Afterlands, page 26
¡Alto!
The officer in the priest’s hat. Kruger managed to rein in the mule, then tried to make it turn to face the man. It would not. It started trotting away, due south.
¡Alto. Alto en seguida!
Kruger twisted round on the saddle, shrugging, gesturing helplessly at the mule’s bald, pistoning rump. He yanked again on the reins but was carried on. The officer called another order. There was a pummelling of hooves. The officer and two lanceros hurtled past him, their horses’ ears laid back and veiny necks stretched into the gallop, then the men reined in hard and wheeled around in the road, blocking the way. The mule came to a stop, its head sullenly down, ears twitching like antennae.
Kruger squinted up at the men. His palate and tongue were sticky, teeth clenched on the stem of his pipe. The lanceros’ chin-strapped shakos masked their eyes in shadow and black drooping moustaches concealed their mouths. The one on the right gripped a lance with a red guidon under the blade. The one on the left aimed a carbine at Kruger’s heart. Between them, on a sorrel mare with a diamond blaze, the small fit officer in his hat and steel-rimmed spectacles seemed a sinister hybrid—the head of a stern scholar or Jesuit grafted onto the body of a soldier. A captain’s stripes were on the sleeve of his gold-braided tunic. He was clean-shaven, a great rarity here, and the glare on the little round lenses hid his eyes.
No se mueva, he said, or seemed to say. His lips had barely opened. He seemed a man with little or no outward modulation; his voice, though penetrating, was toneless, and he was as upright and unmoving in his saddle as if held by a photographer’s spinal brace.
May I ask, Kruger said in his fast-improving Spanish, but the captain cut him off with a remark too brief and flat to make out. Kruger shrugged nervously. No entiendo. The right-hand lancero’s bay stamped and nickered, flaring raw nostrils at Kruger. With his kid-gloved hand the captain made a slow clawing gesture across his mouth. Kruger shrugged again, as if still uncomprehending. The lancero spurred lightly and approached, lowering his lance, and as Kruger watched, paralyzed, the man thrust the blade at the centre of Kruger’s face and at the crucial instant jerked it sideways, smacking the pipe out of his teeth. Under Kruger the mule flinched and shuddered. The lancero reined his charger to one side. There was a crunch as one of the forehooves trampled the pipe.
Speaking to a superior with something in your mouth, the lancero announced, as if reading a charge at a court martial.
Behind cupped hands Kruger made a quick lingual inventory of his teeth. All there. But I have done nothing, he brought out in a voice audibly shrivelling—and how that shamed him, incensed him. No matter how you exerted your reason the body could still be intimidated by weapons and uniforms and rank—by the colonels of the world, even if they resembled pale clerics. Yes, especially if they’d once broken you. He straightened himself on the mule, pushed his hat back off his brow, trying to appear both uncowed and alertly cooperative.
The captain said, You are American.
I am from Prussia. From Germany, Señor. Do you speak any English?
From Germany! The captain’s smile exposed a bank of very long, clean teeth. He lowered his face as if to study his gloved hand resting on the pommel and when he looked up again the smile was gone. Is this true?
I grew up in Danzig, yes. In Prussia.
A very great nation, Germany. A great empire.
Kruger shrugged, his indifference sincere.
Your Bismarck has done wonders to unite it and make it modern. Of course, he had but a single people to work with. Here it is different.
Kruger nodded slightly.
The captain pondered him.
So a citizen of the great German Reich finds himself mounted on an old mule.
The lanceros framing the captain chuckled loutishly. The captain’s face seemed neither pleased by this, nor irked. That same mineral stolidity. Kruger stared up and said nothing, fear and defiance combining to lock his jaw.
Answer me, the captain said in his stiff, ventriloquist’s manner.
I did not hear a question, Señor.
After a few seconds the captain looked down, removed his spectacles and with close attention breathed on either lens. He passed the frosted glasses to the right-hand lancero who, planting his lance in the dirt, received them and drew a white silk cloth from a pouch on his bandolier and polished the lenses with a rapid pinpoint motion. The captain’s eyes, blue as the base of a flame, studied Kruger from far back in the sockets. The lancero finished buffing and returned the spectacles with a smart salute and folded the cloth and tucked it back in the pouch. Without shifting his gaze off Kruger, the captain put on his spectacles, carefully stretching the wire arms behind his small, neat ears.
A German here in the desert, days from anything, riding about on a mule. Why.
Kruger fought to curb his long-aggrieved pride; always this hard striving. And then he heard himself say, In general I prefer mules. From the back of a mule, or walking at its side, one has no temptation to … He meant to finish, block up the roads and molest harmless strangers, but he lacked the Spanish. It was just as well.
As for the desert, I find it generally peaceful.
The captain’s lean jaw seemed to flex. He said, The desert is filled with primitivos, some in open defiance of our authority, and with Lerdo’s guerrillas and spies.
Kruger swung his eyes across the land. A sun-cracked vista of lunar desolation. Here and there stood clumps of olive-coloured scrub and Spanish bayonet and the weird, beseeching forms of saguaro cactus.
