by Bill Brooks
He stood after squatting next to the last of them—Luz’s little sorrel filly with the four white stockings. She would grieve to learn of it, he was sure. He turned and eased out between the rails and crossed over to the house, his hands clenched into fists, his boots leaving a second set of tracks in the fresh snow—a trudge that spoke of loneliness.
Luz was there at the stove when he came in, fixing batter for flapjacks. She had pieces of ham frying in a pan and coffee brewing on the stove lid. The smells were warm and inviting and deceptively all wrong for what he was feeling. She’d set two plates on the table, a fork and knife and spoon for each.
She turned her head when he came into the mudroom, stomping snow off his boots. Saw the look on his face.
“What is it?” she said.
“I don’t want you to go outside this morning.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“I need to ride into town but I want you to stay inside the house.”
“Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Somebody’s killed the horses,” he said, and went on into the bedroom and bent down under the bed and got the pistol, then reached into a cedar-lined closet to the top shelf and found the shoulder holster, and took it down and slipped into it and put the pistol into the holster, then put his coat on before coming back into the kitchen.
She was standing there unmoving, wondering if she’d heard him right, had tried looking out the window above the dry sink but could not see the corral from that view.
“My little Jessie too?” she said.
“Yes. If you have to go to the privy, go now,” he said. “Otherwise I need you to stay put in this house till I get back.”
He went to the corner of the room where the L. C. Whitney ten-gauge stood dark and lethal, all wood and steel, foreboding. Took it and broke it open and saw both chambers were seated with shells, then snapped it shut and set it in place again.
“I’ll walk out with you to the privy,” he said.
She went in and shrugged out of her nightgown and dressed in a pair of trousers and one of his flannel shirts, then laced up her shoes and came out into the kitchen again looking perfectly androgynous, especially when she put on one of his old canvas coats. They went out through the mudroom and walked the now hidden footpath to the privy, where he stood guard until she came out again. His eyes scanned the ridge and in every direction out away from the house. There was no good place a man could be lying in wait. He walked her back to the house.
“I’m going to ride into Domingo and talk to Trout,” he said. “Do you feel safe waiting here alone until I get back? I can travel much faster if we’re not riding double. You know well how to use that.” He nodded toward the shotgun. “You don’t have to be a shootist to hit anything with it; it will stop about anything, including something the size of a circus elephant. You just have to have enough grit to pull the triggers.”
“Yes,” she said, looking at it.
He had long before this moment taught her to shoot pistol, rifle, and shotgun. It was the kind of country a body needed to have such skills—man and woman alike. She didn’t like the guns, the shotgun especially because it had a wrist-breaking kick to it, but she’d hit most of the cans and bottles he’d lined up for her. Good enough that he was satisfied she could defend herself, it came to that.
He took his Stetson from the wood peg and settled it on his head.
“Remember,” he said, reaching for the door latch. “Nobody comes in you don’t know, and if they try, give them both barrels. He reached onto a shelf and took down a box of shells with brass bottoms and red paper the size of a man’s thumb. “I’ll be back here in an hour.”
The terrain was one of gently rolling hills, covered now with a thin blanket of snow so that the green of junipers stood dark against the white, so that the blue of sky seemed made of perfect blue glass, so that the Rio Ruidoso’s water looked like a fat black snake crawling its way along. And where the sun struck the snow, it sparkled like broken glass.
And when he looked back at the house, he could see a curl of smoke from the tin smokestack knowing that she wasn’t defenseless, that she was full of grit and seasoned, and for that he was well pleased. Still, the thought of what had been done in the night troubled him. And what troubled him even more was the why of it.
He spurred the big stud to a gallop for the trip to Domingo. The air brushed cold against his face and bucked inside his clothes. By midmorning the sun would gain enough strength to melt the snow except in the deepest shadows. Spring in this country was always chancy.
He kept an eye for any sort of movement, but saw none.
Except for the thudding hooves, the jingle of bit, the horse’s breathing, the creak of cold saddle leather, the world was as silent around him as if he had been encapsulated in one of those children’s glass domes.
The road was for the most part straight, but rising and falling over the gently sloping landscape, and thus far so early in the day, unscarred by wagon or horse tracks. He ascended a rise and descended the other side before fording a black creek that branched off the Ruidoso. Every little while he would turn slightly to check his back trail, thinking someone was following him. But he never saw anyone.
The previous night and this early morning’s pleasure were all but forgotten now, replaced by the sight of something unspeakable.
It seemed as if a knot had been tied in his guts even as he made plans for his return—what he knew needed doing to keep the coyotes and buzzards and wolves from coming, to rid the place of the stink of putrefaction. Death could not stay no matter how onerous or tragic. Death had to be taken away and gotten rid of.
Soon he saw the dark outline of the town risen out of the new snow. He felt the anger in him building and knew he must keep it tamped down. There would always be more horses, he told himself. But that didn’t mean whoever wanted to could simply violate him and his property.
He’d been trespassed against.
It was not a thing he could simply abide by.
