The Crossings (7 page)

She began to fall, blood pulsing from the gaping wound and intestines beginning to ooze their way out of her, pale and red. Ryan took her by the shoulders.

"
Do the rest of it!
" he shouted. "Or dammit I'll give you right back to them. And I'll give you back
alive
!"

I could see her blinking rapidly, her body shuddering as in a blast of cold and we watched stunned and amazed — all but Elena, I thought, who must have known all along that this was coming — as the girl reached into the bloody cavity Eva had cut for her and dug out her own living heart steaming in the air and held it in her quaking hand. Eva snatched it from her like an eagle on a mouse and severed the arteries with a single quick stroke of the blade and held it to the crowd and shouted
Tezcatlipoca!
again and again as Ryan let go of her shoulders and thegirl crumbled to her knees and I turned and delivered up my hardtack and coffee into the brush.

"Good a time as any, I'd say," said Hart. "Mother?"

He nodded. "Come on, Bell."

He pulled me up by the collar, my legs rubbery and weak and we skirted the periphery of the compound. I glanced over and saw that Ryan had the dead girl in his arms and was walking toward the fire pit, his pants and naked belly slick with blood. I saw him raise her up over his head as though she weighed no more than a dog and saw old Eva place the bloodslick heart on the altar beside them. Then all I did was run.

ELEVEN

We were headed for the wide-open doors to the hacienda. I didn't know why or whose idea it was, Hart's or Elena's, and perhaps the same thought had come to them both in some unspoken passage. But Elena knew full well that down to the very last guard they'd all be outside to witness the spectacle on the hilltop. The hacienda would be empty.

We climbed the stairs to the porch and ran inside through a short corridor and I barely had time to register the great elegant room we were in, bathed in candlelight as Elena marched us through and then pointed to the staircase.

"Up there."

"Why?" said Hart.

"The sisters' bedrooms. They'll make their deals inside, down in this room. We'll know when they start."

We took the stairs to the second-floor landing and walked a long wide carpeted corridor red as blood and studded with oil lamps in sconces past a door to our left and then stopped at the next one to our right and she opened it and we stepped inside.

The room was as big as Mother's entire cabin. A single lamp burned on a nighttable beside a beautiful mahogany canopied bed covered in lace. On its headboard was a carving of sheep being torn and devoured by a pack of wolves. Wolves adorned the finials on the bed and those atop the great swing mirror on the dressing table. I saw why she'd selected this room and not the one to our left. This one faced the yard. Through the windows you could see what was going on down there.

Should you want to.

"Maria's room," she said.

"I'll stay by the door," said Hart.

Elena pulled a velvet-backed walnut chair up to the window opposite him and sat with Hart's Winchester across her lap, watching.

Mother flopped down on the bed. It groaned beneath his weight.

I couldn't believe it. All I could do was look.

"I'm guessing it'll be a while yet. Am I right, ma'am?"

"Yes." Her voice was flat and cold.

"Have to take your rest where you find it, Bell."

He had a point I supposed. I suddenly felt exhausted, all we'd done and seen today a heavy weight upon me. I sat down at the foot of the bed beside him.

"I'd kill for a glass of whiskey," I said.

"On the sideboard," said Elena. "If you're fool enough."

I remember I did consider it. I truly did. It was tempting.

Instead I pulled a chair over to the side of the window opposite her and sat.

"Aren't you worried we'll be seen up here?" I said. "We won't be seen. Look down there."

It was the second time that night a book I hadn't much cared for came to mind. The first was
Inferno
. This time it was Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
.

I was looking at an orgy.

In the moonlit firelit dust of the square I saw men and women coupling everywhere. Women spread out naked upon the bare red earth or on their knees being taken from behind, women sodomized and forced to perform fellatio. In more than one case both of these at the same time. I saw women being mauled and prodded and slapped and caned. And I saw guards and the three sisters passing through all of this and fueling its dementia with bottles of whiskey, mescal and tequila.

