Haldeman, Joe - SS - Manifest Destiny.pdf - Joe Haldeman - przemosta

MANIFEST DESTINY

This is the story of John Leroy Harris, but I doubt that name means much to you unless

you're pretty old, especially an old lawman. He's dead anyhow, thirty years now, and

nobody left around that could get hurt with this story. The fact is, I would've told it a long

time ago, but when I was younger it would have bothered me, worrying about what people

would think. Now I just don't care. The hell with it.

I've been on the move ever since I was a lad. At thirteen I put a knife in another boy and

didn't wait around to see if he lived, just went down to the river and worked my way to St.

Louis, got in some trouble there and wound up in New Orleans a few years later. That's

where I came to meet John Harris.

Now you wouldn't tell from his name (he'd changed it a few times) but John was pure

Spanish blood, as his folks had come from Spain before the Purchase. John was born in

Natchitoches in 1815, the year of the Battle of New Orleans. That put him thirteen years

older than me, so I guess he was about thirty when we met.

I was working as a greeter, what we called a "bouncer," in Mrs. Carranza's whorehouse

down by the docks. Mostly I just sat around and looked big, which I was then and no fat, but

sometimes I did have to calm down a customer or maybe throw him out, and I kept under

my weskit a Starr pepperbox derringer in case of real trouble. It was by using this weapon

that I made the acquaintance of John Harris.

Harris had been in the bar a few times, often enough for me to notice him, but to my

knowledge he never put the boots to any of the women. Didn't have to pay for it, I guess; he

was a handsome cuss, more than six feet tall, slender, with this kind of tragic look that

women seem to like. Anyhow it was a raw rainy night in November, cold the way noplace

else quite gets cold, and this customer comes downstairs complaining that the girl didn't do

what he had asked her to, and he wasn't going to pay the extra. The kate came down right

behind him and told me what it was, and that she had too done it, and he hadn't said nothing

about it when they started, and you can take my word for it that it was something nasty.

Well, we had some words about that and he tried to walk out without paying, so I sort of

brought him back in and emptied out his pockets. He didn't even have the price of a drink on

him (he'd given Mrs. Carranza the two dollars but that didn't get you anything fancy). He

did have a nice overcoat, though, so I took that from him and escorted him out into the rain

head first.

What happened was about ten or fifteen minutes later he barges back in, looking like a

drowned dog but with a Navy Colt in each hand. He got off two shots before I blew his

brains out (pepperbox isn't much of a pistol but he wasn't four yards away) and a split

second later another bullet takes him in the lungs. I turned around and everybody was on the

floor or behind the bar but John Harris, who was still perched on a stool looking sort of

interested and putting some kind of foreign revolver back into his pocket .

The cops came soon enough but there was no trouble, not with forty witnesses, except for

what to do with the dead meat. He didn't have any papers and Mrs. Carranza didn't want to

pay the city for the burial. I was for just taking it out back and dropping it in the water, but

they said that was against the law and unsanitary. John Harris said he had a wagon and

come morning he'd take care of the matter. He signed a paper and that satisfied them.

First light, Harris showed up in a fancy landau. Me and the driver, an old black, we

wrestled the wrapped-up corpse into the back of the carriage. Harris asked me to come

along and I did.

We just went east a little ways and rolled the damned thing into a bayou, let the gators

take it. Then the driver smoked a pipe while Harris and me talked for a while.

Now he did have the damnedest way of talking. His English was like nothing you ever

heard—Spanish his mother tongue and then he learned most of his English in Australia—

but that's not what I really mean. I mean that if he wanted you to do something and you

didn't want to do it, you had best put your fingers in your ears and start walking away. That

son of a gun could sell water to a drowning man.

He started out asking me questions about myself, and eventually we got to talking about

politics. Turns out we both felt about the same way towards the U.S. government, which is

to say the hell with it. Harris wasn't even really a citizen, and I myself didn't exist. For good

reasons there was a death certificate on me in St. Louis, and I had a couple of different sets

of papers a fellow on Bourbon Street printed up for me.

Harris had noticed that I spoke some Spanish—Mrs. Carranza was Mexican and so were

most of her kates—and he got around to asking whether I'd like to take a little trip to

Mexico. I told him that sounded like a really bad idea.

This was late 1844, and that damned Polk had just been elected promising to annex

Texas. The Mexicans had been skirmishing with Texas for years, and they said it would be

war if they got statehood. The man in charge was that one-legged crazy greaser Santa Anna,

who'd been such a gentleman at the Alamo some years before. I didn't fancy being a gringo

stuck in that country when the shooting started.

