Chris Adrian - The Best American Mystery Stories 2007

I plucked at the front of my shirt. Emboldened by drink, I said, “There’s no superior anything in the Texian army.”

After a long drink from the bottle, Blaine said, “That’s the God’s honest truth of it.”

He himself wore an odd assortment of clothing — buckskin trousers with a frilly French shirt whose cuffs he’d tied closed, making it impossible for him ever to take the shirt off without tearing it from his back.

Eyeing me with a mixture of suspicion and pride, he said, “Mr. Sam Houston hisself never had so fine a shirt as this here’n.”

“Sir,” I said, “you must be wondrously dextrous of hand to tie such knots in your own sleeve ends.”

He brushed the side of his nose with a finger and in a hushed tone said, “Nor I but the feller what... dedicated... this here shirt to me.”

To the lieutenant, whose wife had fashioned a personal uniform for him, complete with a bit of modest brocade at the shoulder, I said, “I ask you, sir, how we are to feel like proper soldiers wearing nothing but our own soiled homespun? A soldier’s not a soldier without a proper uniform.” At the very least I wanted to smell of blood and bravery, but the smell of the stable was still overmuch about me. And my spirits were not kindled by our inglorious mode of transportation — three buckboards that had also been “dedicated” to the cause. I was beginning to feel badly humbugged by the “grand campaign.”

The lieutenant said, “These are hard times, but there will be better days ahead.”

Joe stuck his knife in the ground between his legs. “Better times indeed! I hear tell border towns are chockablock with silver and gold. I expect we’ll soon have ourselves some fine uniforms and then some!”

“How is it,” I wondered aloud, “that a nation so phlegmatic has been able to store up such riches?”

Joe’s eyes narrowed, suspecting betrayal. “All I know is there’s gold and glory and more beeves than you can eat in any number of lifetimes. And that’s not to mention the headright land we’ll get once our services are no longer needed. Boys, there’s no way we can lose!”

“You’ll follow orders,” the lieutenant said as he lowered the bottle. I could see that he had stoppered the mouth of the bottle with his thumb. He wasn’t really drinking with us, only making a show of it to help maintain decorum. “Do you hear me, Mr. Sprague?” he said, stiffening. “You’ll follow orders. And orders will never be given to sack the Mexican towns of the border.”

Joe looked at him long and hard. “Maybe not,” he said finally. “But there are orders and then there are orders. And him what gives them today may not give them tomorrow.”

The lieutenant launched himself to his feet. “Is that a threat?”

Casually, as if his only aim were to amuse himself by the fireside, Joe pulled the knife out of the ground and flipped it, catching it first by the hilt, then by the blade, then by the hilt again. His was a marvelous dexterous hand. I have seen carnival performers who have not half his ease with a blade. At last, he looked up at the lieutenant and said, “Only the guilty man would see that as a threat.”

The lieutenant, with a grievous tone, said, “What of patriotism?”

“What of it?” Joe replied. “Patriotism is not high on my list. And soon as I make the thing pay, I’ll light out for parts unknown.”

The lieutenant, stepping forward, said, “You’ll follow orders. You hear?”

Just then Joe flung his blade hard at the ground before the lieutenant’s feet, where it buried itself to the hilt in the soft dirt.

The lieutenant could not help darting backward, dropping the bottle as he did so. His first step made the next step all the easier, and then the next. Soon the darkness took him to its bosom. He had all the courage of a ten-year’s child.

Joe retrieved the bottle, calling after him, “Your Mexican is the boon companion of the bloody Comanch, a feaster on infants. Tell me anything we do to him would be unseemly in the eyes of God or even Sam Dam Houston!”

McKendrick sat stone-like before the fire, but Blaine did not miss the opportunity to catch me by the buttonhole and, raising his close-set eyes to mine, say, “Ain’t he the original Dare-devil? Ellet Mayfield, have we not seen a true man at last?”

From that moment on, the lieutenant kept pretty much to himself, his commands taking the character of suggestions. The whole affair made Joe, whose cohorts gave him a battlefield promotion to General, feel powerful important.

The closer we came to San Antonio, where we would join up with General Somervell’s army, the more our spirits grew. At last, Sam Houston had put his cards on the table. The glory of Texas would amass on the frontier and run the alien marauders to ground. With each town, more and more of our brave lads answered the call. They fell in behind our wagons, they clung to the sides of our wagons. They came on their own mounts, some of them plough horses. In one town a judge dismissed murder charges against a woman so he, the lawyers, and the jury could join our great march to glory. We were near about one hundred strong, though we still looked as ragtag as any band of gyps. But the president himself was reported to be moving among his foundling troops, predicting the stern rebuke with which we would confront Santa Anna.

And so it was that we came to the crest of a hill covered with mesquite and prickly pear, within sight of our goal, San Antonio. My first thought on seeing the white stone walls of the city was of the New Jerusalem. It was the largest and most glorious city I had ever laid eyes on. It was not so much a city as it was a brilliant whiteness in an otherwise empty place. But as we made our way down the hill toward town, our eyes revealed Nature’s cunning deception. The city was a ruin, its fair white walls peppered with grapeshot and musket balls, its streets strewn with Comanche arrows, its residents too fearful even to find hope in our advance. Like a ghost ship adrift on the desert, San Antonio’s five thousand residents had been reduced to a frightened few hundred, and not a white face among them. Even the Alamo itself seemed less like the site of that heroic battle and more a glorified sod house. What was here, I asked myself, that was worth defending?

We made camp with many other volunteers in a pecan grove just south of town, near an abandoned mission one of the townsmen called “Conception.” Our immediate task was to procure supplies — wood, food, whatever we could lay hands on. Joe himself turned up with the copper baptismal font from the mission, which was used to cook soup for the company. For we were a company now, ill fed, ill shod, and lacking in even the very rudiments of military training, but still a company of free men bound to free the Republic from barbarous hands.

While we waited for orders, most of the men kept to camp, either sleeping or consulting the book of prophecies (of which there are fifty-two one-page chapters). Orders were given but few were obeyed. In truth it seemed as though we had been forgotten by Washington-on-the-Brazos. Rumor told of some men slipping away into the night, having no stomach for such waiting.

I and some others spent our days gathering pecans from the groves and selling them in town. I scoured the streets for ammunition, communicating my needs quickly to prospective sellers by holding up a musket ball between the thumb and finger of one hand and a coin between the thumb and finger of another. Even the meager pecan profits were more than I could spend. There seemed to be very little powder and lead to be had in the town, and some of the balls I bought were so misshapen that I feared they would fly no faster or truer than a toad, but I was determined to be as well equipped as possible.