The Guns of Santa Sangre (20 page)

“You have heart,
pendejo
,” he snarled. “I’ll give you that.” The wounded old shootist kept dragging himself toward the pistol in the dirt. The Jefe descended from the church, smoking as he spoke. “I saw a mouse that had heart once. There was this big cat and she had pounced on this mouse, tore off his leg. The back leg. The mouse tried to crawl away, bleeding, without a leg.” The bandit leader’s boots had reached the base of the hill in a crumble of gravel. Mosca slowly and deliberately closed the distance between himself and the crawling man, talking softly. “The cat, she just watched him crawl and crawl without the leg and when the mouse was at the end of the porch thinking it would get away, the cat pounced again and dragged him back, biting off his other leg.”
 

The
borracho
pulled and tugged and dragged himself across the punishing rocks and stones of the hard pack ground. His leg and sides were wet and sang with agony, and he left a smear of blood in his wake. The pistol was now three feet away. He saw his hand reach for it, fingers stretching the last few inches for the stock. Counted rounds in his head. Five more silver bullets were chambered. Then the large ugly shadow fell across him and the old man could smell the bandit leader standing right behind him.

The first shot split his eardrums.

The old man’s right hand reaching for the gun disappeared in a fine red mist and shrapnel of bone fragments. The blasted stump of a wrist geysered a jet of blood a foot in the air. His own screaming drowned out the sound of the second gunshot that ricocheted in a flash of sparks off the pistol, sending the gun skittling another five yards away where it spun in a glint of metal in sunlight until it went still.

Mosca stood tall and awful over the old man who lay writhing in agony, clutching with his good hand his arm shot off at the wrist. The
borracho
spat up at him but the bloody saliva didn’t reach its target and splattered back onto the old man’s face. The Jefe chuckled, enjoying this, puffing cigar smoke. Gritting his teeth, steeling his gaze, the wounded wretch twisted his head to regard the pistol a few yards farther from him now.

And began to crawl for it.

Reaching toward the fallen weapon with his last good hand.

“You have heart,
pendejo
. Like the mouse.” Mosca smiled, nodding his approval. “How I remember the cat on the porch watching as the mouse, now without two legs, pulled himself across the porch with both its front legs, inch by inch, leaving a long trail of little mouse blood. It went
squeak squeak
. The cat, she just waited, for she had nothing better to do.” The bandit blew wafting smoke from the muzzle of his
pistola
, and took another step to keep pace with the maimed man desperately dragging himself on his stomach toward the gun. The old man’s revolver was now two feet from his left hand fingers.

“
Squeak squeak
, eh little mouse?”

Still the old man crawled, dragged, urged himself toward his pistol with his last remaining strength, suffering terribly. Towering above, taking his sweet time, his murderer coldly regarded the side of his victim’s face, watching the drunk bite his lip bloody to stop himself from passing out. Another foot now. The slow drag of shirt on gravel. Those aged fingers stretching for the barrel of the gun with all the force of will their owner could muster to fire just one more silver bullet if he could. Fingertips six inches away. “Can you guess what happened next,
pendejo
, do you even care? I know you must focus now on getting that gun, so I will tell you. The mouse with the big heart, he made it again to the edge of the porch and another inch he would be safe when the cat pounced, dragged him back and bit off his front leg.” Relishing the moment, squeezing every last drop of sadistic pleasure out of it, Mosca slid his revolver back in his holster.

The drunk’s ancient tobacco-yellowed fingertips touched steel.

The bandit spun his pistol out of his holster around his forefinger and fired a single quick shot from the hip, blowing the
borracho
’s left hand clean off. Finger pieces and bits of palm flesh splattered the dirt as the old man wailed dismally, holding up a gruesome soup of a handless wrist out of which jagged a splintered bone.

“My problem, and your problem, is that I am not a cat, I am a wolf.”

