Wraiths of the Broken Land

Wraiths

of the

Broken Land

S. Craig Zahler

Wraiths of the Broken Land copyright © 2013 by S. Craig Zahler

Published by Raw Dog Screaming Press

Bowie, MD

First Edition

Book Design: Jennifer Barnes

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-935738-35-0 / Paperback 978-1-935738-36-7

www.RawDogScreaming.com

Wraiths of the Broken Land is dedicated to Pam Christenson & Jody Zahler

Summer, 1902

Part I

This Ain’t No Sojourn

Chapter I

Shaking Hands

The woman who had forgotten her name shifted upon the damp mattress, and the raw sores across her back, buttocks and arms sang out in a chorus of pain. She turned onto her left side to relieve the wounds. As her legs closed, something hard and unfamiliar press against her vaginal walls, and she said, “Lord...” The woman slid her right hand to her pelvis, poked her fingertips inside, touched a hemispherical lump and withdrew it like a pearl from an oyster. After a moment of lightheadedness, she opened her eyes and looked at the thing pinched in-between her right thumb and index finger and saw that it was a dead baby turtle.

The sight of the deceased creature should have shocked her, but the woman who had forgotten her name felt only a detached curiosity regarding the extracted inhabitant, as if she were listening to nearby strangers discuss a topic of mild interest.

Beside her bed and nestled within small cubbyholes were two candles that yielded the overripe smells of flowers, cinnamon and vanilla and a small amount of amber light. In this cloying luminance, the woman appraised the dead baby turtle that had been inserted into her for some obscure purpose by a man whom she thankfully could not remember. The creature had died with its head and legs withdrawn into its shell, wholly isolated from the world, and she envied it.

Far fouler things had intruded upon her during the past eight months of her subterranean perdition.

For no reason that she understood, the woman set the circular corpse upon her pillow, beside tangled locks of her long blonde hair, and ran a fingertip gently across its crenulate shell. The baby turtle’s head slid from the front aperture and dangled, flaccid.

“Reina!” The voice was male, and it penetrated wood and stone.

The woman looked away from the tiny corpse and across the chamber, at the thick, iron-braced wooden door set in the far wall.

“Foods,” announced the man.

Unable to locate her nightgown, the woman pulled a blanket that was coarse with dried semen over her bare body.

A line of yellow light appeared at the edge of the door and grew into a seven-foot tall oblong. Within the rectangle of luminance stood the man with the wooden nose, the hombre who brought the canister. The candle flames glinted upon his rubber slicker.

The woman said, “Not hungry,” and shook her head. “No food. No comida para mi.”

The man with the wooden nose ignored her statements and rolled the canister into the room, steering it by the lever that jutted from its top. The wheels beneath the vessel squeaked like tortured rodents, and the abused woman felt the shrill sounds within the fluids of her eyeballs.

“Foods,” announced the man with the wooden nose as he parked the canister beside her bed. He leaned over and unwound a corporeal tube from the side of the device.

Repulsed by the thought of eating, the woman said, “No food.” Her quavering body needed something else.

The man with the wooden nose brought the dripping end of the pig’s intestine toward the woman’s mouth, but she pursed her lips and turned her head away. The tube dribbled viridescent drops onto the blanket.

“Reina must eat and keep beautiful.” Air whistled through the nostrils that had been drilled into the man’s false nose, and his small obsidian eyes stared. He raised the end of the pig’s intestine to his mouth, licked a drop of soup from the tip, smiled and nodded. “Bueno. Is good.”

The woman pointed to the dark marks upon her bony arms and said, “I need more.”

“No more medicine.”

Like a fire throughout desiccated woodlands, fear consumed her interiors. “I…I need more.” Her mouth dried up. “I need more medicine, it’s been days since—”

“No more.” The man with the wooden nose raised the dripping tip of the pig intestine. “Por favor reina, tu—”

“I won’t eat until I get medicine.”

A fist slammed into the woman’s stomach. She gasped for air, and the pig intestine entered her mouth. The man with the wooden nose clamped her jaw shut and pumped the canister lever with his right foot. Soup that tasted like garlic, mildew and rotten chicken flooded down the woman’s throat and into her stomach. She tried to call out, but instead sputtered sour broth through her nostrils.

“Bueno.”

The man with the wooden nose pumped another sour burst of soup into her, watched her swallow, withdrew the tube and began to coil it around the canister. “You needs sleep. In three days is big fiesta. You have muy important customers, and the boss wants—”

“Get me medicine,” demanded the woman.

“No more medicine. It is making you sick. Customers complain that you have cold hands and your hairs is falling out.”

Without the opiate’s protection, the woman could not endure another fiesta. “I’ll make trouble if you don’t get me medicine. I’ll mess the bed again.”

“No.” The man with the wooden nose frowned. “No do that.”

“You get me medicine or I’ll mess the bed when a client is here. Make big trouble for everyone.”

The man with the wooden nose whistled through his nostrils, turned away from the recumbent woman, rolled his canister from the room, shut the door and twisted the key.

Alone and full of foul food, the prisoner grew drowsy and fell asleep. In her dream, she was a happily-married choirmaster who lived in San Francisco. Her name was Yvette.

Yvette awakened. Her negligee (which she did not remember donning), face and hair were damp with the sweat of withdrawal. She opened her eyes and saw less. The bedside candles had guttered while she slept, and the room was dark, excepting the small amount of light that crept beneath the oaken door. At the foot of her bed she descried a vaguely triangular shape, like that of a cloaked figure, and felt fear.

The intruder wheezed.

“Who’s there?” asked Yvette.

The intruder breathed, clicked his tongue and sneezed explosively. Yvette gasped and released a small amount of urine.

A wet tongue slid across the bottom of her right foot, and she hastily retracted the appendage. The triangular shape sniffed thrice, orbited the bed, paused beside her pillow and panted. The smells that reached the woman’s nostrils were those of meat and marrow.

Yvette placed her right hand upon a damp snout. The dog whimpered with pleasure at her touch, unfurled its meaty tongue and licked the salt that had dried upon her wrist.

After she emptied her bladder into the metal pot that she kept beneath her mattress, Yvette struck a match, shared the flame with a candlewick and snuffed the phosphorous head inside a crack in the wall.

The dog was a rusty, fifty-pound male mongrel with pointy ears, wise eyebrows and a big beard that sprouted in all directions from its long snout. The guileless animal stared at her directly, as would an innocent child or a lover.

It had been many months since Yvette had looked into the eyes of anyone that she did not loathe, and she felt tears track down her cheeks. The drops lingered at the edge of her chin and dripped onto the sodden mattress.

Unimpressed by its surroundings, the distinguished dog scratched its side and inspected a toenail.

“Howdy,” Yvette said to the creature.

The dog’s mouth opened and shut, as if the animal had intended to speak, but then decided against so doing. It sat upon its haunches and lifted its right paw.

“You know how to shake hands?”

The beast eyed her imperiously.

Yvette leaned forward to clasp the proffered appendage, but was seized by the sickness of withdrawal in a horrible flood. She reached beneath her bed, retrieved the metal pot and violently dislodged the major part of the soup that had been forced into her earlier that evening. Sweat coated her flush, down-turned face and she heaved again.

For a ponderous and inert moment, she dripped.

Yvette pulled tangled twines of hair from her mouth, spat sour detritus into the collected excreta and did her best not to inhale the mephitic odors that would certainly bring about another round of retching.

She replaced the pot, laid back and stared up at the cracked ceiling. When strangers slobbered upon her breasts, as if she were their mother and could somehow return them to a state of ecstatic infancy, or entered her canal, she gazed up at the riven stone and imagined that she was a bug crawling across its coarse surface. Some fellows wanted her to look at them and playact affections, but not until the man with the wooden nose had given her medicine had she been able to render these services.

The hope that she would be saved from her terrible perdition had dwindled each month, and although it had not yet disappeared, it was a miniscule mote of dust. Whenever she spoke to the Lord, Yvette asked Him to send rescuers or call her up to be at His side. She had suffered for far too long. Perhaps the dog was a friend sent by Him to comfort her as her life came to its miserable conclusion?

Yvette sat up, felt a wave of pain, pulled her bony ankles across the bed and set the soles of her feet upon the carpet. Trembling, she reached out and said, “Shake hands.”

The dog sneezed and yawned, but did not proffer a paw.

Yvette pondered the animal’s reluctance and said, “Mano,” which was the Spanish word for ‘hand.’

As if it were about to take a solemn oath, the distinguished canine raised its right paw.

The captive woman shook the appendage and released it. “So you’re a Mexican?”

The dog sneezed.

“I won’t hold it against you.” Yvette ruminated for a moment and remembered the Spanish word for ‘talk.’ “Habla.”

The dog woofed, and the burst of loud air made its beard flap.

Metal squeaked on the far side of the room. Yvette and her distinguished roommate looked at the door. Beyond the open portal and silhouetted by a torch that was ensconced in the hallway stood the man with the wooden nose. Instead of his usual slicker, he wore brown trousers and a fancy burgundy shirt. His small eyes caught the candle flames and shone like two distant stars.

“You like Henry?” inquired the man with the wooden nose.

Yvette felt evil creep into the room.

The man scratched his neck and pointed an index finger at the dog. “His name is Henry. You like him?”

“I sicked up the food you gave me.” Yvette leaned over and retrieved the metal pot filled with her yields. “In here. Can you—”

“Henry is circus dog from Mexico City,” said the man with the wooden nose. “The ringmaster die, and his daughter sells away the animals to buy him un coffin.”

“I am hungry,” Yvette said in an effort to redirect the conversation. “Tengo hambre. Would you—”

“Henry.” The dog looked at the tiny pinpricks of light that were the man’s eyes. “¡Vengaqui!” (Yvette knew that this meant ‘Come here.’)

The dog walked toward the man with the wooden nose.

“¡Alto!”

The dog paused.

“¡Sientate!”

The dog sat upon its haunches.

Yvette’s stomach dropped. “Don’t!”

The man flung the door. Wood and stone impacted the dog’s skull, and it howled.

“Leave him be!” Yvette rose from her bed, grew dizzy and collapsed upon the mattress. “Don’t hurt him!”

The man with the wooden nose reopened the door. The animal whimpered pitifully, staggered back a step, regained its footing and shook its head.

“¡Vengaqui!”

The dog ambled forward. The door slammed upon its snout, and something cracked.

“Stop!” yelled Yvette. “Stop, stop!”

The man with the wooden nose opened the door. Twisting its head weirdly, as if it were watching the flight of a drunken bumblebee, the dog hobbled back into the room. Blood dripped from its nostril and right ear, and a sliver of bone, white and agleam, jutted from its crooked snout.

The man with the wooden nose walked toward the captive. Atop his moccasins, ornate beads clicked like dice.

The dog collapsed upon its side, rose to its feet, walked in a circle and shook its concussed, dripping head.

One yard from the bed, the man stopped. “Reina. Mirame. Look at me!”

Yvette wiped tears from her eyes and looked up.

“You will give good lovemaking to the clients or I will make Henry suffer very bad.”

“I’ll be good.”

“No mess the bed?”

“I won’t,” confirmed Yvette.

“Bueno.” The man with the wooden nose turned away and strode past the stumbling dog. “Now we can be good friends.”

Chapter II

A Quiet Squabble

Nathaniel Stromler strode from the stable toward the Footmans’ house, ruminating upon squabbles, which were his least favorite form of communication. His mother and father had bickered throughout his childhood back in Michigan, especially during wintertime (when the heat of their verbal battles often superseded the blazing emanations of the hearth), and by the time he was ten, he had decided that such dialogues only occurred when people were unable to think clearly, speak precisely and remain rational when confronted by opposing viewpoints.

Kathleen O’Corley, Nathaniel’s fiancé, had a different opinion about squabbles. She believed that such interactions were normal and cleansing, and that they proved a person was an impassioned individual. (He had courteously disagreed with her surmise.)

Nathaniel walked along the pebble pathway, toward the black square that was the house within which he and his fiancé lived, and the chill night winds of the New Mexico Territory tingled his skin. He feared that the folded advert he carried within his vest would incite Kathleen to argumentatively demonstrate her love for him, and for this reason, he had shrewdly awaited the hour when all of the Footmans were indoors and able to hear raised voices.

“Evenin’ Mister Stromler,” said the white-haired negro named Sir, amicably waving his four-fingered right hand.

Nathaniel absently reciprocated the gesture, but his mind was so busy arranging words for his coming discussion that he forgot to proffer any in reply.

Upon the façade, the dark living room curtains informed him that the little ones had already eaten and been sent to bed. Kathleen would not be able to raise her voice.

Nathaniel ascended two steps and landed upon the unpainted wooden porch that circumscribed the edifice’s south and west sides.

The front door disappeared, and the screen swung out. From the home’s amber interior strode its owner, a squat cattle rancher, clothed in workpants and a red union suit. “You missed dinner,” Ezekiel Footman stated with mild concern. The forty-nine-year-old man put an ancient pipe into his mouth and tamped down the bowl’s hirsute contents with a splayed thumb. “Harriet saved you some,” he added as he disappeared onto the western landing, where two benches depended from sturdy iron chains so that five or six people could comfortably rock to and fro while watching the sun sink below the distant mountains.

“Thank you,” said Nathaniel.

“Mmhm.”

Around the corner, a match hissed and flashed, dazzling a moth that had previously fluttered unnoticed just beside Nathaniel’s left ear. The opalescent creature was the size of a small bat. He puffed air at the phantom insect and sent it gently toward the stars.

Nathaniel walked through the screen door and across a checkered rug that dirt and abrasions would only improve and stopped before a substantial looking glass, which was tastefully decorated with a vine motif and golden filigree. This mirror was precisely the type of accoutrement that he had hoped to hang within each deluxe suite of Stromler’s Very High Quality Hotel.

Staring back at him from the reflective glass was a tall, blonde, fully-mustachioed man of twenty-six, who was fairly handsome, but aged prematurely by his large nose, receding hairline (which had yielded an inch of territory during the last two years) and haunted blue eyes.

Nathaniel Stromler had not slept well or felt hopeful or eaten lustily since the day the storm blew down the eastern wall of his half-built hotel and killed a laborer, a young Comanche, who had fallen asleep in the adjacent alley after a long day of construction work. After the event, all of the native employees had refused to work on the edifice (they felt that the death was portentous) and all of the available Mexicans had raised their fees. Nathaniel had all but exhausted his savings to build what stood and the loss was too great to overcome with his remaining funds. Construction halted.

The gentleman and would-be hotelier from Michigan wiped dust from his lapels, put a dab of oil in his palms and slicked back his lank hair. He checked his teeth for corn skins (two salty ears were all that he had eaten that day), saw with irritation how many lines a simple grin etched into his face and returned his lips to horizontal ambivalence.

Nathaniel turned away from himself and strode up the stairwell, across an ugly spotted rug and to the enclosure that he and his fiancé had shared like prisoners for sixteen months, since the day that the winds of catastrophe had blown. Because the furthest any tenant of ‘the baby’s room’ could be from the door was less than four yards, he rapped very gently upon the wood.

“Is that you Nathan?”

“It is I. Are you clothed?”

“I have on my nightgown.”

Nathaniel thought of Orton, the eldest Footman boy, who had more than once inappropriately eyeballed Kathleen (but was good-natured whenever the dog of puberty was not barking in his groin), and he looked over his shoulder. A sparkling white eye peered out of the thirteen-year-old’s darkened bedroom.

“Orton Footman,” said Nathaniel.

The door closed, slowly and quietly, as if a sudden movement or telltale creak would confirm that he was indeed trying to steal a glimpse of Kathleen.

Nathaniel turned back to the baby’s room, put his key into the lock, twisted it around and pressed his free palm into the wood. Seated upon the raised bed that filled most of the enclosure and dressed in a rose nightgown was Kathleen O’Corley, a tall twenty-four-year-old woman with delicate features, reluctant freckles, emerald eyes and loose black hair.

The gentleman withdrew his key from the outside lock, entered the room and shut the door.

They kissed. Kathleen tasted like Harriet Footman’s apple cobbler (which was good, but contained far too much nutmeg). Nathaniel withdrew from his betrothed and readied himself for the unpleasant conversation that was a necessity.

Illuminated by the lamp that hung upon the opposite wall, the woman’s eyes and teeth glowed, as did the stack of handwritten papers that rested upon her lap.

“A letter from your uncle arrived today,” announced Kathleen.

Nathaniel’s pulse raced—perhaps the folded advert that laid within his vest pocket could be discarded without any discussion or squabble. “Did he locate any investors?” The thought of returning to their abandoned child, the half-built hotel, caused the gentleman’s blood to quicken.

“Quite possibly. He sent us the names of three men who might be interested in investing, but are currently undecided. Your uncle has recommended for us to send out letters of solicitation in order to sway them.” Kathleen raised the stack of papers from her lap. “I’ve written the missives already—all that each requires is your signature.” She became perplexed. “Aren’t you pleased?”

“Certainly.”

“Your face has a peculiar way of conveying that sentiment.”

“I am pleased—truly, I am—but when you mentioned a letter from my uncle, I had hoped for something more substantial…more…more immediate.” Nathaniel thought for a moment. “Where are these investors located?”

“Two are in Connecticut. One is in New York.”

Within the gentleman’s chest, the risen hopes sank. “Then it will take days—possibly weeks—to get responses from them.”

“We’ve been lodgers for over a year.” A small amount of irritation sharpened Kathleen’s voice. “This is the best opportunity we’ve had in some time.”

“It is. Indeed.” Nathaniel squeezed his fiancé’s shoulder and kissed her cheek. “I appreciate you taking the initiative and writing out those solicitations.”

“Peruse them so that we may send them off anon.”

Nathaniel nodded, sat upon the footstool, read the first letter (the solicitation was flawless), said “Perfect” and signed its nether region with the gold fountain pen that he had intended to set upon the lobby desk of Stromler’s Very High Quality Hotel for guests to use in the registrar. He scribbled his name upon the other two immaculate documents, set them upon the floor to dry and turned to face his fiancé.

“I found a job.”

“You have a job.” Kathleen’s voice was flat.

“I found a different job. One that offers far better wages than does a cobbler’s assistant.” The verbal articulation of this lowly profession brought a shameful flush to the gentleman’s face, but the point had to be made.

“What is this new job of which you speak with so much hesitancy and circumlocution?”

Nathaniel withdrew a folded advert from his vest, and Kathleen snatched it from his hands.

“I would prefer to read it to you.”

“I am a quite capable reader.”

Nathaniel did not disagree with his fiancé’s statement.

Kathleen unfolded the document and read it three times. She did not look up from the paper when she asked with a dry, quiet voice, “Who are these men?”

“I do not know.” Fabrications often precipitated squabbles, and Nathaniel was an uncomfortable liar whenever he spoke to somebody for whom he cared.

“For what purpose do they require the services of a ‘a gentleman with fancy dress who can ride long days and is fluent in Spanish?’”

“I do not know.”

“How did this very wonderful opportunity come to your attention?” Kathleen’s sarcasm was poisonous.

“Miss Barlone was operating the telegraph and—”

“She is meddlesome.”

“Miss Barlone is aware of our predicament, and last month I fixed her son’s shoes for free when her purse was light. She showed me the advert before she posted it, so that I might claim the opportunity.” Nathaniel paused for a moment. “She has already wired my acceptance.”

“You’ve already accepted?” Disbelief flashed across Kathleen’s green eyes and was summarily replaced by something hotter. “You’ve agreed to work for men, about whom you know nothing, way out in some far-off place?”

“You are getting loud. And neither you nor I know whether the job is in a far-off location.”

“The advert stipulates that the gentleman with fancy dress must able to ‘ride long days.’ What do you suppose that means? Ride around in great big circles!?!” Kathleen’s voice would be audible to any person awake on the second floor.

After his heart had pulsed ten times, Nathaniel calmly replied, “The long ride could be out to a far-off location, as you have suggested, or away to a nearer one and then back by sunset each night.”

“It seems far more likely that you’ll be required to ride into Mexico, since they’ve stipulated that the gentleman rider must be ‘fluent in Spanish.’”

“That is a realistic possibility,” admitted Nathaniel. “I do not know.”

“But you intend to leave me here and ride off with strangers to wherever they might lead you.”

“I intend to earn four hundred and fifty dollars in one week.”

