Hackberry’s face felt cold in the wind, even though he was sweating. “Maybe I did.”
“So why do you feel so offended? Why put on this display?”
“Maybe I want to do business with you.”
“Now we see who our brave Texan really is?”
“Read it any way you want.”
“We are not laying down our weapons, señor.”
“I’ll give you mine anyway. How’s that?” Hackberry loosened the sling from his left arm and placed his palm under the butt of the Krag and flung it end over end through the air. It bounced muzzle-down on a boulder next to the general and pinwheeled farther down the slope.
“¡Que macho!” the general said. “A man of commerce who rises above petty resentments. What business do you wish to conduct?”
“Tell me about the Austrian.”
“Why would he be of concern to you?”
“I think he’s probably an arms dealer. That’s a subject I’m highly educated in.”
“What is it you are offering, señor?”
“The Savage Company is manufacturing a new light machine gun called a Lewis. It’s air-cooled and doesn’t jam and has a ninety-seven-round drum magazine. It fires over five hundred rounds a minute. The British are already using them in the trenches. I can get you a mess of them.”
The general turned to his men. “Did you hear our friend’s proposal, he who has killed our comrades? What do you think we should do with this strange, unwashed gringo?”
“Invite him down here, General,” the junior officer said. “This is a very entertaining man.”
“Yes, please come,” the general said. “We have pulche and roasted corn and pig. The Austrian will be very pleased to meet you.”
Hackberry walked down a narrow gravelly path between two huge boulders that were round and cool and gave shade and made him think of a woman’s breasts. He lifted his hands in the air to show they were empty, the sunlight full on his face, his eyes filming in the glare. “The Austrian beats women?” he said.
“When they ask for it,” the junior officer said. “Sometimes that’s what puta want. That’s why they’re puta, man.”
“I could stand some of that roast pig and corn on the cob.”
“Ah, the gringo is ready to eat,” the general said. “Tell us what else you want. We should bring some girls up here for you? We should give you money that belongs to the people of Mexico?”
“You’re hurting my feelings something awful,” Hackberry said. “You wouldn’t go back on your deal and try to do me in, would you?”
“We made no deal with you, señor. I think you have mierda for brains.”
They were laughing, all their fear gone. The junior officer opened a flask and poured rum into a tin cup and gave it to the general.
“Could I have some of that?” Hackberry said.
“I am always amazed by you. Do you want a blindfold?”
“Sir?”
“It makes it easier. A man can concentrate on his thoughts. He can pray. He can have visions of his family.”
“Those don’t sound like good options.”
“I am going to be your executioner, señor. You and your friends took my son’s life. And now I will take yours. It is only fair. Don’t embarrass yourself by protesting your fate.”
“Isn’t there some other way to do this?”
“Look to the east, señor. It is there where all life begins. No, do not look back at me. Concentrate on the horizon and the dust and the rain blowing in the sky. That is where you are going. It is not bad.” The general moved his right hand from his crutch and lifted a heavy revolver from his holster. His eyes were recessed deep in his face, like marbles pressed inside tallow, a drop of spittle or snuff on his lip.
“You dealt it for both of us, General. Sorry, there’s some people you just cain’t cure of their rowdy ways,” Hackberry said. “I guess that says it all for both of us.” He pulled the derringer from his back pocket and fired the first barrel into the general’s chest and the second barrel through the junior officer’s neck. Before the enlisted men could react, Hackberry took the revolver from the general’s hand. It was a Merwin Hulbert double-action .44. Both of the enlisted men were dark-skinned and sloe-eyed and had the dull-witted resentful expressions of men for whom life had always been a trap, no matter whose interests they served.
“¡Bejan las armas!” Hackberry said.
They stared at him, their lips parted, their teeth exposed, generations of anger sealed in their faces.
“Suben los brazos,” he said.
“No entiendo,” one said, and smiled sardonically.
Hackberry shot and killed them both, the two reports as hard as a slap on his right ear, his palm stinging with the recoil.
