Streets Of Laredo ld-2

by Larry McMurtry

Once, when she was a little too rough with the leg, he cried out.

  It was no wonder, either. His knee was nothing but splinters of bone, and the arm was not much better. Still, Lorena knew that it was the wound in his chest that threatened his life. The wound leaked only a little blood now, but a large bullet was somewhere in the Captain, near his heart, and that was bad.

  Once in the night, Call woke. He had supposed Lorena was gone, but then he saw her putting sticks on the fire.

  "You ought to go on," he said, again. "You can make the river. Pea Eye ain't far from the river. Just follow the Rio Concho into Mexico for half a day. You'll find him." "Captain, I can't ride off and leave you to die," Lorena said. "If you die, I'll go--but not until then." "Foolish," Call whispered. "I might linger for a week. I can't get well. I'd be obliged if you'd go." "Am I such poor company?" Lorena said, trying to josh a little. His breathing was labored, and she didn't expect he would live.

  "You've got a family, I don't," Call whispered.

  "You need to quit talking and rest," Lorena said.

  That was easy advice to take. Call found that just lifting his tongue to make words was heavy work.

  It was as hard as lifting the side of a wagon to fix a busted wheel. A few words, just whispers, and he had to rest.

  In the night the sky cleared, and the cold grew more bitter. Just before first light, Lorena used the last of her wood. She could hear the Captain breathing; there was a rasp in his breath. She had to walk a long way to find an armful of frozen sticks. For a moment she thought she was lost; but luckily, it was still dark enough that she caught a flash of her own fire. She made it back to camp and fed the fire, holding her cold hands over it.

  Despite the good fire, the Captain was shivering. Lorena managed to pull and tug until she got the saddle free of his dead mount. She wanted the saddle blanket. They had only three blankets, and she put all of them on the Captain, placing the heavy saddle blanket over them. She had to keep arranging the blankets, because the Captain became restive.

  When he shifted, he cried out from the pain in his arm and leg.

  Lorena knew she had to choose from between lesser evils. She could try to get the Captain on a horse and take him with her, or she had to leave and hope she could find a town and get back with help before he died. Probably he would die in either event, from moving or from staying.

  He was not a large man; in the years since she had last seen him, he had become older and smaller. She was sure he hadn't been so small when she had known him before her marriage.

  She felt sure she could lift him onto a horse, but whether the movement would kill him, she didn't know. When it warmed a little, she would have to make her choice.

  She tried to feed Call a little coffee with a spoon, but he was shivering so that most of the coffee spilled onto his shirt.

  "You need to take a little, it'll warm you," she said. But Call was unconscious; he didn't respond.

  Lorena decided then to take him with her. If she could get him on a horse while he was unconscious, the pain might not be so sharp. A few buzzards were circling in the cold sky, attracted by the dead horse and the dead deer.

  Lorena's horse was an old black plug named Blackie. The Captain had chosen a solid mount for her, one that would not act up and throw her some cold morning.

  She saddled Blackie and walked him over to the dead horse. The frost was so intense that the dead horse didn't smell, not yet. The corpse would make a good stepladder, she decided; it was the only one available to her. She didn't want to give herself time to think about the task too much.

  She didn't want to waver.

  When she lifted the Captain, she was shocked by how little he weighed. Clarie, her fifteen-year-old, far outweighed him. She had been tussling with Clarie not long before they left home, and had tried to lift her off the ground. It was all she could do to lift her daughter and carry her a few steps.

  Captain Call wasn't as heavy as Clarie, not nearly. It seemed absurd to her that this man, old and small, was still the man they sent after the meanest killers. They should have found a younger manhunter long since, and Captain Call should have been living a safer life.

  That was wisdom come too late, though. As she was carrying him to the horse, the Captain woke.

  He looked at the ground, as if surprised that a woman was carrying him. But his eyes were not focusing, for he was in great pain.

