In the Rogue Blood (36 page)

A week later they rode out of Puebla on their first mission, every man of them mounted on a fine American stallion larger than most Mexican horses and seated on a well-tooled saddle and armed with a pair of new Colt five-shooters and a Hall percussion rifle and some with a shotgun besides. A half-dozen of them carried a lance they had learned to use when they served in the Mexican army and some were armed with sabers and some with bowies as big as machetes. They wore high black boots and gray trousers and short-tailed gray coatees with red collars and cuffs and flat-crowned black felt hats banded with a blood-red scarf. The effect of the uniforms was heady. Edward felt cloaked in power.

With Hitchcock’s approval Dominguez had organized the company into two units which he named the Eagles and the Serpents, a patriotic allusion he found amusing in its irony but which outraged the local populace. Mexican newspaper editorials condemned the company as a reprehensible collection of society’s dregs, as a crew of despicable and utterly damned murderers and convicts who lacked even the single saving grace of allegiance to their native land. The more the good citizens ranted the more pleased did Dominguez seem. “This people are want to hang me,” he said to Spooner and Edward, “and now they are want me to fight the gringos for them. This people are very stupid, no?”

Edward was assigned to the Eagle squad, which was captained by
Spooner and had Fredo as its sergeant. The Serpents’ captain was Pedro Arria and their sergeant a new man named Rogelio Gomez whom Dominguez had known in the old days and who had served as a sergeant in the Mexican army before deserting. As they rode out of town on their fine prancing stallions they were looked upon by the citizens on the streets as a damnable spectacle but a fearsome one even more and thus no one cursed them audibly as their horses clopped past on the cobblestones.

Two weeks later they found Padre Colombo Bermejillo’s ranchero band encamped in the hills a few miles east of the junction of the National Highway and the Orizaba Road. So confident of never being discovered by Yankee scouts had the guerrillas become that they did not even post night guards. Dominguez positioned Spooner’s men on one flank of the camp and himself with Pedro Arria’s men on the other and they waited for first light. When it came they opened fire and killed a dozen as they slept on the ground and shot the other fifteen when they jumped to their feet and ran about in confusion. They then descended into the slaughter and killed off the wounded. Padre Bermejillo was easily identified by the priestly robes he had persisted in wearing despite his excommunication from the Church. Dominguez sent the padre’s tonsured head and the twenty-six noses of the other rancheros back to Hitchcock in a bloody sack.

The trophies appalled many of the Yankee officers in attendance in Hitchcock’s headquarters when they were delivered to him, and the next time Hitchcock and Wengierski met with Dominguez the colonel told him not to send any more such evidence of his successes. Dominguez said he simply wanted him and General Scott to know the Spy Company was doing its duty. Hitchcock said he understood, but there were some officers in their ranks who were set on making trouble for General Scott with the politicians back home and these men would not hesitate to provide American newspapers with a lot of muck about Scott’s sanctioning of “barbarities” in Mexico. General Scott believed that Dominguez and his boys should do whatever they had to do in order to achieve their missions, but Dominguez must henceforth be very careful in his reports to exclude all the unpalatable particulars. And now it was Dominguez’s turn to assure Hitchcock that he understood perfectly.

Dominguez thereafter omitted from his reports even the details of the interrogation techniques they were sometimes obliged to apply as they sought information from villagers in guerrilla territory. When a response seemed to him evasive or untruthful Dominguez would permit the Yaqui
half-breed Bernado—whom they called El Verdadero because of his talent for eliciting truth—to exercise his own persuasive methods of questioning, methods he’d learned as a scout for the Mexican army in its endless war with the Apaches. No man could hold to a lie once Bernardo began to burn his feet or cut out his teeth or slap at his bare testicles with a little rawhide quirt or press the burning end of a stick to his asshole or to the head of his dick.

In early July they caught up to Anastasio Torrejón’s gang in the highlands near Las Vigas where they were lying in ambush for a U.S. pack train coming from Veracruz. The company had been informed of the rancheros’ plan and came around from the west and behind them and caught them by surprise in a drizzling rain. The ensuing fight lasted an hour and four of the company were wounded although only two seriously enough to be of no further service. They killed all twenty-two of the Torrejón bunch. Dominguez sent to Hitchcock a courier report of their success and a string of the guerrillas’ horses.

