Blood Moon

By Ernest Brawley

In the year 1880, an impoverished, half-English journalist named Eduardo Dawson, hitching from Mexico for the American border, meets three fellow travelers who could not be more different. The first is Phoebe Surgener, a wry, strong-willed American ranch lady of obvious wealth and influence. The second is Pleasant Honeyflower, a seedy, fast-talking phony preacher. The third is Marcela Sandoval, a magically beautiful Mexican shepherdess. After their meeting on the road, there follows a seemingly endless night that begins with friendly “get-to-know-you" chatter and evolves as they cross the desert under a great blood moon into episodes of passionate young love, depraved sexual violence, betrayal, and abandonment that will have unimaginable repercussions for years to come. As fate will have it, they all end up in Pleasant Valley, Arizona, and their chance encounter in the desert will turn out to be a harbinger of The Pleasant Valley War, the bloodiest land war in the history of the American West.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Mar 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781649797797

Ernest Brawley

A Californian who has lived all over the world, Ernest Brawley has published numerous short stories and six novels. His prison novel, The Rap, became a feature film, Fastwalking. His farm worker novel, Selena, was purchased by 20th Century Fox. His Mexican novel, The Alamo Tree, was a Literary Guild Featured selection. His Vietnam War spy novel, Love Has No Country, was published in 2021. Streetlight, set in New York City in the crime-ridden 1970s, came out in 2022, as did Desert Places, the story of a beautiful aspiring actress who fights to make a success of her life despite her failure in Hollywood.

Book preview

About the Author

A Californian who has lived all over the world, Ernest Brawley has published numerous short stories and six novels. His prison novel, The Rap, became a feature film, Fastwalking. His farm worker novel, Selena, was purchased by 20th Century Fox. His Mexican novel, The Alamo Tree, was a Literary Guild Featured selection. His Vietnam War spy novel, Love Has No Country, was published in 2021. Streetlight, set in New York City in the crime-ridden 1970s, came out in 2022, as did Desert Places, the story of a beautiful aspiring actress who fights to make a success of her life despite her failure in Hollywood.

Dedication

For my beloved siblings, Diane, Lenor, and Douglas.

Copyright Information ©

Ernest Brawley 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Ordering Information

Quantity sales: Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Brawley, Ernest

Blood Moon

ISBN 9781649797780 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781649797797 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023901333

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street, 33rd Floor, Suite 3302

New York, NY 10005

USA

[e-mail]

[phone]

Acknowledgment

Without the help of my cousin, Kate Dobson Hunt, whose research into nineteenth century Arizona is formidable, I could not have written

Blood Moon.

Note to The Reader

The tragic, comic, and sometimes romantic events in this novel occurred in Arizona Territory nearly a hundred and forty years ago, yet they are still so salient in the collective memory of my family that we speak of them as if they happened only yesterday. My people, Mexican and American, were among the first settlers of Arizona, as witnessed by the place names Brawley Wash, Watkins Road, Robles Junction, and Dobson, Arizona. I am a direct descendant of the Brawley, Watkins, Robles, and Dobson clans, and several of my ancestors were intimately involved in the bloody actions recounted herein. My great-great-grandfather, Capt. W.C. Watkins, for example, was the leader of The Committee of Fifty, a group of vigilantes responsible for the summary hanging of dozens of outlaws in the Tonto Basin and Mogollon Rim regions, and his sons Abe and Frank were involved in the ambush of the last of the cattlemen in the Pleasant Valley War. Therefore, if I sometimes seem biased in favor of the vigilantes in this story, and the sheepmen in their battle with the cattlemen, it’s because old loyalties die hard.

Since Blood Moon is a work of fiction, many of its names, places, events, and dates have been changed. Yet it is based upon real historical occurrences. Some I read about in books such as Arizona’s Dark and Bloody Ground by Earle Forrest and A Little War of Our Own by Don Dedera. Others I heard about with my own ears from aged great-grandparents when I was a small boy in the 1940s. My genealogically minded cousins Joyce, Jan, Kate, and Dixie unearthed additional parts of the puzzle from old newspaper accounts, survivors’ statements, court reports and moldering attic diaries.

