Ghost Warrior

  Rafe didn’t mention that he was a Texan himself. He also didn’t mention that he had been with Gen. Winfield Scott’s forces when they stormed Chapultepec castle in September of 1847 and won the war. He was the sweat-soaked, powder-blackened, sixteen-year-old soldier who had lowered the Mexican flag flying above the fortress and raised the colors of the Voltiguer Regiment. He hadn’t kept count of how many Mexicans he had sent early to their graves that day, and he didn’t want to think about it now. He didn’t object to killing if the situation required it, but he took no pride or pleasure in it.

  A stout individual appeared at Rafe’s elbow. So much hair sprouted on his face and stuck up above his buttoned collar that he looked as though he were wearing a bearskin under his red flannel shirt. He smelled as though the bear hide hadn’t been properly tanned.

  He made a run at the Spanish pronunciation of general. It sounded like Hen-or-Al.

  “The Hen-or-Al is looking for you, Collins.”

  “Which general would that be, Jim?” Rafe had noticed that when the war ended, every former Mexican soldier above the rank of corporal promoted himself to colonel at the very least, and often to general.

  “Armijo. He’s bivouacked at the inn on the square.”

  “Manuel Armijo? I heard he’d fled to Mexico with his tail between his fat legs.”

  When Jim shrugged, the thick fringe of hair around his collar meshed with that of his beard making it seem as though his head were sinking into a brush pile. “He’s headed for Chihuahua with the conducta.”

  Rafe was surprised that he hadn’t heard the clamor of the conducta, the annual wagon train pulling into town on its way south. The solid wooden wheels of the Mexican oxcarts alone made enough racket to raise the dead. But then, the Texans had been making plenty of racket themselves.

  “I suppose he intends to sell guns to the Apaches,” Rafe said.

  “That would be my guess.”

  “Did he say what he wants of me?”

  “Naw. The Hen-or-Al always did keep dark.”

  Rafe finished his Taos Lightning. He laid down a silver peso, picked up his wide-brimmed, dirt-colored felt hat from the bar, and nodded farewell to Doña Yolanda and Absalom.

  As Rafe left, Miguel Sanchez dodged into the milling press of billiard players so he could shovel up a pile of fresh horse manure. Doña Yolanda paid him a centavo for each warm deposit he removed. The work suited him.

  La Luz’s cantina was as close to a cornfield or a grassy prairie as Miguel intended to get. Fields and prairies had a way of sprouting Apaches, but then, so did rocks, arroyos, cacti, creosote bushes, and bare desert floor. Cantinas had yet to produce any, though, so Miguel Sanchez had decided to live out his remaining days here. He might have been crazy, but he was no fool.

  NIGHT SHADOWS WERE DRAPING THEMSELVES OVER MEsilla’s ragged edges and dangling from the protruding butt ends of the roof beams of the swaybacked adobe houses when Rafe left the cantina. He dodged into a doorway to avoid an ox-drawn wagon that almost scraped the houses on each side of the alley. Mesilla’s main plaza wasn’t far away. Nothing was far from anything else in Mesilla. The settlement sat at about the halfway point on the six-hundred-mile route that began in Santa Fe. It crossed the contentious new border with Mexico at El Paso del Norte and wound its perilous way to the city of Chihuahua.

  The wagon train had been making the trip for at least two centuries. Even the poor went along carrying their woolen weavings on their backs or loaded onto burros so they could trade them for chocolate, silver, and silk. The ratio of soon-to-be-married men would be high. Mexican men traditionally made the journey to bring back Apache women as slaves, wedding gifts for their brides-to-be.

  Wagons and draft animals, pack mules, drivers, and exasperation filled the square. Mesilla had become a favored spot for resting the animals and repairing the vehicles, for stocking up on supplies, and for getting drunk and renting love. Already the sound of guitars and singing in the various cantinas mingled with the babel of the drivers’ oaths sworn in several languages and the braying and lowing and cracking of whips in the square. The rattle of wagon chains and the shriek of axles added to the din. The perimeter of adobe buildings concentrated the noise and amplified it.

