Winter Rain

25

Winter 1872-1873

HE HATED THE taste of tequila.

Like someone had boiled down a winter-old pair of longhandles in a copper kettle as they distilled the cactus juice. It turned his stomach just hitting his tongue. Not like the corn whiskey a man got back home in Virginia, even Missouri. Corn whiskey betrayed its punch and potency behind a taste more genteel on the tongue. Like a proper southern gentleman who could shake your hand with civility or kick you in the head like a mule.

But not this tequila. It was a drink as crude as the people who brewed it behind every poor mud-and-wattle jacal huddled beneath the never-changing sky like trail droppings from the passing of the sun itself. Some varieties proved to be more bitter than others, but the best of them no better than sour. He hated having nothing else to drink—warm, milky water, or this goddamned tequila.

But that never stopped Jonah from pouring more of the saddle varnish from the garrafas, the pitchers of fired clay. Never stopped him from bringing the glazed cups to his lips at every stop, every village and cantina, every brothel or barn. More times than he cared to remember, Jonah and Two Sleep had spent nights in any sort of dosshouse where they might lie with the whores for the cost of a few centavos. When there were no beds to be had, no matter the price, sleeping with their animals among the fragrant hay of barns and liveries at no cost at all had done nicely.

Eventually he gave up sleeping in the brothels. Too often had he carried away on his flesh and in his clothing the biting torment infesting those beds and those who made their living in them. Bitterly Jonah remembered the cursed lice up at Rock Island, remembered how that prison vermin tortured a man so that he never really slept soundly, how a man was forced to make a truce with weary sleeplessness. Back then he had wished the lice would freeze to death simply to stop the incessant biting at his whiskers, down in his groin, across his unwashed scalp. Back in that death hold of a prison he scratched himself till he bled, and still the lice lived on. Vermin that moved from the dead men the guards dragged from the cells each morning, and migrated to the living still left in those cages of rotting humanity.

Squashing those painful, bitter memories, Jonah Hook sensed the warmth of the cactus juice spread from his belly, radiating out in spidering fingers of comfort, amazed that he already felt a lightness come to his forehead, his nose seemingly grown bigger. It always swelled on his face with the cactus juice. He hoped he would not suffer the cactus thorns before morning. Just get a bellyful of beans and some of that goat meat down—keep it down—then a night’s sleep. This could be one of those rare nights under a roof and out of the howling cold: small respite for a man who hadn’t been home for ten years.

Oh, he had gone back to Missouri, to the valley, to the cabin he had built for Gritta, of a time in sixty-seven. But Jonah would never count that as going home. Not with nothing there he could call home. Everything was gone, even the window glazing stole. He hadn’t stayed long.

No, Jonah had been on this trail away from his family for ten years now come spring. Spring? If winter ever released its grip from this desert land.

Such different country from southwestern Missouri, different still from that heady richness of the Shenandoah Valley. Fleeing the land of the Mormons, they had kept their noses pointed south into the land of the Navaho in New Mexico Territory. For the most part the Navaho kept off by themselves and weren’t at all curious enough to cross the path of the two horsemen, perhaps content now that they were a defeated people not to know the mission of any sojourner.

Plunging farther still into the land of the sun, they marched past the feet of the emerald mountain peaks of Sierra de Tunecha and on to little clusters of the mud huts, where the jacales knotted around a common spring or well dug from the hardpan desert. Watering holes and villages with names that rang off the tongue: Bernalita and Corrales. Wandering farther east out of the mountains and onto the beginning of the great southern plains, they eventually turned back to the north again, sensing that their answers lay west of the Llano Estacado, on west of the Journada del Muerto itself, that high, hard-baked land the comancheros crossed in plying their profitable trade. The two horsemen rode on past the villages of Pacos and Vermilla, past Ojo de Nicolas and Salina de San Andres, stopping to ask for word at Joya and Cachilla and Albiquira.

Without fail Jonah gave voice to the same question that seemed to rise from the hope that some day would bring him the answer he sought.

Always he asked where a man might find the comancheros.

Instead, the poor folk of those little towns, gathered around the common spring or dusty square, would shrug, point off in a meaningless direction, and gaze back with passionless faces, their black eyes reflecting the glare of the bright sun, or shaded beneath the protection of straw hat brims. All about Jonah were the mouths that said nothing to help, the faces that hid even more.