Certain details, like the oft-told tale that my great-grandmother Letitia was in the habit of cutting the lean off her meat and eating only the fat, I verified with my own eyes. Certain characters, like the pampered sixteen-year-old daughter of a rich and respected rancher who ran off with a notorious outlaw, and the race-baiting cracker from Louisiana who turned out to be one-sixteenth black, are based upon ancestors whose long-concealed histories I discovered by tracing whispered family innuendos to their logical conclusions or through the modern miracle of DNA testing.

The odd thing is that some of the most implausible events and characters in Blood Moon are real. The Pleasant Valley War of the 1880s, the deadliest land war in the history of the West, truly happened. The cattlemen really did allow feral pigs to devour the bodies of slaughtered shepherds. US Army artillerymen truly did concoct a lethal cannon-cocktail of broken glass and sharp pieces of tin to massacre a band of unarmed Apaches. The effete, erudite Coyotero Apache chieftain who was one of the leaders of the Ghost Dance insurrection in Arizona is a real historical figure, as is the bereaved Pleasant Valley widow who walked into a Phoenix courtroom to shoot the man who murdered her husband.

If ever I had any doubts about my own family’s involvement in Arizona’s bloody history, they were put to rest in 2008 when I acquired a yellowing nineteenth-century mugshot from the state archives. There, in the striped uniform of Yuma Territorial Prison, stood my great-grandfather, Milt Brawley, the same old desperado who had run off with the rich rancher’s daughter. And he looked just like me.

The Year 1882

Chapter 1

The specter that sent twenty-year-old Eduardo Dawson running from the city of his birth was an enormous, pale-eyed, raven-haired Mexican woman of Welsh extraction named Maruja Rhys. A rumored diabolist and a certain nymphomaniac, she was known as Maruja la Bruja, or more prosaically in English, Maruja the Witch.

For no apparent reason, she conceived a passion for Eduardo on his first day of work at the Mexico City Herald, the English language daily where she was a veteran copywriter and he a mere cub reporter. Much to the merriment of his colleagues, she continued to follow him about every day thereafter, gazing upon him as if moon-struck, inventing endless flimsy excuses to confer with him.

To complicate matters, Maruja la Bruja lived directly above Eduardo in a company-owned building next door to the newspaper premises, on Calle Isabél la Católica, and every night she leaned out her window to fling clanging centavos onto his laundry terrace, beckoning to him lasciviously when he stepped out to investigate.

At the risk of stoking his own vanity, but in the interests of clarity, Eduardo reminded himself in the journal and sketchbook he kept that this was not the first time a woman had trailed him about, stalking him like a hunted animal. Several times in the past, he had been hounded in a like manner—and by far younger and more attractive huntresses than Maruja la Bruja. Some of them had even managed to fell their beleaguered prey in what he described in his daily personal record as the tangled forest of their intentions.

For the longest time, Eduardo could not imagine why he had become such sought-after game, till one of his most fervent pursuers, a former art teacher of his from the British International School named Mrs. Candice Thatcher, bid him confront his mirror with a fresh eye, as if he had never cast a glance there before. What he saw in the glass before him then suddenly explained it all, for although he was cursed with the thin sandy hair, humdrum hazel eyes and pasty skin of his ungainly English father, he had been blessed with the classical facial symmetry of his beautiful Latin mother. Eduardo was so taken with this new impression of himself that he whipped out his pen, ink and sketchbook and did a quick self-portrait on the spot. When he was done, Mrs. Thatcher, an amateur artist of some talent herself, pronounced it an amazing likeness.

Yet Maruja, as it turned out, was even more passionate and pertinacious than Eduardo’s former stalkers, and she chased him relentlessly for nearly a year. The more he ignored her advances, the more frenzied were her appeals, to the point where he feared she might tie her bedsheets together some inky night and, with her sooty mane flying like some Druidic handmaiden, slither down and ravish him while he lay sleeping.

