against squatters and the Army. All in all, there was a lot of murdering and violence involved and this on a daily basis. All the good things in him withered like green vines in a drought and something else, something shadowed and nameless rose up to fill the void.
Something that had been there from the start…just waiting.
Waiting its turn.
When Texas decided to annex to the United States, he’d joined a group of hellraising Missouri volunteers to fight for its independence from Mexico.
War, any war, was a hard business, but something in Cobb liked it.
His first taste of it was at the steaming holding camps at Matamoros where everyone was anxious to fight and there was nothing to do but take it out on each other. The Missouri volunteers went at it tooth-and-nail with volunteers from Georgia and Indiana and particularly with the regular army, which looked down on all volunteers as trash. At best, they decided, they were mercenaries, at worst, just cut-throats and freebooters. So the volunteers gave them hell at every quarter. And when they weren’t using their fists, they were popping off their muskets at passing game, shadows, anything that moved and some things that didn’t.
Matamoros was one unruly hive of confusion and insubordination. The regular army was incensed over these brigands, these hell-for-leather volunteers.
And the volunteers themselves were amused to no earthly end.
But then Cobb and the others were jammed aboard a riverboat and taken down the Rio Grande. The river had burst its banks, then burst them again. Maybe once after that, too. Point being, the pilots were having a hell of a time with it. They couldn’t be sure what was river and what was flood plain. The boats kept getting snagged in mud flats and bottoms. And in that sparse country, the troops had to dismount every so often to gather wood for the boilers…and such a thing required scavenging for miles sometimes.
Finally, the boats arrived at Camargo…a lick of spit that was neither here nor there nor anywhere you truly wanted to be. Just a little Mexican town on the San Juan River maybe three miles from its junction with the Rio Grande. It had once been sizeable, but was now in ruins from the flooding. The troops unloaded, an irritable and ornery lot, into a camp that was plagued by swarms of insects, snakes, and blistering heat. Men washed their laundry and horses in the same water camp kettles were filled. It was a filthy, desolate place where yellow fever and dysentery raged unchecked. The hospital tents were crowded with the diseased and dying.
Cobb and the other volunteers spent most of their time arguing, swatting flies, and burying the dead.
It was that kind of place.
Death everywhere…and the fighting hadn’t even begun.
Cobb’s volunteers slowly threaded out of the rocks, dumping more cadavers on the stinking heap before them. Twelve of them now. Twelve Mexican guerrillas. The sort that preyed on small bands of U.S. soldiers. Cutting them off, gunning them down. Taking them alive if they could and torturing them. Whipping them until they lost consciousness or cutting off their flesh in small chunks until they bled to death, screaming all the while.
Maybe the regular Army didn’t know how to deal with these pigs, but the volunteer forces surely did.
When you took them alive, you made a game out of it. You buried them up to their necks in the sand and spread honey over their faces and let the fire ants do their thing. You dragged them behind horses over the rocks until they broke apart. You hung them by their feet and swung ‘em through bonfires. You dropped them into pits of diamondback rattlesnakes. You staked them out and let the wildlife have their way. And, if you felt real creative, you took a skinning knife to ‘em…it could last for hours and hours that way.
But, best, when you found their villages, you burned them. You shot down their children and raped their women.
One of the volunteers was pissing on the bodies and Cobb had to yell at him. “Is that how ye show respect for the dead, ye sumbitch?” he said, backing the man against a wall of stone. “Is that how ye treat these chilis? Shows that ye don’t know shit, my friend. Let me show ye how it’s done.”
Cobb pulled out his bowie knife, pressed the blade against his thumb until it bled…just to make sure it was real sharp. Then, carefully and expertly, taking one of the dead ones by the hair, he ran the blade of his knife under the jaw line and around the cheekbone and just under the scalp and then traced it back down again until he had made a bloody circle. Then, sawing and pulling, he peeled the face from the bone beneath.
He held up the dripping mask. “All set to scare the kiddies with.”
The other volunteers were laughing and clapping each other on the backs. Why, it was the damn funniest thing they’d ever seen. Leave it to Cobb to come up with something like that. Just when you thought he’d exhausted his grisly creativity by using the scrotum of a Mex for a tobacco pouch or making a necklace of fingers…he came up with something new.
Pulling their knives, the others began doing it, too.
Cobb walked amongst them, motioning with his bloody knife like a schoolteacher instructing on the finer points of conjugating verbs. Except, Cobb’s classroom was a hot, wind-blown place and his subject was butchering. He made quite a figure standing there in his filthy, threadbare buckskins, forage cap tilted at a rakish angle atop his head. His beard was long and shaggy, his hair hanging to his shoulders in greasy knots. An assortment of Colt pistols, revolvers, knifes, and hatchets hung from his belts. Along with the newly-acquired Mexican death mask and the mummified hand of a priest he’d hacked off in Monterrey and sun-dried on a flat rock.
There weren’t enough bodies to go around and there was some argument as to who was going to get what. Cobb settled that by telling the men it was strictly first come, first served. Those of you who got here first, why ye just carve yerself a face, that’s what ye want, he told them. Ye others, well ye have to make do with what ye can beg, borrow, or steal. Cobb told them-and they believed him-that there would be plenty of trophies to be had down the road a piece. Maybe tomorrow, maybe today.
“ One thing ye can count on, boys,” he said to them, “is that there’s always gonna be more. Mexico’s just full of ‘em.”
He watched them going to work, hacking and sawing and cutting, singing little ditties they’d learned from the Mexican folk, but didn’t understand a word of.
Yes, Cobb watched them, knowing they’d patterned themselves after him. He’d joined up as an enlisted man, but soon enough-maybe through ferocity in battle or sheer savagery-he’d become an officer and their leader. They looked up to him. They fancied all the badges and military decorations he’d taken off dead Mexican officers and pinned to his hide shirt. The necklaces of fingers and blackened ears, the skull of the that Mexican colonel he’d mounted from his saddlehorn.
They wanted to be like him.
They wanted to be a bloodthirsty hard-charger like James Lee Cobb. They wanted to leap into battle as he had at Buena Vista, shooting and stabbing and pounding his way through the Mexican ranks.
It made them fight real hard in battle so they could collect up trophies as he had.
And, yes, they could fight hard and die hard and loot and mutilate the dead all they wanted…but none of them would ever be like James Lee Cobb. They would never have his peculiar appetite for inflicting suffering and death. An appetite born in nameless places where human bones were piled in pyramids and human souls were boiled in cauldrons. They would never have that and they surely would never have the birthmark he had.
The one that looked like a red four-fingered handprint.
A handprint that positively burned when death was near.
What happened at the Battle of Buena Vista was this: Some 14,000 Mexican troops commanded by General Santa Anna charged Zachary Taylor’s U.S. forces which numbered less than 5,000. Through determination, audacity, and sheer luck, the American’s pushed the Mexican’s back.
Easy enough to tell; not so easy to experience.
On a dismal morning in February 1847, the troopers under Taylor received orders to strike their tents and march on Buena Vista. Sixteen miles later, they arrived…lacking provisions, wood for fires. Early the next morning picket guards arrived, saying that a large Mexican force was approaching and approaching fast. James Lee Cobb and
