The Horses

by Bill Brooks

  “Sure.”

  “I could eat one of those chickens,” he said, looking toward the coop.

  “Chickens lay eggs and we tend to eat the eggs and save the chickens till there is a need.”

  “Makes sense. Eggs is okay.”

  “I’ll see what my woman can fix up.”

  The breed stood with some little effort, keeping the blanket tight round his shoulders and said, “I’ll come back when it’s ready.”

  Jim watched him trudge off toward the ridge where his two friends, Tom and Antonia, were buried, then went in the house. Luz was just slipping into her cotton blouse.

  “We have company for breakfast,” he said.

  “Don’t tell me Trout has come back?”

  “No, it’s that old half-breed Apache Trout wanted me to hire to track whoever killed the horses.”

  He saw the puzzlement in her dark eyes.

  “You attract some of the oddest people to your door,” she said.

  “You’re telling me.”

  “You think you can trust him?”

  “I don’t know. Trout thinks maybe it was him who killed the horses. He carries a big enough knife, but I don’t think it was him. He doesn’t have the strength, and besides, it just doesn’t seem like it’s in his makeup—a thing like that.”

  Now she looked concerned as she tucked the ends of her blouse inside her long skirt.

  “What if you’re wrong?” she said. “What if he’s come back this time to kill more than just horses?”

  He shrugged.

  “Don’t you think if that was his intent he would have tried it in the night instead of sitting out there on the porch?”

  “My father told me when I was a child that the Apaches eat horses,” she said.

  “I’ve heard that too. But I don’t know if it’s true.”

  “And now he’s here to share our table?”

  “Just don’t offer him anything that looks like horse.” It was a bad joke but one that broke some of the tension.

  It caused Luz to roll her eyes.

  “The Apaches killed one of my grandfathers,” she said. “This was a long time ago, before there were very many whites around here. My grandmother used to tell me that when she and my grandfather were young there was lots of raiding going on both sides of the border between the Mexicans and the Apaches, stealing each other’s horses and women and even children. I was always afraid the Apaches would come and steal me.”

  “I’m glad they didn’t.”

  She still looked uncertain.

  “I can ask him to leave,” Jim said, “if it will make you feel more at ease.”

  “No. I think maybe my grandmother told me those things partly to scare me so I’d be a good child.”

  “Were you a good child?”

  “Yes, until I ran away with Hector.”

  “I didn’t know you ran away to get married?”

  “You never asked.”

  “You must have loved him very much to elope like that.”

  “I did. I would have run away to the moon with him.”

  He saw a brief light of old memory in her gaze for the now dead husband, recalling, he was sure, those early times, perhaps even the very night they ran away together, and all the days after when love was still new and unscarred by argument and discord.

  “I bet he was a good man, your husband.”

  “He was. And I still have love for him in my heart.” She drew near Jim then and put her arms around him. “And I have love for you too and I don’t ever confuse the two loves, just so you know.”

  “I know.”

  She kissed him, and he felt the ripple of desire begin all over in his blood. Like wobbling fire wire in a dry wind. It always amazed him a little, the effect she had on him, and he only hoped it was the same for her as well.

  They went out into the other room, and she started a fire in the stove and he went and gathered some eggs from the hens in the coop. The rooster strutted around and acted angry and he said, “You son of a bitch, you better keep doing your job or I’ll feed you to that old Apache breed,” and laughed at the thought.

  He took the eggs in to Luz and went back out on the porch looking off toward the ridge, where he saw Hairy Legs up there by the gravestones walking around. He wondered if it was possible that the Apache was a horse killer, and if so, why he would have done such a thing. He didn’t know much about Indians except the few ragged little bands of Comanche he’d helped run to ground in Texas when he was a still-wet-behind-the-ears young Texas Ranger working under Cap’n Rogers. But he remembered tales the Cap’n had told him and the other boys about what fierce fighters those Comanche were, how brave they were, and in Jim’s few encounters with them, he learned the Cap’n was right about Comanche as he was about almost everything else. It was mostly just shoot and run with them. They would fire back and forth at each other and then the foe would disappear into the landscape or cross the Rio Grande into Mexico. Wasn’t any of the young Rangers unhappy to see them not stand and fight to the death. They were hell of horsemen too, Jim knew that much, and even Cap’n Rogers gave them their due when it came to being horsemen.

