Santos Running

Even in his dreams, he’s running. Running hard, barely keeping his saddle with the blood pouring from his side and the moneybag thumping at his knee. Even now, curled in musty blankets in Don Eusebio’s bunkhouse, his dream self is pounding north from Magdalena with a price on his head and a pack of federales on his tail.

“Carlos! Damn it, wake up!”

Santos opens his eyes to watery dawn light, and Lazaro the wrangler kicking the leg of his bunk.

“Get moving. Don’t you remember? It’s la Doña’s betrothal day, and Don Felipe is bringing the horses. We have work to do, my friend.” Lazaro tosses his boots and hat on the bunk.

He rubs his stubbled face, reminding himself who he is these days: Carlos Lopez the cowboy, not Vicente Santos the outlaw. He tends the stables for Don Eusebio de Villareal Marquez on a rancho that’s nearly the size of the village he grew up in.

The nasty graze across his ribs has nearly healed now. And when he’s sure the search has cooled a bit, he’ll slip north some moonless night and disappear.

But not today. Today his side still pains, and summer storms are hammering the mountains this side of the border. Today’s a good day to clean tack and groom horses, and make the stalls ready for the gray mare and the cream-colored stallion that Don Felipe Borquez y Bracamonte brings as a marriage gift to Don Eusebio’s only child.

“Don’t look at him; that’s the best thing. Even if he speaks to you directly,” says Lazaro, rubbing saddle soap into a bridle supple as silk. “They say he’s a sorcerer, and a fearsome one, at that.”

“Don Felipe?” Santos hadn’t heard that. But then, down south, such things are never spoken of. “He’s a rich man, surely; that gets the tongues to wagging.”

Lazaro glances up and grins. “And how did he get so rich? My cousin was a maid in his house. She said he has a workroom where he makes precious jewels from the stones in the road, and gold from sand. Not to mention the people who pay him to witch their enemies for them, or to keep him from witching. I wonder what our Don owes him, that the price is pretty Doña Flor.”

Santos has seen Doña Flor twice in the weeks he’s been working here. Once, he led out her black mare for an early morning ride, and all he remembers is a profusion of black hair in a thick braid against a velvet riding jacket, and lips that made him think of roses. The second time, he watched from the bunkhouse as she rode in the family’s carriage to church, a black veil upon her head and a gold crucifix gleaming on the lace of her high-necked blue dress.

That time, she was all eyes, large and dark, and they swept right past Santos as the carriage turned in the drive. But he could have sworn she knew he was there. Sweet and precious, la Doña: it makes him a little sick to think of her, wedded to a wizened old magician like that.

Clatter and commotion in the house, in the yard. Down the road a cloud of dust rises around a group of riders.

“Oh shit,” says Lazaro. “Hurry. He’s here.”

So Santos straightens his hair as best he can, and gathers up the tack like a nest of snakes in his hands. Don Eusebio is striding out into the driveway, and with him walks Doña Flor. His heart jumps, just once, and he swallows hard as the riders clear the gate and thunder up the drive.

Wizened old magician, hey? Well, think again. A tall dark man in a gold trimmed jacket and the skinny trousers of the vaquero drags hard on the reins of a dancing black stallion, bringing the horse to a theatrical stop inches from the toes of Don Eusebio. Don Felipe Borquez y Bracamonte swings from the saddle and sweeps off his broad brown hat, revealing a tail of glossy black hair and a face like the face of an eagle, all hot dark eyes and the knifeblade nose of a predator.

The two men clasp hands. Don Felipe bows over the fingers of Doña Flor, who offers them like a rabbit to the wolf. The Don gestures sharply, and an outrider clatters up, tugging on the reins of a mare grey as morning mist. Beside her, tossing his head, is a long-legged palomino stallion that makes Santos’ soul ache with yearning. What price for such a magnificent horse?

Time holds still as greetings and compliments are exchanged. Then, as Don Felipe turns with his host into the house, the outrider drops the reins into Santos’ hand.

“Here,” he snaps. “Get them settled in. Not next to each other; he’ll kick down the stall to get at her. And mind his hooves; he’s high-tempered. But el Señor likes ‘em like that.”

So Santos stands there with a fortune in horseflesh in his hands, staring up into the long-lashed eye of the stallion. That horse is tall, taller than any he’s ever seen, and in that eye is a sardonic intelligence. He thinks of the bag of money he buried by the riverbank before hiding out here. He thinks of the moonless, stormless night he’s waiting for. And he thinks of how it would be, running north across the border on this one’s creamy back.

