26

Spring 1873

THERE WASN’T MUCH out there.

Like the old soldier told him, “Jackrabbits and desert. A few Mex squatters. And the Pecos River. North of there—ever’thing—the hull durn country belongs to the Comanch’.”

Into the bitter cold of winter’s last gasp on the southern plains they plunged, crossing low mountains, peeling their way over rough country like all that they had pierced coming to Comancheria. This was a waterless chaparral where only the creosote brush and spear grass grew to break up the harsh monotony of the rise and fall of a sinister land. That, and the cactus. Always the cactus.

Reluctantly winter relinquished its brief hold on this southern land—making for a muddy time of things.

Over Jonah’s head the low roof leaked, drops of cold mud smacking the back of his neck as he scooped the refried beans, what he had come to call Mexican strawberries, from the earthen bowl with the crude iron spoon. Across from Jonah sat the Indian, smearing a load of the refritos into a swab of tortilla that Two Sleep stuffed into the side of his mouth. The Shoshone called fewer teeth his own nowadays than he had four and a half years before, beside the red desert country where the two had first met. In their time together he had been forced to let Jonah pull three of them from one side alone. Two yanked from the other. It was crude, hard work with the small field pliers Hook packed along for gun repair: messy, bloody work, and damned painful too. But after a day or so of walking around with a small swab of his shirttail stuffed down in the bloody hole, the Shoshone had never failed to smile again, poking his tongue through the new gap, the glaze of pain finally gone from his eyes, that singular ache of a rotting tooth now nothing but a dimming memory.

Some three years wandering among the Mex had taught Hook what he needed of their simple language, absorbing enough of a smattering of verbs and nouns and idioms that allowed him to learn even more as the seasons turned, ever turned.

Most every day it never failed to amaze him that these dirt-poor people had stayed in this unforgiving country, nailed down in this land of sunburned offerings, blessed with little shade and even less sweet water.

Water—that was the one thing worth more than gold in this country. Most of what the two horsemen and their stock had been forced to drink across the slow whirl of the seasons had been squeezed from the drying, death-laced water holes and muddy seeps they ran across on their travels. And whenever the pair found themselves in a mud-and-wattle settlement like this very one, Jonah had come to count himself fortunate that the milky water proved thin enough to drink. His prayer had been answered long ago: the earth-colored fluid so predominate in this land no longer troubled his bowels the way it had when first they had begun their sojourn into this land of the sun long, long ago.

A long time back he had tried the Mexicans’ beer—thick as syrup but shy on flavor. So still he drank the tequila, the Mexicans’ pulque, as much as he hated it. And here in this cantina, as in practically every jacal where they had stopped across the years, there was little but that fermented juice of the agave to drink, its sour and ropy taste barely softened by the warm, earth-rich water a man used to chase the cactus juice, to mellow the racy sting of the green chiles set before him at every meal, hot as a spoonful of red ants.

The hanging lamps cast a light the color of a dull tropical orange over everything, especially the deep-brown hide stretched over the back of Jonah’s hands busy above his bowl. From the corner table arose a quick spate of muffled laughter as men gambled with a greasy deck of flare-red pasteboards. Smoke from their cigarillos hung in wispy spiders’ veils just below the lamplight.

His nostrils came alive, flaring slightly as Jonah smelled her—even before he actually heard her, before he felt her arm rope loosely over his shoulder. The peculiar odor of these cantina women, ripe with the fragrance of pomegranate and penole meant to mask the stench of unwashed flesh, bean wind, and the previous customer, had long ago become as recognizable as the smell of his own horse. Back came the memory of that first of these dark-skinned whores he had taken in a squalid little settlement they reached in New Mexico, he grown so anxious for her that there in the dark corner of that low-roofed hovel, out of the firelight, Jonah had let her unbutton his canvas britches and tantalize him, stroking his hot and swollen flesh until he exploded in her hand. Like music he had been starved from hearing in so long—the music of a woman’s laughter—the whore had laughed at his eagerness as she led the gringo back to a dark room where she showed him to a chair, worked him once more into readiness with her tongue and lips, then sat down upon him.

