43

Thieves Smoking Cigars

Rico met a mule driver who was heading in the direction of Rosa’s cantina. He gave him his second-to-last peso to deliver a message to Juan, telling him to start north without him. That was just as well. Looking prosperous was unhealthy these days, and Juan would not be happy to see what Rico did to the clothes he gave him.

He tore the ruffles off the white linen shirt. He ripped the sleeves from the embroidered jacket, then turned it inside out so only the brown wool lining showed. He waded through brambles in the leather trousers, then soaked them in a stream and beat them with rocks to age them. He packed his boots into a saddlebag and wore rope sandals he found discarded by the side of the road.

He had left his rifle in Juan’s keeping. Now he stuck his knife under his waistband at the small his back. He cut a slit in the middle of his blanket so he could wear it as a serape and hide his pistols, knife, and cartidge belt under it. The only things he didn’t have to alter were the ancient straw hat the sacristan gave him and the mud that had splattered all over him and his horse.

He knew the main route to Ayala, but he couldn’t risk running into a barricade or patrol. He intended to follow mountain trails etched into the rocky soil by centuries of burros’ hooves and the soles of peasants’ feet. The problem was the Martíns had never been the sort to travel back roads.

He hadn’t ridden far into the mountains before he realized how difficult finding and following those trails would be. All he could do was keep the sun on his left and pray that rain clouds didn’t cover it. Whenever he met the occasional muleteer or peasant on a burro he asked directions. Asking for help was also a new experience for him.

He needed money, but he couldn’t bring himself to sell Grullo, his only asset. Fortunately for Rico, plenty of people wanted to steal the horse. Even more fortunately, the first band of cutthroats to accost him numbered only three.

Rico breathed a thanks to God for sending them. Most renegados traveled in larger packs. What gave them away as criminals were the cigars. From the aroma of the smoke wafting toward him on the breeze Rico knew they were imported.

The old saying was right. Pobre con puro es ladrón, seguro. A poor man with a cigar is a thief for sure.

The leader had an extortionist’s eyes and pendulous jowls that gave him a greasily prosperous look. He stroked his large paunch as if it were a pet pig snoozing in his lap. He probably considered his hammock-backed, gray-muzzled plow horse to be figuratively as well as literally beneath him, but even if he didn’t, Rico’s Andalusian would be worth the taking.

The second man perched on the rump of a stout burro. The view of him was obscured by two bulging hemp sacks lashed across the animal’s back. A rusty shovel was tied on top of them. The third malefactor sat on a heavily laden, ladder-ribbed mule that wheezed like a windlass with a case of the glanders. The man was grinning like a cheerful death’s head, probably in anticipation of trading up to the plow horse when Jowls took possession of this handsome silver-gray stallion.

Jowls waved his rusty, pepperbox pistol in Rico’s general direction, as if that were all the attention such a shabby chump required. Rico tried not to smile. The gun had been new when his grandfather was in diapers.

A smarter man would have taken one look at Grullo and suspected that his rider wasn’t whom he seemed, but Jowls probably assumed Rico had come by the stallion dishonestly.

“We will relieve you of the responsibility of such a fine steed, compadre.”

Rico raised his hands high in hasty surrender. “Take him with God’s blessing, but please don’t shoot me.”

He fell out of the saddle as though in a panic, and landed on Grullo’s far side. He knew the bandits would kill him without blinking, but they would hesitate to harm the fine horse serving as his shield. He pulled both Colts from under his blanket and extended them around each side of Grullo’s neck. Grullo didn’t so much as twitch. Rico sighted across the horse’s whithers to take aim at the leader.

“Throw your weapons into the arroyo.” He used the parade-ground voice that always snapped the rowdiest troops to attention. “Knives, too.”

