The smart guys along the bar and against the wall were grinning as if they expected me to fall on my knees and start begging him not to shoot me. They would have loved that. There's nothing that would make them happier than to see me spill my guts. There wasn't a man in the place, with the possible exception of Bama, who wouldn't have taken a shot at me if that had happened.
That's a pleasure they'll be a long time seeing, I thought grimly.
I stood up carefully as he stopped at the table, beside Marta.
“There's something you want?” I said.
For a minute he just looked at me. Or through me. There was no way of telling about those eyes of his. Not a muscle twitched in that stone face, but I noticed that his right hand was edging in toward the butt of his pistol—not much, but enough to carry on through when the time came. He didn't even look at Marta. He just reached with a big hand, grabbed her by the hair of the head, and jerked her half out of the chair.
The smart guys sucked in their guts, laughing to themselves. They already had me dead and buried. They didn't like the Indian much, but they hated punk kids like me even more. They figured I had got my reputation the easy way, and they figured I knew it. I guess I jarred them when I said:
“Take your goddamned hands off of her if you want to go on living.”
Even the Indian showed surprise. His eyelids raised about a millionth of an inch. The next thing I knew his gun was coming out of the holster.
I made my grab and didn't bother to aim. There wasn't time to aim, and when you're standing belly to belly, the way we were, there's no sense in it anyway. I just got the muzzle of my pistol over the top of my holster and fired. I didn't hit him. I didn't even come close. The bullet slammed into the floor somewhere, but I wasn't worrying about that.
The muzzle blast from a .44 is a powerful thing. At that range it can deafen a man, paralyze him, burn him, shock him throw him off balance. That was what I was counting on. I didn't need that first bullet, just the muzzle blast. And the Indian knew it. His mouth flew open as he slammed back under the impact, and before he could get his balance, before he could swing that pistol on me again, he was as good as dead.
I had all the time in the world after that first shot. I shot him twice through his left shirt pocket and he jerked like a monkey on the end of a string. He hit the floor, flopping around like a fish with a broken back. I don't know what kept him alive, but he wouldn't die until he managed to lift his pistol again and try to fix it on me.
Sweat poured off his face as he lifted the pistol, slowly, an inch at a time. For him, it must have been like lifting the south end of Texas, but somehow he did it. There was no fear of dying in those eyes of his. They were completely savage, kill-crazy. Then I stepped in and kicked the pistol out of his hand. I slammed the toe of my boot in his ribs.
“You sonofabitch! You filthy sonofabitch!” And I kept kicking him until somebody came up and pushed me back. It was Bama.
“That's enough!” he said. “Jesus Christ, you can't kill a man but once!”
All the anger and hate seemed to rush out in me all at once. I swung on Bama and knocked him sprawling with the barrel of my pistol. “Goddamn you,” I said, “don't tell me what I can't do!”
He was on all fours, shaking his head like a poled steer. Blood was welling up at the corner of his mouth and I could hear every drop hit the floor and splatter. The saloon had been shocked and jarred and stunned to a deathly quiet. The smart guys weren't so smart now. They stood with their mouths hanging open, staring stupidly.
As suddenly as it had hit me, my anger was gone. I put an arm around Bama's shoulder and helped him up.
“How do you feel?”
“I'm—all right.”
But he was looking at me strangely. First at me, then at the dead Indian, then at me again. He said, “I think I need a drink.”
“Sure.” I poured him a drink with my left hand, keeping my gun hand ready in case the Indian had some friends that wanted to take up the argument.
Bama downed the drink and wiped his mouth with a shaky hand. “Put your pistol away,” he said hoarsely. “Nobody wants to fight you. Not now, anyway.” He took a step forward, and a step backward, then he began to fall.
I caught him before he hit the floor and wrestled his dead weight up to something like a standing position. “Give me a hand,” I said to the girl.
She had a stupid, idiot's smile on her lips. She was half crazy with excitement and power and lust and God knows what else. She couldn't take her eyes off the dead Indian. Some insane, morbid love of blood and violence held her entranced, hypnotized her, charmed her.
“Goddamnit!” I said. “Help me get him out of here!”
Her head jerked up. The idiot's stare went out of her eyes and she got her shoulder under one of Bama's arms and we began to drag him out of the place. We dragged him right over the corpse, the rowels of Bama's spurs raking across the Indian's bloody chest and then clanging to the floor. Nobody made a move. I don't think anybody breathed. From the corner of my eye I glimpsed Basset standing in the doorway of his office, his fat face bloated and pale-looking in the orange light of the coal-oil lamps. I think he was smiling, but I wasn't sure, and I didn't care. There was somebody standing behind him looking out with wild, pale eyes. I think it was Kreyler.
