In the streets – Brassteeth – Los heréticos – A veteran of the 1ate war – Mier – Doniphan – The Lipan buria1 – Go1dseekers – The sca1phunters – The judge – /reed from the prison – Et de ceo se mettent en 1e pays.
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With daylight men rose from the hay and crouched on their haunches and regarded the new arrivals without curiosity.
They were half naked and they sucked their teeth and snumed and stirred and picked at themselves like apes. A chary light had washed a high small window from the dark and an early streetvendor’d begun to cry his wares.
Their morning feed was bowls of cold piñole and they were fitted with chains and routed out into the streets clanking and stinking. Overseen all day by a goldtoothed pervert who carried a plaited rawhide quirt and harried them down the gutters on their knees gathering up the filth. Under the wheels of vending-carts, the legs of beggars, dragging behind them their sacks of refuse. In the afternoon they sat in the shade of a wall and ate their dinner and watched two dogs hung together in the street sidle and step.
How do you like city life? said Toadvine. I dont like it worth a damn so far.
I keep waitin for it to take with me but it aint done it.
They watched the overseer covertly as he passed, his hands clasped behind his back, his cap cocked over one eye. The kid spat.
I seen him first, said Toadvine.
Seen who first.
You know who. Old Brassteeth yonder. The kid looked after the sauntering figure.
My biggest worry is that somethin will happen to him. I pray daily for the Lord to watch over him.
How you think you goin to get out of this jackpot that you’re in? We’ll get out. It aint like the cárcel.
What’s the cárcel?
State penitentiary. There’s old pilgrims in there come down the trail back in the twenties.
The kid watched the dogs.
After a while the guard came back along the wall kicking the feet of any who were sleeping. The younger guard carried his escopeta at the ready as if there might be some fabled uprising among these chained and tattered felons. Vamonos, vamonos, he called. The prisoners rose and shumed out into the sun. A small bell was ringing and a coach was coming up the street. They stood along the curb and took off their hats. The guidon passed ringing the bell and then the coach. It had an eye painted on the side and four mules to draw it, taking the host to some soul. A fat priest tottered after carrying an image. The guards were going among the prisoners snatching the hats from the heads of the newcomers and pressing them into their infidel hands.
When the coach had passed they donned their hats again and moved on. The dogs stood tail to tail. Two other dogs sat a little apart, squatting loosely in their skins, just frames of dogs in napless hides watching the coupled dogs and then watching the prisoners clanking away up the street. All lightly shimmering in the heat, these lifeforms, like wonders much reduced. Rough likenesses thrown up at hearsay after the things themselves had faded in men’s minds.
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He’d taken up a pallet between Toadvine and another Kentuckian, a veteran of the war. This man had returned to claim some darkeyed love he’d left behind two years before when Doniphan’s command pulled east for Saltillo and the o cers had had to drive back hundreds of young girls dressed as boys that took the road behind the army. Now he would stand in the street solitary in his chains and strangely unassuming, gazing out across the tops of the heads of the townspeople, and at night he’d tell them of his years in the west, an amiable warrior, a reticent man. He’d been at Mier where they fought until the draintiles and the gutters and the spouts from the azoteas ran with blood by the gallon and he told them how the brittle old Spanish bells would explode when hit and how he sat against a wall with his shattered leg stretched out on the cobbles before him listening to a lull in the firing that grew into a strange silence and in this silence there grew a low rumbling that he took for thunder until a cannonball came around the corner trundling over the stones like a wayward bowl and went past and down the street and disappeared from sight. He told how they’d taken the city of Chihuahua, an army of irregulars that fought in rags and underwear and how the cannonballs were solid copper and came loping through the grass like runaway suns and even the horses learned to sidestep or straddle them and how the dames of the city rode up into the hills in buggies and picnicked and watched the battle and how at night as they sat by the fires they could hear the moans of the dying out on the plain and see by its lantern the deadcart moving among them like a hearse from limbo.
They had gravel enough, said the veteran, but they didnt know how to fight. They’d stick. You heard stories about how they found em chained to the trailspades of their pieces, limber-teams and all, but if they was I never seen it. We picked powder in the locks yonder. Blowed them gates open. People in here looked like skinned rats. Whitest Mexicans you’ll ever see. Thowed theirselves down and commenced kissin our feet and such. Old Bill, he just turned em all loose. Hell, he didnt know what they’d done. tust told em not to steal nothin. Of course they stole everthing they could get their
hands on. Whipped two of em and they both died of it and the very next day another bunch run off with some mules and Bill just flat out hung them fools. Which they did likewise perish of. But I never reckoned I’d be in here my own self.
They were squatting crosslegged by candlelight eating from clay bowls with their fingers. The kid looked up. He poked at the bowl.
What is this? he said.
