The Horses

by Bill Brooks

  “Spring snow can be the worst kind—get some warm days, plant your garden, get your hopes high, then it’s like winter again, everything dead, killed off if it gets too cold.”

  “That’s what I like about this country,” he said. “It’s unpredictable.”

  She stood.

  “You want to just wait it out?”

  “Guess we don’t have any choice.”

  “You want to read a book?”

  He shrugged.

  “What do you want to do?” he said.

  She went to the bedroom. He followed her. It was just one of those days when you had to turn lemons into lemonade.

  Chapter Eleven

  His true and Christian name was Tug Bailey. Long in the tooth now, slow of movement, step and fetch; that’s all he was to the German and his fat wife who ran the Dollar Café. Two bits a day and one free meal for his labor. You do dis, you do dat. They weren’t mean-spirited folks, just Old World folks who demanded a lot. And what right had they to demand anything of him who was born and bred in Texas and not come over on any ship?

  Well, he sat out back in the snow and smoked his shuck and thought about everything, his squandered life, death waiting just up the street one way or the other, how he’d let love slip through his fingers a time or two, living in one room of somebody else’s place and no money in the bank. But what set the fire under his thinking and got it to boiling was the insult that derby-wearing son of a bitch had tossed Little Paris’s way and how he didn’t do a thing about it. His younger days he would beat the man down who insulted a woman—any woman.

  Maybe Little Paris was a whore and maybe she wasn’t a preacher’s wife or even some cowboy’s ma. But she was by God a woman, and where he came from, womanhood meant something no matter what the occupation. Whores were women just didn’t have a piece of paper saying they were married to this one or that, the way he saw it. His own ma had raised him right, respectful of folks, womenfolks most especially.

  So he sat there smoking and stewing what life had gotten to, the way things had changed since he was a kid, how the whole world seemed to have gone to hell, the roughnecks and ruffians, the profane and low dogs, and it just set the fire a little higher in him, got his blood boiling the way it hadn’t boiled in years—all of it just spilling over and he couldn’t say why this time and not some other, except it was what it was.

  Then little one-eared Tommy Nettle came by, always skulking about in the alleys looking for some bit of food somebody might throw out in the trash, especially back there of the café, and he saw Tug Bailey, the café’s waiter and dishwasher, sitting there smoking a shuck, wearing his old Stetson pulled down to the tops of his ears and his apron still tied on, and looking for all the world like a man lost inside himself. Like he too had been tossed out with the garbage.

  “Whatcha doin’?”

  “What’s it look like?”

  “Smoking.”

  “Well, that is by God what I’m doing.”

  Tommy Nettle, town sot, indeterminate age, but younger than him, Tug thought, and just as worse off. Still, Tommy had some spokes left in his wheel if he didn’t drink himself to an early grave before they all got busted out. Run hard, die young, ain’t that what they all said?

  “Yes sir, I can see that’s what you’re doing, smoking. Yes sir.”

  “You want a shuck?”

  “Yes sir, I surely do. Yes sir.”

  Tug handed the sot his makings, but the sot’s hands shook so bad from the whiskey tremors, Tug took them back and fashioned the sot a cigarette before he spilled all the tobacco, then held a match flame steady to it till it caught.

  “Thankee, thankee.” The sot had a habit of repeating everything he said.

  “You look sour as an old bull,” the sot said. Tug looked at that side of the sot’s head where it was missing an ear.

  “How’d you lose that ear anyway?”

  The sot grinned and shuffled his feet. His old coat was frayed so bad the elbows were clean out. No laces in his shoes, skin grimy as an unwashed flyspecked window.

  He reached up where the ear was as though he didn’t even know it was missing, grinned a mouthful of shoepeg corn teeth.

  “Man caught it off with a razor,” the sot said.

  “Why’d he do that for?”

  “I was fighting with him.”

  “What were you fighting over?”

  “Hell if I can remember. We was both drinking pretty hard.”

