TEN
We picketed the horses in the copse of trees and made our way through the scrub, the last few yards or so crawling on our bellies until we were within about forty yards of the compound and maybe ten yards from the lone guard in front who sat tending his small fire with sticks and twigs and gnawing on a half of roast rabbit, his rifle lying in the dirt beside him.
What I saw behind him in the sparks and waves of light pouring off the four huge bonfires might have come straight out of Dante's Inferno — a book I had never much liked in my youth — had Dante been a less than pious man.
"Well, we got us a hell of a party here," said Mother.
A marketing was taking place in front of us.
I saw perhaps thirty young women all grouped for inspection — the sisters' wares on display. Some simply standing shackled together and others bound to posts or wagon wheels, their clothing a bizarre mix of cheap shifts, men's shirts and trousers, dirty dresses and torn underwear or unrecognizable rags which barely even covered them, even a single stained ragged wedding dress among them. I saw drugged, beaten, half-crazy faces scrubbed newly clean for the buyers. I saw the buyers and their assistants, Mexican and Anglo, some well-dressed and some shabby-looking sweating in the heat of the bonfires, moving among them parting clothes and clutching at a bared breast or a crotch or buttocks, checking teeth and gums and laughing and talking amongst themselves.
I saw firearms everywhere.
We were not going up against twelve or fifteen men and three women. In fact there were only two women not on display that I could see — from Elena's description the younger sisters Maria and Lucia — moving from buyer to buyer like ranchers at a cattle show, doubtless talking prices.
But the men numbered well over two dozen.
"How good's their equipment?" Hart said.
"Their equipment?"
"Guns, rifles. How good are they?"
"Good, I think."
"Wait here. Won't be but a few minutes."
He turned and started crawling back the way we'd come, nobody thinking to question him and we lay there watching the milling crowd and listening to the crackling fires near and far.
"Why all the bonfires?" Mother asked her. "They light those damn things every night here?"
"Every night. To turn away the dark. To turn away the jungle and the creatures there."
Mother looked at her like she'd very possibly lost her mind and I suppose so did I.
We were staring out at barren dusty plain.
"Once all this was jungle. Many, many years ago. For the sisters it still is."
We were left to think on that and lie and watch until we heard a gentle rustling sound behind us and turned and there was Hart again crawling toward us through the brush, a horse blanket slung across his shoulder.
"Wait here," he said. "I won't be but a few minutes."
"You already said that," Mother said.
"Watch and learn, Mother."
He took off his hat and crushed the brim down and put it on again and wrapped the blanket around him serape-style and stood up big as you please and started slowly forward like there was nothing out of the ordinary to his being there at all. We heard the dice click in his hand and so did the guard sitting by the fire who lay the half-eaten rabbit down on a stump, wiped his greasy fingers on his shirt and picked up his rifle and stood.
"Quienes?" he said.
"Quemosca ha picado?"
"Eh?"
Hart sounded as bored and lazy as the guard did edgy and confused. Then it all came suddenly clear to him as Hart kicked him soundly between the legs so that he dropped the rifle and uttered a harsh strangled sound which Hart muffled with the palm of his hand and eased him to his knees and then picked up the rifle and gave him a good hard thump to the head with the butt end.
He dragged the man by one arm back over where we were lying, handed the rifle off to Mother and the blanket to me, turned him over and pulled his pistol out of his waistband.
".45 Peacemaker. Lady was right. Good equipment." He pulled out his own ancient pistol and emptied the chambers.
"I'd try to sell this thing back to Gusdorf but I doubt he'd give me a penny for it. Should have buried it alongside his grandfather."
He tossed his old gun back into the bushes and holstered the new one.
"Feel better now?" said Mother.
"Much better."
"Glad to hear it. What about this fella?"
"Oh, he'll sleep some yet."
"No he won't," Elena said.
She lifted the guard's knife from his waistband and unsheathed it and before any of us even quite knew what she was up to her fingers were in his hair and she'd lifted his head and slit his throat as deftly as you'd slit a hog's and turned his head quickly off to the side so that the spill from his jugular flooded the earth beside us.
"Now I feel better," she said.
She looked up as though challenging us to say something but none of us were about to. Beyond whatever personal reasons she had and I thought they were probably very good ones you had to admit there was also a logic to it. One less pasteboard in the deck. One less reason to watch our backs. Hart nodded toward the settlement.
"You see your sister anywhere in there?"
"Yes. In the last group, over toward the hacienda. Celine is the one in white."
"I see her."
I spotted her too. A pretty girl of about fifteen or sixteen in a frayed white slip and camisole. I couldn't quite make out the look on her face from this distance whether strong or frightened though I tried. I seemed to want to know what the other half of this family was made of.
"You got anything on your mind at all about how we're gonna do this, Hart?" said Mother. "I mean, we can't just walk in and kick 'em all in the jewels, elegant though that was."
"Thank you, Mother. I got a notion might work."
