Текст книги "Comanche Moon"

Автор книги: Larry McMurtry

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"No aces," he informed his companion. "That damn Lee Hitch stole every one of them. What good is a deck of cards that don't have no aces?" "You're just playing against yourself," Call pointed out. "Why do you need aces?" "You ain't a card-playing man and you wouldn't understand," Gus said. "I always knew Lee Hitch was a card cheat. I mean to give him a good licking once we get back to town." "I'd suggest hitting him with a post, if you want to whip him," Call said. "Lee Hitch is stout." As dusk approached they started to edge into the foothills and immediately began to see tracks. People had been on the move, some on horseback, some on foot, and all the tracks led out of the Sierra. Gus, who considered himself a tracker of high skill, jumped down to study the tracks but was frustrated by poor light.

"I could read these tracks if we'd got here a little earlier," he said.

"Let's keep going," Call said. "These tracks were probably just made by some poor people looking for a better place to settle." As they passed from the foothills into the first narrow canyon, the darkness deepened. Above them, soon, was a trough of stars, but their light didn't do much to illuminate the canyon. The terrain was so rocky that they dismounted and began to lead their horses. They had but one mount apiece and could not risk laming them. They entered an area where there were large boulders, some of them the size of small houses.

"There could be several pistoleros behind every one of those big rocks," Augustus pointed out.

"We might be surrounded and not know it." "I doubt it," Call said. "I don't think there's anybody here." When they had ridden into the Yellow Canyon before, there had been no army of pistoleros, just three or four riflemen, shooting from caves in the rock. Only their Apache scout had seen Ahumado lean out briefly and shoot Hector and the Captain. No one else saw him.

Ahumado was not like Buffalo Hump–he didn't prance around in front of his enemies, taunting them. He hid and shot; he was only seen by his enemies once he had made them his prisoner.

As they walked their horses deeper and deeper into the Sierra Perdida, Call became more and more convinced that they were alone. From years of rangering in dangerous territory he had gained some confidence: he believed he could sense the presence of hostiles before he saw them. There would be a sense of threat that could not be traced to any one element of the situation: the horses might be nervous, the birds might be more noisy; or the threat might be detectable by the absence of normal sounds. Even if there was nothing specific to point to, he would tense a little, grow nervous, and rarely was his sense of alarm without basis. If he felt there was about to be a fight, usually there would be a fight.

Now, in the canyon that led to the cliff of caves, he felt no special apprehension.

Few landscapes were more threatening, physically– Gus was right about the boulders being a good place for pistoleros to hide–but he didn't believe there were any pistoleros. The place felt empty, and he said so.

"He's gone," he said. "We've come too late, or else we've come to the wrong place." "It's the place we came to before, Woodrow," Augustus said. "I remember that sharp peak to the south. This is the same place." "I know that," Call agreed, "but I don't think anybody's here." "Why would they leave?" Gus asked. "They'd be pretty hard to attack, in these rocks." Call didn't answer–he felt perplexed.

They were only a few miles from the place where they expected to find the Captain, but they had heard nothing and seen nothing to indicate that anyone was there.

"Maybe we came all this way for nothing," he said.

"Maybe," Gus said. "We've had a lot of practice, going on expeditions for nothing.

That's how it's mostly turned out. You ride awhile in one direction and then you turn around and ride back." In the rocky terrain they had several times heard rattlesnakes sing, so many that Augustus had become reluctant to put his foot on the ground.

"We'll just get snakebit if we keep tramping on in the dark like this," he said. "Let's stop, Woodrow." "We might as well," Call agreed. "We can't be more than a mile or two from the place where the camp was. In the morning we can ride in and see what we see." "I hope I see a whore and a jug of tequila," Gus said. "Two whores wouldn't hurt, either. I'm so randy I might wear one of them down." Now that he didn't have to march through rattlesnakes, Augustus felt a little more relaxed. He immediately took off his boots and shook them out.

"What was in your boots?" Call inquired.

"Just my feet, but I like to shake my boots out regular," Gus said.

"Why?" "Scorpions," Gus replied. "They crawl around everywhere, down here in Mexico. One could sneak off a rock and go right in my boot.

