by James Short
The nineteen-year-old boy who had challenged him on the street didn’t pose a real threat. The boy’s father had committed suicide after losing his property which Kurtz had taken as security for a loan. It had happened so long ago that Kurtz first didn’t even remember the family name—Langton—when the red-faced youth spluttered out his challenge to a duel, much less recall clearly why his father had been so foolishly desperate. Kurtz didn’t cheat or lie in his business dealings—he gained sufficient advantage by not preventing people from lying to themselves. So the boy’s father must have walked into his ruin of his own accord.
Kurtz, who usually met such open challenges with gusto, actually felt pity for the trembling kid and made an exception by advising him to reconsider his words. Young Langton nervously drew out his gun. Although unarmed, Kurtz rushed him. The boy got two shots into the dirt before Kurtz wrestled the gun away. He slapped young Langton hard once, bloodying his lip. The boy let out a girlish yelp, and a few bystanders chuckled. Kurtz naturally believed the matter was settled. He handed the revolver to a fellow rancher who happened to be watching. As Kurtz walked away, he was vaguely aware of two women crying and a murmur of approval among the witnesses at his restraint.
Then he heard a small high gasp and a cry, “No!”
Kurtz turned to see the boy rushing towards him, now armed with a large Bowie knife. He barely had time to sidestep as the knife grazed his thigh. Young Langton lunged again. Once Kurtz was able to grip the knife hand, it was an easy matter to wrench the weapon away and then trip him. It was also easy with a grasp of the hair, a few quick slices, and a pop, to pull the scalp off the boy in front of his screaming mother and fiancée. When the fiancée started for him, he held up the bloody scalp. She began to vomit in-between her shrieks.
He threw the scalp on the ground and swore, “The little shit should have taken more care in choosing who he tries to stab in the back.”
Nobody could claim that the scalping wasn’t self-defense, yet many people in the town were distinctly colder to him after this incident. To Kurtz, this coldness was worth their respect.
The stories that his boys out on the range told about their abductions were pretty much the same. A drunken Mexican accosted them and offered a sip of whiskey or tequila to take the chill off the night. Accepting the fiery nip was practically the last thing they remembered. The exception was Glasgow Pierce, who was a teetotaler. Initially, he refused the drink civilly, then more forcefully, striking the drunken Mexican in the face with his whip. The Mexican lunged back, and they fell off their horses wrestling. Pierce called for help. Instead of the other hands coming to his aid, he found his arms and legs pinioned by a whole gang of Mexicans, his nose pinched and the hot liquor being poured into his throat. That was his last recollection.
The priest had also left a flask of whiskey at the bunkhouse for the two hands staying there, making a joke about it being leftover communion wine. Bone Connelly as a joke took practically the whole of it and didn’t wake up for forty-eight hours. If he hadn’t been such a large man, he would have died. Tim Trevor left with a few drops was still rendered helpless, retaining a vague memory of being lifted and thrown on a wagon. When Kurtz examined the pale green residue in his glass, he couldn’t ascertain what the liquor had been spiked with so he added a bit of water, swished it around and fed it to a piglet. The piglet died.
Six months later, a Mexican bootmaker, Gonzalo Blanco, started talking while measuring Kurtz’s feet. Gonzalo, who had the height and proportions of a twelve-year-old boy, lived alone. He had much to say and few opportunities to talk. He was very meticulous in his measurements in part to give him time to get out all his words. Gonzalo seemed to have forgotten that Kurtz was the victim in the scheme, or maybe he just thought that Kurtz had reconciled himself to the loss because he had so much money anyway, or maybe the eagerness to converse overwhelmed his judgment. In any event, Kurtz couldn’t have paid a thousand dollars of hard coin for better information.
According to Gonzalo, a bearded stranger appeared one night in Mex Town asking for lodging. When he offered to pay for his bed and a meal, it was observed that the señor had a fair amount of silver in his purse. The money was refused, of course, but the evidence of so much wealth excited curiosity.
