Winter Rain

Hook wiped his mouth, suspicious that he’d been taken by the red-eyed drunk. “Maybe you can tell me who some of these comancheros are. Names. Where I can find them. That’s all I need. Nothing else from you.”

The fleshy, corpulent Irishman weaved to his feet, a cup of the potent, homemade aguardiente in his hand, then crooked a finger for Hook to follow him from the table. When Two Sleep started to rise, the Irishman motioned the Indian to sit.

Stopping at the open doorway, the Irishman swayed against Jonah, then swung an arm slowly across the scene.

“Look there, Mr. Hook,” he said. “And say to me that you’ll find two boys in all of that dark, smelly nest of vermin. Unpossible.”

“I aim to find the comancheros first.”

“Look, I told you!” snapped the Irishman. “You come to the wrong place looking for help.”

“Just the name of one,” Hook asked, slipping out from beneath the fat one’s fleshy arm.

He drank, then dragged the dribble from his chin. “What do you see there, American? Look carefully and tell me.”

Hook studied the street throbbing with the comings and goings of all sorts of poor. Occasionally a vaquero rode by, resplendent in dress and horse trappings, forcing his way through the crowds of peons by his sheer presence. Only now did Jonah see a carriage roll by, matched fours pulling along the landed aristocracy of Mexico.

“There—that one,” Jonah said eagerly. “He’s a rich man. Bound to know some comancheros who trade into Texas, into Indian Territory.”

“Him?” the Irishman asked, pointing with a slosh of his cup. A pair of Mexicans entered the cantina, forced to duck beneath the Irishman’s outstretched arm. “You see a rich man there, no?”

“He will know the names of some comancheros—is that what you’re telling me?”

The mottled cheeks were flushed with the blush of tequila. “You have been looking in the wrong place, Mr. Hook. Looking for the wrong men.”

In angry confusion Jonah watched the Irishman turn away from the doorway and stumble back to ease himself into the chair once more. He dashed back to the table himself, slamming his two palms down on it as he sat.

“I’m here in Chihuahua—where the comancheros trade from, goddammit. Don’t drink my tequila, then play a riddle on me … telling us I’ve been looking the wrong place for the wrong folks.”

“See at the bar?” he asked, leaning in close to Jonah.

Hook turned, finding some vaqueros with their arms laced around several women in their blousy skirts and shiny high-heeled shoes that clacked along the plank floor. Near them were more well-dressed men. He grew weary of the game. “Them? That rich-looking bunch. You’re telling me they’re comanchero traders?”

“No. Not the obvious, my dear Mr. Hook. The others. There. See? And there. Look carefully and behold. And over there too.”

Jonah shook his head. It made no sense. Every man the drunk pointed out was as poor a dirt farmer or craftsman as a man would care to meet. Not a successful comanchero. Not like the vaqueros dressed so exquisitely as they drank with the whores at the bar.

“C’mon, Two Sleep,” he said with disgust and frustration as he rose.

“We go?”

“We’re going. This bastard’s drunk our tequila and spit back nothing in return. Hope you wake with your head pounding like a carpenter’s hammer.”

With a slap the Irishman dropped his soft, empty hand over Jonah’s wrist, pinning it to the table. “Listen, you fool—I am telling you everything you need to know short of what actually became of your boys.”

Slowly Hook disentangled himself. “You ain’t told me shit.”

He chuckled, wagging his big head, the flaming hair disheveled and uncombed for the better part of his three-day drunk. “Go back north to find out about your boys, Mr. Hook. Talk to the comancheros.”

“I come here to Chihuahua to talk to the comancheros.”

“That’s what I been trying to tell you!” he snorted, upending Hook’s bottle to refill his cup. “There’s no comancheros here.”

Jonah squinted. “They’re up north?”

With a nod the man answered, “North is where they trade. North is where they work.”

“So who the hell are those fancy-dressed fellas you pointed out to me?”

“Them—they’re called ricos.”

“Rich men.”

“Right. Their kind are the money men. They run the operations out of Chihuahua. That’s all they do—never soiling their hands with work. Maybe once in a while one of them will want to amuse himself and take a long vacation, ride north with a caravan, joining his hired vaqueros and the comanchero traders for a diversion one trading season or another.”

He squeezed it in his mind. Had he been looking all this time—month after month, season after season—for the wrong sort of man? Looking for him in the wrong place?

Jonah sensed his heart hammering with self-anger ready to boil over in tears of helpless rage. “You’re telling me there’s no comancheros here? They’re back up north?”

“Ricos, not comancheros. Not here.”

“Back up north, goddammit?” Jonah growled.

He licked the drops of tequila from the red hairs of his mustache. “Yeah. Chihuahua is where you’ll come when you find out which rico train brought your boys in. Here is where you’ll come to get some idea where the boys were taken once they were brought down here. Until then, you got to go back north and find some answers.”

“Back … back to El Paso?”

With a wag of his big head, the Irishman said, “No. Out there. To the northeast is the trail you need to take. It’s wide and well beaten. Used every autumn trading season for years. Centuries, likely.”

“Northeast?”

“To Portrillo and beyond the river.”

“Beyond the river, you say? Texas.”

“Texas.”

So now Jonah drank in this dark, smoky hovel of a cantina in a village he thought the locals called Vieja. Another one of the miserable, stinking jacales squatting somewhere north of the Rio Grande.

With Two Sleep he crossed back into the States at a place called Presidio, angling north by east from there, staying clear of the mountains that hugged the distant skyline here, there, and on almost every side of their line of march. It was a hostile land peopled with too few gringos and too many Mexicans, where a growing population of Texans were protected as best they could be upriver by Fort Quitman on the west, by Fort Davis to the north and Fort Stockton on farther east of there, outposts strung so far apart in that long, desperately thin line of frontier defense the army had been establishing ever since the end of the South’s bid for independence from the Union.

“You got the right idea,” the old man declared to Jonah. “But your line’s off some.”

At a settlement called Marfa a bartender had suggested that Hook scare up one of John Bell Hood’s faithful —an old Confederate soldier who might be able to help point the two sojourners in some likely direction or another. For reasons he could not explain, Jonah trusted the old man more than he had trusted most others come across in the years since leaving Shad Sweete and Fort Laramie behind. It came hard for Jonah Hook to trust others. So much already lay crushed and trampled inside him. Hard anymore to trust, to hope.

The old soldier dragged out a rumpled map with few lines scratched across its dark surface, a parchment given a rich buckskin patina of time and smoke and the grease of many fires.

“There,” Jonah said again. “I draw a line from Chihuahua north by east,” and he slowly traced his fingernail northeast across the Rio Grande the way he and Two Sleep had come, heading on east into the open ground east of Fort Davis and west of Camp Hudson and Fort McKavett.

“Like I said—appears your thinking is on the right track when you head out from Chihuahua. But trick now is you gotta think like a comanchero, friend. Think like someone going north to trade with the Comanch’.”

Jonah’s eyes studied the map, smarting in the dim light and the smoke of cheap tobacco, the smudge of