“Our passions are ourselves.”
—Anatole France
From the bars of my high window I can see the shimmer of the Río Zanjón through the trees, and beyond them the dark Sierras de San Antonio. The mountains are especially beautiful under a full moon, even though on those nights a crowd always comes out from town and gathers by the iron-barred front gate to be entertained by our howling. I have heard their raucous laughter, their mock howls and drunken derisions. I have imagined their bright faces and delirious exultation not to be among us. Usually, however, on those evenings of the full moon I am oblivious to their echoing caterwauls because I am howling with the other inmates, and when I howl, I am aware of nothing but the brute events that brought me here.
At first I was permitted to visit the gardens behind the main building twice a week, like most of the others. But before I’d been here a month I attacked another inmate. We tumbled into a rose bed, snarling and grappling in the dirt. I got my hands hard on his throat and his eyes bulged like red plums. I would certainly have killed him if the guards had not rushed up and clubbed me insensible. When the warden pressed me for an explanation, I told him the fellow had been singing about a woman named Delgadina, which was the name of my wife.
“But señor,” he said, “there must be hundreds of women called Delgadina. Why do you believe he was singing about your wife?”
Bastard. Addressing me as “señor” rather than “don.” I knew all about him. He came from a family of sucklings to the viceroy—bureaucrats, administrators, a line of glorified clerks. My family had been the better of his by leagues since long before the founding of New Spain. We had come wearing armor—not, like his people, lace and rose-water. Now this smiling, bloated pig sat reveling in the circumstance that put him in official authority over me.
“That isn’t what I believe,” I said. “And if you say her name again, I will tear out your tongue.”
I have not been allowed from my cell since.
I do have periods of lucidity—this moment is proof of that. Sometimes they last for days, but I have yet to pass a week without relapsing into . . . what shall we call it . . . my spectacular dementia. I’ve been told quite explicitly what I look like in the throes of my lunatic fits. I tear out my hair—what’s left of it. I slaver like a sunstruck dog. My eyes roll up in my head. I beat my fists on the heavy wooden door, on the stones of the walls and the floor. I howl for hours. In this place of iron and shadows and sweating stone, I become the madman of theatre. I lack only the rattling chains, but I expect they’ll come soon enough.
My howling has rent my voice to a croak which some of my keepers find amusing. My battered hands often look like spoiled meat. They brought a mirror to me last week, thinking, I suppose, the shock might do me good. I saw eyes like firepits, a beard gone wild, facial bones jutting sharply against skin the color of lemonwater. I roared and smashed the glass, and the officious fools bolted from the room like spooked mares. If I were given to religion, or to self-pity, or—worst of all—to the sentiments of Romance, I might say that I have come to know hell. But such talk is the idiom of fools, the self-pitying locution of stage plays and poetry, and I will no more indulge in it myself than I will endure it in others.
Forgive me: I tend to ramble in these periods of respite from the dementia. Insanity of this sort is more than mental torture, it is abject humiliation. How I envy the steadfastly insane all around me. They are spared such recurrent seizures of sanity as I must bear, spared these periodic realizations of where we are, and why.
Suicide? Bah! Some choose it, of course. Not a month goes by without at least one wretch found hanging in his cell or drowned in one of the garden ponds. Cowards, all of them! Suicide is contemptible, the final refuge of the true poltroon. (Like Rojas, that bastard slyboots!) But not I. I will not kill myself, not ever. I am insane, but I am no coward.
Again, I beg your pardon. I not only ramble like a fool, I shame myself with gross discourtesy. My name is Don Sebastián Cabrillo Mayor Cortés y Mendoza. I am patrón of the Hacienda de la Luna Plata. My family has owned this region of Sonora since Coronado marched through it on his way to search for the Seven Cities of Gold. The first of my New World ancestors, Don Marcos Cabrillo, was a lieutenant in Coronado’s expedition. He lost a foot in a battle with Yaqui Indians and was left behind when the column moved on. With a following of four other maimed soldiers and a handful of converted indigenes, he laid claim to all the land visible from the bloodstained mesa where he had been crippled. He named his portion of the earth after the region’s dazzling silver moon—La Luna Plata—and over the next three and a half centuries the hacienda expanded to more than a hundred square miles. It took sharp steel to conquer this country of cactus and rock, and an iron will to rule it. It took hardness—as each generation of Cabrillo men was taught by the one before it. As my father taught me. “Hardness,” he told me repeatedly through my youth, “is everything.”
By the time my father became patrón of La Luna Plata, his authority, like that of hacendados everywhere, was enforced not only by his own pistoleros but also by the powerful Guardia Rural, the national mounted police. Since the rurales’ wise creation by our esteemed president, Porfirio Díaz, bandits no longer pillage the countryside so freely as they once did, and reports of peon insurrections are now quite rare. Like Don Porfirio himself, the rurales well understand the efficacy of hardness. They are authorized to make arrests on their own suspicions, incarcerate suspects indefinitely, interrogate by any means necessary to encourage the truth, and confiscate a suspect’s property as legal recompense to the state. And under the provision of the Law of Flight, they may legally shoot dead any man who attempts to escape their custody. Thus does that highly efficient police force often spare the state the cost and inconvenience of extending judicial formalities to those undeserving of them.
Malefactors on La Luna Plata have always received swift punishment—the branding iron, the lash, or the noose, depending on the severity of the offense. My father was renowned for tailoring the penalty to the transgression. As a descendant of devout apostles of the Inquisition, he owned an imagination well-suited to the invention of punishments. There was, for example, the arrogant mestizo foreman who set his mastiff bitch onto a group of Indian children for no reason but sport. My father sentenced him to kill the animal, skin it, and hang the carcass from a tree in the main plaza for a week. He then had to eat the dog’s hindquarters, raw and rotten, with the villagers looking on. He also had to forfeit half-a-month’s pay to each of the families of the children his dog had savaged.
