Chapter 9
The hand stayed over her mouth and the arm across her chest held like a fence rail set in concrete.
She drove her elbow back into him, all her weight behind it, and got nothing for the trouble but a jolt that ran up her own arm to the shoulder.
She twisted left, dropped her chin, found the side of his hand with her teeth and bit down hard enough to taste salt and dust.
The grip eased. Only by a hair. Just enough to tell her the man at her back was holding her still and meant to do no more than that.
A voice came low against her ear. Accented, and the accent was nothing she’d heard on the border. Something from a good deal further off than Mexico.
“The man on the bank.”
She went still.
“He’s looking the other way. He comes back around in half a minute. Make a sound now and it goes bad for the both of us. Worse for you than me.”
She quit fighting.
They stood pressed together in the mesquite, her spine against his chest, his hand still cupped over her mouth, while the man posted down on the bank finished his slow sweep of the river, west and then south and then back around to the east.
His gaze crossed the brush where they stood and traveled on without a hitch in it.
Twenty yards down the clay the others worked their bundles up out of the raft and onto dry ground, quick and low, none of them speaking, men who had done this enough times before that they wanted only to have it done again.
The watcher faced upstream and held there, his rifle slung and his thumbs hooked in his belt.
The hand came off her mouth.
She stepped clear and turned around.
He was tall and lean, several days into a dark beard, and his eyes were already past her and down on the men at the water, moving along the line of them the way her father used to take the measure of a barroom when they walked into one together.
Hands first. Then belts and what hung off them.
Then boots, then faces. A pistol rode his hip and a rifle hung at his back on a sling, and he stood in the brush with his weight already down and settled, easy as a man on his own porch.
When he’d come up behind her she hadn’t heard so much as a leaf turn.
“Who are you?” she said, holding it under her breath.
“A man who was watching them before you came blundering into the middle of it.” He glanced at her and back to the river. “You’d have stepped on that branch one way or the other. I just decided which.”
“You could have warned me some other way.”
“I could have made noise. Then there’d be eight of us in this brush instead of two, and six of them would have guns out.” He tipped his chin toward the bank. “How many do you count.”
She looked. The watcher held his post upstream. The two who’d been wading had come up onto the clay and were carrying the bundles two at a time toward a cut in the bank where the ground rose.
A fifth man stood a little apart with his back to her, directing the others with short downward chops of one hand, the gestures of a man long used to being minded the moment he lifted a finger.
“Five,” she said.
“Six. There’s another at the top of the cut, in the shadow of it. He hasn’t moved since before you got here, which is its own kind of skill.” He paused, and something in his voice changed by a degree. “The one giving orders. You know him.”
The man at the bank turned far enough to throw his profile against the pale clay.
Dark vest over a white shirt gone gray down the back with sweat.
Heavy through the chest and shoulders, the build of a man who had done hard labor young and gone soft over it later without losing the strength underneath.
“No,” she said.
“Mateo Flores.” He gave the name the flat weight of a thing he’d been carrying a long way and was tired of the heft of. “We go. Now.”
“Those are rifles coming off that raft,” she said. “And the long crates, that’s powder. Dynamite, or close enough to make no difference.”
“Yes.”
“You knew that before I got here.”
He looked at her, one full look, the first he’d spared her. “Two days I’ve lain in this brush watching this crossing. I know what comes off that raft and where it goes and about what hour they like to bring it.”
He drew back into the mesquite, setting each boot down and trusting his weight to it only once it was placed, the way a man crosses ice.
He looked back at her over his shoulder.
“Come or stay, it’s nothing to me. But if you stay they will find you, and a woman alone in this brush is not a thing those men will leave breathing.
You don’t want what comes after they find you. ”
She came.
He went through the mesquite faster than it looked like he was moving, the brush seeming to open ahead of him and close behind without a branch dragging or a twig giving way.
She was quiet in the brush, had been quiet in it since she was a girl her father taught to walk a deer trail without spooking the deer, and this man was quieter than she was, and that needled at her more than she’d have admitted.
They worked east, well back off the water, climbing toward the higher ground where the brush thinned and the footing went to caliche.
Behind them the men’s voices carried flat and toneless across the river the way sound does over water, and then those fell away too, and there was only the dry tick of the brush in a thin wind out of the south.
They came out onto a flat above the river and he stopped.
A few yards back a young Black man sat a horse and held the reins of a second one. He looked at her and took his read of her without any hurry in it, a man working out what her arrival meant and what it was going to cost him, and deciding, for the moment, to wait and see.
She looked at the two of them, then back the way they’d come, then north, where the blue over the low hills had gone the dull white of skimmed milk and the air had taken on the held-breath stillness she’d known her whole life.
She knew that sky and she knew exactly what it meant and how fast it meant it.
“We move,” she said. “There’s weather in that, and you do not want to be standing on a riverbank in this country when it comes down.
It comes down like the lid’s come off.” She nodded at the horses.
“There’s a house a mile north. You can put up there tonight, the both of you, and be glad of a roof. ”
The tall one looked north and read the sky and came to the same figure she had.
“Both of us,” he said. There was a question folded into it, the question of whether the young man was included in the offer, and he was watching her face to see how she answered it.
“Both of you,” she said, and watched something ease in the young man’s shoulders that she hadn’t known was held.
***
The house showed itself through the first of the rain, the drops coming fat and scattered and dark on the dust of the yard, the two oaks out front gone heavy and black with the wet and the clay pots already swinging on their ropes where her mother had hung them empty against the season.
Marielle came in at the front gate and around the side of the house the way she always came home, by habit older than thought, and the two men put their animals up in the stable without needing to be told a second time.
She heard the easy competence of it through the wall, tack coming off and the dry rub of a cloth, men who knew horses and didn’t make a labor of them.
Her mother sat on the back porch in her chair. The bottle was up in her hand tonight rather than down on the boards beside it, which told Marielle more than she wanted told about the hours she’d been gone.
Her mother watched her climb the porch steps and then watched the two strangers come around the corner of the house from the stable, and her face moved through almost nothing at the sight of them, the way it had stopped moving through much of anything across the last year, as though the muscles that had once done surprise and welcome had been let go for lack of work.
“Mama. We’ve got company tonight.”
“I can see that we have.”
Marielle got her up out of the chair and inside and settled at the kitchen table, the bottle going with her because there was no sense in the fight it would take to leave it behind, and went back to the door.
The two men stood out in the yard in the rain, neither one making any move toward the house on his own account, the both of them waiting on a word that was hers to give.
“In,” she said. “The both of you, before you drown standing there. Boots off at the door.”
The kitchen was tight with two people moving in it. With four it became a different kind of room. She worked around the bodies without ceremony, feeding kindling to the stove and blowing the coals up and going through the larder by feel and habit. Dried beans she’d had soaking since morning.
The end of the salt pork. The cornbread from breakfast, gone a little hard at the edges but no worse for frying. She set it all to going and the two men stood against the wall, out of her way, until she put a hand toward the bench and they sat.
“Your name,” she said to the tall one.
“Abe.”
“And you.”
“David.”
“Marielle Vaughn.” She set the pot over the flame and gave it a turn with a wooden spoon. “My mother. Irine.”
Her mother looked David over the way she looked any stranger over, straight on and brief and done with it. She looked at Abe a good while longer, and differently, with the slow attention she gave to things that put her in mind of other things she hadn’t thought about in a long time.
The rain came down hard now, drumming the clay tile of the roof so that the kitchen drew in close around the lamp. Marielle poured coffee and set the cups around and they all sat with it a moment, the heat of the cups good in the damp.
“You know what they were unloading,” she said to Abe.