Then one evening, home from a lengthy, frustrating encounter with Encarnacíon McGinnis, a comely Catholic colleague whose misguided religious fervor rendered her impervious to the charms that others had found so irresistible, and flush with too much cheap Spanish wine, Eduardo threw himself down on his bed fully clothed. Just as he was drifting off into an alcoholic stupor, Maruja la Bruja started tip-tip-tipping her coins on the tiles of his terrace again. There was quite a substantial pile of them by then, for out of fear that she might take him wrong he had left them to rust where they lay.

"¡Ven pa’ca, Eduardo, ven p’arriba! she coaxed, in the faux-friendly tone one uses to beckon a wayward pet, as he stepped out onto his terrace and looked up to where she stood leaning, long-haired, out over her flower planter. Yet the instant she had his attention, the veil of geniality died in her eyes, replaced by something akin to the optics of a carrion crow. An eerie blue fire blazed up in their depths, seeming to wither the flowers before her and flare through the darkness. ¡Ven p’aca, Eduardito mio, ven p’arriba! she chanted, crooking a purple claw at him, and he felt himself wilting," as he would put it later, in the word-besotted alliterative style that was the bane of his editors at the Herald, "wilting to her wicked will like the pansies in her planter."

Slipping out his door, creeping up the open stairway above the patio where the sports editor and his cronies played cards every night, fearing discovery and the ridicule it would provoke in the newsroom, Eduardo cursed the virtue of Encarnacíon McGinnis. Cursed the fever it had ignited in his loins. A fever that now—perversely—rendered him defenseless in the face of the powers of darkness.

Whereupon Maruja la Bruja flung open her door.

Naked as the night she was born, her vast, black, feathery V flaring nearly to her navel, she clamped onto his waist with talons of steel. Swept him up like a fetish doll. Bore him into her foul-smelling nest. Fell backwards on her rancid straw pallet. Dragged him down.

Then with an "antediluvian, raptor-like shriek that shook the rafter beams," she opened her mouth, arms, legs, and nether parts to enfold him in a smothering embrace.

Instantly, he found himself plucked apart, ingurgitated, churned about in some sour, fermented substance, and just as quickly spat out.

In brief, she tupped like a teenage boy.

Having had her way with him, she was no longer interested, and tossed him out on the landing like a pecked bone.

Not three minutes after Eduardo had crept up the stairs, he found himself slinking shamefully down them again, above the laughing men in the courtyard, who all seemed to be pointing up at him.

For the next week, just as he had feared, he was the butt of endless jests at the Herald, especially from "that self-righteous proto-Papist, Encarnacíon McGinnis. To make his humiliation complete, he found that everyone in the newsroom was in on the joke. Encarnacíon had put Maruja up to the whole thing with hints that Eduardo reciprocated her feelings. Even worse, his succubus" had resumed her nightly habit of tipping tinkling coins upon his terrace.

One night, at the end of all tolerance—and with none but the most desperate hopes of redemption—Eduardo patiently awaited the rumble of Maruja la Bruja’s thunderous snores. When at last his walls began to quake and his bedsprings to reverberate, he knew the time was nigh, but he hesitated for a moment despite himself. Convinced that she was an adept in the satanic arts, he trembled in fright, and his heart began to palpitate. Yet somehow, dreading the moment when one of the "heady snuffs and snorts that punctuated her insufflations" might signal an abrupt awakening, he managed to gather what little remained of his manhood, throw his few belongings together, scrape her rusting coins from the terrace, and flee his room.

The next day, after soliciting and failing to obtain a small loan from his only living relative in Mexico City, a "penny-pinching pederast named Dr. Poncio Peña" who had once been married to his great-aunt Paloma, Eduardo hopped a wagon train heading north.

He had left the Herald without giving notice, without a word of farewell to anyone in the newsroom. He had not even bothered to collect his last week’s salary, although he would sorely miss it on the road, where four hundred and forty-seven weathered centavos represented the total sum of his fluid assets.

Like many of his generation, in both Mexico and the United States, Eduardo was fascinated by the phases of the moon and the significance of each month’s unique full moon. He and his peers had inherited the predilection from the indigenous peoples of the continent, who had several names for each moon, to be employed according to one’s mood or the mood of the times. In Eduardo’s case, the inclination was so pronounced that when he was on the road and had no access to a more conventional Gregorian calendar, he could fix a date by the moon with equal precision. He knew, therefore, that he had left Mexico City on the second night of the waning Honey Moon, the sixth full moon of the year.

