In the Rogue Blood Read online

  Not a man in the room was standing and the air was an acrid haze.

  The harelip got up and went to Easton Burchard and helped him to his feet. There was a thick patch of blood on Burchard’s left side just below his ribs and another high on his thigh. “God damn it,” he said, “didn’t nobody miss me?” He tested the leg and it bore his weight and he said he could get along all right.

  There was a clamor of excited voices in the street. The rancher lay on his back with a leg folded awkwardly under him and both hands over his chest wound. His breath came fast and shallow and wet and he seemed agape with wonder at some profound and private revelation as his life drained onto the clay floor. The foot-shot Mexican sat up and shoved his discharged pistol from him and showed the harelip his empty hands. The snakebit man clutched his shin and stared at the Americans without expression. His pistol was still on his belt and the harelip went to him and stripped him of it. The barkeep rose from behind the counter and the harelip pointed a finger at him and the man dropped from sight again.

  Casting glances at the front door as he worked, the harelip swiftly went through the fallen men’s pokes and took their money and their discharged pistols and powder flasks and shot pouches. Easton Burchard set the pepperbox on the bartop and gingerly examined his wounds. Edward went over and picked up the pistol and checked the remaining three loads. Burchard looked at him without smiling and said, “You lookin to buy that rotary pistola of mine?”

  “Quit joshin the boy, we got to git,” the harelip said, stepping between them and hurriedly sticking two of the pistols into Burchard’s belt and hanging the shot pouches around his neck. The voices outside were louder now, their timbre more urgent. “Take a look and see is there any laws out there,” the harelip said to Edward.

  He eased up to the edge of the door and peeked around the jamb into the bright sunlight and saw a crowd of people lined across the street and looking and pointing his way. He turned around and saw the harelip helping Easton Burchard out the back door.

  Amid the carnage on the floor the rancher let a last rattling breath. Five men lay dead. He spied the two dollars still lying on the bar and he went over and put them in his pocket. The crouching bartender glanced up at him and quickly dropped his eyes back to the floor. His bootsoles sucked through blood as he crossed the room. He went out the back door into the alleyway. Some Mexican boys stood by and looked curious. There was no sign of the two Americans. He walked to the end of the alley and emerged in a small plaza where people were haggling with street vendors and shopkeepers, shouting and laughing happily, a trio of fiddlers playing beside a splashing fountain. He circled back around to the street fronting the cantina and saw a crowd of people at the door. Soldiers with bayoneted rifles and several men brandishing pistols were pushing through the babbling throng. He waited till they’d gone inside and then strolled toward the cantina and begged pardon as he made his way through to the Janey horse. He mounted up and reined the mare carefully out of the crowd and hupped her down the street and through the plaza and rode on out of Bexar.

  8

  He bore south on the Camino Real for a few miles before abandoning the main road and once again taking up the less-traveled trails. Though he had not joined in the fray at Bexar he thought one of the survived Mexicans might have cause to identify him as in league with Dick Foote and Easton Burchard.

  As he pushed deeper into brush country the land paled and flattened and thickened with chaparral. Grass gave over to prickly pear and scrub brush and rampant mesquite of bony thorned branches and niggardly shade. The air went dry and dusty, the noon sun white as a soda wafer. Sundown skies proffered visions of biblical firestorms. The air of the evenings was hazed red. He rode without hurry or destination through this alien wildland. He shot jackrabbit and rattler to roast for his suppers, put down early camps and regarded the setting sun at leisure. He felt swallowed by the immensity of the night skies, the riot of glimmering starlight from origins beyond ken. Firetailed comets streaked from pole to pole, plunging to infinity in the bare instant beheld.

