The Bells of El Diablo (23 page)

James pushed through the batwings of the cantina whose name Vienna had translated as the Carnival of Happiness and removed his hat, sand immediately sifting off the crown. He swiped it against his breeches and looked up to see, to his surprise, a blonde in a skimpy pink dress and a matching choker smile at him from where she leaned against the bar.

Her blue eyes roamed across the breadth of James’s shoulders, then up and down before she waggled a knee under her skirt and said, “Well, look what the wind blew in.”

Crosseye and Vienna filed in behind him, stomping their boots and dusting the sand from their clothes. Vienna tossed her head, causing her hair to fly in a delicious black cloud, and it became obvious that despite the male attire, she was very much a woman. Her rich black hair danced about her shoulders as she shook her head again, dislodging the grit from the storm, then threw it back, her gray eyes meeting those of the blonde regarding her incredulously.

“Just pulque will do, honey,” Vienna said, hooking her arm around James’s elbow and heading for a table to the left of the bar.

The blonde made a sour expression before glancing
at the Mexican barman, who started ladling the tanglefoot into tin cups. James sagged into a chair near a crackling sheet-iron stove, on the far side of the table from the bar. Vienna sat beside him, her back to the wall, and Crosseye lowered his heavy bulk into the third chair, on the far side of the table from James. From here, they could keep an eye on the entire room.

There were several other patrons gathered around two tables to James’s left—all dressed in the colorful shirts and the deerskin, gaudily stitched and tooled
charro
slacks of the working vaquero. They wore silk neckerchiefs; one wore a red leather vest under a short bull-hide jacket with large brass buttons.

No work today on account of the wind, so the cowboys were drinking and playing cards. Another vaquero, with a gray beard that hung to his chest, sat alone at a table nearest the stove, a red-and-black-striped blanket draped over a spindly shoulder. He was playing a mandolin very softly, his bent and calloused fingers moving fluidly over the strings, singing very quietly to himself.

The other, younger men had turned their attention to the three newcomers, their brown eyes especially riveted on Vienna. Now as the blond barmaid carried a small tray of drinks to the trio’s table, most of the Mexican punchers returned their attention to their respective games. A few snickered, cracked some obviously lewd jokes while glancing at Vienna, and chuckled amongst themselves.

James felt his ears warm in offense, but he suppressed his anger. He’d heard such cracks before when Vienna had been present, but now, after their tumble
above the goat pen, he felt a proprietary protectiveness despite him and her having made no promises. Still, the goatish lack of manners directed at a woman he now realized he considered his own burned him, and he had to remind himself that this was these men’s territory and that he was a foreigner here. He didn’t want a repeat of what had happened in the first cantina they’d visited here in Cordura.

The bargirl stole another glance at James and smiled, revealing gaps where two teeth should have been. One of her eyes was slightly discolored, as though it had recently been visited by the knuckle end of a fist. She set the tin cups on the table. “Four pesos,
por favor
,” she said, extending the tray over the table toward Vienna with a haughty, faintly mocking air.

“Why, you speak
americano
!” said Crosseye.

“You ain’t the only
americanos
in Mexico, honey,” the blonde said coolly, arching a surprised brow as Vienna plucked coins from her pocket and tossed them onto the tray, giving the blonde a too-friendly smile.

The blonde looked at the coins suspiciously, then bounced the tray, plucking the coins out of the air with one plump, pale fist. “Me—I married up with a prospector who fell on a rattlesnake, swelled up big as a hog, and died, leavin’ me here to fend for myself any way I can.” She glanced at James once more, then wrinkled her nose at Vienna, and turned to Crosseye, curling a lascivious smile. “Got any ideas, sugar?”

Crosseye laughed and pulled the blonde onto his knee. “Well, I can think of a couple right now, but if you got a quiet room somewheres, I’m sure I could come up with a few more!”

James sipped his drink, the cool, slightly pungent liquid popping and crackling as it burned pleasantly across his tonsils before stoking a friendly fire in his belly. From outside, voices rose. Several pairs of feet stomped, and spurs rang. A man moved through the batwings, stopped, and swung his gaze across the room. The man who’d accosted Vienna with a knife earlier now clutched his bandaged right hand to his belly and flung an arm out, jutting an angry finger.