The curiosity might have passed, but Romero Brumas—that’s what the gentleman called himself—didn’t seem inclined to move on, and, in truth, nor were the people ready to let him go. Nobody took at face value his story that he was looking at land for a cattle ranch so there was always an air of mystery in his presence. Romero visited every family in Mex Town by turn and all the small homesteads outside of town and questioned people about the prospects of such a venture. That meant that Conrad Kurtz came up frequently in discussions. At this point, Kurtz asked the bootmaker if he were aware of the name of the person he was telling this story to.
“Si, Señor Conrad. You no see man with black beard.”
“I met him a couple of years before when he didn’t have his beard.”
Gonzalo appeared confused and then smiled. Kurtz complimented the bootmaker on his excellent memory and let him continue.
After several weeks, there wasn’t an acre Romero hadn’t surveyed in the quest for his ranch. He was advised by concerned souls that it would be better to search for land in Mexico because the gringos might not like a Mexican with a great deal of money. They might even try to steal it from him with a trick.
Romero replied that he was from a family of old Californios. His grandfather had been part of the army that had defeated the gringos in the battle of San Pasqual, and if the gringos wanted another battle of San Pasqual, then he would oblige them. Aside from the fact that he was a Californio, and he wore a beard to cover a terrible scar, they didn’t learn very much about the visitor. Nevertheless, several hopeful señoritas were already scheming to include him in their marital schemes.
Then one night Señor Brumas revealed his secret. He invited eight men to a meeting, eight special hombres he had selected because they had the reputation of not flinching in a hard fight. They met in the house of Jorge Muñoz. When the chosen had assembled around the large table carved from a single Spanish oak, Romero poured each man a glass of tequila but told them not to drink until he had finished speaking.
He then began: “I have not been honest with you, señores. I have not made friends with you because you are good, which you are, or kind, which you are, or generous, which you are even beyond the customs of our Latin hospitality, but because I have lost honor and need to recover it. I know you all understand that honor is part of our blood. Our great sin as a people is to love it more than our immortal souls. A man can be no less than his honor. Now, let me show you how I lost mine.”
He lifted up his shirt and turned to show his back where the white ridges of his scars seemed like furrows plowed into his skin. He pulled his shirt down and faced the eight again.
“Conrad Kurtz did this to me,” Romero said making eye contact with each of those present. “He is a man who hates honor in other men because he thinks it takes away from his own honor. He has also dishonored you. Yes, dishonored you, taken away your dignity as men, as he does to even his own kind. Who killed Ramon Garza? We all know Ramon had a dispute with Kurtz over ten dollars owed him for honest work, and we all know that the following week Ramon was found in a ditch with maggots eating out his brain. We all know that when a poor man was dying—Manolo Bustamante—with debts to Kurtz, Kurtz took his last treasure—his daughter, who hadn’t even arrived at her quinceañera—as payment. You know the word for what he made her into. You know she will always be that in men’s eyes.”
Señor Brumas raised his voice as if he were a prosecutor making a case for guilt to a jury. “Conrad Kurtz pays a Mexican half as much as a gringo even when the Mexican does twice the work. Even in small matters, he insults us. He laughed when his dog bit little Clarita leaving her with a scar on her face that she always wears. He refuses to step aside for any of us, even for
old Elvira, who in her eighty-eight years has only done what is good and kind. Yes, Kurtz has also despised the honor of your wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters.
“We have all suffered, we have all lost honor at the hands of Kurtz. But tomorrow night we will recover what we’ve lost. Conrad Kurtz will never be able to look us in the eye again without fear. Honor isn’t free. If you agree to my plan, Conrad Kurtz will come to punish you. If you stand together, he’ll fail. Now anyone who’s more afraid of Conrad Kurtz than he values his honor, or who believes honor is not such a big thing, can leave. Those who want to hear more, drink with me.”
They all lifted the cups to their lips.
