On the distance

Laredo and its twin across the water lay half in dust, half in dream. On one shore, the banner of the Confederacy hung like a wound in the wind; on the other, the tricolor of Mexico wavered in the same heat. No man claimed the river between them, though both drank from it and cast their dead within its current.  The streets were mire and hoofprint, lined with cantinas where traders, smugglers, confederates and mercenaries spoke in tongues of loss.

By night, the levee burned with lantern light, and from the water rose laughter, gunfire, and the low prayer of beasts; each sound a psalm to the same god of want.  Between the two Laredos, the Río Bravo ran low and black, its surface broken by drifting cotton bales swollen with water. They moved downstream like corpses, pale and silent, and the smell of rot clung to the banks. The strong current bore south all things men sought to hold, and could not.

He stepped off the boat before it touched the dock, his boots sinking into mud that smelled of salt and smoke. He had ferried Confederates through this town before, many times, and the river had carried all their fortunes and failures alike. The smell of the cotton made him uneasy; it was always there, but today it seemed sharper, heavier.

A man came down the pier, riding the morning haze, and for a moment, he thought he recognized him. Maybe a Mexican officer or from the Union or maybe no one. He shrugged and moved on. There was always someone like that in these border towns: a shadow at the edge of things, who guided and vanished, leaving men to pay for what they thought was their own cunning.

News traveled slowly, but even here, men spoke in hushed voices of Appomattox; how General Lee had laid down his sword in Virginia, and the rebellion’s heart had finally broken. The word was that Union columns marched south now, closing on Brownsville to retake the last flickering holdouts on the border crossings. The gray coats in Laredo knew it, too; their cause undone, their future shrinking with every kilometer of blue advancing through the dust. Surrender hung in the air, heavy as the river mist, and every man sensed the world was shifting beneath his boots.

Everything was falling apart. The war had turned, and the men in gray were drifting with it; their destinies shaped by their hopeless ambition. Wreckage from recent skirmishes floated past: shards of wood, torn flags, and rusted sabres; a reminder of men who thought themselves immune to ruin. The Río Bravo carried the faint smell of iron and rot, of dreams gone sour. And somewhere, just at the edge of memory, there was that half-remembered presence; the one who had always been there, watching, turning men’s plans against themselves. Or perhaps it was only the fever talking. Either way, the river did not care, and neither did the world.

The Confederate officer appeared then, stumbling from the dock, clutching a satchel of gold that had no hope of saving him. His gray coat was torn, the brass dull beneath the dust, and the men behind him looked less like soldiers than ghosts still bound by habit. He looked through the river glare at the smuggler waiting by the flatboat with his crew, suspicion already hanging between them like heat. No words were needed; neither trusted the other, and yet the gold made liars of both.

The Río Bravo narrowed as the boat pushed down river, mud banks leaning close, reeds whispering against the hull. Empty crates and pallets drifted past, swollen, like corpses bobbing toward the sea. The Confederate officer leaned against a crate, sweating through his coat. Around him, six men shifted nervously, rifles across their laps. Each carried the same fevered hope: that the river, the smuggler , or some trick of luck might preserve what the war had left.

The smuggler eyed them all. He saw desperation dressed in worn gray, clutching gold that would bring nothing but death. These men, once proud at Palmito Ranch, thinking themselves the last wall against the inevitable; now moved as if the world had ended and left them behind. The officer’s gaze, hollow and restless, carried the memory of battles where hope was already a shadow. They lived in denial, clinging to stories and silence, not ready to hear how surrender had crossed the country like a slow wind. The war was finished, but in their faces, the smuggler saw men unready to bury its ghost.

The flat boat drifted loose first, and hours passed with little change after . The river bent sharp, hiding sandbars and snags beneath its ochre surface. Poles struck mud, then water, then wood, and the boat lurched forward a few meters before halting again. The current, weak here, whispered of patience, of inevitability, of all the men who had tried and failed to conquer it.

They worked through the night, torchlight flickering across the cotton bales, shadows moving like fever under the skin. Rats scuttled along the hull, unafraid. Somewhere far downriver , the marshes were thick with reeds and the promise of men waiting, hidden, watching.

The confederate posse huddled together, whispering, watching shadows. The smuggler thought he saw a figure at the edge of the reeds, unmoving, just beyond sight. He blinked ; gone. Only logs floated by, swollen and dark.

“You’ll need to keep your eyes on the river,” the smuggler said. “It tells you what walks here, and who’s already gone.”