They say if a Mexican scorpion bites you on your foot it will rot all your toes off." They hobbled the horses and kept them close by. There was no question of a fire, but they had a few scraps of cold venison in their saddlebags and ate that.

"Why would he ask for a thousand cattle if he was planning to leave?" Call asked.

"Maybe he didn't," Gus suggested. "That vaquero who showed up in Austin might have been lying, hoping to get a thousand free cattle for himself. I expect he just wanted to start a ranch." "If so, he was a bold vaquero," Call said. "He came right into Austin. We could have hung him." "The more scared I get, the more I feel like poking a whore," Augustus said.

"How scared are you?" Call asked.

"Not very, but I could still use a poke," Augustus said.

When he thought about the matter he realized that he had almost no apprehension, even though they were close to the Black Vaquero's camp.

"I know why I ain't scared, Woodrow," he said. "Long Bill ain't haunting us no more.

He was following along for a while but he's not here now." "Well, he never liked Mexico," Call observed. "Maybe that's why." "Either that or he just decided it was too far to travel," Augustus said.

It was after the old crippled woman began to bring him food that Scull's mind slipped.

At first the food she brought him was only corn– ears of young corn which she pitched down into the pit.

The kernels were only just forming on the corn, it was so young; but Scull ate it greedily, ripping off the husks and biting and sucking the young kernels for their milky juice. The cobs he threw in a pile. He had been so hungry he was about to eat the dead snakes; the corn and the cool water revived him; it was then, though, with his strength returning and his ankle not so sore, that he began to speak in Greek. He looked up at the old woman to thank her, to say "gracias," and instead reeled off a paragraph of Demosthenes that he had learned at the knee of his tutor, forty years ago. It was only later, in the night, when the pit was dark, that he realized what he had done.

At first his lapse amused him. It was a curious thing; he would have to discuss it with someone at Harvard, if he survived. He believed it was probably the eyelids. The sun, unobstructed, burned through forty years of memory and revealed, again, a boy sitting in a chilly room in Boston, a Greek grammar in his lap, while a tutor who looked not unlike Hickling Prescott put him through his verbs.

The next morning it happened again. He woke to the smell of tortillas cooking–then the old woman rolled up a handful and lowered them to him in the jug that she used to bring him water. Scull hopped up and began to quote Greek–one of Achilles' wild imprecations from the Iliad, he couldn't recall which book. The old woman did not seem startled or frightened by the strange ^ws coming from the filthy, almost naked man in the pit. She looked down at him calmly, as if it were a normal thing for a white man in a pit in the Mexican mountains to be spouting Greek hexameters.

The old woman didn't seem to care what language he spoke, English and Greek being equally unintelligible to her; but Scull cared.

It wasn't merely damage done by the sun that was causing him to slip suddenly into Greek; it was the Scull dementia, damage from the broken seed. His father, Evanswood Scull, intermittently mad but a brilliant linguist, used to stomp into the nursery, thundering out passages in Latin, Greek, Icelandic, and Old Law French, a language which it was said that he was the only man in America to have a thorough mastery of.

Now the aberration of the father had reappeared in the son, and at a most inconvenient time. In the night he suddenly woke up twitching in the brain and poured out long speeches from the Greek orators, speeches he had never been able to remember as a boy, an ineptness that caused him to be put back a form in the Boston Latin School. Yet those same speeches had been, all along, imprinted in his memory as if on a tablet–he had merely to look up at the old woman to ask for water to pour out, instead, a speech to the citizens of Athens on some issue of civic policy. He couldn't choke off these orations, either; his tongue and his lungs worked on, in defiance of his brain.

Scull began to try and curb himself; he needed to devise a way to get out of the pit before Ahumado came back, or, if not Ahumado, some other pistolero who would shoot him for sport. His tongue might soar with the great Greek syllables, but even that noble language wasn't going to raise him fifteen feet, to the pit's edge. He thought he might encourage the old woman to look around–maybe someone had left a length of rope somewhere. If she could find a rope and anchor it somehow, he felt sure he could pull himself up.

He was handicapped, though, by the insistent Scull malady. When he saw her old face above him he would try to make a polite request in Spanish, of which he knew a sufficiency, but before he could utter a single phrase in Spanish the Greek would come pouring out, a cascade, a flood, surging out of him like a well erupting, a torrent of Greek that he couldn't check or slow.

