In the Rogue Blood (33 page)

They followed the Río Sabinas to its junction with the Salado and held to the Salado’s southeast course and arrived at the village of Anahuac on an afternoon bright with sun and piled high with deep white clouds. Flocks of grackles squawked in the trees and mangy dogs slank along the building walls and squealing children trotted beside the company’s horses. The Laredo Road was another twenty-five miles downriver but the villagers informed them that the main American supply line to Monterrey was the Camargo Road, another fifty miles beyond the Laredo route. A large American army camp sited at Camargo, on the southern bank of the Rio Bravo, was the major transfer point for Yankee supplies to General Taylor. The villagers had heard that the gringos were getting ready to move from Monterrey to Saltillo for a battle with Santa Ana and the road from Camargo was said to be heavy with wagon traffic bearing Yankee supplies.

Dominguez thanked them for the information and then told the compañeros to take from the village whatever they needed by way of commissary. Some of the compañeros forced the villagers to trade fresh sarapes or shirts or sombreros for their tattered own, and some went from hut to hut and stripped each one of its meager store of food. They took
all the jugs of mescal from the village’s single cantina. Some paid a few centavos for what they took and one or two who could write laughingly scribbled notes of hand, but the more brutish among them spat into the palms held out to them for payment. The village elders protested and Dominguez politely apologized but told them his first duty as a chieftain was to the welfare of his men. The few citizens so rash as to resist the thievery were beaten to the ground. A dog composed of little more than hide and bones barked and barked at them from the corner of a house until Pedro Arria shot it dead and the quiet that ensued was greater than that of the silenced dog and hung behind them as they rode away.

They found the Laredo Road but sparsely traveled. Only woodcutters and parties of Mexican army scouts occasionally passed by. The gang moved away from the river and rode south for the Camargo route. Two days later at the Rio Alamo they came upon a trio of Mexican cavalry scouts replenishing their canteens at the bank. Two of the scouts stood and turned just as the compañeros drew out their pistols on Dominguez’s signal and opened fire. The two were knocked back into the water and the third received his bullets while still kneeling and he too fell in the shallow river. The hair of the dead soldiers wavered in the current and blood rose off their wounds in red swirls and carried downstream. They pulled the bodies from the water and went through their pockets and Spooner claimed a pair of cavalry boots for himself and announced them to be a perfect fit. They chased down the soldiers’ horses and some of the compañeros laid claim to the saddles and quickly strapped them onto their mounts in place of their old broken ones. They added the army animals to the company caballada.

Dominguez stood at the riverside and sang softly as he flicked powder residue from the Colt and recharged the chambers. He saw Edward looking at him and smiled. Edward gestured at the dead Mexican soldiers and said, “I figured you and them was on the same side.”

The chieftain smiled uncertainly, his brow furrowed in confusion. “Same side?” he said. He looked at the fallen soldiers and appeared to consider Edward’s question and then spat toward them and looked back at him and said, “Me and
they? Noooo
. Not same side. Somos enemigos!” He laughed and turned toward the compañeros and swept his arm to
include them all. “
My
side, Eduardito.
I
my side,
they
my side. You, tambien!
You
my side.”

He grinned at Edward like a brother wolf.

They came the following afternoon to the Camargo Road and spent a few days reconnoitering. Some days later they attacked a poorly guarded American pack train and killed a half-dozen soldiers before the rest fled in the wake of the muleteers. The compañeros made away with a wagonload of Hall percussion rifles and two cases of Colt five-shooters and mules loaded with powder and ammunition. They armed themselves anew and sold the rest of the weaponry and the mules to a ranchero band operating out of the Magdalena Hills.

They remained in the region for the next three months. When U.S. trains were too well-guarded the company would set upon Mexican army or civilian transports, though these were never so lucrative in their yield as the Yankee trains. They recruited new members and at one point their band numbered nearly fifty but their ranks were always thinned in fights with the Americans. Then their number would again grow slowly.

