by David Xavier
“Five percent.”
“Ten,” the hog rancher said.
Castro dropped his head and gripped his skull with one hand at his eyebrows. “I don’t have ten percent.”
“Then I don’t have any hogs for you.”
“Then I will feed my soldiers cornmeal and they will be malnourished. Don’t you have any patriotism for your country? I have no time for this.”
As he mounted his horse, the hog rancher approached. Behind him the tallest boy still held an angry face. The hog rancher sighed.
“I will take your offer at five percent.”
With a dry mouth and worn patience José Castro entered the cantina at a time when the owner of the place was still yawning and righting the chairs off the tables, and he leaned over the bar with trembling hands. After his second drink his sweat began to dry. When the door opened behind him he turned. He cursed and turned back to the bar. A moment later Fabian de Avila sat beside him.
“You weren’t in your room.”
“Isn’t it a little early for you to be in a cantina?” Castro said, looking straight ahead with a grin. He took a swallow.
“Put the drink down, Colonel.”
Castro bounced his head left and right as if considering, and exhaled through his nose. “No.” He took another swallow.
“Colonel, for the sake of the Virgin Mary, put the drink down.”
“I am putting it down.” He took another swallow.
Fabian grabbed the glass, “You drunk ass,” and Castro backhanded him off his stool and sat and went back to drinking. Fabian stood with his hand on his jaw.
“To hell with you,” he said. He slammed his fist on the bar but Castro did not flinch. “Drink the cantina dry why don’t you. I’ll leave you to it.”
Fabian slammed the door on his way out and Castro spoke to himself. “I will drink the cantina dry.” He reached over the bar and grabbed another bottle and squinted at the label before pouring another drink.
Outside, Salomon and Marisela rode by the cantina on their way back from church. Someone nearby was working, the clack of a hammer on metal. Fabian de Avila was sitting on the cantina steps, throwing small stones with a scowl. Salomon reined up.
“You look as if a teacher just took a switch to your behind.”
“Castro’s inside.”
Salomon looked to the door and back. “It’s Sunday morning.”
“You think he cares?”
“So stop him.”
“I tried.” Fabian raised his chin. “He hit me.”
Salomon turned in his saddle to the noise. He glanced back at Fabian, then reined his horse and rode across the street. He dismounted and entered a repair shop. The hammering stopped. A moment later, Salomon came out with the hammer, a heavy thing with a knot of misshapen metal for a head. He walked past Marisela and the horse and crossed the street. Fabian moved to one side and Salomon walked up the steps past him.
“I thought you were leaving me to it,” José Castro said without looking behind him when the door opened. He set his glass down, still holding it by its handle, and it exploded a second later. The hammering on the bartop sounded like gunshots, and Castro blinked with each stroke as the glass and bottle shattered as if hit by bullets. Salomon did not stop hammering until only little pieces remained. Whiskey dripped off the sides of the bar and puddled on the floor, and Castro sat with his hands held high, like a man who wanted to keep dry.
The door opened and closed behind him. He was alone again save for the cantina owner who came from a back room a moment later to see Castro sitting in the same spot with his dry hands raised over the wet shattered glass as if he had just performed a trick that went terribly wrong.
The owner approached the drunk, his face a mad twist of confusion and anger. José Castro sat staring at the glittering mess and his eyes shifted when the owner came close. He gestured the mess.
“I didn’t do this.”
The patrol was mounted and assembled in the yard, stepping in place at dawn. The men sat in low conversation. A coyote yipped somewhere beyond the presidio walls. Salomon dismounted and crossed the yard.
José Castro was sitting on his cot, fumbling with his boots. His room was dark and he raised his hand to the dim light when Salomon opened the door. Salomon cursed.
“Shut the door.”
“You look like you lost a fight.”
“Just with these boots.”
Salomon stepped in and leaned against the wall.
“I said shut the door.”
