“This is real food,” he said. “Real food at last. Come, come, Damon, Simon, eat. Mira, these tortillas just now from the comal, fresh masa made this morning. Gold.” He closed his eyes as he ate. “Al fin,” he said. “Volvi a la vida.” He handed around the dishes. “Just in a while I will get out the guitar. Then it is one varsoviana after another.” His smile was enormous over his pointed mustache and he had the shotgun leaning against the bench where he sat. “Eat, sit down, eat this.”

Damon and Doro and Simon barely had time to wrap food into tortillas and eat it before they found themselves onstage. The dancing seemed endless. Simon knew they were earning their pay. The tiny settlement was filled with people now, people from every other settlement and ranch outpost within thirty miles. Hispanic and Anglo, Mexican and American. There were men pointed out to him who came from Camargo, far down across the Rio Grande, near to where he had been involved in a battle. Who would miss out on old man Bradford’s daughter getting married to a bandit from Espantosa?

A racetrack of 440 varas had been cleared out in the brush and the races went on into the evening. The little horses spewed clods of dirt and horse manure in their blazing quick sprints, there was more firing into the air and yells, and the tables were covered with barbecue, huge square tamales with fillings of pork and chocolate.

They took a quick break to pour down a cup of the tart tamarind water. Doroteo stood with a pottery cup in his hand, watching the crowd.

“Come, here.” A young woman came to take Simon by the hand.

“My dear,” he said, smiling. “I am but putty in your hands.”

She led him to a skillet full of Spanish Dagger flowers, thick and creamy, being scrambled up with eggs. She took up a broad leaf from the wild grapevine and filled it and handed it to him. Simon ate it all with his fingers. Eating flowers. He walked away with his hand full of another grape leaf and a trembling yellow mound of flowers and egg that smoked in the cool evening air. The air was full of celebration, color, and noise. Men who had ridden in dusty and worn, their ammunition belts frayed and pistols shiny with use, had made themselves spanking clean and wore embroidered sashes in many colors.

When the musicians began their music again somebody broached the first keg of rum. Doro grounded his guitar and tossed down a glass, then started playing again, having missed only three measures. Then that keg was gone and another opened.

Over the noise Damon shouted, “A polka!”

Simon called out “Fire away!,” charged on into the finish of a reel, and then picked up the polka. The hair of his bow was becoming more and more ragged and as he played loose horsehair flew up in a wave. The dancers spun like tops, combining and parting and coming together again. They would dance all night.

Then he and Damon watched with astonishment as Doroteo laid down his guitar in its case, snapped it shut, stepped off the stand, and walked up to the girl with the tilted eyes. He swept off his hat and bowed to her.

She turned away.

All around people glanced at them. Doro placed one hand on her shoulder, turned her to face him, and began to speak. She lifted the hem of her long tunic and pretended to wipe off a stain—barbecue, meat drippings, a fleck of tamal. Doro spoke again, bending low to her.

Then after a moment he took her elbow. She resisted but he did not let go. Then they walked off, avoiding spinning couples and staring grandmothers, into the dusk.

A day later they left without him. He had gone, they said, to her people’s settlement west of the King Ranch headquarters, a place called San Diego. He went to make arrangements, they said. It involved another person, but when Damon pressed for details he was told not to ask or they got vague stories, one piled on another, with much contradiction. But Doroteo was not coming back.

Finally an elderly woman said, in perfect English, fanning herself, it was the girl’s fault. All hers. She had flirted with another man and out of a jealous rage Doroteo had joined Benavides’s Tejanos and ended up in the Battle of Palmito Hill. So there. Simon and Damon realized they had lost their guitar player into the hot and brushy country of the Nueces Strip, where he was at home, where his own drama would be played out and would come to its own end, an end they might never hear of. Rosillo harnessed his horses and gave them a ride to what was still known as the Cotton Road, at an hour of the early morning when it was yet dark.

So then it was just Simon and the dark man with his pennywhistle, on foot to San Antonio.

Chapter Eighteen

They started off going northwest. The road led them through small draws holding spreads of mesquite trees and a few live oaks, which came for water to these natural drainages like animals, filling every hollow with tangled branches and wicked greenbrier. The sky was clear almost every day now; the rains had fallen away and as the sun came up the sky was streaked with long clouds that stretched thin and fell apart.

As they walked Simon spoke of his determination to meet Doris Dillon, to present himself to her as a friend and a lover. A man who would take his place in her life for all the time to come. And San Antonio was nigh on a city, there would be work for them there. Damon listened, all his irony and cynicism laid aside, and said he would come along to just see what happened. In the greenest of our valleys, by good angels tenanted . . .

The road was a braided series of tracks where wagons had gone to one side or another during the rainy season to avoid holes and sinks, then coalesced again. Every once in a while they could see drifts of cotton that had fallen from the big bales during the war and had snagged up against thickets of prickly pear or Spanish Dagger. It was gray and webby now and birds had used it for nests, mice for their burrow linings.

Simon had the deed in his rucksack and the mortgage papers, signed and witnessed. They were going west and upriver, so the Nueces would become more and more clear as they traveled. He felt, despite the long slog on foot ahead of them, that he was getting somewhere. It seemed very precarious, true. The deal was only as good as his ability to enforce it. The girl was his if he could present his case and himself to advantage.

Damon said, “I’m too old for this.”

Simon slapped him on the shoulder. “My friend, you better not be too old for it, since this is the only way we’re getting to San Antonio.”

“What about horses?”

“What about them?”

“Wild horses are all over the place.”

“Even if we did catch some, how are we going to talk them into letting us ride them?”

“Music soothes the savage breast.”

“Who said that?”

“I have no idea. Let me try something else: ‘Within the heart do springs upstart . . . and strange, sweet dreams like silent streams that from new fountains overflow . . .’ What’s the first town we come to?”

“Now take note how I am not complaining about all these poetry quotes.” Simon bent forward against the weight of his pack with fine dusty little puffs surrounding his boots at every step. He knew that soon in the heat of the day his belt buckle would burn his stomach every time he bent over, but the slosh of his water bottle was like a voice telling him they would make it to the Nueces without falling on the wayside from thirst.

“I have,” said Damon. “I have taken note. What’s the first town?”

“Rosillo said we cross the Nueces and then we come to San Patricio. Maybe there’ll be some fountains overflowing there. Maybe a wagon convoy heading west, if we’re lucky.”

That night they secreted themselves in a motte of mesquite, bashing into the low limbs in search of some shelter at the heart of it, maybe a live oak, maybe a seeping chupadera spring. They were happy with what they found: a thick live oak with umbrella limbs. They sat beneath the branches and lit a small fire. It was enough to boil water for the last of their coffee. Simon lay back and listened to the galloping rhythms of Poe. There were dying gladiators and the Conqueror Worm, in human blood imbued. Then Damon picked up his C whistle and played a series of phrases that seemed beyond melodic structure or perhaps it was a thought he spun out note by note.