Afterlands (40 page)

You’re from this very town, aren’t you?

I was born here,
mi sargento
. How did you know,
mi sargento?

Are you the son of Ignacio and Jacinta Soquomac?

Mateo’s eyes, so dark that the pupil and iris seem one, grow rounder. Who are you?

I met your mother when I was here, twelve years ago. You look like her, I see it now.

I do not, he says in a small, dignified voice.
Mi sargento
.

I stayed here by the river, for a month. Please tell me, is she still alive?

The boy’s lips, Jacinta’s full lips, compress, almost sneering. So many visited my mother in those days! I didn’t understand until I was older. It was shameful! I can’t remember all the men …

He stiffens to attention, face impassive. Forgive me,
mi sargento
.

At ease, Kruger says after a moment. How long have you been gone? You’ve heard from her?

Not since I left,
mi sargento
. Two years ago. I left this place with the Padre—the Colonel!

You were … were you forced to join?

Mateo averts his eyes a few degrees, glances back, away again, and then blurts out, I
chose
to join the Colonel,
mi sargento!
I was ashamed of her, my mother! My father I never knew.

She was only trying to feed you, Mateo.

The eyes gleam black, like young ice. Surely he reviles all her
visitantes
, as well as herself?
Hijo de puta. Hijo de la chingada
. Now something hits Mateo—his face aged backward to the unguarded softness of a small boy—and he whispers, Your voice … you were that German man!

That’s a good way of putting it, yes.

The German man with the dog—that old bitch there, is that the one? But your beard, it was so black! You’d tell us about the
indios
of the Arctic, I remember now. For years after, my mother would mention you. The villagers, they all thought you were a …

Un espia
. The boy stops himself—has frightened himself, it seems.

Mateo, now listen to me. I’ve been ordered to send you in first tomorrow, when we attack Purificación, assuming it happens and our platoon is used.

Mateo’s shoulders start to slump until he catches himself, stiffening.

Si, mi sargento!
I shall do as you require!

Yes, but Mateo, this is your own … these people are your people! Are you …

Colonel Luz is our father! He is the Lamp of our Future!
The boy’s eyes flit to Kruger’s and away so fast that Kruger is unsure of what he has seen. Jacinta always maintained that a Sina would make a perfect spy: so much better than foreigners at dissembling feelings, when necessary. The boy is either loyal and determined, even eager, to help the Padre crush the village—and thus growing suspicious of Kruger now—or else he is willing to desert and waiting for a sign from Kruger. Or does he fear that Kruger may be a spy for Luz, trying to trap him? He may have heard about Luz’s lieutenant taking Kruger aside today, while he slept. His face betrays nothing. He must be as unsure of Kruger as Kruger is of him. Nothing more can be said. If Kruger is somehow to help the village, and Jacinta, he can’t risk being caught out now.

Helping the boy, this one too, may be impossible.

In a suddenly aged voice he says, Well … it may not come to a fight tomorrow. The villagers may slip away tonight. We’ll hope so.

Si, mi sargento!

But if we do go in, you’re to keep low and stick close to me. This is my order.

Si, mi sargento!

In the small hours of his vigil he dozes for a second or two, then jolts awake, finally sure. The fire is dead. There’s no moon, but the wind-polished stars throng the sky. Trying not to wake Perra, he sits up. Perra opens her eyes. Stroking her head he whispers
quédate!
—and she’s too old and exhausted to disobey. Mateo is tucked in a ball under his poncho on the other side of the firepit. Sentries, dimly luminous in their white pyjamas, trudge at the camp’s fire-lit peripheries. In the centre of the camp, like an angular snowhut, the Padre’s large, square tent softly glows.

