Borderlands (6 page)

I was trembling with the urge to strike him, but I was afraid that if I hit him even once I would not stop until I’d killed him. At that moment I was afraid even to curse him: I feared that if I opened my mouth I would start howling and never stop.

I took Delgadina back to La Luna Plata and buried her in the sprawling flower garden behind the main house. I dug the grave myself. I called for a priest to pray over her only because she would have wanted it, but when he tried to commiserate with me afterward, I told him to go to hell.

And then I waited. I could do nothing else. Ochoa had his rurales roaming everywhere in search of Juan Rojas, and he had sworn that when they caught him they would deliver him to me. But I lived with an unremitting fear that Rojas might die before they could catch him. He might even choose death to being taken alive. If he resisted arrest, Ochoa’s boys would surely shoot him. Or he might get killed in a drunken brawl in some cantina or whorehouse. He could be thrown from his horse and break his neck. A jealous woman might stab him in his sleep. He might be captured by the army and stood against a wall, or caught by Texas Rangers and hanged from the nearest tree. He could be bitten by a Gila monster or a rattlesnake. He could drown while trying to ford a river, or be swallowed by quicksand. He could get a sickness and die in bed. There were so many ways he might die before I could get my hands on him—and some of them such that I would never even know he was dead—that I chewed my lips bloody resisting the urge to howl. My fists rarely unclenched. I spent hours every day pacing from one top-floor window to another, my throat so tight it felt snared in a noose.

Two weeks passed, and then four, and I thought of nothing but Juan Rojas and the vengeance I would wreak on him for having trespassed so grievously against me. When I was not pacing I was working in the cellar, making special preparations for him. He had robbed me of Delgadina and my unborn son—of my life, if not my breath—and the sole purpose of my continued existence was to make him suffer for his sin. For the first time since boyhood I prayed. I apologized to God for all the blasphemies of my life. I beseeched Him for a single concession and promised I would never ask another: I pleaded with Him to deliver Juan Rojas to me alive. I prayed and prepared for him and I paced, my jaws clenched against the ceaseless urge to howl. And I waited.

Late one afternoon, nearly two months after Delgadina’s death, one of my vaqueros came back from a visit to the whorehouse in San Lorenzo with the news that Juan Rojas was in jail at the rurales’ outpost in Tres Palmas.

All the whores had been talking about it, he said. They’d heard the story of the arrest from a rurales sergeant the night before, one of Ochoa’s men. The sergeant said the rurales had been tipped off by a barkeeper from Sahuaro who’d been sentenced to thirty days in jail for watering his tequila. The barkeep had been in the jail only a week when he heard that his wife had run away to Sonoita with a friend of his, and he was enraged. For more than a month he had been permitting this friend, who was in trouble with the law, to hide in the back room of his cantina, and this was how the friend repaid his kindness—by stealing his wife. On learning of this treachery done to him, the barkeeper in turn betrayed the friend to the rurales. The friend was of course Juan Rojas.

The rurales had gone to Sonoita and entered the pueblo after nightfall. They searched stealthily from place to place, carbines ready, and found him in a cantina, singing to himself with his head on the bar. Although Ochoa had repeatedly assured me that when his boys found him they would do everything possible to capture him alive, I knew the rurales never took chances with their quarry. If he’d made the least show of resistance, they would have shot him a hundred times. The sergeant told the whores he himself eased up behind Rojas and clubbed him in the back of the head with his carbine. He hit him so hard that Rojas didn’t wake up until Sonoita was thirty miles behind them. Chained hand and foot, he made the journey to Tres Palmas in a goat cart. He had now been in jail, my man said, for nearly a week.

It was after midnight when I arrived in Tres Palmas, my horse blowing hard and dripping lather. I had insisted on coming alone, had shouted down my importunate foreman’s pleas to take an escort with me. I had been wild with exultation and, I admit, not thinking clearly. I had bellowed some half-witted foolishness about the moment being
mine
, and I would share it with no one. I told the foreman I would kill any man who tried to follow me. But the hard ride through the cold desert night had cleared my mind sufficiently to regret not bringing an escort. It had finally occurred to me that Ochoa had violated his pledge to bring Rojas to me—and, for whatever reason, might yet be disinclined to hand him over.

