They Came To Cordura (16 page)

No middle name, Chawk muttered, and up in Montana, not far from a four-corners called Salmon. Thorn had to pump him about his life because the giant, his own questions going unanswered, turned sullen. He leaned back into a jeffery uncomfortably. The bright pine firelight silvered the great cocoon of bandage that was his head. His face was black with stubble except for the naked white of the bottle-scar. He had wangled or bullied leather puttees out of supply, and the lower buckle of one was missing, so that it gaped open about a thick ankle. All he remembered about Montana was living in a sod hut and the time when he and his brother, finding a nest of field mice in the roof over their bed, set fire to the nest and burned off all the ceiling grass and took a ‘whupping’ over the head by their homesteader father with a belly-band from a harness. When he was fourteen, and as big as the old man, he had repaid him with a length of angle iron and left home. He had worked southward as a ranch hand and on railroad section gang as far as ‘Albakurkey’, New Mexico, before enlisting. Of his five years in service he had been a troop sergeant for four.

“And a good one, from all I hear,” Thorn said.

“I got to be. Just between us, Major, that Lootenant Wickline ain’t fit to have no troop. If I hadn’t ‘ave took out for the roof the troop’d still be waitin’ behind them dobe buildings. We’d be there yet.”

Ordinarily the officer would have called him for the disrespect, but the opportunity was too good to lose.

“Incidentally, Sergeant, what made you start for the roof on your own hook? Were you thinking of the troop? Did you see they were in trouble and feel you had to do something about it?”

“Them buggers? Hell no, Major.”

“Why, then?” Thorn asked. “What reason can you give me for such a selfless act?”

Chawk sat forward, ran a finger into one dark ear-hole, withdraw and examined it and wiped the wax on his breeches.

“Major, I hate greasers,” he said matter-of-factly. “Too greasy an’ connivin’, they are. I figgered to make the roof an’ kill me a couple.”

Thorn shook his head. “But you had to cross at least eighty yards of open ground under fire, I paced it off.”

Chawk grinned. “That don’t make a piss-difference to me when I can lay hands on a greaser.”

Thorn sat still, blanked and repelled by the man. Over the clean scent of the pines came the reek of him, strong and animal. What had occurred on the roof of the
casa grande
at
Ojos
had not been the destruction of armed enemy so much as simple murder. It was conceivable, after all, that the act of killing might produce in a man, in some men, the same pleasurable sensations as sleep or digestion or sexual climax.

“And you will wear the Medal of Honor for this,” he said, half to himself.

Another slug lashed through the trees and with a solid chunk buried itself in a trunk nearby. Out on the perimeter one of the youngsters on guard replied with three rounds fired in quick succession. The cracking of the Springfield echoed and re-echoed in the canyon. It was probably Renziehausen, taking a boy’s aggrieved and foolish way of hitting back at those who had hurt him.

“Have you thought about the Medal?” the officer asked grimly. “What it means?”

“Sure. I can sure use the extry two horns a month. When does that start, Major?”

Thorn wanted the interview ended. He felt like one who stumbles suddenly upon something unclean, something scrawled upon the walls of human values. He was as sickened as he had been in the morning. He saw the bird again, the beak of pure white stamped into splinters.

He rose. “As soon as Congress approves the award,” he said. “I guess we are finished, Sergeant.”

The non-com did not move. His eyes moved up and down the length of the officer as though estimating the strength in the stocky figure, the steel or flab in the heavy thews of shoulder and thigh.

“Major, you ask me plenty an’ I’m supposed to talk out. I ask you a couple of thing an’ you don’t. Why is that?”

Thorn hesitated. Rough customers were legion in the Army, but he had never encountered one to equal Chawk, whose whole character and history seemed sadistic. He had had little contact with him at Columbus; a regimental executive officer was far removed from the ten troop sergeants. The thing had to come to a head and be drawn finally, like Trubee’s boil; Chawk must be taught he could not make himself familiar with, much less daunt, an officer of field grade. But there would surely be a better time.

He straightened. “Will you go out, Sergeant, and tell Renziehausen to stop wasting ammunition?”

After a moment Chawk hoisted himself, grunted something unintelligible, and pushed away into the pines.

When the senior officer came for Trubee the Geary woman was already rolled in her blanket near the big fire, her hat over her face. Lieutenant Fowler sat close to the blaze, his khaki shirt across his lap, shivering and sewing up the slit in his sleeve.

