Buzzard Bait

by Brett Cogburn

  “You wonder where I go?” the Mexican asked.

  Newt wondered nothing of the sort, more concerned with where the Mexican had come from and whether or not he was alone.

  The Mexican shrugged when Newt didn’t reply, and sipped at the hot coffee. “I have a rancho to the east, but my sister, she lives in Socorro and is very sick.”

  Newt waited long to answer him, while the mesquite wood in the fire popped and crackled between them and the Mexican’s dark eyes watched him. “Hope she gets well.”

  The Mexican nodded gravely, shrugged his shoulders, and made the sign of the Trinity in the air before him. “Maybe I don’t get there in time. Maybe she die. Maybe I go there, and she already well. Sólo Dios sabe.”

  Only God knows. It was a term Newt had heard many times since he had gone west. It was a perfect excuse for anything and everything in a hard country. Something bad happened and you blamed it on God. Some miraculous bit of luck came your way, and you counted it a blessing. More good than bad for most, but Newt couldn’t complain. He’d finally had a bit of luck. What did they used to say back home? Even a blind hog finds an acorn every now and then? Sólo Dios sabe, sure enough.

  It was a hundred miles up or down the river to anything that resembled civilization—nothing but burnt grass and scrub brush as far as you could see in any direction. If there was such a place as “nowhere,” then he had found it. And yet, the Mexican’s horse didn’t look like it had come far, nor did the Mexican.

  The Mexican uncurled a finger from the handle of his coffee mug and pointed at the jackrabbit carcass hanging over the coals on a leaning stick jabbed in the ground. “Your dinner?”

  “It’s not much, but I won’t turn you away if you’re hungry.”

  “You are very generous.” The Mexican rubbed his belly and smiled again, as if to demonstrate how hungry he was. He jerked a leg off the rabbit and made a show of picking delicately at the meat and smacking in delight, as if it were the most exquisite thing he had ever eaten.

  Newt grunted again, but with a little humor. A touch of a smile hinted at one corner of his mouth. Tough, stringy jackrabbit wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. And he was one to know, for until the rabbit darted from under the shade of a mesquite tree and ran in front of his rifle sights, he hadn’t had anything to eat in a day and a half.

  “I was considering eating my pack mule before that rabbit showed up.” Newt didn’t know why he said that, but he found himself relaxing his guard. That wasn’t a good thing for a man camped alone on the Pecos. He cast a quick glance at his saddlebags out of the corner of his left eye and then looked back at the Mexican just as quickly.

  “Your stock, they look tired.” The Mexican pitched the rabbit bones aside after he finished picking them clean, and pointed to Newt’s picket line.

  Newt couldn’t argue with that. Not that his saddle horse and the little pack mule had come so far or so hard, but neither of them were particularly good animals to begin with. But that’s what a man got on short notice when he left in the middle of the night and in a hurry. Every miner in White Oaks knew that you risked your poke and maybe your life riding in any direction out of town. There were some that made a living breaking their backs digging in the hard New Mexico ground, and some that made a living waiting beside the trail for some unsuspecting, prosperous sort to come along.

  And that was why he had saddled up in the wee hours and rode like hell. Not north to the railroad at Las Vegas like most would expect, but south along the Pecos, hoping to strike the Texas Pacific line and catch a ride back East with his fortune intact and some crook wondering how he had gotten away.

  “You look familiar,” the Mexican said. “Do I know you?”

  “Never saw you before.” Newt ignored the hint and opportunity to introduce himself.

  “You got one of those faces that makes me think I see you somewhere before. Maybe that’s it,” the Mexican said.

  Newt didn’t take offense, but there was a time when any mention of his battered face made him self-conscious enough to want to run his fingers over the knot of his oft-broken nose or trace the buckshot and gristle texture of the lump that was one cauliflower ear. Or it might make him want to hit that person in the worst way. A good, solid lick planted right on some unfriendly’s nose always did short-term wonders for his temperament. But he told himself those days were long past and he had learned to dismiss the looks strangers gave him. He had fought for every one of those scars, and he’d be damned if he would be ashamed of them. Let them think what they wanted.