  Everyone carried a pistol or two, a long piece, a sword or machete, and a knife, the bigger the better. The mounted men added holster pistols, rifles, and shotguns slung from their saddles. Rafe knew they probably carried other knives and pistols hidden in boots or under the striped cotton blankets that covered them from neck to thigh.

  Rafe detoured around a Mexican oxcart whose driver was disputing the right-of-way with a Missouri teamster on the high seat of a Studebaker wagon. Several arrows stuck from the side of the Studebaker. While the two drivers occupied themselves discussing each other’s lineage in Spanish and Missourian, Rafe grasped the arrow close to where the iron head was embedded in the wood. He pushed against the side of the wagon with his thumb and wiggled the shaft until he dislodged it.

  He could tell by the red, black, and yellow stripes painted on the shaft that an Apache had made it. He broke the arrow in half and tossed it away. Rafe already had a large collection of Apache arrows, limited to those that Apaches had short at him personally.

  Two Mexicans stood guard over the covered freight wagon parked in front of the inn. They wore the usual blankets and tight leather pantaloons that flared below the knees. The lacing on the sides allowed the white cotton drawers underneath to show through.

  Painted on the side of the wagon was a rendering of the Virgin Mary with a complexion that suggested jaundice. A swarm of cherubim buzzed around her head. Their expressions were probably intended to be pious, but they looked constipated instead.

  Strings of what resembled dried figs hung along the wagon’s sides. They were dark brown and shriveled. Rafe knew they were General Armijo’s collection of Apache ears. When Armijo had occupied the governor’s palace in Santa Fe, he had adorned his office with them. Now he carried them with him. Rumor said that he left them on display even while he was distributing guns from the tailgate of the wagon to possible relatives of the ears’ former owners.

  During the long hours Rafe spent driving his own wagon, he entertained himself with Shakespeare. He could quote hundreds of passages. The one that occurred to him as he looked at the strings of dried relics was, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.” But the line that seemed most apt in Mark Anthony’s funeral speech for Caesar was, “The evil that men do lives after them.”

  Armijo probably sold the guns in Chihuahua with the understanding that the Apaches would use them only on the inhabitants of the neighboring Mexican state of Sonora. After all, the Indians stole Sonoran cattle, horses, and mules and sold them to the grateful citizens of Chihuahua. The Apaches were as adept as Armijo when it came to playing factions against each other.

  Rafe found General Armijo seated on a bench in the corner of the inn’s front room. In the dim light he loomed like an outcrop of rock that had gone soft. He wore a white shirt that could shelter a small family. His belly hung in folds over the waistband of white pantaloons stretched taut across his thighs. The straps of his leather sandals sank into the flesh of his stubby feet like harnesses on an overfed pair of piglets.

  An Indian woman crouched in the opposite corner. She was a slave most likely and Apache by the look of her, though she wore a Mexican skirt and white tunic blouse, and her hair was neatly plaited in a single braid long enough for her to sit on. If looks could kill, Armijo would have been attracting even more flies than he already was. She was lovely and young, probably not more than fourteen, and Rafe didn’t have to guess what use the general made of her.

  You’d best not allow a knife anywhere near her, General, Rafe thought. She will find your gullet under all that suet and divide it in two for you.

  Rafe thought it a good thing that Armijo had been both governor and commanding general when Stephen Watts Kearny and his ragtag army entered Santa Fe five years
ago and claimed the province for the United States. Armijo had capitulated so fast that the occupation had been bloodless. The bloodletting came a year later when the Pueblo Indians rose up and slaughtered every American man, woman, and child they could find in the town. Rafe suspected that Armijo had been behind that. During his tenure as provincial governor he had been behind most of what was greedy, venal, murderous, and dastardly in New Mexico.

  Manuel Armijo smiled broadly when he saw Rafe. “Mr. Collins! What a pleasure.” His English had improved since the Americans took over.

  “No.”

  “You are not Senor Rafe Collins?” He had a booming, jovial voice. When he smiled, his small black eyes disappeared into the rolls of fat around them like currants into bread dough.

  “The answer is no.”

  “But you do not yet know my proposition.”

  “Doesn’t matter. The answer is no.”