This is not a Mexican army. This is Luz’s army. Cut off the head and the body collapses. He reaches into the firepit and grips a handful of warm charcoal. Under cover of his poncho he smudges it over his pyjamas and his hands and his ankles, his feet and face. He takes up his sabre—leaving it in the black leather scabbard—and rises barefoot and creeps away from the fire. Everywhere his body is stiff and sore and cold and his feet a blistered mess but the strength of decision is in him now, and something else, a memory of stealth on the ice floe, slipping out to the cache. As if he was always preparing for this. His heart is kicking its way up into his mouth; yet the pleasure of stealth returns too. The dark earth between the dim fires of other platoons offers a winding path and he follows it quickly, hunched low. The sentry on his stool at the door of Luz’s tent is slumped back against the canvas, his bayoneted rifle across his lap. Kruger approaches slowly, then crouches. The figure remains still. There’s a softly buzzing snore. Kruger eases the sabre from the scabbard, lays the scabbard on the ground. Hunched nearly double he lopes forward and tries to duck through the slit of the tent door. The canvas holds, tied from within. His momentum forces the tent’s front wall to push in slightly so that the sentry, leaning back against it, sags farther with the motion. His snore catches and stops. The point of his bayonet, inches from Kruger’s knee, wobbles. Kruger steps backward and stabs, slashes at the tent door, feels something sever on the inside, ducks through. Blood beating in his chin, he squints and crouches with the sabre raised. Outside, behind him, the sentry resumes snoring. A kerosene lamp burns low on a folding field-table with stools around it. On the table is a map, its corners held down by books, and a bottle of something dark with a few small crystal glasses, neatly ranked. The crystal is the only visible luxury. The feeling is simple, Spartan. Behind the table, a grey nap of canvas hangs from ceiling to floor, running from the tent’s north wall almost to the south wall, leaving a kind of doorway into its darker half. He goes to the opening and through it and Luz is right there, in full uniform, faceless, rigid, his sabre at his side—then the mirage resolves. It’s a legless mannequin on a stand, blank-featured, dressed in Luz’s green tunic and clerical hat.

In the shadows of the corner, a small figure is nestled on a camp cot under a blanket. Kruger steps closer. His eyes readjust to the half light. Luz is asleep in his boots, which protrude from the bottom of the blanket. He’s lying on his side furled into himself, childlike. The plain blanket covers much of his face. Only his deep-pitted sockets are in view, so dark that his eyes might be open and Kruger not know. By his head there’s a simple end-table where another kerosene lamp sits, this one cold. A carpet woven with the design of his flag covers the bare ground by the cot. A carefully squared stack of books on the carpet. His revolver and pince-nez placed on the stack. Kruger can make out a few spines:
MEDITACIONES DE MARCUS AURELIUS. THE PEHUES, SINA, & TARAHUMARA TONGUES. GOBINEAU: ESSAI SUR L’INEGALITE DES RACES HUMAINES
.

All this Kruger absorbs in a few seconds, but those few seconds are enough. He hesitates. He has never killed a man. If only Luz would wake up, shout for help, grab at his revolver! In heroic stories, killing is a simple thing. But to decapitate a sleeping man, this man, seems not only cowardly, it means violently taking sides—that idiot temptation he so despises—when the one small wisdom he has gained from his life is that, when flags start to wave, someone must always refuse to join in. To kill Luz will be to murder his own beliefs—a negation of his life. And yet, this thing must be. The sabre whispers in his fist. The sentry’s bee-like snoring has stopped. Shoes scrape on the gravel outside. Kruger steps up, arcs back the blade. The sentry yells
Ay—ayúdenme!
and Luz’s eyes pop open blindly, he sits up on the cot, the blanket flops off him and he’s naked from the waist up, lean-muscled. The two men stare. In this slowed moment, Luz’s face regains its calm. The tent shudders as men, still out of view, crowd through the door behind the partition. You, says Luz, still unarmed. Kruger steps to the right of him, slashes the canvas wall, ducks through the long wound, drops the sabre and runs faster than he has run in years, faster than he would have believed he could still run. Shots crackle behind him. Muzzle flares light his path, a zigzag through the dozing cookfires and the stirring troops. Bullets sigh and purr around his ears. He tumbles down the steep riverbank in a heedless panic crashing into the water where the paralyzing current grips and sweeps him away. Downstream a sentry stands on the bank and Kruger dips under and hears the muffled crump of a shot and when he surfaces, gulping air, he’s beyond Luz’s camp, his paddling hands and feet numb as he drifts rapidly down into a small, familiar grove of cottonwoods. He swims in to shore, crawls up on the sand.

With stiff, truncated steps, he runs toward the village. His old path is shown by the vivid stars and the torches burning along the defensive wall. The Sinas, if they haven’t fled, will surely take him for an attacker—the river has washed his pyjamas white again—but he’s too frozen to care. From behind the wall a male voice yammers words he doesn’t know, Sina, and Kruger raises his hands, still hobbling forward, and a gruffer voice tries Spanish, but before he can call back, the darkness detonates like La Paz on the Fifth of May fiesta as the Sinas open fire. The air zings with the insect whining of musket balls.
No tiren!
he yells, but the Sinas can’t hear him, he can hardly hear himself, because now Luz’s troops, and presumably Kruger’s own men, have opened fire on the village at long range.

