They Came To Cordura (21 page)

Once, when they struggled down into an arroyo, Renziehausen and Chawk, at the front of the litter, stopped in their tracks. Facing them was a cluster of yuccas, high cacti, the arms aflutter with thousands of silent, migratory bluebirds. For a moment the two soldiers gaped stupidly. Then, realizing the birds would be edible, they drew pistols and blazed away wildly, emptying the automatics, sending the birds up in a living cloud. They did not hit one.

When it was Major Thorn’s turn off the litter he went forward. The low hills on the horizon seemed not to be nearing but to recede in the shimmer of heat. He could not trust his vision. He had left his binoculars in the box canyon. At the rear the Geary woman had taken off her jacket. Though she had got rid of one of her saddlebags the elastic was gone from her stride.

In the course of the next hour he watched his command go rapidly to pieces, unravel as Chawk’s bandage unravelled. Into the arroyos the bearers stumbled, lunging up out of them like service horses run to dying. The blister on Renziehausen’s heel brought on a limp. Trubee mumbled tiresomely that the pebble in his mouth hurt his gums. He had long since thrown away his sweater. Chawk seemed in the best shape, towering up his corner of the litter like a moving tree, but his mouth like that of Lieutenant Fowler was cracked. Thorn remembered hearing of men in the last extremities opening veins to moisten split lips with their own blood. From the waist up every man’s shirt was black with damp. This was the dangerous thing, the sweating. For lack of anything else to do at Columbus, Ben Ticknor had interested himself medically in the problem of dehydration, the effects on the body of prolonged water shortage. Patrols were sometimes lost, failed to locate water, and straggling back to post more dead than alive were met by the surgeon who examined them, questioned them closely. Thorn recalled some of his findings. Bodily moisture lost by sweating had to be compensated for by water intake; if sweat was not replaced by water ounce for ounce breathing quickened, pulse rate and rectal temperature increased, blood volume diminished and circulation slowed, producing muscular difficulty. Temperamentally, dehydrating men grew sullen, intractable, and in the last stages, emotionally unstable. For seven weeks prior to
Ojos
these men had been in the field, committed almost to their limit; now they managed on nerve alone, and when that was gone they would have nothing, no reserve, on which to draw. Without a find of water or the reassurance of iron rails he did not see how they could be kept going even the remainder of this day, much less the next. And for what they were having to endure, the wearing down and the defeat, he damned himself. Giving up the horses had been his decision. He had saved them only to sacrifice them to himself.

He wondered how much longer he could control. By instinct they were still soldiering, but hunger and thirst, particularly the latter if Ben Ticknor’s observations proved out, would put an end to that. For whatever they might do he could not blame them. In their condition they were not responsible. He wondered if Fowler would come to his aid. He wondered where Renziehausen would stand in a showdown. Since the loss of his ear the boy had not been himself.

They might disobey an order to take up the litter.

Or they might refuse to go on without water.

Or they might jump him.

He halted them every twenty minutes now. The rock was too hot to lie on and they sat where they were, heads down, picking the barbs of the
agrito
from their legs and feeling the raw of their faces in a stupor of exhaustion. After each break it was more difficult to get them on their feet.

As they went down into an arroyo a loud voice rang out. “‘For the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills; a land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pome granates; a land of olive oil, and honey, a land where-in thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack anything in it. When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the Lord thy God for the good land which He hath given thee.’”

They got Hetherington down to the pebbly bottom and removing the shirt Major Thorn found him in another coma of fever, his skin burning, eyes closed, head turning from side to side. Raising him he put two quinine tablets in his mouth and enough water to enable him to swallow. The Geary woman brought the bottle and bending over the stricken youth to shield him from the sun the officer began rubbing his face and neck and hands with the liquor. He told the others they would not move until the crisis had passed. The seizure was more severe than that of the preceding night; for almost an hour Thorn worked without ceasing while the soldier babbled the Old Testament, now from the Book of Psalms, now extended genealogies, now snatches of the Hebrew law. When at last his limbs stiffened and sweat poured from him and he lay back as though lifeless, the officer could scarcely stand with the cramp of his exertions. Lieutenant Fowler and Renziehausen were hunched nearby. The Geary woman was out of sight. So were Chawk and Trubee. It took a moment for his mind to alarm his body. Then with a shout at the others he set out on the run down the arroyo. It doubled sharply and he put out his hands to keep from crashing into a large granite outcrop. Over his own panting he heard a sound. Reaching down his right leg to unholster his automatic he stepped warily around the granite.