Tres Palmas was little more than a scattering of adobe buildings on either side of a sandy windblown street blazing whitely under a full moon. I tethered the foundered horse in front of the jail and slipped my carbine from its scabbard, worked a round into the chamber, and went inside.

The windowless room was dimly lighted, the air thick with cigarette smoke and fumes from the lanterns on the walls. Ochoa and a couple of his boys were sitting at a table, playing cards and sharing a bottle of tequila. Nobody seemed surprised to see me—or very pleased. Directly behind them, the door of the only cell was shut, but I could make out the indistinct form of someone standing close to the bars. I held the rifle loosely at my hip, the muzzle jutting vaguely in the table’s direction.

Ochoa looked tired and sad. He returned his attention to the cards he was holding, then threw down the hand in disgust. His eyes were bloodshot. “What, Don Sebastián?” he said. “What
is
it?”

I’d never before seen Ochoa drunk, but I was not surprised by the sullen arrogance the tequila effected in him. Strong drink so easily agitates these primitives and sets loose the mob of resentments always lurking in their dark hearts. But I was feeling no more inclined than he toward the social amenities—and in any case I was not the least interested in his damned resentments, whatever they were. I shifted my stance slightly so that the rifle pointed his way less ambiguously. He flicked his eyes at the weapon and sneered.

“You were to bring him to me,” I said.

“Ah,” he said. He glanced toward the cell. “
Him
. Yes, well, I would have, you see, but I have a duty. A duty to justice.”

One of the others laughed, a sergeant, and Ochoa grinned at him and took a drink. The bottle was nearly empty.

“Listen, God damn you—”

“No, Don Sebastián,” he said. “You listen. I telegraphed my report of his arrest to headquarters in Hermosillo, and they told me a magistrate will be passing through in a few days. He’ll give him a trial and then we’ll hang him, all legal and proper. If it will make you happy, we’ll use your rope. If it will make you happier, you can have his carcass. You can have him butchered and dine on him every night until there’s nothing left but the bones. Hell, you can make soup from the bones till you’ve had the last miserable drop of him.” His two men were grinning whitely, much entertained.

“Damn your lowborn insolence,” I said. “I want him
now
.”

Ochoa’s smile vanished and he spat on the floor. “You
people
!” he said. “I want, I want! You hacendados want
everything
! God damn it, do you think you’re the only ones who
want?
You think
you’re
the only one who ever got fucked? You think you’re the only one who ever wanted to get even?”

The impudent whoreson! Daring to speak to me in that manner! Daring to
refuse
me! Rojas was right
there
, not a dozen feet from me, and this ignorant peon had the audacity to deny him to me. I’d had enough. I brought the rifle up, aimed it squarely in his face and thumbed back the hammer with a loud double click.

“Even a Cabrillo don,” he said, looking as if he were about to smile again, “knows what happens if he shoots a rurales captain.”

“Yes,” I said. “The rurales captain dies.”

My hands and voice were steady. The quivering was all in my heart—because I was certain I would have to shoot him, and then, of course, his underlings would all immediately shoot me. They would kill me while Rojas watched from his cell. And thus, from this tiny distance, he would escape me after all. The injustice of it filled me with a raging sadness.

For a moment no one moved, and then Ochoa sighed heavily and threw up his hands in resignation. “To hell with it,” he said, and stood up. “You or the hangman, what’s the difference? Why the hell should
I
care?” From a peg on the wall he took a large metal key ring with a single key on it and unlocked the cell door and swung it open.

“Out,” he said.

Juan Rojas stepped into the light. He was smaller than I had imagined, both short and slight, but he looked to have strength, and his eyes were as bright and quick as a hawk’s. With black hair hung to his shoulders and a red bandanna headband to hold it out of his eyes, he looked like an Indian. A Yaqui.

Ochoa ordered him to turn around, then bound his hands behind him with a length of rawhide cord. I lowered the rifle to my hip but kept it pointed at Ochoa, then told the sergeant to fetch two fresh horses, saddled and equipped with full canteens. The sergeant looked at Ochoa and Ochoa nodded.

