Afterlands (33 page)

During his month in Purificación, soldiers and miners sometimes pass through and Kruger is displaced—exiled, back into the cold—while Jacinta indulges them serially, sometimes several a night, earning, as she puts it, pesos instead of
pescados
. She is philosophical about it. Or maybe resigned would be the word. Kruger pretends to be untroubled, although gradually, as the days and weeks pass, the pretence becomes more of a test. At times when these brief exiles end he’s less tender with her. Sometimes even rough. All right, he finally admits to Perra—a slender russet bitch with a pointy muzzle, prick ears and a full brush tail, as if a dog could be part fox—I’m a little in love with her. But she has her life here, and I have my road. Weeping without tears he lies wrapped in his blanket in the grey sand that after dark holds the heat of the day until suddenly it does no longer and from then on it holds the cold of the night, while Perra, muzzle between forepaws, lies between him and the embers, cocking her ears and her hackles at any sound and growling low in her chest, and at times those sounds are the breeze-borne whimpers and puffing and sobbing of the miners on Jacinta’s bed. When it’s soldiers, the night is quieter. Maybe it’s considered ill luck here for a soldier to make a lover’s sounds, since they are pretty much the same ones you hear from the wounded and the dying after combat.

The quiet is welcome, although he’s always troubled to see soldiers.

On the road south from Maria Madre to here he had an encounter. He was aboard the scabby, moulting grey mule he’d acquired in Pecos, Texas, in trade for his seaman’s overcoat. The trader had told him that between luck and the lash the thing might see him as far as the border, but Kruger had treated the mule with Franciscan forbearance and it had regained some strength. Their road emerged from the cool gloom of an arid gully and swerved south. In a collarless workman’s shirt with the top button open, sleeves rolled almost to the shoulders, Kruger felt the sun and the warm air on his throat and inner arms as voluptuous, a vagrant’s blessing. The beginning of forgetting. We are happy, he informed the mule. The sages are wrong. A man
can
run away from his troubles. The mule’s jackrabbit ears, now accustomed to German, waggled affably.

In the open a hot wind was waiting for them and, sweeping north with the wind, as if equally elemental, a troop of Mexican cavalry cantering two abreast, their bannered lance-heads glittering in a tight, bristling shock, dust and convection blurring them. Far behind to the southwest, a broad mesa like the prehistoric grave mound of a chieftain. The troopers by now must have seen him; he could only ride on toward them. He was about to urge the mule rightward off the road to give way, when the animal in its own private discretion veered left at a spry trot, then came to a halt. It stood on slightly lower ground. As the company pounded past with the bass-heavy thudding of hooves and the clinking of spurs and scabbards and carbines and trappings, the giant chargers and the riders in their tall plumed shakos loomed even huger. For a moment it seemed they would continue riding, perhaps in some pursuit, because the leader—dressed like the officer at the bear and bull fiesta but wearing what looked like a cleric’s low, wide-brimmed black hat—didn’t seem to notice Kruger. An unarmed man on a decrepit mule hardly would warrant notice. The
lanceros
stared straight ahead as they posted by, pair after pair, wooden wind-up soldiers on mechanical stallions. They wore red sashes and tight short jackets of baize green, their white trousers with gold-buttoned seams fell over star-spurred boots. The nostrils of the horses seemed inflamed like large unhealing wounds and their manes and tails streamed back in the wind like bunting. Kruger got the mule walking. He heard the officer crack out a command. Sharply the men reined in their horses and sat them in loose formation. Kruger, bobbing slowly past the rearguard, thoughtfully tipped his hat. He pretended not to hear the rider galloping up behind him.

_¡
Alto!

The officer in the priest’s hat. Kruger managed to rein in the mule, then tried to make it turn to face the man. It would not. It started trotting away, due south.

_¡
Alto. Alto en seguida!

Kruger twisted round on the saddle, shrugging, gesturing helplessly at the mule’s bald, pistoning rump. He yanked again on the reins but was carried on. The officer called another order. There was a pummelling of hooves. The officer and two
lanceros
hurtled past him, their horses’ ears laid back and veiny necks stretched into the gallop, then the men reined in hard and wheeled around in the road, blocking the way. The mule came to a stop, its head sullenly down, ears twitching like antennae.

