Backlands

by Michael McGarrity

  “Vernon Clagett.”

  Miguel nodded. “The Squirrel. That’s what Patrick called him when they came here from the ranch. You look for him?”

  “I do,” Jake answered. “His sister wants to find him.”

  “He quit the night of the fiesta for Emma. I have not seen him since. At breakfast, Patrick told us he’d walked away, but I thought surely he’d ridden away.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “There were too many people staying the night and not enough room in the ranch house, so I slept in the wagon next to the barn. Late in the night, I woke up to the sound of horses leaving.”

  “You’re certain of that?”

  “Well, I thought so, but it could have been a dream.”

  “How many horses?” Jake asked.

  “Two, I think, but it must have been a dream. I’m sure it was.”

  “Most likely,” Jake said.

  “You say his sister is searching for him?”

  “She needs him at home in Texas,” Jake replied.

  Miguel nodded knowingly. “One cannot escape family.”

  Or death, Jake thought. “I reckon so,” he said. “Good luck with the baby and all.”

  “Gracias. It will be a boy; I am sure of it.”

  ***

  In 1903, Jake’s first term in office as Lincoln County sheriff had lasted less than a year when his opponent won a court fight and took over in August. At the time, Carrizozo was nothing more than a railroad terminus with a few slat-board saloons and cafés, some of them half-tent affairs. It had no schools, no bank, no streets to speak of, and one hotel that skinned folks a dollar a night for a room.

  In 1905, Jake got elected again and served until a new sheriff took office in 1909. By that time Carrizozo had a church, a school, a bank, several fancy houses, two livery stables, a depot and roundhouse, half a dozen stores, and a good hotel or two. Many of the businessmen had moved their establishments from White Oaks, a nearby gold-mining town that had fallen on hard times when the railroad bypassed it.

  During all the years Jake served, Lincoln had been the county seat. That changed in 1913, when a court fight to move the county seat to Carrizozo succeeded. The local politicians who backed the move were so sure of victory, they started building a new courthouse before the case got decided.

  The courthouse had been finished the same year, and it was the most imposing building in town. Made of red brick, it soared two stories on a stone-and-mortar foundation, with a broad stairway leading to a high, arched entry. Above the entry rose neoclassical columns that framed arched windows and a low balustrade, topped off by a square cupola with a flagpole. Behind the entry, a hipped roof with parapets continued the formal façade. Large windows on both floors looked out at a parklike setting with benches and cottonwood trees. It proclaimed to all that Carrizozo was a community on the rise.

  Jake got to town after the county workers, including the sheriff, had gone home for the day. The front entrance to the courthouse was unlocked, so he put a note saying where he would be staying on the sheriff’s office door, put his ponies up at the livery, paid extra for oats, and had a drink at the Stag Saloon before ambling to the Carrizozo Eating House and Hotel, where he’d spent many a pleasant hour visiting with old friends while in town from the ranch.

  Built and operated by the railroad, the hotel had steam-heated rooms, electricity, indoor plumbing, and an elegant dining room, where good food was served around the clock. He got a room and washed up but felt too restless from long days in the saddle to stay still. He stretched his legs on a walk around town, wondering where the search for Vernon Clagett would finally take him. He turned the corner to the hotel to see Tom Sullivan, the current Lincoln County sheriff, step up onto the porch.

  A battlefield veteran of the Great War, Tom had returned home and joined the New Mexico Mounted Police, serving until it was abolished by the state legislature in 1921, which left the citizens of New Mexico without a statewide police force. A native of Lincoln County, he’d amassed one of the state’s best arrest records as a mounted police officer, which had helped get him elected sheriff four years back.

  Inside, Jake spotted Sullivan at the registration desk with his back to the front door, talking to the room clerk.

  “There he is,” the clerk said, nodding at Jake.

  Tom turned. “Howdy, Jake. I’ve got a telegram for you at my office out of Arizona about a fella named Vernon Clagett.”

  “What’s it say?” Jake asked as he shook Tom’s hand.