They are cleverly concealed, of course, said the captain, and a corner of his mouth curled slightly upward; an ironist! Or they are killed. Or, perhaps, in disguise. Tell me where you stopped last night.
At the far end of the canyon. You will find my camp about three hours up the road. Or maybe only an hour, on your horses.
Say “Señor” when you address the captain, said the one with the lance.
Señor, said Kruger.
Always.
What is that in your pockets, the captain asked.
From one trouser pocket Kruger dug a handful of unshelled pecans and from the other a roll of stale tortillas wrapped in cornhusks. The lancero with his lance-head firked the tortillas and then the pecans off Kruger’s upturned hands. The edge of the blade sliced into Kruger’s left thumb. The husks flitted away and the tortillas scattered. The pecans in their red shells as they hit the road made a faint hollow clatter and rolled like marbles.
Tell me what you are doing in this country.
Travelling south, Kruger said stiffly. Señor.
For what reason?
Fisting his hand around the bleeding thumb, he winced a bitter smile. Because it is not where I was before.
Now the captain spoke in a much swifter, brusquer voice, presumably to the lanceros, although he was still watching Kruger with blank lenses. If he thought Kruger was a spy, and therefore fluent in Spanish, surely he wouldn’t do this? Unless it was a trap.
You will show me your documents. And the captain unholstered an immense revolver and held it slackly, like something unclean and disagreeable, pointed at the road by the mule’s forehooves. It looked wrong in his fastidious kid glove. The lancero with the carbine snugged the stock of it tighter into his armpit as Kruger felt in the saddlebag and brought out a folded sheaf. He leaned forward over the mule’s neck and extended his right hand and the captain’s mare shied, nickering, showing Kruger her stained human teeth, rolling back eyes out of a painted crucifixion. Calmly the captain stroked her neck. He didn’t bother coming forward. The first lancero skewered the sheaf with his lance, just missing Kruger’s other thumb, and passed it to the captain.
Through his teeth Kruger said, They are in German and English unfortunately. His thumb throbbed in time with his heart’s slamming. The captain’s spectacles were halfway down the bridge of his nose and his eyes scanned the documents with minimal movement. Jawohl, the captain said at last, in lightly accented German, Ich weiss. Kruger’s jaw unhinged. The man continued riffling through his Prussian naval pension records, seaman’s certificates, U.S. immigration papers, his Polaris contract with the U.S. Navy. Finally he murmured something to his men. Digging their rowels in with boyish zeal they shot forward, one to either side of Kruger, and grabbed him by the biceps and swept him out of the saddle, off the back of the mule. Flat-backed he slammed onto the road, his head smacking. Before his eyes a white door with a soldier on either side, the door of the inquiry room in Washington, he about to enter, the door opening and Tukulito and her husband emerging, she wearing a poke-bonnet, head down, so that his final glimpse of her is of her chin and her sealed, impassive mouth. Good day, Mr Kruger. With a jolt of pain the medieval skyline of Danzig appears, a cutlass moon setting over the Gothic spires and cupolas seen from a porthole in the sick bay of a ship returning him from the Danish War with his freeing wound. For he knew that as soon as he was discharged he would be leaving his country for the New World, like so many other Germans. … Wheezing, he peered around through a spindrift of dust. The second lancero had grabbed the mule’s reins and was towing it along beside his charger, the mule hobbling quickly with legs rigid, head lowered, ears flat. The captain, still sitting his own horse, was peeling off Kruger’s punctured credentials one by one and flinging them toward him, or, more likely, just feeding them to the hot wind, which sailed them dreamily over his face.
Maybe there was no New World.
Failure to answer the questions of an officer in a prompt and clear manner, the remaining lancero stated. Failure to address an officer of the Seventh Regiment of the Cavalry of the Republic with due respect. And with a nasal cry, a drumroll of thudding hooves, he too was gone. Kruger tried to sit up, then decided to lie still. His eyes half closed. A centaur shadow glided over him. There was a dense humid whiff of horse-breath like a field of sodden hay. Far above, an eyeless face hovered in its black brim halo, deep sardonic creases bracketing the mouth. Instead of the coup de grâce the captain was holstering his revolver and, to Kruger’s numb wonder, speaking in virtually unaccented English. You appear to be an intelligent man but your actions are not intelligent. In the future do not be so cursed with courage—like the primitivos. This morning you are fortunate. I shall order my men to leave your saddlebag and cantina in the road. They would be unlikely to think of that by themselves. Senseless cruelty does appeal to them—as opposed to necessary measures. And yet, I must have them. Here he frowns, thoughtfully. There is work to be done. I should advise you now to depart this region. Auf Wiedersehen.
A nudge of the spurs and the blazed sorrel mare thundered off, horseshoes chipping sparks off the stones of the road. In this way Kruger’s mouth and eyes were generously refilled with salt dust. By the time he was able to look again, the captain had caught up with his troop. The men of the Seventh Regiment were receding in the heat, the little grey mule lost among stallions, Kruger’s saddlebags jettisoned in their wake. How easy for a life to become mere flotsam. He got up bleeding and reeled about in the road, trying to corral his identity papers and books, his tumbleweed hat, the fragments of his pipe, the latest note he meant to send Tukulito from Chihuahua City. And slowly walked on, ever southward.