Kruger squinted up at the men. His palate and tongue were sticky, teeth clenched on the stem of his pipe. The
lanceros’
chin-strapped shakos masked their eyes in shadow and black drooping moustaches concealed their mouths. The one on the right gripped a lance with a red guidon under the blade. The one on the left aimed a carbine at Kruger’s heart. Between them, on a sorrel mare with a diamond blaze, the small fit officer in his hat and steel-rimmed spectacles seemed a sinister hybrid—the head of a stern scholar or Jesuit grafted onto the body of a soldier. A captain’s stripes were on the sleeve of his gold-braided tunic. He was clean-shaven, a great rarity here, and the glare on the little round lenses hid his eyes.

No se mueva
, he said, or seemed to say. His lips had barely opened. He seemed a man with little or no outward modulation; his voice, though penetrating, was toneless, and he was as upright and unmoving in his saddle as if held by a photographer’s spinal brace.

May I ask, Kruger said in his fast-improving Spanish, but the captain cut him off with a remark too brief and flat to make out. Kruger shrugged nervously.
No entiendo
. The right-hand
lancero’s
bay stamped and nickered, flaring raw nostrils at Kruger. With his kid-gloved hand the captain made a slow clawing gesture across his mouth. Kruger shrugged again, as if still uncomprehending. The
lancero
spurred lightly and approached, lowering his lance, and as Kruger watched, paralyzed, the man thrust the blade at the centre of Kruger’s face and at the crucial instant jerked it sideways, smacking the pipe out of his teeth. Under Kruger the mule flinched and shuddered. The
lancero
reined his charger to one side. There was a crunch as one of the forehooves trampled the pipe.

Speaking to a superior with something in your mouth, the
lancero
announced, as if reading a charge at a court martial.

Behind cupped hands Kruger made a quick lingual inventory of his teeth. All there. But I have done nothing, he brought out in a voice audibly shrivelling—and how that shamed him, incensed him. No matter how you exerted your reason the body could still be intimidated by weapons and uniforms and rank—by the colonels of the world, even if they resembled pale clerics. Yes, especially if they’d once broken you. He straightened himself on the mule, pushed his hat back off his brow, trying to appear both uncowed and alertly cooperative.

The captain said, You are American.

I am from Prussia. From Germany, Señor. Do you speak any English?

From Germany! The captain’s smile exposed a bank of very long, clean teeth. He lowered his face as if to study his gloved hand resting on the pommel and when he looked up again the smile was gone. Is this true?

I grew up in Danzig, yes. In Prussia.

A very great nation, Germany. A great empire.

Kruger shrugged, his indifference sincere.

Your Bismarck has done wonders to unite it and make it modern. Of course, he had but a single people to work with. Here it is different.

Kruger nodded slightly.

The captain pondered him.

So a citizen of the great German Reich finds himself mounted on an old mule.

The
lanceros
framing the captain chuckled loutishly. The captain’s face seemed neither pleased by this, nor irked. That same mineral stolidity. Kruger stared up and said nothing, fear and defiance combining to lock his jaw.

Answer me, the captain said in his stiff, ventriloquist’s manner.

I did not hear a question, Señor.

After a few seconds the captain looked down, removed his spectacles and with close attention breathed on either lens. He passed the frosted glasses to the right-hand
lancero
who, planting his lance in the dirt, received them and drew a white silk cloth from a pouch on his bandolier and polished the lenses with a rapid pinpoint motion. The captain’s eyes, blue as the base of a flame, studied Kruger from far back in the sockets. The
lancero
finished buffing and returned the spectacles with a smart salute and folded the cloth and tucked it back in the pouch. Without shifting his gaze off Kruger, the captain put on his spectacles, carefully stretching the wire arms behind his small, neat ears.

A German here in the desert, days from anything, riding about on a mule. Why.

Kruger fought to curb his long-aggrieved pride; always this hard striving. And then he heard himself say, In general I prefer mules. From the back of a mule, or walking at its side, one has no temptation to … He meant to finish,
block up the roads and molest harmless strangers
, but he lacked the Spanish. It was just as well.