That’s prime bullmeat, son. From the corrida. You’ll get it of a Sunday night.
You best keep chewin. Dont let it feel ye to weaken.
He chewed. He chewed and he told them of the encounter with the Comanche and they chewed and listened and nodded.
I’m proud I missed that dance, said the veteran. Them is some cruel sons of bitches. I know of one old boy up on the Llano near the dutch settlements, they caught him, took his horse and all. Left him to walk it. He come crawlin into Fredericksburg on his hands and knees buck naked about six days later and you know what they’d done? Cut the bottoms of his feet off.
Toadvine shook his head. He gestured toward the veteran. Grannyrat here knows em, he told the kid. Fought em. Aint ye, Granny?
The veteran waved his hand. Shot some stealin horses is all. Down towards Saltillo. Wasnt nothin to it. There was a cave down there had been a Lipan burial. Must of been a thousand indians in there all settin around. Had on their best robes and blankets and all. Had their bows and their knives, whatever. Beads. The Mexicans carried everthing off. Stripped em naked. Took it all. They carried off whole indians to their homes and set em in the corner all dressed up but they begun to come apart when they got out of that cave air and they had to be thowed out. Towards the last of it they was some Americans went in there and scalped what was left of em and tried to sell the scalps in Durango. I dont know if they had any luck about it or not. I expect some of them injins had been dead a hundred year.
Toadvine was toweling up grease from his bowl with a folded tortilla. He squinted at the kid in the candlelight. What do you reckon we could get for old Brassteeth’s teeth? he said.
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They saw patched argonauts from the states driving mules through the streets on their way south through the mountains to the coast. Goldseekers. Itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague. They nodded or spoke to the prisoners and dropped tobacco and coins in the street beside them.
They saw blackeyed young girls with painted faces smoking little cigars, going arm in arm and eyeing them brazenly. They saw the governor himself erect and formal within his silkmullioned sulky clatter forth from the double doors of the palace courtyard and they saw one day a pack of viciouslooking humans mounted on unshod indian ponies riding half drunk through the streets, bearded, barbarous, clad in the skins of animals stitched up with thews and armed with weapons of every description, revolvers of enormous weight and bowieknives the size of claymores and short twobarreled rifles with bores you could stick your thumbs in and the trappings of their horses fashioned out of human skin and their bridles woven up from human hair and decorated with human teeth and the riders wearing scapulars or necklaces of dried and blackened human ears and the horses rawlooking and wild in the eye and their teeth bared like feral dogs and riding also in the company a number of halfnaked savages reeling in the saddle, dangerous, filthy, brutal, the whole like a visitation from some heathen land where they and others like them fed on human flesh.
Foremost among them, outsized and childlike with his naked face, rode the judge. His cheeks were ruddy and he was smiling and bowing to the ladies and do ng his filthy hat. The enormous dome of his head when he bared it was blinding white and perfectly circumscribed about so that it looked to have been painted. He and the reeking horde of rabble with him passed on through the stunned streets and hove up before the governor’s palace where their leader,
a small blackhaired man, clapped for entrance by kicking at the oaken doors with his boot. The doors were opened forthwith and they rode in, rode in all, and the doors were closed again.
Gentlemens, said Toadvine, I’ll guarangoddamntee ye I know what that there is about.
The following day the judge in the company of others stood in the street smoking a cigar and rocking back on his heels. He wore a pair of good kidskin boots and he was studying the prisoners where they knelt in the gutter clutching up the filth with their bare hands. The kid was watching the judge. When the judge’s eyes fell upon him he took the cigar from between his teeth and smiled. Or he seemed to smile. Then he put the cigar between his teeth again.
That night Toadvine called them together and they crouched by the wall and spoke in whispers.
His name is Glanton, said Toadvine. He’s got a contract with Trias. They’re to pay him a hundred dollars a head for scalps and a thousand for Gómez’s head. I told him there was three of us. Gentlemens, we’re gettin out of this shithole.
We aint got no outfits.
He knows that. He said he’d find anybody that was a guaranteed hand and take it out of their shares. So dont let on like you aint no seasoned indiankiller cause I claimed we was three of the best.
Three days later they rode out singlefile through the streets with the governor and his party, the governor on a pale gray stallion and the killers on their small warponies, smiling and bowing and the lovely darkskinned girls throwing flowers from the windows and some blowing kisses and small boys running alongside and old men waving their hats and crying out huzzahs and Toadvine and the kid and the veteran bringing up the rear, the veteran’s feet tucked into tapaderos slung nearly to the ground, so long were his legs, so short the horse’s. Out to the edge of the city by the old stone aqueduct where the governor gave them his blessing and drank their health and their fortune in a simple ceremonial and they took the road upcountry.
