by David Xavier
Salomon Pico had spent two days awaiting his execution. If he had known of its outcome he had given no hint of it to Marisela during her visits, her hands through the bars. “I thought it was him on the stake,” Marisela had told Capitán Esparza in those final moments of questioning. Which was true up until the moment in the yard when Esparza still held his hand in the air ready to drop, and Vicente took her in his arms and whispered in her ear.
It was then that Vicente pointed to a man walking away from the courtyard wearing Ramiro’s hat and army jacket. The peace came over her then, as she saw him turn his head just enough that his face came to light, and in her mind she saw him in a land where men have no memory. Then the rifles went off together and not a single person present jumped except for Capitán Esparza and the infants.
Vicente had visited his mother once during those two days, unable to meet her eyes. “I was only doing what I thought an officer of the law should do,” he told her. “But I wish now I had not.”
At this she could do nothing but wrap him up and pull him close, and although Marisela encouraged him to visit Salomon before the execution, Vicente could not agree to it. “I would not be able to look at him.” Which is exactly what the children in the presidio did, stepping aboard each other’s backs and peeping in the windows. Vicente did not stay for long, nor did he complete the rosary Marisela had asked him to pray with her in the dark. He stood in the middle of a Hail Mary and ran out the door before he wept in his mother’s arms like a child. In the hallway, he nearly bumped into José Castro when the Colonel came around the corner, and he turned and exited the other way with his hands on his face.
When Capitán Esparza first gave José Castro the newspaper clippings showing Salomon Pico to be a notorious bandit, Castro had pushed them aside. “I don’t want to hear about it.” Salomon had become a trusted soldier and friend, and had saved Castro’s life, which made him as close as a brother. Leaning against the jail he did not ask Salomon about his past. He spoke to him only of the present, “I think you still owe me money on a bet from weeks ago,” and it made him grin when Salomon responded with an unclouded mind.
“I will pay up when you come through on the raise you promised me. Months ago.”
Colonel José Castro had not given an order. There were no secrets passed between him and his soldiers, no head nods, no shift of eyes. Only in that final moment as they walked away from Ramiro Morelos on the stake did they glance to each other in secret, and moments later they were as surprised as any when Capitan Esparza dropped his hand and the rifles went off, standing blinded in the sun that only appeared occasionally over that land but was so warm and bright it made one forget about the rains that clattered the rooftops and washed the chalk and minerals from the walls.
“I saw Ramiro at the door just moments before,” Esparza insisted. And Ramiro was there, as one of the soldiers to escort Salomon to the yard where the amateur firing squad prepared their rifles. And Esparza did see Salomon taken from the jail cell with cuffs on his hands and ankles. “The chains dragged with every step. I heard them dragging, I swear.”
Esparza was not mistaken. The soldiers, including Ramiro Morelos escorted Salomon Pico to the stake, and it was there while they released the cuffs and readied him to be tied to the stake that Esparza stood only inches from Salomon’s face, “I looked into his eyes at the very end,” as the chickenshit policia watched from a distance, squinting against the whiteness, and the villager firing squad stood turning the rifles over in their hands as if it was the first time they had ever seen a rifle up close, and he told the famous bandit he was being put to death for his crimes, may God have mercy on his soul.
Then he turned his back.
“You saw us put Salomon on the stake yourself, Capitán. You saw that happen.”
In that moment, those fifteen seconds where Capitán Feliciano de Ruiz Esparza paced from the stake to the squad, a dark sweat stain showing down his back, Vicente Valderez, noted capturer of the Angel Bandit, took the blue army cap from Ramiro’s head and stuck it on Salomon. Ramiro held Vicente with a look of confusion, even a small smile began to form, some sort of strange joke, but Mateo Santos, standing a half a foot taller behind the now hatless Ramiro, gagged him with the blindfold before he could speak and knotted it so tight that Ramiro’s tongue pinned to the back of his throat and he could only protest through his nose in failing gasps. “I have heard men plead in front of firing squads before,” Esparza would explain later. “I have even heard men break down and cry.” And during these quick movements, the switch of the hat, the blindfold gag, Fabian de Avila stripped Ramiro of his blue jacket, and José Castro and Felipe Ortivez, decorated officers of the Mexican Army, bound Ramiro in place by cuffing his wrists and ankles behind the stake.
To the people who watched on, it was sleight of hand, an unseen trick hidden behind the clustered shoulders. The entire switch took only a matter of seconds, in front of the courtyard audience, under the curtain of the sun, which smeared the soldiers’ actions to a bright blur that people could not look at for too long without their vision going white. When Esparza took his place and faced the man on the stake, the escorting soldiers, one of them in a newly placed cap and jacket, his head lowered, avoiding eyes, took their places behind Esparza.
They did not expect the order to be given. As Salomon Pico made his way from the yard, walking out on his own execution, Castro and Ortivez expected Esparza to turn and see Ramiro staring back at him with wide eyes and muffled screams, giving Salomon only a moment to disappear. But when they faced the stake, they too found it impossible to look at the man on the stake without blinking away, much less identify him.
The presidio walls were as white and hot as the sun, and even at the close range that a firing squad operates at, Ramiro’s face was lost, his features shimmered loose like a painting left out in the heat. And yet, out of a fear of missing his opportunity, a fear of this bandit vanishing from the stake – “I can tell you the stories, Capitán,” – Capitán Esparza ordered the rifles raised and dropped his hand without hesitation. The guns cracked so loud the horses in the stables kicked holes in the walls and the infants began to wail in the shadows.
Then only silence. A strange silence as Capitán Esparza stepped through the gunsmoke. The soldiers had to wait to see, “I cannot believe it,” one of them said as they glanced to each other to see if they all had just seen the same thing, and still when the smoke cleared, they could not keep their blinking eyes on the man slumped on the stake, his head hanging over his chest.
Esparza turned in the drifting smoke and said, “You missed his heart,” as the cloaked villagers shuffled toward the body with white linens dragging. He stood for a moment, as if in realization.
Beyond the incompetent firing squad, the watchers had looks in their eyes, the lack of alarm, the sly smiles, and Ramiro was not present among them. The silence had become a buzz in Esparza’s ears as he went from face to mocking face, blinking the sweat away. In the distance, hoofs pounded behind the buildings where the presidio gates would be and the shouts of its rider echoed like whipcracks.
One of the villagers drowned in the silence, a faded voice, but his continuous calling cut through, “Capitán Esparza, Capitán Esparza,” like a child tugging his father’s sleeve, and when Esparza turned, his eyes were wide.
The villager had no expression, his hands held the dead man’s head so his slack face and rolled eyes no longer hid between the earth and sky, and with an almost practiced voice the villager spoke.
“Salomon got away.”
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This book is a work of fiction. All people and places are fictional and any resemblance to any person, alive or dead, is a coincidence.
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right 2015 by David Xavier Pico
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