Streets of Laredo

by Larry McMurtry

  "Build a fire, Jimmy--it's chill," he said, but again, Jimmy didn't answer, and he wasn't helping, either. He simply transferred Mox Mox's saddlebags with the matches in them and a little food and ammunition to another horse.

  "Build a fire," Mox Mox said, again.

  "We'll freeze if you don't build a fire." "Nope, no more fires for you, Mox," Jimmy Cumsa said.

  "Why not? What's wrong with you?" Mox Mox asked.

  "Not near as much as is wrong with you," Jimmy Cumsa said. "I ain't shot in the lung, and I ain't dying. You're both, Mox. Building you a fire would be a waste of matches, and I ain't got the time to waste on a man that's dying anyway." "I ain't dying, I'm just shot," Mox Mox said. "I'll live if I can get warm." "Hellfire will warm you, Mox," Jimmy Cumsa said, mounting Oteros's big horse.

  "You'll cook plenty warm down in hell, like all those people that you put the brush on and burned." Mox Mox realized then that Jimmy Cumsa meant it. He was not going to help him. He was going to leave him there to die, with a bleeding lung and no matches, in weather that was bitter.

  "I should have killed you long ago, you Cherokee dog," Mox Mox said. "I should have shot you in your goddamn sleep." "You wouldn't have got me, even in my sleep," Jimmy Cumsa said. "I could be sound asleep, or drunk, and still be quicker than you. That's why I'm called Quick Jimmy." "You damn snake, get off and make me a fire," Mox Mox said.

  "I ain't the snake," Jimmy Cumsa said.

  "You're the one they call The-Snake-You-Do-Not-See. Only old Call seen you. He didn't get much of a shot, but he still killed you." "I ain't dead, I'm just shot, goddamn you!" Mox Mox said, again. "Make me a damn fire or leave me the matches, if you're in such a goddamn hurry. I'll make my own fire." "I am in a hurry," Jimmy said. "I want to be a long way from here when the sun comes up, Mox. That old man might still be coming. He killed seven of the eight of us, unless Black Tooth got away, which I doubt." "He ain't coming, he's got those children," Mox Mox said.

  "Well, I don't believe I'll take the chance," Jimmy Cumsa said. "If he does come, he'll find you frozen, or else bled out.

  I never thought a man that old could beat you, Mox, but I guess I was wrong." Mox Mox knew that his only chance was to rush Jimmy Cumsa, grab his gun or grab the reins of one of the other horses--grab anything that might help him survive. There must be brush in the gully that he could find and make enough of a fire to keep himself alive, even if he had to crawl.

  He staggered up and tried to make a run at the horses. If he could just get one fresh horse, he might make it. But the needles in his lungs were sharper than ever, and he couldn't control his legs. He ran a few steps, but fell before he got near a horse. When he finally did get to a horse, it was the one Jimmy Cumsa had just run for twenty miles. It was as useless as his own.

  Mox Mox had a small knife in his belt, the one he used to cut meat. It was his only weapon. He managed to get it out; with luck, he might stick Jimmy and cut him badly enough that he would fall off his mount. But when he lunged with his knife at where he thought the Cherokee was, Jimmy Cumsa wasn't there. He had taken the reins of the extra horses and ridden out of the gully. Mox Mox wanted to slash him to death for his treachery, but there was no one to slash. He could hear the clatter of the horses as Jimmy Cumsa loped away. But in a moment the sound grew faint, and in a few more minutes there was no sound at all, except his own breathing. In the sudden stillness, the sound of his own breathing shocked him.

  His breath bubbled, as a cow or a sheep or a buffalo bubbled with its last breath.

  Mox Mox felt a bitter rage.

  An old man had come out of nowhere and shot him and all his men, except Jimmy Cumsa, and now Jimmy had deserted him, left him to bleed to death or freeze in a gully. How dare the old fool! If he'd only had a moment to turn and fight, he could have rallied the men and caught Woodrow Call and burned him. He could have shot him or stabbed him or quirted him to death.

  Old Call had just been lucky to get in such a shot. It was Jimmy Cumsa's fault for messing with the horses when he should have been standing guard. None of the men, in fact, had been alert.