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B1ack and white 5acksons – A meeting on the outskirts – Whitneyvi11e Co1ts – A tria1 – The judge among disputants – De1aware indians – The Vandiemen1ander – A hacienda – The town of Corra1itos – Pasajeros de un paÃs antiguo – Scene of a massacre – Hiccius Doccius – A naming of fortunes – Whee11ess upon a dark river – The fe1on wind – Tertium quid – The town of 5anos – G1anton takes a sca1p – 5ackson takes the stage.
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I
n this company there rode two men named tackson, one black, one white, both forenamed tohn. Bad blood lay between them and as they rode up under the barren mountains the white man would fall back alongside the other and take his shadow for the shade that was in it and whisper to him. The black would check or start his horse to shake him off. As if the white man were in violation of his person, had stumbled onto some ritual dormant in his dark blood or his dark soul whereby the shape he stood the sun from on that rocky ground bore something of the man himself and in so doing lay imperiled. The white man laughed and crooned things to him that sounded like the words of love. All watched to see how this would go with them but none would caution either back from his course and when Glanton looked to the rear along the column from time to time he seemed to simply reckon them among
his number and ride on.
Earlier that morning the company had met in a courtyard behind a house on the outskirts of the city. Two men carried from a wagon a stenciled ordnance box from the Baton Rouge arsenal and a Prussian jew named Speyer pried open the box with a pritchel and a
shoeing hammer and handed up a flat package in brown butcherpaper translucent with grease like a paper of bakery goods. Glanton opened the package and let the paper fall to the dirt. In his hand he held a longbarreled sixshot Colt’s patent revolver. It was a huge sidearm meant for dragoons and it carried in its long cylinders a rifle’s charge and weighed close to five pounds loaded. These pistols would drive the half-ounce conical ball through six inches of hardwood and there were four dozen of them in the case. Speyer was breaking out the gang-molds and flasks and tools and tudge Holden was unwrapping another of the pistols. The men pressed about. Glanton wiped the bore and chambers of the piece and took the flask from Speyer.
She’s a stout looker, said one.
He charged the bores and seated a bullet and drove it home with the hinged lever pinned to the underside of the barrel. When all the chambers were loaded he capped them and looked about. In that courtyard other than merchants and buyers were a number of living things. The first that Glanton drew sight upon was a cat that at that precise moment appeared upon the high wall from the other side as silently as a bird alighting. It turned to pick its way among the cusps of broken glass set upright in the mud masonry. Glanton leveled the huge pistol in one hand and thumbed back the hammer. The explosion in that dead silence was enormous. The cat simply disappeared. There was no blood or cry, it just vanished. Speyer glanced uneasily at the Mexicans. They were watching Glanton. Glanton thumbed back the hammer again and swung the pistol. A group of fowl in the corner of the courtyard that had been pecking in the dry dust stood nervously, their heads at varied angles. The pistol roared and one of the birds exploded in a cloud of feathers. The others began to trot mutely, their long necks craned. He fired again. A second bird spun and lay kicking. The others flared, piping thinly, and Glanton turned with the pistol and shot a small goat that was standing with its throat pressed to the wall in terror and it fell stone dead in the dust and he fired upon a clay garraffa that burst in a shower of potsherds and water and he raised the pistol and swung
toward the house and rang the bell in its mud tower above the roof, a solemn tolling that hung on in the emptiness after the echoes of the gunfire had died away.
A haze of gray gunsmoke lay over the courtyard. Glanton set the hammer at halfcock and spun the cylinder and lowered the hammer again. A woman appeared in the doorway of the house and one of the Mexicans spoke to her and she went in again.
Glanton looked at Holden and then he looked at Speyer. The jew smiled nervously.
They aint worth no fifty dollars.
Speyer looked grave. What is your life worth? he said.
In Texas five hundred but you’d have to discount the note with your ass.
Mr Riddle thinks that it’s a fair price. Mr Riddle aint payin it.
He’s putting up the money.
Glanton turned the pistol in his hand and examined it. I thought it was agreed, said Speyer.
Aint nothin agreed.
They were contracted for the war. You’ll not see their like again. Not till some money changes hands it aint agreed.
A detachment of soldiers, ten or a dozen of them, entered from the street with their arms at the ready.
Qué pasa aqu�
Glanton looked at the soldiers without interest. Nada, said Speyer. Todo va bien.
Bien? The sergeant was looking at the dead birds, the goat. The woman appeared at the door again.
Está bien, said Holden. Negocios del Gobernador.
The sergeant looked at them and he looked at the woman in the door.
Somos amigos del Señor Riddle, said Speyer.
Andale, said Glanton. You and your halfassedlookin niggers.