  The Mexican continued to study Newt across the fire. The two of them stayed like that for a long while, staring while the mesquite wood crackled and the wind pelted them with sand. Newt found it odd to be at such a test of wills with a man he had only recently met, and a smiling, overly friendly man at that.

  “Now I know,” the Mexican finally said. “You fight that Irishman at Silver City a couple of years ago. What his name?”

  “The Butcher.”

  “Yeah, that was him. You pretty tough. Thought you gonna win a time or two.”

  Newt let a hiss of air out between his teeth that was meant as a scoff. “He broke two of my ribs, my nose, and I couldn’t close my left fist for a month.”

  “¿Cuántos vueltas? Thirty rounds?”

  “Forty-five. That Mick bastard knocked me down nine times.”

  The Mexican remained squatting, but shadowboxed and offered phantom punches over the flames. “That was a good fight. You never imagine some people you will run across. Like you, right here. Sólo Dios sabe. Widowmaker Jones in the flesh.”

  Newt frowned. It was a silly name, and not of his choosing. Seemed like all of his life he had been ending up with things he couldn’t do anything about, trying to do things folks said he couldn’t, and wanting what was always out of his reach. It wasn’t some fight fan or newspaper editor that gave him the name—only a dumb Welshman popping it out of his mouth over a mug of beer in the midst of a victory celebration years before. Such a name shouldn’t have lasted with only a half-dozen, not-so-smart pick-handle men and hired muscle in the saloon, and most of them too drunk or too battered to hear anything. But it did. Some things you’re stuck with, like it or not.

  “What you make for that fight?”

  “Not a dime. It was a hundred dollars, winner take all.”

  “You like that kind of work?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Beating people. Getting beat on.”

  “Money’s hard to come by. Worked for the railroad some, dug graves one winter after that, and worked with a blacksmith that following spring. Ended up in a mining camp after that. Fought for prize money here and there when I could and worked as a mine guard and payroll escort when I wasn’t swinging a pick or handling a muck stick. You know, whatever it took.”

  The Mexican nodded and pointed at where Newt’s hands were draped over the Winchester cradled in his lap. “Big hands. Manos de piedra . . . How do you say? A puncher’s hands, no? All scarred from the men you’ve hit.”

  Newt glanced at his battered knuckles. He’d always had big hands. All those years ago, when he left the mountains, his mother had stopped him on the porch and taken hold of those hands. She looked at them and then looked at him with that wise old look in her eyes.

  “Newt,” she said, “God gives every one of us something—some talent. Some he gives smarts and some he gives beauty or the knack to make money or build things. You, he gave hands made for fighting and a head as thick as a Missouri mule. Some would tell a hot-tempered man like you to ride easy out there where you’re going, and I’ll say the same. It’s a far land and no telling what you’ll run into. But I’ll also tell you, when it comes to a pinch, you use what God gave you. Smite them that vex you to and fro, and lay about you with them hands. Samson didn’t have much else but muscle and bone, and he did all right.”

  Newt laughed to himself and savored the old memory a bit before he answered the Mexican
. “I’ve smote a few that vexed me sorely, and been knocked around myself more than once. You take your licks same as you give ’em.”

  “How did you come to that line of work? This pugilist business?” the Mexican asked.

  “It just happened.”

  “You were fast when you fight the Butcher. Most big men aren’t so fast as you.”

  “I’ve always had fast hands.”

  The Mexican nodded and clucked his tongue, as if it were something he already knew, and as if it confirmed something he already suspected—like a doctor adding up symptoms to make a diagnosis.

  “You ask a lot of questions,” Newt said.

  “Perdóneme. I no properly introduced myself. Me llamo Javier . . . Javier Cortina.”

  Newt immediately recognized the name and started to raise his rifle, but it was too late. The pistol appeared in the Mexican’s hand as if by magic, cocked and pointed leisurely across the fire at him with the nickel plating on the steel shining in the firelight like some kind of talisman.

