The Crossings Read online

  At first I thought it was the coyotes' lonesome howling that awoke me in the night but it was not. It was Elena, her voice, the coyotes providing only appropriate accompaniment to whatever strange harsh language she was speaking which was not English nor Spanish but some tongue I'd never heard before nor ever wished to hear, a violent whisper, a chant almost devoid of long sonorous vowels but which were instead described in a series of short breathy interludes between the explosive dominant consonants that clicked and hissed and barked like something drawn directly from nature, from the wild, from a jungle, here where there was no jungle, the rattle and slither of venomous snakes, a hive of bees, the yip of a coyote, the rustle of leaves in dense air, all of these intermingled and which repeated themselves over and over as she knelt rocking back and forth naked on her knees before the fire, sweat rolling down her long scarred back, feeding broken bits of kindling to the flames. Propped up beside her against the logs was a small crucifix made of twigs and bound with strips of cloth. Beside that a tin plate of cornmeal, another of coffee beans and a third containing two broken eggs.

  She had raided our supplies silent as a ghost.

  And in that flickering light you could believe she was some ghost made flesh. Some ancient Indio demon summoning her brethren.

  It was three hundred years since Cortez. Aztec, Maya, Toltec, Mexica. All gone. Or were they?

  I remembered the wildness in her eyes when first we'd seen her.

  I wondered what those eyes held now.

  She reached over for the plate of cornmeal and tossed it into the fire. In the woodsmoke I now smelled cornbread. She began to tremble. She set the plate down and reached for the coffee beans and did the same and now I smelled morning coffee. The trembling increased. Her head rolled side to side. The rocking became an up and down motion. Her chanting increased its pace. She reached again.

  I wasn't surprised to smell fried eggs as though cooking in a pan.

  She slid her legs apart and the sudden erotic charge did take me by surprise because in that single movement all I watched and heard clarified and I knew it was some life-force she was summoning there before the fire and I could imagine a man there all along and only this moment revealed beneath her thrusting up silent and invisible as she thrust down.

  Something made me turn and steal a glance at Hart and Mother. Mother faced the far wall, asleep.

  Hart's eyes were open. He was watching.

  She groaned and shuddered and fell silent. Her head dropped forward and then her body so that she rested on all fours for a moment breathing hard and then threw herself to the side and onto her blankets. I closed my eyes and pretended sleep.

  Real sleep was long coming.

  SEVEN

  She told us she remembered the day she felt the full weight of what had happened to them. Not just the rapes and the humiliations, the cramped airless foul-smelling sleeping quarters or the mule work in the yard with the goats or chickens or in the garden under the ferocious blazing sun or in the stifling laundry or kitchen, all of them hobbled like horses. Not just the bullwhip.

  She remembered her first time inside the hacienda.

  She has been there merely five days. She has not seen her sister Celine in the last two of those days and that is a torture too. She is drawing a bucket of water from the well. It's needed in the kitchen.

  Maria, the middle sister, thin-lipped, harsh and grim is beckoning to her from the porch. Do that later, she says. Come here. Elena sets the bucket down and walks past the blackened remains of one bonfire and then another. She has trouble climbing the steps to the porch. With her ankles tied together she can only take the steps one at a time. Maria is impatient. Hurry little bitch, she says.

  On the outside the hacienda is old and shabby. Inside she sees the Valenzuras' wealth. A short corridor leads to a huge room through oak double doors. Gold chandeliers hung from gleaming intricately-worked punched tin ceilings, marble fireplaces, armoires and shelves and side towers carved from juniper, oak and mahogany, painted standing bookshelves, yarn paintings and bark paintings of monkeys, snakes and lizards, gold sun masks and jaguar masks, immense gilt mirrors. And everywhere the image of the wolf.

  In iron statuary, in fired clay, in stone. In paint and embroidery.

  The wolf is theirnahaul. The animal to which they link their destiny.