HE WALKED TO the front of the house, the pistol hanging from his hand. There was no movement inside. Someone had released the white horses from their harnesses, and they were eating from a trough hollowed out of a log not far away. He crossed the veranda and opened the door. Beatrice DeMolay was standing with her girls in the parlor. The girls’ faces contained the empty look of people who believe the revelation of their thoughts can bring catastrophe upon them. He pushed the revolver down in his belt. “Why are y’all so afraid of me?” he said.
None of them would speak.
“Answer me,” he said.
“You killed them all?” the woman said.
“My selections were limited.”
“The general, too?”
“I’d say he’s pretty dead. Tell these girls I won’t hurt them.”
“You tell them.”
“They won’t believe me. They’ll believe you. That’s the way they’ve been taught to think. That’s not of my doing.”
“You’ve interfered in the Austrian’s business affairs. You’ve made a mistake.”
“What time is the Austrian due here?”
“He comes when he comes,” she replied.
“Does the hearse contain firearms?”
“Of course.”
“I cain’t figure you. How long have you been running a hot-pillow joint?”
“Don’t refer to me in that fashion.”
“Excuse me.”
“The general stole the weapons and ammunition from Villa. He was going to sell them to the Austrian. The Austrian’s name is Arnold Beckman. He will probably sell the guns back to Villa. Do not be here when he arrives.”
“I wouldn’t challenge your estimation of your clientele, Miz DeMolay. Give me food and let me take a bath. I’ll leave.”
“You have ears that do not hear and eyes that do not see.”
“I know I have my shortcomings, but I’ll be damned if I can explain how I wandered into an asylum that masquerades as a cathouse run by a crazy woman. Maybe I’m being punished for my misdeeds in a previous life, something on a level with original sin.”
“You’re as irreverent as you are arrogant. You need to shut your mouth, Mr. Holland.”
“You’re a handsome woman, but half a dozen like you could have men taking vows of celibacy all over the Western Hemisphere.”
“Go out to the bathhouse and take off your clothes. The girls will heat water. I’ll tell them not to look at you. No one deserves a fate like that.”
“I thought my first wife might be the Antichrist. Shows how wrong a man can be.”
“What did you say?”
“Not a thing. I’m done. I don’t want no more trouble.”
“You don’t think you’re in trouble now?”
“I’ve seen worse. Wes Hardin killed forty-five men. He said he was going to make me number forty-six when he got out of Huntsville.”
“Why didn’t he?”
“A lawman named John Selman put a ball through his eye at the Acme Saloon in El Paso. Hardin had just rolled the poker dice out of the cup. He said, ‘You got four sixes to beat.’ That’s when Selman came up behind him and busted a cap on him. That was the only way he could get him.”
“You wouldn’t have done it that way?” she said.
“No, ma’am, I surely wouldn’t.” He let his eyes hold on hers.
“Go out back and get in the tub,” she said. “We’ll burn your clothes. I have other clothes you can take with you.”
“Who unharnessed the white horses?”
“They were hungry and thirsty.”
“You did?” She didn’t answer. “I didn’t mean that about the Antichrist,” he said.
“Don’t lie.”
Through the front window he could see rain and lighting and dust devils rising off the hardpan, probably harbingers of a monsoon that would cause the desert to bloom and the creeks to swell with mud and driftwood and the willows to lift wetly in the wind like the hair of mermaids. Ishmael, Ishmael, where have you gone? Where is my loving little boy when your father needs you most?
Then he felt ashamed at his self-pity and went outside and did as the woman had told him.
THE GIRLS HEATED the water in buckets on a woodstove next to the tub and poured it gently over his shoulders and head while he lathered himself in the tub with a bar of Pears soap. They seemed to take no notice of his nudity, and he felt no sense of discomfort in front of them. “Do any of y’all speak English?” he asked.
They shook their heads.