He drew rein in front of the Cat’s Paw Saloon. Inside he would surely find at this hour the man he was looking for—the town’s constable, Trout Threadneedle, and the only real law there was in the area.
And by the time he walked through the double doors, he knew he was losing his battle with the anger inside him.
Chapter Five
He found the lawman sitting at the end of the bar in the Cat’s Paw Saloon. There was a DeWitt’s ten-cent romance and a cup of steaming coffee on the bar top before him.
Trout Threadneedle had hair like a woman, long and curly, the color of ashes, same as his flowing mustaches. Bilk, the saloon’s owner, stood behind the bar across from Trout, sipping from a small glass of emerald green absinthe. Bilk’s pinky ring winked in the light cutting through the window and spreading itself over the dark oak. The bar ran north to south along the east wall. An old upright piano stood along the opposite wall, as forlorn this time of morning as a man waiting in the rain for a train. Along the back wall was a big potbelly stove men would gather round in the winter. The tin ceiling was stamped into the shape of diamonds with a fleur-de-lis in the center of each. Gaslights lined the walls for when darkness fell too heavily into the room. There were four tables, each with four chairs men could sit and drink and play poker at, and a wheel of chance stood waiting just where a hallway began that led to two rear rooms, each with a single bed—one for Bilk and one for the whore. At the extreme rear was a small storage room where Bilk kept extra barrels of liquor, and a back door kept locked with a steel bolt.
“I got a problem at my place,” Jim said, approaching the lawman with due caution.
“What sort of problem?”
Trout’s reputation was such that the truth was all mixed up with the rumors until even he did not always know for certain the veracity of his own history. Among the rumors was a reputation for shooting first and asking questions later. Supposedly he had killed a fair share of men and done this and that—teamster; gold
miner; shotgun guard for the Butterfield Stage Lines; deputy in Olathe, Kansas; buffalo hunter in Texas; gambler and pimp in Colorado. In other words, the normal life of an itinerant man of his day.
He was bulked out now, unlike the skinny man in the photograph he carried in his shirt pocket—one of him standing with one foot on a dead buffalo holding a Sharp’s Big Fifty from his Fort Griffin days. All that thinness and youth were as long gone as the buffalo now. His belly sagged over his belt buckle. He was nearly forty years old, and nobody had to tell him his string was running out. He figured his only shot at a future was to find a wealthy widow with property he could settle on to. But, ho! Show me a widow, he’d say to Bilk when the subject came round, and I’ll show you a man willing to kill her other suitors just so he can plop every night in a feather bed and keep her well happy.
Trout was, however, in love with Little Paris, the town’s only whore, who worked the suckers, ranch hands, any old boot who walked through the doors with a lonely heart and more than five dollars in his pocket he was willing to spend for fifteen minutes of dirty pleasure. Bilk was also in love with her. It was a touchy point between the two men and kept their relationship tentative and often taut as new strung wire.
“Horses all killed last night during the storm,” Jim said.
“Horses killed?”
The look Trout offered up was one of incredulity. He’d never heard of such an event.
“What killed them?”
“Somebody with a knife. Slit their throats, bled them out.”
Bilk whistled between the gap in his front teeth. He’d been thinking about Little Paris, who was back there now sleeping late as usual. She wouldn’t get up till noon, then would want breakfast, her eyes all red from the cocaine pills, her words slurred, barely wearing anything at all. Him or Trout or any other man who looked at her could see the dark coins of her breasts through the thin cotton shift she wore. It displeased him to know his weren’t the only eyes that beheld her tawdry beauty. Displeased him even more to know Trout had shared her pleasures and he hadn’t, even though the Cat’s Paw was his place of business and she kept her bed there and used it to ply her trade out of. He could have shared her pleasures too, but he was too proud a man to pay her for them. In his way of thinking, he wanted to win her love, and thought someday he might if he was just patient enough. Sooner or later, she’d realize wasn’t no rich cowboy going to come and save her from the life—and that he, Bilk, was a steady and astute businessman, even if not wealthy.
“The hell you say,” Trout replied, lifting his coffee to his mouth so that the steam gathered in his mustaches.
“I’d like your help finding the son of a bitch.”
“I ain’t no tracker if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Asking you to back my play when I catch up to him, if there’s more than one. Besides, if I have to kill whoever it was, I want it to be legal.”
“Hell, you’ll get no grief from me, if that’s what you’re worried about. A man has a right to protect his own…”
Trout knew the reputation of the man facing him better than he knew his own: Jim Glass, former Texas Ranger, had himself been rumored to have killed out of revenge as well as duty several men, including a wealthy rancher—something over a woman, he thought it was. But you didn’t need to know anything about what was in a man’s past to gauge him: you could tell it in his eyes, the way he spoke and stood, his whole demeanor. Trout had encountered such men before, in Kansas and Texas and Colorado. Men who had that same unflinching look in the face of the worst kind of trouble. Cool as the inside of a cave. Men who didn’t spend a lot of time arguing their case or debating disputes. They said what they had to say, then if that didn’t untie the knot, they shot you. He himself was quick on the trigger and understood why a man needed to be. Hickok was that way, and so were Clay Allison and John Wesley Hardin. All of whom Trout had encountered along the way. Deadly men if you crossed them, and even sometimes when you didn’t. Allison supposedly shot a man for snoring.