  It served them right that they were all dead--all except Jimmy, the one who had ridden off and left him to die.

  Mox Mox crawled to where his horse stood, caught the stirrup in his hand, and pulled himself to his feet. His only chance was to mount and make the horse keep going. Maybe there was a house somewhere that he could get to, someplace where there were matches, so he could build a fire. A fire would save him. He had built wonderful fires over the years, fires hot enough to warm him on the coldest nights, hot enough to burn anyone he had on hand to burn. If he could just get to a place where he could make a fire, a wonderful warm fire, the bubbling in his breath might stop and he would get better and live.

  He pulled himself up slowly and managed with great difficulty to get himself into the saddle. But when he tried to spur his horse out of the gully, the horse refused to move. He jerked when he was spurred, but only took a step or two, and then stood there quivering again.

  Mox Mox wouldn't stand for it; even his horse wouldn't obey him. He still had the small knife in his hand. In his rage, he began to stab the horse as hard as he could. He stabbed him in the neck and slashed at his shoulders. Then he stabbed him in the flank--he would make the animal go where he wanted it to go! He slashed at the horse's flank until the animal finally bolted and tried to flounder up the sides of the gully. But the sides of the gully were too steep.

  In the dark the horse lost its footing and fell, rolling over Mox Mox as it slid back to the bottom of the gully. Mox Mox slid after it, and as he did, the horse kicked at him, catching him hard in the leg. When Mox Mox tried to stand, he heard his leg crack. He tried to stand up, but the leg wouldn't support him.

  In his bitterness and rage at Call's good luck and his own defeat, Mox Mox hadn't fully felt the cold. But with his leg cracked and his breath bubbling, he could scarcely move.

  Soon, the savage wind began to bite. Mox Mox began to think of cutting himself in order to feel the warmth of his own blood. But when he put the knife down for a moment and tried to ease himself into a more comfortable sitting position, the knife slid down the slope, out of his reach. He eased down a little ways himself, but he couldn't find the knife.

  The blood seeping out of his chest began to freeze on his shirt. When he put his hand on his side, his blood was cold. He wanted a fire, but there was no fire and no way to make one. The coyotes began to yip in the cold distance. Mox Mox listened. He thought he heard horses coming from far away. He listened as hard as he could. Maybe Quick Jimmy had been teasing him; he was known to be a teaser. Maybe Jimmy would come back and build him a good crackling fire. Even if the horseman was old Call come to get him, the man might at least build him a fire and keep him alive through the night.

  Mox Mox listened hard. Once or twice, he thought he heard the horses in the cold distance.

  But mainly it was just the coyotes yipping. The wind died; it was cloudless and very cold. Mox Mox reached again for the knife. Better to cut himself than to freeze to death. But he still couldn't find the knife, and when he reached for it, he began to slide and then to roll over. He rolled to the bottom of the gully. There was not even a bush to crawl behind. The two exhausted horses had walked away. It might have been his own horse whose hoofbeats he had heard. There was no warmth anywhere--only the yipping of the coyotes and the yellow of the shining stars.

  Mexico was colder on the second trip than it had been on the first, Brookshire thought, and it had been sufficiently cold the first time.

  Every night he felt nervous about shutting his eyes, for fear that he'd freeze in his sleep.

  They made roaring fires--he soon used the last of his ledger books, even burning the covers getting the fires started--but the fires didn't warm the ground, and the ground was where he had to lay himself down to sleep.

  The Captain's departure had shocked Brookshire badly, that and the fact that they had been ordered back in
to Mexico on the vague hope that Joey Garza would show up at his mother's house. They had already been to his mother's house, and the young bandit hadn't been home. If the plan was to lie in wait for him, then they might as well have waited for him when they were there the first time.

  Now Captain Call, the one man in the whole of the West that Brookshire had confidence in, wasn't even with them. Often in his life when he had failed to restrain his taste for brandy, things had slipped off course. Now it had happened again.

