The Ungentling

Bill’s disappeared upstairs with the little sickly girl but me I’m here to see the blind woman. I hear she did it on purpose, tore donkey tail out of the earth and smeared its milky sap directly in her eyes. It must of stung her hands and face bad and maybe left marks on her fingers. Near Santa Fe, men, women and children are always getting possessed of this sort of ecstasy and seem like taking pleasure in swallowing poison and fire and stepping on scorpions and suchlike. But it ain’t superstition like the government try to tell me in the last war. Superstition I know — that’s when you got to tie your right boot afore your left, or when like they say you can shoot your brother when he wears gray but not if he wears blue. It does make a sort of sense, long as you don’t look at it head-on and just leave it ghostly in the peripheral. But Bill don’t like superstition. He explained it all to me after we strangled that poor boy at Fort Smith. “We done nothing ’cept kill ’em for two years and now you’re boo-hooing over another one,” he growled, and I thought and thought about it and figured he was right. 

But the blindness is no superstition. Even Bill’s got to know that. 

I turn from the lamps and laughter and follow the proprietor to the musky rear of the whorehouse. He ain’t Anastasio like it was during the Mexican War. He’s someone smaller and younger than I guess Anastasio would be now but with his same unreadable black eyes like pools of tar, sullen and restless. He leads me down a short flight of steps and under a wooden lintel so low I got to stoop. 

“You speak English?” 

He jerks his head vaguely, without comprehension. 

“I seen a Roman priest here today. You people say at the end a’ the day the love a’ God and love a’ women are one and the same. Guess that’s how come at the end a’ the day you got the prostitutes, prophetess, and padres all under one and the same roof!” 

Bill thought that one was funny when I told it him. It don’t have much effect on Anastasio’s heir. “Perdón, señor,” he mutters, and nearly shoves me to a chair I can’t hardly see for the darkness. 

The room’s lit only by two candles set afore a holy picture in the far corner. It’s the same picture as sixteen years ago: a gloomy and gory Jesus-on-the-Cross with white and wild eyes rolling back in his head. It makes me sick to see. I don’t take much stock in any sort of Jesus but if I got to choose I’d prefer Jesus-the-Good-Shepherd or Jesus-Blesses-the-Little-Children. I’ve my own fondness for children, if you can believe it. Maybe she’s lighted ’em specially for my benefit — a blind woman don’t need candles. Well, she shouldn’t of bothered. I stare at his face with distaste, so disturbed I don’t notice her already sitting across from me. 

I suffer a whole series of shocks. First, that she’s in the room and I didn’t know it. Second, that her hair’s still the thick, darkish red I remember, untouched by the intervening years. Her face ain’t so lucky — the third shock — pocked and wrinkled and spotted and pouched unpleasantly. She looks old, lot older than me anyhow. It’s a shame. She’d been a real beautiful woman once if it hadn’t of been for the eyes. 

Her eyes like the eyes of Jesus don’t look maybe how you’d expect. They’re mostly shut, and I wish she’d just shut ’em all the way and be done with it. That way she’d look soft and gentle so as to gladden the hearts of men. But problem is she don’t shut ’em. There’s always that sickening white and wild stripe Anastasio told me had ruined her for ordinary work. “We cannot always keep the ones with holy sickness,” he confided in me in his odd English that cold night in January of ’47. I’d been left in the New Mexico Territory to rot with a thousand other American soldiers, liable to die like dogs of the bloody shits. “They are who are called las desadóciles — the ungentle ones.” 

Her breath comes in labored shudders. I watch the whites of her eyes flicker and dart; I feel strangely that she’s watching me. Without my meaning to, my own breath shifts to match her pace: slow, deliberate, each hauled from below like one of the last few of a precious cache. Her spider-webbed hand creeps across the table to find mine, lean and hairy. 

“Te recuerdo.” 

I jump a little. 

“You are changed.” Her voice is aged but clear, neutral like she don’t care so much whether or not I have. 

“You too, Esperanza,” I say hopefully, uneasily. I wonder what it is she can see. I lift my other hand to trace the scar across my cheekbone, clumsily stitched and even more clumsily healed — a habit developed after Pericles trampled it at Little Rock. The poor horse did it on accident but that don’t stop me getting rheumatism of the face as the eternal consequence. Ain’t been a good thing in the winter. “There’s a war again but it ain’t with the Mexicans this time. It’s against ourselves.” 

I figure that might impress her. But she don’t respond to the news. 

“You are a murderer and a thief,” she says simply in the same neutral, level tone. 

“You’re a whore and a liar.” My fingers tighten slightly round her wrist. Her pulse carries on beneath their hold with maddening indifference. “I ain’t any more a killer or thief than I ever was. You ever lay night after night after night on the rock, dizzy and burning and freezing with pain, groaning for a death that never comes? And wasn’t anyone cared. Soon as I could walk they threw me back up on a horse and marched me through Arkansas. It’s the 8th Missouri Cavalry as stole from me — it’s them as tried to kill me. Bill and me took our due, I figure, and we’ll be in California come spring. I ain’t no thief.” I think of the strangled boy, his tongue lolling purple from a blue and yellow face. “And that guard was just another grayback. I b’lieve I shot dozens a’ others afore him. They don’t count neither — they’re enemies a’ the Union.”

My knuckles are nearly white. I slacken, surprised, and pause to see if Esperanza is at all moved. 

“You are making a confession?”