The officers’s jaw tightened. He didn’t look away.
“I know these waters,” he said. “I’ve escaped worse. I’m not dying here.”

The smuggler watched him, silent. Puerto Bagdad drew men who believed themselves clever, certain they could outrun the current. But the war knew which way the tide had turned. It measured their pride, marked them for defeat, and held their names among those already lost for choosing the wrong side. The river carried every story, every scheme. Some things you didn’t say out loud; the desperation was in the air, and the water remembered all.

At night, the river swelled black and wide. Mist rolled off the water, curling like smoke from distant fires. By morning, the officer’s courage had gone dry. The marshes seemed to close in, reeds slapping the sides of the boat like fingers. The smuggler pushed the pole deeper, silently, always watching, always measuring. He knew the river, he knew the men, he knew the price that history always demanded.

He traveled with three fellow bandidos, friends in the river trade, men who trusted him to know the currents and keep them alive. Each carried a rifle, each carried greed, each carried fear. The bandidos and the Confederate soldiers eyed one another with suspicion, their alliances thin as river mist. Both camps were uneasy knowing that what bound them together was not loyalty, but the promise of gold. Greed twisted in the air between them, a fever neither side cared to admit, yet both suffered. In the hush before dawn, their hands hovered near weapons, their thoughts restless, each man wondering who might betray whom once the river’s secrets gave way to fortune.

A figure stood on the far bank: the Union Major, calm as a shadow at noon. He did not call out, only raised a small mirror that caught the sun and turned it toward them, a flicker of light that said more than words. Somewhere upriver, soldiers waited in the reeds and timber, guns laid across their knees, ready to close the river’s throat when the boat came through. He vanished behind the trees the moment the smuggler caught the flicker in his eyes ; as if he knew his signal had already been seen.

They drifted downriver in silence, listening to the occasional creak of the oars, the slap of reeds against the hull, the slow procession of cotton bales that drifted past like reminders of corpses. Insects and birds sang their lullabies under the rising sun, but the sound only sharpened the men’s nerves as the heat began to bite through their skin.

He thought of how the Major had drawn them into this. It had not been a request. He had cornered them weeks ago, at the edge of some nameless town in western Texas. 

The job had gone wrong before it began. They’d moved the cargo upriver under cover of night, thinking themselves unseen. Medicine, gunpowder, weapons; tribute for Colonel Benavides, who still believed the river could keep the Confederacy alive a little longer. He’d fought off the Yankees once at Laredo and thought the river would serve him again. But pride runs shallow, and the Union had been waiting.

Men fell first; sharp cracks in the dark, rifles cutting through shadows, screams swallowed by the marsh. The smuggler watched from behind the reeds as one by one his companions were cut down, or dragged screaming into the trees. Some he had known for years. All dead before the river.

And then the Major appeared, walking slowly, deliberate, as if the night belonged to him. Union troops marching behind him, rifles ready, but he carried nothing. Just his blue hat in his hand, the calm of a man who knew the world bent to his presence.

“You thought the night would hide you,” the Major said, his voice flat and final, echoing among the wounded. “But the night keeps nothing. It watches and remembers. Men are measured by darkness as by daylight, and none leave its judgment behind.”

The smuggler tightened his grip on his rifle. His hands shook, but he did not speak.

“I could have you all executed. It would please the law, and the law is only the shadow cast by power. But men are not ends; they are means. There is one I seek, a name the Union wants claimed. Until he is in my grasp, you are useful, and use is the only reprieve left to men in the path of history. Between the edge of death and the weight of purpose, men are swept along, never knowing which side of the tide will bear them away. Your value is measured only by what the current demands.”

Mercy, the smuggler thought, was only the illusion of shelter before the storm..

“You will take the bounty,” the Major said, his head angling toward the marshes where blue coats waited, silent as fate. “Guide me well. The one I seek is running with what’s left of value in this war: gold, secrets, the last breath of a dying cause. Men like you … who profit in the churn, are not condemned by me. You are the gears that turn in the shadow of every empire, the hands that sift through ruin and carry the spoils forward. The tide respects those who endure and adapt; it has no quarrel with the clever or the hungry. You serve the current, as we all do, and for a while, that keeps you alive. Refuse, and you’ll hang. But even the gallows are only another crossing, another cog in the machinery that grinds men down. In the end, law is driftwood; meaningless to the current and to the men it sweeps away.”