There was a band of drunkards whose loud cursings in the street disturbed the village mass every evening until the priest complained of it to my father, who had the men arrested and sentenced each one to receive a live coal in his mouth. He ordered a rapist to be conveyed to a pigsty, there castrated, and made to watch the swine consume his severed parts before he was hanged. He permitted the father and brother of a young woman who had been beaten to death by her bad-tempered husband to take the killer into the desert and do with him as they thought proper. Among other things, they flayed his skull, and on their return to the ranch they nailed the entire headskin to the crosspiece over the corral gate, where it was shortly devoured by birds and ants. After a few days, only the scalp remained, and it stayed up there for months, a withered testament to the hard certainty of Luna Plata justice.
I was my father’s son in every way—educated by the Jesuit fathers, skilled in the arts of weaponry, easy in the saddle. I was confident in command of men, versed in the social graces, and wholly comfortable with my privilege. And I was guarded in my passions, or so I believed.
On the matter of women my father was as adamant as on all else in life. I was still a boy when I discovered he kept a rawhide quirt on his bedroom wall, and I intuitively perceived how my mother came to bear the small dark scar on her wrist which she tried to conceal under lace-cuffed sleeves. I do not presume to judge my father on that point, though I have dwelt upon it.
Understand: I loved my mother. She was a lovely woman of grace, refinement, and generous spirit. Yet who but my father can know what she was like as a wife? Whatever he felt in their most intimate moments, whatever urges she inflamed in his soul, whatever image of her he carried in his heart—such were the things he surely had in mind when he warned me of the perils of passionate love. In my boyhood he encouraged me to indulge my young appetite for women as freely as I wished. His own casual indulgences had produced a scattering of blue-eyed mestizos among the peons of La Luna Plata. “Enjoy your lust,” he advised me, “but beware of love. It is the most perilous of the passions.”
A few days before my wedding, as we took brandy in his study, he advised me once again. He had arranged the marriage when Delgadina Fernández Ordóñez was but six years old. “She was an awkward, bony child,” my father told me with a smile. “Legs as spindly and knobby as sugarcanes, eyes like a baby owl’s. Your luck is pure gold, Sebastián. Who would have thought she’d bloom into a rose of Castile?”
It was indeed a matter of luck—a bartered bride’s beauty, or her lack of it, is of no significance in these arrangements. My father’s sole concern, of course—the only concern of any don seeking a bride for his son—was to secure some sort of economic or political gain for our family. My union with Delgadina would increase both the expanse of our land and the strength of our political influence in Hermosillo, the capital, where her father, Don Antonio, had powerful connections. “Your dowry,” my father said proudly, “is the most admirable I’ve heard of since my own.”
He paused to light a cigar and regarded me over the flame. “I am told,” he said, “that she is spirited and quick of wit. Somewhat saucy. Occasionally even impertinent. Such qualities in any woman can be amusing, sometimes charming. It is natural to desire a beautiful woman, but if she also possesses charm and a proper wit, well, then love is certainly possible.”
He stood at the window and stared for a long moment at the distant San Antonios. “But listen, my son,” he said with sudden gravity. “Of all the misfortunes a man might meet in life, none is more terrible than to become subservient to a woman. That is a perversion of the natural order. Yet it can happen when a man loves a woman with more passion than he can control. Passion is like a powerful stallion champing at its bit. We must keep a tight rein or risk losing control of the beast. A man on a runaway horse, Sebastián, is both a dangerous fool and an object of ridicule, a thing of scorn in every man’s eyes—and to all women. Such a man’s own wife will look on him with contempt. If she is a worthy woman, she will curse the day fate married her to a weak, unworthy man.”
He had leaned closer to me as he spoke and now was gripping my forearm hard. “Passion, Sebastián, is like fine brandy—a joy, a great pleasure to the man who knows how to drink. But it is an infernal cruse to the fool who gulps without restraint. This you must remember.”
He was suddenly aware of his own intensity and stepped back, smiling awkwardly, and then busied himself refilling our cups. Without looking at me, he said, “Never give her reason to question even in her own mind who is master and who is maid.”
I respected my father above all men, but I was not as guarded as he, as suspicious, as—let us speak bluntly—as fearful of the heart’s strong passions. I had the arrogant confidence of youth. Unlike him, I was absolutely sure of my self-control, utterly confident that my love for Delgadina would never prove a weakness. Indeed, even as he counseled me in his study, he did not know that I was already in love with my bride-to-be. I had been since the first time I’d seen her, a little more than two years before, when she was yet fourteen and I five years older.
It was at my cousin Marco’s wedding reception. I was in the main patio with another cousin, Roberto Luis, a handsome but salacious fellow who would be killed in a duel a year later in consequence of publicly insulting the daughter of a don. He asked if I knew that my betrothed was in attendance, and then laughed at my look of surprise. “Over there,” he said, pointing to a group of girls standing in the shade of a willow at the far end of the patio, protected from male encroachment by a clutch of sharp-faced dueñas. “The sleek thing in the green dress. You lucky prick! A little skinny, maybe, but look at the melons on her!”
She was laughing with the others at some amusement, then turned in a sudden swirl of copper hair and caught me staring at her across the crowd. She smiled boldly and held my gaze—and I felt the breath sucked out of my heart. One of the crones spotted the look between us, and in the next instant the dueñas hastily herded them all into a side patio and out of sight.
We were formally introduced on the morning of her quinceañera—the ritual occasion of her fifteenth birthday, which marked her coming-of-age. I was appointed her escort for the day’s festivities. She was even more beautiful than I recalled from my glimpse of her at Marco’s wedding. She delighted in banter and laughed with ease, her eyes at once impish and full of warm promise. Our betrothal was made public two months later.
We were officially engaged for a year. A few weeks before the wedding, as we were walking in the garden one late summer afternoon (and trailed closely, of course, by the ubiquitous flock of chattering dueñas), she told me that even before Roberto Luis had shown me who she was, I had been pointed out to her. Had she not known I was the man she was promised to, she said, she would never have regarded me with such open audacity at Marco’s wedding. “My God,” she whispered in mock horror, “you must have thought me wanton!”