Salomon looked at the door. He reached with his foot and pushed it open wider and leaned against the wall again with his arms crossed. More light filled the room and Castro squinted.
“You horse’s ass.”
“You can’t lead a patrol like this.”
Footsteps sounded down the hall and one of the officers came to the door, Major Felipe Ortivez.
“Jesus,” Ortivez said, a figure in the doorway.
“Close the door.”
“Can you see out of those eyes?”
“I can see you get demoted. Shut the door.”
They shut the door and tied it locked from the outside, leaving Castro inside with a pitcher of goat’s milk and a loaf of bread. The following day, the women pushed his meals through his cracked door as if he was a prisoner.
The patrol rode without Castro, forty miles the first day, riding singlefile under a sky with no clouds through thick vegetation that croaked with crawlers and birds, ancient paths cut narrow by hard-shouldered Comichies long buried and gone to dust, past stone monuments and sandbrick mounds and round ceremonial pits in the gray earth where once stood painted priests wearing capes of human hair. The patrol camped in the hills outside Cruces, overlooking the Concepcion Bay waters.
During the ride north they had come upon a lone woman dressed in rags and crouched under a thicket of wet palms. Major Felipe Ortivez lay awake now, watching the shadows because of it.
“The scariest part is knowing there are other people like her out here,” he said, propped on an elbow with the flamelight on his face. “She could not have been alone.”
At first he had called out to her – What are you doing out here? What is your name? – but she did not answer, remaining perched in her shelter, staring outward with glazed eyes and stringy hair like some blind witch stationed to warn away travelers. But she was not blind, because the more Ortivez called to her the more her eyes darted to each of the soldiers behind him, taking in their faces.
Ortivez dismounted and crouched before the woman, pushing his hat up. He called to her again, and she mumbled something. Ortivez leaned closer.
“What did you say?”
And she came at him then, hissing and pointing, her eyes wide and marbled in their sockets. Ortivez stumbled backward, and the horses stepped back as well, shying away from this strange scene. He scrambled to his knees and raised his quirt. Only then did the woman stop her approach, but she did not take her eyes from him and she hissed words at him low, her hands waving as if casting a spell, before she turned and disappeared, parting the thick wall of twined branches and vines with a sweep of her hands. Her footsteps sounded behind the thicket wall for a time, then went silent.
“I could feel her looking out at us,” Ortivez said in his bedroll, the smell from the bay waters drifting through their camp and stirring the small flames. “I feel her looking at us right now. Scares the hell out of me.”
The men lay camped below them, small conversations humming in the dark. Ortivez and Salomon had taken an outcropping to build their fire under. Ortivez sat up and stirred the flame.
“I’ll tell you now, an old woman with a boiled brain in the wilderness should not scare us. Not when there are worse things walking around out there.”
Salomon spoke from beneath his sombrero. “I think anything should do a better job of keeping you up at night than a hundred year old woman babbling in the leaves.”
“You did not see the way she looked at m
e. But you are right. She is not what scares me most.”
“And what scares you most?”
“The Devil Man.”
Salomon lifted his sombrero. Ortivez shrugged. “That is what they call him.”
“That’s what they call who?” Salomon sat up.
Ortivez held his thumb to the crevice in his chin in contemplation. He raised his face when he spoke. “There are reports coming down from the missions. Of a man, an enormous man who rides a horse as big as any two you see here, carrying a blade like no other, made by metals man has not discovered yet and scorched by fires too hot for the earth. This man swings this blade, beheading anyone he sees. He goes into camps in darkness and cuts officers’ throats so quickly, so silently, that they die as they are still dreaming.”
“What reports?”
“From the missions. Frontier outposts. Presidios. Patrols like us.”
“Military dispatches say that?”
“No, they do not. The reports call him a man. His blade, just a knife. It is the men who have seen this Devil Man’s shadow, the glint of his blade, who are whispering the stories as they know it. It may sound absurd to some. It does to me. They make him sound like some fairytale monster.”