“I’m sort of tethered to this here town,” Trout said, his upturned high-crowned Stetson resting on the bar stool next to him like a collection can. “I mean you live out there to the old Bowdre place which is clean out of town. I get paid by the citizens’ tax money.”
“I pay taxes too.”
“Yes sir, that is a fat fact. Only your taxes are collected by the county sheriff, sure enough.”
“You suggesting I ride a hundred miles or more to try and find him?”
“No sir, just saying what is fact is all…”
“You going to get off your fat rump or not?”
“Well, there ain’t no need for insults. I’ll come along and have a look.”
Jim headed for the door. Trout traded miserable looks with Bilk. Trout had been reading aloud from the novel for benefit of Bilk, who was himself as illiterate as a three-year-old. The bargain between them was simple and straightforward: in exchange for Trout reading aloud the romances, Bilk would supply free meals and drinks. It was to Bilk’s chagrin as much as it was to Trout’s that he’d been suddenly summoned away smack in the middle of one of the more exciting parts of the romance—where Jack Long had just shot the panther in the eye.
“I shall return,” Trout said with the unnecessary dramatic flair of a second-rate stage actor.
“I’ll keep the coffee hot.”
“Tell Little Paris when she gets up from her beauty rest I’ll be by to have a turn with her.”
Bilk frowned at the notion and thought: You son of a bitch.
Jim was already mounted on the stud awaiting Trout’s exit from the saloon. The sun indeed had risen and gained strength enough to cause the snow on roofs to begin melting, the water dripping off eaves like tears. The broad avenue being churned into a muddy mire now that the town’s traffic had begun—wagons and horse riders and pedestrians.
Trout rode a big bay that had U.S. stamped on its right flank. He walked it round parallel to the boardwalk so he wouldn’t have to step up so far to get his bulk into the saddle.
“Say, I have an idea,” Trout said, shifting his weight to gain balance on the cold hard leather seat.
“I’m listening.”
“Know a half-breed Mex Apache who is a good tracker, not far north of here. You want somebody to track for you, he’d be your man.”
“I don’t want to waste a lot of time on this. I left my woman home alone. That son of a bitch comes back, who knows what might happen.”
“Twenty minutes’ ride is all it is to old Hairy Legs’s place. We could cut cross-country from there, go through Sandy Pass to your place. Be the same amount of time, all told.”
“Lead on, then.”
Trout thinking in utter disquietude, I wished I was laid up with Little Paris in her bed, or married to some land-owning widow so I could give up all this inconvenience. Marry the one, romance the other. A wife and a paramour, like those Frenchmen did it.
The notion settled in him, like a piece of sweet candy.
Chapter Six
Ardell whistled through his teeth, thinking he had the ability to talk to birds, believing they talked to him. He whistled sharp and fluttery, trying to imitate any birds he heard that hid themselves in the poplars and cottonwood branches. He even tried to caw like a crow when he’d see one. And in the evening, he’d coo like Gambel quail or screech like a Harris hawk.
“What the fuck you do that for?” Cicero said. “Ain’t you got no sense?”
“Talking to the birds.”
“Yeah, what they telling you, that you’re dumb as a ox?” Cicero was derisive in his comment. He could say about anything to that knothead brother of his and he’d not get its meaning.
“Telling me their secrets.”
“What secrets is that?”
“Where they live, what it’s like where they live, what it’s like to fly.”
“Lord God.”
“Where we going?”
“Somewhere.”
/> “I’m hungry.”
“You just ate a pan of biscuits.”
“I’m still hungry.”
“Fine, we’ll stop the next town we come to.”
“I could eat a whole cow.”
“I don’t doubt you could.”
“I wished I was married.”
“I wished you was married too.”
“I’d like me a wife and a screen door to keep the flies outta the house and a big long porch to sit on.”
The boy’s thinking was as jumbled as a jigsaw puzzle spilled from a box.
They rode along until they saw in the distance a small house with smoke curling out its chimney.
“Maybe we can stop there and get something to eat,” Cicero suggested.
“Nah, nah, nah…”
“Why not?”
“I ain’t going.”
“Why not?”
“I just ain’t.”
“I thought you said you was hungry.”
“I ain’t going.”
Cicero drew rein and looked at the half-wit. Then he looked off toward the house.
It was just a small house that had a porch on the front, a corral, a shed, and an outhouse, some fencing. Not far off he could see the arch of a river cutting through the hills and beyond the house a ridge, but that was all.
“What’s got you spooked?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re acting like a mule with sore feet.”
“Nothing.”
“You ain’t hungry now, is that it?”
The half-wit shook his head violently. He didn’t want to say what he knew about that place—how the horses had talked and talked and talked to him, had called him.
“Well, we should ride down there and see what the score is. Sometimes opportunity knocks when you least expect it. Might be whoever lives there has got some money kept in a coffee can, some guns and horses we could take.”