“Yes,” he says, for the Don’s rider is staring at him. “I’ll see to them.”

The rider sketches a salute and turns his mount. “I expect you will. Damn, Eusebio’s girl is a looker, eh? By Saint John’s Day, el Señor’ll be riding another kind of filly.”

Santos leads the horses into the hay-smelling darkness of the stable, trying not to think of why that image makes him want to retch.

Days follow nights in a haze of dust and heat and relentless work. Santos mends fences and drives cattle and wrangles the wiry northern horses that used to run wild in the hills. He spends nights off at the cantina in Agua Dulce but he never takes any of the whores to bed. Not with that raw red scar across his ribs and talk still flying of the young soldier shot in the bank heist in Magdalena back in the springtime, and the way Vicente Santos outran the trackers that night.

And when he lies down in the bunkhouse on these stormy summer nights, he listens to the restless stamping of Don Eusebio’s new stallion in his stall, and he stares across the yard to the lamplight burning late in Doña Flor’s window.

One night, he sees her, black hair a cloud around her shoulders, passing in front of the light. She speaks, and then buries her face on the shoulder of the dueña who’s cared for her since childhood. This woman stares past la Doña’s shoulder into the darkness, and he could swear she sees him watching. Then with one irritated twitch of her hand, she draws the curtains shut.

Deep in the night, Santos wakes to a pounding heart. There was a sound, something not ordinary, out in the yard. He eases himself up off the bunk, listening.

Snoring and belching and shifting of bodies in the bunks around him; a coyote howls, far off in the hills. Beneath the heartbreaking cry of a nightbird in the palo verde tree out front, that sound comes again: scrape and shuffle, a chinking of tack, from the direction of the stable.

He gathers up his gunbelt and slips his feet into his boots. Then he quicksteps soft as he can out the door and across the yard.

The stable door is open a crack. He eases up to the door and peers inside. The moon slips free of the clouds, showing him a smudgy figure wrestling with a saddle nearly its own size. He catches a whiff of scented soap: here in the darkness stands Don Eusebio’s only daughter, struggling with tears streaming down her face to swing that saddle over the back of the lovely gray mare.

She raises her eyes at the sound of his step, and looking into her eyes he knows that he should have left long ago, never mind the wound in his ribs and the troops scouring the borderlands for any trace of Vicente Santos.

“Carlos, isn’t it?” In a moment of strained silence, she sniffs back a tear. Then she lifts her chin, eyes glittering in the moonlight.

“Saddle my mare for me.”

“Are you certain, Señorita?” Santos asks gently. “It’s late to be taking a ride.”

“Do as I tell you,” she says. “And hurry.”

Her voice is the voice of Don Eusebio’s daughter, speaking to the hired man on an ordinary summer morning. Cautiously, he drops his gun back into its holster and walks up, hands open, to take the saddle from her.

The gray mare tosses her head, straining against the bridle. He grips the reins, willing her to be still.

“There’s a storm coming. It’s dangerous out here. Go back inside, lady. I’ll tend the mare for you, no questions asked.”

Doña Flor raises a tiny silver pistol aimed, shaking only slightly, at his heart.

“I said, saddle my mare. Stop me and you’re dead.”

He could have that pistol out of her hand in a heartbeat. And she’d scream, and maybe the gun would go off, and maybe in the struggle she’d get her hands on the big Colt at his belt, and maybe tomorrow he’d be in jail for the murder of the Don’s daughter. So he draws a deep breath and prepares to negotiate.

“Why, Señorita?”

“None of your business.” Doña Flor glances toward the silent house. “You can help me, or you can hinder me. If you hinder me, I will kill you.”

Has she ever fired that thing before? But he hears the hysteria beneath her words, so he spreads his hands and speaks gently, as he would to a skittish horse.

“I won’t stop you. I’ll help you if I can.”

Her eyes are wide and dark. Moonlight catches the silver track of a tear on her face. “Then, for the love of God, do as I tell you.”

The cream stallion flicks his ears back. One iron-shod hoof slams the stall door. The whole bunkhouse is going to be scrambling across that courtyard in a minute. Doña Flor’s finger trembles on the trigger of her pretty little gun.

Santos swings the saddle across the mare’s broad back and cinches it snug. The horse shifts and sidles, eyes rolling white. He steps away, hands raised.

