Tombstone is closer but the boys say there’s more cooking every night in the Gulch so that’s where they are. It is most of a day’s ride and none of them are cavalry.
They ditch the mounts at a stable and come into the Calumet Saloon all together, nine of them, uniforms but no sidearms, and the miners are too drunk to care. Royal’s sitter is sore as hell so he stands at the bar drinking from the stone jug they fill from a barrel, what they say is Old Crow but tastes like creosote and it doesn’t matter.
My dearest Royal—
Mail call was early, with Corporal Puckett handing out the letters.
“Royal Scott got him three,” he shouted out, holding the envelopes under his nose. “Smell good, too.”
Oohing and aahing and catcalling from the boys then, like they would with anybody.
“What you want to do is read the last one first,” said Hardaway. “Get to the grit.”
But Royal started with the first one and wasn’t one line in before he couldn’t swallow.
My dearest Royal—
It hurts me so much to have to write this to you.
The thing with a jug is you can’t see how much whiskey is left. He hopes there is enough. The miners are singing one song and the boys from Companies A and H something else, but happy, it is early Saturday night and the holes around Bisbee are puking out copper like there is no tomorrow and the Papagos and the Apaches are quiet and the boys will have half of Sunday to sober up in the saddle and Royal is slugging his way through a gallon jug.
My dearest Royal—
Her handwriting is beautiful, like you’d expect, and at first it was hard to understand that something so wrong could be hiding in such gracefully crafted shapes. If she is as upset as she says she is, he thinks, why can’t you see it in the writing? If the handwriting in the letters was a voice it would be soft, reasonable, calm—
My dearest Royal—
It hurts me so much to have to write this to you. Nature itself has betrayed us, and I am with child.
Something he heard from the Bible once. With child. Too Tall is down the bar telling a story about Coop, who is back digging slit trenches at Huachuca cause they caught him smoking hemp on guard duty. Whatever is in the jug feels better when it gets down now, though swallowing is still a chore. His throat started closing right while he was reading, his insides trying to push up out of him, and by the end of the first section he could hardly breathe.
My dearest Royal—
It hurts me so much to have to write this to you. Nature itself has betrayed us, and I am with child. But our love cannot be.
Fort Huachuca is nothing but heat and dust. They drill, they march into the mountains with full packs on, they listen to the officers tell them they may be needed in the Philippines or in China, but finally it is only Army makework and not nearly enough of it.
“Stick the niggers where they can’t make too much trouble,” Coop grumbles whenever they are out on maneuvers. “Any further an we be in Mexico.”
“All I know,” says Too Tall, who got the trench foot so bad in Cuba they almost had to amputate, “is it aint rainin.”
It is crowded in the saloon, crowded in all of the dozens of saloons in Brewery Gulch, and the boys will tie one on and then climb uphill to buy women but Royal is looking straight ahead, past the two busy bartenders who run back and forth, looking to the even busier picture behind them of the 7th being slaughtered by Indians on the hills he has ridden over on a bicycle. At the lower right there are men already stripped of their clothes, others having their scalps lifted or being trampled by horses or shot or stabbed or tomahawked, and only a few able to fight back. More Indians on horseback are on their way, galloping from the mountains at the top of the picture. The General himself is just up and over from the middle, dressed in buckskins, hatless, empty pistol held as a club in his left hand and saber raised high in his right. Above the frame it says that the beer company presented the original of the painting to the regiment, though why you’d want a picture of your friends being murdered and mutilated is not explained. On the bottom it identifies RAIN-IN-THE-FACE and HALF BREED and GENERAL CUSTER and some others and at the far right SQUAW KILLING WOUNDED. Sure enough above it there is a woman in a red dress grabbing a downed soldier at his collar and raising a club overhead to brain him. No prisoners.
We have no engagement to break off, of course, no, we have nothing but our one night of love to remember—
He has seen Custer’s Last Fight in bars before but never studied the details. The old troopers say you kept the last bullet for yourself because if you weren’t finished they would scalp you alive and then do other things. Coop said that in Caney they found a Spanish officer who’d stabbed his woman, a Cuban girl, and then shot himself in the head. But that is just meanness and honor, Dago stuff, and no model for his present situation.
