Mendoza in Hollywood (29 page)

The party didn’t last much longer. Tomas got cold and ran out of things to shoot at, and Einar got tired of dodging bullets and vanished into the bushes, so Imarte came out and tried to get the boy to come to bed before he caught pneumonia or fell into the fire. He tried to hit her. You don’t do that to an Immortal. She swiftly knocked him out and carried him indoors like a sack of flour.

Some time in the afternoon next day, Einar roused him and got him into a change of clothes. When the 1600-hours stage came rolling
up, Tomas was bundled into a seat, still groggy, and Einar loaded on his trunk and paid for his passage southbound.

Porfirio came out of the hills, and our lives resumed their courses. I don’t suppose I’ll ever see that young man again; but I can imagine how he’ll turn out.

Can’t you, señors?

W
ELL, IT JUST GOT DARKER
and crazier in bad old Los Diablos. Bad things come in by the armful and leave by inches, it’s said. Winter came, but no rain; smallpox instead. It began in the old shacks on the hill where the poorer citizens lived, Sonoratown, the locals called it. The few remaining Indians were dying like flies, and then the Mexicans were being wiped out, and pretty soon there were even rows of coffins being carried to the Protestant cemetery. Stagecoach service became irregular, to say the least, in the dry and bitter cold.

Dry. There wasn’t a creek or a freshet running. Our little stream became pools of standing water, shrinking perceptibly day by day. I don’t know where the trout went. Our well hadn’t given out, but we were taking serious measures to conserve water. Whatever water we used to wash I took to carrying out to the oak trees, to pour over their roots. Within hours after emptying a pail, you could see tiny blades of grass emerging where the water had been splashed. The land was desperate to cover itself with green; but the rain never fell, and next morning there would be deer slot everywhere, and the grass would all be gone.

There was water in the sky, all right; there was water vapor holding the haze together, which stung the eyes at midday and kept the adobe rooms cold as death. There was water in the slate clouds that rolled over us and kept going without releasing so much as a drop.
The longhorns began to rove into people’s vegetable patches, and the last of the old rancheros looked at the brown hills and wondered if they oughtn’t borrow some more from the Yankee moneylenders to tide them over what might be an unprofitable year.

We froze, but we got no rain. San Francisco got rain; but, then, San Francisco never doesn’t get rain. It rained back east in Vicksburg, where another battle was fought, and we read rumors of soldiers drowning in their tents. It rained in Mexico, where Juarez sat in his room and calmly considered what he ought to do about Europe. Everybody else got rain, but we were dying of thirst.

And smallpox.

Oscar stayed home a lot, driving the rest of us crazy; but how was he going to sell anything with people hiding behind their doors, more afraid of the disease than they’d ever been of stray bullets? We saw almost nothing of Imarte, though, so it was a fair trade. She was having a field day, moving among the dying like a scarlet angel, easing their journey out of the world in exchange for life stories gasped out to the sympathetic stranger. To be fair, I believe she nursed a few back to health. When she wasn’t busy compiling statistics on mortality, she found time to get some suspiciously British mining engineer to buy her a Peach and Honey at the bar of the Bella Union, and one or two spilled a few more details to support her pet conspiracy theory. The whole thing was so ludicrous, we actually encouraged her to talk about it, on the few occasions she came home; we needed the laughs.

And who wanted to celebrate Christmas, on the underside of hell? Time was when I enjoyed walking to a town and slipping into a pew to watch a
pastorela
, with the earnest mission Indians trying so hard to get to Bethlehem and all the teenaged boys in the parish portraying the devils who tried so hard to prevent them (a role so natural for any teenaged boy). I loved the way the spoken verses would echo in the old church, and the way the flames of the candles winked in their glass cups, and the way the sleepy mortals observed a reverent hush all around me. It was all so charming. And when the Indian pastores finally made it to the stable, after vanquishing Señor Satan (who always
bore a close resemblance to a gentleman of Old Spain), and the central Mystery unfolded, how lovely to see the black-eyed Mother with her Indian cheekbones and serene smile as she displayed the tiny red Child with his shock of black hair. One could almost come to love mortals again.

Or not. Other years, I’d been alone in the night, where the great trees towered black against the stars, so many white stars, and the air was cold and full of the smell of evergreens. I’d been in the heart of the Mystery then, too. The stars rang like little bells at midnight, and one moment the air would be dead calm on the forest floor, and then a wind would spring up, just on that stroke of midnight, a wind magically warm and full of perfume, and you knew that the Light had begun to fight his way out of his grave, and winter would not last forever.

But this winter of 1862, that promise seemed to have failed. So many coffins, and not a drop of rain.

I
DON’T SUPPOSE I NEED
to tell you that the hauntings became worse, señors. Became strange. He still pursued me in the night, my dead love, but he seemed to have changed; we seemed to have lost England and gone to places I’d never been. I’ll tell you the dream that’s clearest in my mind.