Doña Flor regards the stirrups of her fine lady’s saddle; considers the reins in one hand and the pistol in the other. “Help me up.”

Santos makes a cradle of his hands. Gripping the pistol in two fingers, she reaches for the saddle horn. A tooled leather boot, supple as a child’s skin, lands in his palm, and he vaults her up.

Lightning flares, catching the flash of grief and anger in the woman’s dark eyes. She gazes down at Santos for a long moment, then snatches the reins from his hand and turns the mare’s head toward the stable doors.

Thunder cracks like a whiplash. Rain’s coming, hard rain, and soon. She stops, staring out the stable door into lightning shot darkness. Santos thinks of his plan: moonless stormless night and a silent exit on the back of that gorgeous palomino. He looks at her, struck to stillness by the fury of the night, and a new plan springs to life.

“You don’t have to ride alone,” he tells her. And as she hesitates, he snags another saddle and slip the latch on the stallion’s stall.

“Your father and Don Felipe will be worried,” Santos says.

Slipping as soundlessly as he could down the drive and out onto the road, keeping the horses to a careful walk out of earshot of the house, he and the lady have kept a breathless silence.

But now, as the miles vanish beneath the patrician hooves of Don Felipe’s finest horses, a sinking dread takes hold in his heart as he considers just what drives la Doña into the night with nothing but the clothes on her back and a ridiculously tiny travel bag lashed to the saddle, leaving her reputation and all that she’s worth in ruins.

“Let them.” The chill in Doña Flor’s voice is the answer.

“They say Don Felipe is el brujo, the witch,” Santos says, beneath the growling of the thunder. “And,” he adds, recklessly, “they say that he set a spell that saved your father from ruin. They even say you’re the price for that.”

“Then let them say,” Flor says, “that the price is too high.”

Santos remembers Don Felipe’s hard black eyes, and a coldness settles in his belly.

“He sent me gifts,” she tells him. “Strange things, that made me feel dizzy and weak just to touch them. And then —” she swallows, slides a glance sideways, gauging trust. “You must not tell another soul what I say now.”

“No.”

“The last three nights, he came to me —in dreams, and waking too. Sometimes he wore the horns of a goat; other times he had wings, great dark wings like the hawk, to wrap me in. He had a tail, once, and he —” She bites back the end of that.

“He bade me do what — no decent woman would do.”

And did you? Santos wants to ask, but he lets her talk. The road branches, just up ahead. One fork leads north to the border, the other — east to the riverbed, and the big broken cottonwood where he’d buried the money from the bank job at Magdalena.

“Today I told my father I did not want the marriage. He raged; said he would not lose face, and every girl is nervous before her wedding. He said he would have me wed, or have me dead; and that is the power of Don Felipe! So —” Doña Flor’s mouth trembles.

“Take me north, Carlos. I can pay.” She glances at the traveling bag.

Santos shrugs. There was a day when he might have left her body by the roadside and ridden on, with the mare in tow and her bag, with its alluring chink and rattle of jewelry, secure in his saddlebag. But he remembers her proud tear-streaked face and how every word she said to him made his heart race. And now, as he bears down on his bloodstained money, he has to decide what he must do.

“All right,” he tells her, taking the turning to the north. “This way.”

Was this road ever so twisty; was a night ever so black? The moon’s vanished for good in churning lightning shot clouds; the mountains rear ahead like a solid wall.

Bitter, brilliant flashes of lightning illuminate the landscape, and Santos’ hands clench upon the reins. Desert stretches all around him; not the scrubby, green desert of Sonora but empty sand, littered with bones that gleam in the random light. Off to his right, a large humped body raises a head, staring at him with one crimson eye.

“Oh God,” he blurts. His revolver is in his hand before he knows it and be fires straight at the one-eyed thing. But the bullets vanish, swallowed by its horny hide, and the beast merely glares.

Howls rise from the road behind. Grey and shaggy, a shape appears at his stirrup, and he glances down into the hot black eyes of a wolf. He puts a bullet through its head, but it keeps on coming. Others join it, snapping at his heels. He squeezes the trigger again and again, but the wolves run like wildfire, nipping at the stallion’s flanks. Wings rush overhead and the wolves scatter, eyes rolling. He feels it before he s it: a hawk bigger than the stallion, bearing down on Dona Flor.