Kathleen pursed her lips as if she were about to spit venom into her fiancé’s eyes. “The proffered wages are substantial enough to call into question the safety of this job…and its legality.”

“Unless I am required to do something unlawful or immoral, I will do what is required of me.”

Incredulous, Kathleen shook her head back and forth. “And I shall have no influence upon this decision?”

“You have spoken your mind.”

“At a time when you were deaf to contrary opinions—you had decided the matter long before our discussion.”

“I had,” agreed Nathaniel. “This is something that I must do.”

The woman snorted through her nostrils. “What if I told you that I would leave the New Mexico Territory and go back east to my family if you took this job?”

“I love you deeply, but if you are no longer certain that I can be a proper husband—if you no longer believe that my actions will advance us toward a greater happiness—you are encouraged to seek out a better life with someone else. We are not yet married.”

Kathleen was stunned.

Nathaniel’s stomach shifted, anxiously. He did not think that Kathleen would abandon him, but the possibility existed—she was a smart, educated and attractive woman, and she had not taken a locomotive to the frontier so that she could work as a maid for the Footman family while her fiancé cobbled shoes. Like every couple, they were two separate individuals tied together by a rope with an indeterminate snapping point, and this conversation certainly strained their line. Distant animal noises and more immediate house creaks intruded upon the heavy silence.

Unable to breathe the thickening air, the gentleman said, “It would take five months to earn that much money at the shop.”

“Four months.” The woman’s voice was sharp.

“Kathleen. If the job is hazardous or illicit, I will not go.” Looking into his fiancé’s doubtful face, the gentleman added, “This is a very significant sum.”

“It is.” The woman’s voice was gentler.

Weight came off of Nathaniel’s shoulders—the squabble had ended. “And,” the gentleman added, “the possibility exists that these employers are simply wealthy men to whom four hundred and fifty dollars means very little.”

“The diction employed in the advert doesn’t intimate good breeding,” the woman replied, “but I suppose it’s possible.”

Nathaniel traversed the room with a small step, sat upon the mattress and kissed Kathleen. She admitted him for a moment and withdrew, hastily, as if they were courting teenagers and the condemning head of a parent had just materialized in a window.

“Don’t look so distraught.”

“You closed the door on me,” stated Nathaniel, who was very rarely shut out. He reapplied his lips to those of his fiancé, but she kept her mouth closed in firm denial. As he withdrew, the gentleman remarked, “I did better the first time.”

“Not tonight,” stated the woman. “My mind is too full of concerns to be present with you in a romantic way.”

Nathaniel placed his right hand upon the canvas of bare skin that was framed by lace décolletage and pressed forward, gently urging Kathleen to lie down.

The woman resisted. “I’m too preoccupied by your departure.”

Through a smile, the gentleman said, “Please lie down.”

“Nathan. I am not of a mind to—”

“I understand. And I promise that I shall remain fully clothed.” Nathaniel looked into Kathleen’s emerald eyes and felt her heart beat significantly beneath the palm of his right hand. “This is wholly for your benefit.”

The woman’s cheeks admitted several clandestine freckles, and she nodded.

“Lie down.”

Kathleen laid into the locks of her long black hair and the iridescent fabric of her rose nightgown, and was gently received by the hay-packed mattress. Nathaniel touched his lips to the soft skin just above her bare left knee and landed a second kiss beneath her nightgown, exactly where the leg joined her pelvis. He exhaled warm air upon the woman’s nexus, and her entire body shuddered.

Running his fingertips along his fiancé’s inner thigh, the gentleman asked, “Will you allow me to alter your humors?”

Kathleen made an allowance.

The would-be hotelier and soon-to-be traveling bilingual gentleman looked over his fiancé’s recumbent body and through the window, at the effulgent gray sky, upon which neither sun nor moon trespassed. During the interstices of his three-and-a-half hours of fractured sleep, Nathaniel had pondered the east coast investors, the new job and the progress that he could make on his sundered hotel with four hundred and fifty dollars (plus the six hundred and twenty-four bills that he had saved during these last thirteen months) and was anxious. Although he was still tired, he knew that he would not again fall asleep and so decided to begin his day.

Nathaniel climbed over Kathleen’s long legs, gently set the soles of his bare feet upon the ground (if trod indelicately, the floorboards imitated the previous baby tenants) and leaned forward, slowly shifting his weight until he found himself standing upright. He pulled a yellow riding outfit over his union suit, picked up his shoes, took one step east, reached out his free hand, twisted the key, exited, closed the door and departed to the attic, wherein his traveling luggage was kept while he and his fiancé were lodgers in a room built for humans who possessed nothing more substantial than diapers, pacifiers and teeth the size of rice grains.

Yawning quietly, Nathaniel strode across the second floor hallway, past the master bedroom and toward the wooden ladder that led to the attic. A door opened behind the creeping gentleman, and he turned around.

From the darkened bedroom emerged Ezekiel, scratching the back of his hirsute neck (a location that seemed to offer perpetual itches) while his healthy stomach inflated between the open wings of his plaid robe. The squat man yawned a salutation.

“Good morning,” responded Nathaniel.

“It’s chilly for the summer.” Ezekiel looked over the lodger’s shoulder and said, “Going up to the attic?”

“I need to retrieve my luggage and some garments. I will be away for one week.”

The cattle rancher tilted his head sideways, possibly to allow the hand that scratched his nape some new opportunities, and inquired, “Business?”

“Indeed.”

“Kathleen’s staying on here?”

“She will remain here and tend to her duties.”

A strange narrowing happened in the middle of the bushy aggregation of brows and whiskers that was Ezekiel’s face. “Why’re you sneaking around this way?”

“I did not wish to awaken anybody.”

“We heard you two having some words last night.” The squinting clefts that shaded Ezekiel’s eyes appraised Nathaniel in a blunt and intrusive manner.

“I am not running off.” The gentleman was galled by the implication, but suppressed his indignity.

“You won’t do better than that woman.” Ezekiel lowered one scratching hand from his nape and applied another. “I’ve seen her with my kids, and I’ve seen her haggle with shopkeepers or reprimand them if they try and cheat her. She’s all there—complete and beautiful—and she even stuck by you after those winds wrecked your hotel.”

“I love Kathleen and have no intention of deserting her. I apologize for disturbing you last night, but she and I have amicably resolved our differences.”

Unconvinced, the cattle rancher wrinkled his mouth.

“You may rouse her if you would like to check the veracity of my words,” suggested Nathaniel. It was difficult for him to keep bitterness out of this remark.

“It isn’t necessary.” Ezekiel returned the original hand to the back of his neck, pulled the gaping robe over his belly, turned around and strode into his bedroom. “There’re plenty of successful fellows in Leesville who’d court her if you dawdled overlong or went serpentine.”

No reply issued from the gentleman’s pursed lips.

The bedroom door closed.

Embarrassment and anger sat hot upon Nathaniel’s face as he turned away, strode to the end of the hall, climbed the ladder, entered the attic, located a large green valise and into it packed water skins, a flask, undergarments, kerchiefs, gloves, a double-breasted royal blue three-piece suit, a long-tailed black tuxedo, two white shirts, cufflinks, Italian shoes, shoe polish, two bow ties (royal blue and black), a red cravat, a royal blue derby, a black stovepipe hat and a novel entitled La Playa de Sangre with which he could illustrate his fluency in Spanish.

Presently, he descended from the attic and strode across the second floor hallway. When the gentleman heard a plaintive sound emanate from the closed door of the baby’s room, he paused.

The couple had said goodbye the previous evening, and Kathleen had specifically asked Nathaniel to leave in the morning without rousing her, so that they might avoid an anxious farewell.

Standing in the hallway with his heavy valise in his left hand, the tall blonde gentleman from Michigan listened to his fiancé’s quiet sobs. The sounds shrank his insides and made his vision hazy.

And then he left.

Chapter III

The Plugfords

Brent Plugford inhaled deeply, and with the unseasonably cool morning air came the odors that filled the hotel apartment—damp underclothes, soap, moldering wood, oiled leather, iron, stale cigar smoke and cheap bourbon. The twenty-nine-year-old cowboy opened his eyes and saw Long Clay, whose tall lean body was clothed in a black shirt and matching trousers, standing at the foot of his bed like the late day shadow of a scarecrow. The silver-haired man pointed to the person who slept next to Brent. “Wake him.”

“Okay.”

Long Clay walked toward the window.

Brent sat up, stretched his stiff muscles, ran a hand through his wavy brown hair and looked to his left. Prostrated upon the bed beside him was his younger brother, Stevie Plugford, dead asleep and wearing last week’s long johns. “Stevie. You gotta get up. We’re goin’.”

The twenty-one-year-old man grunted.

“Up,” ordered Brent. “Now.” The cowboy shook his brother’s left shoulder.

Stevie swatted his brother’s hand away and pulled a blanket over his head.

“You shouldn’t’ve drunk so much bourbon,” admonished Brent. “I told you you shouldn’t.”

“Roast in Hell.”

Long Clay withdrew a black pistol, gripped it by the barrel and walked toward the bed.

To the tall narrow man, Brent said, “I’ll get him to—”

The handle of the gun impacted the lump that was Stevie’s head.

The young man shouted, pulled the blanket down and rubbed his tomato-colored ear. “Goddamn that hurt!” Stevie looked up at Long Clay’s triangular face, upon which sat cold blue eyes, a thin gray mustache and a lipless mouth, and declined to proffer any direct criticism.

The gunfighter turned away from the young man, holstered the black six-shooter that was one of two upon his waist, and walked across the room.

Seated upon the windowsill and silhouetted by the drear gray sky was John Lawrence Plugford, a huge man with fifty-six years, a wild beard and worn gray overalls. “You’re done drinkin’ until we get home.” It sounded as if the man’s throat were filled with dry autumn leaves.

“I didn’t take that much,” Stevie defended, “I only—”

“Don’t make Pa repeat himself,” said Brent. “This ain’t no sojourn.”

“I know it ain’t.”

Brent felt a terrible agony in his chest as he pondered the purpose of their journey.

A fist knocked thrice upon the door. Two shooting stars that were drawn pistols arced across Long Clay’s black shirt.

A key tickled plaintive tumblers, and the door opened. Standing in the hallway with two lamb chops in his left hand was Patch Up, a short and pudgy gray-haired negro who was clothed in a maroon suit far finer than any garment worn by the white men. He eyed the tips of Long Clay’s revolvers—one was trained upon his face and the other was pointed at his heart—and fearlessly chewed. Through a mouth full of food, the negro said, “If this is about the lamb chops, I’m willing to make a deal.”

The tall narrow gunfighter holstered his weapons and turned away.

Patch Up swallowed, entered the room and closed the door. “Good morning folks.”

“Mornin’,” replied Brent.

“Mornin’,” croaked Stevie.

The negro strode over to the window and proffered the second lamb chop to the huge patriarch. “Your favorite.”

John Lawrence Plugford shook his head and returned his gaze to the gray dawn outside the window. The wild beard that sprouted from his face and neck seemed like an explosion of outrage.

“It’s cooked all the way through,” added the negro.

The huge man remained uninterested.

“Pa,” Brent said, “you need to eat. We’ve got a big ride today.”

John Lawrence Plugford took the proffered victual, whispered, “Thanks,” and turned again to the gray window. The lamb chop sat in his thick hands like a musical instrument that he did not know how to play.

Brent stretched, set his soles upon the worn plaid carpet and walked toward the yellow dresser, upon which his washed underclothes were sprawled like flat gray men.

“Where’s that Indian?” Stevie asked Patch Up.

“You forget his name?”

“No.”

“People have names for a reason. Even niggers and Indians.”

“Where’s Deep Lake?” asked Stevie.

“It’s Deep Lakes,” Patch Up stated, “there’s an ‘s’ at the end.”

“But there’s only one of him.”

“That’s his name.”

Stevie stood from the bed and stretched. “You tryin’ to make me orn’ry?”

“You should respect what people want to be called. You want me to call you Stovie?”

“I wouldn’t. Where’s Deep Lakes?”

“Don’t know.”

Brent looked up from his damp long drawers and inquired, “He didn’t stay with you in the servants’ quarters?”

“The cooks wouldn’t bunk with an Indian,” said Patch Up. “I told them he was civilized, but they’re suspicious negroes. Deep Lakes said he’d make a camp somewhere and leave town when we do.”

Unhappy that the native had been ostracized, Brent said, “He should’ve come to me with this grievance.”

“He doesn’t want to force his company where he isn’t wanted.”

“Okay.”

Brent set damp socks that still smelled like soap into his suitcase, and nearby, Stevie began to gather his belongings.

Something thudded within the closet, and was succeeded by a dimly audible moan. Brent’s face darkened with anger.

“Goddamn that dumb idiot,” remarked Stevie.

Long Clay walked across the room and opened the closet door. Standing upright within the enclosure and wobbling minutely was a large black trunk.

The gunfighter banged the handle of his pistol upon the wood. “Keep quiet or I’ll get mean.”

The man inside the trunk was silent.

Brent glanced over at his father. John Lawrence Plugford’s vitriolic eyes seared the air. The uneaten lamb chop fell to the sawdust, and the huge man slapped his right hand to the grip of his black sawed-off shotgun.

“J.L.,” cautioned Patch Up.

Brent hastened to the window, gripped his father’s right wrist and said, “Let go of it.”

Long Clay interposed himself between John Lawrence Plugford and the trunk and extricated a flask of bourbon from his rear pocket. Light shone upon the silver vessel and glared in the wild eyes of the patriarch.

“Get calm,” said the gunfighter.

John Lawrence Plugford released the grip of his sawed-off shotgun, took the flask from Long Clay, spun the cap and inserted the nozzle into the thicket that surrounded his vanished mouth. He drank three draughts and summarily replaced his gaze upon the gray morning. As had often been the case for more than half a year, the huge patriarch was beyond words.

Patch Up reclaimed the fallen lamb chop, wiped sawdust from its surface and wrapped it in a piece of wax paper.

Long Clay looked at Brent and Stevie. “Drain the trunk and put it in the wagon. Now.”

Chapter IV

A Ballad for the Real People

Humberto Calles walked toward the gallows that had been erected in Nueva Vida two summers ago, over fifty years after the true people of the land had yielded precious Mexican acres to pale Texicans. The punitive structure was a visibly imposing icon of justice that regularly provided onlookers with an entertaining spectacle, especially if the hanged man struggled overlong or was accidentally decapitated by the noose.

The lone walker reached the gallows, wiped beads of sweat from his head, covered his bald scalp with a sombrero, climbed steps that were decorated with artful tiles that would surely please the eye of any aesthete condemned to death and ascended toward an empty gray heaven. Winded from his climb, the fifty-four-year-old Mexican strode across the platform to the balustrade.

From the stage of death, Humberto asked the onlookers if they would like to hear a song.

“¡Por favor!” shouted eight of the twenty-four people below. Humberto scanned the gathering to see if any town officials were in attendance (they did not want their serious structure used for non-lethal entertainments), but he did not see anybody who might trouble him.

As he adjusted the four strings stretched across the bejeweled frets of his polished blue guitarrita, the balladeer surveyed the crowd. The assemblage was comprised of unhurried people—seamstresses, farmers and old men—and so Humberto decided to perform a long and melancholic song that would appeal to their sensibilities. He squeezed a chord upon his guitarrita’s enameled neck and, with the thick nails that jutted from the fingertips of his right hand, sharply plucked the strings. Atop this steady arpeggio of musical raindrops, Humberto introduced the composition, a ballad entitled, “Beneath the Pebbles,” which was the true story of a man who had fought in the war against the pale Texicans more than fifty years ago.

Strumming a lush augmented chord, Humberto began to sing.

Black clouds rained upon a small farming village in Mexico. In an adobe that was only three seasons old, a man named Alexzander said goodbye to his wife, Gabrielle, who was pregnant with their first child. The twenty-five-year-old man deeply regretted leaving his beloved, but the war with the pale Texicans was going poorly, and he needed to see that the true people of the land retained what was rightfully theirs. Gabrielle wept. (Humberto played isolated high notes in the pizzicato style upon the thinnest string of his guitarrita.) Despite her sadness, the selfless Mexican woman did not protest her husband’s departure because she knew that he must do his duty. They kissed.

(Humberto articulated two melodies that became one harmonized line—the refrain of their love.)

Accompanied by four of his childhood friends, Alexzander departed the small town, journeyed north and joined a failing regiment that was encamped on a Tejas hacienda that had recently been seized by the Mexican army. The gringos had won two decisive battles in the surrounding region, and Alexzander’s superior, El Capitán Jesus Garcia, knew that an unorthodox gambit was needed to defeat the Texicans.

The officer’s plan was simple. Alexzander and his four childhood friends were to hide themselves in a mountain pass that was used by the enemy messengers and slaughter the letter bearers before they ever reached the Texican fort. Alexzander, an educated man literate in both Spanish and English, would alter the documents in ways that would benefit the true people of the land and return the revised missives to the messengers’ corpses for the gringos of the fort to find. The soldiers doubted that they would be able to complete their mission, but it was near the end of the war and such desperate gambits were commonplace.

(Humberto twice played a slow descending melody that was the declining spirit of Mexico.)

The day before the detachment was to leave, Alexzander received a week old missive from Gabrielle in which she informed him that she had miscarried their child. She had wrapped the tiny baby boy in a shawl, buried him in their backyard beside the pond and decorated the grave with smooth pebbles that she had retrieved from the bottom of the creek where she and Alexzander had once stood, twilit, and exchanged their first kiss.

(Humberto played the melody that was their love.)

Alexzander asked Capitán Jesus Garcia to grant him a two-day furlough. The wan soldier hoped to ride south to his village, console his grieving wife and conceive another child before he began his desperate and unlikely mission. The superior officer expected a troop of Texican messengers to come through the pass in the near future and denied Alexzander’s request.

(The balladeer violently strummed his guitarrita and then muted the strings. Below the gallows platform stood twenty-seven spectators, each imagining a personalized and idiosyncratic version of the tale he told.)

Alexzander sent a letter to his wife in which he asked her to ride north and hide herself within the abandoned barn situated at the easternmost edge of the hacienda. He knew that she would not receive the missive for at least six days.

(Humberto flourished his long fingernails and urgently hastened the song.)

Alexzander and his four friends went to the pass wherein they would ambush the Texican messengers. Within an abandoned savage dugout, the quintet hid and waited. Two weeks later, the Texican messengers came through the defile—a group of thirty pale gringos.

(The balladeer strummed frantic triplets; the crowd of thirty-one people was still and silent.)

Although they were outnumbered six-to-one, Alexzander’s detachment, armed with old pistols and knives, engaged the enemy. Half of the pale Texicans were slain in the battle, and four of the Mexicans fell dead to the soil that was rightfully theirs. Alexzander was stabbed in the stomach and shot through the left leg. (Humberto plucked his guitarrita violently and paused. Unaccompanied by his instrument, he spoke.) The mission was a failure.

(The balladeer plucked a slow and careful minor key melody.)

Alexzander rose up to his hands and knees and crawled toward the hacienda. He was cold, and he was thirsty, but he did not relent.

(The slow and careful minor key melody was repeated.)

Alexzander reached the hacienda and crawled across the grass, toward the barn wherein he hoped to rendezvous with his beloved, Gabrielle. Night fell as he proceeded, slowly and in great agony, but the Mexican was inexorable.

At dawn, Alexzander entered the barn. He crawled across the hay, past cows with ruptured udders and bloody goats that had devoured their own kind. Gabrielle called out his name, descended from her hiding place and hastened to his side.

(Humberto played the melody that was their love.)

Shortly after they had conceived the baby that would grow up to write and sing this song, Alexzander died in Gabrielle’s arms.

(The audience below the gallows applauded and called out accolades while the final chord decayed.)

“Gracias,” said Humberto. “Gracias.”

Through this ballad, Alexzander lived, and Mexicans knew his name and thought upon the many honorable sacrifices that had been made over five decades earlier by the true people of the land against the pale Texicans. The performer warmed when he saw two octogenarians wipe moisture from their rugose cheeks.

“Bonita cantando,” complimented a weathered septuagenarian who gripped the elongated necks of two dead black hens with her bronze fist.

Gold and silver pesos clinked and buried the blue-felt lining of the guitar case that Humberto had earlier placed at the foot of the gallows. To his benefactors, the balladeer said, “Gracias. Amigos, gracias.”