Ten days later they tracked down the Miñon gang to its hideout in a canyon just north of Orizaba. The rancheros made a run for it and the fight carried for three days and covered nearly fifty miles before the last of the Miñonistas went down. As a warning to other bandits and rancheros in the vicinity the company hung naked Miñonista corpses by their heels from a tree every few miles along the road between Orizaba and Córdoba. Mexican officials of both church and state complained in outrage to the American authorities and Hitchcock sent a detail to cut down the bodies and bury them. But there was no reprimand of the Spy Company.

The company next rode into the sierras north of Jalapa and searched out the ranchero band of Lucero Carbajal. The fight was fierce but quick and when it was done Dominguez found his old friend still alive among the fallen though he’d been mortally wounded in the belly. Dominguez sat and cradled Lucero’s head in his lap and mopped his brow and rolled cigarettes for him. Edward and Spooner sat close by and waved away any others who approached. Dominguez and Carbajal spoke of the old days and sang songs they had learned together as children and every time Lucero screamed with a new rush of pain Dominguez gripped his hands tightly and whispered to him to be strong, be strong. They watched the western sky turn bloody red behind the mountains and Carbajal said the sight was the most beautiful in all God’s world and Dominguez agreed. A moment later Carbajal was dead and Dominguez and Rogelio Gomez
who had also known Lucero since boyhood dug his grave in the dark and buried him. The rest of the rancheros they left to the scavengers.

They arrived back in Puebla in the first week of August to find Scott ready to begin his move on Mexico City at last. He decided that one squad of the Spy Company would go with him, one would stay behind in Puebla under the authority of Colonel Childs. Dominguez selected Spooner’s band to go with Scott and he put himself in command of it. They set out on a red-streaked daybreak—foot soldiers, cavalry, artillery limbers, caissons, supply wagons, a military train that stretched for rumbling miles and wound about the mountain trails like an enormous martial snake.

The Spy Company rode well ahead of the main force and through the day Dominguez alternated between Spooner and Edward as his report riders to Scott, thinking the general would be grateful not to need an interpreter. And grateful Scott was, but he and his fellow officers had as well been surprised to learn of a pair of Americans riding with the Spy Company. Spooner had carried the first report and on his return he warned Edward of what to expect, but still, the first time he rode to the main body, Edward had suddenly felt every eye in the column fixed sharply on him as he rode past on his way to Scott’s wagon. And then in the general’s quarters he’d been subjected to the severe scrutiny of the half-dozen other officers in attendance. He’d removed his hat and reported that the road ahead looked to be all clear for at least the next ten miles and Scott thanked him and was about to dismiss him when General Worth asked his name and where he hailed from.

“Edward Boggs, sir, from Tennessee. Nashville.”

A bullnecked, whitebearded general named Twiggs asked if he’d ever worn the uniform of his true country. Edward said he’d never been in service before signing on with the Spy Company. Twiggs looked around at his fellows with a narrow smile and said it might be interesting to check the deserter rolls for the name of Edward Boggs. He started to say something else but Scott broke in and asked Edward why he wore the bandanna over his head.

“An accident, sir,” he said. “It’s to cover it over.”

“Let’s have a look,” said a general with muttonchops joining his thick
mustache though his chin was shaved close. Edward looked at Scott and the general returned his stare blankly. So he took off the bandanna.

“Damn, son,” the muttonchops said.

“I fell down drunk one night, sir, I’m ashamed to say, and my hair caught aflame from the cookfire. My own fool fault.” He quickly retied the bandanna over his crown.

Several officers exchanged smiling glances and one said, “I once saw such a—” but Scott silenced him with a raised finger.

“I too have seen similar scars on some few other heads,” Scott said. “Curiously, all the heads belonged to men who had been fallen upon by savages yet were lucky enough to escape with their lives, if not the entirety of their hair.” The officers laughed and Edward felt his face flush hotly.

“No, Davy,” Scott said confidently to the general named Twiggs, “I do not believe this young man is likely to prove a deserter. No one with such, ah,
campfire
scars on his head could be so cowardly as to desert his ranks.” He smiled at Edward and made a gesture of dismissal and Edward hastily saluted and exited the wagon.

A group of enlisted men stood nearby and watched him closely as he went to his horse and mounted up. He heard one say something about “a damn deserter in that Mex scout outfit.”