As he made his way northward, Eduardo filled his sketchbook and journal with wide-eyed impressions of the places and people he encountered, and vivid tales of his many and varied adventures as a penniless vagabond at the mercy of Good Samaritans along the road.

Only after he had put three moons, four Mexican states, and five hundred kilometers between himself and Maruja la Bruja did he dare risk her "necromantic ire and state in clear black and white that he had never regretted for an instant his decision to flee her snare. Nor did he shirk to remind her in his journal, that her beastly machinations had had unintended positive consequences. While frightening me half out of my wits, he wrote, you actually did me a great favor, Maruja la Bruja, for you inspired me to renounce my timid, mundane, urban existence and set out upon a life at the very frontiers of adventure and romance."

Later, on the road, when with the perspective of even more time and distance Eduardo began to have suspicions that his flight might have had more to do with shame and embarrassment than black magic, he confessed to himself that Maruja la Bruja was probably less a witch than a product of his overheated imagination.

Sitting outside in a village plaza one market morning, surrounded by a gawking crowd of Huichol Indians, he did a series of drawings of Maruja la Bruja from memory. The first one he did, while he was still frightened that he might be in danger of humanizing the woman a bit too much, made her look like a creature from Hell, with a black mane of tangled hair, fiery eyes, a hooked beak, a turned-own mouth, and an expression of the most extreme malevolence. When at last he admitted to himself that he had exaggerated the portrait and it conformed more to his fear-inspired mind-set than to reality, he did another sketch from memory.

In this one, there was nothing witch-like about Maruja la Bruja. He depicted her, in all her human frailty, as a plump, homely middle-aged professional woman, a spinster with loads of unsatisfied yearnings. In his third and final rendering, he combined the two approaches and portrayed a visage with aspects of both the previous drawings. His hope was that he’d created an accurate visual representation of Maruja la Bruja’s character, one that showed how her unsightly physical aspect had made her feel weak and insecure and how she had compensated for these insecurities by crafting a strong and fearful doppelganger.

In the end, however, he was not quite happy with his work, for he felt he’d missed something important, something he could not quite put his finger on. His crowd of Indian onlookers, on the other hand, seemed most impressed. Typical of their race, they did not show their approval by clapping, smiling, or saying anything. They showed it by following him silently and reverently from the plaza and all the way back to his current benefactor’s tumbledown lodgings, as if he were some important chief or medicine man.

Smiling to himself, Eduardo felt sure that his untutored Indian admirers were misguided in their admiration and that his work, although perhaps technically accomplished for a young man his age, was flawed in some essential way. Yet he had never felt so honored or grateful in his brief but eventful life.

Chapter 2

Eduardo had thought the state of Sonora would be hot and dry, but the Sierra Madre was not like that at all. It was cool and coniferous, with hemp bridges swinging across deep gorges and fields of yellow maize planted up sheer green mountainsides. Most of the people were indigenous, the most primitive he’d ever seen. Everyone went barefoot, and the machetes the men wore at their waists—made in Toledo, Ohio—were among the few changes in their lives since the coming of Cortéz.

One late afternoon in October 1882, Eduardo—pale, slender, and rather clerkish-looking in his derby hat, fustian jacket, and twill trousers a bit worse for wear—was standing over his carpetbag beside a dirt road near the little mud-walled pueblo of Algarrobas. A faded sign on the collapsing wall behind him proclaimed the road as LA CARRETERA DEL MAR PACIFİCO, POR CORTESİA DEL PRESIDENTE DE LA REPUBLICA, PORFİRIO DİAZ, when in truth it was nothing more than a narrow, overgrown cart trail that often crumbled into a state of Pre-Columbian nullity.

Hoping for a ride out of the mountains and into Alamos, the metropolis of the district, Eduardo had been rooted in place since dawn, when the Blood Moon—in its waxing gibbous phase—had still been hovering over the horizon. He’d had no luck since then and expected no better this late in the day. He’d never been much of a Blood Moon man anyway, though it happened to be the month of his birth and he knew everything there was to know about it, including the fact that it was supposed to be the time when the veil between our world and the spirit world was thinnest.