Well, Harris said I hadn't thought it through. It was true there was going to be a war, he

said, but the trick was to get in there early enough to profit from it. He asked whether I'd be

interested in getting ten percent of ten thousand dollars. I told him I could feel my courage

returning.

Turns out Harris had joined the army a couple of years before and got himself into the

quartermaster business, the ones who shuffle supplies back and forth. He had managed to

slide five hundred rifles and a big batch of ammunition into a warehouse in New Orleans.

The army thought they were stored in Kentucky and the man who rented out the warehouse

thought they were farming tools. Harris got himself discharged from the army and

eventually got in touch with one General Parrodi, in Tampico. Parrodi agreed to buy the

weapons and pay for them in gold.

The catch was that Parrodi also wanted the services of three Americans, not to fight but to

serve as "interpreters"—that is to say, spies—for as long as the war lasted. We would be

given Mexican citizenship if we wanted it, and a land grant, but for our own protection we'd

be treated as prisoners while the war was going on. (Part of the deal was that we would

eavesdrop on other prisoners.) Harris showed me a contract that spelled all of this out, but I

couldn't read Spanish back then. Anyhow I was no more inclined to trust Mexicans in such

matters than I was Americans, but as I say Harris could sell booze to a Baptist.

The third American was none other than the old buck who was driving, a runaway slave

from Florida name of Washington. He had grown up with Spanish masters, and not as a

field hand but as some kind of a butler. He had more learning than I did and could speak

Spanish like a grandee. In Mexico, of course, there wasn't any slavery, and he reckoned a

nigger with gold and land was just as good as anybody else with gold and land.

Looking back I can see why Washington was willing to take the risk, but I was a damned

fool to do it. I was no rough neck but I'd seen some violence in my seventeen years; that

citizen we'd dumped in the bayou wasn't the first man I had to kill. You'd think I'd know

better than to put myself in the middle of a war. Guess I was too young to take dying

seriously—and a thousand dollars was real money back then.

We went back into town and Harris took me to the warehouse. What he had was fifty

long blue boxes stenciled with the name of a hardware outfit, and each one had ten Hall

rifles, brand new in a mixture of grease and sawdust.

(This is why the Mexicans were right enthusiastic. The Hall was a flintlock, at least these

were, but it was also a breech-loader. The old muzzle-loaders that most soldiers used,

Mexican and American, took thirteen separate steps to reload. Miss one step and it can take

your face off. Also, the Hall used interchangeable parts, which meant you didn't have to find

a smith when it needed repairing.)

Back at the house I told Mrs. Carranza I had to quit and would get a new boy for her.

Then Harris and me had a steak and put ourselves outside of a bottle of sherry, while he

filled me in on the details of the operation. He'd put considerable money into buying

discretion from a dockmaster and a Brit packet captain. This packet was about the only boat

that put into Tampico from New Orleans on anything like a regular basis, and Harris had the

idea that smuggling guns wasn't too much of a novelty to the captain. The next Friday night

we were going to load the stuff onto the packet, bound south the next, morning.

The loading went smooth as cream, and the next day we boarded the boat as paying

passengers, Washington supposedly belonging to Harris and coming along as his

manservant. At first it was right pleasant, slipping through a hundred or so miles of bayou

country. But the Gulf of Mexico ain't the Mississippi, and after a couple of hours of that I

was sick from my teeth to my toenails, and stayed that way for days. Captain gave me a

mixture of brandy and seawater, which like to killed me. Harris thought that was funny, but

the humor wore off some when we put into Tampico and him and Washington had to off-

load the cargo without much help from me.

We went on up to Parrodi's villa and found we might be out of a job. While we were on

that boat there had been a revolution. Santa Anna got kicked out, having pretty much

emptied the treasury, and now the moderado Herrera was in charge. Parrodi and Harris

argued for a long time. The Mexican was willing to pay for the rifles, but he figured that

half the money was for our service as spies.

They finally settled on eight thousand, but only if we would stay in Tampico for the next

eighteen months, in case a war did start. Washington and I would get fifty dollars a month

for walking-around money.

The next year was the most boring year of my life. After New Orleans, there's just not

much you could say about Tampico. It's an old city but also brand new. Pirates burnt it to

the ground a couple of hundred years ago. Santa Anna had it rebuilt in the twenties, and it

was still not much more than a garrison town when we were there. Most of the houses were

wood, imported in pieces from the States and nailed together. Couple of whorehouses and

cantinas downtown, and you can bet I spent a lot of time and fifty bucks a month down

there.