He shouted shrilly in Spanish as several more men, all wearing the dusty gray attire of the Mexican
rurales
, stormed in behind him, rifles raised. He shouted again, and the
rurale
at the head of the six-man
rurale
pack stepped forward, his gaze holding on the three gringos and the blonde sitting on Crosseye’s knee.

He was tall, with long, thick curly hair tumbling from his leather-billed kepi stamped with a colonel’s insignia. He wore a long machete on his left hip, behind a holstered pistol. A brushy dark brown mustache mantled his mouth, and a large mole sat off one end of it, like a punctuation mark.

“This one here, huh, Toli?” the colonel said, tearing his gaze from Vienna to settle it on James. “This is the gringo who broke your wrist?”

“
Sí, sí, el Colonel!
”

“Ah!” The colonel laughed and clapped his hands in front of his face. “The same one who just paid a visit to
mi
amigo
Apache Jack!”

He laughed again—harder, more menacing.

As the colonel sauntered slowly toward the gringos’ table, a hush fell over the room. He canted his head slightly to one side, muttered orders in Spanish, and the five other
rurales
hurried up behind him, formed a semicircle around James, Crosseye, Vienna, and the whore still on Crosseye’s knee, and cocked and raised their muskets.

Beneath the table, James loosed his right-side .36 in its holster. Then, leaving that hand over the pistol’s wooden grips, he raised the other one chest-high, palm out. “Whoa, there, amigos! I don’t see why we can’t all be friendly.”

“Gringo
bastardo
!” said Toli, standing up close to the colonel and clutching his bandaged hand to his belly. His cheek was swollen and blood-crusted where James had torn it open with the man’s own gun. “You broke my wrist, blackened my eye!”

The colonel indicated Toli with a delicate turn of his hand—a curiously gentlemanly gesture in a man with eyes like a rabid wildcat. “Is this true, senor?”

James closed his hand more tightly around his
Griswold’s grips and smiled. “True enough. Toli, allow me to buy you a drink.”

“Diddle yourself and your drink, gringo,” said Toli, whose glassy eyes and wet, hanging lower lip showed that he’d had enough.

The colonel looked at the blonde on Crosseye’s knee. “Found one of your own, eh, Kate?” Glancing at the vaqueros who had all stopped playing cards to turn their attention to the loud doings at the gringos’ table, he grabbed the blonde’s hand and jerked her off Crosseye’s knee. “What—with them here, you’re too good for the
Mejicanos
?”

He swung her back behind him and she hit the floor with a scream and went rolling. Crosseye bellowed and bolted out of his chair, quick as a ten-year-old, and buried his ham-sized left fist in the colonel’s belly. Just as the colonel jackknifed forward with a scream of his own, Crosseye pulled his left fist out of the man’s belly and slammed his right one against the side of the man’s head. The colonel hit the floor like a half-ton bale of cured tobacco.

The whole thing happened so fast that the other
rurales
didn’t have time to react. James, bolting up out of his own chair, bulled forward with his arms spread wide and plowed into two of them, knocking them both backward as they triggered their old blunderbusses into the cantina’s ceiling. As he hit the floor on top of both men, he saw out the corner of his right eye a rifle butt slam down against the side of Crosseye’s head.

The big frontiersman groaned. His eyes drifted up in their sockets just before the lids closed over them.

James scrambled to one knee, hearing the colonel and several other
rurales
shouting and seeing the vaqueros leaping to their feet in astonishment at the sudden dustup. Just as James gave a wild Rebel yell, every shred of sanity suddenly leaving him and the old fiery-blooded Scotch-Irish impulses firing unrestrained, he began sliding both his .36’s from their holsters, clicking back the hammers, ready to start shooting—and let the devil take the hindmost!

But before he could get the pistols leveled, a rifle butt smacked him from behind. The pistols turned heavy as lead. He heard them hit the floor as the cantina before him slid around crazily, all lamps dimming at once.

