apostles, the birds holding out their own dark vestments in postures of strange benevolence while about them flapped on the wind the dried scalps of slaughtered indians strung on cords, the long dull hair swinging like the filaments of certain seaforms and the dry hides clapping against the stones.
They passed old alms-seekers by the church door with their seamy palms outheld and maimed beggars sad- eyed in rags and children asleep in the shadows with flies walking their dreamless faces. Dark coppers in a clackdish, the shriveled eyes of the blind. Scribes crouched by the steps with their quills and inkpots and bowls of sand and lepers moaning through the streets and naked dogs that seemed composed of bone entirely and vendors of tamales and old women with faces dark and harrowed as the land squatting in the gutters over charcoal fires where blackened strips of anonymous meat sizzled and spat. Small orphans were abroad like irate dwarfs and fools and sots drooling and flailing about in the small markets of the metropolis and the prisoners rode past the carnage in the meatstalls and the waxy smell where racks of guts hung black with flies and flayings of meat in great red sheets now darkened with the advancing day and the flensed and naked skulls of cows and sheep with their dull blue eyes glaring wildly and the stiff bodies of defer and javelina and ducks and quail and parrots, all wild things from the country round hanging head downward from hooks.
They were made to dismount and were driven afoot through the crowds and down old stone steps and over a doorsill worn like soap and through an iron sallygate into a cool stone cellar long a prison to take their place among the ghosts of old martyrs and patriots while the gate clanked shut behind them.
When their eyes lost their blindness they could make out figures crouched along the wall. Stirrings in beds of hay like nesting mice disturbed. A light snoring. Outside the rattle of a cart and the dull clop of hooves in the street and through the stones a dim clank of hammers from a smith’s shop in another part of the dungeon. The kid looked about. Blackened bits of candlewick lay here and there in pools of dirty grease on the stone floor and strings of dried spittle hung from the walls. A few names scratched where the light could find them out. He squatted and rubbed his eyes. Someone in underwear crossed before him to a pail in the center of the room and stood and pissed. This man then turned and came his way. He was tall and wore his hair to his shoulders. He shuffled through the straw and stood looking down at him. You dont know me, do ye? he said.
The kid spat and squinted up at him. I know ye, he said. I’d know your hide in a tanyard.
VI
In the streets – Brassteeth – Los hereticos – A veteran of the late war – Mier – Doniphan – The Lipan burial – Goldseekers – The scalphunters – The judge – Freed from the prison – Et de ceo se mettent en le pays.
With daylight men rose from the hay and crouched on their haunches and regarded the new arrivals without curiosity. They were half naked and they sucked their teeth and snuffled and stirred and picked at themselves like apes. A chary light had washed a high small window from the dark and an early streetvendor’d begun to cry his wares.
Their morning feed was bowls of cold pinole and they were fitted with chains and routed out into the streets clanking and stinking. Overseen all day by a goldtoothed pervert who carried a plaited rawhide quirt and harried them down the gutters on their knees gathering up the filth. Under the wheels of vending-carts, the legs of beggars, dragging behind them their sacks of refuse. In the afternoon they sat in the shade of a wall and ate their dinner and watched two dogs hung together in the street sidle and step.
How do you like city life? said Toadvine.
I dont like it worth a damn so far.
I keep waitin for it to take with me but it aint done it.
They watched the overseer covertly as he passed, his hands clasped behind his back, his cap cocked over one eye. The kid spat.
I seen him first, said Toadvine.
Seen who first.
You know who. Old Brassteeth yonder.
The kid looked after the sauntering figure.
My biggest worry is that somethin will happen to him. I pray daily for the Lord to watch over him.
How you think you goin to get out of this jackpot that you’re in?
We’ll get out. It aint like the carcel.
What’s the carcel?
State penitentiary. There’s old pilgrims in there come down the trail back in the twenties.
The kid watched the dogs.
After a while the guard came back along the wall kicking the feet of any who were sleeping. The younger guard carried his escopeta at the ready as if there might be some fabled uprising among these chained and tattered felons. Vamonos, vamonos, he called. The prisoners rose and shuffled out into the sun. A small bell was ringing and a coach was coming up the street. They stood along the curb and took off their hats. The guidon passed ringing the bell and then the coach. It had an eye painted on the side and four mules to draw it, taking the host to some soul. A fat priest tottered after carrying an image. The guards were going among the prisoners snatching the hats from the heads of the newcomers and pressing them into their infidel hands.
When the coach had passed they donned their hats again and moved on. The dogs stood tail to tail. Two other dogs sat a little apart, squatting loosely in their skins, just frames of dogs in napless hides watching the coupled dogs and then watching the prisoners clanking away up the street. All lightly shimmering in the heat, these lifeforms, like wonders much reduced. Rough likenesses thrown up at hearsay after the things themselves had faded in men’s minds.
He’d taken up a pallet between Toadvine and another Kentuckian, a veteran of the war. This man had returned to claim some darkeyed love he’d left behind two years before when Doniphan’s command pulled east for Saltillo and the officers had had to drive back hundreds of young girls dressed as boys that took the road behind the army. Now he would stand in the street solitary in his chains and strangely unassuming, gazing out across the tops of the heads of the townspeople, and at night he’d tell them of his years in the west, an amiable warrior, a reticent man. He’d been at Mier where they fought until the draintiles and the gutters and the spouts from the azoteas ran with blood by the gallon and he told them how the brittle old Spanish bells would explode when hit and how he sat against a wall with his shattered leg stretched out on the cobbles before him listening to a lull in the firing that grew into a strange silence and in this silence there grew a low rumbling that he took for thunder until a cannonball came around the corner trundling over the stones like a wayward bowl and went past and down the street and disappeared from sight. He told how they’d taken the city of Chihuahua, an army of irregulars that fought in rags and underwear and how the cannonballs were solid copper and came loping through the grass like runaway suns and even the horses learned to sidestep or straddle them and how the dames of the city rode up into the hills in buggies and picnicked and watched the battle and how at night as they sat by the fires they could hear the moans of the dying out on the plain and see by its lantern the deadcart moving among them like a hearse from limbo.
They had gravel enough, said the veteran, but they didnt know how to fight. They’d stick. You heard stories about how they found em chained to the trailspades of their pieces, limber-teams and all, but if they was I never seen it. We picked powder in the locks yonder. Blowed them gates open. People in here looked like skinned rats. Whitest Mexicans you’ll ever see. Thowed theirselves down and commenced kissin our feet and such. Old Bill, he just turned em all loose. Hell, he didnt know what they’d done. Just told em not to steal nothin. Of course they stole everthing they could get their hands on. Whipped two of em and they both died of it and the very next day another bunch run off with some mules and Bill just flat out hung them fools. Which they did likewise perish of. But I never reckoned I’d be in here my own self.
They were squatting crosslegged by candlelight eating from clay bowls with their fingers. The kid looked up. He poked at the bowl.
What is this? he said.
That’s prime bullmeat, son. From the corrida. You’ll get it of a Sunday night.