During this time Edward learned to speak a passable Spanish although his natural reticence kept him from practicing the language sufficiently to allay his wretched accent. He habitually kept his own company. During respites between the company’s forays he took to riding up into the higher country, to rimrocks facing west for miles to the wilder reaches of the sierras. He’d sit his horse and stare out to the horizon as the sky turned red as a jagged gash in the dying light of the sun. Had he been asked what thoughts he had while gazing on this ancient bloodland his only true answer would have been a howl.

On a chilly afternoon in January they went to Saltillo to attend the hanging of a compañero named Carlito Espinosa. He’d been shot off his horse and taken prisoner during their raid on a Mexican army pack train traversing the sierras between Victoria and Saltillo. The regional commander wanted him made an example to all other bandidos in the region and so announced his execution date and invited the populace at large to attend. The gang entered the town in scattered groups of three and four in order not to attract attention. They entertained no notion of rescuing Carlito, so grossly outnumbered were they by the garrison troops.
The streets were chockablock with soldiers ahorse and on foot and all of them grim of aspect. The gang sought only to bear witness to their compañero’s execution. They joined the swelling crowd in the central plaza. A large alamo tree stood in the center of the square, the bark of its main branch scarred by the hanging ropes of generations. The air was festive. Music and song mingled with shouted talk and children’s laughter and the hawking cries of street vendors. The redolence of roasting chiles and charcoaled meats carried through the plaza.

When Carlito was brought out in a flatbed wagon some of the spectators hissed and flung mudballs at him and some laughed and made loud jokes about his hanging. The compañeros made no show of knowing the condemned. Carlito stood in the wagon and a priest gave him final absolution and the hangman put the noose around his neck. The officer in charge asked if he had any last words. Carlito said, “Chinga tu madre!” The officer went redfaced and the compañeros had to stifle their laughter. The officer loudly proclaimed to the spectators that sooner or later all bandidos were killed or captured and this was what became of the captured. The children, especially, he said, should let it be a lesson to them.

His remarks drew applause and whistles of approval. The officer signaled to the teamster on the wagon seat. The teamster cracked his whip and the wagon rolled out from under Carlito and the crowd cheered lustily as he kicked the air. A second later he abruptly went slack in the way only the dead can do and he oscillated slowly under the tree limb, his pants freshly stained, his eyes upturned and solid white, his tongue bulging from his enpurpled face.

Watching Carlito suspended from the alamo branch Edward remembered a distant time when he had seen a Negro lynched in Mississippi, he and his brother John, and the thought of John reminded him of a recent dream in which he’d seen his brother wandering in a deep wood, the top of his skull flensed to the bone and his head cauled in blood. And in this dream he had again heard Daddyjack’s voice crying, “Blood
always
finds blood. Ye best know it for the truth.”

In February Taylor took his army to engage Santa Ana at Buena Vista. The skeleton force he left in Monterrey was hardly adequate to police the region and over the next few weeks the compañeros had their most lucrative
raids yet along the Camargo Road north of Monterrey. They stole payrolls and clothes and food and new tack, stole horses and guns and ammunition which as always they sold to other bandits and to bands of Comancheros. Sometimes Edward and Spooner were recognized as Americans by surrendered Yankee guards who cursed them for traitors to the Stars and Stripes. Spooner was oblivious to their insults but Edward was incensed at being condemned by men who accepted army punishment as a natural condition of life. On one occasion he threatened to shoot a sergeant who would not leave off his slurs. The sergeant spat at him and said, “I bet you a goddamn dollar you won’t shoot no real soldier when he’s lookin ye square in the eye!” Edward lashed him across the mouth with the barrel of his pistol and the sergeant fell to all fours and spat bloody teeth. Edward asked if he had anything more to say and the man shook his head. He dug a silver dollar from his pocket and dropped it at the sergeant’s knees.

Spooner laughed and said, “Damn, bubba, if you aint the sportsman.”

