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.
He held up the dripping mask. “All set to scare the kiddies with.”
The other volunteers were laughing and clapping each other on the backs. Why, it was the damn funniest thing they’d ever seen. Leave it to Cobb to come up with something like that. Just when you thought he’d exhausted his grisly creativity by using the scrotum of a Mex for a tobacco pouch or making a necklace of fingers…he came up with something new.
Pulling their knives, the others began doing it, too.
Cobb walked amongst them, motioning with his bloody knife like a schoolteacher instructing on the finer points of conjugating verbs. Except, Cobb’s classroom was a hot, wind-blown place and his subject was butchering. He made quite a figure standing there in his filthy, threadbare buckskins, forage cap tilted at a rakish angle atop his head. His beard was long and shaggy, his hair hanging to his shoulders in greasy knots. An assortment of Colt pistols, revolvers, knifes, and hatchets hung from his belts. Along with the newly-acquired Mexican death mask and the mummified hand of a priest he’d hacked off in Monterrey and sun-dried on a flat rock.
There weren’t enough bodies to go around and there was some argument as to who was going to get what. Cobb settled that by telling the men it was strictly first come, first served. Those of you who got here first, why ye just carve yerself a face, that’s what ye want, he told them. Ye others, well ye have to make do with what ye can beg, borrow, or steal. Cobb told them-and they believed him-that there would be plenty of trophies to be had down the road a piece. Maybe tomorrow, maybe today.
“ One thing ye can count on, boys,” he said to them, “is that there’s always gonna be more. Mexico’s just full of ‘em.”
He watched them going to work, hacking and sawing and cutting, singing little ditties they’d learned from the Mexican folk, but didn’t understand a word of.
Yes, Cobb watched them, knowing they’d patterned themselves after him. He’d joined up as an enlisted man, but soon enough-maybe through ferocity in battle or sheer savagery-he’d become an officer and their leader. They looked up to him. They fancied all the badges and military decorations he’d taken off dead Mexican officers and pinned to his hide shirt. The necklaces of fingers and blackened ears, the skull of the that Mexican colonel he’d mounted from his saddlehorn.
They wanted to be like him.
They wanted to be a bloodthirsty hard-charger like James Lee Cobb. They wanted to leap into battle as he had at Buena Vista, shooting and stabbing and pounding his way through the Mexican ranks.
It made them fight real hard in battle so they could collect up trophies as he had.
And, yes, they could fight hard and die hard and loot and mutilate the dead all they wanted…but none of them would ever be like James Lee Cobb. They would never have his peculiar appetite for inflicting suffering and death. An appetite born in nameless places where human bones were piled in pyramids and human souls were boiled in cauldrons. They would never have that and they surely would never have the birthmark he had.
The one that looked like a red four-fingered handprint.
A handprint that positively burned when death was near.
What happened at the Battle of Buena Vista was this: Some 14,000 Mexican troops commanded by General Santa Anna charged Zachary Taylor’s U.S. forces which numbered less than 5,000. Through determination, audacity, and sheer luck, the American’s pushed the Mexican’s back.
Easy enough to tell; not so easy to experience.
On a dismal morning in February 1847, the troopers under Taylor received orders to strike their tents and march on Buena Vista. Sixteen miles later, they arrived…lacking provisions, wood for fires. Early the next morning picket guards arrived, saying that a large Mexican force was approaching and approaching fast. James Lee Cobb and the Missouri volunteers stationed themselves in a narrow ridge, just beyond an artillery battery and waited for their enemies.
Along with them, were elements of the Kentucky and Arkansas cavalry. Each man waited amongst the rocks, eyes wide, flintlock muskets and carbines primed and at the ready, knives sharpened and hatchets in hand. There was a stink in the air-sour, high, heady.
The smell of fear.
For down below, the enemy were massing and everyone spread out on that ridge could see them, really see them for the first time. The sheer numbers. For once, intelligence had neither over-inflated or under-inflated enemy strength. The Mexicans moved and marched, formed-up into ranks and scattered out in skirmish lines. From where Cobb sat…they were mulling, busy things in perpetual motion.
“ Don’t look out there and see yer death, boys,” Cobb told his volunteers. “Look down there and know, know that if they take ye, yer gonna take ten of them motherfuckers with ye.”
Cannonade exploded along the face of the mountain as the Mexican guns-eight-pounders and sixteen-pounders-sought them out. By nightfall, they picked up the pace, raining hell down upon two Indiana rifle companies. Bugles sounded and men died and gouts of smoke filled the air…but the real fighting had yet to begin.
The volunteers and regular army forces waited and waited. Hungry, cold, but not daring to close their eyes as discharges of grapeshot tore up the landscape around them.
