In the Rogue Blood (27 page)

When at last he surfaced from the fever he found his hand in that of a young nurse who said her name was Elena. Her mestizo eyes were as darkly bright as indigo pools under moonlight. She had been educated by Jesuits and spoke English well. She called him Juanito and said they had been sure he would die but she had prayed every hour that he would not. He had been there nearly two weeks and was shrunken to hide and bone and he ached to his very marrow. She told him he had often screamed of people with strange names but he was all right now and needed only rest and nourishment and time to regain his strength. She told him of Santa Ana’s victory over the gringos at Angostura—which the Yankees called Buena Vista—and of the high price paid for it. Many more on both sides had been killed at Angostura than at Monterrey. Much of the talk, Elena told him, was of the San Patricio Company that fought so valiantly, though almost half of them were reported killed. She knew little else about the battle but at his urging undertook to find out what she could. She learned that neither Juan Riley nor Lucas Malone was listed as killed, that in fact Juan Riley had been promoted to captain for his brilliant leadership and bravery in the fight. Moreno had been made a colonel. Santa Ana’s army was now back at San Luis Potosí

A week later he was sitting up and taking broth and his fever was much reduced. So great was the need for hospital beds that Elena was granted her request that he be discharged into her care. She took him home where
she lived with her mother. Her father had been an educated man of Spanish bloodline, a Creole, and as an officer in Santa Ana’s army in the war against Texas had been killed at San Jacinto. She had no brothers. The mother was a wizened thing who kept to her tiny room whose walls were hung with crucifixes and whose shelves held dozens of saintly icons and where she passed her days and nights in whispered prayers to them all.

She fed him and bathed him until he was strong enough to do for himself. She kept him apprised of the progress of the war. Taylor had returned to Monterrey and was apparently under orders to stay there.

In mid-March came reports of a Yankee landing just outside the Gulf port of Veracruz. The city was refusing American demands to surrender. Three weeks later she brought home the news that General Winfield Scott had bombarded Veracruz for three days and nights. The city had suffered terrible destruction before finally capitulating. Everyone was saying that Scott would now begin marching inland to the mountains and then on to Mexico City and there the war would be decided. And there were rumors now, she told him, lowering her voice as though she might be overheard in her own house and perhaps thought a traitor, that Santa Ana had lied about Angostura, that it had truly been no victory.

By the first days of April he was strong enough to walk and he took most of his meals outside in the flowered patio behind the house. Swallows came to water in the small fountain and he fed them crumbs of bread. Elena was a wonderful cook and even when he was not hungry he could not resist eating at least some of whatever she prepared for him. She got clothes for him and he put aside his uniform except for his boots. They took walks down to the nearby creek and had picnics in the shade of the alamo trees along the banks where dragonflies drifted drowsily on the air.

One sunny afternoon at the creek she asked him why he had turned against the United States and chosen to fight for Mexico. He smiled and said, “Because I wanted to fight for you.”

She blushed and lowered her eyes and said, “That is a pretty lie. You did not even know me then.”

And he said, “I knew you. I just didn’t know your name or where you were. I just hadn’t met you yet.” He wondered where these words had come from. He felt they were true but wondered if maybe his mind had come unsound. Yet he smiled at her and at himself because he didn’t
care if he was crazy. If this was what it was to be mad, he thought, then damn him to hell, it’s mad he would be.

She looked at him closely, her bright black eyes roaming his face, her small smile sad in a way he couldn’t comprehend. But when he leaned to her she raised her face to receive the kiss.

He felt he was home.

But still he was visited by dreams of Daddyjack who often came to him in the black heart of the night and showed a yellow grin and fixed his burning red eye on him and said, “Ye aint deservin and ye know it. She dont know ye for what ye are.”

He’d wake sweatsoaked with Daddyjack’s laughter in his ears and Elena would hold him close and coo to him and tell him not to fear, that the war was far away. And slowly his heart would ease from its runaway gallop.