Father will not be moved and I am not of an age to defy him. If it was not for my condition we could wait—
Junior is sitting over with the boys but quiet. And feeling bad, Royal hopes. He drinks more whiskey from the jug. He read all three letters, the second two just more of how bad she feels but she is not the mistress of her own fate, her hands are tied, she suffers with each breath, each word seeming more of a fake than the next, and only the first one has anything for him, scrawled as an afterthought below her name—
I will always love you.
He will not always love her, not if he can help it. He thinks, in fact, that he has already stopped, but that doesn’t make it any easier to breathe. He wants to paint his face like the Cheyenne and the Sioux in the picture and ride straight over somebody, wants to pound somebody to jelly with a club. Dorsey Love is an old man, almost thirty, and he will be the one lying with Jessie, he will be the one raising up Royal’s baby boy or girl, he will be the one that sits at the Luncefords’ big table and the Doctor will have to smile at him and pass the chicken and pretend he is happy about it. The liquor has no bite now, just a smell, and Hardaway is up on a chair reciting The Charge of the Nigger Ninth for everybody in the saloon, though Hardaway is in the 25th and didn’t come up the hill till the second day.
“What you got there?” he called out, passing by as Royal pondered the letters, sitting on the barracks steps. “Some gal that won’t leave you be?”
“Just news from home,” Royal said and looked across at Junior, who was reading his own letter from his mother and knowing by then. “Junior’s sister is getting married.”
“That right?” Mudfish Brown joined in. “Fore you know it he be a uncle. Uncle Junior.”
They were still calling him that on the ride across the scrublands, Junior shooting Royal a sorry look now and then but not saying anything. There is not much he can say that won’t end with Royal hitting him.
I have never understood why Father is so ill-disposed toward you—
Royal understands. Royal has always understood. Junior is the one who doesn’t fit in here, Junior with his little half smile watching the men thumping Hardaway on the back, not a spot on him from a day of riding, Junior the one who grinds through every stupid detail without complaint, who acts like someone even higher than the white brass is watching his every move, judging his deportment, keeping score, while Royal accepts that he is just another sorry-ass nigger no matter how you dress him up.
The second letter didn’t say she would always love him at the end of it, it said how in the light of the terrible circumstances they should probably not correspond any more. And the third one was to apologize for the second one, but it was only a few lines, like she was in a dungeon somewhere and had to write it quick and smuggle it out.
I shall soon reap the consequences of my own weakness. Do not mourn for me, do not even think of me—
She doesn’t say if she means she was weak to come to him at Jubal’s place or weak not to fight more against the Doctor. It doesn’t matter. She is as gone from his life as if she was dead, worse even. Squaw killing wounded. The boys are having too much fun now and he is afraid they will try to pull him into it and the jug is feeling awfully light. He takes it with him, reeling out through the back to the alley behind where you piss and there are two men already sick there, heaving what is probably not really Old Crow and he decides to get the horse and ride somewhere.
But on Commerce Street there are too many men, the town overstuffed with miners come in desperate to spend their pay and get at least as drunk as Royal is. There are three different fistfights in progress and men peeing right out on the curb and a man who has taken his shirt off standing out in the middle and screaming, just screaming. The Gulch rises up steep to the next block, drunken men stumbling down past as he climbs and thrusts the jug into the arms of an already weaving white miner and then passes through an alley between two buildings and just keeps climbing, up the slope and away from the racket of Bisbee and the glowing lights of the copper smelter just below it. It is steep enough that sometimes he has to put his hands down and climb on all fours but finally he is on the ridge, standing unsteadily, looking back down at the lights and the shouting and the raucous music and now and then a gunshot and he can think of nothing more than Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible story. They had it coming and so did he, it looks like, and he wheels around and walks farther away from the light and the noise.
