A Noose for the Desperado

by Clifton Adams

  I don't know where she came from. But now she was standing next to me, grinning as if nothing had happened.

  “Get away from me,” I said. “When I get tired of living I can get myself killed. I don't need your help.”

  She didn't bat an eye. “I think you plenty fast with gun,” he grinned. “You don't be killed.”

  “I'll be killed if you keep telling people I'm a government marshal. What the hell did you do that for, anyway? And after that, why did you bother to warn me that somebody was waiting for me? Do you just like to hear guns go off and see men get killed?”

  She threw her head back and laughed, as if that was the best one she'd heard in a long time. “Maybe you buy Marta drink, eh?”

  “Maybe I'll kick Marta's bottom if she doesn't leave me alone.”

  But I didn't mean it and she knew it. She laughed again and I poured her a drink of the white poison. She poured salt in the cup between her thumb and forefinger, licked it with her tongue and then downed her drink in one gulp. She looked more at home here in the saloon than some of the fancy girls. And she was a lot better looking than any of the doxies. But I noticed a funny thing. None of the men looked at her. They seemed to go to a great deal of troublenot to look at her.

  “Another one, gringo?” she said, holding up her empty glass.

  “Not for me.” But I reached for the bottle and poured her another one. She downed it the same way she had the first one.

  “Where you go, gringo?”

  “To find a bed. There's a big desert out there and I've been a long time crossing it. I'm tired.”

  She took my arm and pulled me toward the door. “Come with me, I fix.”

  “Isn't there a hotel over the saloon here?”

  “You no go there. You come with Marta.”

  God knows she made it clear enough, and she was the best-looking girl I had seen for longer than I liked to remember—but there was something about it that went against me. I felt a sickness that I hadn't felt in a long time, and memories popped up in my mind, sharp and clear like a magic-lantern show I had seen once. We were outside now, on the dirt walk in front of the saloon. At the end of the building there was an outside stairway that went up to the second floor, and on the corner of the building there was a sign: “Rooms.” For no particular reason I began to get mad. I gave her a shove, harder than I'd intended, and she went reeling out into the dusty street.

  I headed for the livery barn to get my saddlebags and she cursed me every step of the way in shrill, outraged Spanish. But I didn't hear. I was listening to other voices. And other times.

  Other times and other places.... I went through the motions of looking after my horse and getting my saddlebags and going up the shaky stairs over the saloon to see if I could get a room, but they were like the motions that you go through in a dream. They didn't seem to mean anything. I remembered the big green country of the Texas Panhandle, where I was born. I remembered my pa's ranch and the little town near it, John's City. And Professor Bigloe's Academy, where I had gone to school before the war, and the frame shack at the crossroads between our place and John's City called Garner's Store where I used to listen to the bitter old veterans of the war still cursing Sherman and Lincoln and Grant, and reliving over and over the glories of the lost Confederacy. And, finally, I remembered a girl.

  But she was just a name now, and I had said good-by to her for the last time. Good-by, Laurin. I had hurt her for the last time, and lied to her for the last time, and I tried to be glad that she was married now and had put me out of her life. Maybe now she would know a kind of quiet peace and happiness that she had never had while I was around. I tried, but I couldn't feel glad, or sorry, or anything else. Except for an aching emptiness. I could feel that.

  At the top of the stairs I pounded on a door and woke up a faded, frazzle-haired old doxie, who, for a dollar, let me have the key to a room at the end of the dusty hall. The room was just big enough to undress in without skinning your elbows on the walls. There was a sagging iron bed and a washstand with a crock pitcher, bowl, and coal-oil lamp on it. A corner of a broken mirror was tacked on the wall over the washstand. There was an eight-penny nail in the door, if you wanted to hang up your clothes.

  It wasn't the finest room in the world, but it would do. I raised the window and had a look outside before I lighted the lamp. I was glad to see that there was no awning or porch roof under the window, and there was nobody out in the street that I could see. I lighted the lamp, took the straw mattress off the bed, and put it on the floor in front of the door. I was dead tired and I didn't want any visitors while I slept.

  Automatically I went through a set routine of checking my guns, putting them beside me on the mattress, stretching out with my feet against the door. If that door moved I wanted to know about it in a hurry. Small things, maybe, but I had learned that it was small things that kept a man alive. Trimming a fraction of a second off your draw, filing a fraction of an inch off your gun's trigger action, keeping your ears and eyes and nerves keyed a fraction higher than the next man's. A heartbeat, a bullet. They were all small things.

  For a long while, in the darkness, I rocked on the thin edge of sleep while almost forgotten faces darted in and out of my memory, flashing and disappearing like fox fire in a sluggish swamp. Laurin's face. And Pappy Garret. The fabulous Pappy Garret whose name was already beginning to appear in five-cent novels, and history books, and maybe even the Sunday newspaper supplements back East. My pal Pappy, who had taught me everything I knew about guns. I tried to imagine what Pappy would say if he could see how famous I had become. Would he smile that old sad smile of his if he could see the bright look of admiration in small boys' eyes as they read the “Wanted” poster?