  “They say you’re the only one who has carried goods between here and El Paso without losing a side of bacon or a grain of corn to the savages.”

  “Just lucky, I guess.”

  “My driver has fallen ill from an excess of Pass whiskey. I would say he is more driven than driving.” Armijo might have winked, but since the flesh of this face almost obscured his eyes, Rafe couldn’t be sure. “I’ll pay you two hundred and fifty dollars to take my lead wagon to Chihuahua—and bring it back, of course.”

  What Rafe had in mind to say was, “I’ll do it when there’s enough frost in hell to kill snap beans.” What he said instead was, “No.”

  Rafe turned and left, although putting his back to Armijo made him uneasy. He had heard the stories. Armijo was the winner in a walk when it came to vindictiveness.

  Night had fallen with a thud by the time Rafe reached the wagon yard behind the hostler’s shop. Horses, mules, burros, and oxen and vehicles of all persuasions had filled the trampled field since he’d tethered his mules that afternoon. As he approached his old Packard wagon, he realized that Absalom was sitting with his back against the front wheel. He passed a bottle to the man sitting with him.

  In the darkness the second man seemed to have misplaced his face. The space between the wide brim of his floppy straw hat and the ragged shirt collar was blank except for the startling round whites of a pair of eyes. Then Rafe walked close enough to see that he was a Negro.

  Absalom stood hastily and dusted the seat of his trousers with his hat. “Is this your wagon, Rafe?”

  “It is.”

  “I didn’t think the owner would be back tonight.” He looked toward Mesilla and the sounds of celebration. “Loud, ain’t it?” He grinned. “Those boys do murder sleep.”

  Rafe smiled at the discovery of someone who could quote Shakespeare.

  “We were fixin’ to bed down with our horses.” Absalom nodded to the three animals hobbled nearby. He waved his hand to include his companion. “This is my man, Caesar.”

  The black man stood up. He took off his hat and held it in front of his chest. “Pleased to meet ya, massa, suh.”

  “Likewise.”

  Rafe watched the two of them collect their blankets and lay them under another wagon. He thought it odd that Absalom would be sharing a bottle with a slave. Southerners would dine with hogs, drink with their horses, kiss their coon hounds on the mouth, bed down with cattle, and dance a reel with a hairy, two-hundred-pound fur trapper, but they were fastidious about doing anything that might suggest social contact with a son of Africa.

  Rafe had learned early in his twenty years not to pry into other men’s business. He also knew that the racket from Mesilla would become more contentious and punctuated with gunfire. He pulled his blankets from the wagon’s leather boot and laid them under it. Before he rolled up in them, he took a cloth packet from his pocket. He unwrapped the beeswax inside, pulled off two pieces of it, and stuffed one into each ear.

  The army hadn’t needed to teach Rafe to shoot. Any boy growing up in Comanche country could hit what he aimed at. It hadn’t been able to make him obedient, except when survival demanded it; but a young West Point lieutenant had taught him to read. A captain had lent him tattered copies of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar. He had sat spellbound in the rowdy audience of soldiers while the officers performed Othello, As You Like It, and others.

  He drifted off to dreams with the Bard in his head. “Innocent sleep I sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care.”

  Chapter 3

  REAR GUARD

  The coyote hustled, nose to the ground, following a jackrabbit’s scent through the desert darkness. When he heard the soft, bubbling cry of a quail, he veered toward it. Saliva flooded the coyote’s mouth at the prospect of tearing into the quail’s succulent flesh. He could almost feel the feathers tickling his nose, the tantalizing flutter of wings against his face before it went limp in his jaws. With muzzle down and bony hindquarters and banner of a tail up, he put one paw out, eased over it, and set another. The muscles of his shoulders and haunches bunched to pounce.

  “Ba’ts’osé, Brother Coyote …” The voice came from a rounded lump next to a large creosote bush. Twin reflections of the full moon shone in the dark eyes that looked out from it. “I have troubles enough,” the mound said. “Play your tricks on another.”

  The mound stirred as Sister shifted under her blanket to relieve a cramp in her leg. By the moon’s bright light she thought she could see chagrin flash in the coyote’s eyes when he realized she was not a quail. He turned and sauntered back to the jackrabbit’s spoor.

