Contention and Other Frontier Stories Read online

  “With what?” Theodore looked at the rucksack and saddle at Hicks’s feet. “You’ve brought no rifle.”

  “I had to leave my daddy’s Winchester behind. We got a coyote problem.”

  Theodore grinned. It didn’t seem possible for so many teeth to fit in one man’s mouth. “Fortunately, we have more rifles than coyotes.” He bent to the crate on the floor.

  The firing range was a level area that still bore signs of having been used for racing horses, and probably would be again when the regiment shipped out and the park returned to being a fairgrounds. Bales of straw stood some hundred yards’ distant, spaced out at ten-foot intervals, with paper targets fixed to them. The carbine he’d been handed, called a Krag-Jorgensen, was heavier than the repeater he was used to and required reloading after every shot. He swung it up to his shoulder, then down to his waist, then up again, accustoming himself to the heft and balance. The bolt-action loading mechanism was simple; from his pocket he drew four finger-length cartridges he’d been given, slammed one into the breech, and planted each of the other three between the fingers of his left hand. With the two officers standing behind him, he took quick aim on the first bale to the left, fired, ejected the spent shell, replaced it with a fresh cartridge, aimed and fired at the next bale to the right, and repeated his actions rapidly, hesitating only to sight in, spending the rest of his ammunition on the next two bales in line. He lowered the smoking weapon.

  Theodore stepped forward, squinting through his glasses. “Leonard?”

  The other officer remained where he was. “Four bull’s-eyes in ten seconds.” His voice displayed no more excitement than if he were tallying cows.

  “Bully!” Theodore seized Hicks’s free hand and pumped it. “We have our sharpshooter.”

  “Thank you, Mr.—uh, Theodore.”

  The grin vanished. “Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt, soldier,” he said. “Sir, when brevity’s more convenient.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “The same goes for you, Lieutenant Colonel,” said the other officer. Looking at Hicks: “Colonel Wood, private. Sir at all times. If this war is to be won, it must be waged with dispatch.”

  Military life required sacrifice. He was forced to trade the stock saddle he’d carried all the way from Del Rio for a McClellan supplied by the War Department, a nut-pincher from the look of it, with its oval-shaped hole plumb in the center, and for a cowboy born to the stirrups, all that marching on foot was pure-dee humiliating and dumb to boot, because they always ended up where they’d started. But he liked most of the men he bunked with in his barracks tent—the tenderheels especially, who held him a hero for his horsemanship—and even theYankee saddle turned out to be as comfortable as a parlor chair when you adjusted the stirrups low so that you rode damn near standing up. Even the leather-tough recruits whose wilderness experience had inspired the creation of this cavalry admired his performance on the firing range. The Rough Riders had cured him of homesickness by becoming his second family. At the end of his first week of training—sore, sunburnt, and tuckered from hair to heels, Spencer Hicks lay on his bunk with his hands behind his head, humming “There’ll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” until he slept.

  The second train ride of his life was a damn sight more pleasant than the first. He got to sit on a cushioned seat, and to sleep with both eyes closed without having to watch out for the bulls. Even so, the griping of his fellow troops was a constant annoyance. Invasive coal-smoke from the stack didn’t discriminate between stock cars and passenger cars; the air sweltered worse as they rattled closer to end-of-track in Tampa, Florida; and a two-day trip for most trains ran double the length for all the stops they had to make to unload, feed, and water the horses. The frontier veterans were as bad as all the rest, and even the welcome interruption of patriotic townsmen and -women who came aboard at major stops to ply the heroes with homegrown treats were met with poor grace by the owners of the more blackened faces.

  And in Houston, New Orleans, Mobile, Tallahassee, and dozens of whistle-stops along the southern route, what seemed to be the same band of brass, strings, and percussion stood on platforms playing that same minstrel tune.

  “I’ll give ’em a hot time up the ass next time,” grumbled a man late of the Arizona Rangers.

  Hicks did his best to make up for such rude behavior. He feasted on hot apple and mincemeat pies, fresh tomatoes, steaming hunks of bread, and ripe pears, washed them down with milk, and touched his hat to achingly pretty girls in hoop skirts and wide-brimmed straw hats. They blushed for the lantern-jawed boy without a whisker to his name and curtseyed, leaving him with a memory of décolletage that he reckoned would see him through many a sultry Cuban night.

