Streets of Laredo

by Larry McMurtry

  "How come you to miss the War, Captain?" Brookshire asked. The likelihood of combat, sometime in the near future, had stirred old memories. He remembered the screams of the men whose limbs had to be amputated, quickly, on the battlefield. He remembered the sound the saw made, as the surgeons cut through bone, and the dull groaning of the men in the hospital tents as they awoke every morning, to face another day without an arm or a leg, or both legs, or an eye, or whatever part was missing. Those memories had ceased to trouble him, during the quiet years in Brooklyn.

  "Somebody had to stay around and keep the Comanches in check," Call said. "Otherwise, I guess they would have driven the settlers back to the sea. They drove them back nearly a hundred miles as it was, with us after them all the time. There was trouble from the south, too." "Still is. We should just take Mexico and be done with it," Deputy Plunkert said. "If we owned it, we could make the people abide by the law." Call ignored the remark. He thought it ignorant.

  "I wish I could have fought in the War," Deputy Plunkert said. "I would have been happy to kill a few Yankees." "That's not polite, there's a Yankee right here at this campfire," Call said. "Mr.

  Brookshire fought for his side. You can't blame him for that." "Why, no, I meant other Yankees," the deputy said. It embarrassed him that the Captain had dressed him down in front of a fat little Yankee such as Brookshire. The man had lost a little bit of his girth, once the diet had dropped to frijoles and not much else. But he hadn't lost any of his Yankeeness, not in Plunkert's view.

  "That damn Abe Lincoln oughtn't to have freed the slaves, neither," the deputy said. He was feeling aggrieved because no one was taking his side, not even the Captain, the man he had left home to assist.

  "What was your opinion on that question?" Brookshire wondered, looking at Call.

  "Oh, I grew up poor," Call said.

  "We would never have had the money for a slave." There had been a time when Gus McCrae had wanted to abandon the Rangers and rush back east to fight Yankees, for he had gotten it in his head that Southern freedoms were being trampled, and that the two of them ought to go fight; this, despite the fact that they had more fighting than they could handle, right where they were.

  Call himself had never caught the fervor of that War. The best man he had working with him at the time was black--Deets, later killed by a Shoshone boy, in Wyoming. He had known people who had owned slaves and mistreated them, and he would certainly have fought to keep Deets from being owned by any of the bad slaveholders; but he could not have fought with the North, against his region, and was content to stay where he was, doing what he was doing. No one in his right mind would have wanted fiercer fighting than the Comanche were capable of. Gus McCrae's problem was that he liked bugles and parades. He had even tried to persuade Call to hire a bugler for the Ranger troop.

  "A bugler?" Call said. "Half these men don't have decent saddles, and we're lucky if we have forty rounds of ammunition apiece. Why waste money on a bugler?" "It might impress the Comanche. They've got some sense of show," Gus retorted. "That's your problem, Woodrow, or one of them. You've got no sense of show. Ain't you ever heard of esprit de corps?" "No, what is it, and how much does it cost?" Call asked.

  "I give up! You don't buy esprit de corps, you instill it, and a good bugler would be a start," Augustus said.

  The argument had taken place north of the Canadian River, when they were chasing a party of Comanche raiders who were, to put it plainly, smarter and faster than they were. The Rangers' horses were winded, and the men so hungry that they were wading around in the icy Canadian, in February, hoping to catch small fish, or frozen frogs, or anything that might have a shred or two of meat on it. Two days before, they had eaten an owl. The men had been cutting small strips of leather off their saddles and chewing on them, just to have something in their mouths. Gus was standing in zero weather, with a norther blowing so hard they could barely keep a campfire lit, talking about buglers.

  They didn't catch the raiders, who were carrying two white children with them, and they never hired a bugler, although Gus McCrae was still talking about it, nearly ten years later, when the Civil War finally ended and the Indian wars were beginning to wind down.

  As for the great and terrible Civil War, Call's main sense of it was derived from seeing people who came back from it. Several Rangers who had served under him left to go fight Yankees. But those who returned were blank and mostly useless.

