"Joe Haldeman - Manifest Destiny" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

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—
but old Dolores said there was nothing to worry about. Said she'd be able to "see" if there
was going to be fighting, and she didn't see anything. This gave Harris considerable more