At dawn the next day, the Mexican cannons started singing again and things really started moving. Heavy fire erupted in and around the volunteers and was answered by American batteries. The entire mountainside was crawling with the enemy like hordes of Hun filled with blood-rage and steel, preparing to sack a town.
Cobb moved his troops out and charged a hidden Mexican emplacement that had been harassing the Indiana rifles, killing the soldiers and hacking on them until they lay scattered in pieces amongst their damaged guns.
But for every ten killed, twenty more came shouting up the hill at them. And behind them, Jesus, half the Mexican army. Infantry in their green tunics, cavalry in scarlet coats. They carried British East India rifles and long lances, wore brass helmets with large black plumes like raven’s feathers.
All hell broke loose.
Cannon balls whistled over the heads of the volunteers, exploding with gouts of shattered rock and flying dirt. Grapeshot ripped into men, spraying their anatomies in every which direction. Smoke hung like a ground fog over everything and the cavalry looked like ghost riders pounding through it. Men were screaming and shrieking, blood covered the ground in viscous, steaming pools. Soldiers-both American and Mexican-dropped and died, piling up like corded lumber. Some rose only to fall again and be crushed under the thundering hooves of horses. Bugles sounded out. Men crawled through the carnage, missing limbs and/or pressing their viscera back into ruptured abdomens. Some wanted to escape…but others, piecemeal, wanted to fight on.
Cobb bayoneted a soldier and slashed the face off another. He saw volunteers fall…but each time he advanced to their aid, bodies fell at his feet, blood and brains spattered into his face, enemy soldiers rushing out at him.
So he busied himself shooting and knifing, taking them as they came.
And around him, the volunteers scrambled over heaped bodies as mounted troopers of the Mississippi Rifles charged into the fray. They wore bright red shirts and broad-brimmed straw hats. The Mexican cavalry met them on deadly ground and muskets sounded and sabers slashed, horses were ripped apart by cannon balls and men fell by the hundreds, the landscape becoming a bleeding, blasted sea of bodies and limbs and glistening internals.
Behind the Mexican cavalry, a body of lancers came shouting and running, infantry with fixed bayonets backing them up.
The Missouri volunteers, many of them burnt black with powder, fought on, ready to take anything that came. Cobb emptied his pistols until they were smoking and hot. He fired his musket, loaded, rammed, fired again with swift expertise. But the Mexicans poured forward in a surging, shrieking tide, severing the American lines, and Cobb found himself crushing skulls with the butt of his rifle, opening bellies and throats with his knives, and taking weapons off dead men, fighting and fighting.
The Mexicans charged not only from the front, but from both sides and behind now. It was sheer pandemonium. Men were falling and writhing. Horses stampeding and throwing their riders, mad now with gaping wounds and terror from the pounding and shooting and screaming. Shells were bursting and rifle balls whizzing like mad hornets, smoke billowing and dust rising up in blinding whirlwinds. Musketry was crashing and big guns thundering. Wagons and their loads were shattered to kindling and everywhere the dead and the dying, blood and smoke and wreckage.
And still more fresh Mexican troops charged in.
Cobb, filled now with a tearing, raging hunger, dashed in amongst their numbers, cutting men down with musket-fire and blazing pistols. He split open the head of a lancer with his hatchet, slit the throat of another, took up his lance and speared a Mexican officer from his horse. He sank the shaft through the man’s chest and impaled him into the ground. Killing two or three others, he mounted the Mex’s horse-a fine white stallion-and charged in, hacking and cutting, shooting and stabbing.
The horse was blown out from under him, a volley of grapeshot blowing the animal’s legs into shrapnel.
From above, the landscape was ragged and gutted, a chasm filled with smoke and fire, swarming with men and riderless horses. It was a slaughter of the first degree and in the confusion, it was hard to tell who was winning and who was losing.
But Cobb didn’t know and didn’t care.
He fought on, killing more men, stealing horses, slicing through the Mexican lines like a red-hot blade. The fighting continued for some time, but eventually, the dead heaped across the ground in great flesh-and-blood ramparts, the Mexicans broke off their advance. Pounded continually by artillery, their cavalry shattered, they pulled back and even this cost them hundreds and hundreds of men.
When the fighting had ended, the battlefield was a graveyard.
A slaughterhouse.
As far as the eye could see, bodies and parts thereof, men blown up into trees, horses disemboweled by cannonball, soldiers cut in half from musketry. It looked like an image from Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death -smoke and fire, cadavers and shattered wagons. Pitted earth. Pools of blood. Thousands of flies lighting off the dead and those near to it. Men begged for medical aid, for water, for their mothers and sweethearts, for an ounce of life so they could do just a little more killing.
