The Crossings (2 page)

Then the thing exploded on him. Threw him over and off his chair.

So that he lay writhing and groaning on the rough plank floor with his shirt on fire and a badly scorched face and gunhand until Jess Ake, the barman, threw a bucket of water on him.

That was the gunfight at the Little Fanny Saloon
.

We waved away the powder-smoke, Hart and Heilberger and I, and Hart collected his winnings off the table.

"I bet he got that gun up at Gusdorf's," he said. "That man ought to be arrested."

I was amazed at his utter calm. My own stomach was churning whiskey and bile in equal portions — and I hadn't been the fellow staring down a pistol but merely sitting behind somebody who was.

I guessed Hart to be in his late forties, early fifties, though it was hard to say and wondered not for the first time what sort of forces had shaped men like some of them you found out here.

If they weren't just plain-out demented, like E.M. "Choctau" Kelly, who was quietly carving a tombstone for Miss Nellie Russell, one of Ginny Smalls' whores over at the Fairview, then the best of them seemed to hold some mix of craziness and courage that served them as a kind of lucky charm.

I think of Old Bill Cooney, who found a black bear snuffling through his ten-dollar sack of coffee beans one morning and got so mad that he chased the bear over half a mile in his stocking feet with nothing in hand should the creature have turned on him but a bottle of lemon beer and a shaving brush.

How could Hart have guessed this outcome?

The answer was he couldn't. It was simply his nature, I suppose, to wait and see. A kind of fatalist patience and presence of mind I couldn't begin to imagine.

We watched as four of the miners took Donaldson by the arms and legs and hauled him outside to what destination I couldn't be certain. Doc Swinlon was surely drunk by this hour but we did have a dentist and a veterinarian who were somewhat less likely to be so. Hart glanced in my direction.

"You look like you're going to be sick, friend," he said.

"I think you're right," I said.

"Get you outside."

He helped me to my feet and out the door to the street with barely a second to lose.

"You shouldn't drink, Bell. You know that?"

"I know."

"Then why do you? I see you every night in there."

"I guess that means you're there pretty much every night too, doesn't it."

Only a drunk would have spoken to him like that but drunk was what I was.

"I can handle it," he said.

"You can't."

Then he shrugged. "Hell, never mind. It's none of my business. Just thought maybe you might maybe have something better to do."

"I'm no damn prospector, Hart," I said.

And there I was, speaking up to him again. I guess some part of me was offended at the criticism. I should have been amazed he even noticed me among the others let alone knew my name. Also grateful that he'd helped me out of there. I've observed that drunks don't tend toward gratitude.

"So? Neither am I," he said.

He started to walk away.

"Dammit, Hart!"

"What."

I didn't
know
what. I only knew I wanted to stop him. Me, Marion Bell, staggering on a still-whirling street. He looked at me like he was inspecting a mongrel dog that might or might not be useful to him.

"You got a horse, Bell?"

I rented an old bay from Swenson's livery at the going monthly rate.

"Course I do."

"You want to do something useful for a change, then?"

"I dunno. What'd you have in mind?"

"Let's get you saddled up. We can talk along the way."

Half an hour later we were passing through a campground on the southern edge of town, lanterns glowing in a few of the tents but most of them dark, someone singing a tuneless drunken version of
Annie Laurie
and from the same tent, a whore squealing. As yet Hart hadn't said a thing. He had the thong wrapped around his middle left finger and kept clicking the dice back and forth together and by then I'd sobered up to the extent that at some point I was able to realize that the rhythm of the dice was the rhythm of his horse's gait.

He waited until we'd passed through the tents and then rolled and lit a cigarette and talked to me.

"You familiar with a gentleman calls himself Mother Knuckles?"

"Big fella?"

"
Big?
You have a gift for understatement, Bell."

"I know him."

"You ever give him a reason to dislike you any?"

"We never met."