And so we were married. But although I loved her dearly—and rejoiced in the beauty of her flesh—I never abandoned myself to my passion for her, not fully, not even in the most ardent moments of our conjugal intimacies. Understand: I relished the affection she lavished upon me and the way she so much enjoyed receiving it in return. We were tenderly solicitous of each other—and avidly amorous mates. Indeed, the fervor of her lovemaking sometimes shocked me, even as it thrilled. Yet I always held a portion of my passion at a distance from my love for her, posting it like a marshal at a fiesta who is forbidden from enjoying himself but must keep a watchful eye on the proceedings and prevent things from getting out of hand. That restraint was the source of my confident self-possession. And as I was first and foremost Cabrillo don—and the next patrón of La Luna Plata—self-possession was imperative. Hardness was everything.
And she? She deferred to my wishes in all matters, of course—though not always without some feigned expression of rebellion: an exaggerated pout that presented her lower lip like a succulent wedge of fruit; a quick, saucy show of her tongue, followed instantly by the giggling smile she could never suppress; a sassy toss of her hair and an impudent sidewise look. Such gestures endeared her to me all the more. I kept no quirt on the bedroom wall.
Our first three children were girls. My father joked about it, but in his eyes I saw the same desperation that was gnawing at me. Then came Hernán—and the fiesta celebrating his birth roared for a week. We hoped for still more sons, but Delgadina inexplicably turned barren and our efforts over the next two years were fruitless. My disappointment was huge, but she gently impressed upon me that I should not permit greed to rule my soul.
“We have a beautiful and manly son, Sebastián,” she said, softly stroking my beard. “Are we not truly blessed?”
Each day brought me some new or deeper comprehension of her beauty, a beauty that transcended the exquisite configuration of her flesh, that went beyond the artistry of her eyes and breasts and hair. Her morning smile, her laughter, her regal serenity and sometimes mysterious gaze, her whispered endearments and touches in the night—everything about her brightened my soul like spring sunlight.
My father was now confined to a rolling chair, both legs ruined under a fallen horse. His hair and mustache had gone white and his hands were palsied, but his eyes were yet dark and hard and sharp. One afternoon, as we took a private glass of wine in the garden, he said, “The first time I saw you look at her, I knew you would never be able to lift your hand to her in reprimand, no matter how strongly she might provoke you. I feared for you. Now I see I had no cause to worry. She loves you dearly, and she seems determined never to give you cause to regret your benevolent nature toward her.”
He raised his glass in a trembling hand. “I salute you, my son, you and your remarkably good fortune.”
Had he lived two years more, he would have changed his opinion of my fortune. But within a few weeks of my mother’s mortal collapse at the church altar one morning as she was receiving Communion, he caught a severe illness of the lungs after sitting outside in the patio during a rare rainstorm while I was away in Nogales on business. He had refused to be rolled under the shelter of the veranda while the cold rain and rough wind lashed him, and he cursed the servants for wanting to treat him like a piece of sugar candy to be guarded against a little rain. He was bedridden the last nine days of his life. I was at his bedside the night he expelled his final breath, a rasping exhalation that sounded like . . . “hard.”
A few weeks after his funeral, I faced the first public test of my fitness as the new patrón of La Luna Plata. Captain Reynaldo Ochoa and his local troop of rurales brought before me a man charged with stealing horses from one of my herds. I conducted the trial in the main plaza of the hacienda, as my father always had, in the shade of the hanging tree. It was a sultry morning smelling of dust and hot stone, and the women in the crowd were all fluttering fans against the heat.
As Ochoa presented the details of the case against the man, I scanned the faces of the spectators. They were watching me even more closely than they looked at the accused, their eyes bright with eager curiosity. I knew they were wondering if the customary character of Cabrillo justice—swift, fitting, and unsparing—would obtain at La Luna Plata under the new, young patrón. Everyone knows that sometimes the son is but a short shadow of the father.
The rurales had intercepted the thief near the northern boundary of the hacienda as he was heading toward the border with eight horses bearing the brand of La Luna Plata—probably, as Ochoa surmised, intent on selling them to North American buyers. Throughout Ochoa’s presentation of the charges and evidence against him, the thief stood slouched over the hitching post he was tied to, spitting idly and smiling like a man at an entertainment. He was precisely the sort of arrogant vermin my father had hated above all other kinds. “They make it a pleasure to pass sentence on them,” he once told me. But then had quickly added: “But never let your pleasure show. No man is so feared—and therefore so respected—as he who dispenses punishment with no show of emotion.”
I asked the defendant if he had anything to say on his own behalf. He leaned back against the post and shrugged with his palms turned up in a theatrical gesture of befuddlement. “Hey, patrón,” he said, “I found those horses. Anybody could see they were lost horses. I’m a stranger here, so I didn’t know whose brand they had. I thought I should take those lost horses to the next town and try to find the owner, maybe get a nice reward for returning them, you know? I was only trying to do a good thing, and these hardworking officials”—he gestured at the rurales—”they didn’t understand.” He looked at me and saw my smile. “Hey, patrón, do I look like a goddamn horse thief?”
In that moment, I had an inspired vision of his punishment. I condemned him to hang, naturally, but not from the tree in the plaza.
“Any man who steals from La Luna Plata must be properly punished,” I said, speaking loudly enough to be heard by everyone present. “But punishment should serve a higher purpose than mere retribution. It should serve as moral instruction, as well.” I smiled at the thief. “Through you, I will show many others in Sonora the consequences of stealing from me. Of course, you yourself will learn little from your punishment other than the difficulty of drawing a breath while hanging by the neck from a rope.” There was a chorus of merry laughter from the spectators.
I decreed that the instrument of his execution would be a gallows erected on a stout flatbed wagon hitched to a strong team of mules. He would hang on that mobile gallows all the way from the hacienda to the border, fattening the crows as he went. In every village along the road from here to Nogales, people would see what happened to horse thieves on La Luna Plata. “At the border,” I said, “my boys will cut down what’s left of you and feed it to the eels in the Río Alisos.”
