Pins (26)

'Debes hablar conmigo o no podremos resolver nuestra situación.'

Emmett looked around. His eyes watered. Vaqueros in bush jackets and chaparreras were lounging about, smoking corn-shuck cigarettes and playing cards. Several wore felt vaquerias with upturned brims. The Jefé was sharpening a knife on a whetstone, and had addressed him across the fire. He looked to be in his early fifties, with a trim moustache. His face was gaunt, and his eyes were sunken. 

'¿Tú entiendes?' he said.

Emmett coughed, and shuffled on his knees.

'We ain't done nothin' wrong,' he said.

The Jefé smiled, and ran the blade of the knife along his palm. A vaquero moved into the circle of firelight and placed Abigail down beside him. Her hands were also bound behind her back, and her eyes were wide and glassy. Emmett leaned forward and strained against his bonds again.

'I did not say that you had,' the Jefé said, placing the knife to one side. 'I said that you had taken us by surprise. The men will act in such a way, when they are taken by surprise in the darkness.'

'We was lost in the fog,' Emmett shouted. Many of the vaqueros were watching him now. His mouth was dry, and his head was spinning. He shuffled closer to the fire on his knees.

'We didn't mean to bother you all,' he said. His voice sounded high and strained in his ears. 'We was lost.'

He glanced at Abigail. She met his eyes. Her mouth opened, and her bottom lip quivered.

'This is certainly a place where a man may become lost,' the Jefé said. 'Two children all the more so. You understand this is dangerous country?'

Emmett's wrists ached. He watched as the Jefé lowered his head and removed his vaqueria. Tendrils of mist floated through the camp, and the fire crackled and popped before him. Everything was bound into a hallucinatory aphasia. 

The Jefé placed his hat on his knees. He had a small fringe of greying hair. It was slicked to one side. Behind it his head was bare, but for a few loose curls at the nape. There was a large, rough patch of exposed bone and tissue at the crown, fringed by jagged, crusty scarring. Emmett swallowed. The man had been scalped. 

'What brings you here?' the Jefé said, watching his response. Abigail whimpered. Emmett grunted and clawed at the rope around his wrist with his fingernails. The Jefé lifted his vaqueria back onto his disfigured head. A vaquero in a woollen poncho stepped around the fire and dropped the backpack down beside him. He muttered something. Emmett caught the word nochuza. The Jefé's eyes sparkled in the firelight. He spat and eyeballed Emmett.

'What brings you here?' he screamed. 

Emmett tried to breathe slowly. He screwed his eyes shut, opened them, and looked through the flames. 

'We was lost, sir,' he whispered.

Abigail's head fell onto her chest. The Jefé watched Emmett and chewed his bottom lip. He lifted the backpack onto his lap and opened it. Vaqueros moved as silhouettes on the molten plain beyond the fire. Emmett felt feverish with fear. His head rolled back. He saw the moon like a purulent abscess in the night sky. 

The Jefé held a small pin up to his eyes and studied it. He returned it to the backpack, stood, and walked around the fire to Emmett. Men moved as he passed. His hussar breeches were embroidered with an intricate pattern of golden loops, and he walked slowly, with immaculate posture. He reached Emmett, leaned down, and grasped his chin firmly with his left hand, forcing him to look up. 

Abigail cried out. She tried to move forward on her knees, and collapsed face-first into the dirt. A vaquero laughed and pulled her back up. Emmett was frothing at the mouth. The Jefé pressed his face close. There was sweat beneath the thin line of his moustache, and his teeth were yellow. He studied Emmett's eyes. 

Scarves of smoke coalesced with the fog, and the two of them were lost briefly to the world. The Jefé lifted his right hand and pressed his index finger into Emmett's left eyeball, massaging and probing. He snapped his hands away and spat. Emmett fell sideways onto the ground and the Jefé paced back around the fire, shouting instructions as he went. 

Emmett lay twitching in the dust, his left eye throbbing and watering. He saw Abigail crying on her knees through the fire. The camp was packed up expeditiously. Vaqueros cut the rope corral and mounted their horses. He saw them haze the cattle out onto the plain. The fire was doused, and he was lifted up onto an unfamiliar horse alongside a smoking vaquero wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat. He lost sight of Abigail and Buck as they rode out into the nubilous darkness.

*

The vaqueros drove the cattle for many days across the barren plains. Emmett was at the rear of the herd, and he knew they were riding south. There was a continuous curtain of churning dust before them, and it caked his face and filled his eyes. Occasionally they stopped to rest, and he was fed beans and tortillas. The vaqueros drank, smoked, played cards, and fought, but he was not harmed. He was only bound while they slept, but he did not see Abigail or Buck again for the duration of the journey, and he fast lost all remaining hope in his heart. 

They had got through every scrape so far on dumb luck, until he had finally stumbled blindly into the end of everything. The world had proved so much bigger and so much more terrible than he had ever thought possible. He had not managed to keep them safe for longer than an half a day after their father's death. He knew now that he had been existing in a child's fantasy. The only saving grace was that he had not had to see the Jefé again, and the thought that they might be treated with mercy at the end of this. He could take Abigail away somewhere and make sure she was safe, before he passed into whatever shadow realm awaited him. 

He lost track of the days and nights. They passed over endless harsh, cracked land. The horses plunged into occasional creeks, and he found himself stirring as water soaked his legs. Buzzards flew low around them, as if awaiting his death. The vaquero behind him said nothing. He wrapped his hands around the saddle strings and held on as they loped through the dust clouds. 

During one evening he heard shots ahead. The horse he was on swerved and reared. Several of the riders around him neckreined their horses away into the darkness. At the camp that night he was aware of more hushed talk than usual, and when they set off in the morning he saw five dead men swinging from a line of juniper trees. Their bellies were cut open, and their guts had spilled in coils onto the plain beneath. Coyotes were sniffing, eating and scrapping below the creaking bodies. 

Further out there was a man tied in a star shape upon the desert floor, his wrists and legs bound to stakes driven into the earth. His stomach was cut open, and Emmett could see entrails snaking over his legs. The man was screaming. A group of skinny wolves were closing in on him, and eyeing the disappearing remuda. 

Emmett vomited over the side of the horse, and fear like he had never known before took hold of him. He wondered if the dead men were the riders he had seen crossing the plain before they had been captured. The men he had supposed to have pursued them from the boomtown. 

The fear did not leave him from that point on, and he was unable to sleep after each day's hard riding. He had visions of Abigail staked out in a star shape. He saw men lifting nooses over his head. High winds seared his face, and during the days the sun was rimmed with scuds of sand as if the featureless plains were merging with the sky. His white eyes were scored red with exhaustion, and the vaquero behind him scooped him up as he lost his grip and swayed.
 

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