While we waited, Rojas stared at me inquisitively but without fear.
You’ll soon find out
, I thought, looking at him. If he read the hatred in my eyes, he gave no sign of it. Ochoa sat at the table, sipping at the last of the bottle and softly singing a love song.

And then the sergeant was calling from the street. I peeked out the door to see a pair of horses in front of the jail—and a dozen rurales spread out across the street, all of them with carbines.

Ochoa laughed and said, “Did you think he would bring a brass band and girls with flowers to see you on your way?”

I jabbed the rifle muzzle under Rojas’ chin and glared at Ochoa. “I’ll settle here if I have to,” I said. But my heart howled at the possibility that I might be forced to kill him so quickly, with so little pain.

“Jesus, man,” Ochoa said. “I hope it never gets me as bad as it’s got you.”

He went to the door and ordered his men to rest easy. Then we all walked out and Ochoa told a couple of his boys to help Rojas get on a horse. I mounted up and took Rojas’ reins too, still expecting Ochoa at any moment to give his men the order to shoot me. But he merely stood with his thumbs hooked on his gunbelt and watched as I led Rojas’ mount away at a canter.

A few hours later the sun blazed up out of the distant mountains and layered the rocky landscape with a hard gold light. We rode in silence through the long shadows of the saguaros. Those early hours of the ride back toward La Luna Plata with Rojas in my custody—to do with
as I wished
!—were glorious. Never in my life had I desired anything so greatly as to have this man in my power. I had desired it with all my soul, dreamed of it, even prayed for it. And now, there we were, the two of us, deep in the desert and on our way to the things I had in store for him. Sweet Mary, my joy throbbed!

The sun was high above the mountains when I realized I was laughing out loud. I had no idea how long I’d been doing it. I looked behind me at Rojas and my good humor vanished instantly. The bastard was smiling.

I jerked the lead rope and his horse lunged up alongside mine. Rojas sat easily in the saddle even with his hands tied behind him.

“You think something’s funny, you son of a whore?” They were the first words I’d spoken to him.

He shrugged. “A man in the desert, laughing at nothing—that’s funny, no?”

I shuddered with the urge to shoot him in his grinning teeth. “Let me tell you some things,” I said. “Let’s see how funny you think they are.”

I talked steadily as our horses paced side by side and the sun climbed higher in the copper sky. I told him—in the most precise and intimate detail—the plan I had for him once we reached the main house. I told him about the little dungeon I’d fashioned in the windowless cellar and the playthings I’d collected there. I spoke to him of scorpions and fire ants and fierce yellow wasps, of venomous spiders whose bite would make a man sick for days. I had jarfuls of all of these things in that dark cellar with the thick stone walls. There were ropes and wires, steel hooks dangling from the ceiling. There were skinning razors and sharp iron spikes, fine long cactus spines and shards of broken glass. There would be buckets of boiling water, pots of caustic lyes. For his thirst, there would be tankards of goat piss. The furnace would burn day and night, and in it were the branding irons.

The more I spoke of it, the faster my breath came. He listened as raptly as a child hearing a fantastic tale. And then he suddenly laughed. “Jesus Christ, man! How many guys do you think I am? You want to do all
that
, you’re going to need more guys to do it to, because I don’t think I can make it past the first few things you got in mind. What’s got you so damned mad, anyway? All this crazy shit—spiders and
goat piss
!
Jesus
! What the hell did I ever do to
you
?”

He couldn’t have stunned me more if he’d spit in my face. I could see that he meant it—he did not know who I was, other than somebody of the hundreds who for one reason or another wanted him dead.

It was outrageous.

I drew my pistol and lashed him hard across the face, knocking him off his horse. I slid from the saddle and grabbed him by the hair and pressed the muzzle hard against his eye. I told him who I was in yells, bellowed my complaint into his face. I hit him with the gun again and let him fall into the dust.

With his hands fast behind him, it was a struggle for him to sit up, but he made it. Blood streamed from his nose and fell in bright drops on his dirty white shirt.

“Cabrillo,” he said, and ran his tongue over his torn lips as though he was tasting the name. Then he smiled all the way up to his eyes. “
Cabrillo!
Goddamn, man, I know you!” He spat a red streak and laughed.