Just as Eduardo was about to throw up his hands and seek lodgings in some dung-infested Indian shack, his skepticism about the latter piece of lunar lore was put to the supreme test, for his ultimate fantasy took shape before his eyes. High stepping it down the road from the village came two fine black Percherons drawing a fancy, red-wheeled buckboard rig loaded with the latest in rough country gear. A spare horse of equal luster trotted along behind, trailing a cloud of dust that shimmered like gold in the sun.

Too mesmerized by the apparition to wave or call out, Eduardo just stood there with his mouth hanging open while it pulled to a stop beside him in a swirl of yellow iron sulfide particles. Nor was the dreamlike quality of the vision in the least compromised by Eduardo’s awareness that iron sulfide is otherwise known as fool’s gold.

The driver of the rig was a skinny, ill-favored little mestizo in a sombrero, grand moustache, and a silver-studded charro getup a size too big for him. Yet just behind him, on a cushioned rear seat set upon leaf springs for comfort, wearing crisp new safari suits with pith helmets and lace-up boots, smiling down upon Eduardo like angels of deliverance, sat a prosperous-looking, middle-aged foreign couple.

As a sometime artist, journalist and aspiring novelist, Eduardo prided himself on his powers of observation. Now that he was free of his plodding, un-poetic editors at the Herald, he felt perfectly free to indulge his gift for alliterative prose. On his present journey, he practiced those powers daily in his journal. When penury prevented the purchase of pen and ink, as was now the case, he solved the problem by the simple expedient of writing imaginary descriptive paragraphs in his brain, memorizing them, and jotting them down later, when his financial state improved. He did the same with his drawings, spending hours sketching them out in his brain in such detail that he might etch them there semi-permanently.

In this way, clicking off the details of the couple’s outward appearance, Eduardo managed to register all their salient features and note them upon the blank screen of his mind’s eye within an instant of first seeing them:

Bright eyed, buxom, and blond, still quite handsome despite her fading hair, the woman sat tall and erect, shoulders back, with an air of worldly good-humor and self-confidence. Her face was lean and elongated, her eyes large and piercingly blue, with a web of crinkly laugh lines veering from their corners. Her nose thin and long with a slight hump in the middle. Her cheekbones high, her skin tanned from a lifetime out-of-doors. And if there had been any doubt as to her sense of humor, the deep, rounded creases above her thin, weathered lips would have scotched it.

Shifting his attention to the woman’s husband, Eduardo discovered upon closer inspection that he did not at all accord to his first impression of wealth and culture. Stooped, gaunt and slack-jawed, he’d let a gob of black tobacco spittle drip into his stringy, gingery Van Dyke. His skin was sallow and unhealthy, his eyes a dull, indifferent gray, and his eyelids drooped, leaving him with a squinty inattentive air.

Scowling down upon Eduardo in jealousy and distaste, their diminutive, unseemly Mexican driver provided a second dose of harsh reality to the scene.

"Buenas tardes, señores," Eduardo said, after having taken the time to bring the three into a proper literary and artistic focus.

"Igualmente, said the lady in passable Spanish. We’re headed for Alamos. Would you care for a ride?"

"Si si, señora, por favor."

"Donde vas, joven?"

Well, my immediate goal is Alamos, he said, thinking it odd that the lady was doing the talking. Then up to the United States. Eventually, though, I’d like to go all the way round the world backwards.

What do you mean by ‘backwards’?

It’ll take a while to explain.

"Estupéndo, she said laughing, lighting a big Havana cigar. Get in, chico. You’re a man after my own heart."

Eduardo threw his things in back and jumped up beside the sullen little driver. He cracked his whip, and they were off in a cloud of yellow dust.

Actually, the idea of traveling around the world backwards had occurred to Eduardo as a sudden inspiration a day or two after he left Mexico City. He was not exactly sure what it meant. It just seemed like an interesting theme for his journey. He reckoned its meaning might sort itself out as he went along. He also imagined (correctly) that his varying replies to the inevitable question would be an interesting conversation opener with people who picked him up along the way. A few months later and many miles to the north, when he would recall these events from a perspective of hard-earned experience, he would realize that his whimsical notion of going around the world backwards was in fact a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy, its meaning symbolic rather than factual.