“It’s just as well,” he said. “I have nothing of value to impart. My life has been dedicated to Pandemonium. That’s a place in hell John Milton wrote about. That also means I’m an authority on chaos and confusion and messing things up. I am also guilty of the kind of prurient behavior ladies such as yourselves are secretly disgusted by. That said, would one of y’all get me a drink of whiskey or rum, and roll me a tortilla with jerky and peppers in it?”
One of the girls patted him on the head and looked him in the eye. “You sure you don’t want nothing else, viejo?” she said.
“You ladies are full of surprises. Oh, Lordy, yes, I do want something else,” he replied. “I declare, I’d like to take two or three of y’all to a dance hall and hire a band that would serenade you all night. That’s the kinds of thoughts a poor, tattered, wayfaring stranger such as myself is always having. But I’m not going to succumb to temptation, no matter how beautiful and young you are. Plus, I don’t have any money, even though I know that subject would not be of importance in our relationship.”
The girls were laughing among themselves, splashing water on his face and back, pouring more of it over his head. In the distance he could see the sky growing darker and a twister dropping out of a cloud and wobbling like a giant spring across the desert floor in sunlight that was as bright as gold. There was a fatal beauty at work in this cursed land that he would never be able to recapture or describe to others. Mexico was a necropolis where the quick and the dead were inextricably linked on opposite sides of the soil, one always aware of the other. It was a place where killing was lauded, and where peasants wore depressions with their knees in the stone steps of seventeenth-century cathedrals, and where the light was harsher and brighter than it should have been and the colors were so vivid they jittered when you looked at them too long.
The girls brought him unpasteurized milk and tortillas stuffed with green peppers and onions and the pork the Mexicans had cooked. As he gazed at the shade and the rain advancing across the hardpan, cooling and cleansing the land, he felt years of rage and violence seep from his body into the bottom of the tub. He closed his eyes and let the wind touch his face and anoint his brow as though he were reliving his baptism by immersion in the Guadalupe River. He heard a rumble of thunder that could have been mistaken for cannon fire. In truth, he didn’t care if it was. The earth abideth forever, he thought.
He opened his eyes and realized the dust had transformed the sun into a reddish-purple melt, and the bathwater that rose to his chin looked as dark and thick as blood, so sticky in texture he would never be able to wipe it from his skin.
HE DRESSED IN a cotton shirt and denim trousers and a canvas coat and a straw sombrero the woman sent down to the bathhouse, pulled a saddle off a dead Mexican’s horse, and saddled his own. Hail was clicking on his hat when he went to the hearse and opened the side door and looked inside. He saw two Maxim machine guns and crates of Mauser rifles and ammunition. The woman was watching him from the gallery, the wind flattening her long dress against her legs. He closed the door on the hearse and walked up to the veranda.
“I’m fixing to light it up. The bullets will be popping in the heat, but they’re not going anywhere. I’d keep the girls inside nevertheless.”
“Beckman considers that his property. You’re going to burn it?”
“The Huns are arming the Mexicans to stir up trouble so we keep our mind off Europe. I don’t want my boy dying from a gun that’s in that hearse.”
“There is no end of problems with you.”
“Tell Mr. Beckman I’m sorry I missed him. If he wants to come looking for me, I’ll get directions to him.”
This time she had nothing to say. He was discovering that her silence had a greater effect on him than her insults, and he found that thought deeply troubling. He took off his hat, even though hail was still dancing in a white haze on the ground. “For whatever reason, you took mercy on me, Miss Beatrice. I hope the Mexicans don’t hold you accountable for the men I had to kill or the ordnance I’m fixing to set afire. You’re a beautiful woman.” He turned and walked toward the hearse.
“Stop,” she said. She approached him, her hair flecked with ice crystals, her face sharpened by the wind. “Beckman is the most evil man I’ve ever known.”
“All the bad ones seem that way until you punch their ticket.”
“You’ll always be welcome here,” she said, and went back into the house.
If that woman doesn’t know how to set the hook, he thought.