  “Just like that, he took a razor and cut off your ear? You kill him for doing it?”

  The sot shook his head.

  “No sir, didn’t kill him. Yes sir, yes sir. Clean off he cut it. Tried sewing it back on but it didn’t take. Turned black as a raisin and fell back off. Sure is a cold son of bitch out here, ain’t it?”

  “It ain’t that cold.”

  “Seems like it is. Snow in the spring. Whatcha make of that?”

  “I seen worse. Snow just makes it seem colder’n it is.”

  “Yes sir, yes sir. It surely does. Wish it would hurry up and get spring and stay that way, don’t you?”

  “I don’t give a fuck if it does or it don’t.”

  “What’s got you so het up?”

  “Sons a bitches,” Tug said grimly.

  “What sons a bitches?”

  “Some was inside a little earlier.”

  “They give you a hard time of it?”

  “Not me—but they insulted Little Paris.”

  “The whore?”

  “You know another Little Paris lives around here besides the whore?”

  “No sir, no sir, I surely do not. How’d they insult her?”

  “They just said the wrong goddamn thing to me is all.”

  “I don’t get it then.”

  “No, you sure as hell would not.”

  “You don’t have a nickel for a beer you could let me have, do you?”

  Tug reached inside his trouser pocket and took out the two bits he’d earned yesterday and hadn’t yet spent because there wasn’t nothing he could think to spend it on. He had about everything was necessary: a cot to sleep on, tobacco, an extra bottle of whiskey.

  “Here,” he said, and gave the money to the sot. “Get yourself something warm to eat in you. Beer, you’ll just piss out.”

  “Yes sir, yes sir, I surely will do that.”

  “And if you drink it up and don’t get nothing to eat, don’t come asking me for no more money. I ain’t a goddamn bank.”

  “No sir, no sir, I surely will not.”

  The sot shuffled his weight foot to foot like he was standing on a hot plate.

  “Well go on.”

  “What you going to do?”

  “I ain’t decided yet.”

  The sot went on.

  But truth was, Tug had decided what he was going to do. Went inside, removed his apron, and set it on a table right in front of the German’s fat wife.

  “I quit, goddamn it.”

  The German came out of the kitchen when he heard his wife’s high-pitched voice.

  “What you do?”

  “I quit.”

  “You vant more money, is that it?”

  “Hell, ain’t enough money in all the banks in San Francisco can make me do this kindy work even one more day. Cash me out, Dutchy.”

  The German paid him for the nearly half day of work because he saw in Tug’s eyes a certain threat he’d not seen before. And when Tug was walking out, the German said something unfriendly that could have been a curse, but he barely heard it because his mind was all over something else entirely. There was something liberating about taking that apron off and quitting the damn old German and his missus. He didn’t allow himself to think about tomorrow or the day after it. You just got today now to think about, he told himself.

  He went down the street to Pablo’s stables where he slept in a shed out back. It was small, but big enough for a cot and his old wood trunk he kept his clothes and such in. Had a Colt Peacemaker
under his clean and folded shirts. A box of shells for it. He hadn’t fired the gun in twenty years but had always made sure to keep it oiled and from rust.

  He put fresh loads in the chambers, tucked it down the waistband of his trousers held up by a wide leather belt fashioned from an old razor strap. He caught a glimpse of himself in the storefront windows of Main Street when he passed by.

  You look like a man means business, he said to himself. You look like you used to look like before they tied an apron around you and put a broom in your hand and you sold that fine racehorse you used to ride and that good rope and all the rest. You look like a rooting-tooting son of a bitch is what you look like.

  He walked to the hotel and asked was there two strangers staying there.

  Woody the clerk saw the gun in Tug’s waistband and said, “Jesus, Tug, you got business with them?”

  “I want to know if they’re checked in, is all.”