The sergeant stepped forward and assumed a posture of authority. Glanton spat. The judge had already crossed the space between them and now he took the sergeant aside and fell to conversing with him. The sergeant came to his armpit and the judge spoke warmly and gestured with a great expansiveness of spirit. The soldiers squatted in the dust with their muskets and regarded the judge without expression.
Dont you give that son of a bitch no money, said Glanton.
But the judge was already bringing the man forward for a formal presentation.
Le presento al sargento Aguilar, he called, hugging the ragged militant to him. The sergeant held out his hand quite gravely. It occupied that space and the attention of all who stood there like something presented for validation and then Speyer stepped forward and took it.
Mucho gusto.
Igualmente, said the sergeant.
The judge escorted him from one to the next of the company, the sergeant formal and the Americans muttering obscenities or shaking their heads silently. The soldiers squatted on their heels and watched each movement in this charade with the same dull interest and at length the judge hove up before the black.
That dark vexed face. He studied it and he drew the sergeant forward the better for him to observe and then he began a laborious introduction in Spanish. He sketched for the sergeant a problematic career of the man before them, his hands drafting with a marvelous dexterity the shapes of what varied paths conspired here in the ultimate authority of the extant—as he told them—like strings drawn together through the eye of a ring. He adduced for their
consideration references to the children of Ham, the lost tribes of Israelites, certain passages from the Greek poets, anthropological speculations as to the propagation of the races in their dispersion and isolation through the agency of geological cataclysm and an assessment of racial traits with respect to climatic and geographical influences. The sergeant listened to this and more with great attention and when the judge was done he stepped forward and held out his hand.
tackson ignored him. He looked at the judge. What did you tell him, Holden?
Dont insult him, man. What did you tell him?
The sergeant’s face had clouded. The judge took him about the shoulders and leaned and spoke into his ear and the sergeant nodded and stepped back and saluted the black.
What did you tell him, Holden?
That shaking hands was not the custom in your land. Before that. What did you say to him before that.
The judge smiled. It is not necessary, he said, that the principals here be in possession of the facts concerning their case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding. But it is consistent with notions of right principle that these facts—to the extent that they can be readily made to do so—should find a repository in the witness of some third party. Sergeant Aguilar is just such a party and any slight to his o ce is but a secondary consideration when compared to divergences in that larger protocol exacted by the formal agenda of an absolute destiny. Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.
The black was sweating. A dark vein in his temple pulsed like a fuse. The company had listened to the judge in silence. A few smiled. A halfwitted killer from Missouri guffawed softly like an
asthmatic. The judge turned again to the sergeant and they spoke together and the judge and he crossed to where the crate stood in the courtyard and the judge showed him one of the pistols and explained its workings with great patience. The sergeant’s men had risen and stood waiting. At the gate the judge doled coins into Aguilar’s palm and he shook hands formally with each ragged charge and complimented them upon their military bearing and they exited into the street.
At noon that day the partisans rode out each man armed with a pair of the pistols and took the road upcountry as told.
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The outriders returned in the evening and the men dismounted for the first time that day and recruited their horses in the sparse swale while Glanton conferred with the scouts. Then they rode on until dark and made camp. Toadvine and the veteran and the kid squatted at a small remove from the fires. They did not know that they were set forth in that company in the place of three men slain in the desert. They watched the Delawares, of whom there were a number in the party, and they too sat somewhat apart, crouched on their heels, one pounding coffeebeans in a buckskin with a rock while the others stared into the fire with eyes as black as gunbores. That night the kid would see one of them sort with his hand among the absolute embers for a right coal with which to light his pipe.
They were about in the morning before daybreak and they caught up and saddled their mounts as soon as it was light enough to see. The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning. As the riders came up through the mesquite and pyracantha singlefile in a light clank of arms and chink of bitrings the sun climbed and the moon set and the horses and the dewsoaked mules commenced to steam in flesh and in shadow.
Toadvine had fallen in with a fugitive from Vandiemen’s Land named Bathcat who had come west on legbail. He was from Wales by birth and he had but three fingers to his right hand and few teeth. Perhaps he saw in Toadvine a fellow fugitive—an earless and branded felon who had chosen in life much as had he—and he offered to wager as to which tackson would kill which.
I dont know them boys, said Toadvine. How do ye think then?
Toadvine spat quietly to one side and looked at the man. I wouldnt want to bet, he said.
Not a gaming man? Depends on the game.
The blackie will do for him. Take your odds.
Toadvine looked at him. The necklace of human ears he wore looked like a string of dried black figs. He was big and rawlooking and one eyelid sagged where a knife had severed the small muscles there and he was furnished with gear of every class, the fine with the shoddy. He wore good boots and he carried a handsome rifle bound with german silver but the rifle was slung in a cutoff bootleg and his shirt was in tatters and his hat rancid.