A bad night for pacifism. Kruger, hoping to prevent the war, has actually initiated it. He retreats to the river through a gauntlet of fire.

Cottonwoods aren’t climbing trees, but he has managed to get halfway up one of the larger ones. He has spent the night trying to hug warmth from the living tree, shivering and dozing a few seconds at a time. To come this far south, he thinks with a kind of dire amusement, only to perish of exposure. … But the stars are extinguished now, the sun nearing. From his perch he has a view in all directions through the limp, coarse-toothed leaves. A magpie flaps up out of the willow scrub twenty feet down and lights on a branch above him. It leans over, the keen pellets of its eyes glaring past him, back down into the scrub. It cries a nasal
maa—maa?
as men, soldiers, appear directly below. Seen from this crow’s nest they are self-propelled sombreros, hunched and sweat-stained backs, dirty sandal heels, picking their way toward the village in silence, bayoneted rifles pointing the way. A sergeant comes behind with a revolver in his left hand and a sabre in his right.

To the west, in open order across the plain, a phantom-white army advances on the town. Mateo will be among them. They move with furtive, leery steps, as if they think the village, now half a mile off, is still asleep and they might take it by surprise, though the village is clearly alert and waiting. It looks much as Kruger remembers it: a tight clump of cocoa-coloured adobe huts and a domed church, hunkered in the crook of a river looping down out of the foothills and snowy ranges of the Sierra Madre. But now braids of purple smoke rise from the houses hit last night in the shelling, and a rough, damaged wall of mud shuts the village off inside its bow of the river. And this is a problem. Once the attack begins, there will be no way for the villagers to flee. The low wall is lined with waiting faces—Sinas with yellow head-bands and bare chests, some mestizos in sombreros—and it bristles with firearms as well as bows, machetes, and, God help them, pitchforks and mattocks.

A corner of Jacinta’s house can be seen, and beyond it the roofless top of the houseboat, but there’s no sign of life in the yard by the river where Kruger once amused Mateo and his pals, and through which he would slink in the moonlight, away from her houseboat, back to this grove. Now behind him the sun blisters up out of the
páramo
and its first, tentative heat is glorious; yet it doesn’t embolden him. Another spasm of shivering hits him. His stomach is chewing and tearing at itself. The growing urge to slink off is more than a temptation, it’s the compulsion of a man conditioned in the marrow to shun hunger—hunger and cold. From up here he can see Purificación to be another floe: floe-sized, almost circular, icy water running around much of it, and crowded with trapped and hungry people. He can see no way to help them now—to help Jacinta or Mateo—or even to approach the village without being shot. He was a fool to think he could alter this puny, provincial chapter of history. Maybe the best anyone can do is to do no harm.

Well back of the peons, on the edge of Luz’s camp, the
lanceros
sit their horses in two tight squadrons, lances hackling, waiting for the peons to soak up the Sina ammunition. Between the mounted groups, three fieldpieces sit ready. Luz, on his mare behind the artillery, holds the opera glasses to his eyes. The camp behind him is empty. A man practised in stealth could easily climb down this tree, slip back upriver into the camp, fill his saddlebags with food, food and blankets, and leave.

The light brimming westward reddens the flattened maize fields and the army tiptoeing across them, nearing the village. The Padre casts a glance at the sun, consults his fob-watch, then draws and hefts his sabre. He swings it down and the fieldpieces fire, spewing flame, bucking backward. Somewhere a drummer and bugler start in. A shell explodes on the earth ahead of the advancing men. A second shell bursts just inside the Sina enclosure and a third whistles clear over the village, into the river near the houseboat, exploding in a geyser of spray. Kruger’s tree shudders in its roots, the leaves quivering. The magpie shrieks and takes wing, bolting eastward. Below and in the fields the men break into a charge, yipping like coyotes, the villagers at the wall waiting, holding their fire with surprising discipline, until, at point-blank, they loose a ragged volley. Soldiers tumble. The fieldpieces fire again and a shell smashes into a house behind the wall and another strikes the wall directly, dead centre, swatting flat the defenders, the attackers as well. From across the fields come screams, shreds of dense oily smoke floating, the panicked clanging of the church bell.