  One boy named Reuben, who had lost an eye and an arm at Vicksburg, did more than anyone to make that conflict vivid to Call.

  "Captain, you don't know," Reuben said, looking at Call sadly with his one eye. "When we get into it with the Comanches, maybe it's ten or fifteen of us, and fifteen or twenty of them, all of us shooting at one another. But in the big fight I was in, it's thousands and thousands on both sides, and cannons and smoke and horses running around half kilt. I seen one horse come by with just a leg in a stirrup, no rider--it's terrible. I got one eye left, and one arm, and I'm one of the lucky ones. All but three of the men I started soldiering with are dead." Brookshire had been worrying a good deal about the train robbery in New Mexico. Who could the second robber be? He had no answer, and neither did Captain Call.

  "The other robber could be anybody," Call told him. "This is a free country. Anybody can rob a train if they can make it stop.

  Trains travel through some lonesome country. If I was a mind to be a criminal, I can't think of an easier way to start than robbing trains." "I've always tried to be honest," Deputy Plunkert said. "I stole some pecans once and cracked them with my teeth, but I was just a boy then." There was something about being so far into Mexico that made the deputy feel hopeless. He had never been very good at finding his way in new country, which was one reason he had made his life in Laredo.

  The town was well supplied, and there was no need to go anywhere. Now that he was married to Doobie, there was no need even to cross the river for girls.

  But he had been swept away by his desire to be a Ranger, something he had always dreamed of being, and now he was deep in the middle of a country he didn't like, with two men who weren't nearly as easy to get along with as Doobie. And one of them was a Yankee, to boot. Sometimes, riding through the empty country, where in a whole day they might not even see a bird or a rabbit and had nothing to eat but a little jerky and frijoles, and had even been instructed to parcel out the water in their canteens, the deputy wondered if he would ever get back to Doobie, or his friend Jack Deen, who liked to hunt wild pigs. Something had carried him away; something he hadn't expected.

  He hadn't even known Captain Call was in Laredo, or that he was hunting Joey Garza. It was like a wind had swept through Laredo one afternoon, carrying him away with it. Would there be another wind, to carry him back home? In his sad moments, Ted Plunkert didn't think there would be a homing wind. He felt that he had made one simple, wrong move, but one that could never be corrected.

  He resolved to be very careful, to give himself the best possible chance. But he didn't know, and he didn't feel hopeful.

  They rode into Chihuahua City on a freezing, windy day, when the streets were nothing but swirling dust. The old women in the marketplace, where they stopped to secure provisions, were wrapped in long, black shawls, and the shawls were spotted with dust. One old woman had killed three lizards and was offering their meat for sale. It revolted Ted Plunkert, that a people would be so degraded as to eat lizards, and he said as much to the Captain.

  "I've eaten lizard," Call said. "I've eaten bobcat and I've eaten skunk." The deputy had lived in settlements all his life, and had no notion of what sorts of things men would eat when they were hungry, really hungry.

  Brookshire rode over to the telegraph office. Call found a barber, and he and the deputy both had a shave. Call enjoyed his, but Deputy Plunkert was nervous. Allowing a Mexican such a good opportunity to cut his throat was not easy for the deputy. But the Mexican shaved him clean and didn't offer him any trouble. Of course, Chihuahua City
was a long way from Laredo. Around Laredo, any Mexican barber would have been glad to cut his throat.

  That was another strange thing about travel. You went among people who had never heard of you. Ted Plunkert had lived in Laredo all his life, and everybody in Laredo knew him on sight, even the Mexicans. He had been living there when Doobie was born, and kept on living there until she grew up and got old enough that he could marry her. Being in a place where people didn't know him was unusual, but so far, no injuries had resulted.

  When Brookshire came back from the telegraph office, he had six telegrams, and he looked sick.

  "Your color ain't good," Call observed.

  "I guess if I was your doctor, the first thing I'd advise you would be to stay away from telegraph offices. Every time you go into a telegraph office, you come out looking sick." "Yes, and there's a reason," Brookshire said. "There's a bunch of news, and not a word of it good." "What's the worst?" Call asked.