The
rurales
were regathering themselves, the colonel climbing to his feet, hatless, hair in his eyes, blood dribbling down from his torn right ear. Toli was bent over, laughing hysterically, tears running down his cheeks, but James couldn’t hear his guffaws. The colonel opened and closed his mouth, javelins of fury stabbing from his eyes. He was shouting, but James couldn’t hear what he was saying, either. Just as James saw Vienna dart into the scene, dropping to a knee by Crosseye, then casting her terrified gaze toward James, the floor came up to smack James’s knees.

As if from miles away at the bottom of a deep well, he heard the colonel’s voice shout something in Spanish and punctuate it with “
Vamos!
” as he swung around, stuffed his hat on his head, and strode out the cantina’s louvered front doors.

James was about three-quarters conscious, so he was aware of being picked up by his arms and being
dragged out of the cantina and into the dusk-dark street. He couldn’t see Crosseye or Vienna, and that worried him until total darkness enveloped him for a time, though he was aware of being moved around, sometimes painfully, and hearing distant voices speaking and yelling Spanish.

Something slammed against his right cheekbone, sending a knife of pain through his face and down through his shoulders, that Scotch-Irish fury boiling upward once more. His eyes opened, and he saw the
rurales
again, though they were in a darker, smaller place lit by the wan, shifting light of several lanterns. Animals moved around on the floor—chickens and goats. James heard the grunts of pigs, though he couldn’t see them. He could smell them, however—as well as the chickens and the goats. He smelled hay and straw and the musky sweat smell of the
rurales
. And spicy cigar smoke.

The
rurale
standing in front of him, blocking his view of the place they were in—a barn?—smacked him on the other cheek. Raw, senseless fury roared again inside James, and he tried bringing his own right fist up in an effort to smash it as hard as he could against the big, broad, pitted nose of the man before him grinning at him, showing two chipped front teeth.

But James then realized his arm was already up. Both his arms were secured above his head, and, try as he might, he couldn’t bring either one down much less fling them at the insufferable, ugly face of the
rurale
pig in front of him.

“Cut me loose, and we’ll make a time of it, you chicken-livered cuss!”

“James!”

The female voice was familiar. He turned to his left. Vienna stood beside him. Her arms were also pulled taut above her head. Her handcuffed wrists were chained to large, steel eye-rings high in the stone wall above and behind her, just as James’s must have been. Someone had removed her serape; it lay at her knees. Her blouse was partway open, revealing the swell of a breast.

“That’s enough,” Vienna said, her face taut with anger.

Beyond her, Crosseye leaned forward, knees bent. He was passed out and half hanging by his shackled wrists that were chained to eye-rings above his head. The old frontiersman was missing his hat. His head drooped toward his chest, and he wasn’t moving beyond the regular rising and falling of his broad, lumpy chest. Blood matted the gray-brown hair at one side of his head, just above and behind his ear.

James looked up to see the same shackles on his own wrists. The links of the chains were log grade. He wasn’t going anywhere soon.

He looked again at the man in front of him grinning at him, taunting, holding his fists balled tightly at his sides. The colonel stepped up from behind him and gently pushed him aside with the back of one hand while the
rurale
colonel’s crazy eyes bored once more into James’s. Dried blood crusted his ear and made two dry rivulets down his neck. He held a cigar and a brandy snifter in his left hand, like a man of leisure preparing for bed.

Around him, amongst the chickens and the goats,
stood half a dozen other
rurale
s, all holding muskets up high across their chests. They stood in silhouette or only partly lit by the weak light from the lamps hanging from posts. Double doors stood open to the night on James’s right. The wind had died. James could hear the chickens clucking peevishly as they plucked seeds from the churned dung and dirt of the stable floor.

On the other side of the stable, a narrow, open doorway revealed stone steps rising out of sight but lit by a near lantern.

“From the American South, I take it?” the colonel said knowingly, puffing the cigar and squinting through the smoke at James. “Confederates?”

James opened his mouth to tell him to do something physically impossible to himself, but then he glanced once more at Vienna. She stared at him hard, her breasts rising and falling heavily behind her red and black muslin blouse.

James turned back to the colonel. “I reckon you have me at a disadvantage.”

“Colonel Basilio Salsidio.”

“Ah.” James remembered the name mentioned by Apache Jack.