I was in a jungle like a Rousseau painting, you know, all those botanical specimens so carefully delineated and dead-eyed jaguars staring forth here and there like so many stuffed toys. Something was coming after me, crashing through the fever-green forest, and where he passed, the palms and ferns and bromeliads all shook to life, lost their neat arrangements, and became real, pulsing and shooting toward the sun.

I’m not sure I was making any effort to run from him.

Then he was coming across a clearing at me, and I could see him at last, the savage, was that a Mayan with his high cheekbones and long curved nose? No, how could I have thought so? This was another kind of naked savage. He was tattooed fearsomely, swirling blue spirals all over his white body, his pale-blue eyes glittering with deadly laughter, and he was on me with the grace and weight of a lion. I went over like a rag doll. What was my stern Protestant metamorphosing into? What atavistic madness was this? He had a flint knife, and it was a beautiful thing, beautifully worked, and as he searched for my heart,
I saw the fan palms waving above our twined bodies. I tried to tell him that the fan palm is the only member of the
Arecaceae
actually native to California, but I was distracted by the discovery that he had the front page of the London
Times
for January 6, 1863, tattooed on his chest.

I tried to read it as he was busily taking out my heart. Then we heard shots behind him, and he turned with a snarl. Looming above us was a vast blue pyramid, and from its base hunters were coming, sending lead singing through the air. He turned and looked back down at me, and I saw that his face was painted too, a pattern of red and white diagonals crossing on a blue Held. No time, no time to do this properly! said somebody, and he rose above me and lifted the blade in both hands for the stroke of mercy.

But I was awake and moaning on my cot before he was able to give it, and blue light was crawling away, diminishing into darkness, leaving me miserably, eternally alive.

T
HE DAY THE ACTORS CAME
, we were taken by surprise. We’d been alone in our canyon for so many days, it was hard to imagine a stagecoach ever stopping here again. But—

“Incoming,” announced Einar, and with sour laughter we hurried down the canyon to see who was arriving, departing, or just passing through. We heard the shouting as the stage pulled up.

“Are you mad, man? Are you demented, have you quite taken leave of your senses?” said a stentorian baritone. “Press on! Press on, though wolves howl and birds of prey darken the air. D’you want to die of the peste, for God’s sake?”

“Mister, if that wheel comes off when we’re coming down the grade, it ain’t gonna be the smallpox kills you,” said the driver. “Now you just hush up and set tight. We’ll be on our way again soon’s we get the spare on.”

“Ay, what a wreck,” said Porfirio, crouching down to look at the wheel. “You want this thing repaired, señor?”

“It’ll have to be.” The driver handed off the reins to his partner and jumped down. “We can’t get new ones from the Concord folks nohow, what with the war. You got any spares here?”

“Si.” Porfirio jerked his thumb at the shed. “You leave the bad one, and I’ll see if I can have it ready when you come back down, huh?”

“Fair enough,” the driver said, going to unhitch the team. “Though I’m half minded to stay up in Frisco, the way things is going. This ain’t no business to be in right now. You heard about the Indian attack this summer?”

“Indians?” queried a soprano voice, and the baritone thundered out:

“Driver, you categorically assured me there were no savages to be encountered on this route!”

“Aw, shut your damn pie hole,” the driver said.

“What Indian attack?” Einar asked, bracing the corner of the wagon as Porfirio settled the jack under it preparatory to taking off the broken wheel.

“Happened in Minnesota,” said the driver, leading the first of the team to our watering trough. “Seems the Secessionists are paying ’em to make trouble. They been cutting down telegraph poles, too. You ask me, I think they’re smart enough to figure out they can raise all the hell they like with the Army busy fighting itself. Whoever’s behind it, I sure don’t fancy being stuck out here with a mess of Indians and Mormons and who knows what all between me and Teaneck, New Jersey.”

There was a noise like an asthmatic goose honking; it came from the passenger compartment. Juan Bautista and I looked at each other in puzzlement. He walked around to the other side of the stage to see if in fact it was a bird, but just as he disappeared, the last honk ended on a shrill indrawn breath and became evident as a fit of hysterics on the part of the soprano.

“Oh, we shall not survive! Ingraham, one cannot venture—into such
places
—without appalling consequence. Such venues. Such wretched venues, and such (for want of a better word) men!” she shrieked.

“Have courage, Caroline. It may be that we have escaped the Pale Rider in one form only to encounter him in another; but I say we
shall
reach the Golden Gate, though calamity leap headlong into our path,” said the baritone. I walked around the wagon to see why Juan Bautista hadn’t reappeared.

He was staring as though transfixed at a wicker birdcage, which was tied on the back under the trunk enclosure. The leather cover hadn’t been fastened down properly, and a flap had blown back, exposing a gnarled and clutching claw the size of a fist. What was in there, a dragon?

Juan Bautista’s face was stony with anger. He began to work on the knots that held the cage in place.