We never did get to know what that was though because at just that moment the crowd went unexpectedly silent and we saw the doors to the hacienda open and walking through those doors — no, gliding through those doors like some Mexic witch on a broomstick was maybe the oldest woman I'd ever seen outside of a sickbed, a wild-haired grinning harridan draped in filmy white, long hanging breasts swaying back and forth beneath what she was wearing, a bleached skull crowning her head and her face painted in black streaks and circles over some dry clay-colored base. Eva. She carried a long black blade in front of her gripped in both hands. Its handle pointed toward the earth, its tip toward the sky.
By its size she should not even have been able to lift it.
The man behind her was painted too, a skull's face imposed over his own in stark black and white which gleamed in the flickering firelight. He was barechested and his chest and arms were massive. Around his waist he wore a belt of what appeared to be human bones. Humerus, radius, ulna. Around his neck, fangs or talons or both. I couldn't say.
In one hand he held a heavy leather leash and at the end of it was a girl who might have been Celine's twin but for the large livid birthmark across her neck. Her dress was clean and white and looked new, a virgin's dress and she stumbled along behind him, her arms and face twitching on the razor's edge of some drug — pulque, mescal or some mix of their own devising, some powerful intoxicant.
"Ryan," Elena said.
"Christ on a crutch," Mother said. "Damned if it ain't. I'd never have known him."
"I'd have known him," said Hart.
For a moment all we heard was the crackling fires. Then the sisters began to chant. That same clicking, hissing tongue I'd heard Elena use only shrill this time. You thought of crickets dense in the still night air.
"Their nahuatl," she said. "Their prayer. The girl? The last time I saw her she was tied to a bed and screaming. I think her screams are over now."
"This is what I think it is?"
"Yes. To demonstrate obedience. To the sisters, to the old gods and the old ways. To show the buyers exactly what they are buying and what happens shou
ld they be fool enough to betray them."
"Why this girl?"
"I don't know. Probably she gave them trouble. Perhaps she was brave. Possibly she is not so valuable to them because of the mark."
The other two sisters, Maria and pug-faced Lucia, fell in behind them chanting as Eva and Ryan marched the girl through the guards and buyers and up the hill which glowed at its summit and billowed tarry smoke. Even the roughnecks among the crowd looking sober now and silent. At the top he turned the girl so that she faced the crowd and unbuttoned the front of her dress and parted it and Eva handed her the long obsidian blade and shouted to the crowd.
"For Tezcatlipoca!"
The girl hesitated, gazing at the knife in her hands in a kind of dazed twitching horror and then Ryan stepped forward and whispered something in her ear and to this day I still cannot imagine what it possibly could have been which would make her face seem suddenly to melt into that expression of beaten-down indifference as she turned the blade toward her and held it there a moment and then plunged it into her belly. Her eyelids flew open in shock and pain and her hands jerked reflexively off the hilt. Eva's hands replaced them and the long ropy muscles of her arms stood out through her flesh like crawling snakes as she sawed upward all the way to her breastbone and then pulled it gleaming out of her.
She began to fall, blood pulsing from the gaping wound and intestines beginning to ooze their way out of her, pale and red. Ryan took her by the shoulders.
"Do the rest of it!" he shouted. "Or dammit I'll give you right back to them. And I'll give you back alive!"
I could see her blinking rapidly, her body shuddering as in a blast of cold and we watched stunned and amazed — all but Elena, I thought, who must have known all along that this was coming — as the girl reached into the bloody cavity Eva had cut for her and dug out her own living heart steaming in the air and held it in her quaking hand. Eva snatched it from her like an eagle on a mouse and severed the arteries with a single quick stroke of the blade and held it to the crowd and shouted Tezcatlipoca! again and again as Ryan let go of her shoulders and thegirl crumbled to her knees and I turned and delivered up my hardtack and coffee into the brush.
"Good a time as any, I'd say," said Hart. "Mother?"
He nodded. "Come on, Bell."
He pulled me up by the collar, my legs rubbery and weak and we skirted the periphery of the compound. I glanced over and saw that Ryan had the dead girl in his arms and was walking toward the fire pit, his pants and naked belly slick with blood. I saw him raise her up over his head as though she weighed no more than a dog and saw old Eva place the bloodslick heart on the altar beside them. Then all I did was run.
ELEVEN
We were headed for the wide-open doors to the hacienda. I didn't know why or whose idea it was, Hart's or Elena's, and perhaps the same thought had come to them both in some unspoken passage. But Elena knew full well that down to the very last guard they'd all be outside to witness the spectacle on the hilltop. The hacienda would be empty.
We climbed the stairs to the porch and ran inside through a short corridor and I barely had time to register the great elegant room we were in, bathed in candlelight as Elena marched us through and then pointed to the staircase.
"Up there."
"Why?" said Hart.
"The sisters' bedrooms. They'll make their deals inside, down in this room. We'll know when they start."
We took the stairs to the second-floor landing and walked a long wide carpeted corridor red as blood and studded with oil lamps in sconces past a door to our left and then stopped at the next one to our right and she opened it and we stepped inside.