Whether out of ill will or ill nature, Felipe drove like a mad man. He careened along the narrow, twisting dirt road, a thousand vertical feet above the canyon, as if in a race against the very fates. In general, the lady indulged him, and she puffed at her cheroot with serene detachment as the wagon skidded back and forth across the dirt trail from the wall of the mountain to the very rim of the precipice. After one preposterously perilous instance of brinksmanship, however, she turned to fix her driver with an angry glare.

"But señora, there was nothing to worry about, Felipe protested. I still had three wheels on the road."

At which point, Eduardo burst out laughing. Felipe was not happy with the display of humor at his expense, but there was nothing to be done about it. The danger was invigorating to Eduardo, and he recalled for the hundredth time the delicious irony that he had been impelled into this life of freedom and heart-stopping adventure by the possibly erroneous notion that a sorceress had sought to enthrall him.

Say, you’re pretty full of beans, aren’t you, young man? Phoebe said.

"You’d be feeling that way, too, señora, if you’d been standing out there waiting for a ride for twelve hours and then suddenly found yourself riding in a rig like this."

Yes, I believe I would be, she said. But you’re not much more than a handful, are you? Wouldn’t be hard to miss you. Looks like you been ‘off your feed,’ as we say on the ranch.

Must admit, I’ve not been eating as much as I’d like to.

Turn around and let me get a look at you, she said. "You know, you wouldn’t be half bad looking, hijo, if you’d put a little meat on your bones. You don’t look particularly Mexican either, with that fair hair and those big green eyes. What’s your name?"

Eduardo Dawson.

Dawson? Where’d you get a name like that? Where’re you from?

Mexico City.

Well, we’re Niall and Phoebe Surgener. From Pleasant Valley, Arizona Territory. And this is our driver, Felipe.

"Encantado. And if I may say so, señora, you speak Spanish very well."

Thank you. Picked it up on our sheep ranch. Most of our shepherds are Mexicans. You don’t happen to speak any English, do you?

Indeed, I do, he said in that language, in a clipped, plummy sort of accent, which, as he knew well, was a bit too studied to be precisely authentic and hardly accorded with his present circumstances in any case. My father was English, you see.

Really? she said. Where’s he from in England?

Her English, he found, was slow, dry, and a bit nasal, but not unpleasant. A kind of twang, he supposed, perhaps from the Southern Prairies.

Saint Ives, in Cambridgeshire, he replied. Bit of a remittance man, I’m afraid. Fancied himself an artist. Entranced with Aztec sculpture, painting, and architecture. At least for a time.

And where’s he at now, Son?

Haven’t the foggiest. He left when I was sixteen. I should think he’s back in England by now. One thing I do know. He’s never far from his bottle of aqua vitae, or ‘anti-fogmatic,’ as he calls it.

And your mother?

She was…of Spanish origin, he said, stretching it a bit. Actually, she was half-Mexican, part Catalonian, and part Sephardic, of all things.

Was?

She died of consumption when I was seventeen, sorry to say. I’ve been on my own ever since.

And you’re how old now? she asked, but before he could respond, she shouted, "¡Alto, por favor! to the driver. After Felipe had grudgingly brought the Percherons to a halt, she nudged her husband in the ribs and said, cupping her hand to his ear, Say, Niall, can you sit up there with the driver for a spell? I want to talk to this young man without putting a kink in his neck."

Her husband complied immediately and without a sound, but his movements were shambling, and he nearly stumbled when he swung off the wagon to exchange seats with Eduardo.

Now, young man, where were we? said Mrs. Surgener, when they were settled in the rear seat together and Felipe had whipped the big black geldings into a trot. Oh yes, I was about to ask your age.

Twenty-one, he said, fudging it by a few months.

Times can be tough out there for a young man your age. How’ve you managed to earn a decent living?

"It’s been something of a travail, I must say. I clerked in a bank for a while, kept books for my great-uncle’s undertaking parlor, and I worked as a reporter for the Mexico City Herald for a time."