In that part of Mexico the women of those times would pin back their hair with fragile white combs made from the sternum and sharpened ribs of jackrabbits, roadrunners, even tuahmec. Every night on the houseboat when Jacinta releases her smoky hair she stands a few of them on the candle-ledge of the icon—a gaudy Pietà nailed to the wall over the bed. She keeps a good half-dozen combs there. Last night when Kruger slipped out with one of them in his hand, she was on her back snoring gently, the sheet pulled to just below her nipples, crucifix glinting, her mouth ajar as if to drink the fluid moonlight pouring onto the bed. At her feet a passionate aftermath of blankets. Now it’s only in hardest sleep, with her face calm and solemn, that she reminds him of Tukulito; otherwise she has become herself to him. Maybe he really can escape his northern past. He bent to ease a serape over her, drawing it to the scooped vale of bone at the base of her throat.
In the comb a few wiry sable hairs were caught, and this morning he wove them among the tines and wrapped the comb in his handkerchief and put it in the breast pocket of his jacket. He has been thirty days, a whole moon, in Purificación. Having spent his last few centavos, he’s altogether broke, and Jacinta must start saving for the new poll tax that the Padre will be coming to collect in the autumn. By Padre she means not the village priest but the scholarly officer he met on the road; everyone in the district fears him, this Captain Luz, Maclovio Luz, not only because he seems to be everywhere at once, but also because he speaks a little Sina.
Kruger must go on to Chihuahua City and try to claim his next puny remittance. Then he’ll make his way southwest up the traders’ trail into the sierra and through the deep copper gorges to the Pacific. I have always wanted to see the Pacific, he has told her, fearing that he might soon tell her more—the rest of his story, what came after the rescue. The temptation is growing. One night he might prowl up from the cantina after a few mescals and tell her the full story and suckle whatever sympathy he can get and be on the way to turning into his father—dyed deep with grievance, poisoned with self-pity. Think of surviving such a sustained assault by Nature, only to find it brutally renewed by Society! It would be that easy to import his mess into Purificación.
At sunup he lashes the saddlebags onto a makeshift travois that the vulpine dog draws, her hazel eyes flicking up to his expectantly, her plume of a tail erect and wagging between the traces. She seems to rejoice at being fastened so physically into the journey. Kruger’s own heart, being human, can’t quite restrict itself to the moment. No humilliado ever forgets himself entirely. His bluchers are freshly shined. He wears his frayed brown suit and round collar and black bow tie, his hair reared vertically over his brow as if pomaded with clay.
Down the path to the village among tufts of sage and creosote brush they proceed with their shadows stretched long before them like stick-figure silhouettes on cave walls. Around them Sinas in yellow field pyjamas are turning the earth for the spring planting. The skies have a scoured clarity; to the west the slopes of the cordillera arch up toward their own separate weather of storm clouds. Jacinta is in the yard, bent over a washtub and a pannikin of soap, her skirts hiked up and her sleeves rolled, thick forearms plunged in suds. Her mother is stationed on her chair in the doorway. On a green serape the first daughter kneels with a bone needle and thread, stringing chillies while her sister squats behind her, gravely braiding her hair. The little son, chin high, dispenses handfuls of corn to the chickens with an air of sovereign pomp and largesse.
Jacinta straightens from the tub and dries her hands on her skirts, beaming her wide silver-capped smile. She greets him as always, ¡Que milagro!—what a miracle, what a miracle to see you!—a greeting that struck him at first as mere rustic quaintness, another instance of Latin hyperbole and social theatre. He has come to see it as appropriate. He rumples the rumpled hair of the boy, Mateo, who ducks from under his palm and bolts away, red poncho flapping, chasing Perra and the jouncing travois through the yard.
There can be no goodbye embrace here, ashore, in the open. Last night before sleep she held his face close to hers by pressing the middle fingers of either hand into the sunburned hollows under his cheekbones, as if to memorize the form of his bones. Maybe the local women do this for purposes of future identification. Now she cocks her head back and narrows her eyes at him, scolding him drolly, her voice low, for him alone. Why had he not remained the full night with her when it was to be his last night on the boat? Su última noche.
I intended to stay. The dreams were especially bad.
Always leaving the bed! It’s a miracle to me that you gringos are so many. Of course the people don’t want you to leave. There have been no funerals in the month of your staying. Stay! The barrancas are full of cavalry and primitivos. (Her word for other indio tribes, all of whom she hates.)
He says wryly, You will be faithful, I trust, until my return.
If you are returning tonight.
He smiles, with closed lips. Her smile seems more truly amused—a sort of Esquimau acceptance of whatever might befall her. He doubts he ever will return. Perra is approaching with her panting grin and lolloping sirloin tongue, gamely leaning into the work as she drags the travois with Mateo lying in state aback Kruger’s saddlebags. Hands on his chest he gazes with glistening black eyes into the blue immensities high up there, his heels sketching twin furrows in the dirt.