  He came one sunny afternoon to a village fronting a river running low and lined with scrub brush and scrawny dwarf oak. The place looked to be inhabited wholly by Mexicans. Dogs ran out with teeth bared and napes raised or slank away craven with tucked tails, depending on their blood. He walked the mare down the dusty street to the river followed by a small troop of yammering boys. After watering the horse he reined around and went to a small café whose front door showed a rough charcoal drawing of a bowl and spoon and he dismounted and went inside and sat at a table. The old proprietor came out of the back room bearing a clay cup of cool water which he set before him as he said, “A sus órdenes, caballero.” Edward gulped down the water which tasted slightly of mud. He made gestures of eating and the old man said, “Si, señor, inmediatamente,” and went through a door in the rear of the room and returned with another cup of water and a small plate of warm tortillas and a wooden spoon wrapped in a white cotton napkin. He next brought out a steaming bowl of some sort of meat in a dark chile sauce and a smaller bowl with beans.

  The old man sat at another table and watched him eat. “El hambre es la mejor salsa, no es verdad?” he said with an avuncular smile. Edward ate and smiled back and said, “Whatever you sayin, mister, you probly right.” When he had done with the meal he gave the homunculus a dollar and received in turn three two-bit silverpieces.

  Outside he found a pair of boys patting the Janey mare and talking to her. They continued stroking the horse as they scrutinized Edward from tattered hat to disintegrating boots.

  “I don’t reckon she speaks Mexican,” he said.

  “Jes,” the larger of the boys said. “She comprende what we talk her.”

  Edward smiled and stroked the mare’s muzzle. “That a fact? Well, it could be she met her a Mex stallion in a corral somewheres. Tell me, what river’s that?”

  “Ribber? Is el Rio Nueces.”

  “No lie, the damn Nueces?” He looked about at the sandy brushland stretching to the horizon in every direction. “They’s supposed to be a army readyin on the Nueces. At Corpus Christi. Where’s Corpus Christi at?”

  “Corpos Chrissie?” the boy said. He looked all around as if he might descry where it lay, then looked back at Edward and shrugged.

  “How bout the rangers? You know where they’re at, the Texas Rangers?”

  “Los rinches!” the smaller boy said, and made an obscene gesture with his little arm.

  “Well hell,” Edward said. He looked off across the river and recalled the harelip’s claim about gold for the taking. He doubted it, but why not have a look anyhow? He could not raise a single objection. Seek and ye may or may not find, but don’t seek and you’re even less likely to find a damn thing. He pointed downcountry. “Mexico. How far?”

  The boys exchanged puzzled looks. The larger one looked at Edward and shrugged and pointed to the ground at his feet and said, “Mexico.”

  Edward laughed. “That so? Well, I hear tell they’s a bunch of rough old boys fixin to change that.” He pointed south again. “What lies yonderway?”

  The two boys peered toward the hazy horizon with great concentration. Then the larger boy looked at Edward and said, “Bandidos. Much bad mens.”

  “Hell, there’s them all over. What else is there? What towns?”

  “Town? Is Laredo.”

  “How far’s that?”

  The boy swept his arm to the south in a gesture of much distance.

  “I’m obliged for the information.” He took up the reins and stepped up into the saddle and raised his hand to the boys in farewell.

  At the end of the street he paused before a store along the front wall of which were hung a few plucked chicken carcasses and dark strings of jerky. On small wooden stands just below them were arrayed packets of parched corn and small sacks of dry beans and ground maize, woolen blankets and colorful sarapes, a variety of earthenware and goathide canteens. He bought beans and jerky and a s
mall copper pot with a green-crusted bottom and an extra canteen, which the store’s dueña promptly charged a small boy with filling at the river. He offered payment of six bits silver and the woman snatched the coins from his hand as though he might yet change his mind. Thus provisioned he tipped his hat to the dueña and hupped the Janey mare to the shallows and made a splashing ford.

  He encountered few wayfarers on these trails so far removed from the main road and those few he came upon were not inclined toward amenities and vanished into the chaparral immediately on catching sight of him. Their wariness put him in mind of a biblical line his mother had ofttimes read to them in Georgia: “The wicked flee where no man pursueth.” If that was true, he now thought, then she was likely fleeing every minute of the day and night. He looked about at the surrounding barrenness and smiled grimly and tugged down his hat and thought: Like some other damned people we could name.