  She follows Maria through the vast room which holds these treasures past a polished oak staircase which separates two corridors, one brightly lit and lushly carpeted with paintings on the walls and potted cacti blooming reds and yellows, the other shabby, dark and bare. Their destination is through this latter corridor and already she is disturbed at what she hears. They walk past six small rooms from which the doors have been removed, set staggered to each other, three on either side. The first is empty but for a single bed, its mattress dark with stains. In the second a young Mexican girl wearing only a rebozo draped across her shoulders huddles weeping in a corner. Her wrists are shackled together in front of her.

  The third is empty too but for a cobweb maze of heavy chains which depend from the ceiling. Directly across from it the fourth room is similar but inhabited. A woman of about Elena's age hangs swaying from a pair of manacles in the center of the room. The woman appears to be unconscious, possibly dead. Her filthy serape has been torn through down the middle. Her feet are mere inches off the floor and her face is bloody from recent beating.

  At the fifth door Maria nearly collides with a fat Mexicansoldado who is emerging from the room, tucking his shirt into his pants. He meekly nods and steps hastily aside for her. As she passes Elena glances into the room and sees a young woman with bright red tangled hair sobbing naked sprawled across the bed.

  The worst by far is the sixth room. She has been listening to the sounds coming from here since they entered the corridor.

  Someone is being horribly beaten.

  And here she sees men she knows — Gustavo, the flat-faced Indio half-breed who brought her to this place and Fredo, the fat one who rode with her sister. Fredo holds a short studded whip. They stand on either side of a table. Tied spread-eagled to the legs of the table face-up across it is a young girl of exactly Celine' s coloring and build and Elena stops dead in her tracks sure at first that it is Celine, absolutely certain of it and in her rage and fear at the bloody carnage in front of her nearly vaults into the room despite her hobbled legs, the threat of death itself won't stop her, until the girl turns her head and she sees by the livid kidney-shaped birthmark on her neck that it is not Celine after all but someone else's sister fated to endure this.

  Come on, says Maria. Whore.

  She follows her with difficulty, the hobbles chafing at her ankles, up a back set of stairs which were probably once for the servants ' use and into a second corridor. The sounds she is hearing now are not precisely screams but they are sounds of great distress and they are female. Maria waits ahead of her at the entrance to the first door she comes to and angrily beckons her in and now she hears also the unmistakable crying of a baby. Elena follows her in.

  The room is lit with more than a dozen scented candles. They do not quite mask the scent of raw flesh and unclean sweat and urine which emanates from the woman upon the bed. The woman has just given birth and the old hag Eva holds it crying in her arms. It is wrapped in a thin white towel. With Eva grinning toothlessly down at it, she thinks, anyone would cry. The pig-faced sister Lucia is cleaning up the afterbirth. Behind them Paddy Ryan stands in shadow.

  Male or female? Maria asks.

  Lucia shrugs. Male, she says.

  As Eva predicted, Maria says. Too bad.

  She turns to Elena. Take it, she says. Elena has no wish to come anywhere near this filthy creature or this child but she does as she's told and manages to do so without touching the old woman's clawed yellow hands. Are you ready, Ryan? Maria says.

  I am, he says.

  She turns to Elena again. Go with Mr. Ryan.

  Ryan leads her back the way she's come and she refuses to gaze into any of the rooms now despite the young girl's screaming and the crack of the whip. The baby's crying is constant and it seems she can do nothing to stop it. He leads her across the courtyard to the barren wasted hill beyond and they begin to climb. She has never been up this hill before but she knows what they call it — Garanta del Diablo — the Devil's Mouth. She has seen the black plumes of smoke which drift continually on the wind.

  As they near the top she stops to catch her breath and glances back toward the hacienda. All three sisters are on the porch, watching them. The baby has at last stopped crying. Ryan has disappeared from sight atop the plateau. The sun beats down. She continues on.

  At the top she sees him waiting for her standing beside a wall-like pyramid of blackened skulls. The wall is tall as he is.

  The air is thick with tarry smoke wafting up from behind him.

  Some of the skulls are very small but all of them are human.

  She begins to cry.

  Bring it here.