As Cobb walked through the carnage, his buckskins wet with blood and burned from blazing shrapnel, he saw living men drag themselves out from under corpses. Wild-eyed, blood-drenched things, they brandished empty pistols and gored knives. They bayoneted the already dead and those begging for death. Battle-shocked officers in blackened uniforms stumbled out, cursing and crying and shouting out orders to dead men. They called for corpses to rise and give chase to the enemy, while amongst them soldiers shambled to and fro, looking for fallen comrades, dropped weapons, and lost limbs.
Cobb and his blood-stained, fire-baptized volunteers, moved through the burning fields of corpses, parting seething mists of smoke, and began mutilating the Mexicans. Scalping and dismembering, chopping off fingers and ears and plucking free death-masks and hands. They laughed with a deranged cackling as they arranged Mexican corpses in obscene displays.
And Cobb urged them on to new and more twisted atrocities as the birthmark on his back blazed and steamed and pulsed.
Something in him was very pleased, very satisfied with what it saw.
War is hell.
And for whatever was in Cobb, this was like coming home.
Fire and heat and smoke and screaming.
The schoolhouse was burning.
Voices inside cried out in Spanish, bastardized English, Indian tongues…begging, pleading to be released, released for the love of God. And Cobb had every intention of releasing them-right into the hands of their maker.
Cobb watched the fire, fed on it, felt it burning inside him, too. His blood was acid that bubbled and seethed. His heart a red-hot piston hammering and hammering, throwing sparks and oily steam. The birthmark at his back was like an iron brand scorched into his flesh.
The volunteers ringed the schoolhouse, muskets at the ready.
“ Any of them chilis get out,” Cobb told them. “Drop them bastards.”
The volunteers had tracked the Mexican guerrillas here to a little town called Del Barra. This is where they lived, operated out of. Just a shabby collection of shacks and adobes leeched by the sun and blasted by desert wind, all lorded over by an old Spanish church and schoolhouse. In the basement of the church, the volunteers found rifles and ammunition, uniforms and weapons stripped from American dead. Many of these still had bloodstains on them.
The priest had refused to let them see the cellar.
Cobb slit his throat.
So the schoolhouse blazed in that hot, arid country and the wind was that of pyres and crematories, the sun melting like a coin of yellow wax in the cloudless sky above.
Sweat ran down Cobb’s face like tears, cutting clean trails through the ground-in dirt. His eyes were wide and unblinking, red-rimmed like the boundaries of hell. A pink worm of a tongue licked salt from his lips. He could hear the sounds of the shouting and shrieking within. Flames had engulfed one side of the schoolhouse now and were greedily licking up another. Inside…old men, women, children. Pounding and screeching to be let out.
There was a sudden wild, roaring sound and the entire schoolhouse was engulfed. It didn’t take much. The wood was dry as tinder, caught flame like matchsticks. Smoke twisted in the air, black belching funnels of it. It stank of charred wood, cremated flesh and singed hair.
The screaming and pounding was dying out now.
“ Just about all fried up, I reckon,” Jones said, scratching at his crotch.
A few flaming forms burst from the inferno now, stick figures swallowed in yellow and orange flame. They stumbled about, arms waving about crazily. If it hadn’t been so profane, it might have been comical. Volunteers opened up on them dropping them as danced through the doorway. More followed. Anything, anything to escape the flames. The volunteers fired, primed and loaded, fired again.
A final form came running with a weird, jerking gait, flames licking from it in flickering plumes. It carried something. Cobb figured it was a mother carrying her child.
He held his hand up.
The volunteers did not fire.
She made it maybe ten, fifteen feet, collapsed in a smoldering heap. Cobb watched her until the fire died out and she was just a folded-up, blackened window dummy, her flesh falling away in cinders. She and the child had been melted together in a roasted mass. Their faces were incinerated skulls. The smoke that came from them was hot and stinking.
Within an hour, as the volunteers sat around drinking mescal and chewing on tortillas looted from the adobes, the schoolhouse had fallen into itself in a jackstraw tumble of soot and blackened beams.
There was nothing left.
After a time, the volunteers burned the church and dynamited the adobes until there was nothing left to mark the village of Del Barra but embers and smoke and the stink of death.
And that’s how they left it.
But, of course, the war had to come to an end.
After Monterrey and Camargo, Buena Vista and Vera Cruz, Cerro Gordo and Palo Alto, the Mexicans, beaten and weary and just simply tired of the carnage, signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the war ended.
The Americans filtered back into Texas and New Mexico.
Some were grateful that it had come to an end.
Others just went looking for another fight.
James Lee Cobb went looking for something, too…he just wasn’t sure what.