Crossers Page 7

  She pulled up and drew her pistol and pointed at a rock on top of a low hill maybe fifty yards off and said, “I want you to hit that rock like this.” She shot, and the dust flew off that rock, which wasn’t no bigger than a basket. It is right hard to hit a target that size from that distance with a pistol when you are standing up, much less from the saddle, like Ynez done. Ben drew the Luger, and I aimed my revolver, and just as we were about to fire, what should come loping up over the hill but a coyote. Ynez yelled, “Shoot him!” I let go and hit a good yard short, and the coyote took off a-running. Ben got off the two rounds left in the Luger, and the coyote tumbled ass over teakettle and laid down dead. Ynez looked at him in this admiring way that made me jealous.

  “Bueno,” she said. “Tomorrow night we will find out how well you fight. There is a detachment of Díaz’s soldiers in Santa Cruz. We are going to attack them.”

  Ben said he knew Santa Cruz, had been there many times. Ynez asked him how well he knew it, and Ben said he was familiar with every street—it wasn’t much of a town.

  “Good,” said Ynez. “You will be at my side and help me direct the company. Our mission will be to seize the plaza.”

  I got a little bit more jealous, and as we was riding back to the hacienda, I thought I’d talk to her some, in the way of getting her interested in me. You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, but when I was young, I never had no problem acquiring female companionship. I asked her where she’d learned to ride and shoot, and she told me that her husband had taught her. Well, it kind of dampened my hopes to hear that she was married, until she said that her husband was dead, killed a couple of months before in a battle, and she’d taken over the company he commanded and so become a soldadera. Well, my hopes went up again but got the wet-blanket treatment in the next minute when she said, “I loved Luis more than my own life, and now I love his memory.” So now I was jealous of a dead man. I wanted to say that a memory can’t love you back and that I could, but I kept my mouth shut.

  Losing her husband had put that tragical look on her face, and the way he died lit the fire behind it. He’d been captured by federal troops, and they strangled him with barbed wire and left his body for the buzzards and the varmints. Ynez hardly recognized him when she found him. “I hate them,” she said. “I hate them all,” and then she let out a string of cuss words I would not repeat to you in English or Spanish.

  Back at the hacienda she gave us our red sashes from out of a chest that was full of them. We put ’em on and kind of strutted around, like we’d just taken Mexico City. Along about late afternoon Ynez and the other company commander, fella nicknamed El Agave, shouted orders for the battalion to muster in formation.

  Colonel Bracamonte come out of the house with his uniform all buttoned up and wearing a sword with two fellas beside him. One of them called out, “¡Batallón! ¡Atención!” Six fellas from our company fell out of ranks and lined up a few yards in front of the wall that surrounded the courtyard, holding their rifles alongside their legs. And there’s my Ynez standing next to them. Lord, it was to be an execution, and that’s when I felt this excitement, except it wasn’t excitement exactly, there was something else mixed up with it that I don’t have the word for … Dread, I reckon. Excitement mixed up with dread, so I couldn’t tell the one from the other.

  The colonel, stiff and soldierlike, walked over to the firing squad and said to bring the prisoners out. I hadn’t noticed before that there was a fella standing guard by the door to this tiny chapel. The guard went inside, and him and a couple of others dragged out two young men with their hands tied behind their backs and a priest and a woman of fifty-odd, real tall and wearing a frilly dress and high-button shoes like she was going to a dance. I will never forget that woman. She had this dignified way about her. Dignified and haughty, too. You could have thought she was the queen of Spain herself. Well, turns out it was Doña Álvarez and her sons.

  The priest was reading from his prayer book and made the sign of the cross over Álvarez’s sons as the guards stood them against the wall and put blindfolds on them. Some more guards was holding on to Doña Álvarez and the padre, I guess to make sure they didn’t interfere with the execution. That woman was staring at the firing squad like she could have killed them with her look. One thing I remember was the light. It was late in the afternoon, and the light hit the pale yellow wall and made it look like it was made of buttermilk. I don’t know why that sticks in my mind.

  Colonel Bracamonte read something about Álvarez’s sons being guilty of crimes against the Revolution, and then he raised his sword and ordered the firing squad to take aim. Doña Álvarez shouted out, “¡Valentía, mis hijos!” One of them was having trouble being brave, shaking like he had the palsy.

