The Hot Country

41

It took much of the morning to prepare to decamp. We buried the dead. Eight of ours. Sixteen of theirs, four of whom were wounded and were still alive and were summarily dispatched where they lay. Slim made it clear that we were burying the colorados only because we might want to use this hacienda again and it was easier to deal with their bodies now. Our men went into individual graves, the colorados went into one, and six of their heads went up on the spikes of the front gate with their identifying red bandanas tied on them like they were peasant girls.

We tended to our own half dozen wounded. Two were in bad shape, but we dug out their slugs and cleaned and bound their wounds and filled them with whiskey and strapped them to their horses, and a couple of the religious among us said a prayer for them.

My new-buddy Villista did indeed get a shot at sewing up the arm of the guy who kicked him in the balls. Hernando Soto. He told me his name and I told him mine and he did not even smile as he doused me with the fire from a phial of iodine and then he focused on my wound with absolute concentration, protruding and gently biting his tongue through the whole process. He sewed me up with a meticulous delicacy that I could only describe as feminine.

And when he was done, I said, “Gracias, mi amigo.”

And he said, very softly, “Viva Mexico.”

“Viva Mexico,” I said.

And we rounded up the riderless horses and packed them with loot from the train and the canteens of the dead for the dry and sun-emblazoned ride before us, and we gathered in front of the hacienda, many of us still on foot, and we were ready to ride. But suddenly all the men of Pancho Villa’s train-robbing gang gathered around me, including those already on their horses, who came down to stand with the others.

Slim stepped forward. In his hand he held a sombrero the gray-green color of maguey leaves, the base of the crown rimmed in darker green from sweat, the front of the brim pinned up. He unclasped the pin and threw it aside, straightened the brim. He held the hat out to me.

I hesitated for a moment, and he identified the hat. “The colorado you killed for me,” he said.

I looked at all the faces arrayed before me, dark in the shadows of their sombreros. They had that placid inertness which was a fighting man’s stare of respect.

I reached up and stripped the fedora from my head and tossed it aside. I took the sombrero from Slim and lifted it and put it on my head. It fit me as if I’d carefully chosen it at a hatter on Michigan Avenue. There was now a moment and then another in which these faces before me did not change but held their expression and in which no one spoke a word, and another moment, and then, as one, we all broke and mounted our horses and we headed north.

Had I killed a man before? For all the men I’d watched die in battle, for all the scrapes I’d gotten into so I could write stories about men dying in battle, until this morning I had never killed a man. But for a long while on the day when I’d done this thing for the first time, as I rode with the Villistas, wearing that man’s hat, which fit my own head precisely, I could only think about the pinto I’d inadvertently shot in the side. I could only hear the pinto neighing in pain and galloping off as if it could outrun this burning in its side. Before we’d left the hacienda I’d mounted my horse and ridden around for a while in the land behind the casa to see if I could find the pinto to at least put him out of his pain. But I couldn’t find him. And on the ride north I thought and thought and I couldn’t stop thinking about where he was right now, how hard it surely was for even an animal to die alone. I worried about the horse and not the men I’d killed. Horses are innocent. We men kill each other in wars because men are guilty. We are all guilty.

And eventually Slim made a point of dropping back and riding by my side. Slim and I rode together through the high-plateau desert of estado Coahuila, and we didn’t say a word to each other. We rode together because I saved his life and he saved mine.