I was glad the window was shut so we didn't have to hear it too.

I saw joyless, spiritless faces.
Both the takers and the taken
.

It was when I saw what they were doing to Celine that I turned away.

"
You, writer
," Elena had said to me the night before. "
Take this down
.

"
They will find it on our bodies
."

I don't wish to tell this. But I think I owe it to all concerned.

"The fat pig is Fredo," she said. "The tall thin one is Gustavo. I do not know the third one. A buyer.

"You don't want to witness this, writer? Fine, don't."

But she wanted me to. I could hear it in her voice. I could see it in the eyes which pooled with tears but never wavered and barely blinked. When I saw what grief and rage those eyes held I turned back again.

If she could so could I.

Though Celine was directly below us had it not been for the thin white camisole pushed up nearly to her breasts I could not have recognized her. Her face was hidden.

She lay spread-eagled on her back naked from the camisole on down and the one Elena called Fredo was kneeling on each of her forearms spread wide above her nearly at the elbow joint. Her head was in his cradled hands, raised up and tilted back toward him which must have agonized neck and arms and the muscles of her back as he moved her head up and down in time to his naked plunging hips. The Indio Gustavo held her legs apart at the ankles while the third man — an Anglo judging from his long thin matted hair — knelt to one side.

There was no way to know if the bird had been dead or alive when he began.

It was dead now.

Its head dangled in on a broken neck, wattles and comb and beak disappearing and reappearing again as he moved the hackles up inside her back and forth nearly up over the breastbone. He had the chicken gripped in both hands and when he looked up at Gustavo he was smiling
.

"It is good,"
she said
. "She will live through this. She does not resist. Soon, little sister. Soon."

I watched until the Anglo tired of this game and stood and walked over to where Gustavo was kneeling, dropped to his own knees in front of her, unbuttoned his trousers and covered her with his body
.

An hour is a very long time to wait when you're frightened and know in your heart that something very bad is coming toward you like distant hoofbeats. Something that will likely change your life forever if you manage to live through it at all. You can deal with that hour in many different ways according to your lights.

Elena's gaze never left what was happening outside the window, the tension in her body visible only in her white-knuckled grip on the Winchester. Mother lay silent on the bed like a man dead in his casket with his hands folded over his belly and his eyes shut. Hart stood leaning against the wall behind the door, his rifle in one hand pointed at the floor and his dice rolling soundlessly across the knuckles of the other.

I sat there facing away from the window and closed my eyes and tried to stop wishing for a drink, tried to relax, tried to think about better days long past, theatre and the opera, baseball games and taverns with the boys at Harvard and my first love, Jane Geary, who left me for a Yalie for godsakes, blue skies fishing the Charles from over on the Cambridge side. But all that came to me instead were images from the Mexican campaign, the twisted broken bodies and hacked limbs foul and wet and pustulent with gangrene, heads cannon-shot five feet away from the bodies they belonged to and the shrieking of the newly wounded and long last sighs of the dying.

An hour is quite some time to wait.

And it was almost that long before I heard her say,
they're coming
.

Mother had not been asleep of course. Or if he was, deserted it as quickly as an eagle deserts its eyrie on sighting its prey below. At the sound of her voice he was up off the bed and flanking the door across from Hart and once again I was aware of the ease and grace of the man despite his huge size. Hart turned to Elena.

"The back door's where?"

"Straight down the hall to the right."

"You still see your sister out there?"

She nodded. "All of them. They're in one group now. Hobbled together."

"Men around her?"

"Just two."

"Good. When it starts, go out the back, get her and bring her round to the horses. These boys will want to get inside. We'll give 'em reason not to for a time. Then we'll follow you. You need any help?"

"You sure?"

"I'm sure."

"You ever shoot a man, Bell?"

"You're going to now. And I'm figuring it'll be mostly buyers in there and most of them'll be unarmed. You don't let that stop you, you hear me?"