  Things were twisting farther and ever farther off course, it seemed to him. The old Indian seemed irritated at having to make a long detour into Mexico to get back to the village. He trotted so far ahead of them during the cold days that Brookshire more than once concluded that they had been abandoned. Colonel Terry was going to think it a very odd way of proceeding. The Colonel had only wanted one bandit apprehended, and quickly. He was going to be mighty aggravated that so much time had passed without results.

  Normally Brookshire would have been in a sweat at the thought of the Colonel's aggravation. But it was impossible to sweat when it was as cold as it was, and anyway, Colonel Terry, who usually entered Brookshire's thoughts at least once every five minutes, now entered them less and less often. When he did enter them, he did so less vividly. Colonel Terry had become mainly a memory from a different life. Brookshire didn't know whether he would ever return to that life, or ever see the Colonel again.

  He rode along obediently, though. He tried to keep himself in order and not let the blowing-away feeling seize him too strongly.

  There was not much else he could do. They were in Mexico, and keeping up with Famous Shoes was task enough for the moment. Vegetation was sparse, and by midafternoon, Brookshire would begin to be nervous about finding enough firewood to keep a good fire going through the night. He tried to keep the location of substantial bushes and trees firmly in mind, so he could return to them and make a fire out of them if he needed to.

  Deputy Plunkert had been deeply upset when Pea Eye told him they were going back into Mexico. It was the one thing he had never intended to let happen; and yet, when the moment came to resign and go home, he rode numbly back across the Rio Grande, behind Pea Eye and Brookshire and old Famous Shoes.

  Deputy Plunkert looked down the river when he was in the middle of it. Laredo was down there, and Doobie was down there. If he just turned left and followed the winding stream, he could not miss getting home. The river would lead him right to it, if some Mexican didn't kill him first.

  That was the catch, though. To get home by way of the river meant going straight through the vicinities where he was most unpopular. Even on the Texas side of the river, there were places where he was rather unpopular.

  Tired as he was, Ted Plunkert didn't feel up to coping with his own unpopularity. It was better to remain a part of the Captain's expedition. Once the bad outlaws were finished, caught, and hung, the Captain had promised to send him home on a train. The thought of the comfort to come was enough to keep him going.

  Pea Eye had no interest in Mexico, but he didn't fear it. The Captain had given him clear orders, and all he had to do was follow them.

  In order to follow them, all he had to do was keep up with Famous Shoes. The old man was unusually irritable, but he hadn't deserted them yet. Even if he deserted them, Pea Eye felt confident that he had enough ability to tell east from west. He could find his way back to the river, and eventually get where he had been told to go.

  The third night, as they were making their campfire behind a little spur of rock, Famous Shoes came walking in from one of his swings through the country ahead.

  "Olin is coming," he said. "He was about to make camp when I found him. I told him we already had a camp, so he is coming here." Pea Eye only vaguely remembered Olin Roy. Once in a while, long before, accident had thrown him into the same vicinity as the Ranger troop. He camped with them now and then. Pea Eye could not recall Olin's occupation, if he had one. Not every traveler did have an occupation, and a good many of those who had one wouldn't reveal it.

  All he remembered about the man was that he was very large.

  "Has he lost any weight?" he asked Famous Shoes. "The way he was back then, a horse could hardly carry him all day." "He weighs too much for his horses," Famous Shoes said. "He is easy to track, though." When Olin Roy rode into camp he didn't look very impressive to Deputy Plunkert or to Brookshire, either.

  "I thank you," he said, formally, when Brookshire offered him a cup of coffee.

  After that, he merely sat by the fire in his old greasy clothes, saying little.

  "The weather's cold, ain't it?" Pea Eye said, rather at a loss as to how to address the big man.

  "It could be colder--I've seen it colder," Olin said. He regretted letting Famous Shoes tempt him into making camp with the travelers. They were pleasant enough and generous with their coffee, but on the whole, he felt he did better camping alone. The necessity of making conversation didn't arise, since no conversation was required when he camped by himself. Making conversation with perfect strangers was to Olin an irksome task. Pea Eye wasn't a perfect stranger, of course, but neither was he someone Olin felt he could easily talk to. The only two people in the world he could talk to easily were Maria and Billy Williams, and even when alone with Maria, he rarely said that much. He usually just sat and listened as Maria talked, or he watched her brush her little girl's hair.