  Fortunately for his heroic status with the public, no civilians were on hand to hear his opinion of the seagoing life. He shared an armed troop transport, an ugly black ironclad christened the Yucatan, with men, horses, and lice, sleeping in a hold as dark as a root cellar but a hell of a lot more close. It stank of manure, urine, oil, sweat, and tobacco spit, and though the ship was bigger than four barns, the ocean was bigger, pitching it up and down and from side to side, sometimes all at once, until the stench of puke overwhelmed all the others.

  “Is it always like this?” he asked a crewman, who smoked a corncob pipe while Hicks unfolded himself from the topside railing, wiping bile from his lips.

  “Just till the sea gets rough.”

  They dropped anchor at last in Santiago Bay and rowed to shore in boats. The march to Santiago was torturous. Swarms of mosquitoes seemed to swim in the sopping heat, gorging themselves on human blood. The jungle foliage, penetrable only on foot, was suffocating, closing in tighter and tighter until the troops could proceed only in single file. When it opened, they gazed at what appeared at first to be a line of boulders at the top of a steep ridge; stone breastworks built to conceal rifle pits. Hicks barely had time to digest this information when something that was not a mosquito whined past the column of men and whacked into a palm trunk. By the time the report came, every man was on his face.

  Smitty, the man sprawled closest to him, swore. “The sarge wasn’t kidding about them Mausers. You’re dead before you hear the shot.”

  Hicks didn’t reply. He was shaking so bad he was sure anything he said would come out gibberish.

  The men under attack returned fire; all, it seemed, except Hicks. He let his carbine slide to the ground and buried his face in the dirt. Compared to the dreadful buzz of the Spaniards’ high-powered slugs and the crack of the enemy reports, the thudding of the Krags struck him as primitive, and woefully inadequate.

  What good were bullets against stone forts? The Mauser fire came down the face of the slope like a hail of comets. He felt Smitty jump; they were huddled that close. He lifted his head and saw a boy with his mouth open as if he’d been picked on in class by his teacher: It formed an O, with a smaller O in the center of his forehead. Then the face was gone, down in the dirt to stay.

  Someone grabbed his shoulder. He shouted, sure he’d been hit. Colonel Wood was there, his face inches from his. He hadn’t heard him crawling his direction. The calm unflappable commander of San Antonio was gone. He looked enraged.

  “Look alive, Hicks! That sharpshooter to the far left is worse than the whole damn Spanish regiment put together. He’s cutting us to ribbons.”

  He knew he was supposed to say “Yes, sir.” His jaw fell open and wobbled there as if it was broken. Nothing came out.

  Wood’s hand mangled his shoulder. “Get hold of yourself! Show these bastards some of what you showed us in San Antonio!”

  The man was giving him some kind of order; the tone was unmistakable, but the words meant nothing.

  “Hicks!” He shook him. The man’s fingers seemed to meet in the flesh of his shoulder.

  Hicks tried to swallow, but it was as if a rock were lodged in his throat. Somehow, he got his fingers around the grip of his Krag and dragged it up to his shoulder, the motion shaking himself l
oose of the officer’s grasp.

  “Colonel! Colonel!” A high-pitched voice: Roosevelt’s. The colonel twisted his head that way, looked again at Hicks, and gave him a push as if he were throwing the man away. He reversed directions and crawled toward the source of the shout.

  The sharpshooter on the ridge showed himself whenever he took aim. He wore a ridiculous tall hat with a plume; in another mood, Hicks would be tempted to pluck it off his head. He managed to swallow this time, nearly choking, swept a sleeve across his eyes, which stung with sweat and tears, and lined up his sights on the smear of face beneath the tall hat; but his eyes blurred and his hands shook.

  And still the bullets came, singing like gleeful witches in a terrifying bedtime story. He heard the noise when they struck flesh, heard men grunt and gasp as if from simple surprise. He thought of the unbelieving expression on Smitty’s face, and in his blindness, was sure the man on the ridge was drawing a bead on him. He let go of his weapon and buried his face again in the earth, sobbing.