The crowd was impressed. There was much nodding and murmuring of approval. The thief himself grinned broadly and shook his head slowly and muttered, “God damn.”
On the following day, as soon as the wheeled gallows was ready, he was hanged. Then an escort of a half-dozen men took him away, the corpse jouncing and swaying at the end of the rope with every jolt of the wagon.
Ten days later a mail rider from the north arrived with the news that the six men I’d sent with the gallows were all dead. They had been attacked by a gang of bandits a few miles north of Laguna Seca. According to what the mail rider had heard in a local cantina, their bodies had been stripped and left in the desert, but the hanged man’s corpse was gone. The name of Juan Rojas was mentioned repeatedly in the cantina talk, and it was generally supposed that the hanged man had been a member of his bandit gang, although no one could say why they had bothered to take away the body. The Rojas Gang were not known to care about the niceties of proper burials, not even for one of their own men.
“Rojas!” my chief foreman said. “That son of a bitch is harder to kill than a cockroach.” A year earlier it had been rumored that Texas Rangers had killed Juan Rojas near El Paso, but then Rojas and his boys raided a ranch in eastern Sonora and made off with a herd of cattle. A few months later it was said that Rojas had been hanged in Fronteras, but once again the report of his death was proved wrong when he robbed a mining company of its payroll near Santa Teresa.
I sent a detail to retrieve the bodies from Laguna Seca and ordered a requiem service for them all. As for Rojas, my boys made inquiries everywhere, but no one had seen a sign of him, and after a few weeks we had to assume he was no longer in Sonora.
So then. Time passed and life was good. Delgadina’s attentions to me were distracted only once—by the death of her father, Don Antonio. He retired to his bedroom early one evening, complaining that he did not feel well, and in the morning he was as cold and stiff as the brass bedposts. He had sired three sons and three daughters, but the first two boys died in infancy, as did one of the girls, and at age fifteen the surviving son was taken by the black fever. Then Delgadina’s remaining sister, her elder, rejected the marriage Don Antonio had arranged for her and instead eloped with a man he regarded as beneath her station. Don Antonio never spoke her name again. He bequeathed all his property to Delgadina (and thereby to La Luna Plata), with the exception of a tiny hundred-acre parcel called La Querencia, which he left to his wife. She had him buried there, behind the house overlooking the Río Magdalena.
Delgadina had loved her father dearly, and for several weeks after his death she dressed in black and went about the house in silent red-eyed grief. She spent hours in the church every day, lighting candles and praying for his soul’s salvation. Then at last she dried her eyes and put away the mourning dress and came to me in the night, her hair loose and gleaming redly in the moonlight, her nipples hard as stones, her tongue greedy in my mouth, on my flesh. She gasped at my touches and panted hotly with her brute pleasure. She sighed in enveloping contentment. In the morning she awoke smiling. “You are my life,” she whispered in my ear. And though I did not say it, she was mine.
For eight unsurpassable years I was married to Delgadina Consuelo Fernández de Cabrillo, and, as with superior wine and high art, our union improved with age. But now . . . now I pace from the barred window to the bolted door and back again, going to and fro in my cell and walking up and down in it, damned to the memory of all that followed. . . .
A few days before his fourth birthday, little Hernán drowned in the river. What do the details matter now? What did they matter one instant after he was dead? Of course I demanded details then. He had been playing with some other children near the trees and well away from the riverbank. Then he went out of sight for a moment while his nanny chatted with her friends, and then someone was crying out that a child was in the water and swirling downstream. Horsemen sped downriver with ropes. And then they had him and pulled him out of the river and he was dead.
Those were the details his young nanny was able to tell us through her stuttering, choking sobs before my fist shattered the side of her face. My boot stove her ribs. Then Delgadina was atop her, shielding her, saving the bitch’s worthless life.
I rode into the desert and galloped in great circles, shrieking at the mountains, howling at the moon. I rode the roan stallion to death. The next day a search rider found me walking over the cracked earth. I yanked him out of the saddle and rode back to the hacienda, then locked myself in the candlelit room with the boy in his open coffin. The windows were hung with black drapes, and a chill draft shook the candle flames so that the shadows wriggled like snakes on the walls. I howled curses at God till the candles burned out, till my voice broke to a rasp and finally gave out completely, till the finality of my son’s death filled the room with its stench.
When I at last opened the door, she stood there, waiting to embrace me. The agony in her eyes stunned me with the realization that mine was not the only sorrow keening under our roof. Her quiet grief helped to placate somewhat the fury of my own, but although she pleaded with me over the following months to make an apology to God for having cursed Him, I would not do it, not even in the face of her argument that if I asked His forgiveness He might yet permit her to conceive another son.
“Damn Him!” I thundered. If hope for another son depended on deference to a God who would so blithely take from me my only man-child, then I spat on all hope. Hardness! Hardness was all!
No. I lie. I am a damnable liar and I confess it. Hardness was not all. Delgadina’s love had become no less vital to me, no less a shield against life’s brute possibilities, than my own hard will—though I could never have admitted it, not then, not even to myself, for fear of admitting weakness. But in a life full of uncertainties—even the uncertainty of preceding your son to the grave—her love for me was as certain and abiding as the sierras, and I wore it like an iron skin against the world.
And then, early in winter, Delgadina conceived. When she told me, I refused to believe it. If she proved wrong, I was afraid the disappointment would make me insane. I simply nodded and said, “We will see if it’s so.”
Her smile was as softly radiant as a sunrise. “It’s so, Sebastián,” she said, placing her fingers against my lips. “It’s so.”
I waited two months more before believing that it was so, and then my exultation soared. We would name him Alvaro, in honor of my father. Four months later her belly was beautifully rounding and she was lovelier than ever.
As in the past, her mother had planned to come to La Luna Plata to assist with the birth, but then the old woman’s health took a bad turn and she was unable to travel. Delgadina asked my permission to go to her mother’s house at La Querencia to have the baby.