  Another week farther south he came upon a dead horse beside the trail. It was bloated hugely under the white sun and its mouth and eyesockets boiled with maggots. The foreleg break was evident and on closer look he saw where the animal had received a large-caliber coup de grâce directly behind an eye. The following day he hove over a low sand rise and saw a Mexican but thirty yards down the trail sitting under a mesquite on his horseless saddle with a rifle across his knees. The man stood and grinned widely and raised a hand in greeting. “Amigo! Qué tal!”

  All in the instant of the man’s salutation Edward noted his good clothes and boots and saw the two white-gripped pistols on his hips and another holstered under his arm and he knew the Mexican was either a bandit or a lawman and in either case he wanted a horse and here was the Janey mare.

  He reined the mare hard left and dug his heels into her flanks and put her toward a thicket of mesquite fifteen yards distant. The Mexican threw the rifle up to his shoulder and fired and Edward heard the bullet crackle through the thick tangle of brittle branches. He held hard to the pommel and hung low on the mare’s left side, using her for a shield, hoping the Mexican would not shoot the horse rather than chance losing her. And then he was in the thicket and thorns were tearing at his clothes and he slid from the saddle and let the mare go on. He ducked low and ran through loose sand along a dense line of brush, doubling back parallel to the way he’d come. He found a break in the thicket and went through it and paused at the edge of a clearing to check his bearings and yes, there was the trail up ahead and there, just a few yards farther on, the man’s saddle lying under the mesquite.

  He heard the Mexican call cajolingly, “Yegua! Ven aquí, mi hijita. Aquí, yegüita, aquí.”

  The mare came trotting into the clearing with the reins dangling and here came the Mexican behind, walking up swiftly but trying not to spook the horse, talking soothingly, saying, “Ay, que preciosa yegüita. Sí, de veras, que hermosa yegüita.” And then he had hold of the reins and the horse tried to pull away and the Mexican was having trouble holding to both the rifle and the mare and so let the rifle drop and grabbed the reins with both hands and jerked the mare’s head down and slapped her on the muzzle. She tried to pull away but he caught her by the ear and twisted hard and she quit struggling.

  Edward came out of the thicket moving low and fast with the pepperbox straight out in front of him. The Mexican heard his boots scuffing through the sand and held the reins with one hand as he turned and grabbed for a pistol on his hip. Edward fired as he came and missed with the first shot and then with the second and the Mexican raised a revolver and fired and the round ripped through Edward’s shirt under his arm and Edward’s next shot hit him in the stomach from a distance of five yards and the Mexican discharged a wild shot as he sat down hard and the mare broke away. Edward clubbed the man in the face with the heavy pepperbox barrels and felt bone crunch and the Mexican fell back. Edward threw himself on the man’s gun hand and wrested the revolver from him and scrabbled backwards and cocked the piece. The Mexican started to sit up and Edward shot him in the chin and the man fell back writhing with his lower jaw destroyed and Edward cocked again and shot him in the red gape of his mouth and the Mexican’s writhing ceased.

  He remained sitting on the ground for a time and let his breath and heartbeat slowly ease. The tips of the Mexican’s long mustaches quivered in a frail breeze. His upper jaw showed a neat curve of bright white teeth and his lower was a bloody ruin of broken bone and molars. His tongue hung lank and purple against his neck. Already the ants and flies were converging onto the feast of his face, attending to an instinctual duty as old as the earth itself.

  The pistol in his hand was a Texas Colt, a .36 caliber five-shooter. He now discovered that the longarm too was a Colt, a smoothbore ring lever carbine whose .525 caliber muzzle gaped hugely. The other two handguns were .44 caplocks. The Mexican had no badge about him but among his possibles Edward found a poke containing more than forty dollars in gold and silver.

  He chased down the mare and calmed her and led her back to where the dead man lay and hitched her to a shrub. Shortly thereafter he was wearing the bandit’s trousers and snakeskin belt and his pistol holsters and his leather boots, which were newly made and fit him only a little big. The man’s bloodsoaked shirt was useless. The hugely brimmed sombrero was an excellent shield against the sun but felt alien on his head and so Edward kept to his own tattered hat. He put the Mexican’s saddle on the mare. It was finely crafted with a great round pommel and in the wallets behind the cantle he found pouches of .36 and .44 caliber balls and two full flasks of powder.