  Sister had spoken Coyote’s name aloud deliberately. Speaking someone’s name put great weight to the request, but that might have been a mistake. Old Man Coyote was a trickster. Sister wondered if evil consequences would follow her talking to him.

  Coyote was responsible for death. Back when the earth was new and animals spoke like people, Coyote had thrown a stone into water. He had declared that if it sank, all living things would experience a sleep from which they would not awaken on this earth. The stone sank, and people and animals and plants had been dying ever since.

  Sister wondered if death and the Mexicans had taken everyone she knew. She imagined walking north alone. She imagined arriving at her village and finding her grandmother and the other old ones dead, too.

  She withdrew deeper into the cave of her blanket and stared out at the expanse of thicket along the river. Night and the pale moonlight had changed the landscape and made it menacing. Thorny mimosa vines wove the willow, acacia, and cactus into an impenetrable wall. She walked along it, but she could not find the narrow trail made by wild pigs and deer passing through it on their way to the water. She could not even find the stubby cylinder of gray rock standing near the path.

  Her brother had pointed it out. “It looks like Mouse’s penis.”

  Sister had laughed. Everyone knew the story of Coyote trading his big penis for Mouse’s small one so he could woo a beautiful woman.

  Now the rock was gone. Maybe Trickster Coyote had taken it the way he had taken Mouse’s penis. Sister took a long, deep breath to still the panic rising in her. In her life she had experienced danger. She was familiar with death, with hunger and thirst, bone chilling cold, and intense heat, but she had never lived alone.

  She gave the quail cry again, and this time she heard an answer from the thicket. It would probably have fooled another quail, but she recognized it as her brother’s. He had taught her to make the cry, after all.

  It sounded again, and she walked along the shadowy wall of vines and bushes, following it. She found the path and crawled into it, relieved to have the thorny branches close in around her. Soldiers on horseback could not follow her here. Even Ghost Owl would not likely risk becoming entangled in the thicket’s treacherous embrace.

  She stood up in the clearing.

  “Enjuh,” Morning Star said. “It is good.”

  She wrapped her arms around his waist and felt the strength of him encircling her. She held on as if he were a log floating in
a flood. She inhaled his aura of smoke and sweat, tobacco and horses. She felt the sharp pressure of the hawk-bone amulet that hung around his neck.

  “I was afraid they had killed you,” she murmured.

  “Soldiers from Sonora attacked the camp. The people of Janos say they knew nothing about it.”

  “Our father is gone.”

  “We must not speak of him again.” He stood back and pushed her tangled hair away from her face, something he hadn’t done since she was a small child in need of comfort. “If we mention those who have left, we call them back and hinder them in their journey.”

  Women and children emerged singly or in small groups from the bushes, but Morning Star waited for one who had yet to come. The boy, Talks A Lot, arrived to tell him the men were gathering for a council and Skinny, the band’s leader, wanted him there.

  “Tell him I’ll come soon.”

  When She Moves Like Water finally appeared, she was carrying a sleeping child on her back. “This is Little Squint’s daughter,” she said. “A soldier’s horse stepped on her arm and broke it.”

  The girl whimpered when Sister lifted her and held her against her chest. Sister laced her fingers to form a seat for her, and the child laid her head on Sister’s shoulder, her broken arm dangling at her side.

  Morning Star enfolded She Moves Like Water in an embrace so passionate that Sister knew Skinny and the rest of the men in council would grow impatient before it ended. She turned away, unable to bear the sight.

  Sister wanted to rejoice in her brother’s happiness. She wanted to like the woman who had displaced her in his affections. She wanted to admire She Moves Like Water’s beauty and grace, two qualities she was sure she would never have herself, but all she could manage was a false courtesy.

  Sister went off in search of Little Squint, walking among those looking for lost relatives and friends. People spoke in hushed voices. The women and children were scratched and bruised. Many were bloody. The children lay exhausted where they fell. In the chill night air, they cupped together for warmth and shared what blankets they had. Broken Foot’s wife, Her Eyes Open, distributed food and water jugs from the cache of them hidden in a crevice under a heap of boulders.