“Mamá has been so alone there,” she said. “The memory of a grandchild’s birth under her roof will comfort her for the rest of her days.”
She knew I had spring brandings to oversee and dozens of stock buyers to receive in the coming weeks, but she assured me she felt strong and quite able to make the rugged three-day journey to La Querencia without me. I was loath to grant permission. The road to La Querencia traversed a portion of the most desolate region of La Luna Plata, and there was but a single rude waystation on the route.
“For goodness’ sake, Sebastián!” she chided me. “Mamá has made the trip a half-dozen times, accompanied only by the driver and an old man with a rusty gun who sleeps on the coach roof most of the way. Am I less able than my mother? With attendants at my side and your pistoleros all around the coach?”
She gave me that look of hers—sidewise, half-smiling. “Do you think,” she said in a stage whisper, widening her eyes in mock fright, “the Yaquis might get me?”
No one had seen a Yaqui Indian on La Luna Plata in years, not since the rurales had tracked down the last of the renegades. A few had escaped into the mountains and would hide there forever; the rest had been killed or sent to the henequen plantations in the Yucatán. But mothers still threatened wayward children with the warning, “If you don’t behave, the Yaquis will get you.”
The truth of the matter was that I did not want her to go because I knew I would miss her terribly. But it was the foolish sentiment of a lovesick boy, and I would have felt worse than foolish to speak it. My father’s old warning rang in my head like a bell. Against such sentimental impulses of the heart, he would have admonished me to stand hard.
And so I gave consent. And on an early pink morning in May, I stood in the main courtyard and returned her farewell waves as her coach—escorted by six armed horsemen—rolled out the front gate. I smiled and smiled, but I already missed her so much my chest felt as empty as an open grave.
We exchanged several letters a week through relays of dispatch riders. She reported that all was well at La Querencia. She felt strong and her mother and the midwives were taking good care of her. She wrote of the stark beauty of La Luna Plata’s western reaches—of the blazing whiteness of its vista and the dazzling blue depths of its desert sky. She wrote of the brilliant flowers and tall green willows along the Río Magdalena, all the lovelier for their contrast with the rough, surrounding landscape of pale rock and sand. I had seen it all myself since childhood, of course, but never before so clearly as through her wondering eyes.
“But sometimes the wind blows hot and hard,” she wrote, “and affects the spirit strangely. At such times I miss you so terribly my heart hurts.” In her final letter she wrote: “It’s a son, my love, I know it is. He has spoken to me in the night, when we comfort one another with our thoughts of you.”
One morning the mail rider didn’t show up. I sent men to search for him, thinking his mount might have quit him somewhere in the wild country. By the following afternoon, none of them had returned. I kept watch on the western horizon from an upper window of the house, but I was tired after a sleepless night and dozed off in my chair.
When I opened my eyes it was almost dusk, and a horseman—one of the searchers I’d sent—was at the courtyard gate, speaking in obvious agitation to the hacienda foreman and several guards. I bolted downstairs, but when he saw me running toward him, he reined his mount around and gave it the spurs. I raced across the courtyard, yelling, “Stop him!” The guards worked the levers of their carbines but seemed uncertain of what to do, and the foreman shook his head at them and gestured for them to lower their weapons.
I was breathless with fury as I reached the gate. “Damn you!” I shouted at them. I pointed at the fleeing rider and ordered, “Shoot that horse! Shoot it!”
The guards again raised their rifles, but the foreman again made a gesture against my order. “There is no need, Don Sebastián,” he said.
I grabbed him by the shirtfront and raised my fist to strike him—but the look on his face stayed my hand. His eyes were full of terrible news. “He feared you would punish him,” the foreman said. “For being the one to tell you what has happened at La Querencia.”
And so he told me.
We set out at a gallop under a thin yellow moon and rode straight through the night and all the next day, and through the night after that, using up one horse after another from the string of reserve mounts we trailed behind us. We paused but once, to refill our canteens at the way-station. Those who slept did so in the saddle.
On the second sunrise we caught sight of a thin plume of smoke in the distance, and I howled once and dug in my spurs. An hour later we arrived at the blackened ruins of La Querencia.
A small band of rurales was grouped around a campfire. On a low rise behind them lay a line of bodies covered with blankets. Captain Reynaldo Ochoa nodded to me as I dismounted, then led the way to the arrayed dead, his big spurs chinking. He said he had not yet buried the corpses because he knew I would want to see them for myself. I quickly went down the line, snatching away blankets and raising hordes of flies. Most of them were servants and their children. The six guards I’d sent with her were among them. And her maids. And her mother. But she was not.
“They took her,” Ochoa said. He was rolling a cigarette, affecting casualness but watching me warily. “Her and some of the other young women.”
I took a step toward him and my face must have been something to see—he dropped the cigarette and put his hand to his saber hilt and took a step back. “Juan Rojas, Don Sebastián,” he said. “It was him and his boys. The stable boy got away and rode to our post at Tres Palmas. We got here as fast as we could, but . . .” He gestured vaguely toward the bodies.
I tasted blood and realized I was biting my tongue to keep from howling. I forced myself to breathe deeply, to think clearly. My head was filled with images of Delgadina—of my little son curled inside of her. I spat blood and asked how he knew it was Rojas.
“Because one of them told us,” he said, smiling for the first time. “Your boys did all right before they went down. They killed seven of the pricks and shot two others so bad they got left behind.” He pointed to a flock of buzzards alighting behind a rocky rise. “I had the dead ones thrown in the arroyo back there,” he said. “Let the scavengers have them. My boys don’t dig graves for killers of children.”
“Where are they?” I said. “The ones wounded—where?”
One was a survivor no more, he said. A couple of the rurales recognized him as a wanted violator of young girls in southern Sonora and couldn’t be restrained from dealing with him on the spot. He was now with his friends in the arroyo. The other bandit said he knew the rurales were going to kill him, too, so why tell them anything. “He wanted to die like a tough guy—you know, with his mouth shut,” Ochoa said. “My half-breed Apache persuaded him to change his mind. He’s a very good persuader. In fifteen minutes he had the fellow jabbering like a parrot. The only reason the whoreson is still alive is I knew you’d want to talk to him.”