The size of the crowd was not substantial enough to produce a significant pecuniary sum, but Humberto was not overly concerned. The riders from America would soon allay his financial troubles.

Chapter V

Gringa Madre

The man who smelled like fish guts pinched the woman’s nostrils shut and clapped the palm of his other hand over her mouth. His bare belly dragged north and south along her stomach like a hirsute slug, trailing sour perspiration. In between her legs, fire burned.

The woman bucked in an effort to urge the man who smelled like fish guts toward a hasty climax, certain that once he spilled his fluids, he would release her, apologize and become remorseful. (This was not the first time he had suffocated her.) The man watched her bitten breasts sway and mumbled the word, “Madre.” The woman, a gringa who was ten years his junior, knew that this was the Spanish word for ‘Mother.’

A full minute without air passed.

The pain in-between the woman’s legs sharpened, and the sores upon her back shrieked. Within her abused shell, she suffocated. Her heart pounded out while the man pounded in.

Although she did not relish the life that she now had, the woman did not want to die beneath a fetid wretch who would not notice her expiration until the temperature of her body matched that of the chill subterranean room. Her death should have more meaning than that.

“Gringa madre.”

The woman’s entire body pulsated in time with her desperate heart, and her oxygen-starved lungs burned.

“Madre.” The man’s breath quickened, and his oily belly squeaked across her abdomen, vacillating north and south.

The woman felt her heart pound within her throat.

“Gringa madre.” The hairy belly squeaked.

The woman lost the power of sight and slapped the man’s face as hard as she could.

Hot fluid streamed inside of her.

The hands that clasped her nose and mouth withdrew.

She gasped. Cold air rushed into her burning lungs. After two huge breaths, the woman’s eyesight returned, blurry and with flashing orbs.

“Sorry,” said the man who smelled like fish guts.

The woman began to cough.

“No germs.” Concerned for his safety, the man extracted his diminishing member and rose from the bed.

“Goddamn.” The woman pressed her bruised thighs together.

The man pulled on his red trousers, tied a rope belt around his waist, slid his feet into two leather-and-wood sandals, walked over to a cubbyhole, reached inside, rummaged amongst his possessions, extricated a flat bottle and brought it over to the woman. “Bebes.” He set the vessel upon her stomach. “Good drink.”

The woman examined the wooden flask, which was engraved with the word or name ‘Coco,’ removed its stopper and drank. The liquor tasted like fruity lantern oil, but she consumed it, eager to diminish everything.

After her fourth draught, she pulled a damp sheet over her sore extremities and looked at Coco’s ugly face. “No sofocarse.” (She did not know how to say, ‘It’s nice to meet you,’ in Spanish, but she knew how to say, ‘Don’t suffocate.’)

“Sorry.” Upon the far corner of the wooden bed, Coco tilted his lumpy head forward and stared at his terrible toes, which looked like root vegetables arranged in two groups of five. His face was heavy with remorse.

The woman saw an opportunity.

“I am going to tell the big jefe that you did sofocarse to me.” (A dead whore had even less value than a coyote carcass, and thus asphyxiation was a forbidden diversion.)

The lumpy head swiveled toward the woman. “It was accident.” The root vegetables in his sandals stirred anxiously. “I tol’ you I am sorry.” He swallowed dryly. “No tell Gris.”

“If I tell Gris you did sofocarse, he will not let you come to the big fiesta. And no more gringa madre for you ever again.”

Employing whatever cogitating vapors were trapped within his skull, Coco contemplated his predicament. “I only play. I never never hurt the gringa madre for real—I was playing.”

“Do something for me and I won’t tell Gris what you did.”

“What you wanting?” asked Coco. “I cannot get you escape from here.”

“I want information. I want to know if somebody’s still alive.”

“Who?”

“The blonde woman they brought here with me.”

“What is her name?” inquired Coco.

“Yvette.”

“Ella es tu hermanita?”

“Si,” Dolores responded, “she’s my little sister.”

Chapter VI

Unsafe and Safe Ventures

Wearing his yellow riding outfit, Nathaniel Stromler rode his tan mare along the central avenue of Leesville, toward the blacksmith’s forge where he was to meet his future employers. A homogeneous blanket of gray clouds covered the vault, diffused the sun and threw the world into a drear limbo from which no person could divine the time of day. Underneath the effulgent slate, the gentleman and his horse failed to cast shadows.

A crucifix that was only slightly darker than its dull surroundings glided across ashen sky, toward the avenue. Presently, Nathaniel, a novice birdwatcher, determined that it was some type of hawk.

A thin black line sprouted from the creature’s neck. Silently, the aviator plummeted from the sky and landed upon the avenue. A short man with dark skin, shoulder-length grayish-black hair, blue denim clothing, a strange bow and a lopsided gait walked toward the felled hawk.

Nathaniel neared the archer, and a third individual, a portly fellow with a green suit and a crescent of white hair surrounding his otherwise bald pate, emerged from a nearby storefront and clapped. “You sure can use that thing good,” enthused the elder. “Can I fiddle with it for a moment?”

The archer, who was a native in his fifties, shook his head, a tacit refusal. He slung the strange bow over his bare left shoulder and knelt beside the bird carcass.

The portly elder inquired, “You intend to make yourself some hawk stew? Maybe some hawk tacos?” He ruminated momentarily. “Hawk a vin?”

“I’ll eat its eyes and mind.”

A disingenuous smile did not disguise the portly man’s disquiet.

The native plucked out his arrow, slid it inside a groove upon the back of his vest and picked up the bird by its talons. The head of the animal dangled, and crimson beads dribbled from the holes in its neck. Without another word, the native departed into an alleyway with his prize.

Nathaniel glanced at the beads of blood that sat upon the dirt avenue like a game of red marbles, wiped chill sweat from his forehead and tried not to think about his fiancé, alone and crying in the baby’s room of the Footman’s house.

Riding east along the avenue, the gentleman passed Harding’s Notable Chandler, Pocket Watches & Knick-Knacks, Dame Gertrude’s Dress Shoppe, Chemist Stuff, Baked Goods, Leesville’s Butcher and We’ve Got Some Guns. Ambitious dust was escorted from porches by the hissing bristles of thick brooms.

Nathaniel neared a motley assemblage, the cynosure of which was a large wagon that had a tattered green canopy, which had been mended with a pair of yellow long drawers. Two tan, five foot nine-inch fellows, who wore damp beige clothes and had curly brown hair, flung blankets upon the bare backs of horses that were tied in front of the blacksmith’s forge. Stretched out upon the crossbar were four other blankets that a pudgy gray-haired negro, wearing a maroon suit, beat with a fire-hardened walking stick.

It immediately occurred to Nathaniel that these were poor men to whom four hundred and fifty dollars would mean a great deal. He gently tugged upon the reins of his tan mare, and slowed the animal’s gait.

The brothers adjusted the cloths that draped the animals’ spines, and the negro whacked a blanket. Without looking up from his work, the older sibling maneuvered so that his torso was on the other side of his horse, hidden from Nathaniel, and hitched his right shoulder. The younger brother, whose red eyes betrayed that he had either a fever or terrible hangover, paused, leaned upon his horse and perspired. The negro had disappeared.

Nathaniel assumed that the shielded sibling held a gun behind the body of the mustang, and he stopped his tan mare. “Good morning.”

Eyeballing the gentleman’s hips and valise, the older brother nodded.

“I never carry any weapons,” announced Nathaniel. A loud whack startled him. He looked to his right and saw that the negro had returned with his stick.

“Doesn’t seem like he’s got one stashed away.” The colored man sneezed out a damp distillation of the dust he had wrought.

“Nope.” The older sibling relaxed his right shoulder and looked up at the mounted gentleman. “Are you Nathaniel Stromler?”

“I am. Are you Brent Plugford or John Lawrence Plugford?”

“Brent.” The fellow strode around his horse and toward the gentleman, openly appraising him. “Where’s your fancy dress at?” His Texas accent was heavy.

“In my valise.”

“Show me them garments.” Brent’s damp boots squeaked. “I want to see.”

The brusque demands irked Nathaniel, and he decided to respond in kind. “Show me the stipend with which you intend to pay me.”

Brent paused just beyond the nostrils of the gentleman’s tan mare. “My pa’s got the money in his wallet.”

“Are you speaking of John Lawrence Plugford?”

“I am.”

“Perhaps I should speak to him directly.” This was not uttered as a question.

“Best to leave Pa in his quietude,” recommended the younger sibling. “He’s…he’s bereft.”

Brent worked through some inner sadness and said to the gentleman, “You’ll deal with me.” His voice was harder than it had been a moment ago.

Although Nathaniel would not leave Leesville until he was certain that these poor rubes could pay him, he wanted to diffuse the burgeoning tension before it turned into a squabble. “I shall show you the garments that I selected.”

“Okay,” said Brent.

The gentleman climbed from his saddle, landed upon the avenue, took his mare’s reins, walked the beast beneath the overhang of the blacksmith’s forge, pulled the lines around a post, claimed the green linen valise from the saddle nook, set it upon a bench, undid its four gold buckles, slid the straps, opened the top and popped the six buttons that secured the inner lining.

“It’s like he’s undressing a prude,” opined the younger bother.

“Stevie,” chastised Brent.

From the dark interior of the valise, Nathaniel raised the black, long-tailed tuxedo jacket.

Brent ran his fingertips along the fabric. “Okay. The other one got some color? Mex’cans like things colorful.”

At that moment, Nathaniel knew that he was going to be required to ride across the border, which he had hoped would not be the case. After replacing the first garment, he raised the double-breasted royal blue jacket.

Brent took the fine coat in his hands and inspected it as if it were the pelt of an Oriental animal. “This one here’s better.”

“You should go show it to Long Clay and ask what he thinks,” advised Stevie.

Ignoring his brother’s suggestion, Brent returned the garment to its owner and disappeared into the dark interior of the blacksmith’s forge. Stevie and the negro resumed their respective tasks—flinging and whacking blankets.

Nathaniel set the jacket inside his valise and withdrew the Spanish novel.

A tall narrow man with an unpleasant triangular face, which was delineated by a long narrow nose, three vertical scars and a slender gray mustache, emerged from the forge, carrying a heavy bundle upon his left shoulder. His hat, shirt and trousers were black, and his eyes were bright blue. He glanced at the gentleman from a superior altitude (it was uncommon for Nathaniel—who was six foot two—to look up at anyone) and walked past him without a word. The ponderous burden upon the fellow’s left shoulder clanked metallically with each stride.

Nathaniel knew instantly that this man was Long Clay. The fellow’s height matched the nickname, and it was clear that he was not the type of person who desired children or remained near accidental gets, and thus was not the siblings’ father. The two long black pistols that jutted from his hips and his cold demeanor informed the world that he was a gunfighter and possibly a practitioner of less lawful trades.

Before he agreed to travel with this type of man, Nathaniel would need certain assurances.

Long Clay set his bundle inside the wagon canopy, beside a large black trunk. The wind moaned and sounded eerily like a miserable human being.

Footsteps shook the slats beneath Nathaniel’s boots, and he turned back to face the doorway. A huge older man, wearing an untamed beard and gray overalls, emerged from the forge, followed by Brent.

“Pa. This here’s Nathaniel Stromler. The gentleman who wired us.”

Eyes that did not seem attached to anything rational stared out at the gentleman from a craggy canvas of inebriation, grief and hatred. In the leather holster that depended from John Lawrence Plugford’s waist sat a wide gauge sawed-off shotgun that had been covered with black paint.

“Good morning,” Nathaniel said to the bestial face.

The patriarch stared.

Brent pointed to the book in the gentleman’s left hand. “What’s that?”

“A Spanish novel entitled, La Playa de Sangre.”

“You can read and understand it?”

“I can. Choose any passage, and I shall translate it for you.”

“I believe you and wouldn’t know if you were lyin’ anyhow.”

Brent extricated a weathered wallet from the breast pocket of his father’s gray overalls and handed it over to Nathaniel. “Count ‘em, so you know it certain true.”

John Lawrence Plugford stared.

The thickness of the wallet told Nathaniel that it contained the promised amount, but he counted out the many, many small bills as he had been instructed. The bank notes were not freshly withdrawn from a bank, and the gentleman surmised that the variegated sum had been earned over a lengthy period of time and squirreled away.

“The amount that you have promised lies therein.” Nathaniel handed the wallet back to Brent. “I will require half of my payment before our departure.”

The older brother reached into the wallet, withdrew half of the notes and thrust them forward.

Nathaniel was surprised by how willing the man was to give so much money to a stranger, and he deliberated on the motley bills and their owners. To take the proffered stack of crisp and wrinkled and bright and discolored notes was to agree to be in their employ.

“Take it.” Brent shook the bills.

John Lawrence Plugford stared terribly.

“Before I accept any wages,” Nathaniel announced, “I must enquire after the details of the job for which I am being hired.”

Without uttering a word, John Lawrence Plugford stormed off toward the wagon.

Brent glanced at his father and returned his gaze to the gentleman. “You’re goin’ to reconnoiter for us. Do some investigatin’.”

Dissatisfied by the vague explanation, Nathaniel asked, “Could you please be more specific?”

“I’ll handle him.” The tall narrow man strode upon sharp black boots toward the forge.

Brent, Stevie and the negro were still.

Long Clay walked directly at Nathaniel, stopped when half of a yard of air hung between their faces and stared down coolly. “You won’t be asked to do anything unlawful.” He radiated the smells of cinders, oil and iron.

Nathaniel drummed his fingers upon the book, found his strong baritone voice and employed it when he inquired, “Shall I have any part in facilitating unlawful acts?”

“That’s our business,” responded Long Clay.

“I would simply like to know to what end my—”

“You work for us or you don’t,” stated the gunfighter. “We don’t answer to you.”

Long Clay turned away and strode toward a tall black mare.

In a voice that was too quiet for anybody but Nathaniel to hear, Brent said, “We’re tryin’ to find my sisters. They were taken. Kidnapped.” Tears glimmered at the bottom of the man’s brown eyes. “We’re good honest folks—I’m just a cowboy foreman—but—” He strained to keep his composure. “We’re all gonna do what’s required to get them back. That’s why Long Clay come with us.”

The gentleman believed the cowboy.

Atop the black mare, Long Clay called out, “Don’t gab about our business.” His words were hard.

Brent extended the advance toward Nathaniel, and the motley bills trembled. “Please.”

Nathaniel took the wage. “I shall return after I have deposited this sum.” He put the bills inside his shirt pocket, replaced the book, tied the valise, took the mare’s reins and climbed into the saddle.

By the time Nathaniel returned from depositing his advance into one of the ten small safes located within The Reputable Bank of Leesville, the gray sky had brightened minutely. The Plugfords and Long Clay were astride their horses, and the negro was seated upon a padded bench at the front of the wagon, holding a long-handled whip with which he could coax his brace of four mismatched steeds. Two healthy palfreys that wore finely-decorated women’s sidesaddles were attached to lines that the huge patriarch held in a tightly clenched fist.

The quietude that had settled upon the assemblage was not peaceful, but ominous.

Nathaniel guided his horse toward the wagon that was situated at the rear of the small caravan.

Long Clay snapped tack, and his black mare started forward. The Plugfords and the negro followed the gunfighter, as did Nathaniel.

The caravan rode west along the avenue.

The portly, gray-haired negro placed the ball of his long-handled whip inside a nook, slid across the wagon bench toward Nathaniel and extended a chubby hand, but the fabric of his right sleeve tugged against his chest and he withdrew the appendage. “Nuisance.” The negro undid his top jacket button and extended his hand once more. “My name’s Patch Up.” He sounded like a Floridian.

Nathaniel took his hand (which was the only one proffered by any member of the caravan) and shook it. “I am pleased to meet you. My name is Nathaniel Stromler.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Stromler.”

They shared a dip in the road and released each other.

“Very often,” Patch Up stated, “folks who ride with me come back heavier than when they left.”

“You are a skilled cook?”

“Your belly won’t want to give up my provender.”

Long Clay guided his horse off of the central avenue and onto a southerly street, and the others followed. The open terrain beyond the last buildings was a vast orange swath as homogeneous and blank as the gray sky.

“Do you have a favorite comestible item that you’d like for the cook to add to his menu?” inquired Patch Up, magniloquently employing third person.

“I am quite partial to grouse and pheasant.”

“Fricasseed or pan fried?”

“You don’t got no grouse or no pheasant,” Stevie grumbled from his spotted colt on the far side of the wagon.

“Not yet. But Deep Lakes got us that hawk.”

Stevie spit his opinion of such meat onto the road.

Nathaniel recalled the archer whom he had seen earlier that morning. “Did you purchase that bird from a native with a limp and a strange bow?”

“Deep Lakes didn’t sell it to us,” replied Patch Up. “He eats the parts he wants and gives us the rest.”

“Is that fellow traveling with us?”

“Near us.” Patch Up turned the light side of his hand up, as if he intended to catch a falling raindrop, and motioned expansively. “In our perimeters.”

The eyes of the siblings flickered to Nathaniel’s face, which likely betrayed some concern at the idea of traveling with a native who ate the brain and eyes of a hawk.

“He’s hunted up grouse before,” Patch Up added, “but prefers animals that breathe the high up air and get bigger views.”

Nathaniel remarked, “Oh?” because he could not think of anything intelligent to say regarding this information.

“He ain’t the kind of Indian you need to worry ‘bout,” clarified Brent.

“I shall not,” replied the gentleman, worried.

The horses cantered, and the town of Leesville retreated. Winds that howled like a miserable man chilled the beads of sweat that clung to Nathaniel’s brow, nape and mustache.

Long Clay coaxed his horse to a brisk canter, and the other riders matched his pace. The buildings at the southern edge of the town shrank.

“And if you need anything mended,” Patch Up resumed, as if he and Nathaniel were in the middle of a conversation, “I can do that too.”

“Thank you.”

“Shirts, pants, shoes, lacerations, broken bones, dangling scalps—I’ve fixed them all.”

Chapter VII

Saddled

Brent Plugford was impressed that the dandy had been able to return Long Clay’s stare, back in Leesville. Nathaniel Stromler had been a little frightened, but it was clear that he had nerves, even facing a gunfighter who could cow any man in existence.

Beneath an ambivalent gray sky, the briskly cantering horses traversed open plains and entered terrain that begat avoidable creosote bushes and unavoidable stalks of purple three awn and black grama. The foliage harassed the beasts’ legs and the riders’ leather chaps, but did not break open any hides or substantially slow the caravan. Patch Up had a tough time steering his vehicle through the arid vegetation, and every few minutes Brent heard the word “Nuisance” muttered or shouted—the volume of the exclamation determined by how strongly the landscape and the wagon wheels disagreed.

The cowboy pulled right upon his reins, guided his brindled mustang in a loop around the rear of the caravan and urged his animal alongside the dandy’s tan mare. Brent glanced at Long Clay and saw only the back of the tall narrow man. This lack of attention from the gunfighter meant that it was now acceptable to speak more candidly with Nathaniel Stromler.

Without preamble, Brent said, “We got a letter from a man named Ojos.”

“Ojos means eyes,” the dandy remarked, “and is not often given as a name.”

The possibility that Ojos was fictitious had been discussed by the Plugfords, but they were desperate and had no other information upon which to act. Brent said, “It’s the name he proffered, anyhow.”

The dandy was quiet.

“In his letter, he wrote, ‘I have identified two rich Mexican gentlemen who know one or both of your missing sisters.’” Brent had read the missive more than fifty times.

“How does Ojos know these men?” asked Nathaniel.

“Ain’t sure. I s’pose he’ll tell us at the rendezvous.” Uttered aloud, the information that he possessed sounded quite insubstantial. “Never spoke to him yet—they don’t got no wire in that town. He told us where he could be found most nights and we’re goin’ there to meet him.”

A field of high black grama harassed the legs of the cantering horses; several beasts complained, yet they all continued apace. The tallest stalks slapped against Brent’s chaps, crackling like a campfire.

The dandy inquired, “Do you think it is possible that the man who calls himself Ojos simply intends to extort money from your family?”

“Of course it’s possible!” exploded Brent. “Don’t you think we’d thought of that!?!” He suddenly hated the arrogant Yank.

Nathaniel was silent.

“You think we all got wooden heads!?!” shouted Brent.

The dandy declined to answer the cowboy and instead adjusted the strap of his yellow hat.