But another quickly said, “How’s he be a deserter if he’s reporting to General Scott and got the U.S. insignia on his coat?”

“He’s riding with Mexicans, aint he?”

“
Those
Mexes are on our side, you damn fool!”

“Shitfire,
you’re
the damn fool if ye believe
any
Mex be on our side!”

Three days west of Puebla they came up through a wide pass flanking the great volcano called Popocatepetl and crested a ridge and of a sudden found themselves looking out upon the entire Valley of Mexico three thousand feet below and spread out before them like a vast map of bright green felt. It lay engirt by a sharp and darkly rugged range, a mountainous circle 120 miles in circumference. And there, directly ahead and blazing like some vision conjured of medieval magic was the fabled city of the Aztecs. The towers of Mexico City stood so vivid in the sharp cool air they seemed to Edward close enough to hit with a rifleshot but were in
fact some twenty-five miles distant. The three great lakes about the city blazed like silver mirrors. It was a vista to awe even Dominguez and the few others who had seen it before, and those who looked upon it for the first time could not put into words what they beheld, this portion of earth fashioned by ancient gods unknown.

When Scott arrived and gazed at the panorama he too was bedazzled. Dominguez beamed as if the vista were his personal gift to him. “Look!” Scott said, spreading his arms toward the valley in the manner of a munificent war lord bestowing wondrous spoils upon his minions. “Look there, my brothers! The very seat of the Montezumas! And soon,
soon
, by all that’s right and holy, that splendid city shall be ours!”

I
n Mexico City Santa Ana made ready. He put the federal district and surrounding states under martial law. He emptied the prisons into military training camps. He ordered every able-bodied Mexican male between the ages of fifteen and sixty to enlist in the army. Press gangs prowled the streets round the clock. Civilian construction crews were conscripted to build new defenseworks and reinforce existing ones. They flooded the surrounding marshland flanking the narrow causeways to prevent Yankee artillery from wheeling over it. Private livestock and conveyances were confiscated by the army in the name of national emergency. American civilians were ordered to join the Mexican military or get out of town.

The San Patricios were quartered in the citadel, on the western side of
the city. From there they could look across the flat marsh to the spectacular castle of Chapultepec less than two miles distant on a hill at the far end of the Belen Causeway. Awaiting their orders they passed the days training recruits and seeing to their weapons and gear. They gambled and wrote letters and got up fistfights to break the boredom. In the evenings and on Sunday afternoons they made rounds of the city and found spectacle on every side. The bullfight plaza was larger, its pageantry more expansive, its aficionados louder than they had witnessed in Puebla. They stood agape before the National Palace and then wandered across the vast main square of the Zócalo thronged with vendors, viejas, beggars, musicians and street entertainers of every stripe. They stepped timorously into the incensed shadows of the gargantuan National Cathedral whose vaulted and groined ceilings were dizzying to look upon and whose altars blazed with polished gold. They remarked upon the realistic renditions of the violence visited on Christ and the various saints depicted on the walls and windows. Moreno had seen much human flesh impaled by arrows during his tour of duty in the Yaqui lands of Sonora and he attested to the accuracy of the wounds inflicted on the statue of Saint Sebastian. It was not the first time John had been struck by such fidelity to violent detail in Mexican religious art. The nailed hands and feet of the sculpted Christ on the Cross, the gash in His side looked as though they would bloody the fingers put to them. The world, he reflected, was naught but killing and rites of blood, even among the pious. The stronger killed and ate the weaker, and the weakest of all fed on the leavings. It was Nature’s ruling principle, the most ancient of its immutable laws.

They toured the National Museum and saw bones of man and beast thousands of years older than the first writ word of history, saw gleaming Aztec daggers of obsidian that had religiously excised, steaming and still abeat, human hearts beyond number. They strolled through the sundappled park at Chapultepec and were poled on dugouts across the flower-strewn beauty of Lake Xochimilco.

And when they had done with enjoying the wonders of the city proper they repaired to brothels as finely appointed as aristocratic salons and staffed with the most desirable whores in Mexico. But not even the pleasures of the girls in La Casa de la Contessa, girls as lovely as daydreams and whiteskinned as any of the Saint Patricks themselves, could long distract them from the knowledge that the Americans were marching their way.