She'll think I'm a devil, he thought. I might yet get free if I could just choke off this Greek.

Xitla, for her part, leaned over the edge and listened to the white man as long as he wanted to talk. She could make no sense of the ^ws but the way he spoke reminded her of the way young men, heart-stricken by her beauty, had sung to her long ago. She thought the white man might be singing to her in a strange tongue he used for songs of love. He spoke with passion, his thin body quivering. He was almost naked; sometimes Xitla could see his member; she began to wonder if the white man was in love with her, as all men had been once. Since Ahumado had run over her with the horse and broken her back, few men had wanted to couple with her–a regret. Always Xitla had had men to couple with her; many of them, it was true, were not skilled at coupling, but at least they wanted her. But once the men knew that Ahumado hated her, they withdrew, even the drunken ones, for fear that he would tie them to the post and have Goyeto skin them. Xitla had not been ready to stop coupling when the men began to ignore her; she did not want to be like the other old women, who talked all day about the act that no one now wanted to do with them. Xitla had coupled happily with many men and thought she could still do so pleasurably if only she had a man with a strong member to be with.

The only possibility was the white man, but before any coupling could take place she would have to get the white man out of Ahumado's scorpion pit and feed him something better than the young green corn.

Xitla didn't know how she was going to do either thing until she remembered Lorenzo, a small caballero who was more skilled than anyone else at breaking horses. About a mile south of the cliff was a spot of bare, level ground, where Lorenzo took the young horses he worked with. There was a big post in the center of the clearing; often Lorenzo would leave the horses roped to the post for a day or two, so that they would have time to realize that he, not they, was in control. Lorenzo left a long rope tied to the snubbing post; perhaps it was still there. With such a rope she could help the white man get out of the pit.

It was a gamble, though. Xitla knew it would take her all day to hobble to the post and back.

There was an irritable old bear who lived somewhere down the canyon, and an old cougar too. If the old bear caught her he would probably eat her, which would put an end to her coupling, for sure.

Still, Xitla decided to try and secure the rope. With all the people gone the old bear might come into camp and eat her anyway. In the early morning she lowered the white man some tortillas and a jug of water and set out for the place where Lorenzo trained his horses.

By midday she regretted her decision. Her bent back pained her so badly that she could only hobble a few steps at a time. Xitla realized she could not go to the post and make it back to the camp by nightfall. The hunting animals would be out–the bear and the puma–if one of them smelled her they would kill her; the pumas in the great canyon were particularly bold. Several women had been attacked while waiting by the cliffso for their lovers to appear.

All day, Xitla crept on, stopping frequently to rest and ease her back. She did not want to be eaten by a puma or a bear. Long before she reached the spot where Lorenzo trained the horses the shadows had begun to fill the canyon.

When she got to the place Xitla saw at once that she had not travelled in vain: the rope that was used to restrain the young horses was still tied to the hitching post. It was a good long rope, as she had remembered. She could tie one end to the skinning post and throw the other end to the white man, so that he could pull himself up. Maybe he would continue to sing his strange love song to her; maybe his member would rise up with the song.

On the way back, though, hobbling slowly through the darkness with the coiled rope, Xitla felt a deep fear growing in her. At first she thought it was fear of the bear or the puma, but, as she crept along, pain from her back shooting down her leg, Xitla realized she had made a terrible mistake. She had allowed the white man's strange love song to drive judgment and reason out of her head; an old vanity and the memory of coupling had driven out her reason just as the shadows were driving the last light out of the canyon. Because she remembered a time when vaqueros would ride one hundred miles just to look on her beauty, she had forgotten that she was an old bent woman nearing the end of her time.

Now that Xitla was caught in the darkness, far from camp, she realized that she had been a fool.

