skeletons (14 page)

“What’s this?”

“Just like in the movies. Our indoor firing range, for handguns. Border Patrol requires all field personnel to keep qualified, so we go through the regular course every month—seated, offhand, so on.”

I looked down the alley. At the far end were six targets, the black outlines of men on white backgrounds. “What are we doing here?”

He unlocked a cabinet, took something out, started toward me with it.

A real GUN.

“No,” I said.

“This is a Smith & Wesson Airweight,” he said. “.38-caliber, swing-out cylinder, two-inch barrel, a—”

“No,” I said. I felt faint.

“Floating firing pin and an aluminum alloy frame. Weighing twenty-one ounces, which is extremely light, and-”

“No,” I said, backing toward the door.

“Firing five rounds. It’s carried in a holster clipped—”

“No,” I said.

“Over your belt. Here, like mine.” He unbuttoned his suitcoat.

“No.”

“I want you to carry this in Harding.”

“No.”

“Have you ever fired a handgun?”

“No.”

“Any gun?”

“No. I will not.” It was difficult to enunciate with a knuckle in my mouth.

“No. I will not carry a gun.”

“I don’t expect you to have to use it, I hope very much you won’t,” he assured me. “But it’s a dandy deterrent. In a tight spot you can at least draw and threaten—that might give us time to get to you.”

“No, I won’t!” I babbled. “I never went to a war thank God because I’m a pacifist and probably a coward and proud of it and I write books about flies and germs and turtles and I won’t carry a gun and even if I did I wouldn’t even point it at anybody much less shoot them because life is sacred and if I’d had any idea I’d be asked to go over there armed I’d never have—”

“Sit with me a minute.” He took me by the arm, thereby removing the knuckle, propelled me to a bench behind the firing line, sat me down beside him. “Let me tell you something about the kind of people we’re up against. We don’t have a monopoly on Mafia in this country, you know. I told you we cracked a big operation in LA last year—Las Huertas, The Blondes. Now and then, if nothing else works, we send a plant south of the border, one of our men, to see if he can get a line on the thing. We sent one into Baja.

A month later we got a box in the mail.

In it were our man’s hands—we recognized his ring. Cut off at the wrists, clenched, filled with pesos.”

“Oh my God.”

“Here’s another.” He paused. “I don’t know if I can take this myself, telling it. Well, anyway, we’ve been after this other ring for two years. Bringing in skilled labor at high prices. It’s as big as The Blondes, and we’ve run into nothing but dead ends. So this last winter we sent a plant down in Chihuahua. A great young guy named Hector Aguilar—our age, wife, two kids. I told you, I head up an SIU, a Special Investigative Unit. Hec went down there with excellent cover. He was a furniture maker, a craftsman, who’d sold his house in Irapuato and had enough to pay his freight to Chicago if he could find people who’d get him over the line and up there. We thought if he could find them, he’d be able to trace the whole route from point of entry to Chicago, even identify some of the people for us—something we could zero in on. It’s worked before. Well, we wished him luck and Hec headed south. We hoped he’d contact us eventually in Chicago. Now I tell you this, Jimmie, because you need to understand why I want you armed. Three weeks later, Alvah Hehns and I were having lunch in a little Chicano beanery in downtown El Paso. We go there every noon, the food’s great. I’ll never forget that noon. We were talking about the latest gimmick they use to beat us. A woman will cross the International Bridge here on the bus, just for the day, to shop. She’s pregnant, about to pop. Once on the U.S. side, she goes into labor, the police rush her to a hospital, she gives birth. By being born here, the baby’s automatically an American citizen. This entitles the mother to apply for resident alien papers for everybody in the family. So here come the rest of them—the father and the other ten lads. And go on welfare. And there you are.”

Henry Snackenberg leaned forward, elbows on knees, head down between his hands. “Back to lunch, Alvah and I. I thought my taco tasted strange—the ground meat inside. After I’d got down most of it I opened the taco up and there in the shredded lettuce was a slip of paper with writing. It said,
‘Te has comido los huevos de Hector Aguilar.’
Translated, ‘You have eaten the testicles of Hector Aguilar.’”

I leaned forward, elbows on knees, head between my hands. Before, at first glimpse of the gun, I had merely felt faint. Now I was tempted to toss my tacos.

“Please carry it,” he said after a while. “I’ve already lost one good man. If I lose another, I couldn’t live with myself.”