Ye’ve not hunted the aborigines afore, said Bathcat. Who says it?
I know it.
Toadvine didnt answer. You’ll find em right lively. So I hear.
The Vandiemenlander smiled. Much is changed, he said. When I first come into this country there was savages up on the San Saba had hardly seen white men. They come into our camp and we shared our mess with em and they couldnt keep their eyes off our knives. Next day they brought whole strings of horses into camp to trade. We didnt know what they wanted. They had knives of their
own, such as they was. But what it was, you see, was they’d never seen sawed bones in a stew before.
Toadvine glanced at the man’s forehead but the man’s hat was pushed down almost to his eyes. The man smiled and forked the hat back slightly with his thumb. The print of the hatband lay on his forehead like a scar but there was no mark other. Only on the inside of his lower arm was there tattooed a number which Toadvine would see in a Chihuahua bathhouse and again when he would cut down the man’s torso where it hung skewered by its heels from a treelimb in the wastes of Pimeria Alta in the fall of that year.
They rode up through cholla and nopal, a dwarf forest of spined things, through a stone gap in the mountains and down among blooming artemisia and aloe. They crossed a broad plain of desert grass dotted with palmilla. On the slopes were gray stone walls that followed the ridgelines down to where they lay broached and tumbled upon the plain. They did not noon nor did they siesta and the cotton eye of the moon squatted at broad day in the throat of the mountains to the east and they were still riding when it overtook them at its midnight meridian, sketching on the plain below a blue cameo of such dread pilgrims clanking north.
They spent the night in the corral of a hacienda where all night men kept watchfires burning on the azoteas or roofs. Two weeks before this a party of campesinos had been hacked to death with their own hoes and partly eaten by hogs while the Apaches rounded up what stock would drive and disappeared into the hills. Glanton ordered a goat killed and this was done in the corral while the horses shied and trembled and in the flaring light of the fires the men squatted and roasted the meat and ate it with knives and wiped their fingers in their hair and turned in to sleep upon the beaten clay.
At dusk of the third day they rode into the town of Corralitos, the horses shuming through the caked ash and the sun glaring redly through the smoke. The smelter chimneys were ranged against an ashen sky and the globy lights of the furnaces glowered under the dark of the hills. It had rained in the day and the windowlights of
the low mud houses were reflected in pools along the flooded road out of which great dripping swine rose moaning before the advancing horses like oafish demons routed from a fen. The houses were loopholed and parapeted and the air was filled with the fumes of arsenic. The people had turned out to see the Texans, they called them, standing solemnly along the way and noting the least of their gestures with looks of awe, looks of wonder.
They camped in the plaza, blackening the cottonwoods with their fires and driving forth the sleeping birds, the flames lighting up the wretched town to its darkest pens and bringing forth even the blind tottering with their hands outstretched toward that conjectural day. Glanton and the judge with the Brown brothers rode out to the hacienda of General Zuloaga where they were received and given their dinner and the night passed without incident.
In the morning when they had saddled their mounts and were assembled in the square to ride out they were approached by a family of itinerant magicians seeking safe passage upcountry as far as tanos. Glanton looked down at them from his place at the head of the column. Their goods were piled up in tattered panniers lashed to the backs of three burros and they were a man and his wife and a grown boy and a girl. They were dressed in fools costumes with stars and halfmoons embroidered on and the once gaudy colors were faded and pale from the dust of the road and they looked a set of right wander-folk cast on this evil terrain. The old man came forward and took the bridle of Glanton’s horse.
Get your hands off the horse, said Glanton.
He spoke no english but he did as he was told. He commenced to put forth his case. He gestured, he pointed back toward the others. Glanton watched him, who knows if he heard at all. He turned and looked at the boy and at the two women and he looked down at the man again.
What are you? he said.
The man held his ear toward Glanton and looked up with mouth agape.
I said what are you? Are you a show? He looked back toward the others.
A show, said Glanton. Bufones.
The man’s face brightened. SÃ, he said. SÃ, bufones. Todo. He turned to the boy. Casimero! Los perros!
The boy ran to one of the burros and began to tug among the packings. He came up with a pair of bald and bat-eared animals slightly larger than rats and pale brown in color and he pitched them into the air and caught them on the palms of his hands where they began to pirouette mindlessly.
Mire, mire! called the man. He was fishing about in his pockets and soon he was juggling four small wooden balls in front of Glanton’s horse. The horse snorted and lifted its head and Glanton leaned over the saddle and spat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
Aint that the drizzlin shits, he said.
The man was juggling and calling back over his shoulder to the women and the dogs were dancing and the women were turning to in preparation of something when Glanton spoke to the man.
Dont start no more of that crazy shit. You want to ride with us you fall in in the back. I promise you nothin. Vamonos.
