As the Captain went about preparing to leave—they had bought a couple of extra rifles in Presidio, and the Captain took one of them and a good supply of ammunition—Pea Eye felt the same sadness tightening his throat that he felt at home when Lorena tried to assure him that his world wasn’t coming to an end.
Lorena could say that to him all she liked, but her saying it didn’t take away Pea Eye’s feeling that the world might be coming to an end anyway. As he grew older, he felt more keenly how hard it was to know anyone. Lorena and the Captain, in turn, let him stay with them and share their lives. But Lorena and the Captain were complete, in a way that he wasn’t, and being complete, they didn’t realize how partial he felt. He was not as good as they were, not as smart and not as strong. They might know him, but he felt he would never be much good at knowing them. Often, in bed at night, listening to Lorena breathe and feeling her body warming his, tears would come to his eyes, from the sense that he didn’t know his Lorena. He didn’t, and he never would. He felt grateful, though, that she was letting him stay with her, and glad that they had the children and the farm.
But it didn’t mean that the world wasn’t coming to an end, or that it wouldn’t.
Pea Eye didn’t attempt to tell the Captain how he felt, though. The Captain was preparing to leave, and he didn’t linger when he had someplace to go.
“I’ll meet you on the other side of the river,” Call said. “If I don’t have too much aggravation with Mox Mox, I wouldn’t think I’d be gone much more than a week.”
“Don’t neglect any killers,” Roy Bean admonished. He was swaddled in his buffalo robe, the cocked pistol still in his hand.
“You oughtn’t to leave that pistol cocked,” Pea Eye said, as they watched the Captain lope away to the east. “You might have a bad dream and jerk and shoot your knee off.”
“It might rain whores out of the sky, too, but I doubt it,” Roy Bean said.
11.
JOEY GARZA WATCHED Captain Call’s departure through a telescope he had taken off the train from San Angelo. The telescope had belonged to an old man with stringy gray hair, who protested so much when Joey took it that Joey shot him. He had not intended to kill anybody when he stopped the train; he’d only wanted to add to his treasures. If the old man had surrendered the telescope peacefully, Joey wouldn’t have killed him. The old man claimed to be a teacher. He said he taught about the stars, and needed the telescope in order to study the stars. He was bound for Fort Davis, where the stars were easier to see, or so he said. He offered to give Joey all his money if Joey would leave him the telescope.
“You see, I can’t get another, not in these parts,” the man said. “I had to send to England for this one.”
Joey thought he was just a disagreeable old man, so he shot him and took the telescope and the money, too. Apart from two or three good watches, the telescope was the only thing on that particular train that Joey felt was worth stealing. He hoped that by going east, closer to the cities of the Texans, he would find better things on the trains he robbed. But if San Angelo was any example, this theory was no good. The train mainly held cowboys, who were being sent to some large ranch. None of the cowboys had anything of value. Sometimes Joey took fine spurs, but the spurs these cowboys wore were of no interest. Even their saddles were poor. So he took the telescope, and the little stand that it rested on, killed the old man, and left.
That night, he used the telescope to look at the stars. He had to admit that the old man had been telling the truth. The telescope brought the stars much closer. When Joey pointed it at the moon, the results were even better. He could see what seemed to be mountains on the moon. The surface of the moon looked a little like the country where the Apaches had taken him. It was pretty bare.
The best use of the telescope, though, was to look at men. He concealed his mother’s spotted pony in a gully, before pointing the telescope at Roy Bean’s door. By adjusting it a little, he could see with great clarity. He saw the famous Captain Call come out with his tall friend, and get ready to leave. He saw the Captain take an extra rifle, and even saw that Judge Roy Bean kept his pistol cocked.
It annoyed Joey that the Captain left his men behind. There were four of them; three were still inside. If they stayed, he would have to kill them before he could hang the judge, but he didn’t want to kill them while the famous bounty hunter, Captain Call, was close enough to hear the shots.
