Dutch Uncle

by Marilyn Durham

  ‘He didn’t have it anywhere. He never had it. I did.’ Her chin lifted. ‘I stole it from you. If you want to have me arrested for it, go ahead.’

  He smiled at her effort, but shook his head. ‘No, Carrie, that just won’t hold water.’

  ‘Jacob Hollander, I have only recently become a thief. I haven’t had time to make myself a liar for you! I stole your wretched money. Don’t you even want to know why? I guess not. The money is everything, isn’t it? Well, there it is, all of it. I didn’t even look to see how much there was until after you told me.’ She was getting stiff lipped and tearful, not full of the brassy confidence of a good thief.

  He had a sudden recollection of a time long gone when he had seen her stand so, her hair loose on her shoulders and her eyes brimming with hard-fought tears. He had found her behind that stand of sunflowers in her back yard that were as high as her head: her private place. It must have been the night her father died. He hadn’t thought of that in years.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Tell me why you took it, then.’

  11

  She looked down at the knitting bag she was twisting between her hands.

  ‘Because he needed you. I thought you’d be gone before he could tell you all of it. I knew I wasn’t the person who could make you stay, just by asking. But I thought that if — something should happen to keep you here — I asked Judd to help me. That was wrong, too, but I didn’t know who else to ask. He’s like a child, you know. They torment him here, and I’ve tried to be his friend to make up for it. He’ll do almost anything for me, but I shouldn’t have asked him.

  ‘Because he misunderstood, or he was too nervous — I don’t know. He was scared to death afterward. He even cried.’ She looked at him somberly. ‘I was afraid, too. When I first touched you to turn you over, I thought you were dead.

  ‘Then, when I was making sure you were all right, I felt the belt under your shirt. I knew what it had to be. I wasn’t thinking very clearly, but I thought something like “This will make it seem more serious,” or something stupid like that. I meant to give it back to you the next night, but you ignored me and went off with that Moon woman.’ She blinked rapidly at her tears. ‘That’s no excuse either, is it?

  ‘It was only because he needed you! Those wretched women are nearly three months overdue. We haven’t heard from them; the agency hasn’t heard from them. And the men here are beginning to think just what you think: that Clem has swindled them in some inconceivable way, that the women are never coming and their money is lost. And God help us if they’re right!

  ‘He says not to worry. But they’ve shot out our windows every time a stage comes in without their women. They shoot high, but bullets ricochet. He says not to worry, but they come around at night and seem to be trying to break in. He says they won’t, really. But how can he be sure? How could he forget how it was the last time?’

  ‘What last time?’

  But she didn’t hear him. ‘If they do fumble the door open some night, and they’re drunk enough, or just feeling mean, what else will they do to him? It happened like that before, and you weren’t there. You should have been there for him then. You owe him something now. You owe him—’ She stopped, looking up at him slowly, as if she had just heard her own voice.

  ‘I owe him what?’ Jake asked, frowning.

  Carrie wiped at her wet cheeks suddenly, blinking away the tears that blurred her vision. ‘Nothing. Nothing, now. I fixed that. I’m sorry, I really am. Take your money and go. And let me go now, too, please.’ She tried to get past him to the door, but he stepped back and leaned against it.

  ‘Not yet. What do you mean, I owe him?’

  ‘Never mind. I’m sorry I spoke. Let me by, please. It’s too late to talk sensibly.’

  ‘No. It may be that I’m a glutton for punishment, because I’ve already been scoured like army brass twice tonight. But I’m tired of little mysteries.

  ‘Now, you wanted me to stick around town and help your brother, so you knocked me over the head and robbed me to make sure I did. That makes perfect sense. Who couldn’t understand it? And now you’re sorry. Fine! My head’s still a little sore, and I’ve probably missed out on a business deal I’ve waited years for. But you gave me back my property and said you were sorry.

  ‘I forgive you. Okay? But here’s the tough part. This is what I don’t understand. If you wanted me here so much, why are you trying to run me out of town in the middle of the night now? The cat’s out of the bag, you’ve confessed your sins. I don’t want to tell you how to play your hand, but isn’t this the time for a little diplomacy? Or have you hired Judd for a bodyguard now?’