He rode on. The company clanked into motion and the juggler ran shooing the women toward the burros and the boy stood wide-eyed with the dogs under his arm until the man spoke to him. They rode out through the rabble past great cones of slag and tailings. The people watched them go. Some of the men stood hand in hand like lovers and a small child led forth a blind man on a string to a place of vantage.
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At noon they crossed the stony bottom of the Casas Grandes River and they rode along a benchland above the gaunt rill of water past a place of bones where Mexican soldiers had slaughtered an
encampment of Apaches some years gone, women and children, the bones and skulls scattered along the bench for half a mile and the tiny limbs and toothless paper skulls of infants like the ossature of small apes at their place of murder and old remnants of weathered basketry and broken pots among the gravel. They rode on. The river led a limegreen corridor of trees down out of the barren mountains. To the west lay the ragged Carcaj and to the north the Animas peaks dim and blue.
They made camp that night on a windy plateau among piñon and juniper and the fires leaned downwind in the darkness and hot chains of sparks raced among the scrub. The jugglers unloaded the burros and began to set up a large gray tent. The canvas was scrawled with arcana and it flapped and lurched, stood towering, luffed and wrapped them about. The girl lay on the ground holding to one corner. She began to drag through the sand. The juggler took small steps. The woman’s eyes were rigid in the light. As the company watched the four of them all clutched to the snapping cloth were towed mutely from sight beyond the reach of the firelight and into the howling desert like supplicants at the skirts of some wild and irate goddess.
The pickets saw the tent lumber horribly away into the night. When the family of jugglers returned they were arguing among themselves and the man went again to the edge of the firelight and peered out upon the wrathful blackness and spoke to it and gestured with his fist nor would he return until the woman sent the boy to fetch him. Now he sat staring at the flames while the family unpacked. They watched him uneasily. Glanton watched him also.
Showman, he said.
The juggler looked up. He put one finger to his chest. You, said Glanton.
He rose and shumed forward. Glanton was smoking a slender black cigar. He looked up at the juggler.
You tell fortunes?
The juggler’s eyes skittered. Cómo? he said.
Glanton put the cigar in his mouth and mimed a deal of cards with his hands. La baraja, he said. Para adivinar la suerte.
The juggler tossed one hand aloft. SÃ, sÃ, he said, shaking his head with vigor. Todo, todo. He held up one finger and then turned and made his way to the trove of shoddy partly omoaded from the burros. When he returned he was smiling affably and manipulating the cards very nimbly.
Venga, he called. Venga.
The woman followed him. The juggler squatted before Glanton and spoke to him in a low voice. He turned and looked at the woman and he rimed the cards and rose and took her by the hand and led her over the ground away from the fire and seated her facing out into the night. She swept up her skirt and composed herself and he took from his shirt a kerchief and with it bound her eyes.
Bueno, he called. Puedes ver? No.
Nada?
Nada, said the woman. Bueno, said the juggler.
He turned with the deck of cards and advanced toward Glanton.
The woman sat like a stone. Glanton waved him away.
Los caballeros, he said.
The juggler turned. The black was squatting by the fire watching and when the juggler fanned the cards he rose and came forward.
The juggler looked up at him. He folded the cards and fanned them again and he made a pass over them with his left hand and held them forth and tackson took a card and looked at it.
Bueno, said the juggler. Bueno. He admonished caution with a forefinger to his thin lips and took the card and held it aloft and turned with it. The card popped once sharply. He looked at the company seated about the fire. They were smoking, they were
watching. He made a slow sweep before him with the card outheld. It bore the picture of a fool in harlequin and a cat. El tonto, he called.
El tonto, said the woman. She raised her chin slightly and she began a singsong chant. The dark querent stood solemnly, like a man arraigned. His eyes shifted over the company. The judge sat upwind from the fire naked to the waist, himself like some great pale deity, and when the black’s eyes reached his he smiled. The woman ceased. The fire fled down the wind.
Quién, quién, cried the juggler. She paused. El negro, she said.
El negro, cried the juggler, turning with the card. His clothes snapped in the wind. The woman raised her voice and spoke again and the black turned to his mates.
What does she say?
The juggler had turned and was making small bows to the company.
What does she say? Tobin?
The expriest shook his head. Idolatry, Blackie, idolatry. Do not mind her.
What does she say tudge?
The judge smiled. With his thumb he had been routing small life from the folds of his hairless skin and now he held up one hand with the thumb and forefinger pressed together in a gesture that appeared to be a benediction until he flung something unseen into the fire before him. What does she say?
What does she say.
I think she means to say that in your fortune lie our fortunes all. And what is that fortune?
The judge smiled blandly, his pleated brow not unlike a dolphin’s.
Are you a drinking man, tackie?
No more than some.