What was it to couple with a man anyway? A little sweat, a jerk, a sigh. The pain shooting down her legs grew more intense. Now she had put herself at the mercy of Bear and Puma, that was bad; but now, as she crept along, a worse fear came, the fear of Ahumado. He was dying somewhere. Xitla knew he must have gone to the south, to their home, to seek the Tree of Medicines; but something was eating at his leg and he would not reach the tree. The pain in her leg came from Ahumado; perhaps Spider had bitten him, or Snake, or Scorpion. A poison was killing Ahumado; those who tasted the poison leaf died of poison when their time arrived. But Ahumado's time was Xitla's time too, and she would suffer it without even the protection of her little shelter at the camp. It was Ahumado who had made the prisoner show her his member and turn her head, Ahumado who had made the white man sing her love songs in the old tongue–perh the ^ws Scull used were in the language of the first human beings, ^ws which no one could resist. Because of it, she had been lured away, far from her little store of herbs and plants, things that might have helped her scare away Bear and Puma–all for a rope to save the white man, for a jerk and a sigh.

Ahumado had made it all happen, so that, as he was dying, a death more cruel than his own would come to Xitla.

She crawled faster, carrying the rope, although she knew well that such haste was foolish. Her fear grew so strong that she threw away the rope she had come so far to get. The rope was only another trick of Ahumado's; its loop was the loop of time that would close and catch her soon.

It was all a joke of Ahumado's, Xitla realized. He had put the white man in the pit to tempt her, to awaken her loins again, to draw her away from camp, where she had herbs and leaves to protect her. She had the black leaves that made a bad smell when burned–if she put them in the fire, then Puma would let her alone.

Puma did not like the smell the black leaves made when they were burned.

Xitla was only halfway back to camp when the night began to end. She had travelled slowly; often she had to stop and rest. Now the light of day was beginning to whiten the sky overhead; when the light sank into the canyon Xitla saw something near the canyon wall, not far ahead. At first she thought it was Puma. She yelled and yelled at it, hoping to scare it away. Puma would sometimes run from people who yelled.

It was not until the animal began to glide toward her that Xitla saw it wasn't Puma, it wasn't Bear: it was Jaguar. Around her neck she had a little red stone; the stone had hung around her neck all her life. The red stone was Parrot. Xitla clutched it in her hand as Jaguar came. Xitla knew that Jaguar would not stop for Parrot. Jaguar was coming to eat her.

But Ahumado too was dying–dying of poison somewhere to the south. He would not reach the Tree of Medicines. Xitla clutched the red stone tight and sent a message to Parrot. She wanted Parrot to find the body of Ahumado and peck out his eyes.

When Scull realized the old woman was no longer in the camp above him, he fell, for the first time, into raw panic, a kind of explosion of nerves that caused him to hop wildly around the floor of the pit, cursing and yelping out strange ^ws; he emitted cries and bursts of language as if he were farting fear out of his mouth.

He became afraid of himself; if he could have bitten himself to death at that time, he would have. He leapt on top of the mound of earth he had heaped over the three corpses and sprang at the wall of the pit several times, hoping to claw his way out of it by main force.

But it was hopeless. He could not leap out of the pit. When he exhausted himself he fell back, his eyes raw and stinging with the dirt that fell in them when he leapt at the walls of the pit.

Scull tried to calm himself but could not stifle his panic. He knew the old woman's absence might be only temporary; perhaps she had had to hobble a little farther than usual to gather the corn she brought him. Perhaps she had even journeyed to another village, to bring back someone who would help him out of the pit. He used all his force of mind to try and find a rational reason why the old woman's absence was temporary, but it was no use; the panic was violent and strong, so strong that he could not stop hopping around the pit, gibbering, mewling, cursing. There were many reasons why the old woman might only be gone temporarily, but Scull could not calm himself even for a second by thinking of them. He knew the old woman was dead, she would never be back, and he was alone, in a stinking pit in Mexico. His heart was beating against his ribs so hard he thought it might burst, and hoped it would; or that the arteries of his brain would pop and bring him a quicker death than starving, day by day, amid the scorpions and fleas –for fleas were one of the worst torments of the pit.

They were in his hair, his armpits, everywhere. If he sat still and focused he could see them hopping on his bare leg. From time to time, crazed, he tried to catch them and squeeze them to death, but they mostly eluded him.

With the old woman there Scull could manage a little hope, but now his nerves told him all was lost. The old woman was dead; he was stuck.

He knew he should resign himself, but for hours he was fired with panic, like a motor, a dynamo.