  Carrie looked at him in despair and began to cry again, putting one hand up blindly to shield her face from him. He was more moved by that defensive gesture than by anything she had said, but he continued.

  ‘The second thing: you say I owe your brother something, dating back to Kansas. Just what that could be, besides the pleasure of being set up for a target by him for the sake of a good headline, I don’t know, but try me—’

  ‘Oh, Jake, you fool! Do you really believe that? Do you really believe that Clem tried to provoke people into killing you just to make good copy? You knew us for four years there. Was he ever so bloodthirsty? Was he ever anything but on your side and against people like Ben McNaughton?’

  ‘Let’s say he had a colorful imagination when it came to politics, or increasing the circulation of his paper, and his imagination about me made it difficult for me to stay alive there.’

  ‘So you ran away before the job was finished and left him to face them. You coward!’

  ‘I’m sorry I disappointed you. Maybe I was just a good-for-nothing sonofabitch, but I didn’t like killing half-wit kids who thought they were faster than me. Kick ‘em in the ass maybe, but not kill them. It was a little weakness of mine. What happened, did some ten-year-old get the drop on him with a slingshot?’

  Her face was bloodless with rage; her voice was a whisper. ‘No, you miserable, selfish, callous travesty of a man. Ben McNaughton hired four men to revenge himself on you for killing his sons. And when they couldn’t find you they came and did everything to Clem they were supposed to do to you! Do I have to tell you what they did? Ben McNaughton was a cattleman. He wanted some kind of — physical proof that they’d found you. Do I have to tell you what that was?’ Her voice broke. ‘I’ve never told — anyone. But I want you to know!’

  Jake was motionless.

  ‘They came late at night, after looking for you. You were gone, but we didn’t know that! They tore up the office, poured ink on the paper, threw the type into the stove, turned over the press. They insisted Clem knew where you were. They told him what they’d — but he didn’t know!

  ‘They took us out to Ben McNaughton’s place. He wasn’t there, of course. He was going to look innocent, whatever happened.

  ‘They put me in the barn and — and they took Clem outside to the place where they branded and — did things to the cattle. They beat him, and told him— I screamed to him to tell them anything. I would have told them, if I’d known. I’d have turned you over to them, then, to sate him, and I loved you! I thought I loved you. You knew that. Is that why you left without telling me? Did Clem know and keep it from me? He shouldn’t have, because he was worth more as a man than you ever could be.’

  Tears choked her. She made for the door again.

  ‘Did they do anything to you?’ Jake demanded, trying to catch her arm. But she jerked away from him.

  ‘No!’ The door banged shut, and he heard her swift feet on the planks until they left them for the softer ground between the buildings.

  He didn’t follow her, or even feel inclined to do so. She had left him shaken and incoherently angry. She had accused him of sins of omission he couldn’t even define. What was she mad at him about? But his mind recoiled from reviewing the last few minutes and the pictures she had conjured for him there.

  All her tears and accusa
tions were only meant to make him feel guilty, and he had nothing to feel guilty about! He hadn’t done anything, then or now, except what anyone had a right to do: leave a place when he chose to go. He had never deserted anybody, because that implied ties, and no one had any claim on him. He wasn’t Clement Hand’s keeper, or hers. They knew nothing about him.

  The whole business had been nothing but the hysterics of a crazy old maid who had seen a man she thought had once deserted her and decided to work her revenge on him. It was female foolishness beneath his notice, now that his money had been returned.

  He went to bed.

  But she was not easily dismissed. He lay quietly, breathed evenly; body commanded to stillness, mind instructed to think of nothing — or of something else. At the end of an hour he was still awake and the room was an airless tomb, haunted by howling women and bloodied little bastards who couldn’t keep their noses out of other people’s business.

  Defeated, he got up and took his chair outside, tipping it back against the adobe wall where the air was dry and cool and he could smoke and think.