“But in Harding there’s—”

“Tell it to Crossworth. To Sansom.”

“Then why me?”

“Because you’re our best bet. You must be getting close to something important. And because for you it’s relatively safe. You’re too conspicuous—your car, your clothes, you’ve met people there, the town knows who you are. That’s why they warned you—three writers in a row would be too many. Of course, if you come too close, if there’s no other way, they will kill you. What they won’t know is that we’ll be near you every minute.”

“Damn,” I said.

“Yes, damn,” he said.

“All right,” I sighed.

“Good,” he said. “Now let’s do some firing.”

“Do I have to?”

“You’d better.”

We stood. He clipped a brown suede holster over my belt on my right side, gave me the weapon. It was very light, had a brown wooden grip.

“Stand on this line,” said Snackenberg. “We’ll try the offhand, or standing, first.”

“Hank, I refuse to shoot at anything that even looks human,” I announced. “On principle. Don’t you have any other targets?”

“Henry. Sure have.” He stepped to the wall behind us, pressed a button. At the far end of the range, the male-outline targets sank out of sight, were replaced with bull’s-eyes. “That better?”

“I guess so.”

“Fine. Now raise the gun in your right hand and hold your right wrist steady by closing your left hand easily around it. Easily. You’re fidgeting. Relax. Why are you fidgeting?”

“Because I’m so nervous I could jump out of my skin, that’s why. And I could itch myself to death, that’s why. The dressings on my chest.”

“Forget all that. Now look down the barrel at the target and raise the end of the barrel until the bull’s-eye rests on it.”

“Will it make a loud noise?”

“No. Stop fidgeting. Is the bull balanced on the end of the barrel?”

“I think so.”

“Good. Now the safety of this weapon is incorporated in the hammer. To be fired, the trigger must be pulled. But don’t pull it. Squeeze it slowly. Got that?”

“Unh-huh.”

“You’re not shutting your eyes! How can you see the bull if you shut your eyes? Eyes open?”

“Unh-huh.”

“All right. Remember—keep your eyes open and squeeze the trigger slowly.”

I squinched my eyes shut and pulled the trigger and there was a BANG and I stood there, eyes still shut, like a pillar of salt.

“Bull’s-eye?” I asked.

“No.”

“Where then?”

“Nowhere.”

“Bullshit.” I opened eyes. “You mean I missed the whole goddamned target?”

“You did.” Henry Snackenberg turned, went to the bench, seated himself, arranged his arms and legs in a patient attitude, tried to grin through his chagrin. “Jimmie,” he said, “you do not shut your eyes when firing a weapon. You do not pull the trigger.”

“The Border Patrol may not,” I declared. “Soldiers and gangsters and hunters and other animals in human guise who lack a proper reverence for life may not. I do.”

In March of 1916 revolutionary forces under the command of Francisco Pancho” Villa cross the border to raid the village of Columbus, New Mexico. Eight civilians are killed, two wounded. Commercial structures and homes are pillaged and burned. The 13th United States Cavalry, stationed there, is caught with its guard down. Seven soldiers are killed, five wounded.

Harding, only thirteen miles north of Columbus, panics. Rumors of impending attack sweep the town. The faces of Villa’s scouts appear to townspeople at windows, under beds, and in trees, mustachios spread, teeth bared in satanic smiles. Every Mexican and Mexican-American in the vicinity is suspected of collaboration.

Sheriff Gilmore deputizes a hundred men, arms them, posts them at bridges and road intersections, forms them into squads which patrol the streets by night.

The day after the Columbus raid, four Mexicans are brought by truck to the jail in Harding. Reconnoitering south of the border, a troop of the 13th Cavalry under Captain Hedley Carpenter has found the Villistas hiding in an irrigation ditch within a mile of Columbus. General sentiment in Harding would hang them at once, but common sense prevails. A lynching would give the community a national “black eye,” for representatives of the press are pouring in to use Harding as a base from which to cover the Columbus story, and crews from Fox and Pathe newsreels as well. Instead, the state of New Mexico indicts Francisco Villa with murder in the first degree of one of the civilians killed at Columbus, a man named J. J. Moore, and indicts in addition, Pancho being absent, the four captured Mexicans as “aiding, abetting, assisting, and being concerned with and engaged in the unlawful and felonious killing of J. J. Moore.” Since the alleged crime was committed within the jurisdiction of the Third Judicial District, trial of the four is docketed for Harding Courthouse with dispatch.

