a task that required small outposts near various villages – Comondú, San Javier, La Bocana and others – that could respond to threats quickly. It was an unpopular job.
A peasant feeling cheated, slipped through a window to slash his employer’s throat and rummage through the dark room for stashes of money as the farmer flailed upon reddening sheets. This peasant was apprehended fleeing through the marshes by the guard of the outpost at San Javier, Major Luis Péna, a man handpicked by José Castro for his ability to sense rising trouble and stop it before it happened. Major Péna caught the peasant by the cloth at the back of the neck, riding up to him as he was pulling his knees high through the wetlands, his hands stained red and clutching a sack of coins.
The peasant was placed in the small jail cell at the outpost until the San Javier policia could take him for trial and punishment, however, Péna’s knack for predicting danger did not come in handy when the peasant’s brothers rushed him from the bushes as he was relieving himself against the outpost wall. There were three of them, each of them skinny and dressed in rags, and they came at him with field tools raised and cut him down as he turned to face them.
“Sons of bitches,” he shouted, and he stepped at them with raised fists.
On hearing screams like that of a gutted pig, the guards rushed out with guns leveled, some of them kneeling to take aim, some of them standing with weapons outstretched, and shot the brothers like a firing squad as they hacked at the Major’s bloodspurting body in the grass, just yards from the safety of the outpost doors.
When a messenger from the outpost woke José Castro to tell him about the butchery, the officer sighed and poured himself a drink. He slapped the stopper back on the bottle. He sat in darkness and the messenger in the doorway could only hear of his movements in the corner, but when a candle was brought into the room and set on the windowsill, one could see that Castro was sitting with his back against the wall and his cot sagging in the middle, his knees slung over the side and his feet not touching the floor. He squinted at the light with bloodshot eyes.
“Do you not have an outhouse at the outpost?”
“Major Péna was taking his morning walk, señor.”
“Tell Esquibel he is to take command at the outpost. I will station a man from my ranks to take his place among the guards.” He finished the drink in one gulp and pointed. “Put out that light.”
Hearing of the replacements at the San Javier outpost, Vicente knocked at José Castro’s door.
“What do you want?”
Vicente stood at attention when the door swung open, and looked through Castro with unflinching eyes. “I can outride and outshoot any man here, Colonel. I know the land and how to survive for weeks on nothing but my own water to drink and sand to eat. I volunteer for the San Javier outpost.”
“No.”
Vicente knocked again. Castro did not answer the door this time, but spoke from within, his voice taking on the exhales of a man easing into repose.
“Go clean the stables.”
“I have shoveled too much of your horseshit,” Vicente said. He spoke with his face close to the doorcrack. “I will go to San Javier whether you appoint me there or not. I am not one of your soldiers and do not have to follow your orders.”
He raised his fist again but the door opened and he stepped back.
“You would do yourself a favor by staying here.”
“I have no rank. You cannot hold me.”
“I know that. But I can have you shot for trespassing on the San Javier outpost.”
Vicente held quiet.
“It is not a boy’s game,” Castro said. “Men die.”
“I will make sure that does not happen.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Because I learned everything I know from Salomon Pico.”
José Castro did not blink. He looked down and leaned his forearm against the doorframe. He exhaled and raised his head. “Who will I get to clean the stables while I find another stableboy?”
Vicente looked Castro in the eyes for a moment, then straightened up and went back to staring through the officer’s chest. “That is not my decision.”
“I am making it your decision.”
Vicente grinned at the side of his mouth.
“Go and tell him the good news,” José Castro said, and he closed the door.
When Vicente told Ramiro Morelos that he would have to shovel the stables while a search was made in the Loreto streets for a new stableboy, he thought it was a joke.
“Go bother someone else with your nonsense,” Ramiro said, and he went back to leaning in the shade with his head against the white presidio walls.
“Well, I have told you and I’ll leave it at that. And one more thing.”
Ramiro opened his eyes in time to see Vicente step over him and take a swing. Only one soldier in the presidio saw the two men scuffle their way behind the barracks, and by the time Fabian de Avila, the sergeant of the guard, made his way across the yard and turned the corner upon the scene, Ramiro had knocked Vicente down a second time. Vicente’s face was lumped under both eyes already. The scar that Ramiro h
ad slit into his chin months ago looked as though it would open again. His lower lip was split. Blood dripped as if from a cracked pitcher.
