Chapter Two
B
ullets hurt like hell going in, but they can hurt worse later. A lot worse, until you can't think and until you don't know where the hurt begins and ends and you would rather be dead than suffer so. But then again, the only good thing about that kind of pain is that it lets you know you aren't dead. If you're a stubborn sort, hurting like that will make you mad enough to fight through it, if only because getting to your feet is the only way you can find the son of a bitch that did it to you and do worse to him.
Newt Jones woke with his face in the dirt, and it was a long time before he could recall how he came to be in such shape. There was a bullet hole through his chest, still intermittently and slowly seeping blood. There was a lot of bloodâsome wet and sticky and heavy, and other blood, older, dried and matted and mixing with the sand and forming a pasteboard crust of the front of his shirt. Yet, he was still alive. Cortina's bullet had passed through him like a hot knife, but somehow it hadn't killed him.
Cortina and his men had taken everything he owned: his livestock, his gun, his gold. Made a fool of him. The damned gold. The most money he ever had. Blood and sweat and backbreaking work. The thought of losing it hurt almost as bad as the hole in him.
At least Cortina had left his boots on his feet. There was that, even if he was too weak to walk. As it was, it took him half an hour to crawl the fifty yards to the river's edge. Most times, he would have complained about the bitter Pecos water, but it tasted like heaven. He drank and drank and then dunked his head under until his mind was clearer.
It took him most of the afternoon to rebuild his fire from the feeble coals left from his previous one, and to bathe his wounds. The second day he smashed a rattlesnake's head with a rock. There were plenty of snakes.
The third and fourth day he ate more snake and took stock of his situation. He had nothing but a sheath knife and the clothes on his back, and it was a long way to anywhere from where he was. The closest settlements were a few little Mexican sheepherder villages back up the river to the north. And then there were Fort Stockton and Comanche Springs somewhere south of him, and the old mail road, running west to El Paso or southeast to Del Rio. Cortina's gang's tracks were headed due south.
He was no scout, but from the sign they left behind, he guessed there were at least five or six of them riding with Cortina. Most likely, every one of them was as salty as Cortina. A man in Newt's condition wouldn't stand much of a chance against them. The smart thing would be to walk north and count himself lucky that he might live. A smart man would do that, no doubt.
On the fifth day he started south, following the river and walking in the tracks of the man he swore to kill. He was in no shape to walk fast, but he walked as best he could. Every step he took was a challenge in itself, and his chest ached like he had been beaten with a sledgehammer. He wasn't a praying man, but more than once he scowled at the sun and asked that if he had one thing left granted to him, then let him come face-to-face with Javier Cortina one more time. Revenge and getting his gold back was the way it should be, but if it came to that, he would gladly settle for nothing but revenge. Cortina should have known that if you're going to kill a man, you better make sure he is dead.
Chapter Three
I
t wasn't much of a tent, as circus tents goâa round thing with the brightly colored panels long since faded to dull pastels, and tears here and there sewn over with mildew-stained patches. One of the stakes had pulled loose from the sandy ground, and the Arabic-styled top that should have formed a needle spire at the center support pole instead sagged deeply. Still, it was perhaps the only circus to ever visit the little Mexican village, and the people who filed inside stared at it admiringly.
Kizzy Grey peeked out of a crack between the wall of the tent and the wagon tarp draped over a stretched rope that served as a screen and a dressing room. Some two dozen Mexican families were crowded together on the small section of bleachers on the far side of the tent from her, their eyes dark beneath the flickering lantern light, and their expressions almost somber, as if they weren't sure what to expect. Some of the children tugged at their parents' sleeves and pointed at the murals of African elephants, crocodiles, immense snakes, sword-swallowers, fire-breathers, and other exotic circus themes painted on plank signs scattered around. Most of the peasant farmers and villagers had likely never seen anything approaching an elephant, nor were they apt to. Billed as a circus or not, the Greys had never owned an elephant, no matter what was on the signs. Although they had once owned a monkey and used it in the show until it bit a customer one night in Kansas City and the drunken Italian track layer pulled a club out of his coat pocket and killed the poor, ill-tempered thing.
The signs were what they were. “Ambience” was what her father used to call his painted flights of fancyâcreating hope and setting moodârather than false advertising. In Kizzy's mind they were an outright lie, but a harmless one if a lie could be such.
There had been a time when the Incredible Grey Family Circus had played before the big crowds in the big towns. But everything fell apart. Since then, it was more of the same, traveling the roads and settling for anyplace that would have them and doing their acts for whatever the local citizenry had to shell out, which of late hadn't been much.
Kizzy turned and stared at the rusted little money box on the table behind her. The night's take for the gate wasn't more than a handful of pesos and not near enough to feed their animals or to keep up with repairs. She shrugged her thin shoulders without realizing she did it. It wasn't all bad. One old woman had bought her family's way into the show with a chicken. At least they would eat well for a meal.