It meant waiting, which Joey hated. He wanted to hang the judge, and then follow Captain Call and shoot him. Once Call was dead, he intended to go to Ojinaga and steal his brother and sister. It bothered him that his mother gave them so much attention. He meant to steal them and give them to the manburner, if he could find him. If the manburner wanted to burn them, that was fine with Joey. They were damaged anyway, too damaged to deserve all the attention his mother gave them. They were merely the products of her whoring. Stealing them would show her what he felt about her low behavior. If the manburner had no interest in burning them, Joey meant to take them deep into Mexico and give them away, to someone who wanted two slaves. He would take them so far away that his mother would never find them, and if he could find no one who wanted them for slaves, he might take them to his cave and throw them off the cliff behind it.
To his relief, the men Captain Call left at the saloon didn’t stay long. The tall man went back inside and got them. There were two more white men, and old Famous Shoes. The two white men looked drunk. One of them was so drunk that he had difficulty mounting. But eventually, they got started. Famous Shoes led them across the river and took them north. Probably the Captain had sent them to catch him, when he came home. If that was the plan, it was silly. He might not go home, and even if he did, white men who were so drunk they couldn’t mount their horses were not going to catch him. He could ride in and steal his brother and sister while they were in the cantina, getting drunk again. They would never see him, or even know he had been there.
Of course, Famous Shoes might find his tracks and track him. Joey decided he had better kill Famous Shoes, at some point; the old man was the last tracker in Mexico capable of tracking him to his cave. It would be best to kill him soon, before some gringo hired him to find the cave. Joey knew that the cave was becoming a legend among the gringos. Soon men would begin to hunt for it. But the cave was deep in the mountains, up a canyon where horses couldn’t go. With Famous Shoes dead, the treasure in his cave would be safe for years.
When Captain Call and the men had been gone a few hours, Joey got out his rifle and looked through the telescope at Judge Roy Bean. The old man had gone inside and got himself a bottle of whiskey. He sat with his back to the building, holding his pistol in his lap. The whiskey bottle, he set on a little rock beside his chair. There was a shotgun propped against the wall and a rifle under the buffalo robe. The old man had brought some kind of newspaper out of the saloon and was reading it in the fading sunlight. It was a large newspaper; when the judge held it up to read, all Joey could see was his legs.
Joey leveled the rifle and shot Judge Roy Bean right through the newspaper, low down, a belly shot. Roy Bean leapt up and began to fire his rifle wildly, as much at the sky as at anything in particular. Joey shot him in the shoulder, so he would not be able to shoot the rifle well, and then he shot him in the leg, causing him to crumple. The old man tried to crawl over to the shotgun propped against the wall, but as he reached for it, Joey shot him in the arm. Joey was surprised that the old man struggled so, after being shot in the belly. He was plainly a tough old man, but that would only make matters worse for him. Joey got on his mother’s spotted pony and rode up to the saloon. He could see the rifle and the shotgun, but he couldn’t see the pistol. Joey thought the pistol was probably under the newspaper the judge had been reading when he shot him in the belly. The wind was blowing the newspaper away. Several pages were stuck on prickly pear piles, between the saloon and the river.
Roy Bean managed to prop up against the wall of the saloon. He had hi
s pistol, but when he pointed it at Joey and tried to shoot, the pistol didn’t fire. The old man was breathing heavily—he tried again to shoot the pistol, but again, the pistol didn’t fire. The trigger wouldn’t pull. Joey had his own pistol out and was ready to shoot, but he didn’t want to kill Roy Bean with a gun if he could avoid it. He had other plans.
Roy Bean grew so irritated with his pistol that he started hitting it against the wall. The joke was on him, he knew. He had kept the pistol on cock for so long that it had rusted tight. It seemed to him that it had been on cock for ten years or more—foolish behavior. Now, the young Mexican had him. He was belly-shot, had a broken shoulder, a ruined leg, and a smashed arm. He couldn’t move well enough to get inside his saloon, where he had a good stabbing knife. The young Mexican rode right up to him, and made a loop in a rawhide rope.