  But the relentless fire from the Rough Riders broke the Spaniards’ lines. They retreated behind the ridge and their rocky trenches fell into American hands. Hicks, encouraged by the silence from the other side, retrieved his Krag and struck a vigilant pose with the stock against his shoulder, offering the promise of cover to those cavalrymen bold enough to lead the charge on the run. (Troops trained to horse, but attacking on foot: No, nothing about this war confirmed the anecdotes he’d heard.) He waited until the first wave had taken the ridge before rising and trotting along at the rear of the column.

  Luck was with him yet. Roosevelt’s summons to Wood had spared Hicks the humiliation of being seen to wither before the enemy. As far as the colonel knew, he’d traded shots with the sharpshooter above, and perhaps had even killed him. The wisest course was not to boast; even, if asked, to profess ignorance of the results of his efforts and be thought modest.

  And await the moment when no one was watching and his path to survival was clear.

  With the sun setting, the force pitched tents on a patch of level ground beyond the ridge, and with sentries posted, ate their rations and set coffee pots boiling on flat rocks provided by dismantled breastworks. Those who had not lost friends in the skirmish amused themselves recounting the details, playing jew’s-harps and mouth organs, burning the soporific mosquitoes with their cigarette ends, and swapping plugs of chewing tobacco.

  Taps sounded. Hicks unrolled his bed and crawled into it. Men were still winding down. Their voices rode like dogwood blossoms on the night air.

  “Hear about Isbell?” he heard someone ask.

  “Nope. Who’s he?” someone else said.

  “Half-breed injun cowboy with Fish’s Company L. Shot him a spick and afore he could duck got hit seven times.”

  “Dead?”

  “Not yet. But if he pulls through, his war-dancing days are sure enough over.”

  “I heard Fish bought it.”

  “Straight through the heart, they say.”

  “That’s the ticket.”

  “Amen, brother.”

  Others shared Hicks’s tent. He stuffed his blanket in his mouth and blubbered silently into the coarse wool.

  When he was wept out, he lay still as death, listening for quiet. The last of the voices had ceased, wood crackled and hissed; the embers dying, the snoring began. Yet he waited, forcing himself to count to a thousand, then slid from under his covers, testing the earth for loose pebbles with the sole of a boot before trusting his weight to it. Standing, he lifted his carbine. His kit could stay behind, but if he were seen without his weapon, his intention would be clear. If challenged, he could say that he was going to the latrine and if the direction was wrong, that he’d gotten turned around in the dark of Cuba at night. Holding his breath, he ducked out through the flap.

  “Hicks, isn’t it?”

  He almost cried out. A bulky figure blocked the stars in a human-shaped patch just yards from the tent. What light there was made perfect circles of the man’s spectacles.

  “Yes, sir!” He saluted.

  “Belay that, Trooper.” Roosevelt’s recently departed position as Assistant Secretary of the Navy had adulterated his army vocabulary. “I don’t want to have to remind you in broad daylight not to salute me. One of your Spanish counterparts would take it as a license to shoot an officer.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Colonel Wood told me of your performance today.”

  His heart thudded. He thought it would burst through his chest.

  “We were all shaken at the start. Quite natural in one’s first engagement with the enemy. He says you gathered yourself together despite that. Were you as successful at shooting Spaniards as straw bales?”

  “I—I’m unsure, Colonel. It was all a fog.”

  A tropical bird made a sound like hysterical laughter. All else was silence. Then: “It was indeed. Nevertheless, every man did his duty. What brings you outside?”

  “Um, I have to make water.”

  “Be alert as you do so. I’m told the Spanish sharpshooters like nothing better than to station themselves within range of our latrines.” Something brighter than the lenses of his spectacles flashed in the starshine: Roosevelt’s famous grin. “Carry on, Trooper.”

  He stood there minutes after the officer moved away, then ducked back inside. When he did have to urinate, he would do so in his bedding. If anyone noticed anything in the morning, he’d pass it off as sweat.

  Opportunity came, ironically enough, when he was back in danger.

  With the greatest reluctance, Roosevelt had been forced to agree with Wood that horses were useless in jungle fighting. They were left behind, and from then on the Rough Riders would walk.