Elsewhere, things started to happen in the spring. The U.S. Congress went along with

Polk and voted to annex Texas, and Mexico broke off diplomatic relations and declared war,

but Washington didn't seem to take notice. Herrera must have had his hands full with the

Carmelite Revolution, though things were quiet in Tampico for the rest of the year.

I got to know Harris pretty well. He spent a lot of time teaching me to read and write

Spanish—though I never could talk it without sounding like a gringo—and I can tell you he

was hellfire as a teacher. The schoolmaster used to whip me when I was a kid, but that was

easier to take than Harris's tongue. He could make you feel about six inches tall. Then a few

minutes later you get a verb right and you're a hero.

We'd also go into the woods outside of town and practice with the pistol and rifle. He

could do some awesome things with a Colt. He taught me how to throw a knife and I taught

him how to use a lasso.

We got into a kind of routine. I had a room with the Galvez family downtown. I'd get up

pretty late mornings and peg away at my Spanish books. About midday Harris would come

down (he was staying up at the General's place) and give me my daily dose of sarcasm.

Then we'd go down to a cantina and have lunch, usually with Washington. Afternoons,

when most of the town napped, we might go riding or shooting in the woods south of town.

We kept the Galvez family in meat that way, getting a boar or a deer every now and then.

Since I was once a farm boy I knew how to dress out animals and how to smoke or salt meat

to keep it. Sra. Galvez always deducted the value of the meat from my rent.

Harris spent most evenings up at the villa with the officers, but sometimes he'd come

down to the cantinas with me and drink pulque with the off-duty soldiers, or sometimes just

sit around the kitchen table with the Galvez family. They took a shine to him.

He was really taken with old Dona Dolores, who claimed to be over a hundred years old

and from Spain. She wasn't a relative but had been a friend of Sra. Galvez's grandmother.

Anyhow she also claimed to be a witch, a white witch who could heal and predict things and

so forth.

If Harris had a weakness it was superstition. He always wore a lucky gold piece on a

thong around his neck and carried an Indian finger bone in his pocket. And though he could

swear the bark off a tree he never used the names of God or Jesus, and when somebody else

did he always crossed the fingers of his left hand. Even though he laughed at religion and I

never saw him go in a church. So he was always asking Dolores about this or that, and

always ready to listen to her stories. She only had a couple dozen but they kept changing.

Now I never thought that Dolores wasn't straight. If she wasn't a witch she sure as hell

thought she was. And she did heal, with her hands and with herbs she picked in the woods.

She healed me of the grippe and a rash I picked up from one of the girls. But I didn't believe

in spells or fortune-telling, not then. When anybody's eighteen he's a smart Alec and knows

just how the world works. I'm not so sure anymore, especially with what happened to

Harris.

Every week or so we got a newspaper from Monterrey. By January I could read it pretty

well, and looking back I guess you could say it was that month the war really started,

though it would be spring before any shots were fired. What happened was that Polk sent

some four thousand troops into what he claimed was part of Texas. The general was Zach

Taylor, who was going to be such a crackajack president a few years later. Herrera seemed

about to make a deal with the States, so he got booted out and they put Paredes in office.

The Mexicans started building up an army in Monterrey, and it looked like we were going

to earn our money after all.

I was starting to get a little nervous. You didn't have to look too hard at the map to see

that Tampico was going to get trouble. If the U.S. wanted to take Mexico City they had the

choice of marching over a couple thousand miles of mountains and desert, or taking a Gulf

port and only marching a couple hundred miles. Tampico and Vera Cruz were about the

same distance from Mexico City, but Vera Cruz had a fort protecting it. All we had was us.

Since the Civil War, nobody remembers much about the Mexican one. Well, the

Mexicans were in such bad shape even Taylor could beat them. The country was flat broke.

Their regular army had more officers than men. They drafted illiterate Indians and mestizos

and herded them by the thousands into certain death from American artillery and cavalry—

some of them had never even fired a shot before they got into battle. That was Santa Anna

economizing. He could've lost that war even if Mexico had all the armies of Europe

combined.

Now we thought we'd heard the last of that one-legged son of a bitch. When we got to

Tampico he'd just barely got out of Mexico with his skin, exiled to Cuba. But he got back,

and he damn near killed me and Harris with his stupidity. And he did kill Washington, just

as sure as if he pulled the trigger.

In May of that year Taylor had a show-down up by Matamoros, and Polk got around to

declaring war. We started seeing American boats all the time, going back and forth out of

cannon range, blockading the port. It was nervous-making. The soldiers were fit to be tied—

Haldeman, Joe - SS - Manifest Destiny.pdf

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