  He was glad of the lack of a shovel so that he need not debate whether to bury the corpse. Already the buzzards were spiraling overhead.

  9

  On a chilly night of rising wind he came into Laredo, but six years removed from its tenure as capital of the erstwhile and tumultuous Republic of the Rio Grande. The half-moon was brightly silver and lit the street white. Blown sand stung his eyes as the mare clopped through the streets faced by mostly darkened windows at this late hour. A guitar strummed in a sidestreet. In the weak cast of light from a small balcony on which sat a shawled young woman he saw the suitor standing below in the shadow of his sombrero and heard the soft croon of his serenade. This tableau of courtly love as alien to him as the language of the love song.

  The street led him to a ferry landing from which could be seen a row of brightly lighted cantinas on the other side of the running river. There carried on the air the music of piano and barrel organ and guitar. He walked the mare onto the ferry and the clomping of her hooves brought forth the ferryman who said something in Spanish. Edward extracted a half-dollar and the ferryman took it eagerly and set to the pulley rope.

  When they bumped against the other bank Edward hupped the mare off the deck and up to the nearest cantina in the row and there dismounted and hitched the horse and patted her and whispered in her ear and then went inside. The room was well lighted and a half-dozen men stood at the bar, a handful of others sat at the few tables. They gave him cursory attention and then turned back to their drink and talk. In a far corner sat a man picking a guitar. Edward ordered whiskey but the barman shook his head. He pointed at the drink of the man beside him and the barman said, “Tequila,” and poured a cup for him. Edward drank it down, gestured for another.

  As he sipped at the second cup he became aware of someone standing very close behind him and turned to face a husky hatless Mexican with an abnormally large head and webs of spittle clinging to the corners of his gaped and awkwardly set mouth. The idiot’s black eyes bulged upon him and looked to be full of mute shrieking. He put his face forth to within inches of Edward’s. His breath was rancid.

  “Get away from me,” Edward said, and put his back to him.

  The idiot mouthed a sound between growl and groan and prodded Edward in the back with his fingers. Edward whirled and slapped away his hand. “I said get the hell away, you damn softbrain.”

  He was aware of the sudden cessation of music and talk. The idiot’s eyes were the wilder now an
d Edward could not bear the terrible silent shrieking he saw therein. The fool put his hand out supplicatingly once again and Edward knocked it aside and said, “Go bother somebody else, goddamn you. I aint givin you a damn thing but my fist you don’t leave off me.” He made a quick scan of the bar and tables, saw hard looks fixed upon him, said, “Some one of you best get this fool away from me quick.”

  The idiot brayed and reached with both hands as if he would embrace him. Edward punched him in the mouth and felt like he’d struck a tree. The fool stepped back and blinked and ran his tongue over his bloody lips and reached for him again and Edward pulled the Colt and hit him on the head with it and the idiot reeled on wobbly legs and fell to his hands and knees and began wailing like a frightened child.

  A pistol muzzle pressed against his temple and its holder said, “Si te mueves te mato, chingado.” Cocked pistols pointed at him from all sides. He let the Colt dangle against his leg and a man on his right cautiously took it from him. Then a fist crunched into his ear and he fell against someone who struck him in the forehead with a pistol barrel and he would have fallen had not someone else grabbed him and held him. He was again punched in the face and then hard in the stomach. As he spewed he was let to fall to all fours in his own vomit. Then he was hauled back up to his feet and held from behind with an arm twisted up high against his back.

  His head rang and his vision was askew and mucus ran thickly from his nose. He felt hands disarming him. Now his sight cleared and he saw a man with a tarnished badge pinned to his coat standing before him. A pair of men were helping the idiot out the front door. Edward’s ear felt the size of a potato, his cheekbone throbbed, blood ran into one eye. He tried to pull free and the man holding him from behind twisted his arm up higher and pain shot through his shoulder and someone began punching him in the ribs and belly. The man with the badge spoke sharply and the punching stopped.