Somehow we got Bama out of the place and up the stairs and into my room. I got the mattress off the floor and put it on the bed, then we stretched Bama out and began to work on him.
He was just drunk, mostly, but there was an ugly lump over his ear and a fine red thread of blood was taking quick long stitches across his face and down his neck, ending in a spreading red blotch on his collar.
“Get me some water,” I said.
The pitcher was empty, so she had to go around to the back of the saloon, where the pump was. In a minute she was back, and I dipped a rag into the water and washed the blood off Bama's face. He still didn't move. “Is there a doctor in this place?” I said. She shook her head. She came over to the bed and put a hand on his chest, on his throat, on his forehead. “No need doctor. Too much tequila.”
Maybe she was right, but it made me uneasy seeing him stretched out there, not making a move, hardly breathing. I hadn't meant to hit him. But, goddamn him, why couldn't he have kept out of my way? Why did people always have to make my business their business? If they got hurt they had nobody but themselves to blame.
“Well, I guess there's nothing else we can do. Maybe he'll sleep it off.”
I sat on the bed, staring at nothing, thinking of nothing. Downstairs, they were probably dragging the Indian out and maybe getting ready to bury him, but it didn't mean a thing to me one way or another. The Indian could never have been born, as far as I was concerned. I had no feeling for him at all; no hate, no anger. And in the back of my mind I knew that somebody—Basset, Kreyler, one of the Indian's friends—was probably planning a way to kill me. That didn't seem important either. I was getting out of Ocotillo. I was getting out tomorrow. The girl was standing there beside me, looking at me and not saying anything. She was still smiling, but it was a different, sweet, almost holy smile: It reminded me of old women on their knees in front of altars saying their prayers. It made me uncomfortable having her look at me that way.
I got up and went out of the room and went into Bama's room and lay across the bed in the darkness. I knew that she would be there in a few minutes. And she was.
She didn't say a word. She just lay down beside me and pressed that hot animal self of hers against me and waited. We both waited, and nothing happened. She came closer and those soft arms crawled over me, and then she was breathing her hot breath in my face and mashing her bruised mouth against mine. Still nothing happened. I could have been kissing a stone statue and it would have been about the same. For a while we just lay there. Maybe she thought that it was the excitement of the fight that made me the way I was, but it was more than that. She just wasn't what I wanted. After a while she went away.
<
br /> Chapter Five
THE NEXT MORNING I awoke to the sound of sloshing water behind the thin partition that separated Bama's room from mine. I got up and sloshed water on my own face, drying it on the tail of one of Bama's shirts. Then I went into the hall and knocked.
“Bama, are you up?”
He opened the door, bleary-eyed, licking his cracked lips. “Well,” he said. “I was wondering what happened to you.”
“I spent the night in your room. It seemed easier than trying to move you. How do you feel?”
“Fine,” he said thickly. “Like I always feel on mornings like this.” He touched the knot behind his ear and winced.
“That's where I hit you.”
“I know,” he said. “You didn't bring a bottle along, did you?”
“Don't you think it's about time to lay off the stuff for a while?”
He looked at me hazily. He sat on the bed, holding his head as if he thought maybe it would roll off his shoulders if he didn't. “God,” he said flatly, “what a rotten, lousy life. You killed the Indian, didn't you?”
“The sonofabitch asked for it.”
Then he thought of something. “The girl—Marta— where is she?”
“How should I know? I guess she went home, down in the Mexican section. I don't care where she went.”
“She—she wasn't with you last night?”
“Not after we got you up here.”
He thought for a while, then he said a funny thing. “Maybe there's some hope for you, Tall Cameron. As unlikely as it seems, maybe there's some hope for you, after all.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
But he seemed to have forgotten what he was talking about. “Sometimes I think that memories are the only things that are real. I wish they were. Are you sure you haven't got a bottle?”
Then I remembered that bottle of greaser poison that Marta had used oh my wrist. I dug it out from under some dirty clothes and poured him a small one. “I'm sorry about that lick I gave you,” I said. “But you butted into something that was none of your business.”
“Yes,” he said, “I suppose I did.” And then he polished off the drink and shuddered. “But that temper of yours,” he said when he got his breath, “you ought to learn to control it. It'll turn on you like a bad woman, and that will be the end of Tall Cameron.”
“Let me worry about my temper,” I said. Suddenly I began to get an idea—or rather, an old idea that had been floating around in the cellar of my mind suddenly came to the top. I said, “Bama, if you hate this place so much, why don't you get out of it?”
He just looked at me.
“What's holding you here?” I asked. “Take your cut of the silver that we got off the smugglers and go down to Mexico somewhere like I'm going to do.”
I was telling Bama something that I hadn't even admitted to myself. I was telling him that I was tired of being alone, that I was even afraid of being alone. I was asking him to ride with me. God knows why a man like me would want Bama with him. He would be no earthly good, and his drinking would probably cause trouble wherever we went.
