The Crossings (6 page)

In the sounds of these names I recognized the language I had heard her use last night by the fire — and felt the same chill at hearing it spoken again here. She'd told us of her father, a simple farmer. But I wondered who her mother had been and what terrible wisdom she'd imparted to her daughter.

"I told you of Ryan and the child at Garanta del Diablo. But I have seen worse."

"Like what?" said Hart.

"I have seen how my sister will die if she resists them. How she may already be dying. Because they will take their time. They always do."

We waited for more. But it wasn't forthcoming.

"Will you give me the horse and rifle?" she said.

We looked at one another across the fire.

"Mother?" Hart said. "It's your horse."

"It's your rifle," Mother said.

They nodded to her and handed her the whiskey and this time she drank.

At sunrise we watched her saddle up and ride away. Watched until she was no more than a speck on the long empty horizon.

"You sure she don't remind you of somebody?" Mother said.

Hart twirled his dice awhile longer and then turned and dumped his coffee onto the fire.

"Damn you, Mother," he said.

NINE

We caught up to her as she crested a hill overlooking the Colorado.

If she was happy to see us you'd not have known it.

We made our crossing.

We'd been lucky with the lack of rainfall of late so that there wasn't much current but Suzie and the other horses were pretty nearly swimming through the middle of it, hooves barely touching down and at times not touching down at all. On the other side we dismounted and unfastened the horse's girths and took off their saddles, allowing that they needed to get their wind back some after working so hard and I pulled my flask out of my saddlebag and passed it around and after a while we continued on.

By late mid-afternoon we'd reached a low flat ridge with sparse cover in the valley just beneath us and Elena stopped and pointed to the southwest.

"About half a mile," she said.

"All right," Hart said. "We'll head on down and wait till nightfall."

We started down slowly four abreast.

"You know where they're keeping her?" Hart said.

"Could be many places. Does it matter?"

"Unless you want to get us killed it might."

She seemed to consider that and then shrugged. "It doesn't matter. I will find her."

Hart shook his head. She turned and studied him a moment.

"We don't get along too well, Mr. Hart. Why is that, do you think?"

"I respect what you want to do here, miss. It's family and I understand that. You're just goddamn sloppy going about it is all."

"That's not what I asked you."

"That's all you need to know about me and my being here, though."

"I don't think so."

"Look. Couple of years ago up to pretty recently I was spending a lot of time and giving a lot of thought to trying to kill you people so your people wouldn't kill me. It took some effort on my part but after a while I got real good at it. Now just because a few old men sign a piece of paper saying it's peacetime doesn't mean I all of a sudden feel all secure and happy in your company."

"I'm a woman, Mr. Hart."

"I'm well aware of that."

"You mean you saw me naked."

"That I did."

"So what did you see?"

"Nothing I haven't seen before and nothing real hard on the eyes particularly."

"You saw a Mexican. Half Indian. You saw an enemy, right?"

"Maybe."

"Of course you did. You saw someone who is not like you. Someone who does not even pray to your Christian god.

He smiled. "That much, at least, I don't hold against you."

"I didn't fight the war."

"I never said you did."

"Mother tells me that you lost a brother."

"Oh, Mother does, does he?"

He shot Mother a look that could have burned saguaro into the steaming sand. Mother caught that look and apparently found an urgent need to study the sky.

"A stepbrother, yes."

"Ask me what I lost, Hart."

"Okay. What did you lose?"

She didn't much like his tone. I didn't much blame her.

"Fine," she said. "To hell with you. It's none of your damn business."

And it was only when we finally reached the grove of sheltering junipers below that I guess she changed her mind.

"A mother," she said. "That's all, Hart. To you, a Mex woman. Dead with a baby inside of her because the only doctor for five miles around was too busy with wounded Anglo
cabrones
like you and Paddy Ryan at the time. You killed women, Hart. You all did. Every last one of you."