“Where?” I said.
I followed him back toward the group of men at the fire, feeling the blood pounding in my temples. The prisoner was sitting with his hands tied behind him, propped against a cactus stump and staring dully into the fire. He had a tourniquet around a badly wounded leg. His other foot was a bootless, black-and-red chunk of charred meat. Ochoa kicked his wounded leg and said, “Hey, prick, the patrón wants to talk to you.”
His face remained empty of all expression as he answered my questions. Yes, it had been Rojas. No, they hadn’t planned it, they didn’t even know this place was out here. They’d come across it simply by chance. Yes, they’d taken some of the women. Rojas thought they might be worth a ransom, or be valuable as hostages if the rurales should catch up to them—both possibilities depending on who their fathers or husbands might be.
In response to my next question, he grinned and said, “Molested?” as if he found the word amusing. “Damn right they’ll be molested. Rojas himself will molest each one till her nose bleeds!”
I kicked him in the mouth so hard I was afraid I’d broken his neck. Ochoa tugged on his ears to revive him and pulled him back to a sitting position. Speaking in a thickened voice through raw bloated lips, he said yes, they’d headed west, toward the sea, but whether they would turn north or south he didn’t know. He thought maybe there were ten or eleven of them left, he wasn’t sure. He was sure they had taken four women.
When I was satisfied the prisoner had given me all the information he could, I told Ochoa to see that he was given his fill of water and that his tourniquet was sufficiently tight. I did not want him to pass out from thirst or bleed to death. I wanted him taken to the arroyo and staked down naked among the dead.
Ochoa glanced toward the buzzards and vultures flapping heavily into the arroyo and gave a small snort of unmistakable disdain—as if he found my mode of punishment too elaborate, too much an excess of the rich. The rurales preferred to shoot a man and be done with it. Impudent mestizo bastard! His barbarous Indian ancestors cut the beating hearts out of sacrificial victims—women as well as men—and then ate their flesh. He would take exception to my means of executing this filthy vermin who’d ridden with the kidnapper of my wife? I dared him with my eyes to speak his objection, but he only shrugged and turned to relay my order to his men.
We set out to the west shortly before sunset, following the route taken by the rurales Ochoa had dispatched in pursuit of Rojas before my arrival. His orders to them had been to split up if they reached the coast without having spotted him. One bunch would go north to the village of San Andrés, the other head downcountry to Puerto Lobos. Rojas would have to go to one place or the other. There was nothing else in any direction but desert or the Sea of Cortez.
At dawn we arrived at a rocky escarpment within sight of the sea and stopped to rest the horses. “Here’s where my boys split up,” Ochoa said. “Which direction do you want, Don Sebastián?” I went south with six rurales and he went north with the other five.
There are no words to describe what I was feeling as we rode. Every phrase I fashion has the sodden impact of banality. Every description I attempt sounds like a cliché from some foolish romance. Nothing, nothing ever said by anyone anywhere can convey what I was feeling. Christ, what pathetic things words are! Their insufficiency is as smothering as a lack of air. The congestion of wrath and anguish throbbing in my veins could never be expressed by words. It could only be felt. It could only be dealt with.
Late that afternoon, we met a half-dozen of Ochoa’s advance rurales on their way back from Puerto Lobos. No one had seen riders anywhere in the vicinity. Rojas had to have gone north, to San Andrés. The advance rurales led a string of fresh mounts, having expected to meet some of their comrades coming from La Querencia to assist them. We switched our saddles to the extra horses and galloped off to the north.
As we rode hard to catch up to him, Ochoa met with the other rurales he’d sent ahead. They’d been waiting for him a mile south of San Andrés. Scouts had confirmed that Rojas and his men were in the village and unaware of the rurales’ nearness. Ochoa didn’t want to lose the advantage of surprise, so he didn’t wait for the rest of us to get there before he attacked. But even though the bandits were caught off guard, they put up a fierce fight, killing two rurales and wounding several more. Ochoa’s boys killed six and took two prisoners. The only one to escape was Rojas himself, who had abandoned his men in the middle of the fight and ridden away into the open desert.
All this I learned from Ochoa when we reached San Andrés, after he answered my first breathless question, after I learned Delgadina was dead.
She had been found tied to a bed in the small back room of a cantina. “Mistreated” was the word Ochoa used. She’d been mistreated but was still alive when he found her. From the look of things she had miscarried only shortly before.
“I told her you were on your way to her,” he said. “And she heard me, Don Sebastián. She smiled. She tried to hold on, to wait for you, but she could not.” He had ordered some women to remove her to another room and clean her before I arrived. He took me there.
When I saw her, I felt my soul leave me like something on wings. I put my fingers on her face, but it was like trying to touch a star, like trying to dry your eyes at the bottom of the sea. I insisted on seeing the room where she’d been found, and there I saw the bloody mattress, the thick red stain that had been my son.
I wanted the two captured bandits burned alive, but Ochoa said it was too late, they had been shot while trying to escape. I whirled on him in a rage, but he held his ground and said, “They did not steal her, Don Sebastián. They did not touch her. That I know. For them a bullet was proper and just.”
“Damn you!” I shouted. “You dare to tell me what is proper—what is just?”
His eyes flashed with anger but he quickly got them under control. “I already sent some of my boys after him,” he said. “We’ll get the bastard, Don Sebastián. Sooner or later. You’ll see.”
I was trembling with the urge to strike him, but I was afraid that if I hit him even once I would not stop until I’d killed him. At that moment I was afraid even to curse him: I feared that if I opened my mouth I would start howling and never stop.
I took Delgadina back to La Luna Plata and buried her in the sprawling flower garden behind the main house. I dug the grave myself. I called for a priest to pray over her only because she would have wanted it, but when he tried to commiserate with me afterward, I told him to go to hell.
