Listen to the Mockingbird

by Penny Rudolph

  Tonio looked down into my face and said gently, “Even if you could have answered that question, you could not have changed him.”

  I held my fingertips to my eyes and willed myself calmer.

  “And you are still wed to this man?”

  I had not permitted that thought to enter my mind for many years, and the truth of it overwhelmed me. “In strictest sense, I suppose I am.”

  999

  At some point we dressed; and Tonio replenished the fire and from a pot, doled some red chile stew into bowls. And at some point we undressed again and slept there, in front of the fire, welded to each other as though resenting that our skin was a barrier between us.

  When I woke, the fire had gone out but the hearth was still warm. Tonio snored softly beside me. Half in a dream, half out, I hugged him to me. A cold wave crested and swept into my consciousness.

  I eased my arm from under his shoulder and stood. What was I thinking of?

  “What are you doing?” Tonio asked sleepily.

  “Dressing,” I whispered, as if someone might hear. “I have to get home. Winona has probably called out a search party. The rest of them will think I’m a brazen strumpet.”

  “You are,” Tonio chuckled.

  I knelt and kissed his eyelids.

  “Uh-uh,” he grunted, rolling over and getting to his feet. “I will see you to the door.” And we both laughed, choking it back like a secret too good to tell.

  999

  Poor Fanny had not had her oats. She raised her head and nickered when she saw me. The moon was lopsided, as though some animal nibbled at it. I made sure to give her an extra measure of feed when I left her in the barn.

  I had closed the kitchen door behind me and was waiting for my eyes to adjust to the absence of the crooked moon when something at the kitchen table moved, then grew taller.

  A scream rose in my throat, but I smothered it there. Through the gloom I saw Winona, drawn up to her full height, arms crossed over her bosom, chin down, foot giving a little tap. “I done worry myself into apple-plexy.”

  The implications of my absence dawned on me. “Oh, Winona. I am truly sorry. You didn’t…the men aren’t searching for me, are they?”

  “I just happens to take me a ride for a look-see, and there be that horse of yours, down by the cuevas. So I tells everybody that of a sudden, you got to go into town.”

  I gave a soft chuckle and threw my arms around her.

  “Go on, now, get yourself to bed,” she growled.

  I hastily prepared to dive into bed, yanking off my clothes for the third or fourth time since I’d dressed in that room the morning before. I was taking off my shoes when something caught my eye, some movement or some shadow beyond the tiny window.

  I rose and walked across the room. It was dark; I hadn’t lit a candle, but the crooked moon was still bright. Sometimes the hands went that way toward the bunkhouse, as did Nacho and Herlinda to reach their quarters at the back of the house. But all of them would have retired much earlier. Nothing outside seemed out of place, although I shuddered a little remembering peering through that other window just as the boy fell against it.

  But tonight there was no bloodied face, no dying mule slued across the door to the barn. All seemed still. I decided I must have imagined it.

  I was turning back to the bed when the corner of my eye caught movement to the left. A coyote aiming to try his craft at the chicken roost? They usually didn’t venture so near to the house. I leaned my head against the window to see better. A shadow was rounding the corner of the house. It seemed too short and squat to be a man—but far too tall to be a coyote. It might have been a woman, but that was ridiculous. No woman would be out and about at this hour.

  I picked up the pistol and made for the door, but two wary circlings of the house revealed nothing.

  The next morning I woke up full of contrary bits and pieces that tugged and shoved at each other like a litter of kittens with one ball of yarn. Tonio’s story had been so full of pain, his grief so real, that his determination to rid the world of that map, to erase that mine from human knowledge, was indisputable. I was not willing to try to coerce him to redraw the map for me.

  On the other hand, I did need to know more about Diego Ramirez, the boy who had fallen against my window and died in my barn. It seemed clear now that the killing had to do with the map. Whoever had shot Diego may well have seen the map, had maybe been with Diego at some point. His killer might very well be the same person who was trying to buy, burn me out or run me off my land.