“Stay down,” Fabian de Avila told Vicente.
“Get up,” Ramiro said.
Vicente did get up. He shook his head. His eyes blurred and tears streamed down his face. This was the second shirt he would stain red because of Ramiro. He charged again and Ramiro sidestepped and caught him under the chin and sent him sprawling face first.
“Let him stay down,” Fabian said.
“He decides that.”
But Vicente kept pulling his face out of the dust to raise his fists again. Fabian knelt beside him when it happened again and told him to lie still, but Vicente pushed his hands away and stood again, his legs staggering beneath him like a cripple taking steps.
Ramiro was toying with Vicente now, circling him and smiling.
“You must enjoy getting scars on your face,” he said. “You are spoiling your pretty looks. I thought maybe you would have brains enough to stay down, but you are only smart enough to know how high horseshit can pile before it falls over. Even a boy in a schoolyard knows to play dead after he gets hit the first time.”
“You son of a bitch.”
Ramiro stopped. “And still he calls me names.”
Ramiro feinted with his left but Vicente did not react the way he was hoping. Instead of hiding away, Vicente stepped forward and put his knuckles in Ramiro’s teeth. Ramiro staggered backward with his hands to his mouth. He fell to one knee and looked at the blood on his fingers and spat. When he looked up, Vicente was smiling with red teeth.
“All right, now we have a draw here,” Fabian said. “I say we call it.”
“To hell with your draw,” Ramiro said.
He sprang forward and the two brawlers rolled in a cloud of dust. Ramiro ended up on top, hammering down just once with both fists to lay Vicente out, his arms sprawled at his sides. Ramiro pulled a knife from his boot, and Fabian yanked him off the unconscious boy just as the blade touched the pulsing skin at his neck.
Salomon cursed aloud when he saw Vicente’s face, swollen and bleeding like a leper.
“Don’t use the Lord’s name in vain,” Marisela said, but when she came to the door where Fabian de Avila stood with Vicente’s arm draped behind his neck, she cursed with the same word.
Salomon gathered Vicente and put him on the mattress. Fabian followed with the boy’s legs. Vicente moaned and hid under his arms. When Marisela came from the washbasin with a towel and the pitcher of water, Salomon pushed away from the bedside.
“Where are you going?”
But he did not answer. He went to the stables and searched around, slamming doors and making the horses stamp and blow, picking through leather straps and buckles on the workbench. He paused when his eyes caught something, and he hefted a ten-pound hammer used for smithing. As he approached the door he dropped the hammer and seized an ax from the wall with both hands on his way out.
“Salomon, don’t do it.”
Fabian de Avila had recruited the help of two other soldiers, one of whom was named Mateo Santos and stood a half a foot taller any man and wore no sleeves, and the three backpedaled in front of Salomon as he crossed the yard with his eyes on some far off destination.
“You will be thrown in prison. Or hanged. You have a wife. Stop and think.”
Fabian de Avila clutched at the ax but Salomon wrenched it away. The other two soldiers grabbed Salomon’s arms and together the three of them carried him away fighting like a madman.
It took them the rest of the day in an empty room to calm Salomon down. Just when they thought he was composed, when he stopped his pacing for a moment and took deep breaths, he charged for the door and the three men had to wrestle him back to the corner.
Ramiro Morelos went unpunished. He was not suspended nor was he reprimanded. Only Fabian de Avila knew the gruesome death that Ramiro’s knife almost cut into Vicente’s neck, and he kept it a secret for he knew if Salomon found out he would pick up the ax again. Vicente made excuses when José Castro asked him about his cuts and bruises the next day.
“It was an accident in the stables.”
“Some accident.” Castro looked him over. “Which of the horses has fists?”
“I am still going to San Javier.”
Castro nodded. “Stay away from accidents.”
Before Vicente left for the San Javier outpost he kissed his mother who held his ugly face in her hands, and he shook Salomon’s hand. Then he rode up to Ramiro who was leaning against the wall grinning with a grass stem moving around in his teeth.
“You look pretty today,” Ramiro said, squinting up.
“I hope I never see you again.”
“If you do, I will finish what I started.”
“If I do,” Vicente said, whistling through is bent nose, “I will send you to hell where you belong.”