TEN

We picketed the horses in the copse of trees and made our way through the scrub, the last few yards or so crawling on our bellies until we were within about forty yards of the compound and maybe ten yards from the lone guard in front who sat tending his small fire with sticks and twigs and gnawing on a half of roast rabbit, his rifle lying in the dirt beside him.

What I saw behind him in the sparks and waves of light pouring off the four huge bonfires might have come straight out of Dante's
Inferno
— a book I had never much liked in my youth — had Dante been a less than pious man.

"Well, we got us a hell of a party here," said Mother.

A marketing was taking place in front of us.

I saw perhaps thirty young women all grouped for inspection — the sisters' wares on display. Some simply standing shackled together and others bound to posts or wagon wheels, their clothing a bizarre mix of cheap shifts, men's shirts and trousers, dirty dresses and torn underwear or unrecognizable rags which barely even covered them, even a single stained ragged wedding dress among them. I saw drugged, beaten, half-crazy faces scrubbed newly clean for the buyers. I saw the buyers and their assistants, Mexican and Anglo, some well-dressed and some shabby-looking sweating in the heat of the bonfires, moving among them parting clothes and clutching at a bared breast or a crotch or buttocks, checking teeth and gums and laughing and talking amongst themselves.

I saw firearms everywhere.

We were not going up against twelve or fifteen men and three women. In fact there were only two women not on display that I could see — from Elena's description the younger sisters Maria and Lucia — moving from buyer to buyer like ranchers at a cattle show, doubtless talking prices.

But the men numbered well over two dozen.

"How good's their equipment?" Hart said.

"Their equipment?"

"Guns, rifles. How good are they?"

"Good, I think."

"Wait here. Won't be but a few minutes."

He turned and started crawling back the way we'd come, nobody thinking to question him and we lay there watching the milling crowd and listening to the crackling fires near and far.

"Why all the bonfires?" Mother asked her. "They light those damn things every night here?"

"Every night. To turn away the dark. To turn away the jungle and the creatures there."

Mother looked at her like she'd very possibly lost her mind and I suppose so did I.

We were staring out at barren dusty plain
.

"Once all this was jungle. Many, many years ago. For the sisters it still is."

We were left to think on that and lie and watch until we heard a gentle rustling sound behind us and turned and there was Hart again crawling toward us through the brush, a horse blanket slung across his shoulder.

"Wait here," he said. "I won't be but a few minutes."

"You already said that," Mother said.

"Watch and learn, Mother."

He took off his hat and crushed the brim down and put it on again and wrapped the blanket around him serape-style and stood up big as you please and started slowly forward like there was nothing out of the ordinary to his being there at all. We heard the dice click in his hand and so did the guard sitting by the fire who lay the half-eaten rabbit down on a stump, wiped his greasy fingers on his shirt and picked up his rifle and stood.

"
Quienes?
" he said.

"
Quemosca ha picado?
"

"Eh?"

Hart sounded as bored and lazy as the guard did edgy and confused. Then it all came suddenly clear to him as Hart kicked him soundly between the legs so that he dropped the rifle and uttered a harsh strangled sound which Hart muffled with the palm of his hand and eased him to his knees and then picked up the rifle and gave him a good hard thump to the head with the butt end.

He dragged the man by one arm back over where we were lying, handed the rifle off to Mother and the blanket to me, turned him over and pulled his pistol out of his waistband.

".45 Peacemaker. Lady was right. Good equipment." He pulled out his own ancient pistol and emptied the chambers.

"I'd try to sell this thing back to Gusdorf but I doubt he'd give me a penny for it. Should have buried it alongside his grandfather."

He tossed his old gun back into the bushes and holstered the new one.

"Feel better now?" said Mother.

"Much better."

"Glad to hear it. What about this fella?"

"Oh, he'll sleep some yet."

"No he won't," Elena said.

She lifted the guard's knife from his waistband and unsheathed it and before any of us even quite knew what she was up to her fingers were in his hair and she'd lifted his head and slit his throat as deftly as you'd slit a hog's and turned his head quickly off to the side so that the spill from his jugular flooded the earth beside us.