She brought news one day that Santa Ana had sent a portion of the army east to cut off the American advance from Veracruz. The San Patricios were said to be part of that force.

He was surprised by his indifference. The war had come to seem somehow unreal, something far away and unconnected to him anymore.

He walked up the hills every day and ate with appetite and felt himself growing stronger. One moonlit evening they went hand in hand to the main plaza and listened to the guitarists and drank lemonade and ignored the disapproving looks of the women in their rebozos and the priests in their black gowns. And on the way back home they stopped under a wide shade tree through which the moonlight dripped like honey and they kissed. And when they got home they made love and all the while he held her naked flesh to him and breathed the redolence of her smooth brown skin and soft black hair he could hear the whispered prayers of the old woman in the adjoining room.

One day in early May she came home with a fever. “I will be all right in a few days,” she said. “Many of the girls at the hospital get sick for a few days sometimes and then they are all right again. It is nothing serious, you will see.”

But the fever worsened in the night. She tossed and moaned and the sweat poured off her and soaked the sheet. She was on fire all next day and night but she smiled weakly and told him in a hoarse whisper she would be fine in another day, he’d see. He stayed at her side and bathed her forehead with cool water and sang softly to her.

On the third day the fever was raging. She soiled herself and wept with
the shame of it. He cleansed her and kissed her and begged her to get well. But the fever rose still higher and she became delirious and could not hear him telling her he would care for her as she had cared for him, telling her how beautiful her eyes were and her breasts and how he adored the sound of her voice. He dozed periodically, woke each time with a start and clutched her to him the better to feel her heart beat against him.

And then the fourth dawn broke through the alamo trees and eased in the windows and he started awake from a hazy stifling dream that rang with mean echoing laughter and she was in his arms with her eyes wide and dried blood on her chin and she was dead.

There was an evening wake and ancient women in black rebozos wailed and prayed loudly without pause until he thought he would go mad from the monotony of it. The mother did go mad, now shrieking like a cat and throwing herself on her daughter’s bier, now pointing at him and screeching, “Tú! Tú eres la razón que ella está muerta! Tú, condenado gringo! Tú!”

In the morning she was buried and none among the mourners offered him a consoling word. Even in the graveyard some glared at him with open hatred.

He went directly from the funeral to a cantina and started drinking and did not stop until he passed out at a corner table. The barkeep knew him for a San Patricio and let him be. When he came to in the next forenoon he started right in drinking again. That night he ran out of money and so traded his tunic to the bartender for a bottle of tequlia. When that was gone he swapped his boots for two more bottles.

The next day he was arguing with the bartender about trading his trousers, which the bartender did not want, for another bottle when an army sergeant and two privates came in and told him he was under arrest. He broke a bottle over the sergeant’s head and gouged the jagged end into his face as he fell. The privates fell to clubbing him with their rifle butts but he twisted the weapon away from one of them and shattered the boy’s teeth with the butt plate and then whirled the rifle around and fired it point blank into the third soldier’s heart. The boy with the smashed mouth fled through the rear door.

He was having his second drink on the house when a half-dozen soldiers
came through the door and the sergeant-at-arms pointed a pistol at him and told him to put his hands up or he would kill him.

John laughed at him and spat on the floor between them and hooked his thumbs in his belt and leaned back against the bar.

The sergeant cocked the pistol as the bartender lunged over the bar and cracked John on the back of the head with a sap fashioned of twenty silver pesos in a leather pouch and he crumpled insensate to the floor.

Four days later the back of his head was still tender. He was in a cell and awaiting court-martial on a charge of murder when Colonel Francisco Moreno, Captain John Riley, and Sergeant Lucas Malone showed up and presented the garrison commander with a paper signed by President Santa Ana himself. They were immediately escorted to his cell. They all looked worn and none was smiling. While John’s manacles were being removed Moreno him asked what happened.

John looked at him and shrugged. “Somebody got killed.”

“They said something about a girl.”

John looked away, then back at him. “There aint no girl.”

