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

comfort than it gave me.
What we didn't find out until after the war was that Santa Anna got in touch with the
United States and said he could get Mexico to end the war, give up Texas and California
and for all I know the moon. Polk, who must have been one fine judge of character, gave
Santa Anna safe passage through the American blockade.
Well, in the meantime the people in Mexico City had gotten a belly full of Paredes, who
had a way of getting people he disagreed with shot, and they kicked him out. Santa Anna
limped in and they made him president. He double crossed Polk, got together another
twenty thousand soldiers, and got ready to head north and kick the stuffing out of the
gringos.
Now you figure this one out. The Mexicans intercepted a message to the American naval
commander, telling him to take Tampico. What did Santa Anna do? He ordered Parrodi to
desert the place.
I was all for the idea myself, and so were a lot of the soldiers, but the General was
considerable upset. It was bad enough that he couldn't stand and fight, but on top of that he
didn't have near enough mules and horses to move out all the supplies they had stockpiled
there.
Well, we sure as hell were going to take care of our supplies. Harris had a buckboard and
we'd put a false bottom under the seat. Put our money in there and the papers that identified
us as loyal Americans. In another place we put our Mexican citizenship papers and the
deeds to our land grant, up in the Mesilla Valley. Then we drew weapons from the armory
and got ready to go up to San Luis Potosi with a detachment that was leaving in the
morning.
I was glad we wouldn't be in Tampico when the American fleet rolled in, but then San
Luis Potosi didn't sound like any picnic either. Santa Anna was going to be getting his army
together there, and it was only a few hundred miles from Taylor's army. One or the other of
them would probably want to do something with all those soldiers.
Harris was jumpy. He kept putting his hand in his pocket to rub that Indian bone. That
night, before he went up to the villa, he came to the hacienda with me, and told Dolores he'd
had a bad premonition about going to San Luis Potosi. He asked her to tell his fortune and
tell him flat out if he was going to die. She said she couldn't tell a man when he was going
to die, even when she saw it. If she did her powers would go away. But she would tell his
fortune.
She studied his hands for a long time, without saying anything. Then she took out a
shabby old deck of cards and dealt some out in front of him, face up. (They weren't regular
cards. They had faded pictures of devils and skeletons and so forth.)
Finally she told him not to worry. He was not going to die in San Luis. In fact, he would
not die in Mexico at all. That was plain.
 Now I wish I had Harris's talent for shucking off worries. He laughed and gave her a gold
real, and then he dragged me down to the cantina, where we proceeded to get more than half
corned on that damned pulque, on his money. We carried out four big jars of the stuff,
which was a good thing. I had to drink half one in the morning before I could see through
the agony. That stuff is not good for white men. Ten cents a jug, though.
The trek from Tampico to San Luis took more than a week, with Washington riding in the
back of the buckboard and Harris and me taking turns riding and walking. There was about
two hundred soldiers in our group, no more used to walking than us, and sometimes they
eyed that buckboard. It was hilly country and mostly dry. General Parrodi went on ahead,
and we never saw him again. Later on we learned that Santa Anna court-martialed him for
desertion, for letting the gringos take Tampico. Fits.
San Luis Potosi looked like a nice little town, but we didn't see too damned much of it.