The room was as big as Mother's entire cabin. A single lamp burned on a nighttable beside a beautiful mahogany canopied bed covered in lace. On its headboard was a carving of sheep being torn and devoured by a pack of wolves. Wolves adorned the finials on the bed and those atop the great swing mirror on the dressing table. I saw why she'd selected this room and not the one to our left. This one faced the yard. Through the windows you could see what was going on down there.
Should you want to.
"Maria's room," she said.
"I'll stay by the door," said Hart.
Elena pulled a velvet-backed walnut chair up to the window opposite him and sat with Hart's Winchester across her lap, watching.
Mother flopped down on the bed. It groaned beneath his weight.
I couldn't believe it. All I could do was look.
"I'm guessing it'll be a while yet. Am I right, ma'am?"
"Yes." Her voice was flat and cold.
"Have to take your rest where you find it, Bell."
He had a point I supposed. I suddenly felt exhausted, all we'd done and seen today a heavy weight upon me. I sat down at the foot of the bed beside him.
"I'd kill for a glass of whiskey," I said.
"On the sideboard," said Elena. "If you're fool enough."
I remember I did consider it. I truly did. It was tempting.
Instead I pulled a chair over to the side of the window opposite her and sat.
"Aren't you worried we'll be seen up here?" I said. "We won't be seen. Look down there."
It was the second time that night a book I hadn't much cared for came to mind. The first was Inferno. This time it was Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
I was looking at an orgy.
In the moonlit firelit dust of the square I saw men and women coupling everywhere. Women spread out naked upon the bare red earth or on their knees being taken from behind, women sodomized and forced to perform fellatio. In more than one case both of these at the same time. I saw women being mauled and prodded and slapped and caned. And I saw guards and the three sisters passing through all of this and fueling its dementia with bottles of whiskey, mescal and tequila.
I was glad the window was shut so we didn't have to hear it too.
I saw joyless, spiritless faces. Both the takers and the taken.
It was when I saw what they were doing to Celine that I turned away.
"You, writer," Elena had said to me the night before. "Take this down.
"They will find it on our bodies."
I don't wish to tell this. But I think I owe it to all concerned.
"The fat pig is Fredo," she said. "The tall thin one is Gustavo. I do not know the third one. A buyer.
"You don't want to witness this, writer? Fine, don't."
But she wanted me to. I could hear it in her voice. I could see it in the eyes which pooled with tears but never wavered and barely blinked. When I saw what grief and rage those eyes held I turned back again.
If she could so could I.
Though Celine was directly below us had it not been for the thin white camisole pushed up nearly to her breasts I could not have recognized her. Her face was hidden.
She lay spread-eagled on her back naked from the camisole on down and the one Elena called Fredo was kneeling on each of her forearms spread wide above her nearly at the elbow joint. Her head was in his cradled hands, raised up and tilted back toward him which must have agonized neck and arms and the muscles of her back as he moved her head up and down in time to his naked plunging hips. The Indio Gustavo held her legs apart at the ankles while the third man — an Anglo judging from his long thin matted hair — knelt to one side.
There was no way to know if the bird had been dead or alive when he began.
It was dead now.
Its head dangled in on a broken neck, wattles and comb and beak disappearing and reappearing again as he moved the hackles up inside her back and forth nearly up over the breastbone. He had the chicken gripped in both hands and when he looked up at Gustavo he was smiling.
"It is good," she said. "She will live through this. She does not resist. Soon, little sister. Soon."
I watched until the Anglo tired of this game and stood and walked over to where Gustavo was kneeling, dropped to his own knees in front of her, unbuttoned his trousers and covered her with his
body.
An hour is a very long time to wait when you're frightened and know in your heart that something very bad is coming toward you like distant hoofbeats. Something that will likely change your life forever if you manage to live through it at all. You can deal with that hour in many different ways according to your lights.
Elena's gaze never left what was happening outside the window, the tension in her body visible only in her white-knuckled grip on the Winchester. Mother lay silent on the bed like a man dead in his casket with his hands folded over his belly and his eyes shut. Hart stood leaning against the wall behind the door, his rifle in one hand pointed at the floor and his dice rolling soundlessly across the knuckles of the other.
I sat there facing away from the window and closed my eyes and tried to stop wishing for a drink, tried to relax, tried to think about better days long past, theatre and the opera, baseball games and taverns with the boys at Harvard and my first love, Jane Geary, who left me for a Yalie for godsakes, blue skies fishing the Charles from over on the Cambridge side. But all that came to me instead were images from the Mexican campaign, the twisted broken bodies and hacked limbs foul and wet and pustulent with gangrene, heads cannon-shot five feet away from the bodies they belonged to and the shrieking of the newly wounded and long last sighs of the dying.
An hour is quite some time to wait.
And it was almost that long before I heard her say, they're coming.
Mother had not been asleep of course. Or if he was, deserted it as quickly as an eagle deserts its eyrie on sighting its prey below. At the sound of her voice he was up off the bed and flanking the door across from Hart and once again I was aware of the ease and grace of the man despite his huge size. Hart turned to Elena.
"The back door's where?"
"Straight down the hall to the right."
"You still see your sister out there?"