Sproule and the kid looked after them. The kid called out and Sproule had started to trot clumsily along behind the horses.
The riders began to slump and reel like drunks. Their heads lolled. Their guffaws echoed among the rocks and they turned their mounts and sat them and regarded the wanderers with huge grins.
Que quiere? cried the leader.
The riders cackled and slapped at one another. They had nudged their horses forward and they began to ride them about without aim. The leader turned to the two afoot.
Buscan a los indios?
With this some of the men dismounted and fell to hugging one another and weeping shamelessly. The leader looked at them and grinned, his teeth white and massive, made for foraging.
Loonies, said Sproule. They're loonies.
The kid looked up at the leader. How about a drink of water? he said.
The leader sobered, he pulled a long face. Water? he said.
We aint got no water, said Sproule.
But my friend, how no? Is very dry here.
He reached behind him without turning and a leather canteen was passed across the riders to his hand. He shook it and offered it down. The kid pulled the stopper and drank and stood panting and drank again. The leader reached down and tapped the canteen. Basta, he said.
He hung on gulping. He could not see the horseman's face darken. The man shucked one boot backward out of the stirrup and kicked the canteen cleanly from between the kid's hands leaving him there for a moment in a frozen gesture of calling with the canteen rising and turning in the air and the lobes of water gleaming about it in the sun before it clattered to the rocks. Sproule scrambled after it and snatched it up where it lay draining and began to drink, watching over the rim. The horseman and the kid watched each other. Sproule sat back gasping and coughing.
The kid stepped across the rocks and took the canteen from him. The leader kneed his horse forward and drew a sword from its place beneath his leg and leaning forward ran the blade under the strap and raised it up. The point of the blade was about three inches from the kid's face and the canteen strap was draped across the flat of it. The kid had stopped and the rider raised the canteen gently from his hands and let it slide down the blade and come to rest at his side. He turned to the men and smiled and they once again began to hoot and to pummel one another like apes.
He swung the stopper up from where it hung by a thong and drove it home with the heel of his hand. He pitched the canteen to the man behind him and looked down at the travelers. Why you no hide? he said.
From you?
From I.
We were thirsty.
Very thirsty. Eh?
They didnt answer. He was tapping the flat of the sword lightly against the horn of his saddle and he seemed to be forming words in his mind. He leaned slightly to them. When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf. He smiled at them and raised the sword and ran it back where it had come from and turned the horse smartly and trotted it through the horses behind him and the men mounted up and followed and soon all were gone.
Sproule sat without moving. The kid looked at him but he would look away. He was wounded in an enemy country far from home and although his eyes took in the alien stones about yet the greater void beyond seemed to swallow up his soul.
They descended the mountain, going down over the rocks with their hands outheld before them and their shadows contorted on the broken terrain like creatures seeking their own forms. They reached the valley floor at dusk and set off across the blue and cooling land, the mountains to the west a line of jagged slate set endwise in the earth and the dry weeds heeling and twisting in a wind sprung from nowhere.
They walked on into the dark and they slept like dogs in the sand and had been sleeping so when something black flapped up out of the night ground and perched on Sproule's chest. Fine fingerbones stayed the leather wings with which it steadied as it walked upon him. A wrinkled pug face, small and vicious, bare lips crimped in a horrible smile and teeth pale blue in the starlight. It leaned to him. It crafted in his neck two narrow grooves and folding its wings over him it began to drink his blood.
Not soft enough. He woke, put up a hand. He shrieked and the bloodbat flailed and sat back upon his chest and righted itself again and hissed and clicked its teeth.
The kid was up and had seized a rock but the bat sprang away and vanished in the dark. Sproule was clawing at his neck and he was gibbering hysterically and when he saw the kid standing there looking down at him he held out to him his bloodied hands as if in accusation and then clapped them to his ears and cried out what it seemed he himself would not hear, a howl of such outrage as to stitch a caesura in the pulsebeat of the world. But the kid only spat into the darkness of the space between them. I know your kind, he said. What's wrong with you is wrong all the way through you.
In the morning they crossed a dry wash and the kid hiked up it looking for a tank or a hole but there was none. He picked out a sink in the wash and fell to digging with a bone and after he had dug some two feet into the sand the sand turned damp and then a little more and a slow seep of water began to fill into the furrows he dredged with his fingers. He took off his shirt and pushed it down into the sand and watched it darken and he watched the water rise slowly among the folds of cloth until there was perhaps a cupful and then he lowered his head into the excavation and drank. Then he sat and watched it fill again. He did this for over an hour. Then he put on the shirt and went back down the wash.
Sproule didnt want to take off his shirt. He tried sucking up the water and he got a mouthful of sand.
Why dont you let me use your shirt, he said.
The kid was squatting in the dry gravel of the wash. Suck on ye own shirt, he said.
He took off the shirt. It stuck to the skin and a yellow pus ran. His arm was swollen to the size of his thigh and it was garishly discolored and small worms worked in the open wound. He pushed the shirt down into the hole and leaned and drank.