  Cortina laughed. “A good fist is something, gringo, but it don’t reach so far as a bullet.”

  Newt’s hand crawled up the stock of his rifle toward the trigger guard.

  The Mexican extended the pistol and pointed it at Newt’s forehead. “Don’t try it. You fast, but not fast as me.”

  Newt cursed under his breath. Damned Cortina sitting there smiling like he was doing him a favor holding a pistol on him. The thievingest bandit on the border, they said he never met a horse he couldn’t steal, a woman he couldn’t bed, a priest that he couldn’t make cross himself, or a man that could run him down or best him with a gun. Of all the people to ride into his camp, and him stupid enough to let his guard down.

  “I should have known you right off.”

  “Don’t take it so hard,” Cortina said. “Maybe you come through this alive. I get your gold, you know, and you get to keep your life. Fair trade.”

  “I don’t have any gold.”

  Cortina clucked his tongue and shook his head. “I follow you all the way from White Oaks. Maybe if you wanted to keep it a secret you shouldn’t have a drunk for a partner. That Yaqui Jim, he buy everyone in the house rounds and pay for it with gold. All the people, they know Yaqui Jim made a strike.”

  “You kill Jim?”

  “That Jim, he don’t listen to reason good.”

  Newt had always worried that Jim couldn’t keep things quiet, despite all the promises he made when they found the pay streak. Nobody would have ever believed the two of them would find anything when they quit their mine guard jobs and headed up the side of the mountain to do a little prospecting. What did a barroom thumper and a half-breed, drunk Indian know about ore? Everybody expected to strike it rich, but few ever did.

  But Newt and Yaqui Jim had—a little pocket on the side of the mountain not yet claimed by the company and with a little ledge laced with gold. It was only a small find, and it had been their plan to high-grade it and get gone before the bushwhackers or company men snooping around found out about it. They were so close to getting away with it, but Jim always loved a bottle and wanted to celebrate and show off a little.

  There were more riders coming through the brush—a lot of them. Cortina heard them but, smiling smugly, didn’t even look their way.

  “What say you lay down that rifle and get your poke for me? Save me the trouble of digging through your things,” Cortina said.

  “Go to hell.”

  “You first, señor.”

  Cortina’s pistol roared, and that was the last thing Newt remembered until he wasn’t dead anymore.

  Chapter Two

  Bullets hurt like hell going in, but they can hurt worse later. A lot worse, until you can’t think and until you don’t know where the hurt begins and ends and you would rather be dead than suffer so. But then again, the only good thing about that kind of pain is that it lets you know you aren’t dead. If you’re a stubborn sort, hurting like that will make you mad enough to fight through it, if only because getting to your feet is the only way you can find the son of a bitch that did it to you and do worse to him.

  Newt Jones woke with his face in the dirt, and it was a long time before he could recall how he came to be in such shape. There was a bullet hole through his chest, still intermittently and slowly seeping blood. There was a lot of blood—some wet and sticky and heavy, and other blood, older, dried and matted and mixing with the sand and forming a pasteboard crust of the front of his shirt. Yet, he was still alive. Cortina’s bullet had passed through him like a hot knife, but somehow it hadn’t killed him.

  Cortina and his men had taken everything he owned: his livestock, his gun, his gold. Made a fool of him. The damned gold. The most money he ever had. Blood and sweat and backbreaking work. The thought of losing it hurt almost as bad as the hole in him.

  At least Cortina had left his boots on his feet. There was that, even if he was too weak to walk. As it was, it took him half an hour to crawl the fifty yards to the river’s edge. Most times, he would have complained about the bitter Pecos water, but it tasted like heaven. He drank and drank and then dunked his head under until his mind was clearer.

  It took him most of the afternoon to rebuild his fire from the feeble coals left from his previous one, and to bathe his wounds. The second day he smashed a rattlesnake’s head with a rock. There were plenty of snakes.