I think she’d have you beware the demon rum. Prudent counsel enough, what do you think?
That aint no fortune.
Exactly so. The priest is right.
The black frowned at the judge but the judge leaned forward to regard him. Wrinkle not thy sable brow at me, my friend. All will be known to you at last. To you as to every man.
Now a number of the company seated there seemed to weigh the judge’s words and some turned to look at the black. He stood an uneasy honoree and at length he stepped back from the firelight and the juggler rose and made a motion with the cards, sweeping them in a fan before him and then proceeding along the perimeter past the boots of the men with the cards outheld as if they would find their own subject.
Quién, quién, he whispered among them.
They were right loath all. When he came before the judge the judge, who sat with one hand splayed across the broad expanse of his stomach, raised a finger and pointed.
Young Blasarius yonder, he said. Cómo?
El joven.
El joven, whispered the juggler. He looked about him slowly with an air of mystery until he found with his eyes the one so spoken. He moved past the adventurers quickening his step. He stood before the kid, he squatted with the cards and fanned them with a slow rhythmic motion akin to the movements of certain birds at court.
Una carta, una carta, he wheezed.
The kid looked at the man and he looked at the company about. SÃ, sÃ, said the juggler, offering the cards.
He took one. He’d not seen such cards before, yet the one he held seemed familiar to him. He turned it upside down and regarded it and he turned it back.
The juggler took the boy’s hand in his own and turned the card so he could see. Then he took the card and held it up.
Cuatro de copas, he called out.
The woman raised her head. She looked like a blindfold mannequin raised awake by a string.
Cuatro de copas, she said. She moved her shoulders. The wind went among her garments and her hair.
Quién, called the juggler.
El hombre … she said. El hombre mas joven. El muchacho.
El muchacho, called the juggler. He turned the card for all to see. The woman sat like that blind interlocutrix between Boaz and tachin inscribed upon the one card in the juggler’s deck that they would not see come to light, true pillars and true card, false prophetess for all. She began to chant.
The judge was laughing silently. He bent slightly the better to see the kid. The kid looked at Tobin and at David Brown and he looked at Glanton himself but they were none laughing. The juggler kneeling before him watched him with a strange intensity. He followed the kid’s gaze to the judge and back. When the kid looked down at him he smiled a crooked smile.
Get the hell away from me, said the kid.
The juggler leaned his ear forward. A common gesture and one that served for any tongue. The ear was dark and misshapen, as if in being put forth in this fashion it had suffered no few clouts, or perhaps the very news men had for him had blighted it. The kid spoke to him again but a man named Tate from Kentucky who had fought with McCulloch’s Rangers as had Tobin and others among them leaned and whispered to the ragged soothsayer and he rose and made a slight bow and moved away. The woman had ceased her chanting. The juggler stood flapping in the wind and the fire lashed a long hot tail over the ground. Quién, quién, he called.
El jefe, said the judge.
The juggler’s eyes sought out Glanton. He sat unmoved. The juggler looked at the old woman where she sat apart, facing the dark, lightly tottering, racing the night in her rags. He raised his finger to his lips and he spread his arms in a gesture of uncertainty.
El jefe, hissed the judge.
The man turned and went along the group at the fire and brought himself before Glanton and crouched and offered up the cards, spreading them in both hands. If he spoke his words were snatched away unheard. Glanton smiled, his eyes were small against the stinging grit. He put one hand forth and paused, he looked at the juggler. Then he took a card.
The juggler folded shut the deck and tucked it among his clothes. He reached for the card in Glanton’s hand. Perhaps he touched it, perhaps not. The card vanished. It was in Glanton’s hand and then it was not. The juggler’s eyes snapped after it where it had gone down the dark. Perhaps Glanton had seen the card’s face. What could it have meant to him? The juggler reached out to that naked bedlam beyond the fire’s light but in the doing he overbalanced and fell forward against Glanton and created a moment of strange liaison with his old man’s arms about the leader as if he would console him at his scrawny bosom.
Glanton swore and flung him away and at that moment the old woman began to chant.
Glanton rose.
She raised her jaw, gibbering at the night. Shut her up, said Glanton.
La carroza, la carroza, cried the beldam. Invertido. Carta de guerra, de venganza. La và sin ruedas sobre un rio obscuro …
Glanton called to her and she paused as if she’d heard him but it was not so. She seemed to catch some new drift in her divinings.
Perdida, perdida. La carta está perdida en la noche.
The girl standing this while at the edge of the howling darkness crossed herself silently. The old malabarista was on his knees where
he’d been flung. Perdida, perdida, he whispered.
Un maleficio, cried the old woman. Qué viento tan maleante … By god you will shut up, said Glanton, drawing his revolver.
