By the time he fought in the Mexican-American War, James Lee had already killed six men… with his hands, his pistols, knife and hatchet.
4
The dry winds were born of blast furnaces and ovens. They scoured the desolate countryside, howling through dry ravines and whistling along the peaks of rocky precipices. Dense stands of chaparral and wiry brush trembled. Sand blew and snakes hid amongst the crags. Buzzards circled in the yellow hazy sky above. Flies lit on the faces of the living and the dead and the wind tasted of salt, heat, and misery.
All in all, Northern Mexico was a parched, godless country just this side of hell.
James Lee Cobb, a Missouri Volunteer, watched as two buckskin-clad irregulars dragged another Mexican corpse from the dirty scrub.
“That’s six now, boss,” one of them named Jones said, spitting a stream of tobacco juice into the Spanish face of a corpse that had taken a load of grapeshot in the belly. He was just one big, wide opening between sternum and crotch now… you could’ve passed a medicine ball through him without brushing meat. “Six of them stinking, mother-raping sonsofbitches.”
“Every time I see a dead greaser,” Cobb said, “I think this land is one inch closer to civilization.”
Jones nodded, kicking at a spider in the dirt. “Yep, I would agree with that, James. I surely would.” He spit at the corpses again. “You know? Some of this country down here… it ain’t too bad. If it weren’t were for the Mesicans dirtying it up, might be fit for a white man. You think?”
Cobb narrowed his eyes, watching for trouble, always watching for trouble. “Could be. Hotter than the Devil’s own asshole, but maybe.”
“Worth thinking on.”
Cobb listened to the wind talk and it spoke in the voices of demons, telling him there would be a lot more killing, a lot more ugly dying before this little party was wound up. Licking his leathery lips, this made Cobb smile.
Whatever Cobb had been as a boy, he was not as a man. He could never honestly mark the point when he had gone from being wide-eyed and naive… to what he was now, a blooded killer.
Maybe it had been his first killing.
That drifter he’d knifed in Kansas after his run from Missouri, the one that seemed eager to teach him the ways of sodomy. Maybe when he’d pulled that hunting knife and sank it clear into the stinking pervert’s belly and felt all that hot blood come bubbling out like lava through a sharp slit in the earth… maybe that had done it. For once he got that first killing over and done with, it all came real easy and natural-like. A predestined thing.
Just like Heller the Witch-Man told him, his life had become “a dark matter.”
Cobb didn’t think much of Missouri or Heller or Uncle Arlen and Auntie Maretta much after he left. Not even the horror that was his mother. Staying alive, staying whole, keeping his belly full and his scalp intact-these things tended to occupy his thoughts. He stole horses and rustled cattle. Trapped beaver in the Rockies and Wyoming’s Green River country. He bootlegged whiskey to injuns and supplied them with U.S. issue carbines for their fights against squatters and the Army. All in all, there was a lot of murdering and violence involved and this on a daily basis. All the good things in him withered like green vines in a drought and something else, something shadowed and nameless rose up to fill the void.
Something that had been there from the start… just waiting.
Waiting its turn.
When Texas decided to annex to the United States, he’d joined a group of hellraising Missouri volunteers to fight for its independence from Mexico.
War, any war, was a hard business, but something in Cobb liked it.
His first taste of it was at the steaming holding camps at Matamoros where everyone was anxious to fight and there was nothing to do but take it out on each other. The Missouri volunteers went at it tooth-and-nail with volunteers from Georgia and Indiana and particularly with the regular army, which looked down on all volunteers as trash. At best, they decided, they were mercenaries, at worst, just cut-throats and freebooters. So the volunteers gave them hell at every quarter. And when they weren’t using their fists, they were popping off their muskets at passing game, shadows, anything that moved and some things that didn’t.
Matamoros was one unruly hive of confusion and insubordination. The regular army was incensed over these brigands, these hell-for-leather volunteers.
And the volunteers themselves were amused to no earthly end.
But then Cobb and the others were jammed aboard a riverboat and taken down the Rio Grande. The river had burst its banks, then burst them again. Maybe once after that, too. Point being, the pilots were having a hell of a time with it. They couldn’t be sure what was river and what was flood plain. The boats kept getting snagged in mud flats and bottoms. And in that sparse country, the troops had to dismount every so often to gather wood for the boilers… and such a thing required scavenging for miles sometimes.
Finally, the boats arrived at Camargo… a lick of spit that was neither here nor there nor anywhere you truly wanted to be. Just a little Mexican town on the San Juan River maybe three miles from its junction with the Rio Grande. It had once been sizeable, but was now in ruins from the flooding. The troops unloaded, an irritable and ornery lot, into a camp that was plagued by swarms of insects, snakes, and blistering heat. Men washed their laundry and horses in the same water camp kettles were filled. It was a filthy, desolate place where yellow fever and dysentery raged unchecked. The hospital tents were crowded with the diseased and dying.
Cobb and the other volunteers spent most of their time arguing, swatting flies, and burying the dead.
It was that kind of place.
Death everywhere… and the fighting hadn’t even begun.
Cobb’s volunteers slowly threaded out of the rocks, dumping more cadavers on the stinking heap before them. Twelve of them now. Twelve Mexican guerrillas. The sort that preyed on small bands of U.S. soldiers. Cutting them off, gunning them down. Taking them alive if they could and torturing them. Whipping them until they lost consciousness or cutting off their flesh in small chunks until they bled to death, screaming all the while.
Maybe the regular Army didn’t know how to deal with these pigs, but the volunteer forces surely did.
When you took them alive, you made a game out of it. You buried them up to their necks in the sand and spread honey over their faces and let the fire ants do their thing. You dragged them behind horses over the rocks until they broke apart. You hung them by their feet and swung ’em through bonfires. You dropped them into pits of diamondback rattlesnakes. You staked them out and let the wildlife have their way. And, if you felt real creative, you took a skinning knife to ’em… it could last for hours and hours that way.
But, best, when you found their villages, you burned them. You shot down their children and raped their women.
One of the volunteers was pissing on the bodies and Cobb had to yell at him. “Is that how ye show respect for the dead, ye sumbitch?” he said, backing the man against a wall of stone. “Is that how ye treat these chilis? Shows that ye don’t know shit, my friend. Let me show ye how it’s done.”
Cobb pulled out his bowie knife, pressed the blade against his thumb until it bled… just to make sure it was real sharp. Then, carefully and expertly, taking one of the dead ones by the hair, he ran the blade of his knife under the jaw line and around the cheekbone and just under the scalp and then traced it back down again until he had made a bloody circle. Then, sawing and pulling, he peeled the face from the bone beneath.