“This Devil Man. Is he Comanche?”
Ortivez looked up from the fire. “Nobody has seen what he looks like. He is a ghost. I wonder if grown men should believe such a thing.”
Salomon stared into the flames. He spoke without taking his eyes away. “Sometimes it is the fairytales that are true.”
The patrol returned to José Castro standing in the presidio yard with his hands behind his back. They dismounted on weary feet, clouds dusting from their clothing with each move. The stableboy ran out and began grabbing reins, leading horses to their stalls.
Castro appeared rejuvenated. His eyes were clear. His hands did not shake.
“Major Ortivez.”
“Sir.”
“You are relieved of command. See me in my office for a full report.”
“Sir.” Ortivez saluted and dismissed himself.
“The rest of you. Eat and sleep. We go out again at first daylight.”
Groans shifted through the patrol as they scattered. Castro stepped close to Salomon and spoke in a voice just big enough to travel between them.
“Get something to eat, Salomon. You are going out again tonight.”
“Yes, sir.”
“There is a transport on its way from Rodado, four American prisoners on their way to trial in El Soldado. Lead them here. If they are lost in transfer it is on us.”
The men already sat hunched over their plates when Salomon came in. Women walked among the tables and spooned rice and beans onto any open areas on the plates. A girl walked about, passing out tortillas and receiving pats on her head.
Marisela was there, leaning over men’s backs with shredded pork gripped in pinzas. Salomon watched her and they smiled when they caught each other’s eyes. She gestured the door and Salomon nodded. She continued to each of the tables.
As Salomon took a plate and covered it with rice and beans, the men talked over their food. It was Ramiro Morelos talking, and Salomon looked over when he heard the story.
“He is over six and half feet tall, some say seven feet, and can touch the walls of any room at the same time.”
“Who can?” Salomon said.
Ramiro turned and looked up. Salomon was standing over him. “The Devil Man,” Ramiro said. “He climbs the presidio walls and stands over soldiers in their beds with a knife sharp enough to cut bone like it was water.”
“You believe that?”
“A colonel at Llano was found in his room, his cot chopped to pieces and him still lying in it.”
Salomon served another spoon onto his plate. “How do these stories get around so quickly?”
“It is a fact. I believe in fact.”
“You believe in anything.”
Ramiro sat with his cup raised halfway. He glanced at the faces around him and spoke to Salomon again. “You ask me he is searching for someone. And he hasn’t found him yet. You might want to sleep with your eyes open.”
“I didn’t ask you. And shut your mouth. There are women and children in here.”
Ramiro gestured the room with his cup. “There is only one real woman here.”
“What did you say?” Salomon said.
Ramiro was grinning, his eyes low. He raised the cup to his mouth but paused before taking a drink. “I said you have a pretty wife. A compliment.”
Salomon glanced around but Marisela had already left. He took a swallow of water and dumped the rest over Ramiro’s shoulder as he moved past. Ramiro shoved his chair back and stood looking down, his arms raised. A dark spot still spread on his lap. The men around laughed. Fabian de Avila choked on his drink. Ramiro cursed and looked around but Salomon was already gone.
Marisela was in the low moonlight when Salomon opened the door. He peeked in and she was sitting on top of the sheets. He set his plate on the bedside table and washed his face at the basin.
“Bring the pitcher,” Marisela told him. “And the cloth.”
He pulled the chair close and sat near the edge of the bed and unbuttoned his shirt. The collar peeled away from his neck. Marisela pushed the plate at him.
“Eat.”
As he ate, she bathed his neck and back. She ran her fingers up the hair on the back of his scalp and pressed the wet cloth across his shoulders, then his collarbone and chest. She gently kissed his shoulders.
“I have to ride to Rodado. Tonight.”
Marisela put her forehead between his shoulder blades and sighed. “Why tonight?”
“I have orders to guide a prison transfer. They are already on their way.”