Gazing up now at this new one in the flickering light shed by the tallow candle that dripped and sputtered in its pool of heady grease at the center of his table, Jonah discovered his lips and the end of his tongue already gone mushy, numbing from the potent cactus juice. Something in his mind made him wonder if this whore was really as good-looking as the tequila made him think she was. Bending low over him, she tantalized him, brushing his shoulder with one of her breasts, her fingers raking through his long hair as she luringly moved the breast past his cheek before settling in the chair at the corner of Hook’s table.

Immediately his eyes fell to her loose blouse, hidden partially beneath the folds of a coarse woollen shawl she had knotted against the depth of her cleavage. In the way she thrust those breasts at him, she made it plain that there was nothing else beneath the blouse, nothing but her brown flesh that rose and fell with her every breath as she poured herself a drink from Hook’s bottle.

“Help yourself,” he said with a wry grin, already sensing his hands on those breasts, willing his lips to suck at their warm aureoles.

There was something playful around her big eyes. Jonah supposed it was the fact that she wanted him, had abandoned the Mex at the bar and came over to show the gringo that she wanted him. She seemed so young, though, so likely that look in her eye was only something practiced, for someone so young would not really know how to share herself with a man. He tugged down the last shred of woman-loneliness left in him, hungering to recognize those small, furtive changes in a woman’s face when she draws close to the one she wants to sink her claws in, if only for a night, if only for an hour, if only for as long as it will take the man to seize his satisfaction.

When he spoke his English, she looked at him quizzically, the cup stopped at her chin. “Señor?”

He hadn’t meant to say it in English. “Don’t matter. Drink up.” Jonah took his cup from the table and clacked it against hers, motioning for Two Sleep to toast with them.

She was woman enough and he had been without long enough, she put the blood so thick in his throat that he could scarcely swallow the ribbon of fire the tequila made descending from his tongue. The pulque didn’t possess the reassuring and familiar formaldehyde stench of frontier whiskey.

She smiled like sunrise calm in the autumntime, something smoky and warm to it, and tossed back the hot tequila in one gulp, hammering the table once as she set her clay cup back down and poured more of the fiery cactus juice into it. That teasing, taunting look in her eyes had probably condemned many a hapless, helpless man to doom in this same stinking cesspool of a cantina.

From the corner of his eye Hook noticed the tall vaquero at the bar for the first time, a young dandy who stood a head above his companions, their faces shrouded in smoke rising from their corn-shuck cigarillos, voices clanging sharp-edged like tiny cymbals. The handsome horseman was dressed in creamy leather all lashed together with stamped conchos and roped in gilt braid. In the dim candlelight Hook could barely make out the man, not much more than a foggy blur of the vaquero’s face as the Mexican glared flints in his direction, and for a minute his tequila-dulled mind argued on which one of them the Mex was looking at. Perhaps the vaquero simply did not like Two Sleep. No matter, really. There would always be those who didn’t take to Injuns.

But that did not quite fit, either, the more Jonah’s slow mind kneaded it while he kept on eating, his teeth tearing at the chiles and the tortilla, sucking back the softened beans, then gazed up at the vaquero again and decided the man was glaring at the woman. That was it, he decided. She had come over from the bar, where he remembered seeing her looped beneath the vaquero’s arm when he and Two Sleep had blown in and slammed the crude door behind them, the fine powder from the trail settling like gold dust in the pale, yellow candlelight. Ever since Jonah had felt her hot black eyes on him.

The way he now sensed the Mex’s eyes burning a hole of hate in his left shoulder.

From where Jonah sat, he faced the door and the room’s only window, his back for the most part turned on the bar and half of the room. His partner watched the rest of that low-roofed hovel.

“How many’s the others?” he asked Two Sleep, grumbling it in English.

The Indian did not answer at first. Instead, he swabbed some more beans and chiles into his tortilla and stuffed it in his mouth. As he wiped the back of a hand across his lips, only then did the Shoshone’s eyes quickly rake the half of the room under his gaze.