  I am not ashamed to tell you that I shut my eyes when the guns went off. I just couldn’t look at them two fellas, no older than me and Ben, shot down like that, no matter what crimes they’d committed. When I opened my eyes again, I saw blood spattered on the wall and the chips the bullets made and the two bodies laying in the dust and the woman I was in love with stand over them and give each one a finishing shot in the head. Doña Álvarez screamed that she was a murderous bitch and that all of us was murderers and criminals and butchers. She got free of the fella that was holding on to her and knelt down by her dead sons and kept yelling, “¡Puta homicida! ¡Asesinos! ¡Criminales!” Ynez laid a hand on her shoulder and stroked her hair and bent down to say something to her—I couldn’t hear what but figured she was trying to give her some words of comfort, if there was any comfort you could give a woman who’d just seen what she had—and then Ynez stepped back and shot Doña Álvarez in the back of the head. It happened so quick I didn’t have time to shut my eyes, so I saw this spray fly out from the front of her head, and her thrown forward onto whatever was left of her face, which couldn’t have been much.

  Now it was the padre’s turn to start carrying on. He hollered out that every last one of us was gone to burn in the fires of hell—the last thing he ever got to say. Colonel Bracamonte shot him down. Come to find out later that the colonel hated priests more than anything. A donkey cart was brought up and the bodies loaded into it, and as it was being driven out the courtyard to wherever the graves was to be dug, Bracamonte turned to us and said, “¡Mueran todos los Diazistas! ¡Viva la revolución! ¡Viva Madero!” The battalion shouted the same words back at him, and while all that shouting was a-going on, Ben turned to me and said, “T.J., we have thrown in with a mighty rough bunch,” and I started to laughing. Couldn’t stop myself, couldn’t figure out what the hell I was laughing at.

  Around sundown the revolucionarios had them a big fiesta. They started in to playing these revolutionary songs, corridos de la revolución. “La Adelita” is the one I remember best—it was about a woman a soldier falls in love with.

  I wasn’t in much of a fiesta mood, owing to what I’d seen that day, but when I heard the second verse, I got all achy inside. Si Adelita quisiera ser mi esposa. That’s what I wanted—to make Ynez my wife and dress her in satin. I’d watched her kill a woman in cold blood, and I was still in love with her. I couldn’t make no sense of it.

  Well, I had plenty of rivals for her affections. I’d say half the battalion was looking at her all moon-eyed while they sang that song. She was their Adelita. I asked her to dance, and she said yes, but she wouldn’t let me hold her close. I asked her how come she shot Doña Álvarez. She looked up at me with that mournful face and said it was because she felt sorry for her, that she wanted to spare her the pain of living out her life with the memory of her sons and her husband. The priest had forgiven the boys their sins, so they was in heaven now, and Doña Álvarez was with them. You know, if I hadn’t been raised up in Mexico, I would have thought that a right strange reason to kill somebody.

  Some fella tried to cut in on me, and I told him más tarde, muchacho. I had something to say to Ynez and I said it. I was in love with her. She laughed. I think that was the only time I ever s
aw her laugh. I’ve got to ask you to pardon my language again. Ynez had a foul mouth and said that I wasn’t in love with her, that all I wanted was, you know, chingar, fuck, because that was all gringos wanted from Mexican women. She let go of me and walked off, but damn if I didn’t see just a little bit of interest in them black eyes of hers.

  The fiesta went on till Bracamonte ordered everyone to hit the hay. Me and Ben got our bedrolls and stretched out next to our horses. He laid his head on his saddle and was snoring inside of thirty seconds, but I had too many mixed-up thoughts buzzing through my head. I poked him in the ribs and told him I couldn’t get no shut-eye. He cussed me and said that I might have the decency to let him get some. I said that the executions didn’t seem right somehow. Ben reckoned they wasn’t, but this here was a war. He was a hard man, Ben was, harder than me, he’d got himself accustomed to bloodshed somehow. Then he sat up and got out his makings and rolled one for himself and one for me and we smoked and he thought for a spell and said that these Messican revolutionaries—I never could get him to say “Mexican” the right way—appeared to be folks long on justice and short on mercy, and that we had best keep that in mind. I told him that Ynez had killed Doña Álvarez out of mercy so she could be in heaven with her boys and her husband.