They sometimes sneaked into Monterrey in groups of a half-dozen or so to sport in the city’s finest whorehouses. For most of the compañeros it was a time of spree and prosperity never to be equaled in their lives.

Taylor returned to Monterrey in March, there to stay until the end of the war, and the gringo army patrols on the Camargo Road became more numerous than ever. On three consecutive raids the gang was driven off from a cargo train by the sudden arrival of Yankee dragoons and in every instance a dozen or more compañeros were killed or captured.

The compañeros had been reduced to eighteen when word came of General Winfield Scott’s landing at Veracruz and his bombardment of the city into submission. When he heard the news Dominguez felt greatly cheered. Now the Yankee advance on Mexico City would be through his patria chica, the region of his birth and boyhood, through the lower eastern ranges of the Sierra Madres that he knew as well as he knew his own hands. The American supply trains would have to follow Scott up into the rugged high country where passage was difficult. It would be much easier to ambush them in the mountains and then elude pursuers than it had been in Nuevo León.

“In the mountains there,” he told Edward, “they will never to catch us. I know
many
good hide places en esas montañas.” The Mexican merchant trains would also be easier to rob now because every Mexican soldier would be needed to defend against Scott and far fewer of them would be assigned to guard the transports.

The whole gang was happy to be going south. That night they sat around the main fire in high spirits and drank mescal and each put five pesos in a hat and were agreed that he who told the best story would win the pool of money. Edward pitched into the hat but passed on a turn at a story. Most of the stories were morally didactic and the compañeros received them with nodding accord. The winning tale was told by the oldest member of the bunch, a graybeard named Lorenzo who was an uncle of Manuel Dominguez. He said the tale was told to him many years ago by his grandfather in Puebla who had heard it from his Spanish grandfather in Guanajuato who had heard it from an English mineowner. His tale was of three bandits who came upon an old man sitting by the side of the road one evening and decided to kill him for sport. The old man was but skin and bone and looked ready for the grave but he pleaded for his life. He said that if they would spare him he would reveal where he had hidden a strongbox full of gold. The bandits grinned and winked at each other and said all right, and the old man gave them directions to a hill a few miles away and told them the gold was buried under the highest tree atop the hill. The bandits thanked him and then killed him anyway. And then for lack of anything better to do they sought out the hill he had told of and dug under the highest tree and were astonished to discover a large strongbox full of gold, just as the old man had said. They laughed and hugged each other and danced all about, singing that they were rich. But the gold was too heavy to carry away all at once and so they decided to sleep there that night and in the morning figure out how to move the treasure to a safer place. The two older bandits then sent the youngest back into town for a bottle of tequila with which to celebrate their good fortune and defend against the night chill. While the youngster was away these two talked things over and agreed that it made much greater sense to split the gold two ways rather than three, and so when the boy got back from town with the tequila they killed him. They then uncorked the bottle and toasted their rich futures and each took a deep drink and both suddenly felt a great pain in their bellies and fell down and died from the poison the boy had added to the tequila after deciding in town that he wanted all the gold for himself.

The compañeros laughed knowingly at this tale’s ironic truth and applauded vigorously. Some pointed at others and said, “Esos tontos eran exatamente como tú!” And those pointed at affected astonishment and said, “Como
yo?
Carajo! Como
tú!
”

In the morning they were ahorse before sunrise and riding downcountry
on an old burro trail well removed from the main road and the gringo army patrols roaming over it.

Southeast of Linares they came over a low sandrise and spied a pair of large covered wagons halted a half-mile ahead. A stiff wind tugged at their clothes and they wore their hats pulled low against the stinging sand. The overhead sun was huge and orange in the dusty haze. The two wagons were each pulled by a pair of mules but one of the animals of the lead wagon was holding up a foreleg and a party of six women and two men were gathered about the injured beast. One of the women caught sight of the riders and pointed at them and all the party turned to look their way and most then glanced around as if seeking somewhere to hide. But the land about was flat sandy scrub to the distant mountains and so they could but stand beside the wagon and watch the eighteen riders coming on.

