TWENTY-YEAR-OLD WALTER WATERS rubbed his dry eyes as he peered across the sweltering darkness of the Sonoran desert. He had been standing guard at this border post for five lonely hours, with his rifle at the ready for the moment Pancho Villa and his bloodthirsty band came riding up. Only a few weeks earlier, and around this same time of night, that Mexican felon had raided Columbus, New Mexico, murdering seventeen Americans sleeping in hotels there.
He never thought he’d ever long for Weiser, but on this night he was downright homesick. With jobs at the timber camps drying up, he had finally gotten up the nerve to join the Idaho National Guard, hoping to catch a little excitement. Yet his unit had been sitting here on the border for four long months with twelve thousand other Guard call-ups, bored to death at dodging snakes and the Spanish flu. The only action he'd come close to seeing was the accidental wounding of a half-dozen tourists who had motored down on a weekend from Tucson to picnic along the Santa Cruz river and watch the Mexican government’s patrols scuffle with the packs of bandits.
What he wouldn’t give to be riding with Black Jack Pershing and the cavalry right now. Last week, in the local general store, he'd come across a copy of the Chicago Tribune that featured a story by none other than his old baseball buddy, Floyd Gibbons. He grinned at the memory of his boyhood encounter with that crazy ax-wielding reporter. It wouldn’t surprise him if Gibbons ended up bringing back a dozen Mexican pitching phenoms and—
He heard a rustling in the scrub brush just ahead.
He lowered his rifle and ratcheted the bolt, making sure it was loaded. Shoot first at these dastardly Mexicanos and ask questions later, his sergeant had told him. He took careful aim at the lurker’s lair.
“Waters!” came a whisper from the darkness.
Startled, Waters let go with a round.
“Hold your fire, you shit-for-brains!”
“Who-o-o-o-o-g-g-g-g-goes-th-th-th-there?”
His bunkmate, Goins Gavin, rushed up and yanked the gun from his hands. Gavin ratcheted the bolt to make sure there were no more bullets in the chamber and then threw the weapon to the ground in disgust. “You coulda splattered me halfway to Chihuahua!”
“You c-c-come up on me like Villa!”
“You think that sombrero-crowned sonofabitch talks like me? Hell, all you ever babble about is Pancho Villa this, Pancho Villa that. You’d think he was the goddamn Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse all rolled up into one! Give it a rest, will ya?”
Waters swallowed his heart back into his chest. “What are y-y-you doing out here?”
Gavin shook his head. “I don’t know why they put you on guard patrol anyway. Half the goddamn Mexican army would be on us before you could spit out a warning.” He reached into his pocket and handed Waters a folded piece of paper. “I’m taking over your watch.”
“How come?”
“The striped buzzards have got a secret spy mission for you.”
Waters got excited. “They want me to go on r-r-reconnaissance?”
“Just read the goddamn order, will ya?”
Waters struck a match for light and unfolded the paper. “S-s-soda water?”
Gavin tore up the order and scattered it to the wind. “The company is out of soda water.”
“W-w-what am I supposed to do about it?”
“That Texarcana asshole who runs the hotel in town has a monopoly on the supply from El Paso. The boys are getting damn tired of paying out the nose for the drinks. Sarge wants you to go in undercover and bring back ten cases of the sparkly stuff.”
“Why me?”
Gavin kept a deadpan glare. “I reckon you’re the only one with the smarts and slipperiness to pull it off.”
Waters broadened his chest. “I’m s-s-smelling a promotion.”
“You’re smelling, all right. Now skedaddle. Oh, and Waters…"
“Yeh?”
“It’s a secret mission,” Gavin warned. “The sergeant and I never knew nothin’ about this, comprende, compadre?”
