Borderlands by James Carlos Blake Read Free Book Online Page A

prisoners. The only one to escape was Rojas himself, who had abandoned his men in the middle of the fight and ridden away into the open desert.
    All this I learned from Ochoa when we reached San Andrés, after he answered my first breathless question, after I learned Delgadina was dead.
    She had been found tied to a bed in the small back room of a cantina. “Mistreated” was the word Ochoa used. She’d been mistreated but was still alive when he found her. From the look of things she had miscarried only shortly before.
    “I told her you were on your way to her,” he said. “And she heard me, Don Sebastián. She smiled. She tried to hold on, to wait for you, but she could not.” He had ordered some women to remove her to another room and clean her before I arrived. He took me there.
    When I saw her, I felt my soul leave me like something on wings. I put my fingers on her face, but it was like trying to touch a star, like trying to dry your eyes at the bottom of the sea. I insisted on seeing the room where she’d been found, and there I saw the bloody mattress, the thick red stain that had been my son.
    I wanted the two captured bandits burned alive, but Ochoa said it was too late, they had been shot while trying to escape. I whirled on him in a rage, but he held his ground and said, “ They did not steal her, Don Sebastián. They did not touch her. That I know. For them a bullet was proper and just.”
    “ Damn you!” I shouted. “You dare to tell me what is proper—what is just? ”
    His eyes flashed with anger but he quickly got them under control. “I already sent some of my boys after him,” he said. “We’ll get the bastard, Don Sebastián. Sooner or later. You’ll see.”
    I was trembling with the urge to strike him, but I was afraid that if I hit him even once I would not stop until I’d killed him. At that moment I was afraid even to curse him: I feared that if I opened my mouth I would start howling and never stop.
    I took Delgadina back to La Luna Plata and buried her in the sprawling flower garden behind the main house. I dug the grave myself. I called for a priest to pray over her only because she would have wanted it, but when he tried to commiserate with me afterward, I told him to go to hell.
    And then I waited. I could do nothing else. Ochoa had his rurales roaming everywhere in search of Juan Rojas, and he had sworn that when they caught him they would deliver him to me. But I lived with an unremitting fear that Rojas might die before they could catch him. He might even choose death to being taken alive. If he resisted arrest, Ochoa’s boys would surely shoot him. Or he might get killed in a drunken brawl in some cantina or whorehouse. He could be thrown from his horse and break his neck. A jealous woman might stab him in his sleep. He might be captured by the army and stood against a wall, or caught by Texas Rangers and hanged from the nearest tree. He could be bitten by a Gila monster or a rattlesnake. He could drown while trying to ford a river, or be swallowed by quicksand. He could get a sickness and die in bed. There were so many ways he might die before I could get my hands on him—and some of them such that I would never even know he was dead—that I chewed my lips bloody resisting the urge to howl. My fists rarely unclenched. I spent hours every day pacing from one top-floor window to another, my throat so tight it felt snared in a noose.
    Two weeks passed, and then four, and I thought of nothing but Juan Rojas and the vengeance I would wreak on him for having trespassed so grievously against me. When I was not pacing I was working in the cellar, making special preparations for him. He had robbed me of Delgadina and my unborn son—of my life, if not my breath—and the sole purpose of my continued existence was to make him suffer for his sin. For the first time since boyhood I prayed. I apologized to God for all the blasphemies of my life. I beseeched Him for a single concession