  “Those boys ride like they’re half horse themselves.” High compliments from a pretty fair horseman himself.

  But Jim also had heard that Apache, unlike the Comanche, weren’t that fond of horses. Now whether it was true they rode a horse till it dropped, then drank its blood and ate its flesh if they had the chance, he couldn’t attest to, but he’d heard such stories from ex-cavalry soldiers who claimed to have fought them in southern Arizona—old men with walrus mustaches and big bellies who’d tell stories for the price of a glass of ice beer.

  One old boy Jim met even claimed he was the sole survivor of Custer’s command at the Little Big Horn and was writing a book on it. Course nobody in the place believed a damn word of it, but they all bought him a round anyway because he was, in the main, a sad specimen.

  Jim saw Hairy Legs bend and look at the inscriptions on the headstones. Whether he could read English or not was in question. Then he saw the breed reach inside his blanket and come out with something and shake his hand as if scattering seed.

  A bank of dark clouds that held the promise of more rain or snow approached from the north, kicking up a little chill wind. Hairy Legs ambled back to the house.

  “You drink coffee?” Jim said.

  The old man nodded.

  “Put some sugar and whiskey in it and I’ll drink it all day,” he said.

  Jim went inside and poured two cups. Luz said breakfast was about ready; she’d sliced some bacon to fry with the eggs and had set a pan of biscuits to bake that made a man want to sit down and just enjoy it all. Jim spooned in some sugar from the little china sugar bowl but forwent putting any whiskey in it. Then he carried both cups outside and handed the breed a cup. He took it in both hands and sipped with wrinkled lips after blowing off the steam.

  “What was it you did up there?” Jim said, nodding toward the ridge.

  “Made tobacco sacrifice to honor the dead.”

  “That was considerate of you.”

  He looked at Jim like he’d just stabbed him in his old heart with a rusty blade.

  “You can hear spirits up there,” Hairy Legs said. “Hear the dead speaking in the wind. They tell me there is a storm coming, plenty of snow. I read it on the moon last night too. How are those eggs doing?”

  “About ready. You want to come inside to eat or out here?”

  He shrugged.

  “Too damn cold out here,” he said.

  They went in, and the old man looked at Luz like he’d known her all his life but hadn’t seen her in a long time.

  She wiped her hands nervously on her apron and took the biscuits from the stove and knocked them into a basket she then set on the table, filled plates with bacon and eggs and set them down on the table too.

  Hairy Legs seated himself at one end of the table and began eating almost immediately. Luz and Jim
set about their own breakfast while the breed ate with vigor and kept watching her.

  He held up three fingers at one point. She held her breath for a moment.

  “What is your meaning?” Jim said.

  “Three is a good number,” he said. “These are good eggs.”

  Luz’s smile was one of near relief even if she was confused by the statement.

  Then out of the blue she said, “Did you kill our horses?”

  He looked at her with a steady, unflinching gaze, pulled his butcher knife from his waistband, and stabbed it into the surface of the table so hard, it was surprising he hadn’t broken the blade. It wobbled a long time.

  “No,” he said, then reached for another biscuit. He ate every last biscuit except for one that he stuck inside his blue jacket pocket. Then he reached inside another pocket and took out three pebbles that were polished no doubt by a year or two of water running over them and set them on the table.

  “For the food,” he said.

  “Good,” Luz said, and took them and put them in her apron pocket, much to the old man’s approval, judging by the pleased look on his face.

  “You got tobacco?” he said.

  “I thought you had some,” Jim said, remembering what Hairy Legs said he had scattered on the ridge.

  He shook his head.