  While I was dawdling over a breakfast of biscuits and honey, I remembered something Winona had said. I braved Herlinda’s scowl, left my plate unwashed and saddled Fanny.

  It was Julio’s turn to tend the cattle. I found him on the mesa near the windmill that pumped water from the well to the cow pond. The wind of the night before had given way to a sun as sharp as a newly honed knife. A yearling calf stumbled, seeming startled by my approach.

  Julio looked like he would have welcomed a visit from Satan himself more than mine, but he yanked off his hat and nodded. “Señora.”

  “Put on your hat, Julio,” I said gruffly. “The sun will scald your head.”

  He nodded cautiously, as if I had asked him to stand on his head, and clapped the filthy, wide-brimmed thing back over his hair. He was seventeen or eighteen and swarthy, built like a young boar hog, legs a little spindly and short body solid as a barrel. For no particular reason other than that I often smelled liquor on him, I had always reckoned he was pretty stupid. I can, at times, be stunningly arrogant.

  “My name is Matty,” I said carefully, consciously trying for the first time to combine the roles of female and jefe and finding I was no more comfortable with it than he was. “I want you to call me Matty.”

  He nodded, wordless.

  Just then, the calf stumbled again. “What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

  “She is the blind one, sen—Miss Matty. The one you find last year.”

  I peered at the calf more closely. One of the eye sockets was puckered and white. “So she survived.”

  Julio nodded. “I think at first it would be better to shoot her. But she is only blind in the one eye. The other, it heal up real good.”

  “You’ve been the one seeing to her?”

  “Si,” he said warily. I could see him considering whether he was going to be scolded for feeding the calf too much or too little.

  “Thanks.”

  “De nada,” he mumbled.

  “Julio,” I said, fiddling with Fanny’s saddle horn, “I hear you do drawings. Pictures.”

  He started to deny it.

  “No,” I said, “I think that’s good. It’s a fine talent to have.”

  We sat there in the sun atop our horses as he struggled to figure out where the high ground was. “Si,” he said finally, cautiously. “I do the drawings. Sometimes. After the work is finished.”

  “Good. I’d like you to draw something for me.”

  He just stared at me, eyes puzzled.

  “You remember that kid who was killed here last year?” Julio nodded. “Could you draw a picture of him for me?”

  The furrow above his nose deepened. Suddenly it dawned on me that Julio knew I’d been arrested for the kid’s murder, and that the boy had been a Mexican about his own age. “Look,” I said, “I don’t know what you’ve been told, but I did not kill that boy.”

  “Si,” Julio said. “Papa, he say that. But already I know it. I know it is impossible that you kill.”

  I half smiled at what seemed like a lame attempt to curry favor. “Why not?”

  “You bring in calf that cannot see,” he said, returning the half-smile.

  I felt like a jackass. “Thank you for knowing that.”

  He nodded, less wary now.

  “I need a picture of that boy so I can show it to people and ask them if they saw him. I think I know his name now, and I sure need to find out who did kill him.”


  Julio looked at the calf, then back at me. “Si.”

  In the barn, I watched the stubby fingers, gripping an equally stubby lump of charred wood, moving quickly over a tattered bit of white cloth he had nailed to a board. Paper, Julio had explained, was hard to come by and tore easily. Soaking the cloth in oil, then letting it dry in the shade, made it much better than paper.

  On the cloth, a narrow face was emerging the way clouds sometimes make images. Suddenly there it was. “That’s him,” I said, “at least that’s very close.”

  Grinning happily, Julio deepened some of the lines, made the nose shorter, darkened the area around the eyes and drew in the hair and the scraggly, half-grown adolescent beard.

  “You are really good.” My awe was genuine.

  He shrugged, still adding lines. “Mama, Papa, Ruben, they say is estupido.”

  “Dumb! Not at all! It’s very good, a wonderful talent.”

  He flashed a sheepish grin, his mouth overflowing with very white teeth. “Good for what?” He was still busy with the charcoal.

  “You could make money with that.”