  The third and fourth day he ate more snake and took stock of his situation. He had nothing but a sheath knife and the clothes on his back, and it was a long way to anywhere from where he was. The closest settlements were a few little Mexican sheepherder villages back up the river to the north. And then there were Fort Stockton and Comanche Springs somewhere south of him, and the old mail road, running west to El Paso or southeast to Del Rio. Cortina’s gang’s tracks were headed due south.

  He was no scout, but from the sign they left behind, he guessed there were at least five or six of them riding with Cortina. Most likely, every one of them was as salty as Cortina. A man in Newt’s condition wouldn’t stand much of a chance against them. The smart thing would be to walk north and count himself lucky that he might live. A smart man would do that, no doubt.

  On the fifth day he started south, following the river and walking in the tracks of the man he swore to kill. He was in no shape to walk fast, but he walked as best he could. Every step he took was a challenge in itself, and his chest ached like he had been beaten with a sledgehammer. He wasn’t a praying man, but more than once he scowled at the sun and asked that if he had one thing left granted to him, then let him come face-to-face with Javier Cortina one more time. Revenge and getting his gold back was the way it should be, but if it came to that, he would gladly settle for nothing but revenge. Cortina should have known that if you’re going to kill a man, you better make sure he is dead.

  Chapter Three

  It wasn’t much of a tent, as circus tents go—a round thing with the brightly colored panels long since faded to dull pastels, and tears here and there sewn over with mildew-stained patches. One of the stakes had pulled loose from the sandy ground, and the Arabic-styled top that should have formed a needle spire at the center support pole instead sagged deeply. Still, it was perhaps the only circus to ever visit the little Mexican village, and the people who filed inside stared at it admiringly.

  Kizzy Grey peeked out of a crack between the wall of the tent and the wagon tarp draped over a stretched rope that served as a screen and a dressing room. Some two dozen Mexican families were crowded together on the small section of bleachers on the far side of the tent from her, their eyes dark beneath the flickering lantern light, and their expressions almost somber, as if they weren’t sure what to expect. Some of the children tugged at their parents’ sleeves and pointed at the murals of African elephants, crocodiles, immense snakes, sword-swallowers, fire-breathers, and other exotic circus themes painted on plank signs scattered around. Most of the peasant farmers and villagers had likely never seen anything approa
ching an elephant, nor were they apt to. Billed as a circus or not, the Greys had never owned an elephant, no matter what was on the signs. Although they had once owned a monkey and used it in the show until it bit a customer one night in Kansas City and the drunken Italian track layer pulled a club out of his coat pocket and killed the poor, ill-tempered thing.

  The signs were what they were. “Ambience” was what her father used to call his painted flights of fancy—creating hope and setting mood—rather than false advertising. In Kizzy’s mind they were an outright lie, but a harmless one if a lie could be such.

  There had been a time when the Incredible Grey Family Circus had played before the big crowds in the big towns. But everything fell apart. Since then, it was more of the same, traveling the roads and settling for anyplace that would have them and doing their acts for whatever the local citizenry had to shell out, which of late hadn’t been much.

  Kizzy turned and stared at the rusted little money box on the table behind her. The night’s take for the gate wasn’t more than a handful of pesos and not near enough to feed their animals or to keep up with repairs. She shrugged her thin shoulders without realizing she did it. It wasn’t all bad. One old woman had bought her family’s way into the show with a chicken. At least they would eat well for a meal.

  Kizzy double-checked herself in the mirror, dabbing at a stray strand of black hair before tugging on her hat. She smoothed the front of her dress, frowning at a stain on it and wondering if she had made the best selection from the open chest full of costumes beside her. Her father had claimed that he paid a genuine Indian maiden to tan and sew the buckskin together. The snow-white, fringed dress was a pretty thing, with embroidery and fancy stitching across the chest and beadwork at the sleeve cuffs and on the hem of the skirt. She loved the dress, even though her father hadn’t really gotten it from any Indian maiden. She had known that, even when she was only ten. He had really paid a Jewish seamstress in Chicago fifty dollars to make it. The buckskin wasn’t really buckskin, and the cheap suede was worn smooth in places from the days when her mother wore it.