The horses’ hooves rumbled, and Brent calmed himself. “That letter—it’s all we got. In months and months of postin’ and sendin’ notices all over everywhere, it’s all we heard.”

“I understand,” the dandy remarked, “and would do exactly the same thing if I were in your position.”

Before the abductions, Brent had been a well-regarded cowboy foreman, a good, honest and thoughtful boss. For years he had fairly employed oldsters, youths, negroes, Indians, Mexicans and even Yanks who had fought on the wrong side during the War for Southern Independence, but this dreadful business with his sisters was changing him. Now, a poorly chosen word or a patronizing question brought him directly to the precipice beyond which laid only violent action.

Brent looked at the dandy and saw that the man was patiently waiting for him to continue. “Ojos said a rich gentleman who spoke good Spanish could get a talk with them Mex’cans who’ve seen my sisters.”

“I am not rich.”

“You’ll have whatever pesos you need to play the part.”

“I see.” The dandy ruminated.

(Long Clay had earlier remarked that it would not be difficult to acquire Mexican dollars, and Brent had an idea how this sum was to be earned.)

The dandy asked, “I am to meet with these two Mexican gentlemen and ask after your sisters?”

Brent nodded. “Once we know for certain where they are, you can ride off. Or if you’d rather, you can ride back with us once we’ve got ‘em safe.”

“Throughout this business, I shall employ an alias.”

“That’s fine.”

Nathaniel Stromler extricated a thorny bramble that had attached itself to his chaps, cast it aside and delicately inquired, “And if this proves to be a ruse…if Ojos has lied to you or if these Mexican gentlemen are unhelpful…?”

“Then you can ride off and keep your advance for time spent. Fair?”

“Very fair,” said Nathaniel. “But I do hope that I can help you locate your sisters.”

As the horses sped past creosote bushes, an errant limb snatched against Brent’s chaps and left behind a pointy lavender-green leaf.

“Are we going to stop and eat in the near future?” asked Nathaniel.

“We’ve got to be at Nueva Vida by nightfall if we want to meet Ojos today.”

“How far away is Nueva Vida?”

“We keep at this pace for the whole day without stoppin’,” Brent said, “and we’ll get there.” The dandy was not pleased by this information, but to his credit, he did not complain. “Patch Up boilt some ‘tatoes last night and we got jerked beef if you want it. None of us is hungry.”

The blank sky smoldered somewhere between gray and black.

Shortly after the caravan traversed an open mesa, its fast progress was impeded by a vast swath of obstreperous creosotes. The dusty horses were forced to slacken their pace and wend the obstacles.

John Lawrence Plugford guided his white stallion beside the pair of cantering palfreys that were reserved for the girls, withdrew a silken rag from his overalls and wiped grit from the empty sidesaddles. He dusted the leather with such tenderness that Brent, watching, felt tears in his eyes and had to look away before he broke. It was clear to him that his father would be wholly destroyed if the girls were not safely recovered—already the huge man was a bestial being whose mind was daily devoured by the jaws of horrible contemplations.

The cowboy wiped his eyes and glanced over at Stevie, about whom he had serious concerns as well. For almost a full decade, Brent had ridden with cattle outfits, and he knew the difference between good fellows and bad fellows and good fellows who did bad things accidentally and bad fellows who did good things deceivingly. This terrible tableau in which the Plugfords were embroiled was exactly the sort of event that could turn Stevie—who already liked to drink too much and cause trouble (and call it fun)—into the sort of man who drank his way into brawls and gunfights and did not live to become twenty-two.

The lives of Brent’s sisters, father and brother were at the precipice.

Beneath the rumbling of hooves and the crackling of purple three awn was an erratic noise, barely audible, that was the captive, the man in the trunk, sobbing. The dandy glanced at the wagon for a moment, but doubted his ears.

The sky became a dark gray slate, a feverish limbo untouched by any celestial body. Weary but apace, the horses galloped from a plain of wild vegetation onto a trail articulated by the hooves and wheels of those who dwelled in the region. The ruts intimated to Brent that Nueva Vida was not far off.

“This is better,” Patch Up opined from the wagon bench. “Not that I mind getting kicked in the behind for eleven straight hours.” He arched his back and elicited seven cracks.

Brent looked over at his brother. “Stevie.”

“Yeah?’

“You’re gonna be in charge of makin’ camp, so keep an eye out for someplace hidden private.”

“We ain’t stayin’ in town?” Stevie looked as if a soft pillow had just been yanked out from beneath his head.

“We don’t want people knowin’ all of our faces or our number,” explained Brent. “Mr. Stromler and I will talk to Ojos, and Long Clay’ll watch from outside, but the rest of you stay back.” Stevie would not win them any advantage in this rendezvous (and it was possible that he would be truculent) and Brent well knew the affects that men like his father and Long Clay had upon people.

“Okay. I’ll make camp.” Stevie was apparently too tired and sore to argue.

“Patch Up will help you.”

Long Clay, who had not turned around once since they left Leesville, looked at the cowboy. “Brent.”

“Yeah?”

“After your meeting, you’re coming with me.”

A chill descended Brent’s spine. Up until that moment, he had assumed that Long Clay was going to garner the needed Mexican dollars by himself.

“Your father isn’t capable right now.” Long Clay turned away.

John Lawrence Plugford, tightly clasping the bridle lines of the two palfreys upon which he intended to seat his saved daughters, said nothing.

“I can go,” volunteered Stevie.

“No you can’t,” said Brent.

The cowboy knew that he had no choice.

The riders endeavored a decline that was steep enough to pull sweat-dampened hair from their brows, and ahead of them, on the southwestern horizon, a mountain range emerged from the ground. The sharp peaks swelled like the sails of approaching warships.

After a twenty-minute descent, the terrain underneath the caravan leveled out. Yucca, cacti and a few hills shaped like turtles interposed themselves between the assemblage and the rising range. Presently, the riders entered a thick copse and wended its dark vegetation.

Stevie pointed out a clearing that was concealed behind a dense cluster of yuccas. “How ‘bout there?”

“Good,” said Brent. “Once we eyeball the town, you come back here and throw camp.”

“I will.”

“Make sure Pa eats. It’s been three days for him.”

“I’ll try to get somethin’ in him.”

“Stevie and I will hold him down if he refuses,” added Patch Up.

“Get somethin’ in.” Brent ruminated for a moment. “Pour soup into his whiskey if you have to.”

The caravan emerged from the woodlands, and the brothers, the negro and the dandy pulled up alongside the two senior men. Forty miles away from the riders stood the dark brown mountains that had consumed the major part of the southwestern horizon.

Brent surveyed the flat plain on the near side of the range, looking for the border town that he had hoped to descry more than an hour earlier. Several miles from his current location, he saw an unnatural ochre luminance upon the land. Relief ran down his spine like warm water squeezed from a sponge. “That’s it.” He pointed. “Gotta be Nueva Vida.” He looked at the dandy and inquired, “What’s that mean? Nueva Vida?”

“It means New Life.”

Brent heard the sound of crackling tinder. He looked to his left and saw that Long Clay was laughing.

Chapter VIII

A Thoughtful Mexican

Humberto Calles leaned his guitarrita case against the wall in the back room of the bar where he regularly performed and, from his beaded, fringe-adorned vest, withdrew his pocket watch. The hands were fixed at nine seconds after eleven seventeen, the exact moment that some careless horse had compressed its mechanisms. When Humberto had found the pocket watch, a circular corpse lying upon a street in Mexico City (where he visited seven of his cousins twice a year), he had pocketed it and planned to have it repaired. Two days later, the balladeer returned home to Nueva Vida and learned that his mother, Gabrielle, had passed away alone in the night. He had mourned her for several months, and shortly afterwards, impregnated his wife Patricia with the child who was to become their first daughter, Anna.

The fifty-four-year-old Mexican believed in the Savior—and often contemplated less-renowned spirits who had not suffered quite so spectacularly—and wondered at portends and hidden significances.

Because Humberto had found the watch shortly after midnight, he was certain that it had been stomped upon in the evening, rather than at the nine seconds after eleven seventeen that occurred in the morning. (It was very unlikely that the little machine—even crushed—would sit upon a Mexico City avenue unclaimed for thirteen hours.) He knew that his mother had died on the night that he had found the watch, and he often wondered if perhaps she had passed away at the exact moment that its hands had been stopped by the misplaced hoof. He believed that this concurrency was likely, and often contemplated its significance.

Ultimately, Humberto had decided not to repair the broken machine. Nine seconds after eleven seventeen was a moment that he was meant to contemplate, frozen forever like a photograph upon a little crushed face.

Alone in the back room of the bar, Humberto clicked the long fingernails of his plucking hand upon the inert pocket watch, thinking of his deceased mother and waiting for the Americans.

A cool shadow slinked across the table and covered the tarnished metal. Marietta kissed the top of Humberto’s bald head, set down a glass of red wine and said, “En la casa.” (The owner of the bar always gave the performer of the night a free drink [and Marietta always gave Humberto a second one when the boss had his back turned]).

“Gracias amigita.”

The thirty-year-old woman smiled, complimented his performance and asked after his associates from America.

Humberto replied that he would allow them twenty more minutes.

Marietta smiled at him, set a lingering kiss upon his right cheek (a quarter of an inch away from his mouth) and walked away.

If Humberto were not a happily married man, he would have danced an intimate duet with the buxom (and flirtatious) barmaid and revealed to her the tender and patient affections of a fifty-four-year-old artist who appreciated women far more than did any hombre her own age. He would have shown her real and selfless lovemaking…

Humberto drank a deep draught of red wine and sighed at the concepts of fidelity and monogamy to which he was shackled. He would remain faithful to his wife for the remainder of his life, and he would never caress or be caressed by a new woman ever again.

There were many reasons to hope for an afterlife.

A pale hand pulled aside the checkered cloth at the entrance of the bar, and a dusty gringo cowboy who had a brown hat, wavy hair, a gun on his right hip and a frown walked inside, followed by a tall blonde gentleman who wore a thick mustache beneath his big nose, a royal blue tuxedo and a charming little derby. They halted beneath a candelabrum, noticed the wax drippings upon the stone floor, took a step to their left and scanned the establishment.

Marietta walked over to the men and said, “You gentlemens are here to meet with Ojos?” (Humberto was pleased that she had remembered to use his alias.)

“Si, Señorita,” replied the tall gentleman. He removed his hat, tilted his head forward and said, “Nosotros queremos hablar con Ojos, por favor.” The gentleman’s pronunciation was flawless.

Marietta pointed to the revolver that sat upon the cowboy’s hip. “You pistola. I need. You can no have guns in here.”

The cowboy scanned the bar, looked back at her and lifted his hands. “Take it.”

The barmaid withdrew the weapon from the holster. “You ask me for the pistola when you leave. I am Marietta.” She slid the gun into her red and brown dress. “I now take you to Ojos.”

“Gracias amiga,” said the gentleman.

Slowly, the cowboy nodded.

The woman escorted the gringos past the tenanted stone-and-tile bar, around three inebriates who threw knives at a plank that was decorated by a blue chalk drawing of an angry bear, beneath a large wooden statue of some bizarre three-headed pagan god that the owner had found in the badlands and hung like a piñata, past a table where two old men played checkers, in-between two long benches that were packed with hombres who drunkenly sang a refrain from one of the songs that the balladeer had performed two hours ago and down three steps, into the sunken backroom wherein sat the Mexicano whom the Americanos had come to Nueva Vida to meet.

Humberto stood up and extended his right hand toward the dusty cowboy. “I am Ojos. You are John Lawrence Plugford or the son?”

The cowboy clasped the proffered hand. “I’m the son. Brent.”

As they shook, Humberto saw something that could have been either distrust or distaste flash across the gringo’s face. They released each other.

“I am Thomas Weston,” announced the gentleman, as he extended his hand.

Humberto shook with him and saw no look of distrust or distaste flash across his face.

“Me llamo Ojos.”

The balladeer released the gentleman’s hand and motioned to the cushioned stools that surrounded his table, which was decorated with red, brown and green tiles. “Please sit.”

The gringos sat upon the stools.

Humberto looked down at the Americanos and inquired, “What would you like to drink?”

“We wouldn’t,” said the cowboy.

The balladeer sat upon a cushioned seat opposite the gringos and inquired, “Do you mind if I drink the wine that’s already been poured for me?”

“We ain’t here for any kind of social.”

Humberto knew that Brent Plugford was not well-educated.

The cowboy set his hat upon the table, reached beneath his beige shirt, extricated a worn grouch bag and pulled the strap over his head. “Your gold.”

Humberto took the proffered pouch, set it upon the table, loosened the purse strings, glanced inside and saw variegated scintillating nuggets.

“There’s no hagglin’,” the cowboy stated, “that’s every crumb we got.”

“This appears to be the amount promised in the poster,” remarked the balladeer.

“You can put it on a scale, so you know it certain true.”

“I doubt that you’d ride all the way down here and attempt to cheat me of an ounce.”

“I’m honest,” stated the cowboy, as if what he said were a well-established fact. “Now tell me ‘bout my sisters.”

“As I wrote in the letter,” Humberto said, “I know the identities of two men who have had dealings with one or both of your sisters. Nine weeks—”

“How?” interrupted the cowboy, openly suspicious. “How you know that these men know my sisters?”

“Please allow me to tell a short story that will answer all of your questions.”

“Go tell it.”

“Nine weeks ago, when I was in Mexico City visiting my cousins, I saw the notice, your reward poster, in a post office. Shortly afterwards, I wrote a song about the missing woman.”

“You wrote a song ‘bout my sisters?”

“Yes.”

Outrage blazed across the cowboy’s face. The gentleman clapped a gloved hand to his companion’s shoulder and squeezed.

“I apologize if I’ve upset you,” said Humberto.

The cowboy smoldered, unable to speak.

“Why did you write a song about them?” inquired the gentleman.

“Their story moved me. Even though gringo Texicans killed my father and stole land that rightfully belongs to Mejico, I thought of these innocent and beautiful women and I was…” Humberto shook his head. “I sympathized—I have two daughters myself—and I became angry with the world, a place where beauty is stolen and abused rather than appreciated.” He thought of his gorgeous cousin Elena, who had vanished twenty years ago and was presumed dead. To the cowboy, the balladeer said, “Your sisters are not the only women that have disappeared in this country.”

The cowboy gave an empathetic nod.

A flung blade pierced the right eye of the blue chalk bear.

Humberto glanced at the drunken knife-thrower and returned his attention to the gringos. “My heart was heavy when I wrote the ballad. In English, the title means, ‘That Which Cannot Be Stolen.’” The singer pointed to his guitarrita case. “I have a special guitar with four strings, which I play in bars like this one and on the street. I played the song, ‘That Which Cannot Be Stolen,” many times.

“Near the end of the ballad, there is a verse that describes one of the missing women in—”

“How did you know what she looked like?” inquired the gentleman.

“There were pictures on the reward poster.”

“Go on,” said the cowboy.

“Near the end of the ballad,” Humberto repeated, “there is a verse that describes one of the missing women in great detail. After I paint her portrait, I call out her name.” With ripping vibrato, Humberto sang, “Yvette!”

Tears rolled down the cowboy’s face.

“Afterwards, I sing the final verse. I describe the other woman in great detail and call out her name.” Humberto sang, “Dolores!”

The cowboy wiped away tears with the brim of his hat.

“I performed this song many times—in cities and in towns and twice inside locomotives. People were very moved by it.” (Humberto decided not to inform the gringos that the ballad was one of his most lucrative compositions.) “A few weeks ago, I came home to Nueva Vida.

“Eleven days ago, I performed ‘That Which Cannot Be Stolen’ in our town square, and when I sang out the names of the women, two men in the audience reacted very strongly. They paled. Their eyes became moist. They were frightened. And I was absolutely certain that they knew one or both of the women in the song.”

“Who are they?” The cowboy’s words fell like a blunt axe.

Humberto hesitated for a moment. “You must promise that the gentleman will speak to them in a civilized manner. They are—”

“Don’t put any goddamn terms to me,” spat the cowboy. “I paid you for this information.” He pointed at the grouch bag.

“It is quite possible that these men are unaware of your sisters’ plight.”

“You don’t know that at all.”

“You are correct,” Humberto admitted, “I do not know how they know your sisters. But these two men are important and have done many good things for this town. You must promise that you will not hurt or kill them.”

“We’ll do what we need to do,” said the cowboy, darkly.

Humberto closed the grouch bag and slid it across the tiled table. “You may reclaim your gold and go back to America.”

Hatred shone clear and bright upon the cowboy’s face.

Humberto drank from his glass of wine.

After the cowboy had calmed himself, he asked, “What if these good hombres of yours ain’t so good?”

“If either of these gentlemen are hurt or killed, I will relay the names John Lawrence Plugford and Brent Plugford to many bad Mejicanos.” Humberto let his threat sit in the air for a moment. “And if I should accidentally cut off my own head or carelessly stab myself twenty-nine times in the liver, there are other talkative people who will dispense this information to the banditos.”

“You’ve told others ‘bout our rendezvous?” The cowboy had a hard look in his eyes.

“Not yet—but I will if I feel unsafe when I leave this meeting or if you harm the Mexican gentlemen in any way.”

“Hell.” Brent snorted through his nostrils like a horse. “You’re a clever Mex’can.”

“One of many millions.”

The cowboy considered his options.

“As for the hombres who have imprisoned your sisters…” Humberto shrugged his shoulders. The execution of men who kidnapped and abused women did not trouble the balladeer.

The cowboy slid the grouch bag across the tiled table. “We’ll leave off these two that you’re connectin’ us with. My word’s good.”

“Bueno.” Although Humberto did not like the cowboy, he trusted him. “I know a place where these two gentlemen gamble and have drinks—a nice establishment.” The performer looked at the tall blonde gringo and said, “You will go there.”

“Why did you not speak to them yourself?” inquired the gentleman.

“I do not wish to become directly involved.” Humberto did not want to be involved at all, but his conscience had compelled him to say something and his family could use the money. “Gamble with one of these men and buy him some drinks. When he is relaxed, tell him the type of woman that you are looking for. He will tell you where to go. ¿Comprendes?”

“I understand.” The gentleman seemed doubtful.

“Es muy facil,” confirmed Humberto.

“You think my sisters are bein’ kept in town?” asked the cowboy.

“I know of no brothel in Nueva Vida that would do this sort of thing, but perhaps there is a hidden place, a prison beneath a home. Or perhaps they are in another town or in a cave somewhere in the mountains.”

The gentleman paled.

“You’re paid to work a full week,” the cowboy said to his companion.

“I am aware of that.”

Brent looked at Humberto. “You ever hear of a Spaniard named Gris? Got one eye?”

“I have not.”

“Okay.” The cowboy seemed disappointed. “Now tell us about these Mex’can gentleman.”

Chapter IX

Empty Skulls

Nathaniel Stromler walked past the checkered blanket that dangled in the front doorway and into the night. The air outside the bar was far cooler than what was trapped inside, and the chilled sweat upon the gentleman’s brow and nape wrought horripulations that matched the texture of his anxious guts.

Brent exited, shoved his pistol back into its home and pulled the blanket across the portal. He touched the brim of his hat, which was a signal to the unseen man in the alleyway on the opposite side of the road, and whispered, “Don’t look over.”

“I shall not.”

The cowboy’s hand landed upon the gentleman’s right shoulder and urged him forward. Nathaniel walked past a barbacao shack, two groping lovers, a burro that was tethered to half of a rusty anchor, four ziggurats of bricks that were to become a building and two whining terrier puppies marooned in an unmonitored baby carriage. The duo crossed the street, circumnavigated an open half-trailer (within which laid four people who the gentleman hoped were asleep rather than decomposing) and turned east, toward the outskirts of Nueva Vida.

Behind a house, a dark shape detached itself from the shadows and disappeared into an alleyway. Nathaniel felt a lambent spark climb his spine.

“Keep walking.” Brent placed the meat of his right palm upon his gun grip.

Nathaniel’s pulse quickened.

Walking abreast, the two men passed several houses, a score of interconnected shacks and a tiny wagon loaded with yucca leaves and hacked-up cactus limbs. The town grew sparse.

Brent asked, “You think you can get these gentlemen to divulge?”

“I will do everything that I can to learn—”

A perpendicular shadow appeared beside the cowboy. Nathaniel’s stomach sank. Presently, he recognized that the darkness was Long Clay.