  He gave me a patient, disbelieving look.

  “With a newspaper, for one thing.” I wished for the hundredth time that Jamie were alive. Photographs were still a novelty.

  “I do not believe they buy from a Méxicano.” He lifted the charcoal from the drawing. “I should put the place of the bullet?”

  “No. I want him to look like he would have looked if he met someone in the plaza.”

  Julio made a few more marks and turned the board toward me, propping it on his knee.

  I gaped at the drawing, my words of praise dried up in my throat. This was as good a sketch of the boy who had died in my barn as I could ever expect to see. It also was not the face of the bloodied man who had stumbled against my window that night.

  This face was rounder. The boy’s neck had been short, as Julio drew it. The man at the window had a longer neck. I realized now that man was also older, five or ten years older than the boy we found in the barn. And he had been bleeding from a wound at the temple. How could I have been so mistaken?

  “Do you remember any blood here?” I pointed at place above the left eye.

  Julio puzzled for a moment. “No. Only here.” He made a circular motion above the center of the forehead.

  The wound on the man who had fallen against my window might have come from a bullet, but one that only grazed the flesh, not one that killed. Or it might have come from hitting the head on something hard—a board, a rock, even a fist.

  I expelled my breath slowly, feeling my heartbeat quicken.

  “It is not right?” Julio asked.

  “No, no. It’s very right. Very good.” I took the board from him and peered at it intently. “You are a fine artist, Julio.” I took from my pocket the twenty-dollar gold piece I had taken from the chest that morning. At the time I had thought twenty dollars was far too much. Now I thought it was too little. I held it out.

  “No,” Julio said, standing up. He brushed his hands on his trousers and grinned. “No pay. Is gift.”

  I looked up at him, realizing I had never thought about the owner of the pair of hands and strong arms I paid wages to. I had hardly even thought of him by name, but only as Nacho’s son. I discovered now that I quite liked him.

  “Take it,” I said softly. “I want you to have it. You have earned it. You are an excellent artist. As soon as I have time, I will talk to some people in town about you.”

  He hesitated, then: “Gracias.” He took the coin and, with his slow, deliberate pace, left the barn.

  I turned back to the drawing. How could I have thought this was the same face that had fallen against my window? The eyes in that face had not been so far apart. Now that I looked at the sketch, the two faces seemed hardly alike at all.

  I had barely looked at the dead boy’s face that night. I had wanted to avoid seeing it. And since the face at my window and the dead boy in the barn had happened together quickly, my brain had decided they were one and the same. There was a slight resemblance, yes—the beard, the dark hair. But the boy’s beard had been that of a boy, scraggly, not full grown. And the face at my window had worn the thick beard of a man.

  I wished fervently that I could describe that other face well enough for Julio to draw it. I was certain now that it was the face of the boy’s killer.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Zeke looked up, surprise written across his broad face, when I strode into his office. Then he smiled. “The room and board so good here you decided to move back?”

  I was feeling dead serious; but this was the first time I’d ever heard him attempt a joke, so I laughed. “Nope, Zeke,” I said, sliding into the chair next to his desk, “I want to ask you something.”

  “Uh-huh,” he nodded. “You just want me to hire you as a cook.”

  “I daresay I figured you must have starved without me here to cook for you,” I retorted.

  That obviously called for another laugh before I could unroll the cloth on his desk and show him the sketch. His eyebrows pulled down in a perplexed line. “Who’s that?”

  “The boy I am supposed to have killed. Kid on the ranch saw him after he was dead, drew him from memory.”

  Zeke examined the sketch. “Why you showing this to me?”

  “You ever happen to see him?”

  After a long perusal of the cloth, Zeke’s pale blue eyes looked up. “Can’t say I ever did.”

  “His name was Diego Ramirez.”

  Zeke frowned and shook his head. “Don’t know, Matty. One Mex name sounds like another, if you know what I mean. How d’you know his name if you never talked to him? And why you askin’ me about him?”