Taking the veteran back with him, Thorn got through the routine questions quickly. Trubee’s given and middle names were Milo and Sharp. The notes on his single-handed assault on the log corral position early in the
Ojos
fight checked out in each detail. But despite his years in the service Trubee was irritatingly not at ease in the presence of an officer, removing his hat and scratching with long finger-nails at his bald spot or picking at ravelings from his sweater or at one of the eruptions on his neck. Now and then he felt beneath himself where his saddle boil had been attended to. Thorn’s distaste for him increased in direct ratio to his sense of urgency. He knew Trubee’s type well. Of sub-average intelligence, by disposition a griper, a plotter, a latrine lawyer, he would lick an officer’s boots and profane him when his back was turned. In an emergency he would be unreliable. In combat he could not be trusted. But in the person of such a man, because he had performed in a certain astounding way for less than five minutes of his life, was represented what seemed to Thorn to be his last chance to see clearly the other side of the human coin.

He closed the notebook. As he prepared to phrase the next, the crucial question, Trubee began a long recital of his ills. He was in very bad health even though the surgeons joshed him or gave him pink pills. He was short of wind, each morning one leg was stiff and took half the day to limber up, ‘roomatism’, probably, and he had two twingy teeth which needed a dentist.

“I bin in tha calvary goin’ on twenny-three years, Majer, sir,” he whined. “I’d ree-tire, but half a private’s pay ain’t enough for a man to take his ease on, you know that. I could git by on full, but that’s anuther seven year an’ I tell you, Majer, sir, I ain’t likely to make it, tha shape I’m in. I’m forty-four an’ that’s too old for tha field, now ain’t it?”

“What is it you want?” Thorn asked impatiently, confirmed in his estimate.

Trubee came to his feet and removed his hat. His small round eyes blinked rapidly as though to button the lids to the pouches beneath.

“Well, Majer, sir, when we git to base I’d take it mighty kindly of you to see about me getting a transfer to tha quartermaster or mebbe drivin’ one o’ them trucks. When a man’s put in twenny years’ faithful dooty he rates consideration, seems to me. He oughta be taken outa combat. Let the young jays do tha fightin’, I say, an’ save tha old boys what’s already put in their share for tha country!”

Thorn almost choked on the irony. “Take you out of combat?” he demanded. “Why man, you’re being recommended for the Medal of Honor, the highest award that can be won in action! How in God’s name can you tell me you’re too old and feeble to fight when you fight as you did at
Ojos
? Tell me that!”

Trubee swivelled his head, put on his hat, took it off again.

“Listen to me,” Thorn said, swallowing his contempt. “I will think it over. But you have to tell me what made you charge that corral at
Ojos
. I want to know how you felt, what you thought just before you left the troop and started out alone.”

“I dunno, Majer, sir.” He was the more raddled because only then did he recall his original scheme, to lie low in an irrigation ditch, shoot his horse in the shoulder, and so skulk the action altogether.

Thorn rose. He had to try another tack. The man had to be led. “Try to remember, Trubee. A and C Troops were bunched up at the wire fence, caught in the fire from the corral. Men were being hit.”

“Yessir.”

The officer pointed a finger. “Someone had to reach the corral and do enough damage so those troops could cut and pass the wire.”

“Yessir, I seen tha Mixicans there.”

“So you lit out on your own to save the men of those troops, isn’t that right?” Thorn’s voice lifted with excitement. “You knew you might not make it, but you had to try? It was a conscious act of self-sacrifice, isn’t that right?”

“Majer, sir,” Trubee said, nodding vigorously, “you put that in writin’ an’ I’ll swear to it!”

Thorn stopped. “You’ll swear to it?”

“Why I will!” Trubee’s Adam’s apple corked up and down. “That I will, Majer!”

The officer seemed to sag. He had stooped once more to bribery, sold himself for the pottage of agreement, and suddenly the whole of the day, from the killing of the bird to the ambush, to Renziehausen’s sorrow, to the circumstances which had forced him to bring his party to this place, burst in him. With two strides he had Trubee by the shirt-front, raising him off his feet.

“You lie, damn you!” he exploded. “If there is one piece of truth in your insect soul I want it! You lied, didn’t you? It isn’t true!”

Trubee gasped for breath. “Majer, sir, if you say so it is, an’ if you say it ain’t, it ain’t!”

Thorn dropped him.

“I been in twenny-three years,” Trubee said coughing. “I know my place. I been busted three times. When a officer puts words in my mouth I let ‘im. An’ I don’t see I’ve give you proper cause to lay han’s on me.”