They had her breeches off and her shirt pulled up and tied round her head, the tails wadded into her mouth so that she could not scream.

At her head Chawk pinioned her arms wide in sand, his knees on her shoulders.

Trubee, his breeches down, tried to butt between her legs, cursing with pain as her knees smashed up at his bare buttocks, at the bandage where the boil had been drawn.

Intent on the act they did not see Thorn as he stepped to them and shoved the snubnose of the .45 into the base of Trubee’s neck.

“Get up,” he said harshly. “Let her up.” Trubee scrambled like an animal, hitching at his breeches.

Chawk lumbered up, his hat falling off. Thorn had never seen such menace on a man’s face.

Lieutenant Fowler and Renziehausen reached them. “If you try this again,” Thorn breathed, “I will prefer charges the day we get to base.” He kept the muzzle full on them.

“An’ what the hell day may that be?” Chawk snarled. “You dunno where that railroad is any more ‘n yer ass. . . ”

“Puffer charges, hah?” Trubee cinched his belt tight and sidled next to the sergeant. “I’ll do tha pufferin’! We ain’t takin’ no more orders from a officer whose guts is yella!”

“That’s enough!” Thorn cried.

Trubee pulled the pebble from his mouth and hurled it to the ground.

“You can’t do nothin’ to nobody! Tell tha boys, Majer—tell ‘em where they found them goddam oak leaves at Columbus! In a ditch, boys! That’s where he was while we was fightin’ for flag an’ country! Tha dirty yella-guts hid out in a ditch! An’ would Seeley Rogers put ’im before a board—no! Tha hull goddam gang a officers hushed it up—hadda been a ordin’ry soljer like you an’ me we’da been to Levinworth, that’s what!” Trubee fairly screamed. “So that high mucky-muck tellin’ us we’re heroes, boys, an’ tryin’ to kill tha lot of us, an’ I say blow ‘im fulla holes an’ put tha pud to tha whoor an’ find our own way home—he dassn’t shoot, boys, he’s a yella-guts, a yella-guts!”

Westering sun glared on Thorn’s glasses and he could scarcely see them. Adelaide Geary had disappeared behind the outcrop. He realized Fowler and Renziehausen were behind him. He had to act before what Trubee said sank in.

“Lieutenant, take their guns.”

The scene was hellish, the men facing him like red men standing at bay in a blaze of red from rock on fire. Behind him nothing moved.

“Mister, take their guns!”

Fowler passed him and removed the pistols from their holsters.

Thorn swung around and motioned with the gun at Renziehausen. “His, too.”

Fowler obeyed.

‘Throw them as far as you can.’’

The Lieutenant heaved them out of the arroyo where they fell and clattered.

“Now move. I will shoot if I have to. I will wing you in the shoulder or arm or leg and you will get to base if you have to crawl. Now move.”

Thorn marched them back towards Hetherington.

“It won’t do, Majer,” Trubee said without turning. “Pullin’ a gun like you had tha craw to use it. You take us in like pris’ners an’ pin them dekkerations on us an’ tha boys an’ me will wag jaw till they rip them goddam leaves offa you.”

“Shut yer yap,” Chawk advised. “He’ll never take us in—we ain’t inclined to go.”

“March,” Thorn said.

After they reached the equipment he had Fowler collect all five Springfields and Hetherington’s pistol and hide them in the cactus. He told Renziehausen he was sorry to do this, he trusted him, but he thought it best only officers carry weapons henceforth. The boy stared at him, not listening, remembering Trubee’s words and trying to picture his commander in a ditch. Putting Fowler on guard, Thorn went back for the woman. She sat behind the outcrop trying to be sick on an empty stomach. When he spoke to her she rose and followed him.

He had the three enlisted men strip off ammunition belts as he and Lieutenant Fowler took the rifle cartridges from their own. Then, after re-wetting the shirt over Hetherington’s face, he ordered the litter hoisted, putting himself and the junior officer at the rear end with holsters unbuttoned and telling Trubee to stay out in front.