Judge Obed Cox, frail and infirm, will preside.

Charles S. Vaught will prosecute. He is forty-four now, but the Buell Wood acquittal has taken him down a peg, and he has not contested Cox for his seat. He bides his time. The old man must retire soon, or die in harness.

But who will defend? None of the attorneys in town will touch the case with a ten-foot pole. Guilt by association they cannot argue, of course; but so rabid is feeling against the Villistas that representing them will mean a sacrifice their practices may not endure. One, however, has not been asked. And in the end, Obed Cox invites Buell Wood to his chambers.

“I want you to defend the Mexicans.”

“No.”

“I have the power to appoint you. You’re an officer of my court. If you refuse, I can—”

“No.”

Obed Cox reaches into his mouth, loosens his upper plate, rubs a gum, replaces the denture.

“Buell, I won’t flog a dead horse.” Instantly he regrets the allusion. “I mean, I could do this and make it stick, but I won’t. You’ve fallen far enough. So I’m not ordering, I’m asking.”

It is true. In the six years since the gunfight on Gold Street and the trial of Buell Wood and his acquittal, the attorney has been the victim of a complete reversal of public opinion. It was as though Harding recognized, as the months passed, that justice had indeed miscarried; that its white knight had been one bloody afternoon a killer with a lust as black as his attire; that the six-gun law of the Old West was as antiquated as saloon gambling and outdoor plumbing. The town was ashamed of itself. And it took out that shame on Buell Wood. It turned its back on him. And the more it shunned him, the more he embarrassed it. It let him begin to drink alone, and drink to staggering excess. It gave him only crumbs of probate work to do. Having lost his wife, he lost his daughter Helene to his father-in-law, John Dampier, who took her to his ranch to raise. His house was sold for taxes, he lived alone, and slovenly, in his office. Into the midst of Harding, Harding exiled him.

“Buell, I ask you not for my sake but for yours. This is your chance. If you make a good, sound, coherent case—”

“They’ll hang.”

“Of course they will. If the law doesn’t, the town may. But I intend to beat it to the rope. On my suggestion, Gilmore has already ordered lumber for a gallows.”

“Well then.”

“That’s not the point. You’ll appear before the public. If you conduct yourself properly, as I know you can, you’ll raise yourself more than a few notches around here. Buell, dammit, I’m old enough to be your father. Do it. Square your shoulders and get out of the gutter and look the world in the eye. You were a proud man once. Be one again.”

Wood goes to a window.

“Buell.”

“All right.”

Obed Cox steps behind him, puts something in his coat pocket. “And take this. Buy yourself a new suit.”

When the attorney turns to leave, there are tears in his eyes.

Later, when the judge informs the prosecutor who will defend, the response is a smile.

“You’re pleased.”

“Happy as a horned toad. Six years is a long time to wait.”

“For what?”

“I lost him once. I won’t now,” says Charles Vaught. “When I’m through with Wood this time, the murdering son of a bitch will wish they’d never let him go.”

The accused are arraigned, stand mute, and counsel enters a plea of not guilty on their behalf. An interpreter is necessary, for they understand no English and are illiterate even in Spanish. The four Villistas are a miserable lot, poor excuses for bandidos, their appearance so indigent that suitable clothing must be obtained from a Catholic charity. But since they are unaccustomed to shoes, shoeless they can go. They are peons, two in their fifties, one an old man of seventy, blind in one eye, and the last a boy of sixteen. Their names are Juan Sanchez, Taurino Garcia, Jesús Alvarez, and Luis Obedo.

A jury is empaneled. By unremarked coincidence it includes the same four influential citizens who six years earlier served on the jury which freed Buell Wood: Francis Word and Hazen VanDellen, merchants; Dr. Jack Shelley, the general practitioner; and Coye Turnbow, banker.

This trial is to be even more memorable. The room on the second floor of Harding Courthouse stifles with a capacity audience—an audience which looks upon the prisoners as already dangling from ropes, already twisting in the wind. The logic of this expectation is reinforced by the sounds of saws and hammers through the open windows. Sheriff Gilmore has begun the construction of a gallows in the small park to the west. There are present, too, in large numbers, a dude press representing cities as distant and alien as New York and Philadelphia. Pathé News has the gall to attempt to film in the room itself, and is thrown out by the bailiff on orders of an irate Obed Cox, camera and crew. New Mexico has been admitted to the Union now, and the legal niceties are more consistently and self-importantly observed.