As for the desert, I find it generally peaceful.

The captain’s lean jaw seemed to flex. He said, The desert is filled with
primitivos
, some in open defiance of our authority, and with Lerdo’s guerrillas and spies.

Kruger swung his eyes across the land. A sun-cracked vista of lunar desolation. Here and there stood clumps of olive-coloured scrub and Spanish bayonet and the weird, beseeching forms of saguaro cactus.

They are cleverly concealed, of course, said the captain, and a corner of his mouth curled slightly upward; an ironist! Or they are killed. Or, perhaps, in disguise. Tell me where you stopped last night.

At the far end of the canyon. You will find my camp about three hours up the road. Or maybe only an hour, on your horses.

Say “Señor” when you address the captain, said the one with the lance.

Señor, said Kruger.

Always.

What is that in your pockets, the captain asked.

From one trouser pocket Kruger dug a handful of unshelled pecans and from the other a roll of stale tortillas wrapped in cornhusks. The
lancero
with his lance-head firked the tortillas and then the pecans off Kruger’s upturned hands. The edge of the blade sliced into Kruger’s left thumb. The husks flitted away and the tortillas scattered. The pecans in their red shells as they hit the road made a faint hollow clatter and rolled like marbles.

Tell me what you are doing in this country.

Travelling south, Kruger said stiffly. Señor.

For what reason?

Fisting his hand around the bleeding thumb, he winced a bitter smile. Because it is not where I was before.

Now the captain spoke in a much swifter, brusquer voice, presumably to the
lanceros
, although he was still watching Kruger with blank lenses. If he thought Kruger was a spy, and therefore fluent in Spanish, surely he wouldn’t do this? Unless it was a trap.

You will show me your documents. And the captain unholstered an immense revolver and held it slackly, like something unclean and disagreeable, pointed at the road by the mule’s forehooves. It looked wrong in his fastidious kid glove. The
lancero
with the carbine snugged the stock of it tighter into his armpit as Kruger felt in the saddlebag and brought out a folded sheaf. He leaned forward over the mule’s neck and extended his right hand and the captain’s mare shied, nickering, showing Kruger her stained human teeth, rolling back eyes out of a painted crucifixion. Calmly the captain stroked her neck. He didn’t bother coming forward. The first
lancero
skewered the sheaf with his lance, just missing Kruger’s other thumb, and passed it to the captain.

Through his teeth Kruger said, They are in German and English unfortunately. His thumb throbbed in time with his heart’s slamming. The captain’s spectacles were halfway down the bridge of his nose and his eyes scanned the documents with minimal movement.
Jawohl
, the captain said at last, in lightly accented German,
Ich weiss
. Kruger’s jaw unhinged. The man continued riffling through his Prussian naval pension records, seaman’s certificates, U.S. immigration papers, his
Polaris
contract with the U.S. Navy. Finally he murmured something to his men. Digging their rowels in with boyish zeal they shot forward, one to either side of Kruger, and grabbed him by the biceps and swept him out of the saddle, off the back of the mule. Flat-backed he slammed onto the road, his head smacking. Before his eyes a white door with a soldier on either side, the door of the inquiry room in Washington, he about to enter, the door opening and Tukulito and her husband emerging, she wearing a poke-bonnet, head down, so that his final glimpse of her is of her chin and her sealed, impassive mouth.
Good day, Mr Kruger
. With a jolt of pain the medieval skyline of Danzig appears, a cutlass moon setting over the Gothic spires and cupolas seen from a porthole in the sick bay of a ship returning him from the Danish War with his freeing wound. For he knew that as soon as he was discharged he would be leaving his country for the New World, like so many other Germans. … Wheezing, he peered around through a spindrift of dust. The second
lancero
had grabbed the mule’s reins and was towing it along beside his charger, the mule hobbling quickly with legs rigid, head lowered, ears flat. The captain, still sitting his own horse, was peeling off Kruger’s punctured credentials one by one and flinging them toward him, or, more likely, just feeding them to the hot wind, which sailed them dreamily over his face.

Maybe there was no New World.