Borderlands (7 page)

“A rolling gallows! What kind of crazy bastard thinks up something like that? Man, you know how tight that noose got from him bouncing up and down on that rope? It pinched his neck to no bigger around than my dick. It stretched his neck a foot! Another few miles and his head would’ve come off—what was left of it. The crows had worked it over pretty good. Ate up his eyes, his lips—”

He choked on blood, coughed and spat red. He grinned at me with his shattered red teeth. He must have seen my confusion in my eyes. “A couple of your boys spoke your name when they were begging me to spare them. They were only following your orders, they said. They were only escorting the gallows to Nogales as you commanded. But I shot them anyway—for being such scared little girls and for not keeping the birds off my brother’s face.”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right—or even what I was thinking.

“You goddamn hacendados,” Rojas said. “You live in forts. You got an army of guys to protect you. You got the goddamn rurales. How’s a guy like me supposed to get even with a guy like you?” He paused to spit again. His grin now turned sly and his eyes blazed like little coalfires. “But you say that little hacienda on the Río Magdalena belonged to you? The beautiful red-haired woman with the mother-belly was
your
woman?” He cackled like a delighted child.

I felt as though I’d been clubbed in the spine. For an instant the white sky whirled. The remote sierras shimmered in the rising heat. His laughter chewed at my ears.

“Believe me, señor,” he gasped, choking on blood and laughter, “
please
believe me—I had no idea she was
your
woman.”

“You’ll pay for it forever!” I yelled. “I’ll listen to your screams like music!” My words sounded hollow in my own ears.

“Hell, man, I
never
would have known,” he said through his laughter, “if
you
hadn’t told me.”

“I’ll give you pain so great, you’ll beg, you’ll
beg
me for death!”

He laughed with bloody spit running down his chin. “Thank you, señor,” he said. “Thank you a thousand times for letting me know I avenged my little brother after all. Thank you!”

“I’ll give you
agony
!” I shouted. I grabbed up handfuls of dust and flung them wildly. I whirled and kicked at the stones around me as though they were hateful things. “AGONY!” I screamed. “Every day! Every night!”

But he was talking right through my raging promises. “… skin like milk! And those tits, my God! Like cream candy with little cherry tips. But best of all was her cunt. Soft as—”

I screamed and threw myself on him, clubbing him with the gun. His head fell back and his eyes rolled up in their sockets. I straddled him and shook him by the shirt collar, shrieking, “You’ll beg me to kill you and end your pain, you will!” I was weeping now, crying like a child. “Every day you’ll plead for your death, you’ll
pray
to me for your death! And sometimes I’ll say yes, and you’ll want to kiss me, you’ll call me Jesus Christ, you’ll ask God to bless me for eternity for so kindly killing you. But then, you worthless bastard son of an Indian whore … I WON’T DO IT!”

He coughed and choked and started coming around, and I raised the pistol to hit him again—and then suddenly realized what I was doing. I jumped up and backed away from him as if he were on fire. I was horrified. In my rage I had been about to destroy the only thing I had left to live for.

He wormed his way a few feet over to a small rock outcrop, panting and grunting with his efforts, and worked his way into a sitting position with his back against the rock. His broken face was caked with blood and dirt.

I hastily holstered my pistol and folded my arms tightly across my chest. Hardness, I told myself, hardness! Maintain command! Steel yourself against the bastard’s taunts. The first thing I would do when we got to La Luna Plata would be to cut out his tongue.

“Oh please let my baby son live.”

He said it in a high mimicking voice and laughed at the look on my face. “That’s what she said to me, you hangman. I stripped her to her earrings and she said, ‘Oh
please
let my baby son live.’ “ He spat blood at me. “Well, listen to this: I put it to her like one of your goddamn branding irons! She was
begging
me to—”

I shot him and shot him and shot him—howling even as I emptied the pistol into his grinning trickster’s face, howling with the horrifying realization of what I was doing, howling as the gunshots faded into the foothills …

As, here in this house of howling men, I have been howling ever since.

THREE TALES OF THE REVOLUTION

THE SOLDADERA

In 1913 my grandaunt Adela ran away with a boy intent on joining Pancho Villa’s Army of the North. She was sixteen. The Revolution promised freedom from tyrants such as Diaz and Huerta—from her own father, the cavalry colonel who venerated them both. The family was landed, rich, its blue veins but slightly darkened with the Indio blood it long denied. Only Adela’s youngest brother did not disown her. We still have the faded photograph he framed, clipped from a Chihuahua newspaper, showing Villa and Carranza standing side by side and squinting in dusty sunlight and mutual distrust—and there, directly behind them, her arms around the necks of fierce-faced compañeros, her breasts crossed with bandoleers, is Tía Adela. The boy she ran away with is not in the picture. Years later he showed up at my grandfather’s door on a crutch, one pant leg folded and pinned to a back pocket. He told tales of Adelita: how she rode on the packed roofs of boxcars jammed with horses and artillery; how she shot more federales in the battle of Zacatecas than anyone else in the brigade; how she danced around a campfire with Fierro the butcher and took a kiss on the mouth from Villa himself. How, at the horror of Celaya, she got caught on Obregón’s barbed wire and was shot to pieces by the machine guns.