  At some unsure point half thoughts became dreams, and then the dreams vanished and there was nothing for a while.

  I don't remember when I first felt the pressure of the door on my feet, but when I felt it. I was immediately awake, wide-eyed, staring into the darkness. There wasn't a sound. Not even from the saloon below. At first, as I lay rigid, I thought that I must have imagined it, but then the door moved inward again, slowly, carefully.

  For just a moment I lay there wondering who in Ocotillo wanted to kill me. Kreyler? Maybe, but I didn't think he would try it while Basset was trying to get me on his payroll. Could I have overlooked somebody in the saloon that had something against me? A brother or cousin or friend of somebody I had killed? That was possible. I managed to roll off the mattress without making any noise. I wasn't scared, now that I knew what was going on. I was awake, but whoever it was at the door didn't know it. When he found out, he would be too close to death for it to make any difference.

  I eased the mattress away as the crack in the door widened. A figure slipped into the room without a sound. I still couldn't tell who it was. White moonlight poured on the bed, but the rest of the room was in darkness, and for a moment that empty bed confused the killer.

  I don't know why I waited. I could have squeezed the trigger and killed him before he knew what hit him. But for some reason I didn't.

  I saw a knife glint dully as he began to move forward. Then I saw who it was.

  I must have given a grunt of surprise, because the figure wheeled quickly in my direction. I didn't see a thing, but instinct told me to do something and do it in a hurry. I started to dive, and as I moved to one side the knife flashed and glittered, cutting the air down over my head. There was a sudden thud as it buried itself in the wall. I heard the quivering, disappointed whine of well-tempered steel. Then I slammed into a pair of legs and we crashed to the floor.

  The would-be killer was Marta, the Mexican girl.

  I heard clothing tear as we went down. I made a grab for her arms but she jerked away and gouged bloody holes in my face with her fingernails. I grabbed again and this time I got her down, my hands on her shoulders and my knee in her stomach. Her body was smooth and hot, and somehow hard and soft at the same time, like gun steel covered with
velvet. Neither of us made a sound. We had landed near the window, and cold moonlight fell on her sweating face. Her blouse had come apart in the fight, and from her waist up she was mostly naked. She twisted her head to one side and sank those white, gleaming teeth in my wrist.

  I heard myself howl as she broke loose and dived across the floor for one of my guns. But I grabbed her hair and jerked her back, scratching and clawing like some wild animal. I could feel warm blood running down my arm, and when she tried to bite me again I hit her. I hit her in the mouth as hard as I could. I felt her lips burst on my knuckles and blood spurted halfway across the room.

  “Goddamn you!” I heard myself saying. She was limp on the floor, but I still had a hold of her hair, holding her head up. “Goddamn you!” I let go of her hair and her head hit the floor like a ripe melon. She was as limp as a rag, and I didn't give a damn if she never got up.

  I fumbled around the dark room in my underwear until I finally found my shirt and got some matches. After a while I got the lamp burning and poured some water into the crock bowl and began washing the blood off my arm. But I couldn't stop the blood that kept gushing out of the deep double wound on my left wrist. The pain went all the way up to my shoulder and down to my guts. Anger swarmed all over me like a prairie fire.

  “Get up, goddamn you!” I said. But she didn't move. I went over and gathered up my guns and her knife, trailing blood all over the place. Then I jerked off half her blouse and wrapped it tightly around my forearm. Pretty soon the bleeding stopped.

  After a while she began to stir. She lifted herself slowly to her knees, shaking her head dumbly like a poleaxed calf.

  “Get out of here,” I said tightly. “And stay out. So help me, if you ever try a thing like that again I'll kill you.”

  She looked at me for a long time with those stupid eyes. She looked like hell. Her mouth was bloody and her lips were beginning to puff. She didn't look so damned wild and deadly now.

  I went over to the door and flung it open. “Go on, get out of here.”

  She managed to get to her feet, swaying, almost falling on her face again. She put one foot out, as if it were the first step she had ever taken. Then she tried the other one. After a while she made it to the hallway. I slammed the door and locked it.

  I don't know how long I sat there on the springless bed, nursing my arm and letting the anger burn itself out. But finally the red haze began to lift and I could think straight again.

  She had tried to kill me! That was the thing that got me, when I began to think about it. But why? I didn't know enough about women to answer that. A lot of people had tried to kill me at one time or another, but, before tonight, never a woman. Maybe she was just plain crazy. I remembered that Kreyler had said that when I had asked him about her. Maybe Kreyler knew what he was talking about.

  My wrist was still giving me trouble. The pain was no longer located in any one particular spot; the whole arm throbbed and ached all the way to the marrow of the bone. I got up and washed it again in water and tried to do a better job of bandaging it, but I couldn't tell any difference in the way it felt. That was when I heard somebody on the stairs. Footsteps in the hall.

  I found my pistol and blew out the lamp. When the footsteps stopped in front of my door I was ready. I jerked the door open and stepped to one side, my pistol cocked.

