Eventually he gave up sleeping in the brothels. Too often had he carried away on his flesh and in his clothing the biting torment infesting those beds and those who made their living in them. Bitterly Jonah remembered the cursed lice up at Rock Island, remembered how that prison vermin tortured a man so that he never really slept soundly, how a man was forced to make a truce with weary sleeplessness. Back then he had wished the lice would freeze to death simply to stop the incessant biting at his whiskers, down in his groin, across his unwashed scalp. Back in that death hold of a prison he scratched himself till he bled, and still the lice lived on. Vermin that moved from the dead men the guards dragged from the cells each morning, and migrated to the living still left in those cages of rotting humanity.
Squashing those painful, bitter memories, Jonah Hook sensed the warmth of the cactus juice spread from his belly, radiating out in spidering fingers of comfort, amazed that he already felt a lightness come to his forehead, his nose seemingly grown bigger. It always swelled on his face with the cactus juice. He hoped he would not suffer the cactus thorns before morning. Just get a bellyful of beans and some of that goat meat down—keep it down—then a night’s sleep. This could be one of those rare nights under a roof and out of the howling cold: small respite for a man who hadn’t been home for ten years.
Oh, he had gone back to Missouri, to the valley, to the cabin he had built for Gritta, of a time in sixty-seven. But Jonah would never count that as going home. Not with nothing there he could call home. Everything was gone, even the window glazing stole. He hadn’t stayed long.
No, Jonah had been on this trail away from his family for ten years now come spring. Spring? If winter ever released its grip from this desert land.
Such different country from southwestern Missouri, different still from that heady richness of the Shenandoah Valley. Fleeing the land of the Mormons, they had kept their noses pointed south into the land of the Navaho in New Mexico Territory. For the most part the Navaho kept off by themselves and weren’t at all curious enough to cross the path of the two horsemen, perhaps content now that they were a defeated people not to know the mission of any sojourner.
Plunging farther still into the land of the sun, they marched past the feet of the emerald mountain peaks of Sierra de Tunecha and on to little clusters of the mud huts, where the jacales knotted around a common spring or well dug from the hardpan desert. Watering holes and villages with names that rang off the tongue: Bernalita and Corrales. Wandering farther east out of the mountains and onto the beginning of the great southern plains, they eventually turned back to the north again, sensing that their answers lay west of the Llano Estacado, on west of the Journada del Muerto itself, that high, hard-baked land the comancheros crossed in plying their profitable trade. The two horsemen rode on past the villages of Pacos and Vermilla, past Ojo de Nicolas and Salina de San Andres, stopping to ask for word at Joya and Cachilla and Albiquira.
Without fail Jonah gave voice to the same question that seemed to rise from the hope that some day would bring him the answer he sought.
Always he asked where a man might find the comancheros.
Instead, the poor folk of those little towns, gathered around the common spring or dusty square, would shrug, point off in a meaningless direction, and gaze back with passionless faces, their black eyes reflecting the glare of the bright sun, or shaded beneath the protection of straw hat brims. All about Jonah were the mouths that said nothing to help, the faces that hid even more.
“Just tell me where I can talk with comancheros who trade into Tejas,” he would plead in his halting Spanish.
And always the poor of those towns went back to their work at the stunted corn they watered frugally, driving their bleating sheep from one patch of burned grass to another beneath an omnipresent cloud of gray dust that turned pink, then orange, and finally red with every sunset. Smiling, these people apologized with their shoulders, sorry they could not be of any help to the sojourners.
Down at the settlement of Santa Fe they were told the nearby river would take them south into Mexico. Perhaps if there were no answers to be found up here, it was suggested, then south where the comancheros lived is where a man might go.
“What river?” he had asked.
One after another of the peons pointed. “That river.”