How’re you fixed for money now?

Bit embarrassed, I’m afraid.

Aside from going around the world backward, she said winking, nudging him in the ribs, what’re your plans for the future, Son?

Near term? I’d be happy to simply make my way to the US of A. Long term? Perhaps a job on a big city daily, or as a foreign correspondent. Maybe write a book or two on the side. I like doing pen and ink drawings, as well. Even a watercolor from time to time.

Now let me ask you one more personal question, if you don’t mind.

Not in the least.

To be entirely frank, Eduardo, I don’t believe you’re quite who you say you are. Like many young people, you might be kind of inventing yourself as you go along. Am I right?

Hmmm, you may have something there, he said, after taking a moment to ponder her question and perhaps turn it to his advantage. "But tell me this, señora, and I should like you to include yourself in your response. Have you ever known anyone, in all your life, who is exactly what he says he is, or who he thinks he is?"

Touché, young man, touché!

After they’d recovered from their fit of mutual admiration, Eduardo said, ‘For every thrust’, my father used to say, ‘a riposte in double measure’.

Where’d he get that?

"Haven’t the faintest. Sounds like something he might’ve picked up in the Count of Monte Cristo, doesn’t it?"

Well, there were probably worse things he could’ve left you with.

Actually, I’d rather he hadn’t left at all, Eduardo said, in a tone pitched somewhere between angry, bitter, and sad. He’d employed it several times on the road, and not without some success. He was a good father, mostly, when he wasn’t in his cups. He was smart. Taught me a lot. But if he felt he had to leave, it might’ve been kinder if he’d not done it in the middle of the night, without a word or a single centavo, and my mother in the last stages of consumption.

Oh, you’re not gonna get all soggy on me now, are you, Eduardo? Just when I’d started to like you? said Mrs. Surgener, shaking her head at him. One thing I can’t stand is people feeling sorry for themselves.

"A momentary weakness, señora, he hastily replied, in a tone suggesting that he was trying mightily to buck himself up. Won’t happen again, I assure you."

Mrs. Surgener kept silent for a few moments and appeared to be considering his words. Just when he was beginning to worry that he’d gone too far in seeking her sympathy, she looked him in the eye and said, I pride myself on my ability to read character. Consider yourself under my protection until further notice.

"Are you perfectly serious, señora?"

Never say anything I don’t mean.

Simply cannot thank you enough, he said laughing, and for once his delight was utterly, unaffectedly sincere.

Don’t mention it, Son. You smoke cigars? Here, try this one, she said, reaching into her bag, smiling at him with a delight to equal his own. You’ll like it.

As the afternoon wore on, it became increasingly evident why Mrs. Surgener had taken the lead in the family. Dull-eyed and nearly silent, Mr. Surgener never made good sense even when he did venture a word or two. One time, when he stepped off to dribble in the bushes by the side of the trail, Mrs. Surgener nudged Eduardo again and whispered, The reason why he looks so poorly, Son, he’s got what they call ‘brain fever’.

Niall had been head shot in the Civil War, she said, and pieces of the minié ball were still rattling around in there somewhere. For years, he seemed fine, but lately he’d taken a turn for the worse. His brain had swollen dangerously, but the minié ball was in there too deep to operate on. The long and short of it, Niall was not long for this world.

When they got the bad news, Mrs. Surgener said, Niall wanted to see something of Mexico before he passed on. She thought it ill advised, but decided to indulge him, so they left their Arizona sheep ranch in the care of their grown sons, put their horses and wagon on a train, and headed for the border. Since this was the fourth year of the Porfiriato, an era of unusual peace and prosperity for Mexico, she reckoned that it was safe for travelers. They only got as far as the mountain hot springs in Agua Caliente, however, before Mr. Surgener’s mental state began to deteriorate. Now they were headed back to Alamos for a few days of rest, then to the railhead in Navajoa and home to Arizona by train.

Maintaining its breakneck pace, the wagon rapidly descended from the region of conifers through layers of oak, chaparral, and scrub brush. At sundown, it rounded a bend with a spectacular view of the saltpans and creosote flats of the Sonoran Desert dappled in several shades of purple and red. Fifty yards down the trail, a two-wheeled Mexican carriage called an araña—a kind of poor man’s gig or dogcart—was blocking the way.