The smuggler looked at his friends, the ones who had survived the initial shots, their faces pale, sweat running in dark streaks through dirt and blood. Some nodded, some whispered prayers, some looked as if they had already died.

The major’s eyes rested on him, unblinking, patient. “You have until I count ten. One… two…”

By the time he reached ten, the smuggler had made his choice. He would guide the confederate party to the ambush. He would survive, and the others… some would follow, some would not. The dead already spoke of the cost, and the living were learning it too.

He knew the Major’s calm had never been kindness. It was power, absolute and inexorable. The memory of that calm slid back into him now, not as a dream but as a map; one that had guided feet and horses into a place where men were picked apart.

That season the river ran lower than any man could remember. Men muttered the current had turned against them, obeying some will older than flags. The low water showed more bank than river, more mud than passage, and the road to Puerto Bagdad ran through that exposed marshland.

When the boat scraped bottom, the officer ordered them ashore. They took the cargo to horses and led the beasts into the marshes on foot, dragging bales and crates as the major had planned. The smuggler’s knowledge of the flats had been the price of his bargain; the Major had used it to steer them toward the shallow zone where hoof and boot would bog and breath would shorten. It was not a channel the Major wanted, but a choke; an expanse of reeds and sucking mud before Puerto Bagdad where men could be made easy targets.

They moved into the marsh with the sun bearing down, boots sinking in silt, horses straining under cotton and barrels. Mosquitoes rose like a living thing; the air sat heavy with rot. Each step toward the mesquite groves pulled them deeper into a hollow that swallowed sound. The second detachment, the gray coats meant to meet them, came late; trudging through the same muck, their uniforms dark with water. The low river had stalled both parties and handed them, in turn, to the place the Major had chosen.

Mesquites stood like dark teeth along the hollow, reeds tall enough to hide waiting men. When the second Confederate detachment finally emerged from the reeds, their faces were worn and suspicious; comrades looked like strangers. The smuggler felt the ambush settle on him then, not as surprise but as the slow closing of a trap he had helped set.

The officer dismounted, boots dull with mud, sabre at his side. “You’re late,” he said. His voice cut the thick air. “The others have been waiting since noon.”

No one answered. Only the river whispered behind the reeds, slow and patient, though even that sound seemed diminished, as if it too were holding its breath.

“You’ll find the bales lighter than promised,” the officer continued, tossing a coin that caught the dying sun. “War strips us lean. But gold is still gold. Provided you prove yourselves worth it.”

One of the smugglers spat into the mud. “Worth more than the rags you’re wearin’.”

Pistols shifted. The grove constricted around them. For a heartbeat, the insects went quiet. The men felt the weight of something waiting; not in the reeds, not in the marsh, but above them, unseen. The smuggler stepped forward, slow. “Gold’s gold,” he said. “But we don’t bleed for your flag.”

The officer smiled thinly. “No,” he said. “You bleed for whoever payin..”

The wind died. The river stilled. And in that silence, they felt it: the presence of the inevitable, watching, calculating, certain. The drought that should not have been, the stillness in the air, the way even the birds waited; all of it bent to a will that was not their own.

Above the hollow, a hawk turned wide circles over the marsh. Then it veered west, and the first barrel of a colt cracked.

A bugle sounded from the reeds, shrill and ragged, and the grove erupted. Muzzles flared, white smoke boiling up in the dusk. The first gray coat fell backward with his throat gone, boots drumming the mud. Horses screamed and tore at their reins.

The smugglers scattered, cursing, pistols drawn too late. From the tree line surged the Union men; blue coats low in the reeds, rifles lifted, firing with measured calm. It was no brawl, no skirmish. It was slaughter.

The Confederate officer’s sabre caught light once, bright as a flare. He shouted his men into line, but they folded fast, gray cloth ripping under the hail of lead. The smugglers were caught between, some crying for quarter, others firing wild at whoever moved.

And then he came.

The Major stepped from the smoke like he’d been born of it, hat shadowing his eyes, colt revolver steady in one hand, saber in the other. He did not shout, nor run, nor flinch. His voice carried low, almost kind, as he walked among the dying.

“There is no salvation in rebellion,” he said, driving the sabre into a Confederate’s chest and wrenching it free. “Nor in profit without providence.”

A smuggler, wounded and crawling, looked up at him with blood in his teeth. “We took your bargain,” he rasped. “We chose…”

The Major looked down, calm amid the noise.
“You chose nothing,” he said. “I only granted an extension to a sentence already written.”

Then he drove the blade through his spine.