  At such times he wished that life was different, and that he could marry Maria and be a settled man.

  It was not possible, of course--Maria had no interest--but if matters had been different, Olin felt he would have been a happier man. There was no one who touched him as deeply as Maria, though he had never been her husband or a member of her family and had not had the pleasure of watching her with her children as a steady thing.

  "Been anyplace special?" Pea Eye asked. The Captain had appointed him the leader of the group, which made him more or less the host; and as host, he felt he ought to try to prompt at least a little conversation.

  "Well, Piedras Negras," Olin said.

  "I've heard that was a rough town," Deputy Plunkert said.

  "No, it ain't," Olin replied. "Of course, Wesley Hardin's there now. Any town he unsaddles his horse in is rough. But he just came for whores. I imagine he'll move on soon." "Why, we heard he was in Crow Town," Brookshire said.

  "He was, but Maria took the whores and left," Olin said. "That's when Hardin left.

  He likes places where there's whores." After that, conversation lagged.

  Brookshire couldn't think of a thing to say. He was wondering if the fire would last the night.

  Olin thought the group was rather odd. In his years of travel, mostly in Mexico, he had grown used to having odd groups turn up--Englishmen or Germans, prospectors, gunrunners, schemers of various kinds.

  But this group was Woodrow Call's posse, it seemed; they were the men who were after Joey Garza.

  They seemed like harmless fellows, and it was difficult to believe that any of them were gifted manhunters. The Yankee mostly shivered.

  Pea Eye was an old Ranger who should have retired from the business long ago. The other man Olin didn't know; he had introduced himself briefly, but had mumbled his name so low that Olin didn't catch it. Even with old Famous Shoes to track for them, there was little likelihood they would ever get within fifty miles of Joey Garza, and if they did, it would only be worse for them.

  Joey had a cold nature. There was no accounting for it, either. His mother was generous and warm. But wherever he got it, Joey had a cold nature.

  If the men did happen to stumble on him, Joey would make quick work of them.

  "What's the news from down the river, then?" Deputy Plunkert asked. It seemed to him that he had been gone from his home for years. He suddenly had a hunger to hear the news from Laredo.

  The large man had been down the river as far as Piedras Negras, and perhaps he had heard something from Laredo. A bank robbery or a lynching
might have occurred since he left, or a store might have burned down, or one or two of the older, more famous ranchers might have died.

  "I didn't stay in Negras long enough to gossip," Olin said. "Having Hardin in town makes me uneasy. He don't look like much, but he's a wild one." "Any news from Laredo?" Deputy Plunkert said. "That's where I hail from." "Yes, they put that damn Sheriff Jekyll in his own jail," Olin said. "I hope they hang the rascal. There's no excuse for forcing a woman." "Bob Jekyll's in our jail?" Ted Plunkert said, very startled. "I'd say that's news." The first part of Olin's comment had startled him so much that he hadn't quite taken in the second part. The thought of Bob Jekyll locked in their jail was so astonishing that he hadn't yet started thinking about the nature of his crime.

  "I guess some little gal came in asking about her husband, and the damned scoundrel forced her," Olin said. He had seen an Apache girl forced once, during the Indian times, and the sight had sickened him. Over the years whenever he thought of it, it sickened him. He knew that Maria had suffered something like that about the time that Joey started killing. From time to time, he considered going to Texas and taking vengeance on her attackers.

  The men who used the Apache girl had shot her when they were through. Maria hadn't been shot, at least. But the thought of her suffering troubled him whenever he remembered it. Maria was the only woman he had tender feelings for. She should be exempt from such abuse, and if he did encounter the cowboys who attacked her, he planned to take their lives.

  Suddenly Deputy Plunkert got a bad feeling.

  "A woman asking about her husband ..." he repeated. Who but Doobie, of all the young women in Laredo, would go to Bob Jekyll to ask about her husband?

  "Do you recall her name?" he asked; of course, there were other young women in Laredo. Other husbands might have strayed. In fact, husbands strayed fairly often. Most of them just got drunk and fell in a ditch to sleep it off.