Waters nodded as he took off on a stealthy run toward town. Stalking from alley to alley, he slithered up behind the Bowman Hotel and found the back door locked. He picked up an abandoned tie rod, slid it into the crease of the hinge, and cracked it open. Leaving the door ajar to let in the light from the full moon, he slipped inside the storage room and rummaged through the crates until he located the bottles of soda water. It suddenly occurred to him that the spying order hadn’t specified where the soda water should be delivered. He figured he’d earn a few bonus points by lugging the crates, one by one, over to Sergeant Bearson’s tent in the encampment. Yeah, he’d leave them outside the flap for the Sarge to find in the morning.
When the heavy lifting was finally finished with no one the wiser, he hustled back into the encampment on the edge of town and slipped into his pup tent. Gavin was already fast asleep, so he crawled under his roll and dreamed about getting a weekend pass in reward.
Hours later, a commotion outside his tent woke him. He rushed out with Gavin and found the sergeant swearing at the top of his lungs and being led away in handcuffs. The Nogales police officers were carrying the pilfered soda water crates to a waiting wagon.
Gavin winked to his fellow Guardsmen who were now scrambling from their tents. Then, he slapped Waters on the back and whispered, “Well done, Private Waters. Secret mission accomplished.”
WHEN THE CONSPIRACY BEHIND THE the nocturnal soda-water gambit had been exposed, the Guard brass punished the culprits and their unwitting dupe by transferring the entire Idaho company to the New Mexican outpost of Deming, a ramshackle town even more primitive than Nogales. There Waters and the prankstering Idahoans were assigned the dangerous duty of guarding the jail that held two Villistas condemned to be hanged for murder.
On the morning of the scheduled executions, the Idaho men, shouldering bayonet-fixed rifles, stood in ranks below a scaffold that had been set in the middle of the main street so that onlookers could gain a better view from their balconies. Hundreds of local Anglos, dressed in their Sunday best and armed with rifles, had commanded the preferred viewing spots before dawn. They had their gun chambers loaded, expecting Villa to make good on his promise to launch another raid across the border to prevent the hangings.
Waters watched with fascination as a deputy tested the trap door, sending it crashing against the beams and oiling its hinges until he was satisfied with its speed. He had never witnessed a hanging. Heck, he’d never even seen a man die peacefully, let alone by harsh means. But these hardened nuevomexicanos around him had seen so much bloodshed and brutality that jerking another Indian to Jesus was just all part of a day’s work to them.
And then, a half-hour later, as the first needles of light sprang up over the desert, the sheriff escorted the two condemned Villistas from the jail. Waters had expected to see drooling brutes, but these two felons were just boys. The one named Sanchez looked about sixteen and couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. The Anglo settlers shouted curses at the young Villistas and prayed the names of their relatives killed by their leader. Then, they listened for Spanish words of defiance that never came as the older of the two boys was set in place under the crossbeam. The Army captain in charge of the grisly affair read the death sentence and then asked the first condemned boy if he had anything to say.
The young bandito shook his head and muttered, “Yo no quiero.” Then he lowered his chin so that the black hood could be placed over his skull and the rope be tightened behind his ear.
While the others watched the noosed Mexican, Waters couldn’t take his eyes off his co-conspirator, Sanchez, who stood only a few feet away, awaiting his turn to fly through death’s door.
As if sensing the question now passing through Waters’s mind, Sanchez turned to him and whispered, “He seguido las órdenes. Que algún día entender.”
Waters elbowed Gavin for a translation. “What did he say?”
“He followed orders. And that one day we would understand.”
Before Waters could make sense of that prophecy, the trapdoor dropped. The first Mexican’s neck snapped with a loud crack, and his spasming legs dangled a few feet above the ground. A doctor casually strolled over and placed a stethoscope to the corpse’s chest. After ten seconds, the doctor turned and nodded to the captain. The dead Mexican was cut down and his hood removed, revealing his eyes and mouth still open. The crowd buzzed with satisfaction, and turned toward Sanchez to enjoy his reaction at having just witnessed what now awaited him.