  They crossed the San Juan River—really not much more than a creek, ankle-deep as it was—and up yet another steep slope, with a blockhouse at the summit, pierced at regular intervals with firing ports. Directly the Americans moved within sight of it, the volley began. The terrible hornet-like Mauser bullets shrilled, clipping the leaves of trees and bringing pieces down all around like snow. Again, the foot cavalry dove to earth. On a sudden inspiration, Hicks wrapped his carbine in his arms and rolled, putting the decline to use, taking himself away from the fire and his regiment. It was like his leap from the train all over again outside San Antonio a hundred years ago; only now he was rolling away from glory rather than toward it. And like that leap it ended abruptly, in a jarring halt, this time against a fallen trunk.

  Once again, his lungs were empty, but instead of waiting while they refilled, he ran, gasping for breath, in the general direction of Santiago Bay. He ran as if in a dream, or underwater, his legs churning in exasperating slow motion. He lifted his carbine to his chest with both hands, to throw it away and rid himself of the weight.

  “¡Yanqui! ¿Que pasa?”

  He stopped, swinging in the direction of the shout. A Cuban irregular, fighting with the Americans, stood eight feet from him, dressed all in white with a palm-leaf sombrero and bandoliers of ammunition crossing his torso in an X. The man was armed with one of the old-fashioned Springfield rifles the War Department had distributed to the rebels, but it was not raised. It dangled at the end of his hand.

  Hicks’s reflexes were accelerated by the madness of fear. He swung his Krag by the barrel, striking the Cuban across the left temple with the flat of the stock. It made a sickening crunch and the man pivoted at the knees and fell to his side. The American broke back into a run, leaping over the fallen man and stumbling down and down the hill in the opposite direction the Rough Riders were charging. Down and down.

  He stood exhausted, starved, mosquito-bitten, and drenched with sweat on a rise overlooking Santiago Bay, where troop ships lay at anchor showing rust stains in bands above the waterlines, which had changed with the unloading of horses, mules, artillery, small arms, and ammunition. Some of them, he knew, would be steaming home with casualties, including the wounded and the slain, the latter sealed in boxes sta
cked in the holds. His perspiration chilled him like a jacket of ice at the thought that he could have been one of them, blinded or maimed or stretched out in eternal darkness.

  A clapboard storage shack had a single window to illuminate the interior. He studied his reflection in a pane. Having shed himself of his carbine, tunic, and campaign hat, he could pass for a civilian—he hoped; one of the nonmilitary American residents recruited as laborers during the expedition. He hadn’t enough of the tongue to communicate with the natives, so passed several Cubans at work or smoking cigars on a break and came finally to a beer-gutted Yankee with a red face and a tobacco bulge in one cheek, sitting atop a piling and drinking beer from a brown bottle.

  “I got a message for the next ship heading to the states,” he said. “I forgot the name.” He put on an anxious expression.

  The man belched and looked at him with red rheumy eyes. “You ain’t the only idiot caught up in this mess. If them Spanish was half-smart, they’d of won this war in a week.”

  “Please, do you know which one’s about to leave?”

  “That’d be the Savannah.” The neck of the bottle pointed at a craft wallowing a few hundred yards offshore. “Sails with the tide.”

  “How can I get out there?”

  The bottle pointed a different direction. “That dinghy’s headed out with a fresh load from the troop hospital. You can catch her if you don’t stumble.”

  He was prepared to repeat the messenger story, but a squad of medics was too busy helping the walking wounded and carrying others in stretchers down a flight of steps to notice when he slid into the sixteen-foot boat and took a seat in the stern.

  This time the motion of the waves exhilarated the passenger. He was heading in the right direction, away from pestilential vermin, relentless heat, blistering marches, and the grave. He knew the awful zeu zeu! of Mauser rounds would be with him always, haunting his nightmares for the rest of his life, but it was life!

  Cargo nets were employed to hoist the nonambulatory patients aboard the Savannah. In the commotion, he clambered up a rope ladder and followed others who were able to walk down a companionway to where an infirmary had been organized, with cots and hammocks provided. He sat on the deck in a corner out of the medics’ way, next to a sallow-looking trooper.