  You can't do this! she says.

  His voice is quiet and without passion. When he smiles the scar on his cheek contracts. Sure I can. Bring it here. Else you both go. Up to you.

  It's a child!

  A boy's no use to us here. That's just the way it is. He draws his sidearm and spins the chamber. Your choice, he says.

  She walks over until she's close enough to gaze into the pit maybe six or seven feet across and sees the fire burning a sullen red and blue within, sees the long-handled iron scoop which lies beside it and closes her eyes as Ryan takes the baby from her arms and hears it begin to cry again perhaps from the loss of her and she is crying too as he tells her she can go back to her work now and she is halfway down the hill moving slowly when the baby 's crying stops abruptly
and all she hears is wind in the hills and the bleating of the goats in the yard.

  Her own tears linger off and on all day long— she feels as though she has lost her own child or a brother — and only stop when lying in her bunk late at night she peers through the weathered wooden slats of the wall to their sleeping quarters and sees Celine with a group of others throwing sand over one of the bonfires, her little sister looking tired and bruised and beaten. But alive.

  EIGHT

  "Get up, Bell. She's gone, goddammit!"

  It was Mother, storming into the cabin.

  "What? What's going on?"

  "She took my horse, goddammit. She took the goddamn roan."

  "How...?"

  "My horse and Hart's Winchester. Gear and saddle too."

  He kicked her blankets off into a corner.

  "The girl did?"

  "Jesus, Bell. Who the hell do you think I'm talking about? The Mex! The goddamn woman!"

  I couldn't believe she'd have the strength to saddle a horse and ride. Not the way she was wounded. Then I remembered what I'd seen last night.

  "Where's Hart?"

  "Outside. If I were you I'd check my clothes, see what's missing. You're the smallest and I doubt she rode outta here naked. I liked that horse, goddammit."

  He was right. A shirt and a pair of trousers were missing from my pack. Not the best of what I had but not the worst either. It was nothing compared to Mother's horse or Hart's rifle but enough so that I felt somewhat betrayed by her too. If she'd asked I'd have given them freely. But she hadn't.

  Hart was sitting on the porch in his boots and long johns, smoking a cigarette and twirling his dice. I sat down next to him with a cup of coffee looking out into the corral at the two new restless mustangs there. The day was already hot and clear. I sipped the coffee and considered.

  "Last night, Hart? By the fire?"

  "Yes. What about it?

  "Hell, I don't know. I don't know what to say. It was pretty damn amazing, wouldn't you say? She was..."

  "She was healing, Bell. Healing the old way. How'd you like it?"

  "All things told? I didn't. Truth is she scared me." He smiled but there wasn't any humor in it.

  "You've got good instincts, son. You ever have serious dealings with a Mex, you hold on tight to those instincts."

  He got up and tossed away the cigarette and turned toward the cabin.

  "So what're we gonna do?"

  He stopped and seemed to ponder that a moment. "Well, Mother's got other horses but I haven't got another Winchester. So I guess we go on after her."

  I considered telling him he could have mine. That's how much I liked the prospect of this enterprise. But I didn't.

  We trailed her all morning and into the afternoon, past flowering yucca and greasewood, prickly pear and tall saguaro, through scrub thick and thin and over grass and owl's clover. We saw a pair of jackrabbits in full rut and hawks riding the thermals high above. In the mostly dry dusty terrain her tracks were clear. To Mother and Hart if not to me.

  You want to tell me what the hell she's doing? Mother said.

  Mother, you know what she's doing, Hart said. Going right back to where she came from.

  It was late afternoon before we found her lying beneath a gnarled clump of trees propped up against one of them, the roan tethered beside her and Hart's Winchester lying across her lap. She looked bad, exhausted — nearly as bad as when first we first saw her — and some of her wounds had begun bleeding again beneath my shirt and Mother's dressings. She said nothing when we reined in and only glared at Hart and watched him as he dismounted his blaze-face black and walked over and took his rifle, walked back to the horse and shoved it in its scabbard and then returned and bent down to her suddenly and took her cheeks between his fingers and squeezed.