“Just tell me where I can talk with comancheros who trade into Tejas,” he would plead in his halting Spanish.

And always the poor of those towns went back to their work at the stunted corn they watered frugally, driving their bleating sheep from one patch of burned grass to another beneath an omnipresent cloud of gray dust that turned pink, then orange, and finally red with every sunset. Smiling, these people apologized with their shoulders, sorry they could not be of any help to the sojourners.

Down at the settlement of Santa Fe they were told the nearby river would take them south into Mexico. Perhaps if there were no answers to be found up here, it was suggested, then south where the comancheros lived is where a man might go.

“What river?” he had asked.

One after another of the peons pointed. “That river.”

They followed, staying with the Rio Grande south past the sprawling settlement of Albuquerque and on to the tiny ranchos of Belen. Sabina, Lumitar and Parida, Fra Cristobal and Valverde. Told they had only to follow the well-beaten path south, farther still, on across the Gadsden Purchase, where they would come to the old town of El Paso. The place crawled with army and border profiteers, every man suspicious of all whom he had not bought with his money.

Still, by simply watching the constant activity along the road heading south, they had learned enough to know that Chihuahua was where they needed next to go. They were lured to that great center of commerce, that hub of riches from which manifold trade routes radiated like the spokes on the wheels of the crude carretas that carried forth all that was shiny and new, glittering and painted, hauling back the wealth of distant ports.

“You ain’t got shit for a chance to find nobody the comancheros brung down here,” the Irishman told Jonah.

It was in a tiny Chihuahua cantina that Hook ran across the fair-skinned, red-headed Irishman with the wild blue-gray eyes split by his swollen red nose. Jonah had been more than eager to lubricate the man’s tongue once he found out the Irishman might know something about the trade flowing back and forth across the Rio Grande into American territory. While the Irishman drank, Jonah and Two Sleep wolfed down steamy bowls of cornmeal porridge mulled by little chunks of raw brown peloncillo sugar.

Hook wiped his mouth, suspicious that he’d been taken by the red-eyed drunk. “Maybe you can tell me who some of these comancheros are. Names. Where I can find them. That’s all I need. Nothing else from you.”

The fleshy, corpulent Irishman weaved to his feet, a cup of the potent, homemade aguardiente in his hand, then crooked a finger for Hook to follow him from the table. When Two Sleep started to rise, the Irishman motioned the Indian to sit.

Stopping at the open doorway, the Irishman swayed against Jonah, then swung an arm slowly across the scene.

“Look there, Mr. Hook,” he said. “And say to me that you’ll find two boys in all of that dark, smelly nest of vermin. Unpossible.”

“I aim to find the comancheros first.”

“Look, I told you!” snapped the Irishman. “You come to the wrong place looking for help.”

“Just the name of one,” Hook asked, slipping out from beneath the fat one’s fleshy arm.

He drank, then dragged the dribble from his chin. “What do you see there, American? Look carefully and tell me.”

Hook studied the street throbbing with the comings and goings of all sorts of poor. Occasionally a vaquero rode by, resplendent in dress and horse trappings, forcing his way through the crowds of peons by his sheer presence. Only now did Jonah see a carriage roll by, matched fours pulling along the landed aristocracy of Mexico.

“There—that one,” Jonah said eagerly. “He’s a rich man. Bound to know some comancheros who trade into Texas, into Indian Territory.”

“Him?” the Irishman asked, pointing with a slosh of his cup. A pair of Mexicans entered the cantina, forced to duck beneath the Irishman’s outstretched arm. “You see a rich man there, no?”

“He will know the names of some comancheros—is that what you’re telling me?”

The mottled cheeks were flushed with the blush of tequila. “You have been looking in the wrong place, Mr. Hook. Looking for the wrong men.”

In angry confusion Jonah watched the Irishman turn away from the doorway and stumble back to ease himself into the chair once more. He dashed back to the table himself, slamming his two palms down on it as he sat.

“I’m here in Chihuahua—where the comancheros trade from, goddammit. Don’t drink my tequila, then play a riddle on me … telling us I’ve been looking the wrong place for the wrong folks.”