“No, I ain’t. I’m here for prophecy, not forgiveness. I don’t need it. And you was wrong that last time. About Bill. He never hurt me none.” My mind glances back suddenly over the stretch of sixteen years, of my old farm in Greene County, the venture, the loss and despair, the faint shimmer of escape I thought the army would afford me one last time. Foolishness — vanity of vanities! I clear my throat. “Bill’s a heartless old bastard but he’s alright. He’s all I got now.”

“What is it you want?”

“Prophecy, goddammit!” My fist hits the table with a resounding bang. “You’re costing me five times as much as any a’ the other girls.” I’m ashamed to say what I’d dreamed the past couple months in those quiet hours twixt waking and sleep. I’d dreamed maybe she’d love me this time. Maybe this time she’d know I was different from the others, the Bills and Anastasios she knew best. Maybe I could rescue her — maybe the red hair and milky eyes I couldn’t forget would remember me. “Te recuerdo” did she say? Does she know who I am? I’d rather she don’t. And for a fleet second I know what the Mexicans know about the love of God and of women.

Esperanza’s eyelids flutter open to reveal the amber crescents of irises long since out of use. She pants in haggard and rhythmless breaths. “You are a slave to yourself in a dark world,” she rasps — no soft clearness now — I try to scrounge up some disgust for this old hag I’d come to worship. “You trust in the lies of man, in the false burdens of time and distance, of flux, of entrance and exit. You are blind in your sight. Find and follow the narrow path of the real, the self not itself emptied of itself. This alone is worthy of your life and your death.”

She throws her head back and wails, a long high wail like a coyote’s, containing within itself the nameless grief of thousands of years — the howl of the desadóciles. Her hand creeps along my arm. My skull starts to burn. The room whirls white-hot. Then I’m pulled upward, out of the dark room, out of the whorehouse, out into cold air over the small city of Santa Fe, then higher till the whole of the Sangre de Cristo range shows afore me. I see the route me and Bill took out of Colorado into the city all at once. I watch a sharp westerly whip snow into life what must be many miles beneath me.

The atmosphere warms. A pink and orange glow spreads like moss over the mountains. Their summits melt into rivers and pour into the valleys, so many libations to an unknown god. Deserts blossom into cactus flower and the silent teem of insects. Forests thicken and scream with an obscene abundance of life, then hush into the brown pallor of autumn. My head aches with the effort to hold it all in, to see all there is to see.

Railroads are born. Criss-crossing like snakes or poisoned veins they dart through the Rockies, through the country and south of the city. Noise and smoke like you couldn’t imagine ascend to the heavens. Santa Fe explodes in concrete and lights. Nights and days pass with bewildering rapidity as fire and poison and concrete stretch and stink. The Sangre de Cristos begin to erode. So does the city, until the whole terrain is rubbed layer by layer, brick by brick into smooth lumps of sand. The sun reaches out a hand and engulfs the planet. I want to cry out Stop stop but I can’t. I don’t know that I have a mouth to speak.

And just as suddenly the scene reverses. Mountains rear their heads. The railways peel away like spruce gum. I’m back to where, or when, I started. The wind seems to retreat, siphoning ice off the peaks. Leaves rise from rocks and fasten themselves to trees, then shrink and swell with springtime juices. Faster and faster time turns on itself; covered wagons and traders on horses stream back eastward; flocks and herds migrate, depart, return; Comanche and Apache mingle, raid, and clash with Spaniards. 

Even faster now. Great beasts like hairy elephants rage, then give way to jungles of reptilian horror. Mountains wax and wane, wax and wane — the globe spins like a top — flood covers the earth. The waters recede. Now darkness, a formless void, and a light like a single pinprick. I am blind; that pinprick is all that’s left.

****************************************************

I’m lying outside, mouth agape, when Bill finds me. 

“Looks like the old girl treated you right.” He nudges my unresponsive side with the toe of his boot. “Sure don’t make ’em like they used to, tell you what. The little one, what’s-her-name — I swear she ain’t worked a day in her life. I like ’em better when —”

“You leave me alone, Bill.”

His hulking shadow starts. “Hngh?”

“I figure you heard me.” I struggle to my feet.

“Whaddya mean, Paul?”

“I mean leave me alone. We’re going our separate ways. And don’t you ever again dare talk about her like that. You hear me?”

Bill’s gristly face scowls. “That right? And who’s gi

tting our cash, I wonder?”

“I don’t care about no cash. Take all the cash in the world, Bill. Hell, take all the gold in California. I got to go back. I’m going to Fort Smith. I’m going back to the regiment.”

Bill yanks me up by the collar and shakes till everything goes in circles again. “You’re gonna confess, is it? Got religion all of a sudden cause a old lady don’t like your looks? Real noble, your confessing for the both of us. Well I don’t like that, Paul. I don’t like that at all.” He drops me gasping to the ground. Dazed, I try again to stand. Bill makes quick work of me — he once beat a bare-knuckle boxer who traveled round challenging folks to matches — three blows to the head and I’m flat on the ground. He looks at me, hesitates, then brings his foot down hard. My nose bursts in a bloom of scarlet; my skull fractured once by a frightened warhorse shoots with flame.

“Hate to do it to you, Paul,” he shouts over his shoulder. “Can’t have you whining like a girl to no authorities afore I git out. I thought you was my friend!” Bill’s already on his way out of town.

I roll to my back. Blood flows into my eyes but I can still make out the stars. And I weep like a child, ungentled.