A different story—forty days and forty nights in the desert, Jesus maybe, or maybe Moses. Mama tried to take them regular to church but for a long time was caring for some white people’s children on Sundays and he and Jubal would go but sit in the back and sneak out sometime before the sermon, so sometimes the stories get mixed up in his head. Forty days and forty nights in the desert and turning away from Temptation and then coming back clean and holy but mostly being away from everybody, away from their ribbing and their eyes able to see the shame of it on your face and them talking about you when they think you can’t hear. Might as well give the damn letters to Hardaway and have him read them out loud. He keeps walking up a dry gulley away from the town, don’t look back, don’t look back, that is another story, and it is getting colder fast now and the wind picking up and he starts to howl back at it. There are coyotes at night, of course, a couple big tribes of them around the Fort that set each other off with their noise that can go on for hours, but you don’t see much of them unless you’re out on maneuvers and cook up a mess of bacon and then they’ll come sniffing, head low and ears back. The stars are gone now, no moon, the sky feeling suddenly low and heavy above him and then there is thunder, rolling at first, and sheet lightning flickering up in the clouds, one section of the sky lighting up for a moment, then another, like the clouds are packs of coyotes calling to each other then CRACK! a bolt sizzling down not so far from him and CRACK! another behind and then it is hail, hard and scouring and there is nowhere to shelter, the land here even more wasted, even less friendly than Montana and the hailstones sting like hell where they slap against his skin, Royal ducking his head in under his arms, left his hat on the bar in the Calumet, and thinking I looked back, dammit, I forgot the story and I looked back and now I will turn into a pillar of shit. And CRACK! it answers, close enough to smell fried air this time, answering him, reminding him how small he is, how it don’t care a thing about his troubles.
Royal sits heavily onto the spiky ground, covering his head and waiting for it to end.
Sergeant Jacks is skirting around Bisbee with Guadalupe and the new mule when a mine foreman riding in the opposite direction tells him there is a soldier sitting in the desert. The mule is the end result of a transaction among Lupe’s hundreds of cousins that started at least two years ago, and he hopes to hell it isn’t stolen. El Chato, who sold it to him at his shack down near Naco a hundred yards from the border, is from the Apache side of her relatives, a son of old Hernán whose sister was one of Geronimo’s wives, and likes to brag about what great stock thieves his people are.
“Some of my fellas hauling timber in seen him,” says the mine foreman, trying not to stare at Guadalupe on the grulla mare beside him. “They stopped and walked all the way over from the wagon road but he said he’d just stay where he was.”
Lupe is half Mex and half Indian, which Jacks didn’t know till they were hitched and nobody come to congratulate her. Relatives on both sides will nod hello if they pass by but that is about all. And then up in Missoula with her it was a whole nother kind of people, white ladies who couldn’t be bothered and the Flathead gals who don’t speak Spanish or Apache. So it is mostly just the two of them, which has been just fine so far. Marriage is a tricky enough deal without the in-laws thrown into the pot.
“Es un loco?” she asks about the soldier when they are riding away.
“No sé cual soldado es,” he shrugs. “Quizás es solamente un borrachón.”
There are men in the company, good men in a pinch, who can’t handle peacetime duty and fall into the bottle. And it is worse out here in the Great Nowhere, easy for a soldier to think the Army has just forgotten about you, that you’ll shrivel up in the sun like a dead rattler. Which is some of why he chased after Lupe so hard on his first tour here, knowing only that she wasn’t white and she wasn’t for sale and that she was one tough trader. They still had a sutler at the Fort then and whenever he would try to swap canned provisions for her wild game or Navaho blankets or other souvenir goods she would pick a can out at random and make him eat the contents, all of it, before she’d close the deal. Wouldn’t talk any English, either, though even back then Jacks could tell she understood it fine.
She points to the sky.
There are nearly a dozen buzzards wheeling lazily in the air, enough to know that what’s below them is bigger than a javelina and high enough to guess that it isn’t dead yet. Lupe leads the mule on a rope. It is maybe a three-year-old, bred in the Mex style on a mustang mare, and is way too curious to have been used in the traces. Its big ears start twitching every which way when they cut off the road and into the chaparral.