  “It’s a long one,” Tom replied. At six-two, he made Jake feel undersize. “Best you come and read it.”

  “Let’s mosey on over,” Jake replied. “If I like what it says, I’ll buy you dinner.”

  Tom grinned. “Then I’m a shoo-in for a free meal.”

  ***

  Jake settled into a chair next to Tom Sullivan’s office desk in the county courthouse and read the telegram from the Arizona authorities. Vernon “Squirrel” Clagett had been a cell mate of Pat Floyd, who in 1893 had been tried and convicted in Cochise County for stealing a saddle and sentenced to serve two years at the Yuma Territorial Prison. Upon the recommendation of the prison superintendent, Floyd had been pardoned by the governor and released early.

  Additional disciplinary reports about Clagett showed he’d been in solitary confinement three times for smuggling, twice for insulting an officer, and once as the prime suspect in the murder of another inmate, who’d died from a knife wound. No charges were filed against him. Considered dangerous, Clagett had his sentence extended after being convicted of selling contraband cigarettes and liquor to other inmates. He’d served a total of eight years.

  There was only one infraction for fighting on Pat Floyd’s record, which caused him to be assigned to breaking rock on the troublemakers’ crew. But he had then been transferred to the prison library, where he worked as a trustee up to the time of his pardon.

  “Does the name Pat Floyd ring a bell with you?” Jake asked.

  Tom shook his head. “Nope, would have told you if it did.”

  “I make it to be a go-by name,” Jake ventured.

  “Could be,” Tom said. “Most boys who use one pick a name close to what their mamas gave them. But trying to find somebody who used a go-by name thirty years ago might be as hard as scratching your ear with your elbow.”

  “Pat for Patrick,” Jake suggested.

  “That’s likely,” Tom agreed. “Got somebody in mind?”

  “Patrick Kerney of the Double K down on the east slope of the San Andres,” Jake replied. “But I want firm proof. If you’ll ask Arizona to send you a photograph of Pat Floyd, that just might help cinch it for me.”

  “I’ll send a request by telegraph in the morning. It might take a while to get it by mail. Why are you hunting these rowdy old boys?”

  Jake folded the telegram and put it in his pocket. “I’m looking for Clagett because his sister wants him found and Pat Floyd because maybe he knows where Clagett is or he killed him. I’m figuring Vernon to be dead.”

  “Why so?” Sullivan asked, lighting a stogie.

  Jake gave a Tom a quick summary of what he’d learned on his search.

  “Clagett may have deserved killing,” Tom said, sliding a piece of paper to Jake. “Take a look at this.”

  It was a year-old telegraph out of Willcox, Arizona, advising all county sheriffs in Arizona and New Mexico that Vernon Clagett was wanted for the theft from a ranch of two pistols and a long gun, which he’d pawned in Bisbee.

  “Seems like old Vernon didn’t go straight and narrow after prison,” Jake allowed.

  “There’s more about that old boy you might want to know,” Tom said with a sly smile. “His name rang a bell with me from my days with the mounted patrol, so I did some searching in the old files and came up with the pièce de résistance, a
s the French like to say. Clagett is also wanted on murder charges out of Graham County, Arizona. Seems in 1920 he killed a man and his wife asleep in their bed and stole their mule and wagon.”

  He handed Jake the old wanted poster. “There’s a five-hundred-dollar reward for his capture.”

  Jake read the poster. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  “I telegraphed the Graham County sheriff,” Tom said, handing Jake a Western Union message, “and here’s his reply. Clagett drove the wagon to Duncan, sold it to a livery owner, and disappeared into the Gila high country. Told folks he was going searching for gold. The murdered couple had a grown son who homesteaded near their place. He identified the wagon, the mule, and Clagett, who’d been hired on to help his father cut and haul firewood to sell in the neighboring towns. Find him alive or prove him dead, and you’re five hundred dollars richer.”

  “That would be a nice piece of change,” Jake remarked. “Would you ask Cochise County to send the court proceedings on the Pat Floyd trial? That might tell me something about the man.”

