• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1034 0

less volatile light. A rear guard of nine riflemen waited in the foothills for their return. When the waters left the men, they began to trot. They were sons of the Papigochic, partly descended from the great Tarahumara, and like the Tarahumara, the Tigers could run for hundreds of miles when they were hunting or at war, their dark carbines across their backs, muzzle down, tied on with string and rope. Machetes and long knives rode their hips, and leather water bottles and, for those who required comfort, a blanket to sleep in when they finally stopped beneath the stars. Their sandals had soles of leather, softened and dyed by immersion in human feces, tied to their feet by knotted rope. Like the Yaquis, they were Catholic, and they wore rough crosses around their necks. None of them had ever seen a tiger and no one knew where the name Tigre came from. But there it was.

Like their namesakes, they were silent, relentless, and deadly. Catholics who rejected Rome, they maintained an uneasy truce with the nomad Mexican priests who brought their endless circuit ride of masses and ceremonies through el norte. The Tigers still owed allegiance to a long-dead Jesuit who was said to fly over mountain passes, who could walk through a mile-high fin of pure stone and appear, an hour hence, in the next village down the mountains, a man who was reported in Navojoa and Tomóchic at the same time, on the same day. These stories the Tigers took as gospel, the medicine of Christ. If they had seen the messiah Niño Chepito in his Sal Si Puedes valley, they would have shot him.

The Tigers rejected the ways of the lowlanders. These Tomochitecos were farmers and silver miners and hunters and traders who answered to one man only—a fighter selected by the village, who was also their pastor and warrior chief. This man, part medicine man and part priest, interpreted scriptures for them, led the daily church services, and counseled the people in all matters great and small. He was the lawgiver and the judge, the religious leader and the war maker. He commanded the militia.

Cruz Chávez.

He could read, and he started every day with a scripture reading for all gathered. The women covered their heads, and the men carried rifles. Each man was expected to defend his family, his church, his village, and his crops, in that order. Each citizen of Tomóchic was free to offer an insight or opinion about that day’s Bible verse.

Cruz carried his Bible in a small backpack woven of wool. He was a righteous man, whose only vice was smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, though in that place tobacco was not known as a vice. He was a mighty guerrilla fighter, and he was told by the angels that he was the godliest man in Mexico. This led him to announce—it only made sense—that he was the acting Pope of the Mexican Republic, and as such, he was the final authority on all matters Mexican.

He was a tall man with a barrel chest. He wore a thick black beard, carried a Winchester repeater rifle everywhere he went. He had learned to read and write in his time away from the mountains, a time he considered wasted, except for the learning. He maintained a small milpa of corn, and he hunted deer for the village. He had three children. He was descended from Spaniards, but the people of Tomóchic did not hold that against him.

Cruz Chávez put up with Padre Gastélum, even though he found him rude. Not wishing to entirely alienate Gastélum, and loath to bring overmuch government attention down on their own heads, the Tigers invited him to give guest sermons. He leapt at the opportunity—and he bullied and lashed them when he took the pulpit, sometimes for over an hour. They were children; they must follow the orders of their fathers in Mexico City; they must come under the control of the Mother Church. Not surprisingly, it was his impassioned denunciation of Teresita—a heretical Indian half-breed, he exclaimed, fanatical enemy of the great General Díaz, consort of the warlike Yaquis—that first caught the Tigers’ interest.

When they came out of the trees, and then out of the foothills,