In the afternoon they came to a crossroads, what else to call it. A faint wagon trace that came from the north and crossed their path and went on to the south. They stood scanning the landscape for some guidance in that emptiness. Sproule sat where the tracks crossed and looked out from the great caves in his skull where his eyes lay. He said that he would not rise.
Yonder's a lake, said the kid.
He would not look.
It lay shimmering in the distance. Its edges rimed with salt. The kid studied it and studied the roads. After a while he nodded toward the south. I believe this here is the most traveled.
It's all right, said Sproule. You go on.
You suit yourself.
Sproule watched him set off. After a while he rose and followed.
They had gone perhaps two miles when they stopped to rest, Sproule sitting with his legs out and his hands in his lap and the kid squatting a little ways from him. Blinking and bearded and filthy in their rags.
Does that sound like thunder to you? said Sproule.
The kid raised his head.
Listen.
The kid looked at the sky, pale blue, unmarked save where the sun burned like a white hole.
I can feel it in the ground, said Sproule.
It aint nothin.
Listen.
The kid rose and looked about. To the north a small movement of dust. He watched it. It did not rise nor did it blow away.
It was a carreta, lumbering clumsily over the plain, a small mule to draw it. The driver may have been asleep. When he saw the fugitives in the trace before him he halted the mule and began to saw it around to go back and he did get it turned but by then the kid had seized the raw leather headstall and hauled the animal to a standstill. Sproule came hobbling up. From the rear of the wagon two children peered out. They were so pale with dust, their hair so white and faces pinched, they looked like little gnomes crouched there. At the sight of the kid before him the driver shrank bac
k and the woman next to him set up a high shrill chittering and began to point from one horizon to the other but he pulled himself up into the bed of the cart and Sproule came dragging after and they lay staring up at the hot canvas tarp while the two waifs drew back into the corner and watched blackeyed as woodmice and the cart turned south again and set off with a rising rumble and clatter.
There was a clay jar of water hung by a thong from the bow-stay and the kid took it down and drank from it and gave it to Sproule. Then he took it back and drank the rest. They lay in the floor of the cart among old hides and spills of salt and after a while they slept.
It was dark when they entered the town. The jostle of the cart ceasing was what woke them. The kid raised himself up and looked out. Starlight in a mud street. The wagon empty. The mule wheezed and stamped in the traces. After a while the man came from the shadows and led them along a lane into a yard and he backed the mule until the cart was alongside a wall and then he unhitched the mule and led it away.
He lay back in the tilted cartbed. It was cold in the night and he lay with his knees drawn up under a piece of hide that smelled of mold and urine and he slept and woke all night and all night dogs barked and in the dawn cocks called and he heard horses on the road.
In the first gray light flies began to land on him. They touched his face and woke him and he brushed them away. After a while he sat up.
They were in a barren mudwalled courtyard and there was a house made of reeds and clay. Chickens stepped about and clucked and scratched. A small boy came from the house and pulled down his pants and shat in the yard and rose and went in again. The kid looked at Sproule. He was lying with his face to the wagonboards. He was partly covered with his blanket and flies were crawling on him. The kid reached to shake him. He was cold and wooden. The flies rose, then they settled back.
The kid was standing by the cart pissing when the soldiers rode into the yard. They seized him and tied his hands behind him and they looked in the cart and talked among themselves and then they led him out into the street.
He was taken to an adobe building and put in an empty room. He sat in the floor while a wild-eyed boy with an old musket watched him. After a while they came and took him out again.
They led him through the narrow mud streets and he could hear music like a fanfare growing the louder. First children walked with him and then old folk and finally a throng of brown-skinned villagers all dressed in white cotton like attendants in an institution, the women in dark rebozos, some with their breasts exposed, their faces stained red with almagre, smoking small cigars. Their numbers swelled and the guards with their shouldered fusils frowned and shouted at the jostlers and they went on along the tall adobe wall of a church and into the plaza.
There was a bazaar in progress. A traveling medicine show, a primitive circus. They passed stout willow cages clogged with vipers, with great limegreen serpents from some more southerly latitude or beaded lizards with their black mouths wet with venom. A reedy old leper held up handfuls of tapeworms from a jar for all to see and cried out his medicines against them and they were pressed about by other rude apothecaries and by vendors and mendicants until all came at last before a trestle whereon stood a glass carboy of clear mescal. In this container with hair afloat and eyes turned upward in a pale face sat a human head.
They dragged him forward with shouts and gestures. Mire, mire, they cried. He stood before the jar and they urged his consideration of it and they tilted it around so that the head should face him. It was Captain White. Lately at war among the heathen. The kid looked into the drowned and sightless eyes of his old commander. He looked about at the villagers and at the soldiers, their eyes all upon him, and he spat and wiped his mouth. He aint no kin to me, he said.