Moreno turned to Handsome Jack but he looked away. Riley seemed irritable, impatient. Moreno studied John for a long moment and then sighed and his air became professional. He informed him that Santa Ana had reorganized the San Patricios into an infantry battalion of two companies of one hundred men each and named it the Foreign Legion. Moreno himself was battalion commander and Riley and Saturnino O’Leary commanded the companies. Santa Ana wanted the unit up to full strength right away and was granting pardons to every jailed foreigner willing to fight under the San Patricio banner. More handbills were being smuggled into Yankee camps urging desertion to the Mexican side and there were reports that dozens of foreigners in Mexico City had enlisted in the Legion in the past few weeks.

“Scott’s pushing to Mexico City,” Riley said. He was nearly twitching with agitation. “Santa Ana’s pulling the whole army down there to make a stand of it. We got to get over there quick, man.” It took John a moment to realize he was pleased to see Jack Riley so apprehensive about his own future.

“I guess the sooner we get down there and kick Scott’s ass the sooner you get to be a general in this man’s army, eh Jack?”

Riley’s eyes narrowed. “Listen boy, I dont know what’s happened to ye here and I dont care a damn, not right now. We aint got the time for it, goddamnit. You rather stay here and be hanged for a murderer, just say so.”

Lucas Malone laughed tiredly and said, “Easy does er, boys. We all of us strung a bit tight just now. Come on, Johnny, let’s get on over to Mexico City. It’s nothin to do now but stick together and fight for our ownselfs.”

John let a heavy sigh. “Our ownselfs, Lucas? Hell man, who
is
that?”

“Dont play the fool with me, boy,” Lucas Malone said sternly. “Do it with Jack here all ye want but dont try it with me. Ye know damn good and well we of a kind—you and me and Jack here and all them other fellers in the compny who deserted the other side.”

“What the hell you mean ‘and Jack here’?” Riley said, but Lucas ignored him.

“Hell boy,” Lucas said, speaking more softly now, “you think you the only one feels pure-dee no-count and lost in the heart? The only one the good folk look at like it’s prison or the noose waitin for ye wherever ye go in this world?”

John looked at him.

“You know what the hell of it is, Johnny?” Lucas whispered.

And he realized that he did know, yes.

“The true and burnin hell of it is, the good folk’re right about us. We know they right. It be the drizzlin shits to know it. And it aint nothin to do about it but admit it and live with it the best we can.”

Riley hooted. Moreno gave them all a puzzled look.

“You’re
so
full of bullshit, Lucas,” Riley said. “Dont be including me in any such bunch of fools.” He looked from one to the other of them and suddenly laughed. “If you two think you aint but common jacklegs, that’s fine by me. Hell, it’s what I think of ye both meself—
crazy
jacklegs, truth be known. But as for me, well, I’m a right fella and I dont mind who knows it.”

John felt himself smiling. They were none of them anything for certain in the world but rogues, the lot of them, and their daddies all rogues before them.

He stood up and put on his hat. “Well
hell
, Lucas,” he said with mock
seriousness, “I feel ever so much better by them words of wisdom. I must of been simple not to understood it before.”

“What ye mean,
must of
been?” Riley said. He nudged Lucas with an elbow and gestured at John. “Fella’s talking like simpleness is some past affliction rather than his natural condition.”

John grinned and said, “Piss upon you, Jack,” and threw a lazy punch that Riley easily slipped with a head roll.

Major Moreno looked on the three of them laughing and punching each other on the arms and shoulders and shook his head. And then laughed along with them. And said, “Vámonos! A la capital! Victoria o muerte!”

“Victoria o muerte!” cried Riley, making towards the door with a raised fist.

“I once knew a old gal named Victoria,” Lucas said as they trooped away. “Tits like a milk cow and a ass like a mule. But
mean?
Whooo! That woman’d just as soon kill you as kiss you, and you never did know which she was gonna try.”

“That aint the Victoria old Moreno’s talking about,” John said.

“Hell it aint,” said Handsome Jack.