And then I waited. I could do nothing else. Ochoa had his rurales roaming everywhere in search of Juan Rojas, and he had sworn that when they caught him they would deliver him to me. But I lived with an unremitting fear that Rojas might die before they could catch him. He might even choose death to being taken alive. If he resisted arrest, Ochoa’s boys would surely shoot him. Or he might get killed in a drunken brawl in some cantina or whorehouse. He could be thrown from his horse and break his neck. A jealous woman might stab him in his sleep. He might be captured by the army and stood against a wall, or caught by Texas Rangers and hanged from the nearest tree. He could be bitten by a Gila monster or a rattlesnake. He could drown while trying to ford a river, or be swallowed by quicksand. He could get a sickness and die in bed. There were so many ways he might die before I could get my hands on him—and some of them such that I would never even know he was dead—that I chewed my lips bloody resisting the urge to howl. My fists rarely unclenched. I spent hours every day pacing from one top-floor window to another, my throat so tight it felt snared in a noose.
Two weeks passed, and then four, and I thought of nothing but Juan Rojas and the vengeance I would wreak on him for having trespassed so grievously against me. When I was not pacing I was working in the cellar, making special preparations for him. He had robbed me of Delgadina and my unborn son—of my life, if not my breath—and the sole purpose of my continued existence was to make him suffer for his sin. For the first time since boyhood I prayed. I apologized to God for all the blasphemies of my life. I beseeched Him for a single concession and promised I would never ask another: I pleaded with Him to deliver Juan Rojas to me alive. I prayed and prepared for him and I paced, my jaws clenched against the ceaseless urge to howl. And I waited.
Late one afternoon, nearly two months after Delgadina’s death, one of my vaqueros came back from a visit to the whorehouse in San Lorenzo with the news that Juan Rojas was in jail at the rurales’ outpost in Tres Palmas.
All the whores had been talking about it, he said. They’d heard the story of the arrest from a rurales sergeant the night before, one of Ochoa’s men. The sergeant said the rurales had been tipped off by a barkeeper from Sahuaro who’d been sentenced to thirty days in jail for watering his tequila. The barkeep had been in the jail only a week when he heard that his wife had run away to Sonoita with a friend of his, and he was enraged. For more than a month he had been permitting this friend, who was in trouble with the law, to hide in the back room of his cantina, and this was how the friend repaid his kindness—by stealing his wife. On learning of this treachery done to him, the barkeeper in turn betrayed the friend to the rurales. The friend was of course Juan Rojas.
The rurales had gone to Sonoita and entered the pueblo after nightfall. They searched stealthily from place to place, carbines ready, and found him in a cantina, singing to himself with his head on the bar. Although Ochoa had repeatedly assured me that when his boys found him they would do everything possible to capture him alive, I knew the rurales never took chances with their quarry. If he’d made the least show of resistance, they would have shot him a hundred times. The sergeant told the whores he himself eased up behind Rojas and clubbed him in the back of the head with his carbine. He hit him so hard that Rojas didn’t wake up until Sonoita was thirty miles behind them. Chained hand and foot, he made the journey to Tres Palmas in a goat cart. He had now been in jail, my man said, for nearly a week.
It was after midnight when I arrived in Tres Palmas, my horse blowing hard and dripping lather. I had insisted on coming alone, had shouted down my importunate foreman’s pleas to take an escort with me. I had been wild with exultation and, I admit, not thinking clearly. I had bellowed some half-witted foolishness about the moment being mine, and I would share it with no one. I told the foreman I would kill any man who tried to follow me. But the hard ride through the cold desert night had cleared my mind sufficiently to regret not bringing an escort. It had finally occurred to me that Ochoa had violated his pledge to bring Rojas to me—and, for whatever reason, might yet be disinclined to hand him over.
Tres Palmas was little more than a scattering of adobe buildings on either side of a sandy windblown street blazing whitely under a full moon. I tethered the foundered horse in front of the jail and slipped my carbine from its scabbard, worked a round into the chamber, and went inside.
The windowless room was dimly lighted, the air thick with cigarette smoke and fumes from the lanterns on the walls. Ochoa and a couple of his boys were sitting at a table, playing cards and sharing a bottle of tequila. Nobody seemed surprised to see me—or very pleased. Directly behind them, the door of the only cell was shut, but I could make out the indistinct form of someone standing close to the bars. I held the rifle loosely at my hip, the muzzle jutting vaguely in the table’s direction.
Ochoa looked tired and sad. He returned his attention to the cards he was holding, then threw down the hand in disgust. His eyes were bloodshot. “What, Don Sebastián?” he said. “What is it?”
I’d never before seen Ochoa drunk, but I was not surprised by the sullen arrogance the tequila effected in him. Strong drink so easily agitates these primitives and sets loose the mob of resentments always lurking in their dark hearts. But I was feeling no more inclined than he toward the social amenities—and in any case I was not the least interested in his damned resentments, whatever they were. I shifted my stance slightly so that the rifle pointed his way less ambiguously. He flicked his eyes at the weapon and sneered.
“You were to bring him to me,” I said.
“Ah,” he said. He glanced toward the cell. “Him. Yes, well, I would have, you see, but I have a duty. A duty to justice.”
One of the others laughed, a sergeant, and Ochoa grinned at him and took a drink. The bottle was nearly empty.
“Listen, God damn you—”
“No, Don Sebastián,” he said. “You listen. I telegraphed my report of his arrest to headquarters in Hermosillo, and they told me a magistrate will be passing through in a few days. He’ll give him a trial and then we’ll hang him, all legal and proper. If it will make you happy, we’ll use your rope. If it will make you happier, you can have his carcass. You can have him butchered and dine on him every night until there’s nothing left but the bones. Hell, you can make soup from the bones till you’ve had the last miserable drop of him.” His two men were grinning whitely, much entertained.
“Damn your lowborn insolence,” I said. “I want him now.”