  “All gone.”

  Jim rose from the table and got his makings.

  “We smoke outside.”

  Hairy Legs nodded and stood up.

  “No ring,” he said, looking at Luz.

  “What?”

  He pointed to Luz’s finger.

  “No husband.”

  “Husband’s dead,” she said.

  He looked at Jim.

  “This your new man?”

  “It is.”

  “Too bad. I been on the scout for a wife. You cook pretty good and don’t look too bad.”

  Luz tried hard not to show her discomfort.

  “We’ll go outside and smoke,” Jim said again.

  The wind had picked up considerable, and the bank of brooding clouds now bunched along the ridge like restless gray cattle getting ready to stampede. They completely blotted out the Capitans.

  The two men rolled shucks. The Apache rolled his like he’d been doing it all his life, and Jim struck a match off the doorframe and held it cupped in his hands till Hairy Legs got the end of his smoke lit, then Jim lit his own before snapping out the match head.

  “I might be able to help you find your horse killer,” Hairy Legs said.

  “How so?”

  “Tracks.”

  “I already looked for sign, didn’t find any, so did Trout when he was out here.”

  The breed let the smoke from his shuck curl around his face like one of the clouds coveting the ridgeline.

  “I don’t know about you, but that white devil with the tin star learned to track from the Crow. The Crow can’t find their asses with both hands. You see what shit they got Custer into, don’t you? I knew old Bloody Knife, Custer’s Crow. Ha, ha, ha.” He laughed, shaking his head. “You see what happened to Yellow Hair with them Crows leading him around.”

  “Why would you want to help me now when you didn’t yesterday?”

  “The spirits told me I should help you.”

  “What spirits?”

  He pointed with his fat nose toward the ridge, where they could see the snow starting to fall.

  “Those who sleep under the fancy rocks,” he said.

  “They said that, huh?”

  “I don’t know, maybe it was just the wind. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. It could have been the horse spirits if it wasn’t the ones sleeping under the rocks.”

  “If you want to help me I wouldn’t turn you down.”

  “Ten dollars is my usual fee.”

  “The spirits give costly advice.”

  “Yes, no shit.”

  They smoked their shucks down. Jim pondered whether to head out in a coming snowstorm with a crazy old half-breed Mescalero Apache he’d have to pay ten dollars to, who didn’t know if he heard voices of the dead, the wind, or slaughtered horses talking to him.

  “How do I know you won’t get me out there and kill me and come back and steal my woman?”

  “I might. She’s a pretty nice woman.”

  “Shit,” Jim said, and rubbed out the stub of his smoke against the porch pillar. “How’d you get that one blue eye?”

  “Maybe I’ll tell you sometime.”

  “Shit,” Jim said again and went into the house.

  Chapter Nine

  “Look yonder,” Ardell said, pointing toward the rise of buildings.

  “Town, all right.”

  “Can we get something to eat?”

  “I guess you worked you up quite an appetite the other night.”

  Ardell didn’t answer. He still had the voices of the horses in his head, crawling around in there like bugs, whispering to him, laughing at him, scratching at the inside of his skull.

  “Roll your sleeves up. Somebody see you with all the blood, they’ll think you murdered somebody.”

  The half-wit looked at his sleeves and rolled them up his fat arms till he couldn’t roll them any higher. He then looked pleased with himself, like he’d accomplished a great thing.

  “Don’t be telling nobody about what you did when we get there,” Cicero said. “Don’t be telling how you hear horses talking to you.”

  Ardell looked like he was about to start blubbering.

  They rode on down the sloping road toward the town, the fetlocks of their horses crusted muddy, the slog and suck of their mounts’ hooves a steady rhythm that sounded like fatigue.

  They reined in at the Dollar Café. There were red-checked curtains in the windows and the smell of something cooking releasing itself from the stovepipe poked through the back part of the roof. Looked friendly enough and might have good eats.

