woke to find his horse staring at him with bewildered eyes. A mile away he found his mule, its legs sticking straight up inside a huge drift.
A day later he reached panchito, a forlorn cluster of adobe buildings grouped around a cantina. Inside the moan of biting wind, he heard the distant maniacal chords of a runaway piano, punctuated by bursts of mindless laughter.
An empty stagecoach was pulled up in front of the cantina. Near the stagecoach a small bandy-legged man, wearing a sheepskin coat and a whore’s feather boa around his neck, was doing his best to mount a horse. Halfway into the saddle, his foot slid out of the stirrup and he fell headfirst on the frozen mud.
He looked up at Zebulon through glazed shifty eyes. “I seen you somewhere.”
“I don’t think you did,” Zebulon said.
The bandy-legged man tried to mount his horse again and then gave up. “Maybe you come in last night with Hatchet Jack,” the bandy-legged man said. “Folks say that half-breed weaselhead should be tarred and feathered. Not me. I’d give the bastard a long rope and a short drop.”
Zebulon dismounted and pushed past him into the cantina.
Three oil lamps hanging from a rafter cast a dim light over the narrow low-ceilinged room. Hatchet Jack sat at the bar wearing a red and white Mexican army coat and a black bowler with a raven feather slanted over one side of the brim. A scar shaped like a long S ran down his left cheek from a wound Zebulon had carved a long time ago.
Hatchet Jack looked at him through one blue eye, one black.
“You’re a hard buzzard to track. I looked for you at the rendezvous, but you had already lit out. They told me you was ridin’ a hot streak but quit while you was ahead. That didn’t sound like you.”
“It was a hard winter,” Zebulon said. “I’m holdin’ on to what I can.”
“I ain’t askin’ for no hand out,” Hatchet Jack said, “if that’s what you’re thinkin’.”
The piano player’s gnarled fingers rolled over the broken keys with mechanical precision. Farther down the bar, two played-out whores sat staring at a rattlesnake coiled up inside a glass jar. When the piano player struck a dissonant chord the snake shifted its head back and forth looking for a way out.
Zebulon poured himself a shot from Hatchet Jack’s half-full bottle of Taos White Lightning, a slug that burned into his gut like a branding iron. While he waited for Hatchet Jack to say what was on his mind, he focused on three stuffed moose heads lined up on the wall behind the bar. All of their marble eyes except one had been shot out, and their antlers and heads were punctured by tomahawks and darts.
“I need help with your pa,” Hatchet Jack said. “I want his forgiveness.”
Forgiveness: it was a word Zebulon had never used before, much less thought about.
“It’s been seven years since you been up to see them?” Hatchet Jack said.
“More like two.”
Hatchet Jack shook his head, pouring himself another shot of Taos White Lightning. “Last time I rode up I went all the way loco and then some. The week before, an Arapahoe war party had buried Pa up to his neck in a swamp with the water rising. Me bein’ of mixed blood didn’t help. He told me not to call him Pa. Said he never should have taken me in after he won me in that poker game and he wanted me gone. That’s when I cleaned his plow.”
“You cleaned Pa’s plow?” Zebulon asked.
“I told him to dig a hole and go fuck himself. Those were my words. Then I took off with his big sorrel horse and a mess of his traps.”
“How did Ma take it?”
“She brained him with an ax handle before he could smoke me. Said she was glad to do it, but that she’d look forward to when I took off and didn’t come back. Which is what I done. Until now.”
Hatchet Jack downed another shot of Taos White Lightning. “I been told to make it up to him by an old Mex brujo. Name of Plaxico. You wouldn’t know him. After I left the mountains I rode straight to the end of myself, doin’ the usual bad mischief before I signed on with him. He has big medicine, that old man. Big sack of power. Learned me all about the spirit world. What to do and not to do. How to find and hold on to your power without sellin’ it on the cheap. He said someone put a curse on me after your pa took me in and that if I wanted to shake it loose I’d have to make it right with him.”
“How do you aim to do it?”
“Damned if I know.”
“What kind of curse?”
“Somethin’ about being stuck between the worlds. Not knowin’ which end is up. He went on about a woman. When I asked him about that, he wouldn’t say.”
“Pa will plug you just for showin’ up,” Zebulon said, not wanting to know any more about curses.
“Unless you ride up there with me,” Hatchet Jack said. “I’m askin’, Zeb. This one time. You be the only one that knows how to stretch the blanket with the old bastard.”
“I used to know how to stretch it. No more.”
Hatchet Jack shook his head. “I went to a whole lot of trouble stealing a prime horse and a bunch of traps to give back to him. Thing was, I got taken bad in a game of stud. A full house to some white nigger’s straight flush. I lost the horse and the traps and everything else.”
He paused. “Look. I’m ridin’ the rump of somethin’ I don’t know about and I need your help.”
When one of the whores banged her shot glass on the bar, Hatchet Jack signaled the bartender to give her a refill.
“That’s how it goes,” he said. “Ever since I poked her, she been on me like the last squirrel of winter. I’d be better off spendin’ time with Ma Thumb and her four daughters.”
The piano player pounded out another tune. The back of the room was full of all-or-nothing gamblers, along with three heavy-lidded vaqueros sitting on the floor against a wall, drunk or half asleep. Four other men sat at a table, speaking in whispers as they looked Zebulon over. Out-of-work ranch hands, Zebulon figured. At the next table a large-bellied rancher was playing poker with the stagecoach driver, a busted-up man with a handle-bar mustache and a soiled patch over one eye. Behind them a man sat slumped over a table; either drunk or possibly dead, his face lay across his forearms and a black cape was draped across his emaciated shoulders. A woman sat next to him wearing a dark green high-busted dance-hall dress and long silver earrings that drooped in a long bow to her neck. Her bronze high-toned face, as luminous as ancient rice paper, was framed by spills of medusa-like hair, blacker than black. Zebulon had never seen anyone like her, not even in his usual rut of Denver whorehouses known for specializing in mixed colors. She was smoking a long Mexican cheroot and appeared, as she looked over at him, more weary than curious. Or perhaps she was just bored.
“Spooky,” Hatchet Jack said. “They come in on the stage, goin’ south to old Mex. Looks to me like the old rooster owns her. Or maybe it’s the other way around.”
The woman removed a deck of cards from her purse. Cutting the cards with one hand, she spread them