  Woody was from out East somewhere, had an accent sounded like nothing Tug never heard before, sounded like northern birch and snow and ice on a pond and soft little hills. Woody featured himself as a poet, albeit a failed one, and would take his lunch at the Dollar Café alone, always reading a book or writing in a journal. Had spectacles he wore made it hard to make out his eyes behind the glare off the lenses. Tug didn’t consider Woody no sort of man to speak of, but didn’t hold nothing personal against him for his ways.

  “I hope you’re not planning on making trouble,” Woody said.

  “I come for an apology, is all.”

  Woody suddenly looked nervous, like a bank clerk with masked men coming through the front door.

  “You’re bound to get yourself killed, Tug, if you fool with those fellows.”

  “Maybe so, just tell me what room those sons a bitches are staying in.”

  “Tug…”

  “Don’t Tug me you little son a bitch.”

  “Now Tug…”

  “Goddamn it, Woody, don’t make me bust you in the mouth.”

  “No…” Woody held up both hands as though to fend off a blow that hadn’t yet been delivered.

  “What room?”

  “Two-oh-one, top of stairs.”

  “Go and get the constable.”

  “Why, Tug?”

  “Because I might have to kill those sons a bitches or they might have to kill me and I want an eyewitness to it whichever way it goes down.”

  “Yes sir!”

  Tug unloosed his Colt and started up the stairs. Woody ran out the front door and down the street to the Cat’s Paw, where he found Trout reading from the same dime romance novel he’d been reading from before Jim came and got him to go look for the horse killer.

  “You better come on,” he pleaded.

  Bilk looked up the same time Trout did, both men having been engrossed in the lurid tale.

  “Come on for what?” Trout asked.

  “Tug’s about to kill some men over to the hotel.”

  “What for is he intending on killing them?”

  “Hell if I know, but you better come on quick.”

  “Jesus fuck Almighty!”

  Trout unhinged himself from the bar stool. Trouble seemed to come and go like the weather—unpredictable as Nancy’s goat. Could be nice one day and terrible the next or both in the same hour.

  He went at as quick a pace as a man his bulk could go, trailing behind Woody, who was all arms and legs.

  Tug rapped on the door hard with his fist.

  “Who is it?” a voice called from the other side. “What you want?”

  “I come to get an apology out of you!”

  “What?”

  Tug repeated his demand.

  The door opened.

  Cicero Pie stood there in his stocking feet and union suit. The big man lay stretched out on the bed like a felled ox.

  “Now just what the fuck is it you’re doing at my door?” Cicero said.

  “You insulted that lady through me at the café and I want you to apologize.”

  “What lady? That Mex whore?”

  “You apologize or get heeled.”

  The Mortician looked at the half-wit. The half-wit sat up, staring.

  “You believe this?” the Mortician said.

  The half-wit shook his head.

  “What’s he meaning, Cicero?”

  The Mortician looked at the waiter.

  “You got yourself a goddamn death wish, old man?”

  “I guess I sure as fuck must.”

  “I guess you sure as fuck must, too.”

  “I’ll be out in the street.”

  “I’ll be right down.”

  “All right then.”

  “All right.”

  Tug turned and walked down the stairs, satisfied whatever it was about to take place would take place soon and all of life would change forever. He felt good, a warmness in his chest, a fire in his blood raging up again. He was by God if anything a man once more and not some goddamn waiter.

  He went out and stood in the middle of the street, the snow falling all around him like a miracle.

  Miracle of days, he thought. Somebody is going to meet Jesus.

  Chapter Twelve

  They made love, then slept, then woke again late in the afternoon of that day, and when he got out of bed and went to the window he saw it had stopped snowing and the sky was a mixture of blue with white smoky clouds. Sun sparkled in the snow so bright and clean it hurt his eyes to look at it. He could hear water dripping from the eaves into the rain barrel. Such was the vagaries of a spring day in New Mexico Territory.

  “It’s quit snowing,” he said.

  Luz rolled onto her side and looked at him.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Yes what?”

  “Yes, I think I would like to marry you.”