The araña had seen better days, and its horse, a skinny gray nag, was lying prostrate between the shafts, wild-eyed, breathing heavily, its neck tangled in the yoke and traces. A big swarthy gringo in a battered Stetson hat, a greasy linen suit, and an old pair of cavalry boots was standing beside it, beckoning frantically. Behind him, perched precariously on the box seat of the listing buggy, a young and pretty Mexican girl in a summer dress sat holding a pink and white parasol over her head as if she hadn’t a care in the world.

Good day, friends; good day to you! the stranded wayfarer bellowed, hastening toward them with the surprising physical poise of some large, stout men. Yup, proud to meet y’all. And that rig of yourn? Them drivin’ horses? Near ’bout the most elegant thangs mortal man ever sot eyes upon.

At Mrs. Surgener’s direction, Felipe pulled the wagon to a stop beside him, and Eduardo could form a more defined impression of the man’s curious mien and exaggerated manner. Splay-nosed, buck-toothed, and double-chinned, sporting a scraggly black musketeer’s goatee, he was nobody’s idea of winsome. And most disconcertingly, his big, milk-blue left eye wandered about in no apparent coordination with the right one, which was brown and small. To round off the impression, he wore strapped to his waist a big, long, Colt .44 Peacemaker and a huge, double-edged knife called—if Eduardo recalled the term correctly—an Arkansas Toothpick. What’s more, he smelled of tequila so strong that it nearly knocked one over from a yard away.

And who might I have the pleasure of talking to? said Mrs. Surgener, with little joy evident in her tone.

Plaisant de Fleurdumiel from St. Landry Parish, Spice Capital of the World, in the great state of Louisiana, at your service, ma’am, he said in a drawl so thick and magnolia-scented that it seemed almost theatrical. No way you gon’ pronounce my family name, he went on without a breath. "But fleur du miel means ‘honeyflower’ in French. So y’all can just call me Pleasant Honeyflower, if’n you like."

"And are you?" Mrs. Surgener asked, gazing down upon him with a fixed and rather imperious grin.

Am I what?

"Are you pleasant?"

Oh, you’re a caution, ain’t you ma’am? he said, chuckling. "Well, might could be I ain’t too pleasant to look upon. Like my mama used to say? ‘That boy, he’s uglier’n the east end of a horse headed west. Looks like somethin’ the dog been keepin’ under the porch. Teeth so buck he could eat corn through a picket fence.’ But, far as character go? Well, as it says in the Good Book, Proverbs 3:17, His ways are ways of pleasantness, and all his paths are peace. Maybe on account of my bible learnin’, some folks like to call me ‘Preacher’."

I did not ask about your physical appearance sir, or what’s in the Good Book, or what people like to call you. I asked a simple question. Are you pleasant?

Well, far be it from me to toot my own whistle, but—

Then don’t.

"Like I say, ma’am, I’m entirely at your disposal, he said, bowing to her deeply, doffing his tall gray Stetson and sweeping the trail with it. And please forgive my politesse from a vanished age. But I swan to mercy, had me a mite of trouble down the road. Old Grey here? Seemed spry enough when I bought her in El Fuerte. ‘Behold, a pale horse.’ I mean, she so full of oats, she kick, she rear up, she cut more shines than a snappin’ turtle on a hot iron. Got myself honeybuggled by that horse trader, though, I reckon, ’cause five or ten mile down the road? She already exfluncticated. Just ain’t a good judge of horseflesh, I guess."

No, I suspicion you ain’t, she said, mocking his dialect.

Yes ma’am, he said, showing his big yellow teeth, not in the least put off by their contretemps. "But like my ole grand-pappy use to say? ‘Even a blooded hound got a few fleas. And in this life we all gotta eat a peck of dirt’."

So, Mr. Honeyflower, she said, doing nothing to hide her impatience. What can we do to help?

Well ma’am, I’d be much obliged if you might could help a fellow North Americano into the next town.

"North Americano? Pshaw! Is that what you’re calling yourself now,