  It was the girl again, Marta.

  She had washed the blood off her face but she was still a long way from being a beauty. Her face was swollen, her lips were split and puffed all out of shape. But she had found a clean blouse from somewhere to replace the one I had torn off of her—and in her hands she had a bottle of whisky.

  “Whisky good for arm,” she said flatly. “I fix.”

  There was no fight left in her. Her eyes had the vacant, weary look that you see in the eyes of very old people, or perhaps the dying. I felt like a fool holding a gun on her, and in the back of my mind I suppose I felt sorry for what I had done to her, even if she had tried to kill me. What could I do with a girl like that? I couldn't hate her. I couldn't feel anything for her but a vague kind of pity.

  And I was dead tired and maybe I did need the whisky.

  “All right,” I said. “Wait until I light the lamp again.”

  I lit the lamp and she came into the room, almost timidly. She took the bowl of bloody water, threw it out the window, and filled the bowl up again from the pitcher. “Come,” she said.

  She unwrapped my arm and washed the wound again. Then she opened the bottle and poured the whisky over my wrist and I almost hit the ceiling.

  “Bad now,” she said, “but good tomorrow.”

  “If I live until tomorrow. At the rate things are going, there's a good chance that I won't.”

  She began bandaging the wrist again, without saying anything. I turned the bottle up and drank some of the clear, coal-oil-tasting fluid. It was the raw, sour-mash stuff that the Mexicans make for themselves, and when it hit my stomach it was almost as bad as pouring it in the wound.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “My house.”

  “It may be fine for wounds, but it's not worth a damn to drink.”

  “Papacito drink,” she said.

  “You like saloon whisky, don't you? Saloons and saloon whisky and gringos. Why don't you stay in your own part of town?”

  For a moment she looked at me with hurt eyes, then went on with her bandaging. I didn't give a damn what she did. I was just talking while the whisky cooled in my stomach. It occurred to me that it was a crazy trick, letting her back into the room. Maybe she had another knife hidden on her somewhere.

  “That good?” she said.

  She finished with my arm, then poured some whisky on a rag and cleaned the blood off my face.

  I had a look in the mirror. “That's fine. My face looks like something left on a butcher's block. I might as well throw away my off-side gun, for all the good it's going to do me. What the hell's wrong with you, anyway? Are you just plain crazy or did you have a reason for trying to get that knife into me?”

  She looked down and said nothing.

  “Out with it,” I said. “I'm not mad now, I just want to know what you've got against me.”

  She still didn't say anything, so I grabbed her arm and jerked her around. Then I got a handful of her hair and snapped her head back.

  “Tell me, goddamnit! Did somebody pay you to try a trick like that?”

  We stood there breathing in each other's faces. Finally she said, “No.”

  “Then why?”

  She shrugged. “I hate you—for a little while. You shove Marta away. I think maybe I kill you.”

  It took me a minute to get it, and after I finally did get it I didn't understand it. Just because I hadn't wanted to go to bed with her, she tried to kill me!

  She was looking down again. Her eyes still had that dull, beaten look in them, and I had a queer feeling that she was crying and the tears were falling on the inside. I didn't know what to make of her. It made me uncomfortable just looking at her.

  She said flatly, “I go now.”

  “That's fine.” I went over and opened the door. She waited a long minute, watching me, as if she thought maybe I was going to change my mind and ask her to stay.

  I didn't. All I wanted was to get her out of here and never see her again.

  After she had gone I lay a long while trying to figure her out. But I couldn't do it, and along toward dawn I lost interest and tried to get some sleep. And at last I did sleep, and dreamed restless dreams, mostly of my home in Texas.

  Fiesta was over when I woke up the next morning. Most of the Mexicans had gone back to their one-mule farms or their sheep herds, or wherever Mexicans go when fiesta is over. My room was a mess, with blood all over the floor, and the bed knocked around at a crazy angle, and everything I had scattered from one corner to the other. My wrist was swollen stiff and hurt like hell.

  I picked up some of the things, shirts and pants and a change of und
erwear that had been kicked out of my saddlebags in the scuffle, and put them back where they belonged. I stood at the window for a while, looking down on the gray scattering of mud huts that was Ocotillo, and for a minute I almost made up my mind to get out of there. The place was crazy, and everybody in it was crazy. I didn't want any more to do with it.

  But where would I go? Back to Texas and let some sheriffs posse decorate a cottonwood with me? To New Mexico or California, and take my chances with the Cavalry or United States marshals?

  I didn't think so.

  It looked like Ocotillo was the end of the line, whether I liked it or not. And that proposition of Basset's—I'd have to listen to that, too, whether I liked it or not, because I didn't have any money and I didn't know of anybody that I could go to for help.

  For a week, maybe, I thought. Or a month at the most. I could stand it that long. When I got some money together I could find a place to hole up until the law lost interest in me. Maybe I'd go across the line into Sonora, or Chihuahua, or some place like that. But it would take money.