The Convict and Other Stories

The stupid face of his son-in-law drew away from him, and he felt the boards of the old porch creak back into their natural level, then the gentle outline of the hills and the blackjack oaks took shape again against the infinite blue, hot sky, and he thought he heard a rumble of horses and a train whistle in a field just beyond the line of his vision.

As he looked with his mind into the brilliant haze, he knew where his sleep was about to take him. There was a low, brown mountain, with a high-banked railway grade at its base. The tracks shimmered wetly in the early morning light, and the sage and stunted mesquite at the bottom of the grade were blackened by passing locomotives. Hack heard the train beyond the curve, and he and the other rangers formed their horses into an advance line and started at a walk through the field of wild poppies. The dried poppy husks brushed back over the horses’ forequarters and rattled like a snake about to strike. The horses shook their heads against the sawed reins, their eyes wide with fright, and tried to cant sideways. Captain McAlester hit his sorrel between the ears with his fist.

“Hold, you shit hog, or I’ll cut your nuts out,” he said.

One by one they pulled their carbines from their saddle scabbards. Hack propped the butt of the Winchester against his thigh and slipped the leather thong off the hammer of his Colt revolver. The wind was blowing strong across the field, and his sweat felt cold in his hair. He bit off a piece of plug tobacco, and it made a hard, dry outline in his jaw.

“Put your star outside, gentlemen,” Captain McAlester said. “We want to make goddamn sure they know who done this to them. Satan will go to church before this bunch of Mexicans ever raids in Texas again.”

They slipped their ranger stars out of their shirt pockets and pinned them on their coats. They weren’t supposed to be in Mexico, but after Villa’s last raid across the river they had ridden two days, wearing dusters over their pistols and carbines, talking to no one, eating jerky and dried corn out of their saddlebags, until they made camp in a grove of juniper trees at the edge of the field last night. While they sat drinking whiskey and coffee out of their tin cups in the firelight, the captain told them how they would take the train: they would simply take it. He was a tall, fine-looking man, Hack thought, but in the wavering light of the fire his face looked as though it had been shaped in a forge. They would attack the train just the way Sam Houston had attacked and defeated the Mexicans at San Jacinto in 1836 when he sent Deaf Smith to burn the bridge behind the enemy. Once the battle was joined, there would be no retreat for anyone. They would fight under a black flag, the captain said, and give no quarter and ask none in return.

Hack took the dry lump of tobacco out of his mouth with his fingers and put it back in his pocket.

“I bet this is more fun than throwing John Wesley Hardin in the DeWitt jail,” the captain said.

“At least that was a fair fight,” Hack said, and they both laughed.

“Here them sons of bitches come,” a man down the line said.

The locomotive pulled around the curve, the white smoke blowing back over the bending line of box and cattle and flat cars, all of them loaded with small, dark men in brown uniforms. Hack squinted his eyes and saw a machine gun set up on a tripod just behind the engineer’s cab. Mexicans sat up on the spine of the cars, their rifles in jagged silhouette, and legs hung down through the slats of the cattle cars as though there were no bodies attached. It looked more like a refugee train than part of an army en route to another campaign.

“All right, let’s fry them in their own grease,” the captain said, and kicked his horse into a trot.

It wasn’t really necessary for him to give orders, because each man kn

ew what the captain would do before he did it. Each of them was leaned partially forward in the saddle, the reins wrapped around one fist and the carbine held upward, his thighs posting easily with the horse’s motion, the stomach muscles drawn tight, the genitals tingling lightly with expectation. The captain would have made a good cavalry officer, Hack thought. The sun was at their backs and the Mexicans still weren’t sure who they were. Also, the captain knew that in a charge their quarter horses were good only for a few hundred yards, and if they began their attack at too long a distance, their horses would be spent early, their carbines would be ineffective against the train (“Them thirty-thirties would hit them cars like birdshit on a brick,” he had said), and the nine-millimeter Mausers and .30–.40 Kraigs that the Mexicans used would cut them into piles of rags.

“I think they’re about to sniff us. Git it!” he shouted.

