Chris Adrian - The Best American Mystery Stories 2007

No fuckin’ way. Not at this stage of her career, she thought. A pro went it alone, until the money got big. Then she’d have her pick.

Marry Stevie?

A tear trickled down her cheek. Ripped and burned, the smoke smelling of damp pulp paper and evergreens.

But it was gone in a moment, and everything was back on track.

Lucy lay in the bed she’d made, and dreamed of lists.

From Prairie Schooner

Teudilli sent a message to Moctezuma in Mexico describing everything he had seen and heard, and asking for gold to give the captain of the strangers, who had asked him whether Moctezuma had any gold, and Teudilli had answered yes. So Cortés said: “Send me some of it, because I and my companions suffer from a disease of the heart which can be cured only with gold.”

Let it be said here and now that a Texian has no taste for discipline. This I freely admit. But when a man of parts hears the call to arms, when his mind’s eye imagines the sweep of his country’s swift sword of destiny, there can be little choice but to heed the call. And so, as a servant of God and the state, being twenty years of age, bold, fearless, and believing the Mexicans to be a feeble, mongrel, Priest-ridden race, I took it upon myself to enlist in Sam Houston’s Army of the Republic. There was also, I admit, some talk of treasure. But then, there’s always talk of treasure, the soldier’s goad.

I had made a hash of farming, or so my good wife ceaselessly insisted. My name is Ellet Mayfield, and even this she turned against me with “May-Not-Field,” her constant joke to the ladies of her circle. Not content to stay at home and play the fool for her amusement, and desperate to establish some other way of life before next planting season, my enlistment was, I admit as well, an effort to reassert the manhood that God bestowed upon me. I yearned for the crisp uniform, the polished boot, the sound of the charge arousing noble hearts. These fine features, I was soon to learn, were not part of Mr. Houston’s army, which was so poorly supplied that we looked more like a band of brigands than a well sorted out brigade of soldiers. Still, it was well-known that the towns along the lower Rio Grande were groaning with the weight of treasure heretofore beyond calculation. The stores of silver alone would make each of us a rich man. But there was more, as any faithful reader of the Telegraph and Texas Register well knew. Mountains of gold and the landscape a moving black mass of livestock as far as the eye can see. How such a backward race had been able to amass such riches was a question that did not much trouble us.

Our little company of thirty-four volunteers was bivouacked for the night on our way to San Antonio. Not two days before, General Santa Anna had taken the city, but reports of late had him already leaving. Was it cowardice or deep strategy from the Napoleon of the West? For us, it was the first of many confusions. Why did we make haste to San Antonio if he was already half-way to the River? Houston would never give the order to follow. He believed a war on Texas soil was winnable but not on Mexican soil. And yet he had surprised us before this sudden about-face, now sounding the call to arms where before he played the coward’s part.

Our lieutenant joined a few of us at our campfire, where we enlivened ourselves with liquor. We talked as if we’d been soldiers for many years, when in fact, we were veterans of a day. He was a fair-featured man whose brown hair, even in the field, was oiled and combed smartly to the side. Indeed, some said he dressed his hair with so much pomade it was proof against any musket ball. And though his jaw was fringed with a trace of beard, there was something womanish about his face, a softness that I took for good breeding. He had the eyes of a poet, focused distantly on other worlds. He did not impress as a man of action. But then, right few of us did.

“Lieutenant,” I said, trying to draw out our commander, “how did you busy yourself before enlistment?”

“I had a business concern in Virginia.” He seemed about to go on but, instead, stirred the fire with a piece of kindling. Joe let fly a low chuckle, for it was widely known that the Lieutenant’s “business concern” was a shop for ladies’ garments.

The Lieutenant seemed a man unsuited to the company of men. It was as if he had started the conversation because it seemed the right thing to do, and now, once into it, he wasn’t for certain how to handle himself.

“Mr. McKendrick?” he said, turning the topic to another at our fire.

McKendrick was the constant companion and “business partner” of Joe Sprague, who had made something of a companion of me from the first moment of enlistment. But the business he, McKendrick, and a third man named Blaine conducted was beyond the limits of all honesty. They were partners in cattle-rustling. They had prospered by raiding only Mexican herds, which the law was loath to prosecute. In the eyes of some, Joe and his freebooters were contributors to the cause of freedom.

McKendrick was a tall, taciturn man who sat beside Joe like a shadow and whose deep-set eyes went untouched by fire light. He wore mismatched boots and woolen trousers that were too short. His shirt was a former feed sack that gave him cause to scratch, often his only contribution to conversation.

At the lieutenant’s question, he turned to face him but without the slightest hint that he would speak. It was a discomfiting gesture. After a moment, the lieutenant turned to me.

“And you, Mr. Mayfield? What was your profession?”

“I was a farmer,” I said, “though it was never a life I cared for.”

“I should say not!” said Joe Sprague, whose bottle we passed. “Farming’s nothing but a fool’s game.” In contrast to his partners, Joe dressed in plain buckskin and a heavy cotton shirt of indeterminate color. He was a man whose face you forgot the second after seeing it, the round, self-satisfied cheeks, the darting eyes always alert for the main chance. I liked him for a quick-spoken saucebox and someone to help pass the time. War, I was finding, could be powerful boring.

“And you, Joe,” I said, “what were you before enlistment?”

Joe looked at me with scornful eyes over the bottle he raised to his mouth. When he finished drinking, he said. “Same as I am now — a young man in search of oppterunity.”

Joe passed the lieutenant the bottle, who swirled the brown liquor and held the bottle high to look through it in the moonlight. “And what ‘oppterunity’ is that?” he said.

“Never you mind what all I done in life. More than you, I’ll tell you what. But right now? Right now, I’m fixing to put ole Santy Anny to the knife.” He flashed a hunting knife that glinted awfully in the fire light. “Mexico’s nothing but a nigger republic. I’ll take my knife to the lot of them. And if Sam Houston isn’t careful, he’ll feel the nick of my blade, too.”

Your knife is your sure stopper of conversation, but the young lieutenant was unflummoxed. “Is it everyone you’re after killing?” came his mild reproof.

“Them what needs killing will get killing. That’s all I’ll say.”

The lieutenant fell into a dark study of his drinking companions. “And does that include your superior officers?”

At these words, Blaine, the fifth and last of our party, entered the clearing with an armload of firewood. He was a small, rough man of misshapen features, accented by his habit of cutting his own hair with a hunting knife. Hearing the lieutenant’s words, he dashed the firewood to the ground and, with fearsome aspect, said, “There ain’t no superior officers in the Texian army.” He dropped to the ground heavily beside me and clawed at the air for the bottle.