“You can find the camp from here?” Brent asked Nathaniel.

“I believe so.”

The gunfighter and the cowboy disappeared behind a house.

“Damnation.”

Nathaniel applied his monogrammed silk handkerchief to his damp forehead and looked northeast, across the plain toward the tangled coppice in which the Plugford crew was positioned. The woods were a hirsute black growth upon the dark gray land, and within them the camp was completely obscured.

The abandoned gentleman replaced his handkerchief and walked. His loafers wobbled upon hidden stones and unseen roots, and he considered the deeds that his companions might commit to acquire the pesos that he needed to convincingly playact the role of a wealthy whoremonger. Nathaniel did not think that Brent was a dark man, but the cowboy—in his desperation—submitted to Long Clay, a charcoal jackal with a thousand sharp teeth in his stomach. Once again, the gentleman contemplated abandoning the Plugfords, although he knew that he would not. He wanted to keep his word, earn his full wage and aid the women. The avenue of egress was more than two hundred miles behind him.

Nathaniel entered the woods.

Within the forested region, the world was bifurcate. The spiky obstacles that rose up from the earth were jet black, and the sand, the sky and the gentleman’s outstretched hands were dark gray.

Cautiously, Nathaniel walked along an elusive footpath, which was demarcated by flat stones, and around him, the woods grew denser. Opaque night began to overpower that which was dark gray and discernible. Time sped up or slowed down.

He stumbled over a root and flung his arms wide. A yucca needle pricked his right palm, and he retracted his hand. The gentleman looked at his injury and saw a droplet of night traverse his dark gray palm.

“Damnation.”

Nathaniel wiped black blood upon the trunk of a tree, strode three paces and ducked below a low-hanging branch that attempted to choke him.

“Damna—”

Two metallic clicks emanated from the mound of blackness directly in front of the gentleman. He froze.

“Who’s there?’ asked the dark pile.

“Nathaniel Stromler stands before you.”

“I was hoping for something a bit tastier.” There was a vertical glimmer within the darkness—light upon a gun barrel. “Is Brent there with you?”

Nathaniel recognized the speaker as Patch Up. “Brent is not with me. He has gone off on an errand with Long Clay.”

“I suppose that’s why you didn’t employ the special signal.”

“I was unaware that there was any such signal.”

Several leaves rustled and a twig broke.

“Why’re you over this way?” inquired Patch Up.

“I am returning from Nueva Vida.”

“Is the town on wheels?”

“Pardon?”

“You’re walking south.”

The night concealed Nathaniel’s embarrassment. “These damnable woods have…they have discomfited me.” A hand landed upon the gentleman’s shoulder and startled him. He turned and was barely able to discern the gray hair and sleepy eyes of the pudgy negro who stood right beside him.

“If you could navigate dark woods all by yourself,” Patch Up stated, “you wouldn’t be our dandy.”

Nathaniel chose not to respond to the remark.

“Good news.”

“That would be an anomaly.”

“I’m roasting up a grouse—your highly-preferred favorite.”

Nathaniel’s anxieties had trumped his hunger for the last two hours, but his stomach reacted immediately to the news with a noise that an elderly and infirm housecat might make. “That is splendid information. I am famished.”

“Let’s chow.”

Patch Up led Nathaniel down a declivity, through a trampled creosote patch limned by firelight and into a clearing. Beside the sunken campfire squatted the sinewy native who had killed the hawk earlier that morning. The longhaired man was clothed in jeans and a vest, and his hands were splattered with wet blood that dripped onto heated stones, sizzled and filled the air with the smell of copper. Firelight shone upon the waxen, reddish-purple skin that covered his right arm, and the man’s eyes, fixated on the blaze, glowed like jewels.

“That’s Deep Lakes,” Patch Up informed Nathaniel.

“I recall him from this morning.”

Very aware of his royal blue fancy dress at that moment, the gentleman strode beside the campfire and to the native said, “Greetings.”

“Good evening to you, Mr. Stromler.” Deep Lakes sounded like an educated man from the Northeast.

The gentleman was about to endeavor more conversation when he noticed the carcasses. At the foot of the native laid a dead bobcat and an armored, beaded, gray capsule-shaped creature that Nathaniel did not recognize from life experience, but instead from an illustrative plate in the first volume of his encyclopedia as an armadillo. The light from the fire shone inside the animals’ cracked-open skulls.

Deep Lakes raised one of his dripping hands, put a pinkish-gray clump of matter into his mouth and swallowed it whole. Blood dripped onto the stones and sizzled. Sickened by the sight and the cloying odor, Nathaniel looked away.

Patch Up walked over to the far side of the campfire, wrapped his hands with damp rags, leaned down, grabbed the thick end of a long iron stake and raised an impaled, plucked and salted grouse from the hearth coals. Half of the bird had been cooked, and the remainder was completely raw.

The negro wrinkled his mouth and looked back to the area where the horses were hobbled. “Stevie!”

The crooked-nosed twenty-one-year-old emerged from behind the wagon. “What?” He was bare-chested and held something shiny in his right hand.

“Did you turn Mr. Stromler’s grouse like I asked?” Patch Up whispered to Nathaniel, “He didn’t.”

“I did,” proclaimed Stevie.

“Then exactly half of this bird is fireproof?”

“Go roast.” Stevie swatted the air and raised the shiny object to his mouth.

Patch Up looked at Nathaniel. “He’s in the flask.”

“I am more than content to eat the cooked half of that grouse,” remarked the gentleman.

“Let me give it some symmetry.” Patch Up leaned the spit beside the hearth and from his left coat pocket withdrew a metal cylinder that was surmounted by a brass crank. “Got eleven spices in here. And special salt.” He ground the peppermill, and multicolored motes clung to the bird’s skin.

“Bravo,” said Nathaniel.

“Hey!” shouted Stevie. “The dandy’s back!” He gestured with his flask and drank, as if he had just concluded a toast.

From the darkness behind the wagon emerged a broad lumbering shape that Nathaniel mistook for a bear until he recognized it as John Lawrence Plugford. The powerfully-built patriarch strode past his son (who hastily secreted his liquor flask), directly toward the campfire.

Suppressing trepidations, Nathaniel said, “Good evening, Mr. Plugford.”

Two red lights gleamed beneath John Lawrence Plugford’s heavy brow.

“Would you like some of this grouse?” inquired Patch Up.

The patriarch shook his leonine head, arrived at the campfire and focused his terrible eyes upon the gentleman. “What happened?” The voice that emerged from the tangled silver and brown beard was a funereal rasp.

“Brent and I spoke with Ojos—the man who sent you the letter.”

John Lawrence Plugford nodded. His eyes were like gun barrels.

“Ojos gave us the names of the two gentleman who saw your daughters, and—”

“What’re their names?” John Lawrence Plugford reached into the chest pocket of his gray overalls, withdrew a fountain pen and unscrewed its cap with huge fingers that made the writing implement look no larger than a lollipop stick. The steel tip glared with reflected firelight.

The bestial man gazed at the gentleman.

Nathaniel hesitated.

“Don’t make Pa ask twice,” Stevie advised from behind his father’s shoulder.

Nathaniel said, “The men are Manuel Menendez and Juan Bonito.”

Upon the back of his left hand, John Lawrence Plugford wrote.

Manwell M

The tip clogged and scratched his skin. The colossal man sucked upon the steel, spat, shook the fountain pen and continued to write.

inindez. Wan Boneeto.

John Lawrence Plugford slid the cap onto his fountain pen, screwed it down, turned his back to the fire and walked toward the darkness.

Concerned that the wrathful man was going to hunt down the two Mexicans directly, Nathaniel said, “Sir.”

The patriarch continued into the shadows.

“Mr. Plugford, sir.”

“J.L.” shouted Patch Up. “Wait a moment.”

The huge man halted, but did not turn around.

To his substantial back, Nathaniel said, “Those two men are not to be harmed. They are the contacts with whom I am to meet, and they will tell me where to find your daughters.”

The fire dimmed and the camp darkened. John Lawrence Plugford was silent.

“Your son guaranteed that Manuel Menendez and Juan Bonito would not be harmed,” clarified Nathaniel. “He gave Ojos his word.”

From the other side of the massive shoulders issued a quiet and crackling inquiry. “How do these two men know my angels?”

Stevie, Deep Lakes and Patch Up looked at Nathaniel.

The gentleman did not doubt that a poorly-worded answer would bring about violence. “I am not certain how these men came to know your daughters.”

The huge hands became fists.

“J.L,” said Patch Up. “We need to let the dandy talk to these Mexicans before you get involved. That’s why he’s here.”

John Lawrence Plugford nodded his head, strode forward and vanished.

The native slid two fingers into the cleft skull of the bobcat and scooped out a pink morsel that he swallowed without chewing.

To Nathaniel, Patch Up said, “Your grouse is ready.”

“Please set it aside. I may regain my appetite in a short while.”

“I’ll save it for you.”

“Hey dandy!” Stevie staggered toward the campfire, reached into his back pocket, withdrew a balled-up paper and flung it. The projectile impacted the gentleman’s chest and landed on the ground beside the pit, where it glowed bright yellow. “Brent said you gotta study that. They’re pictures from the reward poster.”

Nathaniel leaned over, picked up the paper, opened it and saw—backlit by pulsating firelight—the beautiful and crumpled faces of Yvette and Dolores. They were smiling.

Chapter X

Bad Men

Black toenails scrabbled upon the tiles of the trespassed den. Brent Plugford, whose face was hidden behind the rubber mask of a smoke respirator, braced the white dog, muzzled its mouth and drew a curved blade across its throat. Blood warmed his left pant leg, and he felt queasy.

Although Brent’s job as a cowboy foreman had twice required him to shoot a man (a Yank named William who had tried to steal the payroll, and an ornery drunk with the same name who did not appreciate being dismissed from a riding outfit by a boss young enough to be his grandson), each fellow had pulled a pistol, and in so doing, authored his own end. Brent felt that his actions were fully justified, and he had been untroubled by remorseful sentiments when he had buried and abandoned each body beside the cattle trail. But the innocent creature that struggled in his hands was different from the men named William or any animal that would provide sustenance: The white dog was killed so that he could commit a wrongful act.

Two final paroxysms contorted the draining creature, and Brent’s vision blurred. The blood that saturated his left pant leg grew cool and sticky.

In his hands, the thoughtless, dripping animal stared out blindly.

A shadow fell, and Long Clay, wearing a rubber respirator mask, pointed to the ground.

Upon the cold tiles, Brent laid the dog.

The gunfighter scratched a match. White light flared upon the glass lenses that covered the eyes of the masked men, turned orange and illuminated the enclosure. The den was large and furnished with Oriental rugs, Spanish tapestries and glossy European furniture, all of which seemed to confirm the owner’s purported wealth.

A black snake descended from the ceiling. Brent froze.

An instant later, the cowboy realized that the serpent was actually dog’s blood sliding down his left lens, and he wiped the gore away.

Long Clay pointed the barrel of a black pistol at a wooden doorway on the western wall. Brent nodded, confirming his readiness. The gunfighter snuffed the match.

Toward the chosen door, the trespassers stalked. Brent prayed that they would not have to hurt anyone.

Long Clay extended his right hand, clasped an ornate knob and twisted it gently. The cylinder squeaked. The tall shadow pushed the door forward, slowly and carefully, revealing a vertical line of pure night that grew wider and wider.

The space beyond the den was utterly opaque.

Staring into the inscrutable black region, Brent’s apprehensions grew.

A match flared in Long Clay’s right hand and revealed a long hallway, the walls of which were hung with paintings. The gunfighter snuffed the glaring head, tapped Brent’s left lens and pointed at the passageway on the opposite side of the den and at the French doors through which they had entered the house.

The cowboy apprehended that he was to hold in his current position and monitor these two points of ingress. He nodded.

The gunfighter was absorbed by the black hallway.

Alone with his respirations, Brent monitored the den and the portals that led to it. The room was as still as a photographic image and the house was quiet. Upon the wall that he had not earlier surveyed hung a painting that was a family portrait. The cowboy’s stomach sank when he saw a boy depicted in the image.

A man yelled and was abruptly silenced.

Brent drew his gun and looked up the hallway into which his partner had disappeared, but he saw only darkness. The cowboy was a wholly inexperienced criminal, but he had heard stories from his father and knew not to run blindly into a tableau, especially when Long Clay was the protagonist. He returned his attention to the den.

A figure emerged from the opposite hallway.

Brent pointed his pistol. On the other side of his weapon stood the eight-year-old child from the portrait, terrified.

The cowboy shoved his revolver into his holster, lunged forward, clapped a palm to the boy’s mouth, threw him to the floor and pressed a knee into his stomach. Brent wanted to tell the child that he would not hurt him, but Long Clay had insisted that he remain mute unless the situation were dire—any English or one poorly-pronounced Spanish word would mark him as a gringo. Fortunately for the cowboy, the prone boy was so terrified that he did not struggle overmuch.

At the end of the hall wherein Long Clay had disappeared, a white light flashed, accompanied by a dim pop that Brent recognized as a muted gun report. The cowboy’s stomach sank.

The boy looked west and saw the slain white dog for the first time. His big eyes filled with tears and his chest convulsed beneath the cowboy’s knee. Brent tasted bitter self-loathing, but kept the boy pinned—he knew that things could get much worse.

Quiet footsteps sounded within the dark hallway.

Brent raised his revolver. A matched flashed thrice and was gone. Recognizing the signal, the cowboy lowered his weapon.

Long Clay emerged from the shadows, a lacquered wooden box nestled underneath his curled right arm.

Fully aware that he could neither wrangle nor defeat the gunfighter, Brent hoped that his father’s old partner was not the type of man who would hurt or kill a subdued child.

The gunfighter set the wooden box upon the sofa, holstered his gun and knelt beside the youth. The boy trembled beneath Brent, as had the white dog four minutes earlier. Long Clay reached into his shirt pocket, withdrew a plum and inserted it into the boy’s mouth. Relieved, the cowboy pulled a kerchief across the plugged orifice and tied it. The two men hog-tied the child, placed him upon an Oriental carpet and rolled him up like a burrito.

The rug breathed.

Long Clay tucked the wooden box underneath his right arm, strode through the French doors and disappeared into the night.

Brent glanced at the breathing rug, the butchered dog and the opaque west hall at the far end of which an innocent man might have been murdered. Poisons tainted the cowboy’s blood.

He cursed silently, hurried through the French doors, stole across the backyards of four houses and entered a tall stand of creosote bushes wherein waited Long Clay. The thieves removed their rubber masks, tossed them and the wooden box inside two sealskin sacks and hastened to an adjacent dirt road. Brent was a fit man, but he was usually atop a horse when he needed to move quickly, and his thighs and buttocks burned as he matched his partner’s long quick strides.

A lean dog that looked like a brindled coyote emerged from a shack and followed the thieves for twenty yards, barking continually. Long Clay thrust a gun barrel through its eye and fired. Its skull pan wholly muted the blast.

The men departed the western edge of Nueva Vida, entered the dark gray badlands and began to circle around to the east. As they walked across the gritty plain, Brent’s blood-soaked pant leg alternately chaffed and stuck to his skin.

“Why’d we have to wear them perculiar masks?” asked the cowboy.

“Would you have preferred a scarf?”

Brent looked at the tall narrow man, but was unable to determine whether or not he was irritated by the question. “Scarf would’ve been easier.”

“Do you think that a scarf—which covers half of man’s face, none of his hair and can pulled off by a child—is the best way to maintain one’s anonymity?”

“I don’t.”

After the pair had walked in silence for a few minutes, Brent said, “I’ve got one other question, and then I won’t ask you nothin’ more.” The gunfighter neither accepted nor refused the inquiry. “What happened when you went up that hall? I heard a gunshot.”

“You didn’t do anything but kill a dog and gag a child,” replied Long Clay. “That’s all you need to know.”

“I thought I was s’posed to know what happened—since I was your partner.”

“No cowboy who cries over a dumb dog is my partner.”

Brent was humiliated by the remark, but did not bother to defend himself.

A silent and brisk half-hour walk brought the two men to the footpath that led into the tangled black coppice. Brent slung his sack over his right shoulder and preceded the gunfighter inside.

Twenty strides later, the cowboy heard a distant wailing. He tensed and drew his revolver, but quickly realized that the ululation was his brother attempting to sing.

“Hush him or I will,” threatened Long Clay.

Brent hastened along the winding footpath, where dark tree limbs and darker yucca spikes advanced from the opaque surroundings like the weapons of inhospitable natives. As he ran, a corner of the wooden box tattooed a bruise upon his back.

Stevie’s singing grew louder.

An orange glow that Brent recognized as the sunken campfire flashed beyond two fronds that looked like a witch’s hands. Oriented, the cowboy sped directly toward the camp.

Stevie sang, “The muskets flashed upon the barbican.” (Five wooden thumps punctuated the line.) “The thunder of Confederate pride!” (Wood rumbled.) “A hand with a union cuff of blue, reached down like the greedy claw of the Jew. ‘We are united!’ they lied. ‘Pay our tariff!’ they cried. But to the end, we did defend, with a rebel shield of pride.” (The singer inhaled deeply.) “Of Pride!” A miserable note was held for an amount of time unrelated to the (poorly) established meter.

When Brent entered the clearing, he saw the dandy, the Indian and Patch Up seated around the fire pit and looked for his brother.

“Of infantible Southern pride!” brayed Stevie, stretching the final word through ten flat notes, as if he were an opera singer, rather than a man who was completely unmusical.

From the darkness, Brent divined his wailing brother. The bare-chested young man was seated at the back of the wagon, atop the black trunk in which the captive was kept. “Stevie!” hissed the cowboy. “Get down from there and keep your mouth—”

“You’re back!” Stevie thumped his heel against the trunk, leaned over and (loudly) whispered, “My brother’s back from his special mission.”

It was fortunate that the dandy was faced away from the drunken singer.

“Get down from there and keep your mouth shut.” Brent heard Long Clay’s footsteps upon the path. “Do it now.”

Stevie considered his brother’s suggestions. Depending upon how drunk he was, he would either obey Brent or resume his song at a louder volume.

“Of infantible Southern pride!”

Holding the barrel of a gleaming black revolver in his left hand, Long Clay emerged from the woods, ready to whip the young inebriate.

Brent ran toward his little brother, the soak.

“I believe,” the dandy remarked from beside the campfire, “that the word you are attempting to sing is ‘indefatigable.’”

“Yank!” berated Stevie.

Brent grabbed his brother’s right arm. “Come off of there and don’t say nothin’ unless you want Long Clay to wallop you again.”

The inebriate glanced across the campsite and was sobered by the sight of the approaching gunfighter.

“I’m tryin’ to save you a beatin’,” said Brent.

Stevie nodded. “Okay.”

“Now get off of that trunk.”

The young man leapt to the ground, landed on two feet, teetered to each compass point and stood upright.

A large shape emerged from the shadows, shuffled past the siblings and headed toward the gunfighter. Brent threw his brother a stern glance and followed after his father.

“Did you earn?” John Lawrence Plugford asked Long Clay.

“We earned.”

The patriarch nodded, walked to the campfire and interposed himself between the dandy and the flames. “Get to town.”

Surprised by the blunt imperative, Nathaniel reached into his trousers, withdrew a pocket watch and clicked its release button. Silver arrows glimmered in his weary blue eyes. “It is nearly ten minutes after one in the morning.”

John Lawrence Plugford, a huge silhouette above the fire pit, loomed.

“Most Mex’cans stay up late.” The cowboy set the plunder beside the campfire. “That’s why they’ve got them afternoon naps.”

The dandy looked at the sealskin sack and frowned, as if he were the parent of the flayed animal.

“Should be plenty for your performance,” added Brent.

The dandy reached into the bag and extricated the burnished box. Firelight sparkled upon three drops of blood that sat atop the wood like ladybugs, but the tall man from Michigan did not remark upon the sanguinary keepsakes.

“It’s got a latch.” Brent pointed an index finger.

The dandy twisted the brass knob, pulled the bracket and raised the lid. Gold and silver coins, a large black book and bundles of paper money filled the padded, purple interior.

John Lawrence Plugford withdrew the tome and held it close to his face.

“That a bible?” asked Brent.

The patriarch nodded.

“You gonna give it to Yvette?”

“It’s in Spanish.” John Lawrence Plugford tossed the holy book into the fire pit. The tome curled, flashed, shriveled and blackened.