  She was cut deep there and it must have hurt like hell but she said nothing.

  "You want to remember something, woman," he said. "Your little friend died all over me last night. That matter to you? Do you give a good goddamn about that? I don't think you do. This what we get for helping you?"

  He squeezed harder. Blood seeped through the bandage beneath his thumb.

  "Hey, Hart," I said. "Jesus, Hart!"

  She was a thief but she was hurt and a woman and I was nearly down off Suzie when Mother reached over and stopped me.

  "Leave it be, son."

  "You do that, Bell," he said, and then to her, "now are you going to talk to me? Because I'm a little tired of you looking at me in Apache, if you get my meaning. You stole from me and you stole from Mother and Bell over there and I want to know why and if you don't start talking to me soon I may just take the roan and leave you under this goddamn shade tree for the wolves and coyotes this evening. Because I am looking at one damn fool here, doing what you're doing."

  He released her and stood away. Finally she nodded. "Can I have a drink of water?" she said. The first words in English we'd heard out of her.

  "Hell," said Mother, "you can have dinner. We all will. Then we'll talk. That okay with you, Hart?"

  "That's fine, Mother."

  Now what's your goddamn name? he said and she told him.

  We got her on the horse and rode in the rapid-falling sunset to a creek we knew of where the mustangs liked to take their water evenings. She told us she wanted a bath, that it would make her feel much better and nobody tried to talk her out of it. Hart said he'd come along. The horses needed watering he said and our canteens needed filling. It didn't seem quite proper to me but nobody tried to talk him out of it either. Not even her. I could only figure she wasn't much for privacy.

  Mother had thought to bring along fresh bandages so replacing them after her bath wasn't going to be a problem.

  We watched them descend the slope to the stream, Hart leading our horses and Elena the one she'd stolen from Mother and then we set about gathering what firewood the meager scrub around us had to offer.

  "What's his problem, Mother?" I asked when we were nearly through.

  "Who? Hart? You mean with the Mex?"

  I nodded.

  "Hell, Hart knows the Mex well. Most of 'em are still half Indian you understand. So you got to show 'em your cojones. Get them to respect you. Otherwise they're liable to slit your throat one night just because they like the shine of your boots. You know that Hart was a drover during Win Scott's Puebla campaign."

  I said I hadn't. I was surprised to hear it in fact and told him so — that I was with Scott myself and Hart knew that and so did he. So why hadn't they told me?

  "Hell, I was there too," Mother said. "I never told you, neither."

  "Why?"

  "You never asked, Bell. Anyhow that was where we met, Hart and me. Summer of '47, just after Santa Anna got his ass handed to him at Cerro Gordo, just before the push to Mexico City."

  "You were garrisoned there? In Puebla?"

  "Nope. Supply train. Hell of a time for everybody, though, no matter where you were."

  "I know. You had Santa Anna on the one hand scurrying around scrounging for troops and cash and us just sitting there waiting for reinforcement and filling up the goddamn hospitals. For months in that garrison we lost twelve or so men every day to heat and dysentery and all you could do was wrap them in the shit-stained blankets they died in and dump them into those pits they had outside there. Some dazzling military mind, that Scott had. Bastard never stopped drilling those boys though they were lucky to get half rations. And there he is, waiting for the 9th New England Regiment I think it was to come fill his goddamn ranks while he decimates them on the parade grounds. Crazy sonovabitch."

  "You never saw the worst of it, though, Bell."

  "I saw Mexico City."

  "That was plenty bad, I grant you. But the worst was the guerrillas. I was with a supply train, as I say. Hart was a drover. We saw plenty of those sons of bitches and we saw what they did. First they'd steal you blind and then just kill you for the pleasure of it. Cut a man's heart out and tongue out and rip his pecker off and string 'em from the limb of a tree with his body propped up beneath it. Supposed to scare the hell out of you and believe me, it did."

  We had what we judged was enough dry juniper and brush for the fire so we began gathering the stones with which to bank it.