  “I sure will.” Tom snuffed out his stogie and stood. “Are you happy with what you’ve learned?”

  Jake got to his feet. “Hell, I’m almost giddy.”

  “That’s good, because the idea of you springing for a meal at the hotel has given me one hell of an appetite. They’re serving up oysters that came in fresh on the train, and I mean to have me a plateful.”

  “You’re gonna love what I have to tell you about why Vernon’s sister is looking for him.”

  “Tell me now,” Tom said as he locked his office door.

  “Nope, I don’t want to waste a good dinner story,” Jake replied.

  ***

  Jake Owen’s story of the hunt for Vernon Clagett and Pat Floyd so intrigued Tom Sullivan that he got up early the following morning and knocked on Jake’s hotel room door.

  “How about I buy you breakfast,” Tom said when Jake opened the door. “Then I’ll drive you out to White Oaks to see old Edmundo Anaya.”

  “I’ll meet you in the dining room,” Jake replied. “Order me two fried eggs and some biscuits and gravy.”

  Over a final cup of coffee after breakfast, Tom slid a five-star Lincoln County deputy sheriff’s badge across the table to Jake. “I’ve been thinking that you may need the law on your side,” he said. “Especially if Clagett turns up alive and wants to make trouble, or Pat Floyd does the same. Do you swear to uphold the Constitution of the United States and the laws of New Mexico?”

  “I do,” Jake said, slipping the badge into his shirt pocket.

  “You’re duly sworn,” Tom announced. “Pay is a dollar a month, just to make it legal.”

  Parked at the curb outside the hotel was a new Model T Ford coupe with SHERIFF in white letters painted on the doors. Jake climbed aboard as Tom slid behind the wheel and cranked the engine with the electric starter button on the floorboard. It caught right away.

  “It cost two hundred and forty dollars,” he said. “It’s got twenty horsepower and a top speed of forty-five miles an hour. I had to talk the county commission into spending the money on it, but I’ll tell you, old son, with almost five thousand square miles to cover, it saves me time going from one place to another.”

  “Unless you get stuck, or need to go somewhere a car can’t,” Jake ventured.

  Tom nodded. “There’s that, but it’s convenient when the weather is good and the roads don’t run out.”

  The Ford bounced along the dirt road to the old gold-mining town of White Oaks at a good clip, throwing up more dust than a herd of wild horses. Sheltered in a small valley surrounded by hills and mountains, the town had fallen on hard times. It had once been a busy town of twenty-five hundred souls, but when the gold played out and the railroad bypassed it, most folks left. Now no more than a few hundred remained, with the number dwindling every year.

  Many houses stood abandoned. Empty stores, including the two-story bank building, looked out on quiet streets. Up by the mines, idle stamp mills silently rusted. The schoolhouse tucked into a gentle hillside, the whitewashed church on the valley floor, and several of the stately Victorian homes with lovely grounds still looked cared for, but where neat rows of modest homes had once stood, now there were only piles of rubble, forlorn sections of picket fence in front of empty lots, and weathered, boarded-up houses with collapsed porches.

  Edmundo Anaya lived with his wife in a dilapidated cottage on Jefferson Street near an old placer site on the outskirts of town. Now nearly blind, and crippled badly with rheumatism, Edmundo greeted them in the small, cluttered front room while his wife made fresh coffee in the kitchen.

  “It is not often my old friends come to visit,” he said to Jake as he rose slowly from his chair and offered his hand. “What brings you and the sheriff to my home?”

  “I’ve been negligent about visiting,” Jake said as he shook his hand, shocked by the sight of his old deputy. His body was bent and twisted, and thick spectacles accentuated his washed-out, runny eyes. Both men were of the same generation, and while Jake had his aches and pains, his complaints about his health were nothing compared to Edmundo’s frailties. “For that, I apologize.”

  “There is no need,” Edmundo replied, settling back into his chair.

  “We’re here to ask you about a man named Pat Floyd,” Tom Sullivan said.

  “Pat Floyd,” Edmundo repeated, staring in Sullivan’s general direction. “I don’t know him. Does he live here in White Oaks?”