One of the men was a muscular Negro in a sleeveless shirt, the other a tall clean-shaved white man in a yellow duster, and as the gang drew closer they saw that although the women were dressed in the Mexican style of loose colorful cotton skirts and bare-shouldered white tops they were all of them American and young and most of them pretty. The horsemen broke into grins and some whistled and raised a fist to each other and one said, “Ay, que bonita compañía de putas! Y puras gringas!”

“Esas gringas son tan puras como una pocilga,” Pedro Arria said and they all laughed.

They reined up before the party and sat their horses and the white man shielded his eyes with his hand against the blowing sand and said in English, “Amigos! Hello, amigos, hello!” His face was tight with apprehension until he saw that two among this band of dusky mustached men appeared to be of his own race and he bellowed at them, “Howdy, boys! Damn good to see some fella Americans hereabouts!” He carried a pistol on his belt but the black man was unarmed. Some of the girls looked frightened but others boldly returned the grinning Compañeros’ carnivorous leers. The injured mule had a broken leg, a compound fracture of a fore cannon, and the jagged ends of the break showed through the bloody hide. The animal stood in its traces with the bad leg held off the ground
and seemed to be staring into its own unconveyable experience of the world.

“I was warned I ought not take this damn sandland route,” the man said, addressing himself to Spooner and Edward in a strained voice striving for familiarity, “specially not with mules instead of oxen. But I just figgered they was exaggerating, the way folk tend to do.
Now
looka here this mule. Stepped in a hole yonder you got to practically step into youownself before you can see it. Bone just went
pop!
like busting a scantling under a boot heel.” He looked at the mule with disgust, as if the animal had deliberately maimed itself simply to irritate him.

He introduced himself as Alan Segal of Tennessee by way of Mississippi and freely volunteered that he was in the whore business. The previous summer he’d recruited a dozen American girls in Louisiana and Texas to come with him and make their fortune servicing Old Rough and Ready’s troops down on the Rio Grande. But by the time they got there Taylor had moved the bulk of his force some eighty miles upstream from Fort Brown to Camargo on the tributary San Juan about three miles below its Rio Grande junction. Segal and his whores made their slow way over a rough wagon trace and came at last to the American camp which proved a pesthole even in comparison to Fort Brown. The soldiers were elated to have these American cyprians come to ply their trade but life in Camargo had made their tempers raw as open sores and on the very night of the whores’ arrival a pair of soldiers got in a fight over one of them and the bloodied loser limped away into the night only to reappear a few minutes later with pistol in hand and fire on his assailant but he was too drunk to shoot straight and instead hit the girl in the neck and killed her. The next day Segal solicited General Taylor for reimbursement for his loss of property and was laughed out of Old Zack’s tent. A week later one of the other girls got her face and breasts razored badly by a drunken corporal who cursed her and repeatedly called her by the name of his faithless sweetheart back in Arkansas. This girl didn’t die but the episode left her so badly disfigured and so unenthusiastic toward the trade that Segal was obliged to put her on a steamer back to Galveston.

Before they’d been at Camargo a month he lost two other girls to sickness. “You never did see such a place for sickness,” Segal said, looking up at the half-circle of riders sitting their horses and staring down on him and the Negro without a trace of fellowship on their faces and all of them casting looks at the girls like dogs eyeing freshly butchered meats. The whoreman had been talking fast in his obvious belief that a steady
flow of words might hold these men at bay. The Negro at his side didn’t know where to look.