T
hey left behind them in Laredo eleven dead and more than a dozen maimed or wounded on that cool March dawn when they broke the blackbeard Jaggers out of jail and accepted Edward into the company as well. Only one of the dead was their own. They were fifteen that departed at a gallop and in a great raise of dust bore due west, Edward on the Janey horse he’d recovered along with his guns and outfit from the livery where he saw a large painted Indian impale the stablebuck to the wall with a pitchfork through the neck. As he put heels to his mount he caught glimpses of men sprawled in the street in the awkward attitudes of death and splotched dark with blood. He saw a woman kneeling at a water trough with her back bloody and her face submerged in the gray-pink water. Saw a dog crawling on forelegs and dragging its bullet-smashed
nether half. Saw a small boy staggering in the street with blood in his eyes and then abruptly trampled under the hooves of the horse express rumbling out of town and out to open country. In that galloping band the Janey mare looked like a blooded darling in contrast to the motley bunch of yet half-savage horses that only weeks earlier had been running wild on the desertland and now wore bridles of plaited human hair adorned with clicking bones and teeth.

The company went unpursued.

They made camp that evening in the hills. The Janey horse was white-eyed fearful at being tethered amid the mustangs. They jostled her and snapped at her with their teeth. One lunged and bit her flank and she spun and kicked the pinto so hard it trumpeted and shied away and thereafter the mustangs mostly let her be.

The company’s fires tossed and swirled in the sandy nightwind and the men supped on the haunches of an antelope brought down with a Hawken gun at well nigh six hundred yards by a deadeye named Runyon who had been showing off. Jaggers introduced Edward to Geech and Finn and Huddlestone, who sat about the same fire.

They were going to Chihuahua under contract to the governor to hunt Apache. The deal had been closed in the neighboring state of Coahuila where the company had been recruiting itself and squandering its pay in Saltillo cantinas and cathouses after weeks of chasing down a fearsome bandit gang in the Sierras de San Marcos for the Coahuila government. They’d returned to the capital from the expedition with fifteen heads dangling on either side of a blood-stained pack mule including that of the infamous Pablo Contreras which of its own brought them one thousand pesos in silver. The alcalde himself identified the head as Contreras’s and the governor ordered it displayed on a lance head over the main portal of the municipal building.

It happened that a party of officials of the Chihuahua government was at that time in Saltillo attending a federation council and these men were deeply impressed by the sight of the miscreant heads lined along the top of the front wall of the municipal building and being fed upon by crows. They invited Hobbes for an audience and informed him that if he could hunt Indians as well as he could catch bandits he should be interested in the state of Chihuahua’s willingness to pay one hundred pesos for every Indian warrior scalp and fifty for the scalps of women and children. Hobbes claimed to have fought the heathen in the years he’d trapped in the Sangre de Cristo range and while with the Henry expedition on the
upper Missouri and with the likes of Tom Fitzpatrick and Jedediah Smith along the lower Colorado River. He said that if the governor could see fit to pay the bounties strictly in gold—any mix of Mexican doubloons and American eagles being just fine—they had a deal. The governor’s men were agreed, and Hobbes set about readying his company.

While he took on supplies in Saltillo he sent a few men upcountry to Sabinas to buy and break fresh horses from the mustangers who regularly brought their wild herds there to market. Geech and another man he sent to Laredo for a supply of dependable blackpowder and new gangmolds for the company’s Texas revolvers. When those two rejoined the company just south of Sabinas they brought with them as well the news that Jaggers was in the West Laredo jail.

“The captain don’t like killing lawmen if he don’t have to, not even Mexican ones,” Huddlestone told Edward, then turned and grinned at Finn. “Which is more than I can say for some in this outfit.” Huddlestone was burly and one-eyed and a pink cicatrix wormed from above his brow down under his eyepatch to midway down his cheek.