“What did they do? The prisoners.”
“I did not ask. My job is to just to deliver them here.”
“Are all outpost scouts worked so hard? I have not heard from Vicente.”
“Vicente is fine. I have never seen someone pick things up so quickly. And so proficiently. He has a lot of courage and principle.”
“That is what scares me about him. He has too much courage. Too much loyalty to the job.”
“Those are not bad qualities to have. I will request a scout patrol and stop in San Javier to see him. But tonight, I have to go. It won’t take long.”
“Then go now and hurry. I will be here when you get back.”
Salomon rode through the night under a cloud covered moon. He had to light a stick whirled with moss to find his way among the thick vines and stems with large leaves that hung over the trail. His horse could see better in darkness than he could, and soon he tossed the torch and rode carrying his pistola.
The transport was two law officials from Rodado leading the four American prisoners, each with their hands tied to their saddles. The officials rode with torches, and Salomon saw them coming from a long way off. Instead of surprising them in the dark, he built a small fire beside the path and waited.
The prisoners were mere shapes in the black night, the torchlight only touched at the angles of their faces and revealed no design. They remained silent in their saddles.
“Let’s not wait around,” Salomon said. “It is slow moving in the dark.”
“Don’t you want to know what they did?” one official asked.
Salomon turned. “No.”
They were four Texas businessmen who ran a trade route from Baja California to Sonora. They were sailors, come down the narrow strip of gulf waters to dock in coastal towns and load fish and fruits, trinkets and metalworks, blankets, small animals. Loading the shipdecks, the American traders straightened from their work in a trance, staring deep into the village shadows, their eyes following around corners and down narrow streets. The women in these port towns moved about with golden skin from living every hour close to seawaters.
These villages began to report of missing girls, and the fathers looked the wrong way, questioning the merchants who came
from neighboring villages inland. It was a dock laborer at the Rodado port who wandered through a wrong door in the ship’s hull and discovered the room full of sedated girls blinking back at him from the dark. He dropped his armful of bananas and ran against the movement on the narrow loading plank, squeezing past men with heavy loads in their arms. Word quickly spread among the workers, who dropped what they held over the plank sides to the water below and emerged from the hull with the girls in their arms.
They went back aboard and tore open doors and pulled down curtains, finally finding the American smugglers barricaded in the cargo hold. The villagers were chipping at the doors with shards from shattered vases and prying at cracks in the bloodied wood with their fingernails when law officials intervened among the shouts and the wet floor and stopped what would have turned into a gruesome dismemberment.
“Keep moving,” the lead official ordered the prisoners on the trail. “We do not stop until we are behind presidio walls.”
As the moon returned overhead, Salomon could see the blue path wormed behind them in the far distance, dim torches bouncing along the trail.
“They are villagers,” the official told Salomon. “Following to see the trial. By the time we get to Loreto they will be days behind.”
The official looked at the sky and discarded his torch trailside to burn out. They rode on in the night, the path now a blue ribbon over the jungle hills.
At the presidio gates, Salomon looked back but could not see the following villagers. Many of them were afoot, a few rode mules, and they stuck together rather than stringing out over the vague path, walking over a hundred miles to assure the people of their villages that the Americans would be punished properly. The village girls had told of the Americans foul whispers in the dark as they sailed from port to port, and the village men carried knives to rush the criminals for desecrating their girls’ security, their confidence in the world, if they were not sentenced to death otherwise.
In the daylight the American prisoners gained features. Sitting on the stone slabs in the presidio jail they had soft faces and looked about with sorrowful eyes. One would not think such faces capable of kidnapping, or of the abuses they might have dreamed of in a shipchamber, which now lay scattered in pieces at the bottom of the gulf waters, hacked apart by machetes and burned while still tethered to the port, the flames crawling along the rope lines in the night, reflecting off the waters, until they fell away and the remaining wreckage went under in a hiss.