Not until they mounted the side of the arroyo did what had happened hit him. It was out, foul, with no mercy, but out. It was as though he had been leeched suddenly of a thing which for weeks had poisoned his being, but now, freed of it, he was also bereft of that which had given him power, no matter if misused, and bearing, no matter if compassless. In an arroyo somewhere, God knew where, in the state of
Chihuahua
in
Mexico
, a rape had been attempted upon the body of a woman and performed upon the soul of a man. Nothing for that man would ever be the same. He closed his eyes and let the pull of the litter lead him.

As the sun drove down the sierra at their backs the shadow of the litter, like that of a sail, grew long before them, vanishing into arroyos and scudding up from them as the bearers stumbled towards the low hills, rubied now, which slithered away in space. Trubee stumped in front, his head swiveling over his shoulders to spy on the two officers. The Geary woman shuffled after. Chawk had left his hat at the place where they had attacked her. At each stop, timed according to exhaustion, the senior officer checked Hetherington’s forehead. Fever still burnt in him like a candle low of wick. Once, when they took him up, he was tipped to the ground and lay with eyes closed. Yet when lifted again and moved a few steps his voice sounded above, reciting, and Trubee swore at him, saying to the others, see, that was what he was, a “snot-nose, holy-rollin’ preacher”. Even with day dying, the air over the basin did not cool for the rock held the heat. They were men in the last stages of consciousness.

In the oven that was his skull Thomas Thorn talked to himself.

‘One of the canteens is empty and I am carrying it.

‘In
El Paso
they are playing the last chukker at the Fort. On
Chavez
Avenue the cattlemen gather in the hotels and stand with one boot on the rails while the ladies preparing for the evening bathe in perfumed water.

‘I left the rifles. If we run into Arreaga again. . . ”

‘According to a literary scholar and military surgeon and the last friend I will ever have, so malformed were his legs that Alexander Pope required three pairs of stockings and the services of a maid to draw them on.

‘I do not have much left. If I go down may I be forgiven.’

‘The Tex—Mex runs northwest from
Chihuahua
to
Cordura
, north through
Dublán
to the border. It is a ride of two days,
mas o menos,
to the railroad, and of one, then, to
Cordura
.

‘At
Verdun
, do the French hold firm?’

‘I could not shoot them, even in the arm or leg. They are of the golden race.’

‘Thomas Woodrow Wilson of Princeton. John Joseph Pershing and William Clenning Fowler of West Point. And Plebe Poe.’

‘“If I could dwell where Israfel hath dwelt, and he where I, he might not sing so wildly well a mortal melody” with cowardice in his heart and a stone in his mouth.’

‘There is the bird.’

He was overjoyed that the toucan was alive after all, to watch it soar straight and low over the hills, larger and closer, its plumage aflash in the last of the sun. He turned and said something to the Geary woman, pointing with free arm, and the others stopped and looked where he pointed. The bird flew nearly overhead with a great popping noise and they saw the black number 44 on its side. Not until the biplane was winging north from them did they drop the litter roughly and wave and shout after it with cracking voices. When it disappeared they sank in their places a long time.

What finally stirred them were Trubee’s tears and snuffled iteration that he was too old for the field and his years of faithful service too many that he should die in a place like this.

Blessed dusk cooled the basin. They could go no farther. Promising them food and water when they were done, Major Thorn pointed out and set them to pulling up the
chamiso
and chopping its roots. It was the only fuel. When they had cut enough to last the night and a fire was lit he doled out water in cups and Lieutenant Fowler small portions of native corn from the grain-bag. Searching until he found a tiny hollow in the rock, the senior officer showed them how to pour the corn into it and pound it to a powder with a stone. When mixed with water heated in the cup it was called
pinole
and was very nourishing if not palatable. So infirm was their pounding that by the time they were prepared to eat, it was night. Above them big stars burst.

As was his custom Thorn made his own fire. Lieutenant Fowler helped him bring Hetherington’s litter to the new fire where he could be tended; he seemed to be asleep and no attempt was made to feed him
pinole,
greasy-tasting since there had been no water with which to wash the tin cups after the morning meal. Fowler and the Geary woman ate with the senior officer. Thorn did not fear trouble from the men during the night; he could alternate guard with Fowler. Trubee and Renziehausen had already bedded down and Chawk was unbuckling puttees. After the Geary woman left to roll into her blankets Thorn spoke to the Lieutenant.