  "The worst is that my wife died," Brookshire said. "Katie died. ... I never expected it." Before he could get a grip on his feelings, he found himself crying, even dripping tears on the telegrams. He hurriedly thrust them at the nearest man, who happened to be Deputy Plunkert. Katie was dead; pneumonia had carried her away. She was already buried, too. He would never see her, nor speak to her, again.

  "I swear," Call said. "That is bad news. I'm sorry to hear it. I wish now I'd sent you back from Amarillo. You might have been a help." "It's too late. ... Katie's gone," Brookshire mumbled. It was the most shocking thing that had happened to him in his life. He and Katie had discussed his death several times, for he was fourteen years older, and it would only be natural that he die first. That was what they had expected, what they had discussed. He had supposed she would go right on being alive, doing her sewing, putting up with the cat, and making meals for him when he got home. On Sundays, they often ate out.

  That was how Brookshire had supposed it would be. Someday, he would pass away. If Katie missed him for a while, that was natural, but in all likelihood, her distress wouldn't last long.

  She would soon take his death in stride and be able to continue with her life in fairly good order.

  Certainly, she would be a help with her sister's children, for they themselves had none. Often, her sister's children had stayed with them, and on three visits out of four, there would be emergencies or crises.

  Katie was never more useful than at such times.

  She knew how to judge the seriousness of fevers, and never gave a child the wrong medicine.

  Brookshire was not nearly so useful in crises involving children. Katie was never more irritated with him than when he gave a child the wrong medicine or misjudged the dosage. She felt strongly that he ought to learn to dose children correctly, even though they didn't have any children of their own.

  Now all that had been turned upside down.

  Katie had died, not he, and he had no choice but to receive the news in a gritty, cold, Mexican town, where he had been sent by Colonel Terry, to do a job he was in no way fit for.

  "You're my overseer, Brookshire," the Colonel told him, the day he left. "See that the Captain doesn't waste time and doesn't waste money. I want the Garza boy stopped, but I don't want unnecessary expense. You're a competent accountant, and I'm depending on you.

  Keep your ledgers neat." The Colonel, who had lost an arm in the War, did not shake hands with him when he left.

  The Colonel rarely shook hands with his employees. He had the notion that people caught diseases by shaking hands. He avoided it, unless he was with the President, or the governor, or the mayor of New York, or some such higher-up.

  Now Brookshire had gone too far from home, and he had tried to do his exact duty, only to have Katie catch something and be the one to die. She would never again complain of his erratic dosing, when her sister's children were ill. It was a hard thing to accept, real hard. Brookshire struggled to regain control of himself, but he couldn't. He wept and wept.

  Deputy Plunkert quickly handed the telegrams to Captain Call. He was surprised to see that a Yankee would cry so, over a wife. He had heard that all Yankees were cold with their women, but this one, Mr. Brookshire, had tears running all down his face. The old Mexican women in the market, wrapped in their shawls against the sand and the wind, were watching the man silently, as if they, too, were surprised by his tears.

  "If you like, we'll stop for a day. It's hard to travel when you're grieved. I've done it," Call said.

  "No, read the telegrams," Brookshire said. With Katie dead, the only thing he had to cling to was duty. He had to keep thinking of duty, or he would be lost.

  Call took the telegrams from Deputy Plunkert and read them. In the last years, he had improved his reading considerably. Charlie Goodnight had books in his house, fifteen or twenty, maybe. Call had been inside the Goodnights' house just once, to visit them.

  He had not paid much attention to the books, but Goodnight had one that had just come in the mail a few days before. It was called A Texas Cowboy, or Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony--on its cover, it had a picture of a man sitting on a pony that was clearly not Spanish. The book was by Charlie Siringo, a kind of ne'er-do-well who had cowboyed a little and rangered a little, while gambling and drinking steadily, at least in the years when Call had been aware of him.

  It was a surprise that such a man had written a book, but there it was.