Ochoa’s smile vanished and he spat on the floor. “You people!” he said. “I want, I want! You hacendados want everything! God damn it, do you think you’re the only ones who want? You think you’re the only one who ever got fucked? You think you’re the only one who ever wanted to get even?”
The impudent whoreson! Daring to speak to me in that manner! Daring to refuse me! Rojas was right there, not a dozen feet from me, and this ignorant peon had the audacity to deny him to me. I’d had enough. I brought the rifle up, aimed it squarely in his face and thumbed back the hammer with a loud double click.
“Even a Cabrillo don,” he said, looking as if he were about to smile again, “knows what happens if he shoots a rurales captain.”
“Yes,” I said. “The rurales captain dies.”
My hands and voice were steady. The quivering was all in my heart—because I was certain I would have to shoot him, and then, of course, his underlings would all immediately shoot me. They would kill me while Rojas watched from his cell. And thus, from this tiny distance, he would escape me after all. The injustice of it filled me with a raging sadness.
For a moment no one moved, and then Ochoa sighed heavily and threw up his hands in resignation. “To hell with it,” he said, and stood up. “You or the hangman, what’s the difference? Why the hell should I care?” From a peg on the wall he took a large metal key ring with a single key on it and unlocked the cell door and swung it open.
“Out,” he said.
Juan Rojas stepped into the light. He was smaller than I had imagined, both short and slight, but he looked to have strength, and his eyes were as bright and quick as a hawk’s. With black hair hung to his shoulders and a red bandanna headband to hold it out of his eyes, he looked like an Indian. A Yaqui.
Ochoa ordered him to turn around, then bound his hands behind him with a length of rawhide cord. I lowered the rifle to my hip but kept it pointed at Ochoa, then told the sergeant to fetch two fresh horses, saddled and equipped with full canteens. The sergeant looked at Ochoa and Ochoa nodded.
While we waited, Rojas stared at me inquisitively but without fear. You’ll soon find out, I thought, looking at him. If he read the hatred in my eyes, he gave no sign of it. Ochoa sat at the table, sipping at the last of the bottle and softly singing a love song.
And then the sergeant was calling from the street. I peeked out the door to see a pair of horses in front of the jail—and a dozen rurales spread out across the street, all of them with carbines.
Ochoa laughed and said, “Did you think he would bring a brass band and girls with flowers to see you on your way?”
I jabbed the rifle muzzle under Rojas’ chin and glared at Ochoa. “I’ll settle here if I have to,” I said. But my heart howled at the possibility that I might be forced to kill him so quickly, with so little pain.
“Jesus, man,” Ochoa said. “I hope it never gets me as bad as it’s got you.”
He went to the door and ordered his men to rest easy. Then we all walked out and Ochoa told a couple of his boys to help Rojas get on a horse. I mounted up and took Rojas’ reins too, still expecting Ochoa at any moment to give his men the order to shoot me. But he merely stood with his thumbs hooked on his gunbelt and watched as I led Rojas’ mount away at a canter.
A few hours later the sun blazed up out of the distant mountains and layered the rocky landscape with a hard gold light. We rode in silence through the long shadows of the saguaros. Those early hours of the ride back toward La Luna Plata with Rojas in my custody—to do with as I wished!—were glorious. Never in my life had I desired anything so greatly as to have this man in my power. I had desired it with all my soul, dreamed of it, even prayed for it. And now, there we were, the two of us, deep in the desert and on our way to the things I had in store for him. Sweet Mary, my joy throbbed!
The sun was high above the mountains when I realized I was laughing out loud. I had no idea how long I’d been doing it. I looked behind me at Rojas and my good humor vanished instantly. The bastard was smiling.
I jerked the lead rope and his horse lunged up alongside mine. Rojas sat easily in the saddle even with his hands tied behind him.
“You think something’s funny, you son of a whore?” They were the first words I’d spoken to him.
He shrugged. “A man in the desert, laughing at nothing—that’s funny, no?”
I shuddered with the urge to shoot him in his grinning teeth. “Let me tell you some things,” I said. “Let’s see how funny you think they are.”
I talked steadily as our horses paced side by side and the sun climbed higher in the copper sky. I told him—in the most precise and intimate detail—the plan I had for him once we reached the main house. I told him about the little dungeon I’d fashioned in the windowless cellar and the playthings I’d collected there. I spoke to him of scorpions and fire ants and fierce yellow wasps, of venomous spiders whose bite would make a man sick for days. I had jarfuls of all of these things in that dark cellar with the thick stone walls. There were ropes and wires, steel hooks dangling from the ceiling. There were skinning razors and sharp iron spikes, fine long cactus spines and shards of broken glass. There would be buckets of boiling water, pots of caustic lyes. For his thirst, there would be tankards of goat piss. The furnace would burn day and night, and in it were the branding irons.
The more I spoke of it, the faster my breath came. He listened as raptly as a child hearing a fantastic tale. And then he suddenly laughed. “Jesus Christ, man! How many guys do you think I am? You want to do all that, you’re going to need more guys to do it to, because I don’t think I can make it past the first few things you got in mind. What’s got you so damned mad, anyway? All this crazy shit—spiders and goat piss! Jesus! What the hell did I ever do to you?”
He couldn’t have stunned me more if he’d spit in my face. I could see that he meant it—he did not know who I was, other than somebody of the hundreds who for one reason or another wanted him dead.
It was outrageous.
I drew my pistol and lashed him hard across the face, knocking him off his horse. I slid from the saddle and grabbed him by the hair and pressed the muzzle hard against his eye. I told him who I was in yells, bellowed my complaint into his face. I hit him with the gun again and let him fall into the dust.
With his hands fast behind him, it was a struggle for him to sit up, but he made it. Blood streamed from his nose and fell in bright drops on his dirty white shirt.
“Cabrillo,” he said, and ran his tongue over his torn lips as though he was tasting the name. Then he smiled all the way up to his eyes. “Cabrillo! Goddamn, man, I know you!” He spat a red streak and laughed.
“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.