From a distance he does look dead, though he is sitting up, cross-legged in the middle of a big patch of ocotillo and cholla cactus. There were maybe twenty each from A and H got the two-day pass, let them blow off some steam and keep the barracks scraps to a minimum. Men are not mules, which would be happy to eat mash and switch flies all day, they get mean and skittish if there’s too little to do, if there’s nobody else to fight but each other. Huachuca isn’t bad duty, laid out just like Fort Missoula only the mountains are scrub instead of evergreen, but riding herd on the cursing, whining, sweat-stinking lot of troopers will wear a man down, so whenever there is a chance to spend a night at the cabin he grabs it. If there was ever a person don’t need taking care of it is Guadalupe. She won’t come on the Fort any more, not even to sell, and he figures it is on his account. The old hands know better than to call him Squaw Man or tamale-eater but still it is nice to keep the two things separate. Army owns enough of you.
It is Royal Scott.
It is Royal Scott and he’s lost his hat and the skin on his face has started to blister. He sits cross-legged, hands resting on his knees with his palms up, eyes closed. Lupe hands Jacks her reins and gets down, stepping carefully over the horse-crippler and around the cholla till she can bend down and look at him close. He opens his eyes to see her.
“Here she is,” he smiles. “Come to kill the wounded.”
“You got lost in the desert,” calls Sergeant Jacks, giving the boy an out. Scott looks over and doesn’t seem too surprised that he is there.
“No, Sergeant, this is just where I come to a stop.”
“You were due back in camp sometime yesterday, I expect.”
The boy shakes his head. “I need to go home.”
“You are home, son. Till they tell us different.”
He keeps smiling, one of those don’t-give-a-damn-no-more smiles Jacks has learned to be wary of. Guadalupe is still bent over the boy, studying his face.
“Just leave me here, Sarge. I aint worth shit for a soldier.”
He is mostly right. “Army will be the judge of that, son. Get up and we ride in together.”
Private Scott holds his hands out. At some point, probably in the dark, he fell and tried to catch himself and got both hands full of cholla spines.
“I can’t hold no reins.”
“You just get up. Lupe can pull you along.”
Lupe helps him stand. He teeters some when he walks, but there is no bottle left on the ground so it is just thirst and hunger and being out in that crazy hail that made such a racket on the cabin roof.
“Thank you, M’am, I think I got it now.” He looks up to Jacks. He isn’t the worst in the company, but he is no warrior, not like some of the old boys or that wild-ass Cooper. “This is her, isn’t it? Mrs. Sergeant.”
“That’s her.”
“I thought it was just a rumor.”
Jacks gets down from his buckskin quarter horse to help her hoist him up onto the mare.
The boy’s hands are useless so it is not easy. The circle of buzzards loosens, disappointed, and one by one they peel off to search for a less active prospect.
The private is still watching Lupe. “She write you letters when you’re away?”
“She don’t write.”
“Good. Don’t teach her.”
When the boy is settled in the saddle Guadalupe rides bareback on the new mule, who is surprised but doesn’t kick, pulling the mare along by the reins.
“Es que se le parte el corazón,” she says to Jacks when they are on their way to Huachuca. “Nada más.”
The Army will occasionally grant leave on the death of a soldier’s mother, but makes no provision for broken hearts. Every time the damn mail comes there is somebody left in a funk, and he wishes the people at home would have the decency to lie if they don’t have good news to report.
“We’ll stop on the way, deal with them hands of yours. Lupe got something to put on it.”
“She a medicine woman?”
“Horse doctor. If she can fix saddle galls and glanders and poll-evil, I figure she can’t do too much damage to a colored infantryman.”
It is only a glue that she makes that you paint on after the big spines are pulled out and wait for it to dry. When you peel it off all the little cactus hooks and hairs in the wounds come out too. They ride for some time, Scott still smiling his smile though he is facing at least a week in the brig and won’t see another leave for months, though it must be some effort to keep seated being weak and dizzy and riding with his hands crossed in front of his chest.
“You were out there a good five miles from Bisbee,” Jacks says finally. “Mind telling me where you were headed?”
“Not headed anywhere. Just waitin.”
“Waiting for what?”
The private stops smiling and looks off to the right to the Dragoons, where old Cochise holed up with his people. “You sit there long enough,” he says, “and the Dark One is spose to come and offer you the world.”