  "I want you to read it and tell me if you think there's anything true in it," Goodnight said.

  "I think it's all yarns, myself." Call read the book and agreed with Goodnight. It was all yarns, but what else would anyone expect from a braggart like Siringo?

  Reading Siringo's lies had improved his reading, though. He had even thought of stopping by Goodnight's house to borrow another book, in order to keep in practice. He had heard that General Crook, whom he had once met, had written a book. General Crook would be far less likely than Charlie Siringo to fill a book with lies.

  Call took his time, and read the telegrams carefully. Then he reread them, in order to give Brookshire time to recover a bit from the terrible news he had just received. Four of the telegrams were from Colonel Terry. The first was merely an inquiry:

  Where are you? Stop. Report at once.

  The second was in a similar vein:

  Important that you report at once.

  The third telegram was the one Call studied the longest. A train had been stopped in Mesilla, near Silver City, New Mexico. It had been carrying only three passengers, but all three had been killed and their bodies burned. A witness, a Zu@ni man, had been killed and scalped, but not burned. It was not the work of Joey Garza. A local tracker said seven men were involved.

  The fourth telegram from the Colonel offered reinforcements. Call, if he accepted the job, could hire as many men as he needed, catch the Garza boy, and then go to New Mexico to deal with the new threat.

  The fifth telegram was from Goodnight, a surprise to Call: first, that Goodnight would take the trouble; and second, that he could guess where Call was going accurately enough to have a telegram waiting for him. Of course, Charles Goodnight was no fool. He had not lasted as long as he had by being ignorant. His telegram was as terse as its author:

  Mox Mox is alive. Stop. He's your manburner. Stop. Your deputy is on his way. Stop. Famous Shoes tracking for him.

  Stop. Mox Mox burned four of my cowboys.

  Stop. You may not recall. Stop. Available if needed. Stop. Goodnight.

  The final telegram was the one with the sad news about Brookshire's wife. Call folded them all and put them in his shirt pocket. The one about Mox Mox he meant to study later. Mox Mox was a renegade from the country north of Santa Fe. News that he was alive, and evidently had a gang, was startling. The man had supposedly been killed some ten years earlier in Utah, by a Ute Indian. Call remembered that rumor, and he also remembered the four Goodnight cowboys Mox Mox had killed and burned, in the days when Mox Mox had been a junior member of Bl
ue Duck's gang of roving killers. Goodnight had pursued the man then, pursued him all through New Mexico and into Arizona and Utah, but had met with one of his rare defeats. Mox Mox had vanished into the canyons. It was not long afterward that news came of his death at the hands of the Ute. Not a word had been heard of him since. Now he was alive and in New Mexico, and he had a gang and was picking off trains. It did complicate the search.

  Balancing the complication, though, was the news about Pea Eye, news that Call found very gratifying. The man was loyal, after all. And, if he had old Famous Shoes with him, Call would not have to go looking for his deputy. The two of them would just show up one day.

  Brookshire, though still wobbly from his tragic news, was watching Call closely. Katie was dead, and he had only his job to think about now.

  He wanted to get on with it. He wanted to know what Call's opinion was about the other telegrams.

  "Are we going after the new robber, Captain?" he asked.

  "He's not a robber--he's a killer," Call said. "He kills men and then burns them.

  Sometimes he don't bother to kill them before he burns them." "He burns people?" Deputy Plunkert said, shocked. "Burns them when they're alive?" He had heard of Indians torturing and burning people, in the old days, but this wasn't the old days, this was his own time.

  "Yes, he burns them to death, in some cases," Call said. "I don't know much about the man. I had about quit rangering before he showed up. He killed some of Goodnight's men, but that was in Colorado. I've never been there.

  "His name is Mox Mox," he added.

  "What kind of a name is that?" Brookshire asked.

  "Just a name," Call said. "Your Colonel wants us to lope up and catch him, after we subdue the Garza boy.

  "There's some good news, too," he added.

  "Pea Eye is coming, so we'll have reinforcements.