Jory Sherman: Blood Sky at Morning

He cut open his belly with a surgeon’s precision until his father’s intestines spilled out in blue-gray coils. Trask and his men had watched his father die, heard him beg for a bullet to his brain. They watched the elder Cody die slowly, his great strength drained from him, his tortured breathing descending to a rasp in his throat before it turned into a final death rattle.

Zak knew all this because a Mexican boy, Jorge Vargas, living next door, had watched it all through his father’s window, powerless to help, his family gone to market that morning when the men rode up and entered Russell’s adobe home.

From Jorge’s description, he knew the man who had killed his father. Their paths had crossed before, in a Pueblo cantina when he and his father had come down from the mountains, following Fountain Creek. Ben Trask had a reputation even then. A hardcase. A gunny who preyed on prospectors and miners, a merciless killer without a trace of conscience.

All in the past, he thought, and no more grieving for his father. Instead, a vow he had made when he found his father’s body and learned the story of his death. If there was such a thing as justice in the world, then Russell’s death demanded it. An eye for an eye. A life for a life.

Zak folded into sleep, descended to that great ocean of dream where the events of the day were transformed into an odd journey through bewildering mazes inside massive canyons, where guns turned into unworkable mechanisms and people’s faces were ever-shifting masks that concealed their true identities, and horses galloped across dream-scapes like shadowy wraiths and every shining stream turned to quicksand beneath the dreamer’s awkward and clumsy feet.

It turned cold during the night, and Zak had to pull the wool blanket over him. He awoke before dawn, built a quick fire and boiled coffee. He never looked at the flames and stayed well away from the glow, scanning the horizon, listening for any alien sound. He relieved himself some distance away in a small gully and covered up his sign. He was sipping coffee as a rent appeared in the eastern sky, pouring cream over the horizon until the land glowed with a soft peach light that grew rosy by the time he had finished and put on his spurs. He checked his single cinch and gave Nox a few handfuls of grain, then let him drink water from his canteen, which he poured into his cupped left hand. He checked his rifle and pistol, rolled up his bed and secured it inside his slicker behind the cantle. He did not eat, a habit he had formed long ago. When he went hunting, it was always on an empty stomach.

Gently rolling country now, bleak, desolate, quiet, as the sun rose above the horizon, casting the earth and its rocks and flora into stark relief. The rocks seemed to glow with pulsating color, and the green leaves of the yucca, the pale blossoms, took on a vibrancy that Zak could almost feel. It was the best time of day in the desert, still cool, yet warm with the promise of diurnal life returning to a gray black hulk of territory glazed pewter by the moon, now only a pale ghost in a sky turning blue as cobalt.

He rode over a rise, following the pony tracks, and there it was, nestled in the crotch of a long wide gully that fell away, then rose again several hundred yards from its beginning. An old adobe hut, still in shadow, stood on a high hump of ground, nestled against a flimsy jacal that joined it on one crumbling side. A mesquite pole corral bristled on a flat table some two hundred yards away. Zak counted eight horses in the corral, some with noses buried in a rusty trough, another one or two drinking out of half a fifty-gallon drum, next to a pump outside the corral.

Six of the horses were small, unshod, pinto ponies, actually, while the remaining two were at least fifteen hands high and were shod. They were rangy animals, looked as if they hadn’t seen a curry comb or brush, and he could almost count their ribs. None of the horses looked up at him, and Nox didn’t acknowledge them with a welcome whinny, either.

A thin scrawl of smoke rose from the rusted tin chimney set in the adobe part of the dwelling. It hung in the motionless air below the gully’s rim. It appeared to be coming from an untended fire, possibly one that had been banked the night before. There was no sign of life in either the adobe or the jacal, but Zak knew someone had to be inside. He debated with himself for a moment whether to ride up to the door or walk up and hail the occupant.

It took him only a moment to decide. A man on foot was not of much use in such country. Whoever lived there could be off at a well or hunting jackrabbits for all he knew, and could return at any moment. If he was off his horse, he would be caught flat-footed and might lose Nox. There could be a number of men inside the hut, and more out roaming around.

He rode up to the door without being challenged.

He loosened the Walker Colt in its holster, slid the Henry rifle out of its scabbard a half inch.

“Hello the house,” Zak called.

He waited, listening.

Nox’s ears stiffened and fixed on the door as they both heard sounds from inside. The sun cleared the lower rim of the gully and shone on the sod roof of the adobe like spilled liquid gold.

“ Quien es? ” a voice called out.

“ Un viajero ,” Zak replied. “ Quiero comprar un caballo .”

There was a series of shuffling noises from inside the adobe. Then he heard the sound of a latch bar scraping against wood. A moment later the door swung open on creaky leather hinges. An un-shaven, unkempt man wearing dirty baggy trousers, huarache sandals, suspenders over a grimy white undershirt, stood in the doorway, his brown eyes blinking in the glare of the sun. He wore a pistol on a worn ammunition belt. The pistol was a Navy Colt converted from cap and ball to percussion. The bullets looked to be .36 caliber. Deadly enough, Zak thought. He wore his holster low, just above his right knee.

“ Caballo? Tu quieres comprar un caballo ? Tienes dinero? ”

“I have money,” Zak replied in English, “in my pocket. Habla ingles? ”

“Yes, I speak English. You are a traveler, you say. Where are you going? You do not look like you need a horse. You are sitting on a fine one.”

“I need a packhorse. Maybe one of those ponies you have out there in the corral.”

The man’s eyes shifted in their sockets. “Ah, the pony, eh? You would buy a pony to use for a packhorse?”

“I’m a prospector,” Zak lied. “I need to carry some ore to Tucson. That is where I am going.”

“Ah, to Tucson? To the assay office? You have found gold?”

“I do not know what I have found.”

“Where did you find this?”

Zak cocked a thumb and gestured over his shoulder. The man looked off in that direction, a look of disbelief on his face.

“There is no gold there,” the man said, and took a half step backward. His face fell back into shadow. “There is an army fort. Maybe you can buy a horse there. I do not wish to sell the ponies.”

“Mister, you step outside where I can see you, or I’ll blow your head off as sure as you’re standing there.”

The Mexican hesitated. His right hand sank toward the butt of his pistol. It hovered there like a frozen bird with its wings spread for a long moment.

“You would draw the pistol on me?” he asked.

“If you don’t step out right now. I’ll draw so fast you won’t even see it.”

The man laughed and raised his arms, wiggled them to show that he wasn’t going to draw his pistol. He stepped down from the doorway and stood there, looking up at Zak.

“You mean to rob me, then? I have nothing. I am a poor man with only those few horses you see out there.”

“Just don’t move,” Zak said, and swung down from the saddle. He let the reins trail as he walked up close to the man. “What do you call yourself?” he asked.