Segal said so many of Old Zack’s troops had made use of the muddy and sluggish river for everything from a horsewash to a laundry to a latrine that the San Juan had quickly become a cesspool, and yet it served for the camp’s drinking and cooking water. Hardly a man in camp was unafflicted by diarrheal distress the soldiers called the “blues.” There was no escaping the stink of shit within five miles of the camp. The most common complaint from Segal’s whores was of men fouling the bed as they humped. Dozens of soldiers were stricken daily by dysentery, yellow fever, measles, typhus, God knew what. The hospital tents were always full and the groaning carried through camp day and night. At every dawn and sundown the dead were taken from the tents and heaped on carts and trundled to the burying ground. Anybody with eyes, Segal said, could see that more troops would die of disease in this forsaken country than would ever be killed at Mexican swordpoint. Except for the two girls who took sick and died, however, the rest of his whores seemed immune to everything save the common venereal afflictions.

“When General Zack left for Monterrey, we followed along,” Segal said, “and I tell you, once our boys took that town we did a better business than ever.”

Dominguez watched the whoreman as if he were an enthralling freak of nature on par with a talking dog, but most of the compañeros now paid the gringo little mind, being far more interested in the smiling girls and stepping their horses nearer to them.

Segal and his party had then tailed Taylor’s army to Saltillo and provided respite to the boys at Buena Vista, then returned to Monterrey in Taylor’s wake. But by now other American whoremen had showed up with their stables and the Mexican clergy were complaining loudly that the Yankee cyprians were a disgrace to their noble city. Because he was trying to maintain cordial relations with the local population Old Zack ordered all the American whores and their mongers out of town. Some of the operations set up in tents just outside the city but Segal had heard that Taylor’s next move would be to Victoria and he wanted his troupe to be among the first to get there. Rather than take the well-traveled Monterrey-San Luis Road down to Salado and then cutting through the pass to Victoria, Segal thought to take a shortcut via Linares and the open country to the south of it. They’d been trudging over that flatland for more than a week when the mule broke its leg not an hour ago. Segal
scowled at the crippled animal whose breath was coming hard and whose eyes were white and rolling.

“Porqué no han matado esa mula?” Dominguez said.

“Why aint you shot that mule?” Spooner asked the whoreman.

“We was just talking about doing it, me and the Ethiopian here, when you fellas come along. We was thinking maybe—”

“Chingados!” Dominguez snarled. He pulled his Colt and shot the mule twice through the head and the whoreman flinched and the horses shied as the dead mule crashed to the ground in its traces and the girls squealed and huddled closer together.

Dominguez spat and reholstered the pistol. “Dijo que eran ocho,” he said. “Donde están las otras?”

“You said it was eight of em,” Spooner said to Segal, “but we don’t count but six of the little darlins here.”

“Two of em took sick just before we left Monterrey this last time,” Segal said, speaking even faster than before. “Worked in that pesthouse of a Camargo camp for weeks and didn’t neither of em even say a-choo and then they both of a sudden turn sick as dogs and been steady puking and shitting and just generally making a smelly awful mess so I put em in the other wagon by theirselfs and let the nigger drive it and hope none the other girls catch it from em. But I swear I’m bout ready to leave them two by the side of the road someplace cause it aint no damn hospital train nor deadcart I’m—”

“Is any a these sweeties sick?” Spooner asked. He smiled at the girls. They were grinning at the compañeros and letting the wind swirl their skirts up high on their thighs and folding their arms under their breasts to swell them in the low-necked Mexican blouses.

“
These
here girls? No sir, nary one,” Segal said. He looked at his girls and then back at Spooner and abruptly smiled as if suddenly suspecting that not only might this proceeding yet be survived, it might even prove profitable. Edward looked on him in wonder. The man’s turn of optimism struck him as lunatic.

“They’re hardy stock as well as finelookin, these gals,” Segal said, “not a tainted one in the bunch and each of them more fun than—”

Dominguez put his horse forward and the pony snapped at the whoreman’s face like a mean-tempered dog and Segal’s smile vanished as he fell back. The chief beckoned a tall redhead whom he’d been giving the eye and who had been smiling at him in return. The girl came forward and took his proffered hand and her thighs flashed whitely under her
blown skirt as he swung her up behind him on the horse. A look passed between him and Pedro Arria and then Dominguez reined the animal about and hupped it into a canter toward a clump of mesquite some fifty yards away and there he halted and dismounted with the girl and drew her into the sparse chaparral.