“See at the bar?” he asked, leaning in close to Jonah.

Hook turned, finding some vaqueros with their arms laced around several women in their blousy skirts and shiny high-heeled shoes that clacked along the plank floor. Near them were more well-dressed men. He grew weary of the game. “Them? That rich-looking bunch. You’re telling me they’re comanchero traders?”

“No. Not the obvious, my dear Mr. Hook. The others. There. See? And there. Look carefully and behold. And over there too.”

Jonah shook his head. It made no sense. Every man the drunk pointed out was as poor a dirt farmer or craftsman as a man would care to meet. Not a successful comanchero. Not like the vaqueros dressed so exquisitely as they drank with the whores at the bar.

“C’mon, Two Sleep,” he said with disgust and frustration as he rose.

“We go?”

“We’re going. This bastard’s drunk our tequila and spit back nothing in return. Hope you wake with your head pounding like a carpenter’s hammer.”

With a slap the Irishman dropped his soft, empty hand over Jonah’s wrist, pinning it to the table. “Listen, you fool—I am telling you everything you need to know short of what actually became of your boys.”

Slowly Hook disentangled himself. “You ain’t told me shit.”

He chuckled, wagging his big head, the flaming hair disheveled and uncombed for the better part of his three-day drunk. “Go back north to find out about your boys, Mr. Hook. Talk to the comancheros.”

“I come here to Chihuahua to talk to the comancheros.”

“That’s what I been trying to tell you!” he snorted, upending Hook’s bottle to refill his cup. “There’s no comancheros here.”

Jonah squinted. “They’re up north?”

With a nod the man answered, “North is where they trade. North is where they work.”

“So who the hell are those fancy-dressed fellas you pointed out to me?”

“Them—they’re called ricos.”

“Rich men.”

“Right. Their kind are the money men. They run the operations out of Chihuahua. That’s all they do—never soiling their hands with work. Maybe once in a while one of them will want to amuse himself and take a long vacation, ride north with a caravan, joining his hired vaqueros and the comanchero traders for a diversion one trading season or another.”

He squeezed it in his mind. Had he been looking all this time—month after month, season after season—for the wrong sort of man? Looking for him in the wrong place?

Jonah sensed his heart hammering with self-anger ready to boil over in tears of helpless rage. “You’re telling me there’s no comancheros here? They’re back up north?”

“Ricos, not comancheros. Not here.”

“Back up north, goddammit?” Jonah growled.

He licked the drops of tequila from the red hairs of his mustache. “Yeah. Chihuahua is where you’ll come when you find out which rico train brought your boys in. Here is where you’ll come to get some idea where the boys were taken once they were brought down here. Until then, you got to go back north and find some answers.”

“Back … back to El Paso?”

With a wag of his big head, the Irishman said, “No. Out there. To the northeast is the trail you need to take. It’s wide and well beaten. Used every autumn trading season for years. Centuries, likely.”

“Northeast?”

“To Portrillo and beyond the river.”

“Beyond the river, you say? Texas.”

“Texas.”

So now Jonah drank in this dark, smoky hovel of a cantina in a village he thought the locals called Vieja. Another one of the miserable, stinking jacales squatting somewhere north of the Rio Grande.

With Two Sleep he crossed back into the States at a place called Presidio, angling north by east from there, staying clear of the mountains that hugged the distant skyline here, there, and on almost every side of their line of march. It was a hostile land peopled with too few gringos and too many Mexicans, where a growing population of Texans were protected as best they could be upriver by Fort Quitman on the west, by Fort Davis to the north and Fort Stockton on farther east of there, outposts strung so far apart in that long, desperately thin line of frontier defense the army had been establishing ever since the end of the South’s bid for independence from the Union.

“You got the right idea,” the old man declared to Jonah. “But your line’s off some.”

At a settlement called Marfa a bartender had suggested that Hook scare up one of John Bell Hood’s faithful—an old Confederate soldier who might be able to help point the two sojourners in some likely direction or another. For reasons he could not explain, Jonah trusted the old man more than he had trusted most others come across in the years since leaving Shad Sweete and Fort Laramie behind. It came hard for Jonah Hook to trust others. So much already lay crushed and trampled inside him. Hard anymore to trust, to hope.