He jumped and jumped; it was as if lightning ran through him. He could not make himself stop jumping; he saw himself soaring with one miraculous jump all the way up, out of the pit. He jumped and gibbered all day, until dusk.

Then he collapsed. When the sunlight of a new day woke him, he was too drained to move.

He still had a little water, and a few scraps of food, but he didn't drink or eat, not for several hours; then, in a rush, he choked down all the food, drank all the water. Though he knew there would be no more he didn't care to ration what there was. He wanted to put sustenance behind him. He had, he thought, fought well; he had held out against torturous circumstances longer than many a man of his acquaintance would have, excepting only his second cousin Ariosto Scull. But the fight was over. He had seen many men–generals, captains, privates, bankers, widowers–arrive at the moment of surrender. Some came to it quickly, after only a short sharp agony; others held to their lives far longer than was seemly. But finally they gave up. He had seen it, on the battlefield, in hospital, in the cold toils of marriage or the great houses of commerce; finally men gave up. He thought he would never have to learn resignation, but that was hubris.

It was time to give up, to stop fighting, to wait for death to ease in.

Now he even regretted killing all the rattlesnakes. He should have left one or two alive. He could have provoked one or two to strike him; while not as rapid as the bite of the fer-de-lance that had killed his cousin Willy in a matter of seventeen minutes, three or four rattlesnake bites would probably be effective enough. Scull even went over and examined the dead snakes, thinking there might be a way to inject himself with the venom; it would ensure a speedier end. But he had beaten the snakes until their heads were crushed and their fangs broken; anyway, the venom must have long since dried up.

After his day of hopping and jumping, raging and gibbering, clawing at the walls and spewing fragments of old orations and Greek verse, Inish Scull settled himself as comfortably as he could against the wall of the pit and did nothing. He wished he had the will to stop his breath, but he didn't. Whether he wanted it or not, his breath came. It was a bright day; to look up at all with his lidless eyes was to invite the sun into his brain. Instead, he kept his head down. His hair was long enough to make a fair shade. He wanted to let go the habit of fighting, to die in calmness. He remembered again the Buddhist, sitting calmly in his orange robes by the Charles River. He had no orange robes, he was not a Buddhist, he was a Scull, Captain Inish Scull. He thought he had fought well in every war he had been able to find, but now was the day of surrender, the day when he had to snap the sword of his will, to cease all battling and be quiet, be calm; then, finally, would come the moment when his breath would stop.

Call and Gus were moving cautiously into the canyon of the Yellow Cliffso when a great bird rose suddenly from behind a little cluster of desert mesquite. Five more rose as well, great bald vultures, so close to the two men that their horses shied.

"I hope it wasn't the Captain they're eating," Augustus said. "It'd be a pity to come all this way and lose him to the buzzards." "It wasn't the Captain," Call said–through the thin bushes he glimpsed what was left of the body of an old woman. The vultures were reluctant to leave. Two lit on boulders nearby, while the shadows of the others flickered across the little clearing where the body lay.

"Must have been a cougar, to rip her up like that," Gus said. "Would a cougar do that?" "I guess one did," Call said. "See the tracks? He was a big one." They dismounted and inspected the area for a few minutes, while the vultures wheeled overhead.

"I've never seen a lion track that big," Augustus commented.

A rawhide rope lay not far from the corpse.

"Why would an old woman be way out here alone?" Gus wondered. "All she had was this rope. Where was she going?" "I guess we could pile some rocks on her," Call said. "I hate just to leave a body laying out." "Woodrow, she's mostly et anyway," Gus said. "Why spoil the buzzards' picnic?" "I know, but it's best to bury people," Call said. "I believe she was crippled–look at her hip." While they were heaping rocks on the corpse Call got an uneasy feeling. He couldn't say what prompted it.

"Something's here, I don't know what," he said, when they resumed their cautious ride into the canyon.

"It might be that cougar, hoping for another old woman," Gus said.

A few moments later, Augustus saw the jaguar. He was not as convinced as Call that Ahumado and his men had left, and was scanning the rocky ledges above them, looking for any sign of life. Probably if the old bandit had gone, he would have left a rear guard. He didn't want to be ambushed, as they had been the first time they entered the Yellow Canyon, and he took particular care to scan the higher ledges, where a rifleman could hide and get off an easy shot.