They put him in an old stone corral with three other ragged refugees from the expedition. They sat stunned and blinking against the wall or roved the perimeter around in the dry tracks of mules and horses and retched and shat while small boys hooted from the parapet.
He fell in with a thin boy from Georgia. I was sickern a dog, the boy said. I was afraid I was goin to die and then I was afraid I wasnt.
I seen a rider on the captain's horse up in the country from here, the kid told him.
Aye, said the Georgian. They killed him and Clark and another boy I never did know his name. We come on into town and the very next day they had us in the calabozo and this selfsame son of a bitch is down there with the guards laughin and drinkin and playin cards, him and the jefe, to see who gets the captain's horse and who gets his pistols. I guess you seen the captain's head.
I seen it.
That's the worst thing I ever seen in my life.
Somebody ought to of pickled it a long time ago. By rights they ought to pickle mine. For ever takin up with such a fool.
They drifted as the day advanced from wall to wall to keep out of the sun. The boy from Georgia told him of his comrades displayed on slabs cold and dead in the market. The captain headless in a wallow half eaten by hogs. He ran his heel out in the dust and gouged a little place for it to rest. They fixin to send us to Chihuahua City, he said.
How do you know?
That's what they say. I dont know.
That's what who says?
Shipman yonder. He speaks the lingo some.
The kid regarded the man spoken of. He shook his head and spat dryly.
All day small boys perched on the walls and watched them by shifts and pointed and jabbered. They'd walk around the parapet and try to piss down on sleepers in the shade but the prisoners kept alert. Some at first threw stones but the kid picked one from the dust the size of an egg and with it dropped a small child cleanly from the wall with no sound other than the muted thud of its landing on the far side.
Now you gone and done it, said the Georgian.
The kid looked at him.
They'll be in here with whips and I dont know what all.
The kid spat. They aint about to come in here and eat no whips.
Nor did they. A woman brought them bowls of beans and charred tortillas on a plate of unfired clay. She looked harried and she smiled at them and she had smuggled them sweets under her shawl and there were pieces of meat in the bottom of the bowls that had come from her own table.
Three days later mounted on little malandered mules they set out for the capital as foretold.
They rode five days through desert and mountain and through dusty pueblos where the populace turned out to see them. Their escorts in varied suits of timeworn finery, the prisoners in rags. They'd been given blankets and squatting by the desert fires at night sunblackened and bony and wrapped in these serapes they looked like God's profoundest peons. The soldiers none spoke english and they directed their charges with grunts or gestures. They were indifferently armed and they were much afraid of the indians. They rolled their tobacco in cornhusks and they sat by the fire in silence and listened to the night. Their talk when they talked was of witches or worse and always they sought to parcel from the darkness some voice or cry from among the cries that was no right beast. La gente dice que el coyote es un brujo. Muchas veces el brujo es un coyote.
Y los indios tambien. Muchas veces llaman como los coyotes.
Y que es eso?
Nada.
Un tecolote. Nada mas.
Quizas.
When they rode through the gap in the mountains and looked down on the city the sergeant of the expedition halted the horses and spoke to the man behind him and he in turn dismounted and took rawhide thongs from his saddlebag and approached the prisoners and gestured for them to cross their wrists and hold them out, showing how with his own hands. He tied them each in this manner and then they rode on.
They entered the city in a gantlet of flung offal, driven like cattle through the cobbled streets with shouts going up behind for the soldiery who smiled as became them and nodded among the flowers and proffered cups, herding the tattered fortune-seekers through the plaza where water splashed in a fountain a
nd idlers reclined on carven seats of white porphyry and past the governor's palace and past the cathedral where vultures squatted along the dusty entablatures and among the niches in the carved facade hard by the figures of Christ and the apostles, the birds holding out their own dark vestments in postures of strange benevolence while about them flapped on the wind the dried scalps of slaughtered indians strung on cords, the long dull hair swinging like the filaments of certain seaforms and the dry hides clapping against the stones.
They passed old alms-seekers by the church door with their seamy palms outheld and maimed beggars sad-eyed in rags and children asleep in the shadows with flies walking their dreamless faces. Dark coppers in a clackdish, the shriveled eyes of the blind. Scribes crouched by the steps with their quills and inkpots and bowls of sand and lepers moaning through the streets and naked dogs that seemed composed of bone entirely and vendors of tamales and old women with faces dark and harrowed as the land squatting in the gutters over charcoal fires where blackened strips of anonymous meat sizzled and spat. Small orphans were abroad like irate dwarfs and fools and sots drooling and flailing about in the small markets of the metropolis and the prisoners rode past the carnage in the meatstalls and the waxy smell where racks of guts hung black with flies and flayings of meat in great red sheets now darkened with the advancing day and the flensed and naked skulls of cows and sheep with their dull blue eyes glaring wildly and the stiff bodies of defer and javelina and ducks and quail and parrots, all wild things from the country round hanging head downward from hooks.