Kizzy double-checked herself in the mirror, dabbing at a stray strand of black hair before tugging on her hat. She smoothed the front of her dress, frowning at a stain on it and wondering if she had made the best selection from the open chest full of costumes beside her. Her father had claimed that he paid a genuine Indian maiden to tan and sew the buckskin together. The snow-white, fringed dress was a pretty thing, with embroidery and fancy stitching across the chest and beadwork at the sleeve cuffs and on the hem of the skirt. She loved the dress, even though her father hadn't really gotten it from any Indian maiden. She had known that, even when she was only ten. He had really paid a Jewish seamstress in Chicago fifty dollars to make it. The buckskin wasn't really buckskin, and the cheap suede was worn smooth in places from the days when her mother wore it.
No matter, it was still an impressive costume. She took both of her pistols by the butts and lifted them a little in their holsters, adjusting the gun belt cinched around her narrow waist until it felt comfortable. She looked into the mirror one last time and pressed her lips together to smooth the red lipstick on them, blowing a kiss at herself before she walked out before the crowd.
“Ladies and gentleman, lords and ladies,” her voice rose to the sagging tent top. “Perhaps since mankind first captured fire or mastered the art of shaping flint, there has been no greater moment than when he first sat astride a horse. Until then, his spirit was incomplete; until then, the horse's spirit was incomplete. In that moment, when the horse first moved beneath him, the partnership was forged. Man and beast racing over the plains, swift and sure, stronger for one another. Nothing so mighty, they became like the wind.”
She paused dramatically, noting that none of the crowd seemed to speak enough English to understand everything she said, but her tone obviously had their attention. Half of pandering to any crowd was always about the showmanship, anyway, rather than the words.
“And in time, many men came to ride the noblest of the beasts, but every once in a generation there was born a special rider and a horseman like no other. And ever more rarely a horse was born to match him. And once every century, or two or three, that special horseman and that special horse came together and magic was the result. Man and horse working together, until the giant, beating heart throbbing beneath the rider's legs flowed into him and they breathed and lived as one.”
Fonzo timed his entrance perfectly. All six of the horses loped through the open tent door in a perfect line, side by side, with their long manes dancing with each stride and Fonzo standing with a foot each on the backs of the middle two, riding standing up, Roman style, with a long set of reins attached to the halters on those two horses.
Two times, he took them around the ring, and then on the third revolution he steered to a low jump made of a small log resting on end braces some two feet off the ground. All six of the horses sailed over the jump with their front legs folded under them and their nostrils flared. Fonzo stayed standing, even through the jump, and the crowd clapped when he landed without a hint of losing his balance and his knees absorbing the shock.
Kizzy smiled. No matter how many times she saw them, the six snow-white horses were truly beautiful. If her father had done one thing for the family showâfor her and Fonzoâit was that. Ten years he had spent searching for matched animals, so alike in size and looks that anyone not a horseman might not recognize a difference in them at a glance. Every spare coin her father had ever been able to put together, he spent on those horses: Bucephalus, Herod, Mithridates, Sheba, Solomon, and Hercules. Blood and sweat and tears, and all the years putting the show together, making it something, all represented in horseflesh.
Her attention switched to her brother. Fonzo was as nimble as a cat, slight and wiry and athletic, with grace and balance oozing from him as effortlessly as quicksilver sliding over glass. For all the trouble he often caused her, she would still be the first to admit that he could ride like no other, as if he were born on a horse, or as if he were once a part of the horse and some appendage that had been removed and found its proper working once returned to the body from whence it was taken.
Fonzo guided the horses around the ring one more time, the horses keeping perfect pace and spacing, and their noses even, like they were bound together with invisible harnesses. The second pass over the jump, Fonzo floated up, his feet losing contact with the horses' backs. The crowd gasped, thinking he was about to be thrown to the ground, but to their amazement, he landed on two different horses and rode around the ring smiling and waving one hand at the crowd as if it were nothing.
The somber faces of the crowd turned to smiles and they pointed to him and laughed in wonderment. Fonzo leapt to the ground without even stopping the horses. They continued to circle him until he picked up a braided, long-handled buggy whip and whistled to them and cued them with some motion of the whip that only he and the horses understood. As one, they shifted into a single-file line, and with a second signal they stopped and faced inward to him at the center of the ring, like wagon spokes surrounding him. He raised both arms high overhead, and all six horses reared on their hind legs and pawed playfully at the air.
While the other five waited, one of the horses then came slowly forward and bowed to Fonzo with one of its front legs stretched out before it and the other bent beneath it. Fonzo swung onto its back and led the other horses around the ring again at a fast lope.
Riding bareback, Fonzo took a double handful of mane and swung off as if he were going to dismount on the run. The instant his feet hit the ground he bounced back up and landed again on the animal's back. The second time he did it he twisted and contorted his body so that he landed facing backward.