“You arrogant pup, do you plan to hang me? Go away,” Roy Bean said. “I’m the one that hangs people around here. I’m the law west of the Pecos, or ain’t you heard, you damn cub?”
The next moment, he was choking so badly he couldn’t talk. Before he even realized the boy was moving, Joey Garza had slipped off his horse, flipped the rawhide noose around his neck, and jerked it so tight it almost crushed his Adam’s apple. Roy Bean felt a burning anger at Woodrow Call, who could have stayed put with his men for a day or two, and given Joey Garza time to pass on by. The boy had outsmarted Captain Call, and now look!
But the pain in his throat grew so severe that it cut off his anger along with his breath. Joey got back on his spotted pony, and Roy Bean found himself being pulled up toward the roof of his own saloon. The boy had flipped the rawhide rope over the chimney and was backing his horse away, pulling the judge slowly upward. When his feet left the ground, he twisted slightly, trying to get a hand under the rawhide rope. But the rawhide was unforgiving; he felt scalding bile flood his throat.
Roy Bean struggled and twisted. He felt that if he could just get one breath, he might yet struggle out of the noose and live. But Joey Garza slowly backed his horse, pulling Roy Bean higher, pulling the noose tighter. The rawhide was like steel. Roy Bean twisted again. He thought he might crawl up on the roof and get free, but he only had one hand. His lungs burned badly; the air seemed like black water. Call’s man had been right about the pistol—he shouldn’t have kept it on cock all those years. The Mexican boy backed the horse another step, pulling him so high that his head mashed against a roof beam that protruded from his wall. Black water flooded the world, where the air should have been.
When the old man’s kicking and twisting began to slow, Joey got down and carefully gathered up the pages of his newspaper. The wind had scattered them badly, but Joey took his time and got them all. There was a bullet hole through the paper, and the prickly pear had torn it a little, but it was all there. Joey folded it carefully and put it in his saddlebags. There was a picture in it of a lady who wore many jewels. Maybe someday he would stop a train with a lady on it who had jewels he could take to his cave.
Then he went inside the saloon and looked around, hoping old Bean owned something worth stealing. The old man was still kicking and twisting—once or twice, Joey heard him thump against the wall. There was not much in the saloon, though. The only thing he found that he considered worth taking was a silver picture frame.
The frame sat on a whiskey box by the old man’s bed. The woman whose photograph was in the picture frame seemed to Joey to be the same woman whose photograph was in the newspaper, the one whose jewels he wanted to study. But the light in the little room was dim; he wasn’t sure. He took the picture with him.
There was nothing in the saloon except cases of whiskey. A knife hung on a peg inside the door, but it was an old knife. Its blade had been sharpened so many times that it was as thin as the moon, when the moon was only a sliver.
Joey took the knife and used it to cut open Roy Bean’s clothes. The old man was dead. He hung just beside his own doorway. Joey wanted to see where his first bullet had gone in. It had struck just below the navel. The old man had been tough as a javelina, Joey decided. Not many men would struggle that hard, after being shot below the navel.
Before leaving to take up the trail of Captain Call, Joey stood up in the saddle and crawled onto the low roof, in order to snub the rawhide rope more securely to the chimney. He wanted to make sure that Judge Roy Bean would be hanging by his own door when the next traveler showed up at the Jersey Lily Saloon, hoping for a drink.
12.
CHARLES GOODNIGHT SAT until past midnight, studying the fire in his kitchen fireplace. Winter was always severe on the plains, but this winter was unusually severe. It drizzled and then froze; drizzled and then froze; by Christmastime, there had been three big snows, which was rare. The cowboys rode long days, trying to keep the cattle from drifting too far from his range. Goodnight himself was in the saddle fifteen hours a day, most days.