Although Brent was not a religious man, the sight of the burning bible made him feel uneasy.

Long Clay cast his shadow upon the plunder. “Use the coins.”

The dandy looked up. “The banknotes are for larger denominations and more commonly carried by men of wealth.”

“Paper money is locally made at a thousand banks, individualized and easy to identify. Those coins are myriad and spend all the way to China.”

“I understand.” The dandy yawned, nodded his head and looked at Patch Up. “Would you please extricate the ten and twenty peso coins while I tend to my toilet?”

“Certainly,” said the negro.

The dandy rose to his feet and stretched.

“Mr. Stromler,” said Brent.

The dandy looked at him.

“Deep Lakes is gonna follow you to town. He’ll wait outside the club, hidden invisible while you wheedle Menendez and Bonito. If you go somewhere else, some other place, Deep Lakes is gonna follow you there and let us know.” The dandy did not look very confident. “Once you’ve identified my sisters—you studied their pictures, right?

“I did.”

“Once you’ve identified my sisters, you come outside wherever you’re at and drop your hat on the ground and scratch your nose. That’s your meaningful gesture. When Deep Lakes sees the meaningful gesture, he’ll send up his signal and we’ll all come ridin’.”

“What happens then?” inquired the dandy.

“Deep Lakes will get you hid and when we meet up with you, you’ll tell us what’s inside and where the girls are.”

“And what shall I do after I have fulfilled my obligations?”

“After you’ve apprised us, you can start back to the New Mexico Territory. And if they make you leave your horse behind, we’ll bring her along and some water too so you can ride off north.” Brent looked over at Long Clay and inquired, “That’s it, right? How we discussed?”

“That’s how it begins,” remarked the gunfighter. “Once I’ve heard the layout described, I’ll detail the rescue.”

To the dandy, Brent said, “Go get presentable and on your mare. My sisters are waitin’.”

Chapter XI

Two Lullabies

A tiny fist knocked upon the outside of the bedroom door, and a voice equally small and delicate inquired, “¿Padre?” The intertwined husband and wife hesitated.

Lodged within the canal whence the knocker had emerged ten years earlier, Humberto looked up from Patricia’s flush face and over to the door. “Dos minutos, por favor.”

“Si,” replied his youngest daughter, Estrellita.

Humberto doubted that he could achieve his culmination in the remaining time (he was no longer in his forties), but he would certainly bring a significant smile to Patricia’s face. He did not conjure the image of the luscious barmaid Marietta, but she appeared in his mind nonetheless and brought about an unexpected release that was as sharp and soothing as the tequila wrought from the special blue agave that was grown in Guanajuato.

The balladeer climbed from his satisfied wife, covered her body with a warm blanket, kissed her nose, pulled on his linen pajama pants, strode to the bedroom door and undid the lock that was only employed when he and Patricia were romantically engaged. In the hallway stood Estrellita, the little star. Her big eyes were wide with fear and he knew without asking that she had been upset by a nightmare.

Humberto stepped into the hallway, shut the bedroom door and asked his daughter if she would like a bedtime song.

Estrellita considered the proffered medication and said, “Dos cantos.”

“No.” Humberto would have agreed to play two songs for her (she was his most adorable patron, and she possessed a more fertile imagination than did any adult), but it was half-past one in the morning, and he felt that he must deny her request. “Un canto solamente.”

The ten-year-old girl, who had inherited her considerable bartering skills from her mother, said that she would compromise and accept one-and-a-half songs.

Shaking his head, the balladeer explained that a song was a story that should be told in its entirety or not at all. (Whenever she fell asleep during a familiar lullaby, he completed the tale the very next day.)

Estrellita asked for him to play, ‘The Acolytes of Saint Pedro of the Object.’ (This epic ballad was as long as two normal songs.)

“Si.” The balladeer was fully aware that he had been bested by his conniving little star.

Humberto took Estrellita’s little hand, walked her to the hickory peg from which depended his guitarrita case and claimed the unique instrument that he adored not quite as much as his wife and two girls, but more than any of his aunts or uncles or cousins or nephews. Father and daughter walked up the hallway, passed by Anna’s crutches and entered the room that the balladeer had built during Patricia’s second pregnancy.

The space was dark. Neither moonlight nor starlight shone through Estrellita’s window, and the mountains outside were indistinguishable from the charcoal sky. Humberto set his guitarrita case down, struck a match and lit the wick of a lantern that was hung too high for his daughter to reach. Amber light chased the shadows away.

The little girl locked the door (as if she intended to hoard every forthcoming musical note), climbed into bed and told her father that she was ready.

Humberto withdrew his guitarrita and sat upon the windowsill. Behind him, the sky and mountains were a black curtain.

A gentle melody drifted from the instrument’s plucked strings and into the girl’s ears. Unlike some balladeers who had to sing loudly in order to ring accurate pitches, Humberto performed adeptly at any volume.

The lyric described an imaginary South American town that was located in the bottom of a dell and surrounded by green forests and tall white mountains.

“Objeto Bendito!” Estrellita sang in concert with her father. (Humberto was pleased to hear his daughter match the pitches almost perfectly.)

The people who live in Blessed Object go to church and before each meal say grace and acknowledge His great sacrifice. They are pious. (Humberto played a melody where each note was plucked strictly on the downbeat—this refrain showed the townsfolk’s steadfast devotion to the Savior.)

As is often the case with Catholics who live in rural communities, the residents of Blessed Object have augmented the Trinity with a provincial saint to whom they pay tribute.

(“San Pedro del Objeto!” Estrellita sang, a little ahead of the beat because of her excitement. Humberto added a two-measure etude so that he could lean over and kiss her forehead.)

Saint Pedro of the Object is the supernal patron of the town and this is his story.

(Upon Estrellita’s face was an enormous smile.)

Two hundred years ago, at exactly nine seconds after eleven seventeen at night, an infant escaped his crib. He crawled from his house, across dark cobblestones and to the craftsman’s shop that was located on the far side of the settlement. When his parents found him the next day, he was covered with wet clay. His mother and father apologized to the shop owner and repaid him for the material that their child had ruined.

They took young Pedro home and—with a long ivory shoehorn that the man used to get into his knee-high boots—very gently scraped the clay off of the baby’s skin. The parents put their child back into his crib and went to sleep.

The next morning, when the mother and father entered Pedro’s room, they saw two babies. One baby was Pedro, and the other was made out of clay. The parents were uncertain how their six-month old child could have sculpted this second baby, and they suspected divine aid. This clay infant became the first sacred Object.

The settlement that was located in the bottom of a dell and surrounded by green forests and tall white mountains was given the name Blessed Object.

(“Objeto Bendito!”)

Throughout his life, Saint Pedro of the Object refined the Object that he had begun as an infant. He apprenticed with a carpenter, mastered the art of woodcraft and carved elaborate curly hair, one strand at a time, for his Object. With lapis lazuli, he made eyes for his Object. With fine pearls, he made perfect fingernails and toenails for his Object.

When he was a man of forty, Pedro studied the diagrams of anatomy and thereafter began his most time-consuming elaboration. He inserted pieces of clay, each no larger than a pea, into a tiny hole in the left shoulder of the hollow Object, and with long needles and tweezers, he sculpted bones, nerves, arteries and organs inside the boy.

Saint Pedro of the Object died when he was sixty-six years-old—exactly twice as old as the Son had been when he was betrayed by Judas Iscariot and crucified. The patron was buried in the central square and mourned by every person in Blessed Object.

(Humberto saw that his daughter was getting sleepy.)

The following day, the townsfolk went to place new flowers upon Saint Pedro’s grave, and they saw the Object, prone atop the burial mound. The villagers contemplated divinity. They journeyed to Saint Pedro’s house and saw that the armoire in which the Object was kept was still locked, and they knew that the patron had been buried with the only key.

The townsfolk prostrated themselves. This event was the second miracle performed by Saint Pedro, the patron of Blessed Object.

The white crescent upon Estrellita’s face was engulfed by a round black yawn.

Humberto let his chord decay and announced that he would finish the song tomorrow.

“Gracias.” Estrellita’s eyelids drooped, resisted for a moment and yielded.

The balladeer leaned over, kissed his most sacred creation upon the forehead, adjusted her cotton blanket, took himself and his instrument to the far side of the room, opened his guitarrita case and saw the grouch bag of gold nuggets that he had received from the desperate Texan earlier that evening.

Even though he did not believe in the immediate divine intervention of which he sang, Humberto said a silent prayer for the abducted gringas. He tucked away his four-stringed child, blew the flame off of the lantern wick and felt the plaintive lump in his guts that was awarded to each good father on the day that his first daughter was born.

Chapter XII

The Reapers of Scotch and Tequila

Nathaniel Stromler adjusted his royal-blue derby and walked up the only paved road in Nueva Vida, toward a white three-story building that was surrounded by carriages, stagecoaches and horses that glistened like satin. Beneath a jutting overhang and illuminated by two glaring mirror lanterns hung a green-and-gold sign.

Castillo Elegante

de

Humo, Bebidas & Dados

To the worldly, would-be hotelier from Michigan, who had thrice visited Europe and once (accidentally) sojourned in the Orient, the establishment did not resemble the elegant castle that the sign promised, but the rectilinear specters of tobacco smoke before every window, the braying laughter and the sudden exclamations that were concurrently joyful and angry did confirm the alleged cigars, drinks and dice. Two clean-shaven men in pine green uniforms stood on either side of the mahogany front door, monitoring the gringo as he approached. They wore bright new pistols and stern faces, and Nathaniel was unsure whether they were privately contracted guards or law enforcement officials or both.

“Good evening Señor,” said the man on the left with stilted, but clear English. “Welcome to Castillo Elegante.”

“Gracias,” Nathaniel replied, “y buenas noches a ustedes.”

Both men were surprised by his precise and confident enunciation.

The gringo strode underneath the overhang and saw upon the door a pretty placard warning any poor man who thought that he might smoke, drink or gamble in Castillo Elegante that he was not welcome.

No Hay Hombres Pobres Permitido.

The sentry on the right pulled open the heavy door, exposing a luminous and smoky pine-green interior.

“Amigos.” Nathaniel gifted the guards with two ten-peso eagles and saw by their bright eyes that such generosity was uncommon.

“Gracias Señor,” said the one who spoke.

The other nodded appreciatively.

(Nathaniel thought it best to have the armed men favorably predisposed to him should things go unexpectedly bad during his reconnoiter.)

Feeling the weight of his predicament and a sharp pang of apprehension, the man from Michigan paused at the portal and glanced back at his tan mare, the glowering sky and the shadows that concealed his hidden accomplice Deep Lakes, whose exact location was unknown. Nathaniel steeled himself, filled his lungs with chill air and entered a sizable parlor that was decorated with pine-green wallpaper and sofas and inhabited by people who did not seem to understand that dawn was less than four hours away.

A throng of Mexicans wearing shiny blue suits converged, and the gringo’s eyes stung from the potency of the cigar and cigarillo smoke that they exhaled. Serving women offered smiles and drinks to any man not focused upon their bosoms, which were coaxed into voluptuous prominence by strict lace corsets. A young mariachi, a woman with castanets and an ancient trumpeter, all of whom were outfitted with gold-fringed pine-green suits, performed unobtrusively in an alcove that was illuminated by two mirror lanterns.

As he began his first circuit of the parlor, Nathaniel considered Ojos’s description of Manuel Menendez. ‘Menendez is fifty, portly, five-and-a-half feet tall, has a mustache, some liver marks and some gray hair.’ The orbiting gringo saw that half of the men who peopled the room could be thus described, and unless he asked a serving woman or a chance stranger to identify his quarry, he would be unable to divine the Mexican gentleman from his two score doppelgangers. Consequently, Juan Bonito, ‘a five foot four-inch mestizo with a flat nose and torn right ear,’ was the gentleman upon whom Nathaniel decided to focus his search, even though Ojos had warned him that the fellow was ‘strange and far less approachable than Menendez’.

Three circuits of the room did not reveal the conspicuous little man to the gringo. Certain that Juan Bonito was not on the first floor, Nathaniel looked for the stairwell that led to the upper stories and saw, in a dark portal, a golden diagonal line that was a balustrade.

A serpentine limb wrapped the gringo’s arm, and his breath caught.

“Hello, handsome and tall American.”

Nathaniel looked to his right and saw a young Mexican woman who had wide, innocent eyes and a lascivious smirk. The girl looked eighteen years old (or younger), although perhaps she was in her twenties (like negroes and Orientals, Mexicans aged slower than other people).

“Buenas noches,” Nathaniel replied a little uneasily. It had been years since he had last felt the warmth of a pretty woman who was not his fiancé.

“Did you ride into the town today? From Texas?”

“You are twice correct.”

“You would like a hot bath?” The woman’s painted lips framed a smile. “I will clean you well.”

Nathaniel devised a polite reply. “I…did not come here for…female companionship.”

The woman sharply withdrew her hand from the gringo’s arm and said, “I give baths only.” She took a step away and added, “You smell like horse.”

“I apologize for my assumption, I was—”

The indignant woman departed.

Nathaniel, who had twice visited New York, checked his trousers to see if the bathhouse girl had acquired an illicit stipend or a new American pocket watch, but he located all of his possessions. He walked to the stairwell at the back of the room, and as he ascended, he imagined how soothing a warm bath—administered by the girl or Kathleen or himself—would feel. The musings unhelpfully recalled his weariness and many aches.

Up the steps, Nathaniel trudged. The gold rectangle above him grew, and from it emanated the sudden shouts of winners and losers engaged in the ritual of inviting chance into their wallets. Amidst the cacophony, the crystalline strings of a harp resonated.

The gringo passed through the portal and into a luxurious room that was decorated with golden wallpaper and furnished with white divans and stools that were occupied by more than a score of game players. The servers wore opalescent bodices that showed the tantalizing edges of their tan breasts (which undoubtedly helped the gamblers make wise decisions whenever they bet against the house), and a mulatto woman in a silk gown played a delicate melody upon a large golden harp in a far corner. Depending from the walls were four impressionistic oil paintings that depicted stately horses atop drear mountain peaks. (Nathaniel recognized that this room was supposed to invoke Europe, but to him it seemed designed by a man who had never traveled more than three miles from the hacienda in which he had grown up. Had the gringo seen a harpsichord, he would have laughed aloud.)

The gamblers focused their attentions upon cards, dice, drinks, female flesh and the eyes of bluffers, and thus were less interested in growing the volume of smoke than were their desultory contemporaries below. As Nathaniel made his survey of the room, his stinging eyes cooled.

Seated at a white table that had raised edges was a small man wearing a brown suit. His back was to Nathaniel, and so were his mismatched ears, one of which looked as if its top half had been shot off at close range. An anxious pulse thrilled through the gringo’s chest.

Nathaniel circled the table and furtively noted his subject’s flat nose, atop which sat a strong brow that suggested a mix of Mexican and native ancestry. This man was Juan Bonito.

In addition to his tight brown suit, the ugly little man wore a red derby, a matching bowtie and bright white gloves, and thus appeared like something that might accompany an organ grinder with upraised palms and a banana agendum.

Juan Bonito furiously shook dice in a golden cup that was decorated with coruscating beads, as did his three peers, all of whom fit the vague description of Manuel Menendez. The caroming ivory rattled like a hailstorm. The quartet overturned their cups and slammed them to the table. Clandestine dice settled, and gamblers glanced underneath lifted lids.

Nathaniel did not know if they played the type of Liar’s Dice wherein there was one loser per round or the variation wherein a victor took the entire pot from multiple losers, but either way, the ante seemed very substantial for a game of guesses—each person had fifty pesos upon the betting circle.

The gringo knew better than to approach the table before the round had concluded, and thus watched the game from a respectful distance.

“Empezas,” Juan Bonito said to a man who wore a pinstriped jacket.

The chastened fellow bid five rolls of three.

A man who chewed upon a damp, unlit cigarillo said, “Seis los tres.”

The next fellow in the clockwise progression bid seven rolls of three.

“Deceiver!” exclaimed Juan Bonito.

The men raised their cups, and the revealed dice showed five threes.

With bright white gloves, the diminutive mestizo took the winnings from the gentleman at whom he had yelled, circumspectly inspected the pesos and added them to the metropolis of coins and neatly-arranged bills that stood beside his right elbow. (The other bets remained untouched.)

Nathaniel asked if he could join their game.

The man who had just lost made a space between himself and Juan Bonito, so that the gringo could sit, look at the champion’s ruined ear (which looked like a burnt clam) and lose.

“Gracias Señor.”

A Mexican woman who had strong arms slid a chair before the gap and placed a golden cup with dice upon the table. Nathaniel thanked her and sat down.

Fingering his ruined ear, Juan Bonito said, “We do not play for wooden nickels.”

The gringo withdrew his coin pouch from his jacket, opened the strings and poured onto the whitewood table a score of high-value pesos. Juan Bonito and his contemporaries nodded.

Nathaniel decided that a man of wealth (or at least the fictitious individual whom he was portraying) would adhere to some of his inbred preferences when abroad, and would not care overly whether or not he ingratiated himself to the locals. He turned to the woman who had inserted his chair and said, “Quiero un escocés, viejo y dulce, por favor.”

The server recommended Águila Azul, a particularly fine tequila that was very popular amongst the refined gentlemen who visited Castillo Elegante, but the gringo politely refused her advice. Rebuffed, the woman nodded and went to retrieve a glass of old and sweet scotch.

Nathaniel and the loser from the previous round each placed fifty pesos upon the betting circle.

“Empezamos,” announced Juan Bonito.

The gamblers shuttled their dice and shook their cups, and a hailstorm of rattling ivory blotted out all other sounds. The mestizo nodded. The gamblers slammed their cups to the table and surveyed their rolls. Nathaniel’s dice showed a two, two threes, a four and a six.

“Perdon.” The presumptuous gringo announced that he would like to make the first bid.

Two nodding heads granted him permission.

Nathaniel said, “Seis los cuatros.” (This was an uncommonly high opening bid.)

“Lying deceiver!” shouted Juan Bonito.

The gentlemen lifted their cups, and the upturned faces of their dice showed four fours—two short of Nathaniel’s wager. Juan Bonito claimed the gringo’s money, circumspectly inspected each coin and erected a new building at the eastern edge of his monetary metropolis.

The quintet played another round. Once again the gringo bid high and was called out by the small mestizo.

“Drat!” exclaimed Nathaniel.

Juan Bonito flashed a kind smile at the American naïf and said, “Do not begin with big numbers. With so many men playing,” he swept his hand in a circle, “you will not reap.”

“Gracias.”

“I will begin the next time.” Juan Bonito amicably patted Nathaniel’s shoulder.

Gamblers rattled their dice and slammed their cups. The round began with the mestizo and ended with the gringo’s bad bid.

“Drat!” exclaimed Nathaniel. (He hoped that he was not overdoing his display of ineptitude.)

The woman with strong arms placed a glass of scotch at the gringo’s left elbow.

Nathaniel reached for a gold coin, but had his wrist seized by Juan Bonito.

“No,” admonished the mestizo. “I am taking your money. I pay for the drink.”

“Gracias.”

The diminutive man handed the woman a twenty-peso piece, which was an extraordinarily generous payment.

“I think we should alter the direction of the bids,” Juan Bonito suggested to the gringo, “so that I cannot call you a lying deceiver.”

“Gracias.”

It was difficult for Nathaniel to picture this conscientious fellow paying to violate a captive woman, but he knew that men could become something else—something that they loathed—when the wolf of lust growled within them. The mestizo might very well have some dark reservoir filled with the unkind looks and remarks that his appearance, stature and ironic name elicited.

“We go in the new direction,” stated Juan Bonito.

The gentleman with the unlit cigarillo between his lips changed the corner of his mouth in which the soggy cylinder sat, as if it were a weathervane for the order of bidding.

Nathaniel set down fifty pesos.

“Empezamos.”

Cups became ersatz maracas and were slammed to the whitewood. Two rounds of bids circled the table. The man with the damp unlit cigarillo called the fellow to his right a liar and lost fifty pesos when the dice were revealed. The victor (whose name was Victor) left the table with his winnings and another round was played in which Nathaniel called Juan Bonito’s bluff and won back some of his money.

The night trudged.

Nathaniel bought his gambling mentor a drink and had the courtesy twice returned.

“Dishonest liar deceiver!”