Jowls’s partners patted themselves down. They produced hardware from holsters, hats, serapes, shoes, and shirts and lobbed them over the side of the cliff. Jowls hesitated and Rico shot off his new sombrero to chivvy him along. Jowls muttered a rendition of Rico’s lineage to the counterpoint of his rifle, pistols, and cutlery clanging against the side of the cliff.

Rico knew he shouldn’t waste time. Another gang of sin verguenzas, shameless ones, could round the bend at any time.

“Put the sacks there and pile your clothes next to them.”

“Shoes, too, señor?” asked one of the cronies.

“Shoes, too.”

Crony Number Two surveyed the rocks and thorns that carpeted hundreds of square miles. “For the love of God, señor, not the shoes.”

Rico smiled like a wolf at a plump deer. “You may throw your shoes over the cliff empty or I will throw them over with your feet inside them.”

With a pistol still pointed at Jowls, Rico walked out from behind Grullo and hefted the gunny sacks. The bandits had reaped a rich harvest from some haciendas. When threatened with disaster, the well-to-do’s first impulse was to bury their valuables. The flaw in that plan was that most bandits were peasants, and if peasants knew anything, it was how to dig.

Rico upended the sacks and spilled out the bounty. The silver candlesticks, Greek statues, porcelain shepherdesses, and mirrors framed in gilded plaster cherubs looked familiar. These were at least three of the looters who had plundered his family’s home. He gave them a wolfish grin. God did have a sense of humor after all.

With a pistol trained on the bandits, he bundled their clothes with his other hand and flung them into the abyss. Then he kicked the booty after them. He couldn’t say why doing it gave him such joy. Maybe it was because they represented afternoons spent sweltering in a starched collar in parlors that were burlesques of London drawing rooms. The stench of camphor and the jumble of useless gewgaws had always given him a headache.

The bandits groaned as their treasure rattled to the bottom a thousand feet away. Rico imagined some farmer in the canyon, standing bewildered in his rocky field while riches fell around him.

He mounted Grullo and rode off leading the mule by a rope. The plow horse and burro followed. He would have bet all the loot lying at the bottom of the canyon that Lieutenant Angel could find a use for the extra mounts.

 

Angel put great faith in the apocryphal belief that, like lightning, the federal army would not strike twice in the same place. So her company returned to the caves in the high cliff below San Miguel. The men slept in the largest cave and the women and children in the smaller ones. They were hard to reach and easy to defend and Angel’s people felt safer than they had in a long time.

Angel and Antonio sat on a ledge and watched the swallows dart in and out of the spray and mist where the hundred-foot-high waterfall hit the river. They leaned back against the limestone wall with their legs dangling, and enjoyed two of Don Bonifacio Martín’s habano puro cigars, imported from Cuba.

Everyone knew that Cubans made the best cigars. The word cuba itself meant casks of the sort that contained tobacco. Angel preferred habanos puros for their symbolism as much as for the euphoria their smoke caused. Cubans believed that slaves could produce sugarcane, but only free men cultivated tobacco.

In a little while the band would leave for General Zapata’s headquarters in Ayala, but Angel was enjoying this early morning respite on the ledge. For a few minutes she could pretend that life was always like this, with rare June sunshine, waterfalls, and the finest of cigars. Then small stones rattled down the slope. With regret, Angel and Antonio tossed the puros into the river and drew their pistols.

Socorro lost her footing and slid the last few yards down the steep path. Antonio caught her before she pitched over the edge. Her hair was in tangles, her clothes torn. Her bare feet left bloody prints on the pale limestone rock. She was out of breath.

“’Tonio, they took Papi.”

“Fatso’s dogs?”

“Yes. We avoided the barricades, but a patrol caught us. Papi shot at them so I could escape. They had a lot of men tied together.”

Angel knew the federal army’s routine. El gobierno rarely kept prisoners for long in Morelos for fear their comrades would free them. They loaded them onto trains and transported them far away.

The rendezvous in Ayala would have to wait. Angel had a chore to do first. This time she would make sure the train never carried any of her people into exile again.