FROM A GULCH he snaked tangles of broken tree limbs that were as hard and smooth and pointy as deer antlers. He crushed them under his boot and stuffed them beneath the hearse, then ripped the curtains and the felt headliner from the interior and packed them inside the branches. He searched under the driver’s seat for a flint striker or the matches needed to light the carriage lamps, and found a box of lucifers. As an afterthought, he decided to make use of a grease-smeared blanket he had seen wedged between a crate of rifles and the side of the hearse. When he tried to lift it, he realized it contained objects that were heavy and metallic and probably ill-suited for carrying in a makeshift sack.
He squatted down and unfolded the blanket and spread it on the ground. Inside it were seven brass candlestick holders and two candelabras and a leather bag of low-denomination Mexican coins and a hinged rosewood box. He opened the box and stared mutely. An artifact lay pressed into a hard cushion of green silk; it resembled a chalice, perhaps one stolen from a church. The impression, however, was illusory. The chalice was actually two goblets that looked made from onyx, both inverted, each base fused to the other. They were encased by a framework of gold bands encrusted with jewels that could have been glass or emeralds and sapphire. The shades of color in the goblets were the strangest he had ever seen in a mineral: dark brown with tinges of black and a subdued yellow luminosity that seemed to have no source. The top goblet was inset with a gold cup.
He picked up the artifact and turned it over in his hands but could see no markings that indicated its origins. He replaced it in the deep pocket that had been formed in the silk cushion and closed the top. On the bottom of the box, someone had carved a small cross and the word “Leon.”
He knew the Mausers in the crates would be coated in packing grease and in need of thorough cleaning before being fired, so he set down the rosewood box and returned to the canyon and picked up a Mauser dropped by one of the dead Mexicans; he also stripped the bandoliers from the body. In the saddlebags of the junior officer he found a spyglass and a bowie knife in a beaded deerskin scabbard and photographs of women in corsets and bloomers, their hair piled on their heads. He found a clutch of letters probably writte
n by family members. He threw the letters and the photographs on the ground and searched the general’s body for the ammunition that went with the Merwin Hulbert. Then he slung the Mauser on his shoulder and put the bowie knife and the spyglass and the Merwin Hulbert and the ammunition and the bandoliers in the saddlebags and walked back to the hearse.
The hail had turned to rain, and the sun had slipped into a layer of cold white clouds that resembled a mythic lake. He slid the wood box and the bag of Mexican coins in the saddlebags, and tied the bags onto his saddle, and set fire to the fuel he had stuffed under the hearse.
As he rode away, he heard bullets popping like strings of Chinese firecrackers in the flames and wondered if the woman was watching him from a window. When he turned in the saddle, the windows in the house were as glossy and impenetrable as obsidian. Maybe in the morning he would find his son’s encampment. Or maybe he would be found by Beckman. Or maybe neither of those events would happen and he would ride all the way to Texas by himself, left to the mercy of his thoughts, a hapless and cynical pilgrim who could neither correct the past nor live with its consequences.
THREE DAYS LATER, at dawn, he and his horse were camped on a ridge overlooking a bowl-like desert glistening with moisture from the monsoon that had swept across the countryside during the night. Hackberry peered through his spyglass at a single column of smoke rising from a campfire at the foot of a mesa where a group of eight or nine men had picketed their horses and slept under their slickers and were now boiling coffee and cooking strips of meat on the ends of sticks. As the blueness went out of the morning and the mesa grew pink around the edges, he could make out the face of each man in the group. He recognized none, but he knew their kind. They were exported from Texas on passenger cars and put to work in the Johnson County War. They ran “wets” across the border and ran them home when they were no longer needed. They were “regulators” or sometimes “range detectives.” In Ludlow, Colorado, they fired machine guns from an armored vehicle into striking miners and asphyxiated women and children in a root cellar for John D. Rockefeller. A professionally charitable person might say their real enemy was modernity. The West had shut down and the party was over. Regardless, the best of them would cut you from your liver to your lights for a bottle of busthead or a roll in the hay with a black girl.