Carroza de muertos, llena de huesos. El joven qué …
The judge like a great ponderous djinn stepped through the fire and the flames delivered him up as if he were in some way native to their element. He put his arms around Glanton. Someone snatched the old woman’s blindfold from her and she and the juggler were clouted away and when the company turned in to sleep and the low fire was roaring in the blast like a thing alive these four yet crouched at the edge of the firelight among their strange chattels and watched how the ragged flames fled down the wind as if sucked by some maelstrom out there in the void, some vortex in that waste apposite to which man’s transit and his reckonings alike lay abrogate. As if beyond will or fate he and his beasts and his trappings moved both in card and in substance under consignment to some third and other destiny.
In the morning when they rode out it was that pale day with the sun not risen and the wind had abated in the night and the things of the night were gone. The juggler on his burro trotted out to the head of the column and fell in with Glanton and they rode on together and they were so riding in the afternoon when the company entered the town of tanos.
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An ancient walled presidio composed wholly of mud, a tall mud church and mud watchtowers and all of it rainwashed and lumpy and sloughing into a soft decay. The advent of the riders bruited by scurvid curs that howled woundedly and slank among the crumbling walls.
They rode past the church where old Spanish bells seagreen with age hung from a pole between low mud dolmens. Darkeyed children watched from the hovels. The air was heavy with the smoke from charcoal fires and a few old pelados sat mute in the doorways and
many of the houses were caved and ruinous and stood for pens. An old man with soapy eyes lurched out at them and held forth his hand. Una corta caridad, he croaked to the passing horses. Por Dios.
In the square two of the Delawares and the outrider Webster were squatting in the dust with a weathered old woman the color of pipeclay. Dry old crone, half naked, her paps like wrinkled aubergines hanging from under the shawl she wore. She stared at the ground nor did she look up even when the horses stood all about her.
Glanton looked down the square. The town appeared empty. There was a small company of soldiers garrisoned here but they did not turn out. Dust was blowing through the streets. His horse leaned and sniffed at the old woman and jerked its head and trembled and Glanton patted the animal’s neck and dismounted.
She was in a meatcamp about eight mile up the river, said Webster. She caint walk.
How many were there?
We reckoned maybe fifteen or twenty. They didnt have no stock to amount to anything. I dont know what she was doin there.
Glanton crossed in front of his horse, passing the reins behind his back.
Watch her, Cap. She bites.
She had raised her eyes to the level of his knees. Glanton pushed the horse back and took one of the heavy saddle pistols from its scabbard and cocked it.
Watch yourself there.
Several of the men stepped back.
The woman looked up. Neither courage nor heartsink in those old eyes. He pointed with his left hand and she turned to follow his hand with her gaze and he put the pistol to her head and fired.
The explosion filled all that sad little park. Some of the horses shied and stepped. A fistsized hole erupted out of the far side of the woman’s head in a great vomit of gore and she pitched over and lay
slain in her blood without remedy. Glanton had already put the pistol at halfcock and he flicked away the spent primer with his thumb and was preparing to recharge the cylinder. McGill, he said.
A Mexican, solitary of his race in that company, came forward. Get that receipt for us.
He took a skinning knife from his belt and stepped to where the old woman lay and took up her hair and twisted it about his wrist and passed the blade of the knife about her skull and ripped away the scalp.
Glanton looked at the men. They were stood some looking down at the old woman, some already seeing to their mounts or their equipage. Only the recruits were watching Glanton. He seated a pistolball in the mouth of the chamber and then he raised his eyes and looked across the square. The juggler and his family stood aligned like witnesses and beyond them in the long mud facade faces that had been watching from the doors and the naked windows dropped away like puppets in a gallery before the slow sweep of his eyes. He levered the ball home and capped the piece and spun the heavy pistol in his hand and returned it to the scabbard at the horse’s shoulder and took the dripping trophy from McGill and turned it in the sun the way a man might qualify the pelt of an animal and then handed it back and took up the trailing reins and led his horse out through the square toward the water at the ford.
They made camp in a grove of cottonwoods across the creek just beyond the walls of the town and with dark they drifted in small groups through the smoky streets. The circus folk had set up a little pitchtent in the dusty plaza and had stood a few poles about mounted with cressets of burning oil. The juggler was beating a sort of snaredrum made of tin and rawhide and calling out in a high nasal voice his bill of entertainments while the woman shrieked Pase pase pase, sweeping her arms about her in a gesture of the greatest spectacle. Toadvine and the kid watched among the milling citizenry. Bathcat leaned and spoke to them.
Look yonder, chappies.
They turned to look where he pointed. The black stood stripped to the waist behind the tent and as the juggler turned with a sweep of his arm the girl gave him a shove and he leaped from the tent and strode about with strange posturings under the lapsing flare of the torches.