By the end of the fitting, the bootmaker had given Kurtz the information he needed to start his investigation. Conrad already had gained a fair idea of the individuals who had directly participated. Several would pay with their lives. Others would bitterly regret they had crossed him the remainder of their time on earth. However, he would make no moves yet. The thinking man must take one step at a time. First, he needed to square accounts with Romero Brumas.
Kurtz had no doubt about the identity of his avenger. Taking into account the scars on the back, an anecdote from Gonzalo about a card trick the stranger had done, the proximity in age, and a vague similarity in appearance, Kurtz connected the young gambler who had tried to cheat him with the priest who had drugged him. Kurtz couldn’t help but admire the performance and the gall. He had to admit he had miscalculated. When he found the young gambler again, he would not repeat the mistake.
Kurtz pondered the problem of finding Romero Brumas or whatever his real name was and concluded that men were the wrong sex for the job—the wrong sort of tracker. Men are good at following a single trail such as that of an elk or a bear. The best are like superior hunting dogs which can pursue a scent over any terrain. When they lose the scent, however, they just mill around and lick themselves. He needed an animal, or more particularly, the kind that sniffs the air and gathers a more general idea of what’s in the vicinity.
The way he explained it to Jimmy Boswell was that women cast wide nets in their habit of gossip, yet don’t have to move from their front porches. There is little they don’t know about the place where they live, and less they can’t find out if they put their minds to it. Kurtz planned to enlist hundreds of these accidental detectives in his cause.
Jimmy, an old cowboy who had been a better charmer than roper, still had the knack with the ladies, if not the same follow through. This old Western roué’s job was to visit a hundred bordellos and ask the residents if they had come across or heard of a young man with dark hair, dark eyes, skillful at cards and whose back was terribly scarred. Kurtz offered a thousand dollars for the information leading to the right individual. The women should tell their sisters, and so they would be able to share in the reward. The young gambler might not be the type that stepped foot in such establishments. Still, information like that tended to drift into places where the uncovering of the body led to the uncovering of random secrets or the airing of interesting and odd tidbits of news.
Like a peddler or traveling salesman with an established clientele, Jimmy Boswell paid periodic visits to the bordellos and reminded the residents of the reward. Over the course of six years, there were many false leads. The girls still received five or ten dollars if the lead was in any way credible, which kept the reality of the thousand dollar award alive in their minds.
It did pay off—seven years later. A prostitute from San Francisco was visiting her sister who practiced the same profession in an out-of-the-way town tucked next to a small bay. The name of the town was Solvidado. They got to talking about clients, and this sister mentioned her favorite who treated her as sweetly as a boy treats his true love. If that hadn’t been his usual way of treating the sporting ladies providing temporary companionship, she would have imagined that he was in love with her. This individual was a man of some means, a respected citizen, but oddly didn’t seem to have an apparent source of income. His back was scarred, he claimed, by a whipping ordered by a cruel sea captain after he was shanghaied in San Francisco. When Kurtz was provided a sketch of the man little doubt remained. Printed on the bottom of the sketch was the real name of his quarry: Thomas Deering.
Kurtz cultivated other sources. The whore who had sewn her five hundred dollars (the other five went to her sister) into her pillow was assured that passing on useful details of Tomàs’s life would bring her more sweatless profit.
A transient appeared one day cadging a handout at Deering’s backdoor. If Tomàs had not been otherwise distracted, he might have become suspicious of the beggar who confronted him two or three times a day with a crooked smile and a dirty extended hand. The private detective early on became aware of Tomàs’s nocturnal wanderings, yet his subject was so adept at covering his tracks that it took a better part of three weeks to discover the goal of these wanderings. He first assumed the tryst was with Mrs. Boller, once renowned for her beauty. Then a close observation of the pair going to church made him suspect that the affair must be with the veiled daughter.