The Union men advanced with bayonets, their faces set and pale. But their commander’s hand moved quicker, calmer, swifter … like a teacher correcting errors, precise in his brutality. He fired once into the officer’s horse, and the beast shrieked, collapsing, crushing its rider. The Confederate clawed in the mud, saber still in hand, but the Union officer stood over him, revolver aimed down.

“Aint’ no mistakin’ you.. “, the officer said softly , with recognition. ” you ordered fire at Sumter”

The confederate officer spat mud and blood. “Traitor.”

The Major’s gaze lingered.
“It was your vanity and greed that drew me here,” he said, his voice measured, almost contemplative. “The war is done, but men like you refuse its ending. You run with your pride and your gold, believing yourself outside the reckoning. Ranks, uniforms… these are only names men give themselves, badges of borrowed power. The tide knows nothing of such things. History is a tapestry, and loose ends must be seen to. The flow doesn’t care for the shape of victory, only for completion. I find a certain art in it… the last strokes, the final judgments; because in the details, time finds its meaning. In the end, it is not the uniform that matters, but the settling of accounts.”

The revolver barked, and the word was buried in the earth with him.

All around, men begged. The bandidos who’d thought themselves clever, gray coats who’d dreamed of escape, all broken in the reeds.

The Major moved through the bodies, calm and deliberate, the air thick with powder and rot. He gave no ear to their pleas. One by one he ended them, the smuggler remained, crouched low among the roots where the marsh met the shallows .

The gold lay scattered among them, bright even in the mud, a fool’s sun for dying men. His eyes fixed on it gleaming through the smoke , close enough to reach, close enough to die for.

Then the rain came. Slow at first, then harder, till the marsh began to swell. Bodies rose, turning, the blood-stained cotton and horses drifting back toward the river’s pull.

He looked once more at the gold, at the dying light across the water, and turned away. The river was rising. He slid into the reeds and let the mud take him, and when the Union men passed, he was gone.

The Major’s boots sank slow in the mud as he approached the place where the man had been. He holstered his pistol, wiped his blade on his coat. His eyes lingered on the current ; not searching, not surprised, only measuring… as if the escape too had been part of the design. He stood watching the current claim the field. The rain hammered his hat brim, his coat soaked through, and the men beside him were gathering what they could: rifle, packs, coins, their dead comrades. He raised his hand.

“Leave it”, he said. “It belongs to the river now.”

He stepped closer to the bank, his face lit by the pale shimmer of lightning over the now flooding marshes . The men behind him hesitated, their burdens heavy. The Major spoke again, his voice low, shaped by the rain and the hiss of the water.

“Let it take what it’s owed. It has fed on men before, and it will again. Gray or blue, saint or sinner … all the same once they’re in its mouth.”

He paused, as if listening for the river’s answer.

“See how it takes them,” he said. “It remembers no flags, no vows, no names. It drinks all the same blood and makes no distinction. The water bears them away and leaves no record.”

The smuggler crawled deeper into the roots, pistol empty, lungs burning. He could still hear the Major’s voice, steady and unhurried, carried by the wind along the water.

The mud clung to his boots, heavy as guilt. He did not look back. The river would remember enough for both of them.

He felt a sickness stir in him, not of the body but of the soul. The river had taken all, and it would take more. Men came and went, their colors washing into one another until no border remained between sin and salvation. The Confederates had paid, the smugglers before them had paid, and he… he would pay too.

Not freedom, not guilt, not even life itself. Only debt. A debt the river remembered, a debt the Major whispered to it with words soft as smoke and cold as blood.

He rose, moving through the marsh, mud heavy on his legs, lungs burning, senses sharpened to the slow, patient pulse of the water. Behind him, the river pulled the dead, the gold, the sins ; all of it back toward its mouth. And somewhere in that endless flow, he felt the major’s presence, not as man but as measure, counting and weighing what had been given, what had been taken.

Around him, the marsh began to hum with the rain, the slow movement of the current, the faint groans of the dying slowly fading behind him.

He moved through it all, silent, careful, feeling the weight of inevitability settle into his bones. He understood now that the Major had not spared him; he had marked him. Not for mercy, but for recognition. For survival at the price of everything else.

He did not stop. He would not stop. And the river, patient as always, would carry what it must, leaving him to the debt he now understood he owed ; not gold, not glory, not even life, but the simple knowledge that it had all been taken, and he had survived.