THE COLONEL

From the veranda of the hillside mansion serving as our headquarters, I watched the firing squad do its work in the plaza below. The wailing of widows and wounded men carried up to mingle with the furious piano music from the ballroom behind me. In the plaza a federal captain stood against the church wall and made a hasty sign of the cross just before the rifle volley shook him and he fell dead on the cobblestones. As a labor detail dragged him away, the next man in the line of condemned stepped up to the wall: a hatless whitehaired colonel who stood at attention. The captain in charge of the executions raised his saber and gave the commands: “Ready!… Aim!… Fire!” The rifles thundered and the colonel rebounded off the wall and dropped to the ground. And then slowly, awkwardly, as the spectators gasped and began to raise a great jabbering, he got to his feet and slumped against the wall.

The riflemen looked at the captain. The captain stared at the colonel—and then thrust his saber up and yelled, “Ready!” I had never seen one get back on his feet before. “Aim!” The old man pushed off the wall and stood weaving, trying to square his shoulders. “Fire!” He bounced off the wall and fell in a heap. Then pushed up on his elbows. Then made it to his hands and knees. The crowd hushed utterly. People blessed themselves and knelt in the street. I thought, holy shit.

The captain spotted me and yelled, “What
now
, my general?” With twelve bullets in him the old man sat on his heels with his shoulder against the wall. He brushed vaguely at the blood soaking his tunic.

“Once more!” I ordered. “If he’s still breathing after the next one, we’ll give him a clean uniform and command of a regiment.”

The colonel was on one knee and still trying to rise when the next volley hit him. I rued not having spoken to him before he died.

THE TRIUMPH

We looted the city to its bones. Whatever we didn’t want or couldn’t take we destroyed. Every grievance we had against the bluebloods, the Spanish, the Church, the bosses, against our own fathers, against
life
, we redressed against Zacatecas. The streets ran with blood. We shot military prisoners standing against the wall, priests kneeling at the altars, rich bastards groveling on the floors of their fine big houses. We packed the mineshafts with corpses, piled and burned them in the streets. A little boy watching the flames constricting the tendons of the blackening dead cried, “Look, mamá! They’re dancing!” We rode horses into the mansion salons, grinding horseshit into parquetry, shredding Middle Eastern carpets to rags. Into roaring fireplaces we threw books, ledgers, letters, photographs. Not a sculpture in town went unbroken, not a windowpane stayed intact. Our soldaderas paraded the streets in silk dresses, in bridal gowns of delicate lace trailing in the dust. Their feet scuffed the cobbles in satin slippers. We picked the churches clean of their gold and silver. We stripped houses, stores, stables of everything that could be carried away. Toward our trains flowed a steady stream of stock and wagons loaded with strongboxes, stoves, furniture, clothes, gilt picture frames and chandeliers. Every automobile in town that still ran was driven onto the flatcars. The mules walked stiff-legged under loads of booty. The wagons creaked with the weight of it. The trains groaned. It was our greatest victory in the war against the oppressions of the rich. As we pulled out of Zacatecas the air was heavy with the odors of smoldering ashes, blood-dampened dust, enemy flesh going to rot. All the powerful smells of triumph.

UNDER THE SIERRA

The mountains were blazing under a high sun when the first tremor passed through the cornfield. It rolled lightly over the low hill flanking the cemetery and rippled into the village of Sombra de Dios. It shook dust from the walls and roofs and rattled crockery and tins. All singing, all laughter, all gossip ceased. The animals fell silent in their pens. The only sound was of Paco Cantu’s one-eyed white dog, whining and turning in tight circles in the middle of the muddy street. Women at their cookpots took quick account of their children. Girls at the creekbank made swift signs of the cross and hastily gathered their wash.

In the cornfield the men stood fast and tried to sense the earth’s intentions through the soles of their feet. Sombra de Dios was set on a narrow tableland in the western range of the Sierra Madre, a region of Mexico which often trembled as if in sudden fright. These shudders were usually brief and harmless, and the villagers had long ago learned to make jokes of them. “The mountain has been startled from its siesta,” they might say. Or, “The earth is once again shrugging at one of God’s great riddles.”

But sometimes a tremor was more than a minor interruption of the day’s work. Sometimes it was a warning of imminent worse, an advisement that, for reasons known only to God, the earth was in a black temper, in a mood to bring ruin.

For a long moment the men in the field waited to see if worse was coming. Then somebody uttered a loud derisive curse, and somebody else added to it. A pair of young machos expressing their fearlessness. Now others among them grinned and made dismissive gestures and made fun of each other for their frighted looks. They resumed their slow shuffle along the rows, plucking corn and dropping it into the long bags slung across their chests and dragging behind them.

And then again the stalks rustled queerly. Louder this time. And the ground again quivered under their feet.

Once more the men stopped working. Some slipped off their picking bags and began to ease slowly out of the field, casting anxious glances at the dark wall of the mountain barely fifty yards away.

“It is nothing, nothing!” Anastasio Domingo called out to them. He was a village elder and the foreman of this season’s harvest. “A little trembling. It will pass. Don’t be such hens and get back to work!”

Standing beside him, his eldest son Benito could feel the ground shivering softly against his soles. He was as eager as the others to abandon the field and put distance between himself and the looming mountain. But his place was at his father’s side.

Now a low growl sounded deep in the earth—and the rest of the men threw off their bags and hastened away.