5.
The Anderson Ranch,
southeast of El Paso, near the Rio Grande
John Anderson spent the day pacing. Delivering Travis to
Angel de Venganza had been as easy as John had feared. Cooped up on the ranch,
never allowed to travel alone since members of the posse started turning up
dead, Travis jumped at the chance to go to El Paso alone for a simple errand.
John knew Travis would find justification to spend the night drinking,
gambling, and whoring. John would never have minded if Travis had been able to
confine himself to those activities. He’d been young once himself.
Travis in town on his own was what
led to the current predicament. No whores caught his drunken fancy that night,
so he forced himself on a young married woman named Rosalyn Bentley. Travis
almost had to kill the husband when he came looking to avenge his wife’s honor.
John never learned all the details, but some agreement assuaged Bentley’s
grievance; a scapegoat was needed. Jaime Escalante had a reputation as a
roughneck and Lothario. He had been known to flirt with Rosalyn Bentley and
there were white men in El Paso who had suspicions about their women’s
interactions with Escalante. Hanging the rape on him would only work if no one
looked too closely, and there were people who mattered in El Paso who would not
be inclined to look closely at all.
John Anderson knew none of this
when he agreed to hire a posse to bring back the accused rapist. At the time
he’d been proud to see Travis step forward to choose and organize the men,
attributing it to a growth of civic responsibility. Only later did he realize
the story Travis and Bentley cooked up would not hold water were the Mexican
allowed to face charges.
Dark thoughts and recriminations
occupied John’s mind all day until he noticed the shadows creep along the side
of the main house. Travis had left not long after sunup. John had begun to
worry the Mexican might have gone back on his word when he heard a horse
approach at a full gallop. The hoofbeats stopped at the edge of the front porch
and a voice he didn’t recognize at first began to scream.
“Daddy! Daddy! God damn
it, Daddy. Come look what that son of a bitch half-breed beaner did to me!”
John ran to the front door. Travis
sat his horse so close to the porch he could dismounted directly onto it. He
was hatless with hair hanging over his face in long strands. Tears dripped form
his jaw. Snot fouled his mustache.
“What is it boy? What happened?”
“What happened? What happened?
This happened!”
Travis pulled the hair back from
his face to look straight at his father. Branded into his forehead was the
letter V, the lower point almost to the bridge of the nose, between the eyes.
John felt ill. Refused to look
away. “Did they hurt you, boy?”
Travis’s face a mix of pain, rage,
and confusion. “They? Weren’t no they. One man. Same one killed Red and Easy
and the others. Picked me off on the way to town like he’d been waiting for me.
First time in almost a year you let me go out alone and…” A flush of
realization came to Travis’s face. “You knew.”
“It was the price of saving your
life.”
“You worked it out? You talked to
him? Knowing what he’d been doing, you met him and didn’t kill him?”
“We have to answer for what we did.
To atone.”
“You got a brand on you I don’t
know about? What the hell does V stand for, anyway? He said you’d know. Said it
was appropriate.”
Tears clouded John’s vision. Travis
had lived within a mile of the border all his life and knew no more than ten
words of Spanish that weren’t insults or blasphemy. “Violador, I
expect.”
“What’s that in English?”
“Rapist.” John was already
recovering. “Get Esmeralda to put some of her salve on that burn. I’ll help you
down.”
Travis reined his mount away from
his father’s reaching hands. “I don’t need no more of your kind of help, you
old bastard.” Walked his horse to the corner of the house. “I’m warning you,
old man. You best sleep with one eye open form now on.”
John let him go. Much as he loved
the boy and as much as his son was hurting, he knew the only way Travis would
come at him was to hire it done. John stood alone and watched the sun begin to
sink across the river. All the work he’d done. Buried a wife, a daughter, and a
younger son, only to leave his life’s labor to such an heir.
He didn’t know how long the man had
been sitting his horse at the crest of the ridge. Only after Joh focused on him
did the rider tip his hat before walking his horse down the other side.
6.
Southwestern United
States and northern Mexico
Seven years later, it surprised no one when Travis Anderson
hired six gunmen to bring Angel de Venganza back to the Anderson ranch, dirt
still falling on his father’s casket. The men, renowned bounty hunters all,
ranged as far as Yuma, Fort Smith, Denver, and Chihuahua. They examined hotels
and saloons and brothels and stage lines and train depots for two years. Travis
had no idea how much whisky or how many whores he paid for.
He recalled them when the expenses
began to cut into his own habits. In all that time and distance they
encountered no one who had seen or had knowledge of a man named Angel de
Venganza. He had no family nor friends nor enemies. No birth or baptismal
records. No headstone.
Men who knew Easy Book in Texas
could not place the name. The men who’d been drinking with Red Durham in Bisbee
never had a name for the young Mexican Red sat with that night. Never got a
good look at his face. The livery owner was new in town, the previous
proprietor having moved on. California, maybe. Or Oregon.
The only person to see Angel de
Venganza after John Anderson watched him ride his horse into the setting sun
was Travis Anderson, who saw him every night.
