HACKBERRY SADDLED HIS horse and rode down the far side of the ridge, leaving behind the man who had no name. Within hours, he found himself talking to his horse, a habit he had seen only among prospectors and solitary travelers in the Great American Desert, many of the latter longing for a saloon or a straddle house or the tinkling sounds of a piano to forget that Cain’s mark did not go away easily.
By sunset, when he saw a village on the edge of a milky-brown river, he was light-headed with hunger and aching from his injuries and the wood-slat military saddle he’d pulled off a Mexican soldier’s horse. He dismounted and walked into the village, his Mauser rifle slung upside down on his shoulder. Then he realized he was witnessing one of those moments that caused people to call Mexico a magical land. The sun had dipped below the hills, but the bottom of the sky remained blue, and the rest of it was mauve-colored and sprinkled with stars. As he entered the main street, he saw people beating drums and dancing with bells on their ankles and wrists and singing in a language he didn’t understand. The children carried baskets of marigolds and chrysanthemums and placed them on an altar by a stone well where the dirt streets of the village converged. Some of the adults wore death masks; others carried poles hung with skeletons made from carved sticks that were painted white and clicked like bones. The air was filled with smoke and the smell of firecrackers and hissing pinwheels and bottle rockets popping in the sky.
The Day of the Dead, he thought. Is it that late in the season? Do I face the close of another year without the touch of my son’s hand, without the forgiveness that I’ve purchased with years of bitterness and remorse?
Once again, his thoughts had shifted to himself. He wanted to hide himself in a bottle of busthead and sleep for a week.
In the torchlight he saw an adobe wall pockmarked by gunfire, a jail where two uniformed soldiers with rifles lounged in a breezeway, a blind woman roasting unshucked corn in a fire, children running through pooled rainwater, a priest in a cassock watching the revelers from the entrance of a mud-walled church, a five-seat merry-go-round pulled in a slow circle by a donkey. Hackberry tilted his hat low on his brow and walked his horse past the jail, trying to keep the dancers between the so
ldiers and the Mexican cavalry rig on his horse.
He went down an alley and tethered his horse by an outhouse behind a cantina and untied his saddlebags from the horse’s rump and entered the cantina through the back door, the rifle still on his shoulder. The light from the oil lamps was greasy and yellow, the cuspidors splattered with tobacco juice, the towels in the rings under the bar’s apron grimed almost black. The prostitutes were either middle-aged fat women or teenage girls whose teeth had already gone bad and who sat demurely by the small dance floor as though they were not sure why they were there. The fat women were garrulous and loud and obscene and drunk or deranged, and openly grabbed or fondled men’s genitalia as part of the entertainment. Hackberry took the leather coin pouch from his saddlebags and set it on the bar. The bartender pointed to a sign on the wall. It read NO SE PERMITEN ARMAS.
Hackberry handed the bartender his rifle. “Whiskey con una cerveza, por favor,” he said.
“Un bebedor serio,” the bartender said. He had the face of a funeral director and wore a starched white shirt buttoned at the throat without a tie and a black coat that could have been stripped from a scarecrow.
“También quiero un filete,” Hackberry said.
“Como usted desee. ¿Quiere una chica?”
Hackberry ignored the question and gazed at the three guitarists playing in the shadows.
“¿No le gustan chicas, hombre?” the bartender said.
“I came here for the philosophic discussion.”
“¿Que dijo?”
“¿Quienes son los soldados en la cárcel?”
“Son los protectores del país. Son los soldados de Huerta. Son los guardianes de los prisioneros.”
“Huerta’s jackals?”
The bartender shook his head in warning. “No hables asi aquí. Los prisioneros son comunistas.”
“You’ve got Karl Marx in the jail, have you?”
The bartender’s eyes were pools of black ink. He set a glass of beer on the bar and poured whiskey in another. Hackberry counted out his coins and pushed four of them toward the bartender with the heel of his hand. “Salud,” he said.
He sat at a table and waited on his steak. As at all saloons and brothels and gambling houses he had ever visited, the mind-set and conduct of the clientele changed only in terms of degree. The meretricious nature of the enterprise and the self-delusion of the victims made him wonder at the inexhaustibility of human folly. Gandy dancers, drovers, saddle tramps, gunmen for hire, prospectors, wranglers, drummers from the East walked through the door of their own volition and allowed themselves to be fleeced until they were broke or until “old red-eye,” as they called the early sun, broke on the horizon.
But what of his own history? Somehow he had always translated his sybaritic past into memories of beer gardens with brass bands and strings of Japanese lanterns under the stars, or Kansas dance halls and hurdy-gurdy saloons where the girls were young and as fresh as flowers, where a young cowboy could be forgiven for temporarily forgetting his upbringing. The alcohol that boiled in his blood was simply a means of satisfying the pagan that lived in everyone. The men who died in front of his guns were part of an Arthurian tale, not the result of a besotted and childish man’s self-glorification.
Paradoxically, this kind of introspection took him to one place, a whiskey-soaked excursion into a long black tunnel lit by the fires burning inside him, where he never knew what lay beyond the next bend, where the viscera governed all his thoughts, and violence and enmity always had their way. True, his adversaries were deserving of their fate and their loss was the world’s gain. That was not the problem. The problem was the secret knowledge about himself that Hackberry carried in his breast and never confessed to anyone: Had he not worn a badge, he would have ended his days like the Daltons and the Youngers and Black Jack Ketchum and Bill Kilpatrick and Frank James and all the other bad men who closed down their act on the scaffold or in a weed patch or as caricatures in sideshows.
He remembered eating the steak in the cantina, the blood mixing with the darkness of the gravy as he sliced it from the bone. He remembered draining a whole bottle of whiskey, and he remembered a girl sitting on his lap while she filled her mouth with his beer and pushed it into his. Maybe he went into a crib with her, maybe not. When he awoke in the middle of the night, he was lying in a pole shed full of manure and moldy hay, his saddlebags under his head, the Mauser rifle cradled in his arms, his throat flaming. He cupped water out of a trough and vomited, the stars blazing coldly in a black sky. He went back into the shed and passed out, too weak and sick to check or even care about the contents of his saddlebags, his coat pulled over his head.
He had a dream of a kind he had never experienced. In it, he saw the woman named Beatrice DeMolay standing outside the shed, still wearing the dark blue dress with the ruffled white collar. She knelt beside him, placing her palm on his forehead. He tried to get up, but she held him down, her eyes never leaving his.
Why are you here? he asked.
Her lips moved silently.
I don’t know what you’re saying. Are you in trouble?
She leaned down and placed her mouth on his. He could feel his manhood rising.