The mare shrieks. Flor clutches the pommel of her saddle with both hands as the great bird with the eyes of Don Felipe Marquez y Bracamonte sinks talons longer than his hand into the padded shoulder of her riding jacket.

The stallion shies. Santos grips his ribs tight and aims straight into the sorcerer’s face, but the hammer comes down on an empty chamber. Bone and feather buffet his head; one downward slash opens his arm from shoulder to elbow. Under the roaring chaos of rain and wind and thunder, he hears la Doña’s voice, sobbing over and over: Pater noster . . .

The stallion drops his head and sunfishes. Santos hits the ground with a sickening crunch of bone below his knee. Doña Flor tumbles to the ground beside him. Riderless, the horses vanish into the dark.

“Pray with me, Carlos. Pray!” she cries, and as the rain begins in earnest, Santos feels the words pouring from his tongue, the prayers he learned in childhood before he learned to kill.

This is not the rain of a sweet summer thunderstorm. The force of the water slams Santos like a wall, driving breath from his lungs. The hawk stoops again, screaming fury, and in the lightning shapes flicker and dance, faces inhuman and bright. Jagged splinters of lightning form hands, reaching. The air sizzles as they sweep past, and their mouths are caverns of fire.

The hawk makes another pass, and claws rake his back. Flor grips his hand; the crucifix in her fingers presses hard against his palm as their ragged voices rise in prayer after prayer, every remembered snippet of the Mass, every verse he remembers from the Bible.

Up ahead, a hillside rises amid a heavy stand of riverside cottonwoods, and upon that hillside is a blot of black. A cave, it has to be, he’s hidden out in enough of them to know.

“Up there,” he shouts. “Let’s go.”

And just as if some celestial door slams shut, the rain abruptly stops. The hawk who is Don Felipe screams, the fury of it echoing far into the sky; wingbeats fade into silence.

Santos glances at Flor, who stares openmouthed into a sky of summer stars. The storm cloud is nothing but a tattered shroud over the mountains to the west, where a half-moon hangs low and golden; the same moon that led him to the stables of Don Eusebio, a lifetime ago.

The road seems to rise up; waves of darkness beat inside his head. How much blood has he lost, tonight? He staggers; la Doña’s hands are cool through his blood soaked shirtsleeve, and her arm slides around him, holding him steady as they stumble through the stillness of the night.

The cave smells of dust and dried flowers, and incense like they burned in church when Santos was small. He stands in darkness, listening to the thunder of his heart.

Light blooms suddenly, like the flicker of a thousand candles burning.

“Madre de Dios . . .” whispers Flor, and they both stare.

Mother of God: yes. Candles of all sizes and shapes fill a stone shelf at the back of this little cavern. Their light washes over the outlines of a dark-draped figure in the center of the pile of offerings at its feet: dried flowers, a silver knife, a child’s doll, a skeletal hand with bones intact.

The figure waits, head bowed, hands outstretched in that posture Santos remembers from church. But this is not the gentle Virgin who birthed a savior, and a chill crawls across his shoulders. He steals a glance at Flor, who drops to her knees, raising trembling fingers to her mouth. Then a hot and jittery blackness fills his head, and he crumples among the dried flowers at this dark Virgin’s feet.

Somewhere above him, voices murmur. Flor’s, and another, sounding like the wind in tall branches, the murmur of running water, the song of doves.

“Sanctuary,” says that other voice. “For you, mija, always, for you are my own. But not for him.”

“He helped me.” Flor says. “He was going to guide me north. And now he might die. Will you not save him?”

Beneath the heavy sweetness of incense and petals, Santos smells the bitter tang of blood. His own; he realizes he’s lying in a pool of it. But somehow, it doesn’t matter. Everything seems distant and hazy, and he’s content to just drift, listening to the talk of a well born girl and a goddess.

“He helped you?” The breathy voice, like night birds calling, rings with contempt. Even with his eyes closed, Santos feels those blank eyes upon his face. “Vicente Santos. Will you tell Lady Flor how you meant to help her?” Santos turns his head away, but the voice of the Madonna is relentless. “How you meant to take her jewels and her horses, and leave her dead on the riverbank?”

“Santos?” Doña Flor blurts. “The outlaw Santos? I heard talk of him. But this is my father’s hired man Carlos —”

“This is a robber and a murderer, who lies about everything, including his name. But —” the Lady bends close to Santos and a cold sweetness wraps around him. “He delivered you here to me. If you ask it, mi corazon, I will offer him a chance.”