Another rope was thrown over the beam, and the diminutive Sanchez, nursing a thigh wound suffered during the Columbus raid, limped up the stairs, prodded from behind. On the platform, the captain and sheriff conferred in animated whispers, arguing about some aspect of the ritual. Finally, the sheriff shook his head and stood aside. The captain positioned the inexpressive Sanchez on the reset trapdoor. Figuring the Mexican boy, like his co-conspirator, had nothing of any importance to say, the officer quickly fit him with the hood and set the noose.
The door hinged and Sanchez dropped, but this time there was no crack of the vertebrae. The young bandit writhed from the rope, gurgling and gasping. The sheriff glared a curse at the captain for not heeding his warning that the boy did not weigh enough for the length of the fall to do its work.
Waters turned aside, his stomach churning. As the Mexican boy near him struggled in agony, the crowd murmured, and some yelled suggestions on how to finish the grisly deed. The captain just stood there, dazed. Finally the sheriff pulled a knife and, standing atop a barrel rolled up for his assistance, cut Sanchez down. Still hooded, the boy collapsed to the ground, snorting for air and undulating like a worm.
“Well?” demanded the sheriff. “What do we do now?”
The captain’s face was whiter than a shroud. “Get the damn judge down here.”
Ten minutes later, the sheriff escorted the reluctant judge from his courthouse office to the street. The judge glared at the captain, shaking his head with disgust. “This is what we get letting Washington tell us what to do.”
“Do we let the boy live, or not?” the captain asked.
Sanchez had regained consciousness and was sitting up, gasping for breath through the hood.
Waters tried to imagine the terror the poor boy must be going through. Probably he was wondering if he had landed in some dark Limbo where the gringo English was spoken. Outraged by the cruelty, Waters shouted, “At least t-t-take his hood off while you ch-ch-chew the fat!”
The captain spun on his heels and pointed at him. “Silence, soldier!”
Waters stood steaming. Gavin shot him a glare of warning to shut up while the judge and town leaders continued to argue over what law applied to botched executions. Finally, the judge ordered the local telegraph office to send a wire to the governor asking for instructions. As they waited, the heat built into the day and fried the street, and poor Sanchez sat trembling and hooded, sweating and waiting for the Almighty to decide his fate.
AN HOUR LATER, THE TELEGRAPH operator came running down from his office waving a response from the state capitol. He stole a glance at Sanchez, who couldn’t make out what was happening, and then reported to the sheriff, “The governor said hang him again.”
The vengeful crowd, now reinvigorated for another swinging, abandoned the shade under the awnings and rushed to their favored spots under the gallows.
The sheriff shook his head in disgust at the captain. “How’s he expect me to get a different result? That gallows you Army boys built isn’t high enough.” When the captain just shrugged and motioned for him to get on with the governor’s orders, the sheriff searched the crowd and pointed to a burly rancher. “Jeffers! You want to earn ten dollars?”
“Doing what?” the rancher asked.
“I’m assigning you the position of hangman for the day.”
“What does that mean?”
The sheriff glanced over at the hooded boy. Then, he told the drafted rancher, “Get it done.”
The rancher dragged Sanchez up the stairs of the gallows. He wrapped the rope around the praying boy’s neck and dropped him, with no more fanfare than if he were tossing a chicken from a coup in his barn. The crowd cocked their ears for the crack. They shook their heads as the boy just hung there again, kicking and fighting for breath.
“Goddammit!” the sheriff shouted. “It’s down to five dollars now!”
Pissed off that his hangman’s fee had been halved because of his failure, the giant Anglo waved his hand at the sheriff to keep his powder dry. For a third time, the local rawhider reeled up the Mexican boy through the drop hole and cradled him writhing in his arms. He turned Sanchez upside down and drove him through the hole as hard as he could, as if he were spearing a fish under a frozen lake. This time, finally, the good citizens of Deming heard their loud crack.
Waters didn’t wait for permission to fall out. He rushed into an alley and lost the burrito he had eaten for breakfast.