I stayed quiet.
Dark clouds moved in, robbing the world of light. Within minutes the rains were falling, and Shelby and I moved the horses into a thick canebrake near some offshoot of the big river.
“Think it’ll flood?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“River was too low to start with.”
He nodded.
The rain came and would that it could wash away our sins. Instead it only turned the dirt to mud and sent all manner of creatures, good and evil, seeking whatever shelter might be had. Water pooled at the rim of my hat and hesitated there, as if unsure what to make of this newfound freedom, then continued on to the ground, where it was lost to the silt and slush of a saturated truth.
We slid off the horses and held blankets over our heads. The horses shifted in the thicket and searched for some comfort that wasn’t there.
“Did you hear that?” Shelby hollered at me through the drumming of the rain.
I turned my eyes out toward the plain and listened.
The storm crawled along overhead en route to the places we’d come from, and through the sheets of water it dumped upon the land I heard first one faint cry and then another.
“You hear it?” Shelby asked again and I held up my hand.
The dull bass of a drum permeated the air around us. We squinted from under our blankets but saw only a faded country masked by rain.
The drumming grew closer and less muted and soon shapes began to move through the curtains of water. Men appeared, maybe seven or eight. They marched in a single column with the drummer at one end and a man carrying a small, crudely sewn Mexican flag at the other. They stood straight, their drenched uniforms sticking to their bodies. They slogged through the mud and the rain as if neither were there, as if they were spirits upon the land, answerable to nothing and no one save the phantom force which commanded them only to march, as if they had been called down by the old gods of this country to turn back these gringos, these intruders who already took too much of the land belonging to their ancestors.
Shelby and I looked at one another and back at the men. They halted, facing the river, fifty yards from where we stood. One of the men stepped forward from the others and turned and shouted something at them. He then spun and again faced the river.
“Rendirse, rebeldes!” the man cried.
There was no answer.
“Rendirse!” he repeated, the men behind him standing motionless, rifles shouldered and faces forward.
“What in the hell do you reckon is happening?” Shelby asked.
“Couldn’t say.”
“What’s he saying?”
“Hush.”
Then from out of the brake more ghosts emerged, these even less human than the last. Three of them, wearing tattered clothing and no hats. Only one had both shoes. They trudged forward, defeated, with their hands in the air.
The shouting man beckoned them to come closer, and they did and he spoke to them at some length and a few times patted them on the shoulder and the back. Then the man lowered his head and shook it in a slow, dramatic fashion, as if some grave disappointment had befallen him. The man returned to the column and stood nearest the drummer and raised his arm in the air. The soldiers brought their guns to the ready and the ragged men stood facing them, their chins in the air.
“Madero!” one of the men screamed into the falling rain.
“Madero!” the other two called.
“Díaz!” answered the leader of the soldiers, and he brought down his arm and the soldiers fired and the three men jerked and twitched and collapsed into the mud and onto one another, and we held tight to our spooked horses as they stomped and tore at the tall canes surrounding us.
The soldiers reloaded, approached the dead men, and fired another round into them. The leader then went about stripping them of what little belongings they had. When it was over, the soldiers marched back out across the plain and east toward La Morita. The flag flapped in the wind and the rain and pulled at the stick it was fastened to. As the soldiers began to fade from our sight, the cloth came loose and whipped into the air and hung there for one stolen moment before it was beaten down into the mud by the relentless rain.
* * *
When at last the storm moved on, I walked out from the river and to the bodies left lying there. I stared down at them. They had fallen in positions unnatural, or at least unnatural to the living.
“Bring me a plate,” I called to Shelby, and while the ground was still soft I dug shallow graves and the digging was slow and, in the humidity, torturous.
“You ain’t making much headway, son,” Shelby said. He was chewing on the last of our dried meat.
“Go quicker if you grabbed that other plate and helped.”
“Shit, we just bought them plates in Tucson,” he replied. “I ain’t as eager as you to go ruining mine on account of some dead Mexicans.”
“They ought to be buried.”
“They ought not have pissed them soldiers off, I reckon.”
“This from the outlaw,” I said.
“Well, then they ought not have got caught. That sit better?”
“I hope that boy got a good burial.”
“It sure as hell wasn’t no open casket,” Shelby said, laughing.
“You’re a real sumbitch, you know that?”
I went back to my work. When I was through, I rolled the bodies into the holes and apologized to the men for not having dug deeper and then I filled in the mud and stacked stones from the river to mark each man. Perhaps I should have spoken some words or a prayer, but I doubted God was listening so instead I just said, “I’m sorry,” and I was.
* * *
We rode out that evening, cutting through the old disputed lands along the border, headed for the San Pedro River and then Agua Prieta. Shelby said he knew some gambler there who could help us get settled. I was forever hesitant but always agreeing in the end.
We rode past the sun as it set behind us and we listened to the coyotes call, and as night began to fall the jackrabbits would dart from one mesquite bush to the next, never quite assured in their own safety, never finished running.
We put the horses into the San Pedro at noon the next day and the cold water was a welcome relief to all involved as the sun continued to tear through October with no sign of slowing. The third day after the river we came to a mature paloverde tree. It grew on a short hill, shading cacti and scrub brush scattered beneath it. Its green bark split near the roots to allow for multiple trunks which rose up and out and splintered into smaller branches. The tree itself was not twenty feet, and any sturdy limbs were much lower still. Yet from one of the branches hung a naked man, his bare feet only inches from the ground. His neck did not look broken, but the rope had strangled him, and in case it hadn’t, he was full of bullet holes, the half-dried blood running down his exposed legs. His face was swollen and his eyes bulged and across his chest hung a slapdash sign written in blood onto a slab of mesquite bark and fastened with a thin string: Viva Madero. Viva México.