  They dismounted, Cicero making sure the gun riding his hip was covered by his frock coat, his dark trousers stuffed down into the tops of his muddy boots. Slapped his derby hat against his leg, knocking off whatever dirt it held, but most of the hat’s stain was the whitish bands of sweat where brim met crown. He looked to the impartial observer like a drummer with a lump under his coat, unless they looked deep into his feral eyes. He wore a waistcoat of blue silk and had a derringer stuck down in one of the pockets as a backup for close-in work, something he admired whenever the opportunity presented itself. Killing a man at distance of say twenty paces was one thing; killing him in so close you could smell his cloying breath, look right into his fearful eyes was something else altogether. He almost preferred the close-in work for the intimacy of the thing. Like when he’d shot the doctor.

  “Wipe off your boot soles,” Cicero said to the half-wit before he opened the door. Ardell scraped them off on the edge of the boardwalk till Cicero nodded and then they went in.

  There were just a few patrons. At that hour, the bulk of the morning crowd had already eaten and gone on its way. Cicero picked a table by the front window so he could watch the street. He liked keeping an eye on things, considered himself a class A observer of humankind. Had to be if you were in the killing business. A man’s weakness shows itself in many ways—so does a woman’s. He’d had women on his mind a lot lately. It had been three, four days since he’d lain with one—that whore in Fort Sumner—the little bow-legged one got passed around like a jug of cheap whiskey. Couldn’t complain on the price, though, six bits and she’d do whatever you told her. Ugly little thing if you left the light on, so he didn’t. Just snuffed the flame and told her to go at it and she did, and it felt about the same as if she’d been a pretty gal.

  A waiter came over. A tall, thin man with whitish shaggy mustaches, a slight hump to his back. What age will do to you, Cicero thought. Bend you like a mis-struck nail.

  “What’ll it be, boys,” the fellow said. Had a drawl to him sounded like he was originally from somewhere east of the Mississippi, which
of course he was. What Cicero Pie couldn’t have known about the waiter was, he had been a top hand in his younger days, had worked all the good ranches from here to the XIT in the Texas Panhandle. At one, he’d worked that spread as a stock detective tracking rustlers and shooting them like you would coyotes.

  Rustlers and anything else that took the ranch owners’ beeves. He was a crack shot with a Winchester rifle before his shooting eye went bad. Like looking through a glass of muddy water is how he described it. For a time, he had courted a woman named Maggie and come near to marrying her, but was so slow getting around to proposing, she married a storekeeper up in Tascosa instead, and it broke his heart so bad, he took to the bottle—crawled right down in it. Liquor led him to the life of drifting and more liquor until his days got all used up and he found himself down on his heels in the little New Mexican town working as waiter, dishwasher, swamper. He never thought it would come to this, but it had.

  And now here he was, hard up against sixty, serving soup and steaks to fellows like these two, an oaf and a derby-wearing son of a bitch.

  Cicero rubbed last night’s sleep out of his eyes as he looked at the chalkboard with the menu written on it—half the words misspelled he did believe but could not be certain since he himself had never finished school beyond the fourth grade.

  Bef for beef, pootatoe for potato, and so forth.

  “I’ll have a bowl of stew and a chunk of bread and some coffee.”

  The waiter looked at the half-wit.

  Ardell shrugged.

  “Me too, I reckon.”

  The waiter, who’d seen his share of blood in days quickly fading to mere memory, noted the blood on the rolled-up sleeves of the oaf. He wondered what sort of bloody mess the oaf had gotten himself into, but knew better than to linger, and turned and went toward the kitchen.

  “That old fellow’s got a humped back,” Ardell said.

  “Like he’s got a big turtle under his shirt.”

  Ardell grinned at that.

  Cicero’s eye had come to rest on the thin, good-looking woman sitting across the way, sipping coffee and turning the pages of a Montgomery Ward catalog. She looked half Mex, half white, skin the color of honey. He stared till she looked up, which he knew she would. Their eyes met, and she held his gaze for a long moment, then turned back to her catalog as though she’d not seen him at all.