“Five,” he replied in English. Then moving his hands quickly, but casually, in the ballet of plains sign language, Two Sleep told Hook the rest.

Three of them do not belong to the rest of the poor ones. Three of them are for us.

“Three with him?”

The Shoshone nodded his head.

When Hook began to look back to the woman, he watched the Indian’s eyes climb and narrow. Jonah smelled the man before he heard the leather-heeled boots clatter to a halt beside his chair.

“You may be only a slut,” he told the woman gruffly. “But tonight you are my slut. Come with me.”

Her black eyes went to Jonah’s, perhaps to search for hope, to plea for help, to find a hero.

“Come!” he roared at her.

Jonah’s eyes climbed to the vaquero’s now. Blinking, clearing them of the tequila-and-chile tears, he found the Mexican’s eyes shining like those of some despised, creeping night animal. The man’s breath rose and fell in great gusts, sweetened with agave.

“Time enough for you to have her, friend,” Hook told the man in Spanish. “Go and leave her for now. Go back to the bodega and your friends. Time enough for you.”

With a smooth movement the vaquero brought his right hand to rest on the handle of the long knife stuffed in the colorful sash at his waist. The left hand seized the whore’s wrist and yanked it up.

“Come, I said!”

She began to babble in pain, gripping the hand that imprisoned her. Her head was thrown back as he kicked the chair out from beneath her, yanking her roughly to her feet, yanking her back from the table.

“No cause to do that,” Jonah said quietly, in his own tongue. “Leave the woman be.”

As the vaquero’s three companions inched toward them, the bar at their backs and the massive rowels on their Mexican spurs jangling like tambourines, Hook thought he heard the click of two hammers coming to full-cock.

“Two Sleep?” he asked as he rose slowly from his chair, without looking at the Shoshone.

The Indian whispered, “They are dead men—they move on you.”

Jonah turned back to the vaquero. “I will say it for the last time,” he spoke in Spanish. “Leave the woman be.”

With a laugh the vaquero whirled the whore backward out of the way, pulling his knife as Hook’s arm swung, bringing up the cup filled with tequila. It splashed into the Mexican’s face at the same moment the knife glinted candlelight across the distance at the end of the vaquero’s arm. It moved like quicksilver sliding off an upended piece of isinglass.

Numbed by the liquor, Hook didn’t feel the pain of the blade’s slash along his left arm. Yet he knew in that primitive way of the animal that his flesh had been opened. A moment later he sensed the hot, sticky beading along the slash. The Mexican stood smirking at him, wiping the tequila off his smooth brown face.

For a moment Hook stood transfixed by his blood-slicked arm, his glazed eyes crawling past the three others at the bar, then coming to stop on the vaquero’s face as Jonah’s right hand went to his belt for his own knife. It came into the candlelight slowly, a dull glint reflected off the long blade that had scalped more than one of the Danites he hunted with a vengeance.

“No. Shoot him and we go,” Two Sleep snapped, pushing his wobbly chair back slightly. “Put the goddamned knife away. Shoot him now.”

Hook wagged his head, shaking loose wispy webs as his eyes crawled across the men gathered at the bar, stopping once on the fat bartender, his brown neck plopped atop his shoulders in unwashed rolls like a turkey’s wattle, long ristras of dried chiles hung behind him like crimson curtains. The man’s hands were out of sight. Danger pricked Jonah as he looked back at the shrieking woman, the back of her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide in terror.

He sensed she had seen enough blood spilled on her account. Women like her drew trouble, like flecks of iron to a lodestone. Yet knowing it did not help. Here he was, his own knife drawn against the young vaquero, who again pushed the whore back out of his way and turned sideways, crouching slightly at the knees.

There was no grace, no finesse in Hook’s sudden, drunken lunge for the Mexican. The only thing that saved him was the surprising suddenness of it, closing before the vaquero could slash out at his enemy.