  Ben thought that was the most damn fool thing he’d ever heard, and finally I got it off my chest, that I was in love with Ynez. Now that, said Ben, was even more of a damn fool thing. Ben was funny when it come to women. One time when we was in Mexico on a cattle-buying trip, I’d drug him over to a cantina in Nogales where we could line us up a couple of señoritas, and he wanted nothing to do with the ladies of the night, nor the day neither. Said he wasn’t gone to do that with no gal till he was married. I argued with him that a wife would expect her husband to know what the hell he was doing and how could he if he hadn’t some practice. And he said he’d learned to walk without practice. I reminded him that he’d crawled first, but he didn’t see my logic. Anyway, he snubbed out his cigarette and told me to stop thinking with what was between my legs and to get some sleep. We were a-going into battle inside of twenty-four hours, and if I didn’t have a clear head I might get myself killed.

  I damn near did.

  We got rousted out at dawn. First order of business was looting the hacienda’s storerooms for flour and beans and coffee and whatever else might come in handy. While all that was going on, a crowd of peons come marching down the ranch road and gathered outside the walls and asked to see the jefe. These peons raised corn and alfalfa and other crops on the Santa Barbara, and they wanted to know what was to become of them now that the rancho was under new ownership.

  Colonel Bracamonte stood up on a box and told them that the rancho sure enough did have new owners and they were it. Bracamonte threw them a big white grin under that big black mustache, but them peons just stared at him without a word. It took him a while to get the idea across, but finally some of them got it, so when Bracamonte called out Viva la revolución, they shouted it back at him.

  The battalion left for Santa Cruz middle of the afternoon. The plan was to make a night attack on the federal garrison. That country down there didn’t look no different than in Arizona, grasslands and arroyos and mesquite and prickly pear and so damn many rocks you thought that God didn’t rest on the seventh day but made rocks and dumped ’em all right there. We rode cross-country, to make sure nobody could alert Díaz’s troops that we were a-coming. Our company was in the lead, with the colonel and his aides leading us and the Yaquis maybe half a mile ahead as scouts. Sometimes, coming over a rise, we could see them, loping along on foot with their bows and arrows, them Indians could have kept up that pace all day and had enough left over to have them a dance at night. Behind us was the donkey carts and burros, and the camp follower gals walking alongside. I calculate that altogether there was about a hundred fifty, sixty of us. Ben and me were in high spirits, this was what we’d joined up for, not to watch executions. And Ben was tickled pink because he’d found some ammunition at the hacienda for that fancy Luger.

  The next part of my story is hard to tell, but I will tell it.

  When we came to the Santa Cruz River, Colonel Bracamonte called a halt to rest his soldiers and water the horses. We were gone to wait there till sundown and make the rest of the march under cover of darkness. Me and Ben rolled us some smokes and were taking it easy. I remember looking downriver and seeing the Colonel huddled with Ynez and his other officers and some Yaqui scouts.

  Then Ynez come up and said the colonel wanted to see us. That ain’t exactly right. She was looking at Ben when she said it, but Ben being my compadre, I decided I should go along too. When we got there, we saw a rough kind of map of Santa Cruz drawed in the dirt, and the colonel said to Ben that he’d heard from Ynez that Ben knew the town and asked if it was accurate. Ben told him it wasn’t and drawed a correct map. The colonel looked at it and then he switched from Spanish to English. “I order you to shoot that man” was what he said, and made a kind of movement with his head at a scout the name of Apache Juan. Ben and me looked at him like we hadn’t heard right, so he repeated his order, and Ben said, “What the hell for?”

  Bracamonte’s face turned to stone. “Because I have ordered you to.”

  Ben said that he wouldn’t shoot nobody without a good reason, and being told to do it, colonel or no colonel, wasn’t a good reason, it was no reason at all.

  I could tell no one had ever talked to Bracamonte like that, but he held his temper and told Ben something like that he’d been suspicious of Apache Juan from the minute he’d joined up and now his suspicions were confirmed because he’d asked Apache Juan a lot of questions and wasn’t satisfied with his answers.

  I have got to hand it to Ben. It was plain to him and me that we was being put to the test, that if he didn’t do as ordered, it was gone to go hard for both of us. But Ben said he still hadn’t heard a good reason—if the colonel didn’t like the answers that fella gave, then he should shoot him himself.