Hack flicked his roweled spur into the ribs of his Appaloosa, leaned into the pommel and tightened his legs at the same time, and felt the power of the horse swell up under him. He was a dead shot, even from horseback, and he loaded his own soft-nosed X-cut bullets with enough grains of powder to knock down a barn door. He rose in the stirrups each time he fired, ejected the smoking brass casing with a flick of three fingers in the lever action, and fired again. The explosion in his ears and the acrid smell of the burned powder made the blood beat in his temples, and he drilled shot after shot into the tangle of soldiers caught in the cattle cars, then swung his rifle into the men on the spine who were trying to fire back from a sitting position without falling from the train.

The Winchester snapped empty, and he turned the Appaloosa into an even gallop with the train, the reins loose over the pommel, while he slipped the cartridges from the leather hoops of his bandolier into the magazine of his rifle. Two cartridges spilled from his hand, and when he tried to catch them he saw that his trouser legs were white with the beaten pulp of poppies. He felt the spring of the magazine come tight when he pushed in the last shell with his thumb, and he wrapped the reins in his fist again and leveled his rifle across his forearm to fire into any of those small men in their dirty, brown uniforms.

But he had forgotten the machine gun mounted on the flatcar behind the engineer’s cab. He was abreast of the locomotive, and while he looked into the terrified face of the engineer through the square iron cab window and tried to swivel backward in the saddle, he knew that it was simply too late. The man on the machine gun had turned the barrel right at him and was hammering up the elevation with his fist, his face like a twisted monkey’s paw under his cap. Hack tried to extend the Winchester with one hand at a backward angle and fire at him; but it was a comic gesture, he thought, even as the Lewis gun’s barrel flashed at him out of the sunlight, a waving of a silly wand in front of eternity.

He heard the bullets thunk into the rib cage of the Appaloosa, then the horse’s weight went out from under him as though it had been hit between the ears with a sledge. Hack landed on the tall poppies, the reins still tangled around his fist, and felt the hot back draft of the train blow over him. Blue coils of entrail pressed out the stitched wound in his horse’s side. He flung the reins from his hand and ran after the flatcar, heedless of the bullets crisscrossing through the air around him, and emptied the cylinder of his single-action Colt .45 at the machine gunner. He was firing too fast, and the recoil brought the rounds high, each of them whanging into the iron plate of the engineer’s cab. His hammer snapped on a spent shell casing, and he stared after the receding face of the machine gunner.

Remember what I look like, you son of a bitch, he thought, because I’ll be back to get you.

Then he felt his coat jump and saw a neat horizontal tear along the cloth.

Get up, Hack.

It was the captain, and he was having trouble sawing the bit back in the sorrel’s teeth. The horse’s neck was covered with foam, and there was a green froth at its mouth.

“Forget that goddamn Mexican. Swing up behind me. You hear me?”

The captain pulled his boot out of one stirrup, and Hack grabbed the back of the saddle and swung his weight up on the sorrel’s rump. The last of the wooden cars clicked away past them, and in the sudden quiet and the sweep of the wind through the dry poppies, Hack looked back down the track at the small, brown men strewn along the embankment.

The next night back in Juarez they drank and whored until dawn. The girls came to him in succession all during the night and mounted him on the down mattress, his pistols hung on the brass bedstead, holding his sex tightly between their hands before they pressed it inside, as though they drew some power themselves from the blood of their own kind that he had spilled that day. There was a bottle of tequila and a saucer of salt and red peppers and sliced limes on the night table next to his head, and each time he finished with one girl he took another drink, with a bite of pepper in his teeth and a salted lime for a chaser, and he felt the heat swell up through his erection again.

“Get up, Hack. They’re going to cut the cake,” his daughter Bonnie was saying.

He saw the green river again in the afternoon haze and the soft hills that looked like women’s breasts.

The cake was covered with white lace and candy roses, and his name, Hackberry Holland, and the numbers nine and four were written on top in pink icing. Someone had placed nine and then four candles on each number. They sat him in the chair at the head of the table, from where he could see his face reflected in the mahogany-framed mirror on the dining-room wall. In the glow of pink candles he didn’t recognize the face, the white hair that stuck out from under the Stetson, the toothless mouth that made his lips a crooked line, the incongruous baby quality of the skin against the white whiskers.

“I’ll blow them out for you, Grandpa,” Bonnie said.