  He had to admit the woman had got to him. How, he didn’t know. She had set on him every chance she got from the moment he landed in this hole. She had planned an attack on him and had him brained; had rolled him herself, like a Barbary Coast tough. Then she’d come in here tonight and made him feel like a criminal. God, what tongues women had! She’d managed to make him feel as if he not only owed her an apology, but even owed her damned interfering brother a pound of flesh.

  In a pig’s eye! He owed them nothing. He had his own back again, and he was free to go; she’d said so.

  Free to go was an unexpectedly long thought. Nothing followed it for a while.

  A slight noise in the doorway disturbed him. Paco was watching him with one wet eye just visible around the frame. Jake started to order him back to bed, then relented.

  ‘You got a bellyache?’ he asked.

  Paco sniffed and inched farther out the door until both eyes were fixed on Jake.

  ‘I thought you was gone,’ he said.

  ‘I thought you were locked up for the night.’

  ‘You forgot. Chake?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You gotta go away tomorrow?’

  ‘Where’d you get that?’

  ‘She said. She kick you out, Chake? Can she do that to us?’

  Jake pulled on his cigar, considering. ‘I don’t know. I guess she thinks she can. Maybe she can. What do you mean, us? She didn’t say anything about you going.’

  ‘If you don’t stay, I don’t stay neither,’ Paco said fiercely. ‘The hell with her!’

  Jake twisted around to look at him. ‘What’s the matter with you? She likes you! She wants you to stay, and she treats you pretty good. I guess you wouldn’t even be sleeping in the jail if I wasn’t here. She’d probably make Clem come over here and put you up in his bed.’

  ‘I don’t want to! I like to sleep in a jail with you, Chake.’

  ‘I’ll be a son of a— Here — you look like you need a smoke. Don’t puddle up like that.’

  He handed over his cigar to Paco, who took a suffocating pull on it, then coughed explosively as some of the smoke went in the wrong way. He leaned on Jake’s knee, choking and tearful, while Jake beat him on the back. A moment later, somehow, he was sitting on Jake’s lap wiping his nose and eyes on an unusually clean shirt sleeve. After a brief stiffening, Jake relaxed and let him stay there.

  They shared the cigar in silence for a time.

  ‘You gonna go now, like she said?’

  ‘Well, I’m out of a job here. What do you think?’

  ‘Don’t do it. She can’t boss us around. She ain’t even got married yet.’

  Jake grinned at him. ‘Where’d we go? We’d still have to move out of the jailhouse, and you know how you feel about sleeping in jail. Why, you’d have to get arrested to find a bed like that anywhere else.’

  Paco began to chortle as he saw the joke. ‘Hey, Chake, if you ain’t the marshal no more, then there ain’t nobody that can arrest people. There ain’t nobody that can arrest us if we want to keep on sleeping in the jail. We can do what we want and nobody can arrest us.’ He nearly upset himself from his perch laughing at this sudden revelation.

  Jake grunted to himself because he had a vision of Carrie Hand heading a vigilante mob to get him thrown out of jail.

  ‘You’re a pretty smart kid,’ he acknowledged for the second time that night. ‘But you hang around with the wrong bunch of people.’

  ‘I don’t hang around with nobody but you, Chake.’

  ‘Yeah. That’s what I mean.’

  ‘I don’t want to hang around with nobody else. I like you better.’

  Jake put the cigar between his teeth again, thoughtfully. ‘Why?’ he asked around it.

  But Paco was at a loss to say why. He shrugged, studying Jake’s stained vest for a clue.

  ‘Since I know you, you just hit me one time,’ he murmured. ‘And you don’t make fun of Urraca ‘cause she can’t talk, like some of the other tíos did. And you show me how to play cards good so I can get rich like you when I grow up.’ He fingered his nose.

  Jake looked at him in silence for a few seconds. Then he tipped his chair forward and dumped Paco easily back on his own feet. ‘It’s time you went back to bed, cardsharp. Me, too. Get going.’ Paco obeyed him, unruffled by the sudden end of their communion.

  J8ke did not follow. He heard the cell door clang shut and the bunk creak slightly under Paco’s body. After that the harpy festival down the street at the cantina was the only sound, and it was growing fainter.