His wife, Mary, was gone visiting a sister; otherwise, he would have been chided for working too hard. With Mary gone, the kitchen was about as much of the house as he needed to use. There was a cookstove as well as the fireplace, but he rarely cooked, himself. Now and then, he singed a beefsteak, and ate it with strong coffee. Muley, his ranch cook, had a kitchen in the big bunkhouse, where the cowhands ate. Muley, like many ranch cooks, was intolerant of suggestion or restriction. Every once in a while, when Goodnight took a meal with his cowboys, he was in the habit of speaking his mind. But if Goodnight made a habit of eating with his ranch hands too often and putting in his two cents about the food, a habit that visibly annoyed Muley, the result would be that Goodnight would rise up someday and fire Muley for insubordination. It would be a severe aggravation if he had to fire him. Adequate ranch cooks were at a premium in the Panhandle. He would have to go to Amarillo, if not farther, to find a replacement.
The fire in the little kitchen fireplace gutted and blew, as the wind sang over the chimney. Northers had been almost constant for the past month. Day after day, the plains would be coated with a thin sheet of ice, as a result of the freezing drizzle.
Goodnight rarely slept more than three hours a night. The bulk of the night he spent in the kitchen, drinking strong coffee, figuring a little, and thinking. When Mary was home, she slept her eight hours, like a log. If she woke at all, it was usually to complain that he was burning too much kerosene in the lamp.
“I can’t figure in the dark,” he told her often, pointing to his account books.
“Nor in broad daylight, either,” Mary said. “Figuring ain’t your strong point, Charlie. If all you’re going to do is think, then turn off that lamp and sit in the dark and think. You don’t need light to think by, do you?”
Often, he obeyed rather than quarrel; it was dangerous to quarrel with Mary, when she was sleepy. If the quarrel got too vigorous, she might wake up, in which case she would press the quarrel all through the next day. She was capable of pressing one for a week or more, if she was aggravated enough. Such quarrels were a great waste of energy, and a good reason for spending as much of life as possible on horseback. Once a quarrel broke out, it was like a prairie fire—neither reason nor patience could extinguish it. Mainly, it had to be left to burn itself out. Many times he had thought such a quarrel burned out, only to have it flare up again as a result of some chance remark, and consume another hundred acres of his time.
But Mary wasn’t there to complain about his extravagant waste of kerosene, this time. No one was there. In rummaging through his desk that afternoon, looking for a hardware bill that he had evidently mislaid, he came across an old brand book, dating from the days long before, when he and his partner, Oliver Loving, had first ranched in Colorado.
Perusing it now in the kitchen, with the fire guttering and the wind singing, was a chastening experience, testament to the uncertainties of the cattle business and of human existence as well. Not only was his old partner, Oliver Loving, dead, but so were a large majority of the cattlemen and trail bosses whose brands were recorded in his
book. Those who weren’t dead had mostly gone bust in the cattle business. They were farming now, or selling hardware in the small towns scattered about what had once been the great open range. Many of them had been good and able men; competent, resourceful, and good companions on the trail. But they hadn’t lasted. Some got busted up by half-broken horses. Some drowned in foolish, impatient attempts to cross unfordable rivers. Others had taken sick and quickly and quietly expired. Perhaps they worked in the rain and sleet too long; the next day, they had a sniffle, the sniffle became pneumonia, and they died.
The book contained over four hundred brands. As he turned through its pages, Goodnight kept a little tally of those brands that were still active, used by the same cattlemen who had used them during the trail-driving days. He found only eight brands whose owners were still alive and in the cattle business. Those were the toughest of the tough, or the luckiest of the lucky.
Goodnight knew himself to be among the luckiest of the lucky; he had fought Indians for over twenty years and never received a scratch. Bullets had killed men fighting at his very elbow, but no bullet had ever struck him. He had taken herds across almost one hundred waterless miles, and not starved. He had raced to turn stampedes, in pitch darkness, over broken country on unreliable horses, and had not once fallen or been thrown. He had been in barrooms and other crowded situations with outlaws who would shoot you if they didn’t like the way you removed your hat; yet, he had removed his hat pretty much as he pleased and had never been shot.
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