  "Captain, do you think you can ride?" Lorena asked. "I caught that other horse--I'll put you on Blackie." Call blinked; the world was hazy. He saw the black horse standing by the dead horse. Lorena was carrying him as if he weighed nothing. The fact was, his weight had dropped in the last few years. But not being on his own feet startled him. It made him wonder if he was still himself.

  He had always had his own feet on the ground.

  To be carried, even the few steps to the horse, was like floating. He felt he was floating into another life, a life so different from his old one that he wondered if he would even have the same name.

  "I ain't been carried since my ma carried me, I guess," he whispered.

  Lorena got his good foot in the stirrup.

  Call pulled up with her help, but when he swung his bad leg over the saddle, he yelled out; then he vomited and fainted.

  At least he was on the horse, Lorena thought.

  He was unconscious. She cut his lariat into sections with the big bowie knife he kept in his saddlebags, and then she tied him on.

  The buckskin stray was jumpy when she first mounted, but she walked him until he settled down. Captain Call was alive, but only just.

  She didn't want any jumpy horses causing his death. She led Blackie, and led him slowly.

  She hoped Call would come to from time to time, to direct her if she strayed off course.

  Call did awaken several times during the day, but he was too weak to speak. The pain in his leg was so intense that he could not hang on to consciousness for more than a few minutes. Lorena checked on him frequently. She was hoping for directions, but Call's whispers were incoherent. He muttered a name, but she didn't catch it.

  Lorena stopped well before dark. She wanted plenty of time to gather firewood. They stopped by a little creek with a trickle of water in it. She wanted to heat water and try again to wash the Captain's wounds. He had wet himself during the long day horseback. She knew she could never manage to change his pants with the shattered knee, but she could at least put him by the fire and dry him. The wound in his chest was still leaking blood. She cleaned that and then cleaned off the saddle; it was a bloody, smelly mess.

  Lorena gathered an abundance of firewood and drank several cups of strong coffee. She gave the Captain some and he came awake enough to drink it gratefully. All they had was bacon.

  Lorena fried some, but the Captain only ate two bites.

  "Dillard," he whispered. It was the name he had been muttering all day. But it meant nothing to Lorena.

  "Dillard Brawley," Call said. "He was the barber in Lonesome Dove." "Well, I never used a barber in Lonesome Dove," Lorena said. "I guess I never met him.

  "A centipede got in his pants and ruined his leg," Call whispered. "Gus and me tied him to a table and cut his leg off. We had to--he would have died of blood poisoning, if we hadn't.

  You have to do the same, you have to cut my leg off." "No," Lorena said. "That town can't be more than two more days. There'll be a doctor there to tend to your leg." In his haze during the ride, Call remembered Gus McCrae's wounded legs and how they looked before he died. Both Gus's legs had turned black, and Gus's wound had been nowhere near as bad as his. During the day, a great clot of blood had formed on Call's splintered knee. The bullet had hit just below the knee, but had gone upward and wrecked the kneecap. Lorena had tried to wash the clot, but it looked so bad that she had concentrated on doing the other wounds first. The bone fragments were like needles.

  Then she remembered the one-legged man in Lonesome Dove; he had come in the bar sometimes.

&nbs
p; He had a hoarse voice.

  "Was Dillard the man with the hoarse voice?" she asked.

  Call nodded. "He ruined his voice, screaming, when we took the leg off," Call whispered. "We thought he'd faint, but he never fainted. He just screamed his voice away." Lorena concentrated on washing the wounded arm; she hoped the Captain would forget about the leg, though she knew the pain must be too great to allow for forgetfulness. She was not squeamish. Clara had sometimes been in demand as a midwife, and Lorena had gone with her to help. She had also helped castrate horses when the ranch was shorthanded, and she had helped birth foals, as well as babies. She had felt the pains of childbirth five times herself, and she didn't faint at the sight of blood, even a lot of blood. She had seen injuries, some of them horrible. She had once bandaged the arm of a farmer who had been mangled in a haying machine, and she had several times cut fish hooks out of her own children.