Mosca moved with lightning speed and with one filthy fist grabbed the old man by his thinning white hair, brutally yanking his head up and lifting his shoulders off the ground with savage force.

“And a wolf goes for the throat.”

With that, Mosca sheathed his gun and drew out his knife, sawing at the
borracho
’s neck. The blade cut deep into the flesh, gushing blood in all directions. The bandit’s feral visage was splattered with the bright red oxygenated arterial spray and his grinning teeth turned crimson in a face that was a lurid mask of gore. The dying man’s eyes bulged in unimaginable horror as in his remaining seconds of consciousness he felt his own head being cut off. Mosca viciously jerked the blade back and forth, slicing through skin, tendon, muscle and finally spinal cord with a sickening
crack
and the torso began to fall away, held to the head by a long, wet rope of meat. Grunting impatiently, the bandit leader shook the nearly severed head violently in his grip, until the last grisly strand of muscle snapped and the skull came loose. He carried it by the hair over to a corral fence and slammed the ragged neck stump down on a jutting wooden post, grotesquely impaling the decapitated head. Its sightless eyes stared glassily. Mosca wiped the blade clean on the dead man’s hair then sheathed it, his own gaze as detached as the head. “
Si
, you had heart,
pendejo
. Too bad for you it’s over there.”

The bandit leader kicked the headless trunk out of his way as he trod back up the hill to Santa Sangre.

“Fuck you and your silver.”

Up above on the ridge, tears poured down Pilar’s cheeks watching the scene below from her hiding place. She had seen the whole savage and brutally sadistic killing. Made herself watch. Yet had done nothing. What good could she have done? she told herself over and over. Had she showed herself, with certainty she would have been captured and raped and killed and eaten like the rest. But while her reasoning was sound, the peasant girl knew in her heart she was a coward and she was afraid and that old man who had died so badly down there had not been afraid to die, to do what he could.
You are no hero, Pilar. You have learned there are no heroes, just the strong who prey on the weak
. Shame and self-disgust consumed Pilar and she felt small and worthless as she slunk back from the ridge into the hard lengthening shadows of the lowering sun.

The old man down there at least had been brave.

It made his flesh that much tastier to the vultures who even now descended to feed on his remains.

Then it hit her. The dead man had been using silver bullets, and somewhere on his corpse he likely had more rounds. The body was out in the open in the square. As soon as the bandits went back inside the church she decided she would sneak down into the town and retrieve the silver rounds and the weapons to fire them, staying out of sight. It was up to Pilar now to rescue her sister and her mother, though she would certainly die in the attempt. Her promise had been to return for Bonita, not live forever. She could be brave still.

A few minutes later, the girl risked a peek over the edge of the ridge and saw the two bandits collecting all the unused silver bullets and guns from the dead old man, scavenging the body of weapons like the vultures were of its flesh. The carrion birds did not even pause in their feeding as the brigands took the last of the ammo that could kill them back up into Santa Sangre and all hope was once again lost.

That’s when she saw her little sister step out of the church hand in hand with the bandit leader and for the first and only time in her life, Pilar prayed for her own death.

“Sit with me.”

“Okay.”

The big man with the bad smell sat on the edge of the hill, eye level with the child. “Sit on my lap.” Bonita watched him a moment. He was smiling, patting his thigh. So she sat on him. He put his dirty paw of a hand gently on her back as she perched on his knee. They looked out at the quiet village, and for a while neither spoke.

He did first. “It is cool up here,
si
?”

“The breeze is nice.” She nodded.

“It blows your hair like a dandelion.” Mosca sniffed her hair in a way that was odd to her. “You have beautiful hair, child.”

“Thank you.”

He stroked her black tresses. She wrinkled her nose. “You smell bad.”

Mosca chuckled. “But you smell very, very good. So good I will eat you.” He laughed and she did too, like it was a game. “You are a good girl,
si
?”
 

