House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“I think you’d better get out of here, gringo.”

“I appreciate your advice. I just wondered about the man you brought in. I think I’ve talked to him before. He seemed like an ordinary fellow to me, not a bandito.”

“He’s an informer.” The soldier closed the bolt and snapped the firing pin on an empty chamber. He returned the rifle, staring into Hackberry’s face. “An informer for the gringos is what he is, gringos like you.”

“The man lives in a cave and eats insects. I doubt he’s taken a bath since Noie’s flood. Why be harsh on an afflicted man?”

The soldier stood up from his chair and stretched. “Maybe we can arrange for you to take his place,” he said.

HACKBERRY REMOUNTED HIS horse and crossed the river on a wood bridge that was roped together in sections and seemed about to break apart in the swollen current. The trail was lined with cactus that bloomed with red and yellow flowers; he tried to concentrate on the flowers and the grass growing from the humps of sand and not look back at the village. What good could he do there? He was not the Creator. When you ventured south of the Rio Grande, you learned to accept people as they were or you would be quickly undone by them. Mexico was not a country; it was a state of mind that never changed and was responsible for the blood on many a stone altar. The man who blinded himself to that fact deserved whatever happened to him.

He was willing to share his food with you, as paltry and stomach-churning as it was.

“Shut up,” he said to himself.

His captors are jackals. You know what they’re capable of.

“They’ll probably turn him loose. He’s of no value to them.”

You know better.

“Have it your way,” he said to whomever.

He turned off the trail and tethered his horse inside a grove of cottonwoods. The morning was cold and smelled of sage and pinyon trees and creosote and the fresh scat of wild animals. He removed the spyglass from his saddlebags and sighted across the top of a sandstone rock at the back of the jail. A man with shackles on his ankles was emptying two buckets of feces into an open ditch. Hackberry focused the spyglass on the barred window in the back wall but could not see into the shadows. He collapsed the spyglass and sat down with his back against the rock and shut his eyes. Then he opened them and looked at the sky. What the hell am I supposed to do?

His question remained unanswered. A tiny stream ran through the cottonwoods. He drank from it and sat back in the shade and listened to the wind rustling in the leaves overhead. What a grand day it was. He wanted to shed his life as a snake sheds its skin. Of all the iniquity of which human beings were capable, was not betrayal the one hardest to undo? When he experienced these thoughts, he wanted to weep.

Instead, he again aimed the spyglass at the jail. This time he had no doubt what was taking place with the prisoners. Five of them had filed out of the building, their hands bound behind them. A soldier with a hammer was clanging a large iron bell by the side of the jail to bring the villagers into the street. The last prisoner in the line was Huachinango. The prisoners were motionless, staring at the adobe wall pocked with gunfire, almost all the holes roughly at the same height.

The priest from the mud-walled church was talking with the soldier Hackberry had let examine his rifle. The priest was obviously pleading. The soldier lifted up a horse quirt and poked him in the chest with it, pushing him backward, jabbing him in the ribs and spine, herding him as he would a hog.

Hackberry swung up on his horse and leaned forward in the saddle, bringing the heels of his boots hard into the horse’s ribs, the Mauser balanced across the pommel. Just as he turned down the main street, his horse heaving under him, he heard someone shout “¡Fuego!” and saw five Mexican soldiers fire their rifles chest-high into three ­prisoners who were standing blindfolded against the wall. Their faces seemed to shudder in the smoke, then they went straight down, like puppets whose strings had been cut.

THE VILLAGERS WERE bunched across the street from the adobe wall, afraid to look at the dead and afraid to look away from the soldier conducting the executions. The men held their hats in their hands; the women had covered their heads with shawls, as though they were attending Mass. The villagers’ craggy, work-seamed faces resembled teakwood carvings. The soldier in charge was explaining to them why the executions were taking place and why the villagers must remember the event they were witnessing during the three-day Festival of the Dead.

The soldier assured them the prisoners were not loyal and good campesinos, as were the villagers; the prisoners were traitors and deserters and marijuanistas and informers and tools of the Americans. Had the villagers not heard of the gringo called Patton, the American officer who tied bodies on the fenders of his motorcar? The gringo about to die, Huachinango, was not a harmless drunk but a spy who spat on the cross and gave up the names of patriots to American killers. Today should be one of joy, not mourning, he said. Today these enemies of the Mexican people would be covered over in the anonymous graves they had earned.

Hackberry held his rifle aloft with one hand as he got down from the saddle. “I’m here on a peaceful mission. I have no quarrel with you,” he said. “The one you call Huachinango lives in the desert because he’s deranged. He’s a poor man, like the campesinos. The last thing this fellow wants to do is hurt anybody.” He repeated his statement in Spanish.

“You are a very troublesome man,” the soldier said. “Would you introduce yourself? I didn’t catch your name earlier.”

“I didn’t give it. Actually, I’m down here prospecting talent for William Cody’s Wild West show and would like to interview you and others about that possibility.”

“Then you are famous? A man of the people?”

“That’s why Mr. Bill gave me this job,” Hackberry said. “How about it, amigo? Cut this fellow loose, and you and me can talk business.”

“Let me see your rifle once more.”

“Yes, sir, just don’t snap the firing pin on an empty chamber, if you don’t mind. It tends to mess up the spring.”

“I will take care not to harm your rifle, even though I suspect it was taken off a Mexican soldier. You don’t have a pistol?”

“Not on me.”

“Why did you tell me you were a friend of General Huerta? Why did you tell me such a ridiculous lie?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it a lie. I met the man. I met Emiliano Zapata, too. You can ask him.”