This news delighted Kurtz. So his young gambler was having a secret affair with a girl for all intents and purposes hidden from sight. Kurtz smelled a situation rich in advantages for him. The strongest man was as vulnerable as the woman he loved. The thorough detective also acquired valuable information about Madeleine Boller. Before the Negro servant came, it was said that Widow Boller would die of starvation before letting go of a dollar to pay the grocer. Such an extreme appreciation of the value of money suggested to Kurtz the widow would be cooperative for the right price.
What Does Heaven Have To Do With Marriages?
Jacinto was quiet for the next ten minutes while they walked in the direction of the sound of the waves. He smoked a cigar, which Philip could smell.
Finally, Jacinto broke the silence, “You know what I miss most about being alive? The ability to cry. If you could sell tears in my world, we’d pay you immense sums of immaterial wealth to possess them. Where were we? Kurtz? Let’s leave Kurtz alone. We’ll go back to the meeting when Tomàs first saw the beautiful face of his beloved Penelope and the disastrous argument they got into.”
“I have money. I can hire servants to do…” Tomàs was saying.
“Servants? I’m not going to sit idle and let other people do for me what I have striven so hard to learn how to do for myself. I’m not going to be a doll set on a shelf half-forgotten. I’m not going to be the poor blind woman who must be served because…” Penelope mimicked the nasal voice of Reverend Culpepper’s aged wife, “‘Poor dear thing, can’t you see she is blind and can’t lift a finger for herself?’ I won’t be pitied because I will make demands on you, such as any woman whom you love would make. More demands, not because of my blindness, but because I expect my husband to be better than you are.”
“You say I’m not good enough for you?” Tomàs had never imagined such words could come from her mouth. “I suggest it’s easier to find a new man than to change an old one.”
“Hear me out, dear friend. Isn’t it foolish of me to fall in love with you, the first man I’ve really met? Then I ask myself the question: why go further if I do love? I do love. I told Franklin that at least we have in common the ability to find our way around in the dark. Franklin said some good things about you: that your word was your bond; that you were kind and generous. He also said that a man such as you must have crimes on his conscience.”
Tomàs winced at the memory of the one crime the guilt of which he would have traded for the guilt of a hundred lesser crimes. He glanced at Franklin, who made a slight bow and then left the room.
“I don’t want to know about them because I don’t want to fall out of love with you. What matters is what you are from now on. Every time I hear your step, my heart catches in my throat. Happiness is the sound of your voice. I think of a thousand different ways I can make you happy. I fear the thousand different ways I might disappoint you. Let’s l
eave this aside for a while and watch me. You might not want to court a woman with my limitations. I want you to see how I manage. Come into my kitchen and keep me company while I prepare your meal.”
First and foremost, Tomàs had the leisure to study Penny’s prettiness much more openly than if she had been sighted. There was a small frown as she concentrated, measuring the flour and water with her fingers rather than her eyes, mixing, kneading, and replacing the already risen loaves in the window. She moved deftly—her blindness not at all apparent.
Everything had its place, which she seemed to know as well as the location of her hands. She didn’t speak much, except to mention that she had burned herself on the stove more times than she could count, and then laughed, saying the burns had been minor. “Now, for my next act, I will entertain you by cooking a roast. Oh, I forgot, Franklin said I should curtsy after I give a performance. Although I think he was teasing, I will do it anyway.” She curtsied, not ungracefully.
A little while later, he began to feel uncomfortable watching her rapidly chop potatoes and carrots. “Can I help?” he offered.
“Only if you close your eyes,” Penny replied.
“How would you know?”
“Do you think you could fool me?” Penny asked.
“Not today, but with a little practice, I might be able to do so on another day.”
Penny’s expression turned serious, almost sullen, although she made a couple of more stabs at banter. His own attempts at lighthearted repartee fell flat. Then, they fell again into their old habit of easy conversation. Tomàs was able to hold her hand, which gave him the opportunity of venturing to kiss it once, then twice.
She giggled and said, “What sort of woman do you think I am?”
Finally, the roast large enough to feed ten laborers was extracted from the great oven and placed on the table along with a plate of steaming vegetables and a loaf of the freshly baked bread.