The Diezmo by Rick Bass (top fiction books of all time TXT) 📗

we would do well to stay on the main road all the way to the border—that although we would probably encounter a few soldiers and cavalry, there was none anywhere in such force as to outnumber us.

The Brit seemed delighted by our derring-do, by the valor of our grand escape, and wished us Godspeed, and before riding southward (toward Colonel Barragan’s still-trailing little force) he paused and asked if there were any artists among us. To my surprise, one of the boys I had fished with on the Rio Grande, Charles McLaughlin, eased forward on the frothy, leg-trembling mule he was sitting, and raised his hand.

The Brit was delighted, and, still astride his own mule, nudged his animal forward and made a great show of presenting to Charles McLaughlin a blank journal and a little leather-bound satchel containing pens of varying gauges, and little vials of ink, as well as some chalk and pastels.

“You are on the grand adventure of your life,” he said. “You must record it, not for posterity, but for yourself.” A lone cloud was drifting across the sky, and as it passed now before the sun, the Englishman folded his parasol and, before placing it in an empty rifle scabbard attached to his saddle, reached out with it and touched Charles McLaughlin on the shoulder as if knighting him. He turned toward Wallace and Cameron then, studying them as if evaluating them for a painting—and then the cloud was past, exposing his bright pate to the sun’s cold brilliance again, and he pulled the parasol from his scabbard and hoisted it once more and then rode on.

We found our first and last water at Agua Nieta. The spring was alkaline, surrounded by calceous stone walls of great antiquity, erected to keep animals out; but we knocked out the walls and gate and drove our remuda right into the warm shallow spring, where we slid down from our saddles and lay on our bellies like pigs, drinking among the mules and horses as they too wallowed and thrashed in the salty pond. Our thrashings were soon soiling the spring with horse piss and green mule shit, as well as the vomit of soldiers who had drunk too much too fast, and their own piss and shit and grime as they stripped out of their filthy rags and laundered them, standing ankle-deep in the turmoil and scrubbing themselves with gouty fistfuls of the chalky mud.

I and a few others crouched at the edge of the salty pond—the water was lowering before our very eyes—and quickly filled our flasks and canteens, splashed water on our bare faces and arms, and cleaned ourselves as best as we could. We looked backwards often, to see that the waver of Barragan’s men was larger, becoming more and more distinct—and finally leaders rousted the wallowers from the now vile spring and told us we needed to be moving again.

Charles McLaughlin was seated on one of the stone walls, sketching the scene before him quickly, and by the time Wallace and Cameron had the men and their stock rounded up, he had finished his sketch. Those of us who cared to look at it agreed that it was almost realistic, but we were a bit surprised that it had come from his hand, and from his eye.

He had made the scene appear almost idyllic, with very little of the squalor.

In that regard, the picture was false, but in the sense that it presented ourselves the way we would have liked to be seen, it was true.

Briefly strengthened, the wallowers began to argue with Cameron about his decision to stay on the road. “Let’s go up into the mountains,” they said. “The cavalry can never find or follow us there.” And I regret to say that although I had heretofore been in complete agreement with everything Cameron and particularly Wallace had counseled, in this instance I was among those clamoring to go up into the mountains and perhaps cross back over into Texas, farther west, through the Sierra Madres.

Only Cameron and Wallace wanted to stick to the main road. But now that the war was breaking up, their power was fading, and the hundred-other of us had our way.

What did we know of mountains? Only enough to be dangerous to ourselves. When we looked back, we rejoiced, at first, on seeing that Barragan’s men had paused at the foot of the mountains, watching our ascent, and had not followed. Indeed, some of them turned back, and from our initial vantage, already some thousand feet above them, we had cheered. Others of Barragan’s men watched us a while longer and then rode on farther north: and to a man, we felt that our choice had been the right one.

Barragan’s men had not long been gone from sight before we began to encounter our first difficulties. What had seemingly offered us salvation, the mountains’ ruggedness, was also what threatened to break us, for the pitch became steeper and our footing less certain in the scree at the base of the cliffs we sought to scale. Having never ridden horses in the mountains, we had not realized there might be terrain too steep for them or even the mules, and soon we were having to lead them up and over the larger boulders and through the scree, horses and men sliding and scrambling alike. We were having to pull and push them up through slots and chimneys, our work made all the more impossible by the heavy burdens of our looting.

Some of the clastic rocks were still sharp-edged, remnants from a long-ago exploded earth—and the razor edges of those shattered rocks slashed our tattered boots and shoes and sliced the fetlocks of our pack train, so that we left behind us a wandering ribbon of red, like a skein of bright thread laid down on a map.

There was no water, only brush and cactus and shattered stones. The vertical walls of granite were flecked with dark