  I skipped the first question. “I’m thinking my best chance to get out of this free and clear, with my land still belonging to me, is to see if I can find whoever did kill this kid. Zeke, there was someone else out there the night the boy was killed. I saw him. For a long time, I thought it was the boy I saw, before he died. But it wasn’t. So I’m trying to find out where this kid was before he got himself shot and whether anyone was with him. And anything else that might help.”

  Zeke gave me a look that said only a woman would think of such a peculiar approach. “Good luck,” he said.

  999

  At Smithers’ barbershop, Simon Trujillo gave me a startled, embarrassed look, as though I had walked into an outhouse full of men. He did most of the barbering for old Ben Smithers. Simon was a thin, nervous fellow; he almost dropped his scissors. I didn’t recognize the man lying in the chair with a towel over the lower part of his face, but the eyes rolled toward Simon as if my presence were the barber’s fault.

  “I wonder if you gentlemen would mind taking a look at this picture?”

  Simon finally stopped staring, and his head bobbed twice. The man in the chair sat up with an ill-tempered jerk and I recognized Jonathon Mapes, who ran sheep over near Doña Ana. His square face was red where the towel had been softening up his beard for a shave. His hair was the color of rusted iron, wiry curls with a lot of grey. His chin was split by a cleft. There was a sullen look about the jaw; but at sixty-something, he was still handsome.

  I unrolled the cloth and laid it in Mapes’ lap.

  “Looks like a Mex,” he growled. “What about it?”

  “This kid died in my barn last spring,” I said. “I’m trying to find out if anyone knew him.”

  “Not likely,” he fumed. Then his eyes sharpened and ran over my face like knives. “I heard tell it was you killed him.”

  “No,” I said, trying to keep the rush of anger out of my voice. “I certainly did not kill him. Apparently, someone thinks I did because I was arrested for it; but my foreman told Zeke that he saw me in the house about the same time this boy was shot, so Zeke knows I couldn’t have done it.” I hoped Zeke in fact did believe Nacho.

  “So, what do you care whether anyone saw him?” Mapes growled.

  “Seems to m
e it would be best all around if we found out who did kill him.”

  Mapes flung himself back down in the chair and clamped the towel over his face. Then he jerked the towel away again and pitched it toward the sink behind Simon. “Dratted thing’s cold now.” He fixed me with a stare. “Never saw him. And I don’t want you botherin’ my boys. They ain’t seen him, neither, and they got work to do. Anybody comes to my spread uninvited gets a bead drawn on ’em.”

  “That’s right friendly,” I said. I knew a lot of folks didn’t much like Mapes, but it wasn’t just his mean mouth. A creek ran through his land and he had dammed it. The creek only ran summers and didn’t carry much water even then, but the air was often still in summer, too still to stir a windmill. Then, ranchers without springs like mine had to depend on creeks. Anybody below Mapes’ land had nothing to rely on except whatever water they had pumped up in the winds of February. One of Mapes’ men might have seen the kid in town or stopped him on the road, but I decided I’d head out his way only as a last resort.

  I turned to Simon. “How about you?” The little man was obviously intimidated by his customer and probably wished I were on the moon—or anywhere but there. His eyes flicked back to the sketch. I took it from Mapes’ lap and held it out. “Please,” I said. “Take a good look. Did you see him? It would have been in January or early February. Did he come in for a haircut or a shave? Or did you happen to see him around town?”

  “I think maybe I see him,” Simon said slowly, still staring at the sketch. “But I am not sure.”

  “Where?”

  “Not here. That I would remember. In the plaza. By Garza’s.” The general store.

  “Please. Think carefully. Was he coming out of the store? Was anyone with him? What was he doing?”

  Simon thought about that. “He was coming from the bank. Or maybe the saloon. I notice him because he was walking very fast. The heel of his boot, I think it come off and he almost fall.”

  “Was anyone with him?”

  “There was another man, yes. Not with him, but I think maybe he try to catch up with this one.” Simon pointed to the sketch.

  “Did he catch up with him?”