"That's good. Because you're going to. I do a little mustanging with Mother now and then. Lots of good horses out here left over from the war which is mostly what we're after. Your real mustang's bred from the old Spanish and these belonged to us not long ago but they're still wilder than hell. Maybe if you're very nice to him he'll let you help us out some."

"I never did any mustanging."

"All you got to do is ride for now. We'll handle the rest. You can ride, can't you?"

I wasn't going to dignify that by giving it an answer. I doubt he expected me to.

"What is it you
did
do, Bell? If you don't mind my asking."

"I was a war correspondent for the
New York Sun
. Followed Win Scott's troops into Mexico City."

He nodded. I couldn't say if he was impressed by the fact that I was a writer or bored with the notion or what. "Scott," he said. "
That
dry tit."

And that was all I had from him until we reached the cabin.

THREE

She said that it was sunset before they'd crossed the plains and reached the river.

She'd ridden all that way with her hands tied behind her back, perched high on the saddle in front of the tall wiry Indio whose name was Gustavo and many times over the journey she felt his prick harden up against her. He had already had both her and Celine but she guessed he wanted more.

She wondered if her sister was experiencing the same in front of Fredo, the fat one with the prickly mustache.

She was sore just about everywhere but especially against the saddle and very thirsty. As they crossed the shallows into Mexico she stayed alert for some means of escape — their horse missing its footing perhaps — but there were none. The Anglo riding point knew his river well. The crossing was smooth and steady.

When the fourth rider leading the pack horse from the back of which over a dozen chickens dangled reached the other side of the river Gustavo turned and said,
Mexico. Is home, no? Why your people leave here?

She felt no wish to answer him.

"I see your eyes, little one," he said. "I see the way you fight. You and the sisters, I think you are the same."

She found it hard to believe that a foul-smelling dog like this had sisters of any kind so she asked him.

"What sisters?"

"
Las hermanas de Lupo. Las hermanas del diablo
. As old as the mountains, little one. As old as the gods are old. Just like you."

He laughed.

"You know," he said, "I think maybe they will have to kill you."

The night was moonless and starless beneath low-lying clouds and she saw the bonfires well before the settlement. There were four fires and as many wooden outbuildings on either side of an old hacienda which had seen better days and as they approached she was surprised and puzzled at how many people these mostly small buildings must have housed within, some of them
soldados
like the ones they rode with but most of them women, young and dirty and moving listlessly at their various chores, hauling water and wood and cooking and stoking the flames.

Even before the old crone stepped out of nowhere out of the smoke in front of them she knew there was something very wrong here because many of these women were Anglos — fragile-looking blonde women working side-by-side with Mexican peasant girls and she thought she already knew how this collection had come to be. Some of them wore little more than rags and some what appeared to be castoff dance-hall costumes badly torn and wore grotesque amounts of makeup on their bruised filthy faces perhaps to shame them and some were clearly ill and staggered under the burden of their toil. She heard moans and laughter and from somewhere a muffled scream.

Then the old
hechicera
stepped out of the smoke billowing around them and her fears for their safety in this place turned to something more akin to dread.

As old as the hills?No
, she thought.
But old enough. Unknowably old
.

Beneath the black concentric circles painted across her cheeks and chin and the black crescent moons which hollowed the eyes burning up at them and the black slashings across the lips and nose, her skin hung off her face like slugs crawling. She wore some kind of thin gown, ragged and nearly transparent so it was possible to see her withered layered flesh beneath and the dugs with their huge dark nipples pointed down toward the earth. Her hair was long and matted and she smelled of brimstone and rotted blood. On her head was the sunbleached hollowed-out skull of a coyote, its top row of teeth still intact.

The coyote's grin seemed to match her own.

In each of her hands she held a living rattlesnake gripped below the heads which twisted writhing around her arms. At the sight of these or perhaps the smell of her the horses shied and whinnied and tried to move away.

Gustavo removed his hat to her. The Anglo Ryan merely nodded as they passed.