  He turned from the window and smiled.

  “I was hoping that you’d come to that decision.”

  “I thought about it but I knew the moment you asked me that I would say yes. In a way, it feels as though we’re already married.”

  “Guess that means I need to ride into town and buy you a ring.”

  “No, your word is good enough. Besides, I already have a ring at home that Hector gave me.”

  “No, I want to buy you one that’s from me. No disrespect,” he said. “But I want it to be a real wedding. We’ll invite everybody we know and everybody we don’t know. Have a real shivaree.”

  “It’s not necessary.”

  He came to the bed and lay down beside her.

  “That’s the way I’d like it, Luz—a real honest-to-God wedding, let everybody know how I feel about you.”

  She smiled.

  “It is the happiest of times and the saddest of times,” she said, thinking about the horses.

  “Whatever it is, we can get through it,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  He stood again and dressed and she watched him, then sat up herself and he watched her—her caramel brown body a study in womanly beauty, a body he so craved even when he thought he’d had all of it a man could possibly stand. He knew he could never get enough of her if he lived another fifty years.

  “I love you,” he said as she pulled a peasant’s blouse over her head.

  “I love you too, Jim.”

  It was the best kind of love, he thought, a steady, deep-down love he knew would always be there in him—a love like a river, one that always flows.

  “I’ll make us something to eat,” she said.

  “I’ll go see how the breed is making out.”

  Hairy Legs had lain in the shadowy interior of the shed with its smell of saddle leather and harness and stacked bales of hay and bags of grain. He’d drunk his whiskey-laced coffee and felt its thin rivers of fire course through his blood. Cold all the time now that he’d gotten old. Wondered sometimes if he might freeze to death just from being cold all the time in his blood.

  The wind had howled like some old wolf for a time, then eased to a whimp
er before falling silent altogether. Snow blew through the cracks of the boards at first, but he was nice and comfortably warm within the extra blankets. Only thing that would have made it cozier would have been a woman in there with him too. He couldn’t even remember unless he thought on it hard how long it had been since he’d felt the warm flesh of a woman.

  After the wind quit telling him things, he heard the yip and snarl again coming up from where the white devils had dragged the horses. He’d come right past the arroyo the night of his walk from his place to here. Had seen them down in there, ghostly under the moon, the shadowy dark bodies of the skulking canines and skirted wide, case they took it in their feeble brains to get something live on the hoof. Figured by now they’d have those horses et down to the shoes.

  He remembered eating horse once. It wasn’t very good. Not as good as buffalo or antelope. Not even as good as rabbit.

  It was Three Fingers’s old gray horse. Had died on him without known cause.

  Three Fingers cut it up into big pieces and shared it with everyone. The piece he had eaten had been roasted over a fire. Tough to chew, real stringy. Wouldn’t have et it at all except it was Three Fingers’s sister gave it to him. Him and her drunk as dogs on a jug of liquor she’d stolen off a liquor drummer passed through and was diddling Hump Dog’s widow at the time, his attention on his liquor stock being duly distracted by Hump Dog’s widow’s cries—an old trick she used. The drummer, a little round man with bugged eyes, squealed like a pig in his thrusting. Hump Dog’s widow and Three Fingers’s sister worked in concert whenever they could to steal whatever wasn’t nailed down. Three Fingers’s sister was named Sweet Grass. But there wasn’t anything sweet about her except she usually had something to drink and the price wasn’t overly steep for a man hard up for both liquor and a woman if he wasn’t too choosy about either.

  No, he didn’t think he’d want to eat no more horse ’less he was starved.

  The door rattled open.

  “It’s quit snowing,” Jim said.

  An almost angry light sliced in through the open door, sharp as a knife blade.

  “You hungry?”

  Hairy Legs thought about them horses being eaten by the coyotes and wolves and probably ravens too. Thought about Three Fingers’s old gray horse that time, the taste of it not even able to wash away with Sweet Grass’s stole liquor.