  Bracamonte stared at him for what felt like an hour, and Ben stared right back, one hard man to another. For a second there I thought the colonel was gone to do what Ben said, then turn his pistol on us. But he grinned cold like and more or less said that us gringos were a pain in the ass and … Well, I can’t remember his exact words, but they went something like this: “I have determined that this man is a traitor and a spy. He gave us wrong information about the town. He is going to desert us tonight and warn the federals of our approach. You have your reason, señor, now follow my orders.”

  Ben hesitated just the littlest bit—it was right unusual for him to hesitate—and looked over at Apache Juan like he was trying to judge for his own self if the fella was a spy and a traitor. I shot first. I was pretty handy with a pistol, but I’d never shot a man in my life, and my hand was shaking so bad when I drew my Colt that it threw my aim off. I winged him in the leg. He spun around and grabbed his leg, and right then Pow! Ben fired the Luger, and Apache Juan dropped like a bale from a hayloft. He was still twitching when some other soldiers took his boots.

  So now Ben and me was executioners, too. We’d come for gold and glory and so far hadn’t seen none of either. The past fifty-some years, I have asked myself a hundred times over, Why did you shoot that man? And near as I can figure, it was because I knew Apache Juan was a doomed man no matter what and I just wanted to get it over with. And Ben? He never did say what was a-going on in his mind, and I never asked. He wasn’t one to explain himself anyway. Once he done a thing, it was done, and there was no looking back.

  Bracamonte said “Bueno,” that was all, but you could tell his opinion of us, and Ynez’s too, had changed. They trusted us now. Helluva way to earn their trust. So the sun went down, and we left Apache Juan for the coyotes and the buzzards.

  The battalion rode out single file through the cottonwoods alongside the river. There wasn’t a moon, and riding under those big trees was like riding through a tunnel with a blindfold o
n. Must have been close to midnight when the word come back in whispers to dismount. A few men were left behind to picket and guard the horses. The rest of us moved out afoot. The river made a bend between us and Santa Cruz, and we waded across it. Coming out from under the cottonwoods was like going from night to day, on account of our eyes had got so used to the pitch black. The town was dark, not a light burning anywhere, but we could make out some houses and the bell towers of the church. The colonel with El Agave’s company split off to circle around to the west side of the town. They were supposed to take the federal troops’ barracks. With Ben as a guide, Ynez led our company up the main street toward the plaza. Truth to tell, I thought I was gone to wet my pants from being scared and keyed up at the same time.

  Somebody a couple of streets over, where the first company was, shouted. Couldn’t hear what exactly, but we heard the gunshot clear enough. Found out later it was a federal sentry who’d spotted El Agave’s men. They shot back, then there was more yelling, then more shooting, a whole lot of it, and stray rounds cracked over our heads like little whips. Ynez yelled, “Line of skirmishers, left!” Being ignorant of soldiering, Ben and me didn’t know what the hell that meant, but we saw our company shaking itself out from single file into a firing line, so we got the idea. What folks these days would call on-the-job training. “¡Adelante!” Ynez ordered, and we started to advance on the plaza. The church was off to our left, a courthouse directly across, and a bandstand in the middle. All of a sudden I heard a noise the likes of which I’d never heard before. The federals had them a machine gun on the bandstand! Would have wiped us out if it hadn’t been for two things—the gunners couldn’t see us too clear, and they was seven, eight feet off the ground on the bandstand, so the rounds flew high. Some of our boys shot back. A few of them, like Francisco, could handle a gun, but most, even though Ynez said she wouldn’t have no man who didn’t shoot like her, could not have hit a fat bull’s ass with a canoe paddle. They seemed to be shooting every which way but straight up in the air. Ben yelled to them to aim at the muzzle flashes of the machine gun. The machine gunners got the same idea and shot at our muzzle flashes. A couple of men got hit. Then I saw Ynez go down, flat on her face, under a tree at the edge of the plaza. Without thinking, I ran over to her to carry her out of the line of fire. The machine gunners must have seen me. Anyway, they fired in my direction and chopped chunks out of the tree trunk maybe a foot over my head. Told you I’d damn near got myself killed on account of that woman. She screamed at me, “Get down, you fool!” She hadn’t been shot! That sure was one time I didn’t mind getting called a fool, and I flung myself down right next to her.