Then it hit me that maybe I could feel the day coming when I would look around me and discover how far down I had gone. When that day did come I would want somebody around that I could still look down on. And that somebody was Bama.
I think he could see the way my mind was working, but there was no anger in his eyes, except possibly an old anger at himself. He started to say something, but he changed his mind at the last moment and had another drink.
“Think it over,” I said. “Maybe I could use some company if you want to ride along.”
Looking at the bottle, he said, “Do you really think you'll get out of Ocotillo?”
“Why shouldn't I? I've got enough money coming to keep me below the border for a while. After that, something will show up.” Then I said, “Speaking of money, I think I'll go down and pick up my cut from Basset. Do you want to come along?”
He reached for the bottle again. “I think I'll just sit here for a while, if you don't mind. Anyway, I got my cut last night.”
So I left him sitting there, getting an early start on the road to nowhere.
The bartender was leaning on a broom, contemplating a dark brown splotch on the saloon floor, when I came in. I said, “I want to see Basset,” and his head snapped up as if he had never seen me before.
“Sure. Sure,” he said. “Wait a minute, I'll see if Basset's up yet.”
He went back to the rear of the saloon, where I guessed Basset had a sleeping room next to his office—he struck me as being the kind of man that wouldn't like to get too far away from his business. After a minute the bartender came back.
“It's all right. He's in the office.” He was still sitting, fat and sweaty, behind his desk when I went in, looking exactly the same as the last time I had seen him. “Well,” he wheezed, “I guess you came by your reputation honest. You can handle guns, I'll say that for you. You've got a bad temper, though. You'll have to learn to hold onto that if you're going to work for me.”
“I'm not going to work for you,” I said. He sat back, blinking folds of fat over those buckshot eyes. “Now, look here,” he panted. “What's the matter?”
“I don't like wholesale murder and I don't like robbing people,” I said. “I just want to get out, like I told you. Now if you'll just figure out my cut of the silver...”
He lurched his hulk over in the chair and sat there blinking those eyes at me, breathing through his mouth. “Well,” he said. “If that's the way you feel about it. Sure, you can have your cut. No hard feelings.”
He pulled out the big bottom drawer of his desk and opened a strongbox with a key. He took out a heavy-looking, clanking canvas bag and shoved it across the desk toward me.
“Here it is,” he said. “You sure you don't want to change your mind?”
“I'm sure,” I said. I didn't bother to count the silver. I just picked it up and walked out, hoping that I had seen the fat man for the last time.
I went back up to my room and Bama was still there, drunk, as I had expected. I heard him talking to somebody as I came up the hall, and when I got to the door I saw that it was Marta.
“What's she doing here?”
Bama shrugged, “Maybe she's in love with you,” he said, waving his arms. “Maybe she can't bear to have you out of her sight.”
“She'd better start getting used to it, because I'm going to put Ocotillo behind me.”
I threw the sack of silver on the bed and she stood there looking at me. She seemed to come and go like night shadows, and every time I saw her she seemed to be a different person. I tried to remember how she had looked the first time I had seen her, there in the dusty street with fiesta going on all around us. I couldn't remember.
“I think the girl's got the wrong idea about you,” Bama said. “She thinks you killed the Indian because of her. It wasn't that at all, was it, Tall Cameron?”
“No,” I said, “it wasn't.”
“See?” Bama said, waving his arms again, as if he had just proved something.
The girl didn't say anything. She just stood there looking at me, and I had a feeling that overnight she had grown from a wild animal into a woman. And not a bad-looking woman, at that.
But I still wasn't interested. “You really ought to do something about her,” Bama said. “Tell her to go home. It's not decent the way she walks in and out of this place any time she gets the notion.” Bama lay back on the bed, holding the empty whisky bottle before him, staring into it as if it were a crystal ball and he were about ready to give us the beginning and end to everything. But, instead, he dropped the bottle and dozed off.
I began digging in my saddlebags, getting my stuff together. “Why don't you do like he says?” I said. “Go home or somewhere. Why don't you stay down in the Mexican part of town with your own people?”
“You need Marta,” she said.
“I don't need anybody.” But
she didn't believe me.
And I didn't believe myself, for that matter. An old, half-forgotten memory began to shape in my mind, and I remembered what Bama had said the day before. “Why don't you tell me about the girl you left in Texas? The girl you grew up with and loved and planned to marry—”
For a moment bright anger washed over me, a hurting, twisting anger that made me want to kill Bama as he lay there in his drunken stupor. But then I remembered Bama's own lost love and the anger vanished. We weren't so different, at that, Bama and me. We both lived in the past, because men like us have no future.
A Noose for the Desperado Page 7