HACKBERRY WENT NO more than five hundred yards farther up the incline, then turned the horse down an arroyo onto a flat bench that looked out upon the village and the milky-brown river and the low hills in the distance and a volcano from which a thin column of smoke rose into a turquoise sky. “You’ve been a loyal horse, and I know you’d like to skedaddle for Texas, but there’s a mean huckleberry down there in the cantina we just cain’t let slide. No, sir. What’s your opinion on that?”
His horse looked at him, one ear forward and one ear back.
“Those are exactly my thoughts,” Hackberry said. “It’s not honorable and it’s not Christian. You do not let the wicked become the example for the innocent and uninitiated. Is that the way you see it?” He patted the horse on the neck. “Forget my teasing. It’s about time we give you a name. How about Traveler? That was the name of Robert E. Lee’s horse. Look at that sunset, Traveler. The sky is on fire in the west, and the rest of it is as green and vast as the ocean. Don’t let anybody tell you there’s no God, old pal.”
But he could not hold on to his ebullient mood. The curse of his family, the one that caused him to curve his palm around the grips of an imaginary revolver in his sleep, was always with him. Sometimes his eyes did not go with the rest of his face, and those who knew him well would separate themselves from him. His mother had been a loving woman, his father sometimes stern and inflexible but fair in his business dealings and protective of children. Some in the family had a bad seed, some didn’t. Those who had it found or created situations that allowed them to do things others preferred not to hear about.
Hackberry hadn’t simply knocked John Wesley Hardin out of the saddle and stomped his face in. He’d nailed him to the bed of a wagon with chains and kicked him between the buttocks with the point of his boot and thrown him headlong into the sheriff’s office, hoping all the while that Hardin would fight back and get his hand on a weapon so Hackberry could finish the job and purge the earth of a man whose merciless glare reminded him of his own.
As the sky turned from green to purple, he peered through his spyglass and saw the executioner, Miguel Ordoñez, and his five compatriots exit the cantina and ride single-file through the revelers and along the banks of the river, which they crossed on the wood bridge held together by rope. The executioner was slumped in the saddle, half asleep, a corked bottle of greenish liquid propped between his thigh and scrotum. The line of six horses disappeared from view, in the shadows of a hill. Hackberry closed the spyglass and followed.
He watched them cross a dry lake bed that cracked under the horses’ feet and left a long line of serpentine tracks entwined like a braided scar across the landscape. They camped at the foot of a hill, among brush and cottonwoods, and built a fire around which they squatted as their simian ancestors might have. One man left the firelight and went into the bushes to defecate. His friends acknowledged the event by arching dirt clods down on his head.
Hackberry tied his horse to a bush and pulled the .44 double-action revolver and the hatchet and the bowie knife from the saddlebags, and worked his way uphill in the dark, until he was above the campsite and could look down on it without silhouetting against the stars. Six to one, he thought. Well, it could be worse. Then he added, as he was wont with his thoughts, Not really.
Two of the soldiers had gone to sleep on bedrolls. Three others w
ere listening to a joke Miguel the executioner was telling while he sat on a log, taking small sips from his bottle, the bottle lighting against the fire each time he raised it. The joke was not actually a joke but a story involving a prostitute and a donkey performing on a stage. The soldiers’ horses were tied in a remuda between two trees; the soldiers’ rifles were stacked.
Hackberry’s sheathed bowie was stuck in his back pocket; he held the .44 in his left hand, the hatchet in his right.
He stepped into the firelight, his coat open, his straw sombrero pushed up on his forehead. “Top of the evening to you, boys,” he said. “This is from my friend Mr. Glick.”
The first two who died never knew what hit them, one of them falling into the fire. The men in the bedrolls ran for their rifles. Hackberry kept shooting, not counting rounds, hardly able to make out a target in the smoke and waving shadows, the .44 bucking in his palm. Then it snapped dryly on a fired shell. He let the revolver fall to the ground and pulled the bowie from his back pocket with his left hand and slung the scabbard from the blade and plunged his own body into the midst of those still standing. He felt the bowie embed to the hilt in a soldier’s side, felt him slide off the blade as another man shot at him with a Mauser, the bullet whining into the darkness like a whipsaw. He swung the hatchet blindly behind him and struck nothing, then caught a fleeing soldier between the shoulder blades.
Just as quickly as his vendetta had begun, it ended, and he was standing in front of the executioner, who stared at him openmouthed, the bottle of mescal still in his hand, as though his possession of it could return him to that envelope of time and security just before his camp was attacked. Hackberry’s sleeves were red with splatter, his ears filled with a sound like wind echoing inside a cave.
“I am only a soldier carrying out orders,” Miguel said.
“Take my knife.”
“No.”
“I’ll give you the hatchet and keep the knife.”
“No.”
“Pick up one of the rifles.”
“I’m only a functionary, little more than a clerk. I am not one who makes decisions.”
“Then drink from your bottle. All of it.”
“No. Not unless you will join me. We are both soldiers.”
“Look at the evening star. Right above the hills. It always winks, like a faithful girlfriend. In the summertime, on the Guadalupe, it rises into a lavender sky about nine o’clock. You can pert’ near set your watch by it.”
“See, you are like me, a man of intelligence. There should not be these difficulties between us. Down there in the village, the people live as ants, as Indios. They appreciate nothing.” He pointed. “The women are good for chingada, but what good are the others? I am glad that—”
After it was over, Hackberry threw the hatchet in the fire and peeled off his bloody coat and wiped his face and hands on the liner, and rolled it as he would a cloak and dropped it into the flames, then walked up the slope to the place where Traveler waited for him.
LATER HE WOULD remember little of his ride back to the border. He knew he was drunk part of the time; he suspected he had an attack of food poisoning and was delirious for a night and a day; he thought he and Traveler rode in a boxcar in which the chaff spun like dust devils; he bathed in a gush of ice-cold water he released from a chute under a tower by train tracks; he saw bodies floating in a river at sunset, their clothes puffed with air. He was sure of almost all these things, at least for a few moments. Then he would remember the peyote buttons he ate in an Indian’s hovel, the rum he drank for breakfast, the fear he saw in the eyes of everyone he passed, and the voice of Wes Hardin whispering, You’re mine forever, Holland, a killer like myself, odious in the sight of God and Man. How does it feel?
Then one bright morning Hackberry found himself on the banks of a river bordered with willow trees that had turned yellow with the end of summer. The air smelled of rain and schooled-up fish and a farmer on the far side of the river plowing under his thatch with a steam tractor. In the distance he could see cattle on a hillside and a white ranch house with a red tile roof, and a single oil derrick and poplars planted along a driveway that led to a rural church.
Was it Sunday? He couldn’t remember. He paid a ferryman to take him across the river. On the landing a man reading a newspaper under a pole shed set aside his paper and got up and put on his hat and walked toward Hackberry, a revolver hanging on his hip like a pocket watch swinging on the vest of a blind man. “American citizen?” he said.
“Do I look or sound like a Mexican?”