Cerveza para los Bandidos Una Más

Story by Sumit Vohra.

The newspapers called him a bandit. On the river they called him Don Juan, and the old women crossed themselves when they said it, the way you do for a saint who hasn't been made official yet.

His mother had held her land by a Spanish grant older than the town of San Lázaro. Doña Feliciana never learned to write. She signed every paper of her life with a cross, and the padre signed beside it as her witness. That was how it was done on the river, and everybody knew it.

Then the lawyers came, with English papers and a county court that met in English, and every year the line of her land moved a little closer to the house. By 1859 a lawyer named Harlan held a deed for most of it. Nobody on the river had seen it signed.

An old woman on the porch of a whitewashed ranch house by the river, a surveyor's red flag staked close to the house

In July, Juan rode into San Lázaro for coffee and saddle leather. In the plaza, Marshal Pruitt had an old man down in the dust and was beating him with the butt of a pistol. The old man was Anselmo, who had broken horses on Doña Feliciana's ranch for thirty years and had put Juan on his first pony.

The marshal raises his pistol over an old vaquero in the dust of the plaza while Juan watches from his horse

Juan told the marshal to stop. The marshal told Juan what he could do with himself, and with his mother.

Juan shot him once, in the shoulder.

Juan on horseback, his revolver just fired, the marshal stumbling back clutching his shoulder

He lifted Anselmo onto his horse, and they rode out of town at a walk. Nobody followed. Nobody wanted to be the first.

Juan rides out of town at a walk with old Anselmo in the saddle in front of him, the street watching

By morning there was a price on his head. By the end of summer, sixty riders had come to the ranch on the river. Vaqueros, farmers, a schoolteacher, two brothers who had lost the same field twice. Every one of them had a story about a line on a map that moved.

Riders arriving at the ranch on the river at dusk, a man in spectacles among them, Juan watching from the porch

Anselmo mended slowly in the shade of the porch. He didn't talk much. But one evening he asked to see the copy of Harlan's deed that the court had sent to Doña Feliciana, and he held it a long time.

"Your mother's name," he said. "Written out. Every letter."

Juan looked at it. Feliciana Montoya de Cárdenas, in a fine and careful hand. The hand of a woman who had never once in her life written her own name.

Old hands hold a deed signed with a flowing signature beside an old Spanish grant signed with a cross

On the last night of September, before dawn, sixty riders came into San Lázaro by three roads at once.

Before dawn, columns of riders with red sashes converge on a sleeping river town from three directions

They did not touch the bank. They took the jail, where four men from the river had sat for months without a judge, and the jailer chose not to argue. They took the land office, and the iron box under Harlan's desk, and the deed book inside it.

Juan lifts the deed book from an iron box under a desk while the jailer stands in the doorway with his hands raised

When the sun came up, the book was across the river, open on a table in front of a judge, a priest and half the town of Matamoros. Forty deeds. Thirty-one of them signed, in a fine and careful hand, by people who signed with a cross.

A judge and a priest study the open deed book in a town square across the river as the townspeople lean in

Juan nailed a paper to the church door before he left. It did not say death to anybody. It said that the law should be the law for everybody, and that until it was, the river would remember.

The newspapers in the north called it the raid of a red-bearded bandit. On the river, nobody corrected them.

That night the cantina on the Mexican bank was full. Juan came in last and sat with his back to the wall. The barkeep set down a beer for every rider at the table, and then one more, in front of the empty chair where Anselmo always sat.