In the button eyes Thorn saw hatred, but worse than that, calculation. The man was treacherous to the core. His bite would poison. Sweated by emotion, shaken by disgust at himself, he turned away from Trubee, barely managing to dismiss him and to say it was time Hetherington and Renziehausen were relieved.

He stood for a while helpless with failure. The thing was over. From five men he had learned nothing.

A round from the Villistas slammed into the jefferys, angling off with the drone of a hornet, and brought him to himself. The report of the rifle was cradled by the canyon walls for a full minute. In the ensuing silence he heard the stamp and snuffle of the tied horses. The two youngsters came in, whispering as they made their blanket rolls into a double bed. The sweat cooled on him. The night was chill. He hunched closed to his fire and finally forced himself to his task.

Wilber James Renziehausen, 396543, Private, F Troop, 12th Cavalry, for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at risk of life, above and beyond the call of duty, in action involving actual conflict. On 16 April, at 05.46 hours, during an attack by Provisional Squadron, 12th Cavalry, upon Villista forces holding a ranch called
Ojos Azules
near
Cusihuiriachic
,
Mexico
, F Troop, charging down the main road, found its progress halted by an adobe wall twelve feet in height which bounded the ranch on the west. There was no possible access to the ranch, nor to the central enemy position, the roof-top of the
casa grande,
or main house, from the west except through a massive wood and iron gate in the wall, barred from the inside. Attempting to reconnoiter over the top of the gate, one member of F Troop was killed instantly. At this point, acting entirely on his own initiative, Private Renziehausen stood in his saddle, climbed over the gate and leaped to the ground inside under heavy, close-range fire from the more than 30 Mexican rifles on the roof-top. Two Mexicans appeared behind him. The first, who fired at him point-blank, he killed with his pistol. As he grappled with the second, a hand-grenade thrown from the roof-top exploded, riddling the Mexican, whose body had served him as a shield. Still under fire, Private Renziehausen then unbarred and opened the gate, permitting F Troop to enter mounted. As a result of Private Renziehausen’s courageous act, one reflecting the best traditions of the cavalry service, the full weight of F Troop was added to that of D Troop, attacking on foot, and the enemy position on the roof, the heart of Villista resistance, was reduced. Signed and sworn to, 18 April 1916, Thomas Thorn, Major, Cavalry, Awards Officer, Punitive Expedition, U.S. Army.

Trying to re-read what he had written he could not see well. Removing his glasses he found the lenses dirty and while cleaning them with his shirt-tail found also that when they had been knocked from his nose by a pine branch dust had got between the layers of tape in the knot which held bow to rim and the tape was loose. With his pocket-knife he cut off the hanging end and pinched the remaining layers together. Near-sighted, he had worn glasses as long as he could remember. Anything beyond ten feet lost sharpness, beyond a rod or two was quite blurred, but the glasses gave him complete correction and the strength of the lenses had never had to be increased. He put them on again and sat for a long time. He did not hear the occasional rounds fired across the canyon, the dull thump of what must have been Mausers answered, later, by the crack of Springfields. He did not want to talk to himself in his notebook. He did not want to think about the plight of his party or how to get them out of it. It seemed to him that he must arrive at a different definition of courage, to isolate it from goodness and morality and consider it by itself, an independent factor in the arithmetic of men. The only denominator possessed in common by the five men of the detail was their heroism. Was it conceivable that a man might be at once treacherous and brave, shiftless and brave, vicious and brave, dishonest and brave? Or the converse, be faithful, conscientious, gentle, honest, and cowardly?

He signed Renziehausen’s citation, tore out the page, folded and put it away in the oilskin envelope. He should write the other two, for Chawk and Trubee, now, tonight, for if there were fighting tomorrow he might not live to write them. Neither his life nor their citations would be a great loss. So harsh had been the impact of the interviews upon him, so repugnant to him were the characters of the pair that at the moment he did not care whether what they had accomplished went down in military annals or not. It was, in the end, for him to decide. He had not thought of that before. He should have. What he determined to give he might also determine to deny. His authority, in this matter at least, was absolute. If by their behavior subsequent to
Ojos Azules
he became convinced neither Chawk nor Trubee was worthy of the Medal, he would not write their citations. He would weigh their conduct carefully henceforth. He would put them on the scales when they reached
Cordura
and let the balance fall where it might. But if they did not reach
Cordura
?