  He continued to sit motionless against the adobe wall, watching the empty Street where his discarded cigar’s tiny ember made the only light.

  12

  Dreams didn’t often trouble Jake. When he had them they were anxious shadow struggles involving the loss of something: a heavy jackpot, his hotel room, or even his place at a bar. But when he woke they always vanished like smoke, leaving no more than a faint stain of apprehension on his mind.

  This one was different. He remembered it vividly, as if seen by the light of a large fire in the night, the image a chiaroseuro of orange on black. The memory was tinged with a furtive excitement, too, and a clammy sense of shame he hadn’t felt since he was sixteen years old.

  He sat on the edge of his bed, rubbing his face awake and disliking the sensation. His mouth tasted as if he had been eating worms, and he ached like a rejected bridegroom.

  He had slept in his clothes, but he didn’t take time to change shirts or shave. He needed to get outside and see if strong New Mexico sun and sand-dry New Mexico wind could do anything to banish the damp-cellar depression he felt. He paroled the kids and took them toward the cantina for breakfast.

  When they passed the window of the newspaper office Clem scrambled out from behind his desk and opened the door.

  ‘Jake, have you got a minute?’

  Jake paused unwillingly, finding it difficult to look at Clem this morning. ‘They haven’t had breakfast yet,’ he parried feebly.

  ‘Going over to Sánchez’s? Good, I’ll come with you.’ Jake shrugged agreement, and Clem fell into step beside him.

  ‘Carrie told me about last night, Dutch. I ought to try to explain—’

  ‘Never mind. It’s all been explained.’

  ‘Well, my apologies are in order, somehow. She only did it to help me. That doesn’t excuse her, of course. Or me, for not insisting she return your money as soon as I suspected what she’d done.’ He sighed. ‘She’s not easy to deal with, as I suppose you know by now. She’s been an angel of a sister to me, and I love her, but when she takes it into her head to do something for my own good— Well, I had no choice but to keep silent, did 1?’

  ‘Would you really have gone to jail for her, if she’d hidden it where I’d have found it?’

  Clem blinked at him. ‘Why, I don’t know, Dutch. Would you really have sent me there?’


  Jake answered that with a snort.

  ‘There’s another thing,’ Clem said after a moment. ‘She said she fired you.’

  ‘That she did.’

  ‘Well, she certainly exceeded her authority there. The League hired you, and only the League could dismiss you. I know they want you to stay on. You will, won’t you?’

  ‘Damn it, Clem, I don’t know what I’m going to do. Just say I’m paid up to the present and let it go at that.’ He finished gloomily. ‘I don’t know how I’d get out, anyway, unless I rode one of Sánchez’s ice wagons down to Sonora.’

  The almost boyish grin of relief that flooded Clem’s face didn’t make Jake feel any better. He looked away from it quickly to the street beyond, and stopped. ‘What the hell is that?’

  In the open lot behind the cantina’s laundry yard a small army of men and women were wrestling with a large tent.

  He recognized Ramón from the livery stable and a half-dozen other Sánchez cousins, as well as the full contingent of laundresses, led by Prudencia. Sánchez stood in the middle of the stage road directing the work.

  ‘Arranque! Arranque!’ He saw the two men approaching and smiled. ‘Señores, buenos días. How do you like her? Is she not beautiful? It will make a fine thing for your paper to tell about, Señor Clem.’

  ‘Where did you get it?’ Jake asked, as the canvas began to expand into shape like a huge dirty muffin, trailing strings of tattered bunting flags from its peak.

  ‘From the bruja, patrón; the red one. Hey, burros, what are you doing there? Pull the ropes! Manuel — Prudencia, stop this tickling!’

  ‘He bought it from Delia last month,’ Clem said. ‘But I didn’t think he was supposed to get it until he paid — here she comes now.’

  Delia, clad in a dragon-infested kimono hastily pulled on over a corset and underdrawers, came sailing into the street trailing an admiring crowd pulled out of the saloons and stores she had passed. Her hair was wild and her face was stern.

  ‘All right, you little sneak, put it back or pay for it!’