The last time Nathaniel had seen a watch, its small hand was reaching toward the number five. It was difficult for him to believe that less than twenty four-hours ago, he had stood in the Footman’s house, outside the door of the baby’s room, listening to his fiancé’s quiet anguish. That somber moment now seemed almost as remote as his childhood in Michigan.

The man with the unlit cigarillo decided that he needed to light the damp tobacco leaves that had tantalized his nostrils all evening (his wife only allowed him one smokable per day since his lungs were bad) and so he left Nathaniel and Juan Bonito alone at the table.

After three hours of gaming, the moment of inquiry had finally arrived. Nathaniel wet his mouth with a sip of scotch and turned to his quarry.

Juan Bonito, who had stopped speaking English after his third tequila (excepting when he called someone a ‘dishonest liar deceiver’), announced (in mildly slurred Spanish) that he must return home.

A pang of fear lanced Nathaniel. Calmly, he suggested that they share one final round of drinks.

Juan Bonito contemplated the offer.

“Uno mas, mi amigo,” insisted the naïve American. This was the first time that the gringo had called the mestizo ‘friend.’

The little man ruminated upon the offer. “Si, amigo—uno mas.”

“Bueno.”

Juan Bonito reached beside his chair, raised a crocodile skin briefcase, rested it upon the table and said that he would clean his money.

Although Nathaniel found the proposed chore to be quite odd, he nodded nonchalantly and ordered the final round from a serving woman who had an inexhaustible supply of curls, smiles and energy.

Juan Bonito undid several steel latches and opened his heavy briefcase. Affixed to the lid were a five-shot revolver and a serrated knife. (It was clear that no brigand was going to shoot off the little man’s good ear.) The mestizo spread his newly-acquired banknotes across the surface of the table, raised a perfume bottle labeled ‘Agua’, sprayed water onto the wrinkled bills and arranged them in four neat stacks that he covered over with a damp cloth. The little man glanced at the gringo and remarked that he liked clean money.

“The best,” agreed Nathaniel.

Juan Bonito produced four candles, stood them in an empty glass, struck a match and lit each wick. He shook the phosphorous head until the fire became a zigzag of smoke, dropped the tiny tinder and withdrew from his reptilian briefcase what appeared to be a small clothing iron.

“Muy inteligente,” complimented Nathaniel.

Eyes full of serious purpose, the mestizo held the underside of his small iron to the quartet of flames. The smell of heated metal overpowered the duller odors of cigarillo ashes and vanished drinks.

Casually, the gringo remarked how much he liked what he had seen of Nueva Vida.

Juan Bonito rotated his iron and recommended the pernil tamales at Casa Jorge and the barbacao shacks on the west side of the town, which were superior to their eastern siblings.

After thanking the mestizo for the advice, Nathaniel leaned forward and, in a quieter voice, mentioned that there was something else that he desired, especially while he was away from his wife.

“Bebidas por Señor Bonito y el Americano,” the serving woman said as she set down a glass of tequila and a tumbler of scotch.

Nathaniel withdrew a coin from his greatly diminished purse and paid for the drinks.

“Gracias.” The woman stirred a curl with a lascivious finger and departed.

Juan Bonito pressed his iron to the damp cloth that covered the bills, and water hissed. Through the vapors, the mestizo asked the gringo if he wanted a sporting woman.

Nathaniel confirmed that he indeed desired the company of such a lady.

The mestizo remarked that there were two brothels in Nueva Vida and three discreet women of luxury who received clients at their homes.

After a meaningful pause, the gringo proclaimed that he desired a type of woman who would be uncommon in this region.

“You would like…scotch…instead of tequila?” inquired Juan Bonito in slurred English.

“Yes,” confirmed Nathaniel. “I prefer scotch.”

Juan Bonito’s expression became somber. “There is a place that has two gringa women.”

Nathaniel’s heart raced.

“They are…” Juan Bonito searched for the correct words. “One is filled with drugs, sick, and the other…she is a drunk and her right foot is missing—chopped off.”

Sickened by the news, Nathaniel turned his head down and cleared his throat.

“These gringas,” Juan Bonito added, “they…they are not happy women.”

“I would pay them very well for their time, and I would be kind to them.” It was hard for Nathaniel to feign any carnal interest in the described captives. “Muy, muy generoso.”

Juan Bonito nodded his head. “Bueno.” He gathered his banknotes and supplies, placed them inside his alligator skin briefcase, withdrew a jar half-filled with amber fluid and unscrewed its top. “Bueno,” repeated the little man while his mind pictured things that brought a dolorous expression to his face.

“What is the location of the establishment in which they work?” inquired Nathaniel.

The mestizo dropped a dirty coin into the amber solution, and it clinked against the bottom of the jar, bright and clean. “Come here tomorrow night at nine and look for the crimson stagecoach. For fifty pesos, it will take you where you want to go—to Gris’s place.” A dirty coin struck the solution and twisted.

“Gracias amigo.” Nathaniel’s employment of the word ‘friend’ no longer seemed to please the little gentleman. “Where is Gris’s establishment?’

A silver coin twisted through the solution, settled at the bottom and shone. “Through the mountains.”

Suppressing his apprehensions, Nathaniel inquired, “Does it have a name?”

Juan Bonito admitted a mirthless grin. “Catacumbas.”

Nathaniel was chilled by the utterance of the Spanish word for catacombs.

Part II

Catacumbas

Chapter I

A Portrait of Gris

Dawn beams sneaked past gray clouds that looked wrought in clay by brutish hands, entered the picture window of an arrogant mansion built from the stones of three Aztec temples and cleaved the seated subject of portraiture into bright and dark halves. The orb of the sun was reduced to a single brilliant pinprick in the man’s lone eye. His name was Gris.

“Eres muy guapo,” complimented Carlo, who stood behind his easel, opposite the man from Spain.

Gris remarked that all frivolous comments should be withheld.

The admonished artist nodded and studied the portrait that he had worked on every morning for the last five days. Some of Carlo’s subjects liked to talk, while others preferred to read a book or listen to music (produced by either a phonograph or a string quartet), but Gris had thus far preferred to stare forward and ruminate in silence. Additionally, the atypical man from Spain had asked to have himself accurately depicted. Gris’s scarred neck, prematurely white hair, thick feminine lips, long eyelashes, narrow nose and sunken right eyelid were to be accurately detailed. This unique and oddly handsome face was to be captured and conveyed—unaltered.

After two hours of utter silence, the Spaniard looked at his pocket watch.

Carlo informed the subject that the painting was nearly finished, excepting only the walls of the room and the still life, which required more detail.

Gris said that this was acceptable.

“Bueno.” The painter asked if he should include the flies that crawled across the festering still life.

Gris told the man to render the tableau faithfully.

The putrescent emanations were partially obscured by the whisky-soaked kerchief that Carlo had tied over his nose (as if he were a bandito), but the odors had grown stronger throughout the week and were currently capable of bypassing any filtration. Untroubled by the smells of rot, Gris lazed in a brown leather chair, the heels of his knee-high leather boots resting upon a footstool that was a dead man’s agonized head. From the ‘X’ carved into the corpse’s swollen stomach spilled black oil that was decorated with blood flakes and yellow bits of congealed fat. Within the ichor lurked many gray scorpions, three of which still moved.

Carlo did not wish to know why the man had been filled with oil and scorpions. This tableau existed, and the artist felt that his only responsibility was to render it well. He eyed the nascent flies, joined dots of blue, yellow and green paint with an obsidian dollop, mixed them thrice and added a dab of linseed oil.

With iridescent black paint, the artist detailed the fly that stood upon the pierced and bitten tongue of a man who had somehow displeased the Spaniard. Two inches below the wet mark that was a two-dimensional corpse inspector sat the placard that bore the name of the portrait.

El Decreto de Gris (The Decree of Gris)

The subject had named the piece himself.

Chapter II

The Insides of Men

Brent Plugford was galvanized, and a disorienting numbness filled his head, as if he were drunkenly dreaming. He punched a tree to rouse himself, but was rebuked by reality.

“Hell.”

The cowboy wiped bark and sap from his red knuckles and looked up at the dandy.

“I am sorry.” Upon Nathaniel’s right shoulder sat the sun, a fiery epaulette that glared directly into Brent’s eyes. “I thought that you should know exactly what Mr. Bonito said to me.”

“I needed to hear it accurate correct.”

“I am sorry.”

The cowboy looked away from the dandy and over toward the fire pit, where lazy smoke wafted up from dwindling embers, and his father, his brother and the negro slept inside moth-gnawed bedrolls. Beyond the trees that surrounded the camp stood the ten mountains referred to as Gran Manos, and somewhere within that rock were two white whores who were probably Brent’s sisters. “Did the red Mex’can name them?” He wanted to believe that his sisters were not a drug user and a drunken amputee. “Maybe it’s some other women.”

“The place where they are being kept is owned by the man for whom you are looking.”

“Gris?”

The dandy nodded.

“Okay.”

Brent was not certain that he would relay the conditions of the women to his father and brother.

“I am sorry.”

“Did Bonito rape them?”

The dandy hesitated for a moment. “He did not detail his assignations.”

“You were there,” grumbled Brent. “You played games with him for hours. You ain’t got no damn opinion on what kinda fella he was, and what he done?”

“He was disturbed by their conditions and was loath to mention them to me at all.”

“But he did! He knows they’re pris’ners and still he went and gave out his goddamn recommendation, so you could—” Brent hated the end of his sentence too much to say it aloud. “Goddamn that little red Mex’can.”

“My sympathies are with you,” said the dandy, apparently out of equivocating remarks. He placed his left hand upon the cowboy’s right shoulder and squeezed.

The sun disappeared behind a mountain that was John Lawrence Plugford.

Brent swatted Nathaniel’s hand from his shoulder. “You don’t need to go and touch me.”

The dandy was perplexed by the admonition.

“Where’re my angels?” asked the patriarch. His voice sounded as if it traveled across a far greater distance than three yards.

“A place called Catacumbas,” replied Brent. “The dandy’s goin’ there tonight.”

Ashes fell from his father’s wild beard. “We’ll follow.”

“Yeah.” Brent hoped that his father would not ask the dandy to repeat the purported details. “We’ll follow.”

The huge man strode away, but the sun, smothered by thick clouds, did not return.

Brent looked over at the dandy. “You better get some sleep for tonight. It’s cooler ‘neath the wagon.”

The tall gentleman yawned enormously and nodded.

“But let me grab out some supplies first.”

Brent and his dizzy brother removed the black trunk from the wagon, took it to the other side of a high creosote barbican and set it upon its end. Inside the prison, something thudded.

The cowboy went to the edge of the bushes, removed his phallus (which already smelled overripe from the long day in the saddle), dampened triangular leaves and said over his shoulder, “Pull the stopper.”

“I’ll be sick if I do—I’ve got dizziness and some sour tastes.”

“Confound you and that whisky.” Brent tucked away his extrusion, buttoned his pants and walked toward his brother. “I see you in the flask again, and I’m givin’ you bruises.”

“You can’t lick me.”

“I done it every time.”

“When we was younger, okay, sure, before you became a drover boss. But I’m big now—a adult—and I see how things are. I know what kind of man I am, and I know what kind you are.” Stevie smirked.

Brent did not at all like the look upon his brother’s face. “And what kind of man am I?”

“Why don’t you go an’ ask that fiancé you used to have? Why don’t you ask Janie Dill what—”

Brent slammed his fist into his brother’s stomach.

Stevie doubled over, fell against the trunk and took it to the ground. Within the prison, the captive groaned.

The red-faced young man clutched at stalks of purple three awn, convulsed twice and heaved his breakfast. Pale detritus spattered flora. “Go roast.” Stevie coughed. “Roast in Hell.” He spat bits.

Brent was mortified that his little brother had goaded him so successfully. “You okay?”

“You’re a sneak,” Stevie griped, “gettin’ at me…like that.”

“I was right there in front of you and came at you straight.”

“Well…”

Brent knelt beside the prone young man. “You didn’t deserve that treatment.”

“I didn’t,” confirmed Stevie.

“I’m sorry.”

The younger sibling neither accepted nor refused the apology, which was as amenable a reaction as the cowboy could expect at that time. “C’mon.” Brent helped Stevie to his feet, swatted the dust from his back and wiped detritus from his face. “Let’s take care of this.”

The siblings righted the trunk. Holding his breath, the cowboy slid a stick into the loop of twine that depended from the stopper and jerked his arm. The rubber plug popped out of the wood. Urine and darker substances drained through the aperture and colored the dirt.

Shielding his nose and mouth, Brent asked, “See any blood?”

Stevie rapidly shook his head.

A dismal moan sounded within the trunk and was muted by the reinsertion of the stopper.

The hidden sun climbed. The black, gray and silver clouds took on the texture of sharp volcanic rock.

Patch Up cooked a stew with turnips, carrots and potatoes (all of which had been in the wagon since Texas) and the game that Deep Lakes had recently slain.

Shortly before the crew ate supper, Long Clay returned to the site, dust covering his black garments. He walked over to the patriarch and said, “His real name is Humberto Calles.”

Brent knew that the gunfighter had just identified Ojos.

John Lawrence Plugford sat upon a stone, removed the steel-tipped fountain pen from his gray overalls, unscrewed the cap and wrote upon his left pant leg.

Umbeartoe Cayez

Long Clay walked toward the dinged stew pot that Patch Up tended beside the fire.

To the gunfighter, Brent said, “Ojos dealt with us fair.”

“If a posse of vengeful Mexicans rides into Texas, we need to know whom to look for.” Long Clay raised a spoonful of stew to his mouth and blew the steam west.

“Okay.” The cowboy was relieved that the gunfighter did not plan to execute the contact, who had seemed honest.

Long Clay swallowed a spoonful of stew. “J.L.”

John Lawrence Plugford looked at his old partner.

“You need your strength for tonight.”

The huge man stood from his rock and strode toward the pot.

Patch Up grabbed the largest wooden bowl that he possessed, filled it with stew and pulled an aluminum spoon from his shirt pocket. “It’s hot.”

John Lawrence Plugford ignored the spoon, took the bowl, opened his mouth and drank the stew, chewing half as often as he swallowed. Rivulets of broth wound through his wild beard, and steam rose.

“He’s really relishing the flavor,” remarked Patch Up.

The patriarch set the empty bowl upon the ground.

“Give him another,” Long Clay said to the negro.

Patch Up refilled the bowl and handed it to the patriarch.

The huge man gulped the contents and set down the empty vessel. “Thank you.”

“It’s good to see you eat,” replied Patch Up. “And thanks for not swallowing the bowl.”

Brent and Stevie patted their father’s back, as if he were an enormous infant waiting to be burped.

The patriarch pointed to the silver, black and gray clouds that hung in the vault. “Looks like a photograph.”

“It does,” confirmed his sons.

The huge man reached into his left pocket and withdrew a small wooden frame that contained a photograph of the Plugford clan. He looked at it for a moment and tucked it away. “Brent?”

“Yes?”

“Would you shave off these whiskers?”

“I’d be happy to.”

“I don’t think my angels would recognize me like this.”

Chapter III

Towards the Fire

Employing Patch Up’s steel scissors, Brent Plugford sheared away the outermost inches of his father’s wild beard. Oily and hard clumps fell in-between the huge man’s work boots and were swept into the fire by an erratic northeast wind. The cowboy brushed leaves, seeds, fleas and agglutinated bits from the huge man’s prickly face, received a bowl of lather, took a sable-haired brush and applied white foam as if it were plaster.

The dandy, roused from his five-hour nap, walked to the campfire and handed Brent a straight razor that had a mother-of-pearl handle, which was embossed with the initials ‘N.J.S.’ “I sharpened it yesterday morning.”

The cowboy accepted the blade and opened it; the action of the hinge was smooth and silent. “This’s real nice. Was it a gift?”

“Yes. From my fiancé.”

“Thanks for the loan.”

“You are welcome.”

The lumpy clouds were cracked by tenacious rays of twilight. With a steady hand, Brent set the razor to his father’s lathered neck and authored a clear swath.

The dandy adjusted his royal blue trousers, sat beside the fire, served himself a bowl of stew and ingested a spoonful. “This is very flavorful.”

“I hoped I’d get an accolade from you.” Patch Up looked over at Stevie. “The dandy appreciates it.”

“I’m thrilled what he thinks.” The sullen young man was still nauseated. “Jubilacious.”

“You should try some,” Patch Up said, “though I should warn you—this is a South Stew.”

“What’s that?”

“Only tastes good going down.”

The jibe was not well received. “Go roast, nigger.”

“Have a recipe for that? Roasted nigger?”

Stevie spit into the fire. “Always got somethin’ clever to say, don’t you?”

“I have retorts.”

Brent withdrew the luminous razor from his father’s face and said, “It’s done.”

John Lawrence Plugford’s neck, chin and cheeks were pale and soft compared to the remainder of his tough bronze hide. “They’ll recognize me now.” The patriarch felt his exhumed skin with a broad palm.

“They will.”

After Brent had finished his meal, he walked around the fire and returned the straight razor to its owner, who was wearing fresh green drawers and busy with his toilet.

“Thanks ‘gain.”

“You are welcome.” The dandy swirled a washcloth in a wooden water bucket, raised the soapy fabric to his face and scrubbed.

Brent surveyed the man’s garments. “You don’t have a revolver, do you?”

“My ambition is to become a hotelier rather than a gunfighter.” The washcloth squeaked upon Nathaniel’s chin.

“You should be able to pertect yourself.”

“I will not carry a weapon.” The statement was a definitive proclamation.

“You should make a exception tonight.”

“Would you shoot an unarmed man?” The dandy applied suds to his armpits and scoured.

“Not unless it were a necessity.”

“Would your brother or your father or Patch Up shoot an unarmed man?” The dandy dunked the washcloth and brought suds to his nape.

“Same with them.”

“A door opens whenever a man wears a gun, and I choose to keep that door shut.”

“There’s some wisdom in that,” Brent admitted, “but we ain’t dealin’ with no honorable men here. These fellows…well, you know what the hell they done.”

The dandy rubbed the washcloth across his hairless chest. “Many men—good and bad—have qualms about gunning down an unarmed opponent.”

“Then take a little two-shot—somethin’ you can hide. You don’t want to be in no Mex’can catacombs without no way to protect yourself but your bowtie.”

“I shall consider it.” The dandy’s tone was dismissive.

“I rode with some drovers who think like you, and I buried one of them. Take a little bullet-flinger.”

“I shall consider it.”

While the dandy dressed himself in his black tuxedo, the Plugfords, Patch Up and Long Clay gathered their possessions, put out the fire, buried the coals and saddled their horses. Presently, the family and the gunfighter mounted their steeds, and the negro clambered onto his wagon bench.

Brent guided his horse toward the dandy, who was cleaning grit from his tan mare’s left eye, and reined beside him. “You get in that crimson stagecoach like Bonito said to. Deep Lakes will trail you and get us whenever you throw him a signal. You remember the meaningful gesture?”

“Drop my hat, lean over and scratch my nose.”

“That’s it—precise exact. Here.” Brent leaned over and proffered the handle of a two-shot lady’s gun.

The dandy eyed the weapon, and the tan mare took one step backward, as if proffering an opinion.

“Take it,” insisted Brent. “Put it in your pocket or in your drawers.”

The dandy shook his head. “No.”

“Why the hell not?” The cowboy wanted to slap the tall Yank idiot.

“If a weapon of this variety is discovered on my person,” the dandy said as he climbed atop his tan mare, “my character would be called into question.”

“I’m questionin’ it right now.”

The mounted gentleman eyed the cowboy from a superior altitude. “I will not fire a gun upon a human being.”

Brent heard the sound of crackling tinder that was Long Clay’s ugly laugh. Stevie muttered something derisive and inaudible.

“You’re a wooden fool.” The cowboy coaxed his horse forward and placed the lady’s gun inside the dandy’s saddle pack. “In case you get a epiphany.”

“I will not employ that device.”

“Maybe his horse will use it to save him,” remarked Stevie. “Come to his resc—”

“Be quiet,” said Patch Up.

Brent looked at Nathaniel. “Try to fix in your brain what you can of the layout of them catacombs.”

“I have a superior memory and will try to learn as much as possible.”

“Okay.” The cowboy nodded at the tall gentleman. “Good luck.”

“And to you as well.”

“Say a prayer if you believe in that stuff.”