She shrugged. He held her on his lap under the hot sun of the day. “You are a bad man,” she stated firmly. “And you have dirty fingernails.”

The bandit roared with laughter. “I like you, child. You are very brave to speak to me in such a manner. What is your name?”

“Bonita.”

“Such a pretty name.”

The little girl thanked him politely, perfectly behaved.

“Are you not scared of me?”

She shook her head. “No.”

His reddened eyes twinkled with mirth. “Why is this, my brave little one?”
 

“Because my sister will come and save me.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “Will she? And where is your sister now?”

“I don’t know.”

“But I do.” With a wolfish grin, he nudged his bearded jaw toward the ridge across the village. “She is right over there, at the blacksmith’s shop. Do you know what she is doing at this very minute as we speak?”

“Getting ready to come and save me.”

“Watching us right now. We can’t see her because she hides, but she sees you. Wave to her.” The bandit lifted the little girl’s hand and they both waved. “That’s it. Wave hello.” The child waved for a while, then put her arm down.

“Do you think she saw me?” Bonita asked.

“Certainly. She is crying right now, because she knows that all is lost. Your big sister is very brave, like you. She rode very far to bring dangerous
vaqueros
to kill us, but she chose poorly and those men stole the silver. They were very bad men.”

“Worse than you?”

“Much worse because they lied. I am bad, but I do not lie.”

“I’m sad now.”

The bandit stared in her face with gentleness. “I had a beautiful little girl just like you once. You remind me of her.”

“Did she die?”

He nodded somberly. “She was about your age.”

“What was her name?”

“I don’t remember.”

The little girl looked at him perplexed, like he was kidding her. “How can you forget your child’s name?”
 

His eyes were distant now. “Because it was a long, long time ago.”

She fidgeted. He adjusted her position on the loose pants on his muscled thigh to make her more comfortable. “How long?”

He regarded her with melancholy. “Five hundred years.”

“People don’t live to be five hundred years old.”

“No, people don’t.”

“So how can your child have been five hundred years ago?”

“Because I am not People. I think you know this.”

“Yes.”

He touched her face.

Sniffed her skin.

Tears began to flow from her eyes.

“Don’t be sad, little one. Everybody dies. This is as it should be.”
 

He stood.

“One day you will, too,” he said. The bandit held out his hand. “I will take you back to your mother.”

Bonita rose and took his hand and together they walked back into the church. “My sister is coming.”

“Perhaps.”

“My sister, when she comes, she will kill you.”

The little girl looked up at the huge bandit with her honest button eyes.

He didn’t blink.

All he said was…

“I know.”
 

The bloody bullet wound of a sun sunk into a lake of gore on the horizon as gathering darkness extinguished the last traces of any hope of day. The desert at dusk stretched endlessly on all sides, claustrophobic in its sheer vastness. Three distant riders rested their horses and trotted toward a box canyon of crevices and towering rock crags.
 

Far to the rear, hanging back, a fourth horse and rider pursued them with the dogged dour determination of a coyote. Like the ageless desert predator he was, the hunter blended into the landscape and stayed out of sight.

The gunfighters had been on the trail for three hours, retracing their steps from the long morning ride from the cantina because without a map of the area they didn’t know where they were, and a wrong turn in the endless desert with its lethal heat was a death warrant. Plus their own sign was still fresh and easy to follow. They’d decided to head west once they reached the stagecoach trail they’d encountered earlier, and from there follow it west. The Wells Fargo line would be routed to civilization. The men took it easy on their horses because the animals were weighed down with the brimming saddlebags of silver. If they lost any of the mounts, they’d have to rig up a drag for some of the treasure and that would slow them considerably. It had been about 3:00 p.m. when the men had ridden out of Santa Sangre, and night was fast approaching, so they began looking for a place to camp and start out fresh first thing the next morning. That box canyon ahead looked as good a place as any. Tucker said again what he had said every half an hour since they fled. “Too damn easy.”