  But she didn't want to have to be the one to remove Captain Call's leg. Better to travel night and day until they reached a settlement where there was a qualified doctor. The knee looked so bad that she was even indecisive about cleaning it. Still, there was Gus and his death to remember. The clot on the Captain's knee was black.

  Lorena thought about it until her mind went numb. She tipped over by the hot fire and slept a little.

  In the morning when she awoke, the Captain was looking at her out of feverish eyes. Lorena looked at the leg and then looked away.

  "You might bleed to death," she said.

  "I didn't yet," Call whispered. "I ain't handsome, like Gus. I've got no women to lose. If I have to be one-legged, I will. I want to live to kill that boy." Lorena felt a flush of disgust. The man was all but dead and might be dead before a day passed, or even an hour. He could barely whisper and his arm was ruined; he had a bullet in his chest that made his breath sound like a snore. Yet he still wanted to kill. The sympathy Lorena had felt for him in his pain, went away. Not all of it, but much of it.

  "You ought to think of a better reason to live than killing a boy," Lorena said. "If killing is the only reason you can think of to live, then you might as well die." Call was surprised by the anger in Lorena's voice.

  Lorena was surprised by it herself. It came from memories and from times long past, from things she had felt about Gus, and things she had felt about Jake Spoon. The very man before her, Captain Call, the man with the ruined arm and leg and the deep chest wound, had himself hung Jake Spoon, his friend. If Gus McCrae hadn't killed to save her, she would have died alone at the hands of cruel men, long years before. She would have had no husband, no children, no pupils. Killing was part of the life they had all lived on the frontier.

  Gus's killings had saved her, but Lorena still felt a bitterness and an anger; not so much at the old, hurt man laying by the campfire as at the brutal way of life in the place they lived.

  She and Clara sometimes daydreamed of making a trip to England together to see civilization.

  They meant to visit Shakespeare's birthplace, and to see a play. They had amused themselves in the Nebraska evenings by imagining what they would say if they happened to meet Mr.

  Browning on the street, or Mr. Carlyle.

  Yet here she was, not with Clara in a theater or a nice hotel in London, but on a bleak prairie, with not even one house within a hundred miles, caring for an old killer who wanted her to cut his ruined leg off so he could get well and kill again. She had studied and educated herself, but she had not escaped. When she looked around and saw where she was and remembered why she was there--because this man had taken her kind husband to help him kill a train robber--she felt a deeper anger still.

  "I'm tired of it," Lorena said. "I'm tired of it, Captain! You oughtn't to have taken my husband. He's not a killer. You and Gus were the killers. I loved Gus McCrae, but not like I love my husband. Our children love him and need him. You oughtn't to have taken him from us." Call was sorry he had said anything; better to have stayed quiet until he died. Lorena was risking her life to help him, and Pea Eye was risking his life too; and yet he had angered her. There was justice in what she said, too. He shouldn't have taken her husband. He had taken him and wasted weeks of his time and put his life in jeopardy, and for nothing.

  "The Garza boy is a killer," he whispered.

  "I don't care," Lorena said. "There's killers and killers and killers out here. My husband's got nothing to do with that. You should have let him be." Call remembered the fury Clara Allen had directed at him in Nebraska, as he was leaving her ranch with Augustus's body to bring it back to Texas. Now another woman, and one who was putting herself to great trouble to save him, was just as angry, if not angrier. He didn't know what the flaw was in his speech or in himself that brought up such anger in women.

  But the fury was up in Lorena. He saw it in her eyes, in the way her nostrils flared, in the stiff way she held herself.