Long Clay said, “Let’s go.”

Brent pulled his horse around.

Reins snapped, and hooves rumbled. The Plugfords, Patch Up and Long Clay rode through the coppice and out onto the plain, where they began their wide circumnavigation of the town.

Atop his brindled mustang, Brent conceived a simple prayer that he would say to Jesus Christ. (The cowboy had twenty pounds of doubt for every ounce of faith, but he was not too proud to ask for help from the most popular omnipotent power.) Tightly gripping the horn for no reason that he apprehended, Brent fixed the faces of Yvette and his twin sister Dolores in his mind and said, “Please keep them from any more harm and let them know we’re comin’ to rescue them. Amen.”

The cowboy relaxed his grip and looked up at the horizon. The sun had disappeared behind the western mountain range, and the remaining clouds were an endless wall of thick blue plaster.

He doubted that his words would transcend.

Chapter IV

Muchacho Tracks

Trailing a shroud of dust, Nathaniel Stromler rode directly toward the ochre wound in the azure gloaming that was Nueva Vida. On this dangerous night, the tall gentleman from Michigan was saddened by the fact that he and Kathleen had not yet been married, although if the reconnoiter went terribly, at least she would not become a widow.

“Enough of that line of thinking.” The chastening voice (even though it was his own) calmed him.

The blue clouds that filled the horizon looked like ocean waves as seen from the deck of a steamship bound for Europe, and they beckoned Nathaniel eerily, asking him to leap overboard and fall into the sky. He returned his gaze to the ochre town.

Effulgent and squat, Nueva Vida grew and consumed the gentleman. He sped past the eastern barbacao shacks that Juan Bonito had told him to avoid, reached the main avenue, rode due west for fifteen minutes and guided his cantering mare onto the lone paved road. Shod hooves clacked noisily upon the stone and garnered unfriendly glances from people holding the hands of children or carrying bundles.

Nathaniel retarded his horse’s gait.

At the end of the avenue stood Castillo Elegante, brightly illuminated by mirror lanterns. The gentleman looked at his pocket watch, saw that its little hand was just below the number nine, replaced the timepiece, dusted his black tuxedo, coaxed his horse toward a gate to which two burros were tied, swung himself from his saddle, landed upon his loafers and pulled the mare’s reins around the wooden crossbar.

Nathaniel turned toward the gambling house and saw a dark figure standing directly in front of him.

“Good evening, Mr. Stromler.”

Presently, the gentleman recognized the silhouetted individual. “Good evening, Deep Lakes.”

A spyglass hung from the native’s neck, and the two severed muskrat heads that depended from his denim vest dripped. “I’m going to trail your stagecoach. If you enter a different vehicle or mount a horse, cast one or two of these upon the ground after the transition has been made.” The native handed a small silk pouch to the gentleman.

The fabric tickled Nathaniel’s palms, and he started. “What is in here?”

“Fireflies.”

The gentleman held the undulating pouch by its drawstrings. “They will not fly away?”

“I removed their legs and wings.”

“Oh.” Nathaniel was displeased to learn that his fate depended upon the lambent glow of mutilated insects.

“They are a tool,” Deep Lakes said, “but I’ll be able to track you whether or not you use them.”

“I shall surreptitiously deploy a few should the mode of transportation change.”

“May your decisions be wise.” The native departed.

Nathaniel delicately placed the pouch of dismembered fireflies inside his jacket, set his black stovepipe hat atop his head and walked up the paved avenue.

Before him expanded the bright white façade of Castillo Elegante, which was attended by the same two pine green guards whom he had met the previous evening. Parked immediately beside the pair was a very large crimson stagecoach. Nathaniel was chilled by the sight of the vehicle, yet strode toward it, undaunted.

Amidst the black steeds that were harnessed to the stagecoach stood a pale man, who was clothed in a blue tuxedo and had an odd discoloration in the middle of his face. He emerged from the beasts, looked at Nathaniel and inquired, “Are you the American friend of Juan Bonito?”

The gringo replied that he had very recently become acquainted with Juan Bonito.

“Bueno. Good.”

Nathaniel continued forward and soon apprehended that the fellow’s nose was made out of wood and affixed to his face with metal wire. When the distance between the two men diminished to a yard, they stopped and shook hands. The pale individual was almost as tall as the gringo, and his clasp was indelicate.

“Buenas noches.” Nathaniel focused his gaze upon the man’s brown eyes.

“Buenas noches.”

They released each other.

The gringo asked the man with the wooden nose if his name was Gris.

A smile came to the fellow’s lips and his false proboscis shifted. “I working for Gris. I am called Ubaldo.” His breath smelled like pungent chicken soup.

“I am Thomas Weston,” replied Nathaniel. (This name belonged to a horse thief who was lynched in Michigan in eighteen forty-two.)

“You would like to go to Catacumbas?”

“Si.”

“It is one hundred pesos to go.”

Nathaniel told Ubaldo that Juan Bonito had stated a different price.

Ubaldo nodded and said, “The price normal is fifty pesos. Pero est—but tonight is big fiesta.” He pointed to the crimson stagecoach. “You may ask them—they all pay one hundred.”

Through a window, Nathaniel saw two luminous orange dots, which were the ends of cigars, and the vague shapes of four men. “I do not need to enquire with them.” The gringo withdrew his wallet.

“No pay now—I do not want to hold so much moneys.” Ubaldo walked over to the stagecoach, twisted a wooden handle and opened the door. “Please enter.” He smiled, and his nose shifted.

Nathaniel removed his stovepipe hat, set a black loafer upon the lowermost step, ascended its superiors and entered the plush and capacious lavender interior of a stagecoach in which four men sat quietly with their lascivious imaginings. The quartet nodded cordially to the arrival, but proffered no words.

“Make yourself a seat.” Ubaldo shut the door. “One more person is come and then we go.”

Nathaniel pulled his tuxedo tails to his buttocks and sat upon a spring-supported velvet bench, in-between a smoking hombre and the left window. Upon his thighs, he rested his stovepipe hat.

“Buenas noches Señor Bonito,” greeted Ubaldo.

Nathaniel looked through the window and saw the little mestizo walk toward the stagecoach. Although the gringo did not know how the Plugford crew would endeavor their rescue, he assumed that bystanders with varying degrees of guilt would receive a thrown fist or something invisible that was accompanied by a loud bang. Nathaniel wanted to warn the little man away from Catacumbas, but he could not think of any way to do so without arousing suspicion. And Brent’s comment about the ‘red Mex’can’s’ complicity was correct—Juan Bonito had recommended two whores whom he knew to be captives.

The mestizo wore a bright blue suit, yellow shoes and a matching bowtie, and his ruined ear was somehow whole. He shook hands with Ubaldo, and presently entered the stagecoach.

“Buenas noches, Señor Weston.”

Nathaniel wished the mestizo a good evening.

The little man looked at the smoker seated beside the gringo and asked him if he would yield his seat.

Without hesitation, the hombre stood from the bench.

Juan Bonito sat beside Nathaniel. “Tonight is a fiesta, and it is more pesos to get submerged in Catacumbas.”

The gringo stated that the driver had asked for one hundred pesos.

“It is the price—but for you it is free.” Juan Bonito smiled.

Nathaniel understood that the little man intended to treat him. “Thank you, but I cannot accept your money.”

“I should not have taken so much from you in the games last night—that was improper. Now I have the opportunity to make more fair. It is why I come along tonight.”

The stagecoach sagged as hard boots thudded upon the wooden ladder that led to the top of the vehicle. “Vamos al Catacumbas,” announced Ubaldo from the roof. He punctuated his proclamation with a whip crack.

Behind Juan Bonito’s smiling face, Castillo Elegante and the two pine green guards slid from view.

“Gracias—eres muy generoso,” Nathaniel said to the mestizo’s half-rubber ear.

“I like to have friends in America for when I visit there with my childrens.”

Nathaniel nodded absently.

“Do you have any childrens?” inquired Juan Bonito.

“I do not.”

“You would like childrens?”

“I would.”

“They are a great joy, though my third child killed my wife when he was born. And he was sick and did not live for many years.”

“You have my condolences.” Nathaniel did not want to hear any more personal information about Juan Bonito.

“His name was Benino. The doctors say—if Benino had growed up—he was going to be very tall.” The little mestizo smiled proudly, and Nathaniel had to look away.

The western remainder of Nueva Vida disappeared, and the vista expanded. To the southwest stood the ten peaks of Gran Manos, silhouetted before moonlit clouds that were pock-marked and gray like the lunar orb itself. Three stagecoach inhabitants reclined in their seats and placed derbies over their faces.

“It is not a short travel,” informed Juan Bonito.

Nathaniel leaned back and stretched his legs.

“Would you like to see pictures of my childrens?” The mestizo reached into a jacket pocket. “I have one of Benino from the last birthday fiesta—”

“I am very tired. Perhaps you will show the photographs to me on our return journey home?”

“Si. You will peruse them later.” Juan Bonito withdrew an empty hand from his jacket.

After a brusque nod, Nathaniel shut his eyes so that he no longer had to look at the wounded man’s face.

The horses cantered briskly. Stagecoach wheels sizzled across firm grit and clicked upon occasional roots and stones. The weary gringo would have fallen asleep were he not juggling apprehensions for his own safety, as well as concerns for the captive women, Patch Up (whom he liked), Brent (who was simple, but meant well), John Lawrence Plugford (whom he pitied and feared) and Juan Bonito.

The lanterns upon the sides of the vehicle were extinguished and the plain became a dark ocean. “¡Alto, muchachos, alto!” Ubaldo shouted at the horses. The animals whinnied and their pace slowed. “¡Alto!”

Nathaniel and the other passengers looked outside. The landscape stopped moving, and the steeds quietened. Suddenly, the gringo wondered if he were about to be robbed or executed.

Boots slammed upon the dirt, and a silhouetted figure appeared outside the stagecoach window. The man with the wooden nose told the stagecoach passengers to extinguish their cigars.

Concerned that Deep Lakes or the Plugford crew had been descried by Ubaldo, Nathaniel asked if something was amiss.

“He always check for robbers,” stated Juan Bonito. “Some people knows that this stagecoach has rich mens.”

Ubaldo raised a spyglass to his right eye and scanned the terrain. Nueva Vida, the plains, dark flora and clouds were slowly captured, warped and released by the bulbous glass. The driver paused, and frozen in miniature upon the iridescent lens were the northern mountain peaks, distended into the shape of a clutching hand.

Nathaniel asked Ubaldo if he had descried anything of concern.

“No.” The man with the wooden nose screwed and collapsed his spyglass. “I am just cautious.” He climbed the wooden ladder, disappeared onto the roof and said, “Vamos muchachos.” The lanterns had not been relit, and the stagecoach became a rolling shadow.

Outside the vehicle, black protrusions that were rocks, branches, cacti and yucca glided across the dark gray plain, while opaque mountains gnawed at the horizon. Upon the expanding range appeared onyx daggers, which were huge valleys, and crushed tumbleweeds, which were arid woodlands. The mountains climbed, and Nathaniel felt as if he were shrinking.

A whip cracked. “Mas rapido,” exhorted the driver.

The tattoo of the horses’ hooves quickened, and black aberrations sped past, blurry and elongated. Nathaniel wondered at the wisdom of driving horses so quickly across a poorly-lit plain.

“No have concerns,” the perspicacious mestizo said, “the horses could wear blindfolds and it would be safe. They know the way.”

Nathaniel nodded, yet remained unconvinced that it was safe to travel at such a speed through the badlands on an unclear night. Even if the animals traversed some previously established route, a significant stone or a sinkhole could tumble a horse and heave its contemporaries and the vehicle into the air. Every anomaly in the road engendered an acute jolt that touched the gringo’s stomach with a cold finger, and he suspected that his retreating hairline would yield a little more ground before he made it back to Leesville.

The mountains raced toward the front of the stagecoach.

“There is a throat,” Juan Bonito informed Nathaniel. “A place where we enter.”

Nathaniel nodded and leaned back in his seat. On either side of the rumbling vehicle, tilted dark flora, elongated and blurry, raced across the gray canvas.

“¡Hombres, cuidado!” cautioned the driver from above.

Hombres clasped the leather straps that dangled from the cabin ceiling, and so did the gringo. The stagecoach tilted back. Outside the windows, stone walls shot up and confined the vehicle.

A whip cracked. “¡Muchachos!”

Within the defile, gravity tugged at Nathaniel’s guts.

Chapter V

Fidelity, Faith and the Black Circle

The luscious mystery within Marietta’s cleavage deepened as she leaned toward Humberto Calles, and the kiss that she placed upon his bare scalp felt like a benediction.

As the barmaid stood upright, she complimented the balladeer’s performance, which had ended thirty minutes earlier.

Seated at his favorite table in the sunken back room, Humberto pointed to his guitarrita and stated that his unique instrument is what gives his songs a special quality.

Marietta touched a fingertip to his throat, ran it gently to his lips and remarked that the mouth is the most important instrument of all.

Her digit lingered, suggestively.

The sounds and lights within the bar dimmed, and the balladeer saw only the face of the woman who stood over him, as if descended from Heaven directly to Nueva Vida, Mexico. His heart thudded, his phallus swelled and warm light filled his blood. The beauteous arrival leaned forward, and her luscious mystery expanded.

Anxious, the faithfully married, fifty-four-year-old man slid his chair away from the table and rose to his feet.

Marietta asked him why he had withdrawn.

Thinking about his wife and daughters, Humberto stammered.

“¿Crees que soy bonita?”

The balladeer said that she was pretty—dangerously pretty.

Marietta pressed her lips to Humberto’s mouth and connected their tender interiors with her tongue. The man was eighteen years old, quick and hale, with long dark hair that ran down to his buttocks in a braided tail; he was a skilled musician who knew everything and was too smart to commit himself to one town or one woman.

“P-por favor,” Humberto pleaded as he pulled away from the kiss, warmth and youth proffered by Marietta. “Por favor.” He looked at her befuddled eyes, apologized, took his guitarrita case, retreated and plunged through the checkered blanket into the night, where cool air turned the perspiration that covered his face into clammy oil.

Humberto looked up at the smoldering plaster that hid the heavens and asked the Lord why the barmaid had behaved so aggressively this evening.

During the silence that followed his inquiry, the balladeer removed a linen kerchief from his blue shirt, wiped his chilled face and felt a soft warm kiss upon his neck. His heart pounded.

“Por favor, mi amor.” Marietta pressed her breasts into Humberto’s back, slid her palms across his stomach, interlaced her strong fingers and held him tightly.

Firmly, the married man pulled away.

The barmaid stated that she had watched the balladeer perform for nearly twenty years.

Retreating from temptation, Humberto thanked her for her patronage.

Marietta confessed that she had longed to share a bed with him throughout the duration of her womanhood.

From a distance of five yards, Humberto announced that he was a faithful husband.

“Por favor—hacer una excepción.”

“No.” The man explained that even one indiscretion would sunder the vow of marriage.

Defeated, Marietta told Humberto that he was an excellent man in every way imaginable.

The balladeer tapped an index finger upon his bald scalp and said that he possessed a flaw.

Marietta laughed. “Por favor, vuelve dentro de la barra.”

Humberto thanked the woman, but declined her invitation and said that he intended to go home and spend some time with his family before they were all asleep.

The barmaid kissed the balladeer’s left cheek, presented her round buttocks and walked through the checkered sheet. Pondering wondrous treasures refused, Humberto began his journey home.

Beneath imposto lunar clouds sat the sturdy and unchanging house that the balladeer had built sixteen years earlier. The tangible memories of Marietta’s embrace and kisses stirred Humberto’s blood like a third cup of coffee, and he rambled around his home in an attempt to diminish the surfeit of energy.

During his sixth moonlit orbit, the balladeer paused at the wooden swing set that he and his cousins Pablo and Pablito had erected on Anna’s third birthday, one year before it became apparent that she would need to use crutches for the remainder of her life. The fifty-four-year-old man sat upon a dangling wooden seat, withdrew his crushed timepiece, rocked forward and watched the reflection of the moon shatter upon the cracked glass.

Unrecognized by the device’s dead hands, time passed.

Humberto secreted the crushed pocket watch, stood up and carried his guitarrita into his quiet home. The delicious specter of pernil and roasted chilies greeted him, and he hungrily proceeded across the woven rugs toward the kitchen.

“Papa.”

Humberto looked up the long dark hallway that traversed the entire house. The doors leading off of the passage were shut, excepting the final room—the addition where his younger daughter slept.

“Papa.” The timbre of Estrellita’s solicitation was odd.

Humberto felt an uneasy chill, set his instrument down and walked toward the gun rack to retrieve his rifle. His stomach sank when he saw that the weapon was missing.

Estrellita squealed.

The balladeer yanked his guitarrita from its case, held it by the neck (as if it were an axe) and sped up the hall into the addition.

“Stand still or I’ll kill them.”

Humberto froze.

A lone candle shone upon the black clothing, gleaming gun barrels, glass eyes and rubber head of the tall narrow man who was seated upon the girl’s bed. At the intruder’s feet and facedown upon the floor were Patricia, Anna and Estrellita. They were blindfolded, hog-tied and had plums, secured by wire, filling their mouths.

Humberto was horrorstruck.

The tall shade with the rubber head pointed one gun at Estrellita’s back and the other at Humberto’s left thigh. “Remain calm.”

The balladeer’s hands tightened upon the neck of his instrument. “I will do whatever you want.” A long fingernail cut through an E string, and it twanged.

Patricia, Anna and Estrellita wept through runny noses.

“Set the guitar down.”

Humberto placed the instrument upon the floor.

“Come into the room and shut that door behind you.”

Instantly, the balladeer complied.

The tall shade pointed the barrel of a pistol toward the far corner. “Sit on that wooden pony.”

Hands trembling and guts expanding, Humberto strode toward the oaken quadruped, sat down and faced his captor.

“I have some questions. You will answer them succinctly and honestly. Do you understand?”

“I understand.” Humberto stared at the lenses that covered over the intruder’s eyes, and in them saw only the glaring white reflections of the candle flame.

“If you lie to me or make me repeat myself, I will put a bullet into one of these women.”

Humberto’s vision became blurry.

“Do you understand?”

Horrified, the balladeer nodded his head. “I understand.” His voice was a weak whisper.

“You had a meeting last night with two of my associates. Do you recall this meeting?”

“Yes.”

Prone upon the rug, Patricia turned her head toward her husband. A splinter of cartilage jutted from her smashed nose, and her right eye was purple.

The tall shade asked, “Do any of the women in this room know the identities of my associates?”

“No.”

“Have you told any other person the names of my associates?”

“No,” admitted Humberto.

“You are lying.”

The heel of a black boot landed upon Anna’s curved leg. The fourteen-year-old girl screamed into her plum and writhed.

Humberto vomited wine upon the floor. He shut his eyes, clenched his fists and restrained the violent impulses that he knew would get his entire family killed.

“Look at me!”

Humberto opened his eyes, and tears flooded down cheeks.

The tall shade with the rubber head placed the tip of a revolver into Anna’s right ear.

“¡No!” The balladeer’s heart stopped. ¡”Por favor! ¡Por f—”

“To whom have you given the names of my associates?”

“Nobody! I promise. I swear I have not told anybody.”

“Are there any papers in your possession—or in a vault or in the mail—that contain the names of my employers?”

“No.”

The tall shade pointed a black circle that was the end of a gun barrel at the balladeer’s face.

On the floor, the women wailed into their plums.

At that moment, Humberto knew that he was going to die.

“If I find out that you lied to me,” the tall shade warned, “I will execute your wife and give your daughters over to men who fuck little girls and cripples.” The wraith set the heel of his left boot upon the back of Estrellita’s head. “Did you tell me the truth?”

It took Humberto a ponderous moment to remember how to speak. “I did. I knew better than to involve any innocent people in this.”

“I believe you.”

The black circle flashed twice.

Humberto flew off of the wooden horse, felt the floor slam into his back and saw gore that was part of his head run down the west wall of Estrellita’s room. He said goodbye to his family, who wept and screamed one hundred thousand miles away, and also to Marietta, whom he realized had been sent by the Lord to save his life.

Chapter VI

The Sunken Land

The stagecoach wheels turned across the defile floor, reducing small rocks into pebbles and grinding the latter into grit. Within the vibrating vehicle, Nathaniel Stromler watched crenulate stone walls scroll past the window.