I hesitated, then nodded.

"Hell, look at it this way," said Mother. "Suzie's got a tick? It's feeding off her blood? You take it 'tween thumb and forefinger. Then you squeeze. May not be pretty but that's what you do. It's the horse that's of consequence, not the goddamn tick."

"Our aim's to clear the room, Bell. That simple. Nobody stands but us when it's finished. That, and to watch each other's backs. Let's do it."

I did not truly know war.

I knew it only by only its consequences. But as we walked the stairs, Hart and Mother in front and Elena and I behind, I felt what I imagine any soldier must feel who though not yet having engaged in battle is not wholly ignorant of those consequences. Fear, yes, of course fear. A clear ringing signal from mind to body that quickens the heartbeat, deadens the legs and thickens and dries the throat so that it was nearly impossible to swallow. Of course fear. But also a hammering dread, a great overwhelming
reluctance
. I was about to risk my life for the single awful purpose of taking the lives of others — and as many lives as possible. And what sane man would wish to do either.

Our aim's to clear the room, Bell
.

I long ago knew that war was insanity.

What I did not know was the exact nature of how that insanity was made manifest in a single soul.

For a moment it seemed incredible to me that I should even be here.

That feeling of displacement grew with each step I took to the extent that I could only dimly register the laughter and talk coming from the room we were approaching below and smell the cigar smoke until finally we reached the landing and the open wide double doors and Hart and Mother stepped inside and raised their rifles to astonished faces all around and I stood at Mother's side with Elena to the right and then the feeling fled like a dove from a flame as we began firing.

I saw the fat woman Lucia go down like a toppled sack of grain with a bullet from Elena's rifle before I had even sighted and pulled the trigger on the bearded Mexican in the tailored suit directly in front of me. His move for cover came too late. My bullet caught him in the chest.

I did not then think
I have killed, I have just killed a human being
. I doubt I thought anything. It was as unconsidered a response as a cat lashing out after a mouse in front of him scurrying across the floor. I just kept shooting.

There were shouts and men screaming and in that enclosed space the deafening staccato bursts of rifles and I was aware that while Hart had been correct, that most of these men were unarmed, a few were shooting back at us with pistols so that they became the nexus points of all our senses, Hart and I firing simultaneously at a dirty long-haired Anglo who might have been the one we saw on top of Celine outside the window. He pitched back into a slim side table which shattered beneath his weight and fired wild into the ceiling, raining the others with crystal glass from the chandelier.

Mother shot a man who looked like a gambler from the way he dressed and who fired at him with a four-barrel pepperbox even after it was empty.

The woman Maria had two men standing in front of her, presumably both guards, one whose pistol remained holstered, his hands already in the air and one firing at me in panic and missing wide. Mother blew him back to where Maria would have stood had she not been on the move already, throwing open the rolltop desk behind her, snatching up the pistol inside and firing at Elena. I could hear the bullet pass like a mosquito in flight and saw Elena's cheek sprout a sudden line of blood as she sighted the woman down and fired.

Men were falling all around us, only a few left standing and none of them armed by now but for the guard with his hands in the air. I shot one of them twice in the back as he made for the front window to my left. I saw Maria stumbling trying to stand and firing at Elena though by then she was shot in each thigh. Elena sighted once again and squeezed and her face disappeared beneath a bright red flower of blood and bone.

Mother shot the guard who'd surrendered.

The bullet shattered a thin china vase behind him.

Elena and Hart walked to where a dirty young Mexican man was cowering crying and praying in short breathy gasps beneath the long narrow table in the center of the room and Hart shoved away the table with the sole of his boot and Elena pointed her rifle down and shot him at the base of the neck.

And then for a moment there were only the moans of the dying and the echoes of our rifles like waves pounding a nearby shore and gunpowder drifting thick on the still air, watering our eyes and tasting of copper and brimstone in our mouths.