Still amazed by this apparition Elena turned in the saddle and saw two younger women step up beside her,
these both middle-aged,
she thought, each dressed in black. One was bone-thin and hard-looking, grim and expressionless, clean and neat. The other stocky, with cruel peasant's features.

She had just met the Valenzura sisters. Old Eva, Maria, and Lucia.

Her guardians in hell.

FOUR

"
WHAT THE GODDAMN KIND OF FIRST-THINGIN-THE-MORNING HORSESHIT IS THIS?
"

The calfskins layered across the cabin's floor had seemed sufficiently large for three the night before but now seemed much too small for two. I awoke to the bellowing of a huge bearded bear of a man in sweat-stained long johns staring at my feet directly across from his balding head. What had been merely an admittedly large, yet gently snoring figure in the dark was now the red-eyed face of hostility. It seemed likely as not that he would reach over and tear off my feet and beat me with them.

Where was Hart when I needed him?

Then I smelled the coffee.

"Easy, Mother. The gentleman's name is Marion T. Bell."

He was standing at a scorched blackened stove which might well have dated back to the War of 1812.

"Bell? I never hearda no goddamn Bell!"

He got up and stepped into a pair of frayed grey trousers and pulled up the suspenders and that was that, he was dressed. I couldn't remember for the life of me where I'd put my own and didn't want to move just yet. Not until he'd settled down some. I watched him stomp across the floor to Hart and Hart pour something steaming brown and nearly as thick as syrup out of a stained tin pan.

He divided the stuff evenly into three tin cups and handed one to Mother who drank it straight away.

It was possible to imagine at that moment that his lunch might be a Joshua Tree burst aflame.

"Thought we could use a third hand."

"Him? Christ on a cross, Hart. He's
green
. Look at him!"

He turned to me. I was up and searching for my shirt and pants. I found them easily enough, neatly folded on the only chair in the room, my boots beneath the chair. Hart's doing.

"Yer
green
, ain't ya! Jesus Christ, Hart. You throw this dumb green kid at me first thing in the goddamn morning and I dunno what to think, I really don't. I dunno what the hell's on your mind sometimes. You know that? God damned if I do. 'Spose we could use a third body out there, though. Yeah, I guess we could. Can he ride? He can ride, can't he?
Can you
ride,
goddammit?
"

"He rode with Scott into Mexico City."

"Win Scott?
That
dry tit? Well what the hell. I'm Mother Knuckles you're Marion T. Bell. Pleased to meet ya."

He put out his hand.

It was a handshake I will not readily forget.

It was not my own horse but a young sorrel they had me on that day and I won't forget her either, because while I knew nothing of the nature of our undertaking she knew everything. We found five horses grazing in an arroyo, beautiful creatures, chestnut and bay — not at all like the tough unlovely beasts descended from the Spanish breed but tall and strong — and we herded them stricken with some primal fear of us yelping riders through a long wide wash directly into the box canyon I learned that Hart and Mother had used many times before, Mother working left and Hart working right and the horse Suzie and I center, the easiest position to hold because the wild horses would naturally want to break to either side.

Suzie did the work and all I had to do was hold on — a daunting enough proposition in itself with her darting left and right according to the horses' movements ahead of her, riding at a far faster speed than any I'd ever had need of before and then once we'd trapped them, riding back and forth across the mouth of the canyon turning on a dime to discourage three of them from bolting for freedom while Hart and Mother choke-roped the other two to the ground, looping and tying off the ropes around the forelegs first and then the back, returning to their horses to repeat the process with two of the three chestnuts until finally Mother took the fifth and last alone.

For a man the size of Mother, it was amazing to watch him work with such sheer dexterity and speed. You more or less expected it of Hart. But Mother was a revelation. The power in him was clear. The grace was not. Yet it was there in full measure.

As the weeks went by it was he and not Hart who showed me how to tie a slip knot, how to throw a rope, why and for how long to force a hard-ridden mount to wait before food and water, wiping the sweat off her ribs and backbone and brushing her down until she cooled some. Hart had a distance about him. Mother nearly lived up to his name.