On one of the higher ledges he saw something that didn't register clearly with his eye. There was something there that was hard to see–he stopped his horse to take a longer look and when he did the jaguar stepped into full view.

"Woodrow, look up there," he said.

Call could not immediately see the jaguar, but then the animal moved and he saw him clearly.

"I think it's a jaguar," Augustus said.

"I never expected to see one." "I imagine that's what got the old woman," Call said.

For a moment, surprised, they were content to watch the jaguar, but their mounts were far from content. They put up their ears and snorted; they wanted to run but the rangers held them steady.

The jaguar stood on the rocky ledge, looking down at them.

"Do you think you can get off a shot?" Call asked. "If we don't kill it, it might get one of these horses, when it comes nightfall." Augustus began to lift his rifle out of the scabbard. Though both men were watching the jaguar, neither saw it leave. It was simply gone. By the time Augustus raised his rifle there was nothing to shoot.

"He's gone–it's bad news for the horses," Call said.

"I'll never forget seeing him," Augustus said. "He acted like he owned the world." "I expect he does–th world, at least," Call said. "I've never seen an animal just disappear like that." All afternoon, as they worked their way carefully through the narrow canyon, they often looked upward, hoping for another glimpse of the jaguar–but the jaguar was seen no more.

"Just because we don't see him don't mean he's not following us," Call said. "We have to keep the horses close tonight." Suddenly the canyon opened into the space they remembered from the time they were ambushed. The cliffso above them were pitted with holes and little caves. They stopped for a few minutes, examining the caves closely, looking for the glint of a rifle barrel or any sign of life.

But they saw nothing, only some eagles soaring across the face of the cliff.

"We ought to walk in, but we can't leave the horses," Call said. "That jaguar might be following us." "I think this camp is deserted," Augustus said. "I think we came too late." They rode slowly into the deserted camp, a sandy place, empty, windy. Only a ring of cold campfires and a few scraps of tenting were left to indicate that people in some numbers had once camped there.

Besides the tenting and the campfires there was one other thing that suggested the presence of humans: the skinning post, with a crossbar at the top, from which a badly decomposed, mangled, and half-eaten corpse still hung.

"Oh my Lord," Augustus said. He could barely stand to look at the corpse, and yet he couldn't look away.

"They say Ahumado had people skinned, if he didn't like them," Call said. "I supposed it was just talk, but I guess it was true." "I ain't piling no rocks on that," Gus said emphatically. The bloated thing hanging from the crossbar skinning post bore little resemblance now to anything human.

"I'll pass myself, this time," Call said.

He did not want to go near the stinking thing on the post.

In the pit, not far from where the two rangers stood, Inish Scull had slipped into a half sleep. Many times he had dreamed of rescue, so many that now, when he heard the voices of Call and McCrae, in his half sleep, he discounted the ^ws. They were just more dream voices; he would not let them tempt him into hope.

"We ought to search these caves," Call said.

"They might have had the Captain here. If we could find a scrap of his uniform or his belt or something at least it would be a thing we could take to his wife." "You look in the caves, Woodrow," Gus said. "I'll stand guard, in case that jaguar shows up." "All right," Call said.

As Call started for the largest of the caves at the base of the cliff, Augustus noticed the pit.

Because of the shadows stretching out from the pit it had been hard to see from where they entered the camp.

Curious, Augustus took a step or two closer–a stench hit him, but a stench less powerful than that which came from the swollen black flesh hanging from the skinning post. He stepped to the edge of the pit–f the stench it seemed to him that the pit might be a place where Ahumado tossed his dead. It could be that Captain Scull's body might be there; or what was left of it.

He looked into the pit but did not at first see the small, almost naked man sitting with his head bent down in the shadows near one wall of the pit.

Augustus saw some dead snakes, a broken cage, and a mound of dirt with the dirt not piled thickly enough to shut out the stench of death. He was about to turn away, disappointed, when the man sitting against the wall suddenly rolled two white lidless eyes up at him from beneath a long dirty mat of hair.

"Oh Lord! Woodrow .

Woodrowffwas Gus yelled.

Call, almost at the entrance to the first cave, turned at once and came running back.