Finn spat into the fire and ignored him. He was a small but compact man lacking a left ear and the little finger of each hand. His hair flared from under his hat and his beard was a greasy thicket thriving with parasitic life. Edward would come to hear that Finn was a fugitive from the Kentucky hills who’d burned his wife to death for an act of infidelity. The man who put the horns on him he was said to have beheaded.

“They aint no money in killing a lawman,” Huddlestone said, “and it can bring on trouble a businessman don’t need. And that’s what he is, the captain, a businessman, you see.”

Finn snorted. “So’s a undertaker a damn businessman. But I don’t know no undertaker with five hundred dollars on his head.”

Now Huddlestone ignored Finn in his turn. “But he warnt about to leave old Bill in that cárcel, the captain. A man rides with James Kirkson Hobbes is a man don’t get left behind. But like I say, he’ll try to keep from killing a lawman if he can. When we got to the outskirt of the west Laredo an hour or so before dawn, the captain went on in by hisself to talk to the alcalde and try to buy Bill out of the hoosegow. He come back before long and said the alcalde hadn’t been too pleased about getting woke so early and wouldn’t even come downstairs to talk to him. Had his manservant to tell the captain
maybe
he would have time to see him later that afternoon. Well hell, the captain didn’t have time to waste waiting on some Mexican muckamuck who
might
see him. So we all rode
into town and up to the alcalde’s house and the captain halloed the place again and the alcalde come out looking all Señor Mucho Mighty. The captain said he had to have Bill Jaggers out of the juzgado right now so we could get on about our business. But it’s no reasoning with some people. The alcalde starts blabbering real loud at the captain in Mexican and the captain stood for it for about a half-a-minute and then shot him in the mouth and blowed his teeth out the back of his head. Not ten minutes later you was heading for the outcountry with us. Could say it was a lucky thing for you the alcalde didn’t let the captain buy Bill out of jail or you’d likely still be back there.”

Edward looked over at the captain sitting apart from the company, removed from the raillery and the fires, with a Mexican sarape over his shoulders against the gusty chill, smoking his pipe and staring out at the vast blackness to the west.

They were a band even more primitive of aspect than the horses they rode and all had eyes that never did look on a living thing with a moment’s mercy. They wore coarse cloth and animal skin, some of it not fully cured, and their hats were of every description and appointed with raptor feathers or snakeskin bands. They wore belts fashioned of human skin and necklaces of gold teeth and of trigger fingers and ears withered and black and looking like strung dried fruit. The one called Finn carried on his belt a tobacco pouch tanned from a squaw teat, the hide the same brown hue as its contents and black-nippled at its base. Some had themselves been docked of one or both ears and some lacked fingers or owned but one eye. Among such mutilations Edward’s severed ear was of little note. In that company were tattoos of every sort and scars of every description, primitive sutures fashioned in dire circumstance. Some in the company bore branded letters or numbers on faces and hands and inner forearms. They were armed each man with bowies the size of machetes and skinning knives and Colt five-shooters, and in that company were longarms of every sort from Hawken guns to Kentucky and Jaeger rifles to doublebarrels to hugebore muskets charged with shot or pieces of brass or handfuls of silver dimes. And among them too were five Shawnee trackers and scouts, their chief called Sly Buck, the large one who’d pitchforked the stableman.

This Indian conferred now with Hobbes and his lieutenants, a lean and thinly blondbearded man named John Allen and a whitewhiskered and rotund man of indeterminate age named Foreman who dressed in black and was supposed to have once belonged to the Jesuit order and was
addressed by all as padre. When the confab broke up the Shawnees mounted and departed to westward.

By himself any man of the company would attract wary attention on the streets of any town. He would be regarded as a vagabond pariah, as a moral affront and a physical danger to ordered society, as the sort to be dealt with swift and sure by well-armed and strong-numbered legal authority. Many of them had been thus regarded and dealt with. Most every man among them had a price on his head. But conjoined in company they were more than an engine of outlawry. They were a violent agency as old as human blood. They were a force as fundamental and terrible and beyond rational ken as death itself, as elemental as fire or temblor or howling wind.