  “Teresa Chávez told me you might have known him,” Jake said.

  “Who?”

  “Teresa Chávez, your cousin Ignacio’s widow,” Jake clarified.

  Edmundo shook his head. “I don’t know her either.”

  “Yes, you do,” Jake urged. “Teresa and Ignacio would put us up when we traveled together through Tularosa on official business.”

  Edmundo nodded. “Ah.”

  “Do you remember now?”

  Edmundo gestured helplessly. “Only a little.”

  “Do you know Patrick Kerney?” Tom Sullivan asked.

  “From long ago?” Edmundo asked.

  “Yes,” Jake answered.

  He made a small space between his thumb and forefinger. “Un poco, I think. I forget so many things. You tell me, did I know him when I was your deputy?”

  “Probably not,” Jake said as Edmundo’s wife came into the front room with mugs of strong coffee. It was time to stop asking any further questions. “That coffee sure smells good.”

  Edmundo smiled. “Sí. We always have good coffee. It is one of the few things I tell my wife I always must have, no matter what—good coffee.”

  As he drank his coffee, Jake hoped Edmundo’s memory might improve, so he made small talk about their days sheriffing together. Edmundo recalled some of the more notorious bandidos he’d arrested, though he easily confused the crimes, the dates, and the places. At one point he seemed to think it was still 1908. When Jake asked about his children, Edmundo talked about a dead son, killed long ago in a tragic wagon accident, as though he were still alive.

  They left with nothing to show for the visit other than the sadness of seeing a once proud, strong man laid low and in such poor circumstances.

  “I do believe Teresa Chávez bamboozled me into believing that I’d talked her into giving up Patrick Kerney’s secret past by sending me to see Edmundo,” Jake said as Tom wrestled the Ford down Jicarillo Street on the way out of town.

  “Maybe she didn’t know Edmundo had gotten so frail and forgetful,” Tom suggested.

  Jake laughed at such an absurd notion.

  “Now what?” Tom asked.

  “I wait and hope Arizona has a prison photograph of Pat Floyd.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “Old Patrick Kerney doesn’t need to know that, does he?”

 
; ***

  For two weeks, Jake faithfully rode to his mailbox hoping to find a letter either from the Arizona prison authorities or one from Tom Sullivan containing the proof he needed to confront Patrick Kerney. What finally arrived left him with conclusive evidence that Patrick Kerney had used the go-by name of Pat Floyd when he’d been tried, convicted, and sent to Yuma Prison.

  Although Arizona had been unable to find a photograph of Pat Floyd, the district court in Cochise County had sent a copy of the trial transcript, which included his sentencing statement to the judge. In it, Floyd told the judge he stole the saddle because it had originally belonged to him, that he’d lost it in a card game, and that he badly wanted it back. He swore the saddle had been given to him on his fifteenth birthday by a man named Cal Doran, who had raised him up after his pa died. It was a double-rigged, hand-tooled stock saddle with wool-lined fenders and a nickel-plated horn and had so much personal and sentimental value that he got drunk one night and foolishly decided to steal it back. He apologized for his grievous error in judgment and asked for leniency. His youth and remorsefulness got him a reduced sentence of two years.

  Tom had circled Cal Doran’s name and added a note on the margin of the page that Doran had been a Lincoln County deputy before the turn of the century and a partner in the Double K Ranch with John Kerney, Patrick’s father.

  Tom had also enclosed a personal letter:

  Dear Jake:

  I sent a passel of telegrams to sheriffs in New Mexico asking if either a Pat Floyd or Patrick Kerney were known or suspected criminals and all the answers came back in the negative. Of course that doesn’t mean anything definite. I’ve discovered Kerney served in the Rough Riders in Cuba and was cited in one of Teddy Roosevelt’s dispatches for volunteering as a runner during a battle and getting the message through in spite of being wounded in action, so he’s got some grit.

  One notion continues to plague me about Kerney. Seems any man who has made so much of an effort to keep a part of his past a secret for so long just might become dangerous when faced with the truth.