"Now
I
feel better," she said.

She looked up as though challenging us to say something but none of us were about to. Beyond whatever personal reasons she had and I thought they were probably very good ones you had to admit there was also a logic to it. One less pasteboard in the deck. One less reason to watch our backs. Hart nodded toward the settlement.

"You see your sister anywhere in there?"

"Yes. In the last group, over toward the hacienda. Celine is the one in white."

"I see her."

I spotted her too. A pretty girl of about fifteen or sixteen in a frayed white slip and camisole. I couldn't quite make out the look on her face from this distance whether strong or frightened though I tried. I seemed to want to know what the other half of this family was made of.

"You got anything on your mind at all about how we're gonna do this, Hart?" said Mother. "I mean, we can't just walk in and kick 'em
all
in the jewels, elegant though that was."

"Thank you, Mother. I got a notion might work."

We never did get to know what that was though because at just that moment the crowd went unexpectedly silent and we saw the doors to the hacienda open and walking through those doors — no,
gliding
through those doors like some Mexic witch on a broomstick was maybe the oldest woman I'd ever seen outside of a sickbed, a wild-haired grinning harridan draped in filmy white, long hanging breasts swaying back and forth beneath what she was wearing, a bleached skull crowning her head and her face painted in black streaks and circles over some dry clay-colored base.
Eva
. She carried a long black blade in front of her gripped in both hands. Its handle pointed toward the earth, its tip toward the sky.

By its size she should not even have been able to lift it.

The man behind her was painted too, a skull's face imposed over his own in stark black and white which gleamed in the flickering firelight. He was barechested and his chest and arms were massive. Around his waist he wore a belt of what appeared to be human bones. Humerus, radius, ulna. Around his neck, fangs or talons or both. I couldn't say.

In one hand he held a heavy leather leash and at the end of it was a girl who might have been Celine's twin but for the large livid birthmark across her neck. Her dress was clean and white and looked new, a virgin's dress and she stumbled along behind him, her arms and face twitching on the razor's edge of some drug — pulque, mescal or some mix of their own devising, some powerful intoxicant.

"Ryan," Elena said.

"Christ on a crutch," Mother said. "Damned if it ain't. I'd never have known him."

"I'd have known him," said Hart.

For a moment all we heard was the crackling fires. Then the sisters began to chant. That same clicking, hissing tongue I'd heard Elena use only shrill this time. You thought of crickets dense in the still night air.

"Their
nahuatl
," she said. "Their prayer. The girl? The last time I saw her she was tied to a bed and screaming. I think her screams are over now."

"This is what I think it is?"

"Yes. To demonstrate obedience. To the sisters, to the old gods and the old ways. To show the buyers exactly what they are buying and what happens should they be fool enough to betray them."

"Why this girl?"

"I don't know. Probably she gave them trouble. Perhaps she was brave. Possibly she is not so valuable to them because of the mark."

The other two sisters, Maria and pug-faced Lucia, fell in behind them chanting as Eva and Ryan marched the girl through the guards and buyers and up the hill which glowed at its summit and billowed tarry smoke. Even the roughnecks among the crowd looking sober now and silent. At the top he turned the girl so that she faced the crowd and unbuttoned the front of her dress and parted it and Eva handed her the long obsidian blade and shouted to the crowd.

"
For Tezcatlipoca!
"

The girl hesitated, gazing at the knife in her hands in a kind of dazed twitching horror and then Ryan stepped forward and whispered something in her ear and to this day I still cannot imagine what it possibly could have been which would make her face seem suddenly to melt into that expression of beaten-down indifference as she turned the blade toward her and held it there a moment and then plunged it into her belly. Her eyelids flew open in shock and pain and her hands jerked reflexively off the hilt. Eva's hands replaced them and the long ropy muscles of her arms stood out through her flesh like crawling snakes as she sawed upward all the way to her breastbone and then pulled it gleaming out of her.