The old soldier dragged out a rumpled map with few lines scratched across its dark surface, a parchment given a rich buckskin patina of time and smoke and the grease of many fires.

“There,” Jonah said again. “I draw a line from Chihuahua north by east,” and he slowly traced his fingernail northeast across the Rio Grande the way he and Two Sleep had come, heading on east into the open ground east of Fort Davis and west of Camp Hudson and Fort McKavett.

“Like I said—appears your thinking is on the right track when you head out from Chihuahua. But trick now is you gotta think like a comanchero, friend. Think like someone going north to trade with the Comanch’.”

Jonah’s eyes studied the map, smarting in the dim light and the smoke of cheap tobacco, the smudge of tallow candles that gave this cold, stinking, low-roofed room its only glow of life. The far northern edge of the old Confederate’s map had the words Indian Territory scratched across it in bold letters, while the tracings of rivers were barely more evident than the many wrinkles aging the old parchment.

“I come this far from the plains because I was told that the comancheros trade outta New Mexico. Went down there the long way from Fort Laramie, wandered around and found out I needed to head south to Chihuahua. That was where I was told to come back north, into Texas.”

“And here you are,” the old man said softly, his rheumy eyes lit with the candles’ glow and the cheap aguardiente. “When’d you leave that north country? Fort Laramie, you said?”

“Right,” he answered. “End of summer, sixty-eight.”

Jonah watched the old man’s eyes flick from him to the Shoshone and back again, widening in pure wonder as he whistled low. “You got any idea what month and year it be, son?”

With a shrug Jonah replied, “Didn’t keep track. S’pose it never mattered. Why?”

“Man has a job to do—he just does it, right?” He wagged his head in amazement. “Got the patience of the Eternal Himself, you do. Why, don’t you have any idea you been wandering over four year, friend?”

In ways, it felt like more than four years. In another way, Jonah was just as certain the old man was having sport with him. “Four years. You’re crazed, mister. It can’t be seventy-two.”

“No, friend, it ain’t.”

Jonah grinned, smiling at Two Sleep. “See? Told you. Knew you was having fun with me.”

With a shrug of his shoulder, the old man explained. “It ain’t seventy-two. It’s winter of 1873. Already two months gone past the new year.”

For a long moment he stared down at his hands, in a way wishing he hadn’t come to know that so much time had slipped under him wandering through the land of the Mormons before he plodded back and forth through season after season begging for and scratching out information in New Mexico, time fooled away before they ever wandered south to Chihuahua. All that time had stacked up solid as cordwood behind him, one piece at a time. He hadn’t noticed because there had always been another village to visit, another trail rumored to hold promise. In the end every day, week, month, and year had come at him and flowed on past in such small, unobserved pieces. So much of his life, and he hadn’t noticed it gone.

Of a sudden Jonah’s thoughts turned on something peculiar: that he would turn thirty-six this approaching summer. And owning up to that only meant that Gritta had grown much, much older too. Some ten years’ worth of older from the time Jonah had last held her against him.

And the boys. They weren’t really boys no more. Grown into men without him.

As much as he wanted to cry or lash out and hit something, someone, Jonah stoically turned back to the old soldier. Then gazed back down at the map, his heart thrumming in his ears, his breath come shallow like the flight of moth’s wings. “All right, old soldier. You want me think like a comanchero.”

The old man wiped some tobacco juice out of his gray chin whiskers before he asked, “Lookee there and tell me where you gonna go to trade, friend?”

Jonah’s eyes rose to the Shoshone’s, then slowly moved over to the old man’s. “I’m gonna go where the Injuns are.”

“Good! But—not just any Injuns.”

“The Comanche.”

There was that gap-toothed smile of triumph. “Doggedy—now you got it!”

With a slash of a grin, feeling the hot hammer of blood at his ears, Jonah gazed back down at that old, faded map in the candlelight. “All right. Show me where the comancheros go to trade with the Comanche.”

Without a word the wrinkled one licked his lips in the glow and wispy faint smoke of those tallow candles, then dragged his long fingernail across the parchment … slowly up from Chihuahua, across the Rio Grande west of Presidio, ever on as his fingertip neatly split the seventy-odd miles of wilderness lying between forts Quitman and Davis.

Jonah looked up and asked, “What’s out there?”