His hand is nerveless and clammy. Flor’s fingers, finding his own, fill his palm with warmth. “God teaches us forgiveness, and love,” she says steadily. “You are the mother of God. And so, I ask it.”

The black figure laughs, and Santos thinks of apples in springtime, and the bright chill of a wintertime dawn. “I am the mother of everything,” she says. “And everyone. Even gods, I suppose. Are you sure?”

He opens his eyes to candlelight, and Flor staring at him, dark eyes stark in the whiteness of her face. Deep in those eyes is a look that pierces straight to his heart, and he remembers why it made him sick to think of her in Don Felipe’s arms.

“I am,” she says.

The Lady — the Virgin, the Mother of everyone including gods — touches Flor’s cheek with a cool black finger. “Pobrecita. Well then. There is no saving without sacrifice. What will you give me for your life, Santos?”

Blood is ebbing from his veins, and thought from his mind, but he thinks of summer sun and Flor’s black hair flying, and he manages one last word.

“Anything.”

The Lady smiles, not gently. “Then run, Santos.”

Darkness closes in around Santos, hot and thick. The stone floor of the cavern drops away and he’s falling naked, down into a blackness more complete than anything Don Felipe could conjure. Faces float past, contorted and grim; some covered in blood, others nothing but skulls with eyes that nevertheless stare straight through him.

He knows them all. He’s killed them all, in gang fights and shootouts and jobs like the one in Magdalena. And here he comes too, the young Federal with the sleek black mustache, only now one side of his face is a mess of rotting flesh and blackened bone.

Santos wants to run. His feet find a purchase on a road of black rocks and he takes off sprinting. But the faces follow. His bare feet slosh through wetness. Looking down he sees he’s ankle deep in blood. Behind him somebody laughs. It’s Don Felipe in hawk form. Then he becomes a feathered snake, and then a lion with wings, joining the army of the dead. Women rise too, like slips of mist: a tiny fair girl holding the wraith of a child, the bar girl from Los Arboles who killed herself because he left her, the farm girl he got so drunk that night.

Breath burning in his chest, he runs, faster. But they keep pace. His head teems with nightmare images. Ahead, the darkness parts, a little. Up ahead is a river full of silver water and he knows that if he gets there, he’ll be safe. Sobbing, he flings himself forward, though his heart is like to burst.

The blood-soaked ground gives way to thick grasses, icy cool against his bare ankles. The river calls him like salvation.

“Anything?” The voice of the Goddess falls like diamonds into his mind.

“Oh God!”Santos pants. “Yes ...”

Bitter pain slices into his foot and another slashes across his ankle. Those sweet grass blades are knife sharp now, cutting with every step. But the faces of his past crowd closer. The riverbank seems farther away with every step, but still he stumbles on. Almost -- yes, anything! Anything! He hears himself shouting, but a sword-edged grass blade catches him at the ankle, and he falls, staring at the blood that fountains from the stump of his leg.

No more running now. And so, he curls in dirt with his hands over his head, screaming and screaming as the past rolls over him in a nightmarish surge, swallowing him into hot darkness once again.

Into that darkness falls the voice of the Goddess, cool as springtime snow. “Blood stains, blood cleanses. Enough?”

“Yes —” he breathes, and opens his eyes again.

Morning light pours like a blessing through the mouth of the tiny cave in the hillside. Santos pushes himself stiffly onto one elbow, letting his heart slow down as he takes stock. The air smells of candle wax and blood, but the stone floor is clean. Beside him, face smudged with dirt and tears, sleeps Doña Flor with her black hair spread like a wing across her arm.

On a makeshift altar at the back of the cave stands a tiny plaster statue of La Virgen with her robe painted bright blue. Around her scatter the offerings Santos remembers, but of last night’s black stone figure there is no trace at all.

He eases to his feet, haunted by the memory of knives. His ankle burns like fire. Pain, breathtakingly sharp, jabs clear into his stomach. Bracing himself against the cave wall, Santos tugs off his boot. Circling his ankle is a thick scar bright as new blood. As he stares, fighting queasiness, that foot seems to waver and fade, just a little, and he hears in his mind a voice like the calling of doves.

“Enough?”

“Enough,” Santos says firmly. From down the hill comes the chink of tack and the fretful whinny of the cream-colored stallion. He slips the boot back on and turns to wake Flor. Outside, the road waits like a ribbon in the dawnlight to carry the both of them north.