Once the crowd had quieted, Kizzy stretched one arm toward her brother in a dramatic pose. “Another round of applause for Fonzo the Great and his magnificent horses.”
Fonzo leapt from his horse and joined Kizzy in the center of the ring, the horses still revolving around at his bidding. He motioned for the crowd to quiet.
Fonzo's voice rose high and clear in the confines of the tent, only slightly deeper than his sister's. “And man soon found that the horse was good for war, and the mighty men of old broke themselves against each other in one wild charge after another, sword in hand and a swift warhorse beneath them, until empires were made, and a time came when a warrior was no warrior at all unless there was a four-legged brother beneath him and carrying him into battle.
“Weapons of steel, sword and mace, required a strong arm, and the mighty usurped the weak, and giants ruled the world until here, on the frontier of the New World, an invention was madeâa weapon so great, so cunning and minuscule, yet deadly, that history would be changed. The American cowboy likes to say that Samuel Colt made all men equal, but it is not only men that can handle a gun.” Fonzo turned and bowed to Kizzy. “I give you Buckshot Annie, at the same time the prettiest woman west of anywhere, and the finest marksman to ever lift a firearm.”
Kizzy bowed deeply in an imitation of the courtly dip of someone paying homage, as if the crowds were kings and queens instead of dirt-poor peasants and subsistence farmers. When she raised her head again to face them, she smiled and blew another kiss.
Fonzo went back to the circling horses and swung up on one on the fly. As soon as he was astride, she began to pitch him a series of red, shiny glass balls, one at a time. He caught them on the run, one-handed, stuffing them into a leather bag at his waist.
Kizzy stood with her back to the crowd and slowly drew the pearl-handled Colt revolvers at the same time. She let them dangle at arm's length beside her thighs, standing unmoving except for her eyes tracking her brother as he went around her. The next time Fonzo passed before her he tossed one of the glass balls high above him and she shattered it with one shot from her right-hand pistol. On his second pass he tossed two balls simultaneously and she busted those, too, with a shot from each gun.
The crowd had grown deathly quiet, but she was used to that. She suppressed the smile building on her lips and holstered her left-hand gun and waited for Fonzo's next pass. That time, he launched four balls into the air, and she shot from the hip without even taking aim with the pistol sights. She worked the trigger on the double-action Colt Lightning so fast that the four shots almost sounded as one. All four balls shattered, and brightly colored bits of glass showered down like falling stars.
Fonzo dismounted again and the horses raced out the open door and left the tent. He ran to her side and they gave the crowd another bow. As if it had taken the farmers and goat herders that long to get over seeing such a slip of a young girl shoot so, they finally erupted into a round of applause.
“Pretty good stuff when you can impress anyone on the border with your shooting prowess,” Fonzo said under his breath as they bowed again.
Kizzy smiled demurely at the crowd, and her eyes strained upward toward the ceiling of the canvas tent. She was a far better than average shot, but none of the spectators ever seemed to notice the tiny holes all over the roof of the tent or the unusually quiet pop her .38s made. Busting such glass balls out of the air with regular bullets and black powder charges would have been a feat of marksmanship, indeed, but the lead birdshot and reduced loads she reloaded her cartridges with, much like small shotgun loads, made it a far easier thing. And the less powerful shot loads were much safer for work inside the tent or around crowds, rather than sending stray bullets speeding to who-knows-where to hit who-knows-what. However, the scattering of the pellets over the last year since they had added her act had pinpricked the tent with holes to the point it leaked like a sieve on a rainy day, and the tent was getting in pitiful condition as it was.
They shook hands with the villagers as they filtered out of the tent, and Kizzy did a few more trick shots with real bullets under the open sky, where she could pick a safe direction in which to shoot. Normally, Fonzo would have mingled through the crowd to find one or more men with enough faith in their own marksmanship to think that they could best a girl in a shooting match, but there wasn't enough money in the village for anyone to make any kind of a wager.
Fonzo let the children pet his horses, and even gave a few of them a ride, smiling even though not many months ago he would have charged four bits per person to have their photo taken sitting on one of the horses. But the camera was ruined when one of the wagons overturned crossing the Rio Grande a month before, and there might not be four bits left in the entire village.
The sun was going down when their guests finally filtered back to their village of mud-daubed picket huts, eroded adobe walls, and bleating goats. Fonzo traded a stained and frayed red velvet jacket that his father had once worn as ringmaster, along with four pesos, for the services of two of the village men to help dismantle and pack the tent. It was long after midnight before the tent was loaded into one of their wagons, and it cost them two more pesos to buy some hay for the horses.
The more elaborate of their two wagons was a gaudy thing, with high wheels, a bright red paint job, and gold pinstriping on every edge. It was what Kizzy's people called a
vardo
. It had plank sides and a shingled roof, and inside it was their living quartersâa narrow bed on each side, cabinets for storage, and a small kitchen area and stove for cooking when the weather was too bad to build a fire outside.