He reached Linares by the turn of the next moon, bones aching, skin scorched by wind and sun, each step heavier than the last. Nights had offered no rest, only whispers of the river in the reeds, the ghosts of men he had left behind pressed into his shadow. The road seemed endless, each hill and hollow folding time into itself, and with every kilometer he felt the weight of the blood, the gold, and the silence he carried alone. By the time the town rose before him, he was not the man who had left the marshes … only a shadow moving through a land that had learned to forget.

The road wound through dry hills, thorn and dust, where the wind moved like a whisper through the bones of cattle left to bleach. He had not spoken in days. The sky above him was wide and pale, a lid over a land long emptied of grace.

Linares lay quiet at dusk, the bells of its church tolling slow. The sound carried down the narrow streets, through the jacarandas shedding purple on the stones. A few lanterns burned in the windows, dim and yellow, and the smell of tortillas drifted faintly from some back kitchen. It might have been a holy town once.

He entered it like a ghost.

At the cantina by the plaza, men looked up and looked away again. He took a corner seat, ordered mezcal, and drank in silence. When he caught his reflection in the bottle’s neck, he did not know the man staring back ; eyes sunken, face marked by something deeper than fatigue.

He thought of the Major; that calm voice, that hand tracing the water, the way the river seemed to bend toward his words.

It struck him now that the he was no man of sides. Not Union nor Rebel, not law nor outlaw. He was older than any of it. He merely walked where blood had already chosen to fall.

And the smuggler, by surviving, had joined his trail.

He left the cantina and walked to the church. Its doors stood open. Inside, candles burned before la virgen , and a priest knelt at the altar, his whisper lost in the echo of stone. The smuggler watched a long while, then crossed himself without knowing why.

He knelt too, but no prayer came.

What rose in him instead was the sound of the river; the slow, endless current that bore everything downstream, washing away trails of any men.

He realized then that the Major’s lesson had not been of mercy, but of order. That in the great account of things, survival was only postponement, and every man was drawn, in time, to pay his due.

Outside, a wind passed through the plaza, rattling the jacarandas. Petals fell like bruised rain across the stones.

He left the church and did not look back. Somewhere beyond in the border; the river still moved, dark and certain.

---

By the spring of sixty-seven, the smuggler had taken another name and another cause.

He wore the brown coat of Juárez’s army now, the badge of the republic pinned over a chest that had once borne no flag but hunger. They said the Empire was dying in Querétaro, that Maximilian himself was caged in the city, pale as a saint, waiting for the firing line. But men were still dying for him in the dust, and the trail of blood had only changed course.

His company waited outside the city, their campfires dim against the dry hills. He sat by one, cleaning his rifle, when a familiar voice came through the smoke … low, calm, and merciless in its certainty.

“You keep good habits,” the voice said.

He looked up, and there he was. The Major. No older. No younger. Same pale eyes, same stillness in the way he held himself ; as if the world turned slower around him. His coat was Juárez’s blue now, but the badge could not disguise what he was.

“I thought you’d be up in Washington,” he said.

The Majors’s lips curved faintly. “Still chasing men, I see… under new banners.”

Around them, the wind carried the noise of artillery from the city, the hollow boom and echo of walls dying.

“I knew I would see you again ,” the smuggler said.

The Major ’s eyes narrowed, a slow shadow across his face. “It was always coming. The river, the roads, the wind itself … they do not forget. Nor do I.”

The smuggler said nothing, the weight of that truth settling like dust in the smoke-choked air.

The Major looked toward the lights of Querétaro, the sky above it pulsing faintly with fire. “Another empire ending,” he said. “They fall the same, you know. Flags change, tongues change, but the men beneath them are the same flesh. The same greed. The same death.”

He turned to the smuggler. “Tell me, do you still carry gold?”

The smuggler’s hand clenched. “No, ya no.”

The Major nodded. “Good. You have learned, then, what cannot be kept.”

He stepped closer, his shadow falling over the man’s face. “But remember this: the tide takes all, and returns all. Men may think they escape, but the flow never forgets.”

The smuggler felt the chill in his chest again; the same as that day by the marshes of the Río Bravo. He looked at the Major and knew that whatever battle waited in Querétaro would not end anything. Not for him. Not for the world.

The Major turned away, heading toward the fires where Juárez’s troops gathered. The men hailed him as “Coronel.”

The smuggler watched him go, the shape of him swallowed by dust and smoke. He knew the tide had found its way back into war and that he, once again, would follow its current until it claimed what was owed.