He turned and kicked his horse through the presidio gates, his face a twist of anger and embarrassment that his mother watched with a hand outheld. Marisela wept each night by the window for a week, and tears rolled to her ears as she slept each night after.
Major Esquibel took command at San Javier and appointed Vicente as the scout after reading the letter in José Castro’s writing that Vicente brought with him. Although he had no rank on his jacket, Vicente turned out to be the most disciplined of the soldiers at the outpost, standing at attention in the yard before each sunrise, alone except for his horse, with a brushed jacket and a polished saddle. On his scouting patrols Vicente became friendly with the farmers and with the San Javier policia, standing in the station with the blue-capped officers, looking over the unpleasant faces on the wanted posters tacked to the wall.
“These are men who spend their lives harming others,” the sergeant at the station told Vicente. “They are men that must be brought to justice.”
“I will watch for these faces as I ride,” Vicente said.
Salomon spent weeks riding the region, going from Mulegé to La Bocana. To San Rosalia. Instead of enjoying cool water to drink and wash in, he drank the juices from ocotillo and hanging vines, and opened his mouth under dripping stones. He sat drenched in sweat on hot rocks and under damp leaves, smelling his own odor. Instead of sleeping next to his wife’s warm body on a soft mattress, he curled up in his army jacket and leaned against rocks miles away from his pillow. It would be months before he could look at Ramiro without his fists balling up. Soon only his jaw would clench when Ramiro opened his mouth to speak. Even now, miles away, Salomon swore under his breath at the thought of him.
When Salomon did return it was during the night and there was a new boy sleeping in the stables who looked after the horses.
“How old are you?”
“I am ten years old.”
“And why do you want to work at a presidio?”
“Because I am a soldier too,” the boy said. “I do not like bad men.”
Salomon thumbed a coin through the air to him and turned to walk the starlit yard.
“El bandido famoso.”
Salomon stopped and slowly turned. He swallowed. The stableboy looked up from the coin. “Did you see any on your patrol?”
Salomon exhaled. “No.”
The stableboy lowered his head and nodded, and disappeared back into the stables to strip Salomon’s horse.
At his room, Salomon opened the door without a sound. Marisela was sitting up in bed with her hands folded over the moontouched blanket.
“What are you doing awake?”
“Waiting for you,” she said. “Every night, waiting for you.”
José Castro drank and played cards with increasing frequency despite his efforts to quit. He went on extreme diets where the only thing he ingested was goat’s milk and bread, knowing that the relief of alcohol was just a reach away. He had hidden his bottle from himself, but in a place where nobody would find it and confiscate it, so that he had an exit from this wretched cleanse when, not if,
he needed it.
“The milk is to bathe and rejuvenate my innards,” he told those who asked. “A remedy from the old world. And the bread is so I don’t get hungry.”
The goat’s milk made him dizzy and by the afternoon he had tossed the bread aside to retrieve his hidden bottle from the ribcage of a butchered hog on ice in the presidio kitchen. The sergeant on kitchen duty watched as Castro hurried across the tile floors in a sweat to yank open the icebox and tear apart the pork cuts until a wave of relief washed over his face. “Every time you open the box the meat goes bad,” the sergeant said, but Castro did not answer. He just sank with his back against the box and the bottle tilted up.
Early one morning José Castro spent an hour arguing with the docile hog rancher outside Loreto about the price of meat provided to the presidio.
“If it weren’t for the presidio and my patrols you would sell only one or two hogs a month.”
“I would sell more than that,” the hog rancher said quietly.
“To whom?”
“To whomever I want. Your offer is too little. My margin is too narrow for so much work. Don’t you know anything about selling?”
“I know about buying. The presidio budget is slim.”
“You will have to go somewhere else.”
José Castro looked off to the rising sunlight. He looked to the ground with his hands on his hips. “I raise my offer by one percent.”
“Then I will cut that much meat off the steaks I provide.”
“That makes no sense.”
“It does to me.”
“I have forty men to feed.”
“I have a family. I don’t have forty children, but they need to eat too.”
Castro looked to the youths gathered at the corral barrier, watching the negotiation. They were a skinny bunch of teenagers in straw sombreros, each of them with one foot propped on the fence as the hogs rooted beneath them. The tallest of them made a point to glare at Castro and to not look away. Castro gave the hog rancher a sidelong glance.