“Yo no soy tan modesto como el jefe,” a compañero named Julio said as he slid out of the saddle, his eyes fixed on a darkhaired vixen who smiled at him and stood her ground as he approached. “Aquí mismo me sirve bien.” He grabbed the girl’s arm and pulled her to him and her smile vanished as he ripped open her blouse to expose her breasts.

“Hey now, amigo!” the whoreman said. His protest was lost in the compañeros’ cheers. The girl tried to pull away but the bandit twisted her arm and forced her to her knees and held to her with one hand as he unbuttoned his pants with the other. The compañeros laughed and dismounted and started for the other girls who were now all of them big-eyed with fear, their backs against the wagon.

The whoreman made no move for his pistol but only raised his hands and patted the air and shouted like a carnival barker: “Hold on now, boys, hold on! Let’s do her in a orderly fashion! Just form up a line at the wagon here and all of ye have ye money ready and—”

Pedro Arria stepped up to him with a wide smile and put a hand on his shoulder in the manner of an old friend. A Green River knife appeared in his other hand and without losing his smile he thrust the blade to the hilt into Segal’s heart and the man was dead even as he fell. The Negro turned and ran and two of the compañeros shot him in the back and the man collapsed with his feet still striving for purchase in the sand for a few seconds more before they stilled.

The compañeros fell to the girls and there followed carnal riot on that sandblown flatland. They took turns at holding some of the girls down for their fellows who went at them with their pants bunched at their boottops and their buttocks bared to the wind. Dominguez returned with the redhead whose hair was now wild and her mouth bruised and a pair of compañeros quickly set upon her. Most of the whores were acquainted with mean turns of the trade and bore their violation with little outcry. They would all of them survive the brutal visitations of that afternoon although two of the them would take ill and die before summer and one would perish a year later in a San Antonio hotel fire and one would be disfigured by smallpox and spend her remaining days attending in an East Texas pesthouse. The redhead would make her way to Saint Louis and
within months enrapture a wealthy silverhaired shoe manufacturer who would die of heart failure while they made love on their wedding night and she would thereafter become a woman of fashion and a patroness of the arts and live a life of sophisticated ease into the next century.

The wind slowed and then ceased altogether as the compañeros continued to sport with the girls into the late afternoon. But now Edward’s interest waned and he belted up his pants and went to rummage through the lead wagon. He there found a sealed jar of peaches in syrup and just as he opened the jar Spooner came over to join him. They shared the peaches and then went to see what might be found in the other wagon.

Spooner pushed aside the cover flap and the stench that befell them from the darkness within was a fierce and sickly composite of body wastes and mortifying flesh and it loosened their sinuses and watered their vision. They fell back from the wagon and hawked and spat and wiped their eyes and nose. “Sweet Mother Mary,” Spooner said. They tied bandannas across their lower faces and again pulled back the flaps and peered over the wagon gate and saw the two girls the whoreman had spoken of.

They were lying naked on blankets befouled with their wastes. All Edward and Spooner could see of them in the dim light was that one was darkhaired and the other fair. They let down the wagon gate and pulled out the brunette by her heels and Edward felt the stiffness in her heelstrings and knew she was dead even before they saw her distended belly and that her eyes and mouth were full of ants. They gently lowered her to the ground so as not to jar the pent gases from her. Then they brought out the other and saw that she was yet alive.

She was wasted to skin and bone and crusted with filth. Her eyes were red slits against the light of the late afternoon. Her pale yellow hair was a rank tangle. Edward knelt beside her and saw her eyes move from him to Spooner and then cut back to him. She was breathing through her partly open mouth and showed a chipped front tooth. A white razor scar followed the line of her jaw from ear to chin. Her eyes showed a rim of blue and roamed over his face and her little breasts rose with a deep breath. A small choked sound issued from deep in her throat.