A cry of shock, a yelp of pain reverberated in Jonah’s ear as he slid his knife along the Mexican’s ribs, dragging the man close with his free arm. He felt the warmth ooze over his blade hand. With all the strength he had, Hook held the vaquero close, continuing to dance from beneath the man’s wild swings with that knife, knowing that if the Mexican broke free …

His breath exploded from him when the vaquero spun Hook and pushed him backward against the bar. The Mexican’s free hand clamped around Jonah’s wrist, repeatedly hammering the arm and hand against the edge of the bar. Unable to maintain his grip, the knife popped free, sent spinning down the bar.

As quickly Jonah brought both hands up, seizing the vaquero’s wrist, holding his red-tainted knife high overhead. There they struggled, pitching their weight against the other, spinning and each trying to throw his opponent off balance. Hook lunged for the vaquero’s ear, catching it between his teeth, squeezing down until he felt the salty, thick syrup trickle over his tongue. With a squeal of pain followed by a grunt of effort the Mexican drove his knee into Jonah’s groin.

Down Hook tumbled, the sudden pain radiating out from the core of him like exploding stars.

In triumph the vaquero stood over his vanquished enemy, rotating the knife handle as he dropped to his knees on top of Hook so that he could plunge it into the gringo’s heart. He smiled, then as suddenly as he had descended on his enemy, the vaquero wore a look of utter surprise, a pinched look of panic as he rocked back to gaze down at his chest where the American released a second knife.

Staring dumbfounded, the Mexican struggled to rise. But his legs had gone to water and would not hold him.

Hook shoved the Mexican off. The vaquero tumbled to the floor, his legs beginning to draw up as Jonah pulled his knife free from the man’s chest—then savagely plunged it into the red-stained white shirt again and a third time, splattering flecks of blood across the creamy buckskin jacket.

“Donde?” the vaquero asked with a gasp, blood on his lips.

“Where? Where’d I get the knife?” Jonah asked in reply, slowly pulling the blade from the man’s chest, then holding the sharp tip against the vaquero’s Adam’s apple. “Where I come from, a man never carries just one knife, Señor. Never just one.”

With a jerk Jonah fell to the side as the bunched gunshots boomed in the low-roofed earthen room. A last one rang in his ears before Jonah rolled over to find Two Sleep still sitting, his pistol muzzle smoking, and two of the vaquero’s companions crumpling slowly, a third clawing desperately at the edge of the bar, their own guns tumbling from their hands to clatter dully onto the pounded clay floor.

“Watch the drink man,” Jonah snarled at Two Sleep, his head nodding at the bartender.

Two Sleep leveled one of the pistols at the Mexican behind the bar as Jonah crabbed back to the vaquero, who lay wreathed in blood, his breath coming ragged. He put the tip of his knife blade back against the Mexican’s throat, then gazed up into the flickering candlelight, eventually finding her.

“C’mere!” he ordered her in English. When she did not obey immediately, he called her gruffly in Spanish.

Whimpering, the whore stood over him, tears having streaked the alegría she had used to rouge her cheeks.

“You want me to kill him quick?”

She shook her head, then nodded yes. “Sí. No, no—leave him be.”

“You love him, eh?” Jonah asked as he slowly drew the bloody knife from the vaquero’s throat, wiping it off on the buckskin jacket.

“No—I could not love him. He is trouble to me every time he comes in,” she said quietly in the hushed cantina. “But there would be more trouble for me if you kill him.”

Hook peered down at the Mexican and sighed, then gazed up at the whore. “It doesn’t matter now, Señorita”

“He is dead too?” growled the bartender.

As he rose, Jonah stuffed the second knife away inside his boot. “These others, they should have minded their own business. How about you? Will you mind your own business?”

The man’s puffy black eyes were like a frightened, caged animal’s as they darted here and there, then eventually landed back on Hook’s face. He slid Jonah’s knife down the bar toward the American. “Sí. Just go. Go now and never come back.”

Two Sleep still had his pistols drawn, covering the room as Jonah dragged up the Winchester propped against their table. Hook reached over to clamp his right hand around the woman’s wrist, holding his left forearm protectively in front of him.

“You owe me, Señorita. You better help me stop this bleeding—for saving your life.”

Her eyes climbed from his bloody shirt, softening as they peered into his. “Yes. I owe you, Señor.”