  "You remember what I was, Captain," Lorena said. "I was a whore. Two dollars was all I cost--a dollar on Sunday. I don't know how many men bought me. I expect if you brought them all here, they'd about fill this desert. I expect they'd nearly make an army." Call remembered well enough. Gus and Jake and Dish and many men in Lonesome Dove had visited Lorena. In those days, cowboys rode fifty miles out of their way to visit Lorena.

  "But I'm not a whore now," Lorena said.

  "I'm a married woman. I'm a mother. I teach school. I didn't stay what I was--can you understand that? I didn't stay what I was!

  Clara cared for me, and she showed me a better way." Call didn't know what was wrong. Lorena had clenched her fist, and if he had been well she might have hit him. But the Garza boy was a killer, and a deadly one: he killed frequently and without pity, so far as Call knew. He had been hired to stop the boy's killing. That was his job. Getting well in order to do what he had been hired to do seemed a reason to live; though when he took stock of his actual condition, he knew it was unlikely that he would ever go on the hunt for a killer again. He probably wouldn't live anyway--why was the woman so angry?

  "I'll cut your leg off!" Lorena said.

  "I'll cut it off now! If you die, then you'll have been killed by a killer like yourself. But if you live, you oughtn't to stay a killer. I didn't stay a whore!" In her anger she thought she could just take the big knife and cut the ruined leg off. But when she actually prepared for the task, she cooled quickly.

  Call was feverish and barely conscious. When he saw Lorena take the knife he wondered, in a dim, faraway state of mind, if he should have made the request. He and Gus together had a time getting Dillard Brawley's leg off, and they'd had a saw. A knife wouldn't cut bone.

  If the joint was shattered, as it seemed to be, she might cut there. But she would have to nick the knife blade first to make a kind of saw.

  "Hit the knife on a rock, hit hard," Call said, weakly. "You need to nick it a little, so it'll saw.

  "Once you've nicked it, sharpen it," he added, in a whisper. "There's a whetstone in my saddlebags." Lorena found the whetstone. She hit the knife blade hard against a rock, again and again.

  Finally she made a few small nicks along the blade. Then she sharpened the big knife for several minutes. Captain Call had his eyes closed. Lorena hoped he was unconscious.

  She filled the coffeepot with water and heated it; then she poured the water over his knee until most of the black clot was gone. She knew she had to cut at the joint, and she wanted to see as clearly as she could.

  "Captain, I oughtn't to do this," Lorena said.

  "I don't know how to take a leg off." "If I die, it'll be the bullet that killed me, not the knife," Call whispered. "It won't be none of your fault." "That's how you feel, maybe," Lorena replied. "I'm the one that will be doing the cutting.

  If this don't work, I'll be questioning my judgment for a long time." Time and again in her marriage, Lorena had watched Pea Eye put off decisions. He would hem and haw, and lean one way and then another, and try to weigh the pros of a given matter against the cons. Usually he would k
eep on weighing the pros and cons for several weeks, or even months, until one day Lorena would have had enough of his procrastination. She would whirl and make the decision herself, annoyed that she hadn't gone on and made it weeks before.

  She was at such a point with the Captain. He was only just barely alive. His leg was ruined. Either she had to carry him on and hope she found a doctor before he died, or she had to cut.

  Without speaking to Call again, she made her decision--she'd cut. She grasped his thigh with her left hand to hold it steady, and she cut.

  Call moaned; he was too weak to manage a scream. He was in a hazy, hot state. He moaned twice, and then boiling red water seemed to settle over him.

  Lorena was glad he was unconscious. She didn't want him looking at her with his feverish eyes while she labored to remove his leg. It was labor, too; the hardest, apart from childbirth, that she had ever done. In no time it seemed she had blood to her elbows. The knife became slippery, so slippery that Lorena had to wipe off the handle several times. The flesh cut, but the bone was unyielding. She sawed and sawed, but it seemed that she was only scraping the bone. The Captain was bleeding heavily again, and it seemed to Lorena that he must be almost drained. He might be bleeding to death even, as she cut.