by Bill Brooks
“What would you do were you me?” I said.
Tom had been a chaplain’s assistant in the Union Army and later a preacher before his wife died and he began to drift in search of answers to questions he said pressed on him after her death. And by the time I’d met him, he said he hadn’t found any answers yet. All I could hope was he found them in that last hour of his life, or he’d found them when he crossed over from this world to the next.
“You’re not going to tell me, are you?” I said.
The coyote loped off upriver like something was chasing him but he wasn’t scared.
I shook the pebbles in my hand like dice.
“Why the hell did you have to go and die on me?” I said. Another gust of wind caught in my shirt.
I stood and walked back down to the house, but instead of going inside, I went to the shed and got my saddle, then walked to the small corral I had the stud in.
I slung the saddle on the top rail.
The stud eyed me like he knew the jig was up for one of us.
“Today’s the day,” I said. “I’m feeling like a dance.”
He whinnied and tossed his head.
“You’re going to get rode or I’m going to get throwed, but this is the last day we do this thing if it ain’t one or the other.”
He was a block of muscle and fury, a cyclone of a horse the color of the desert, with a line running down his back, black as death. Just standing there looking at him reminded me I still had plenty of bruises from the last several times I’d tried to break him.
I crawled between the lower rails and took my rope and let out a loop. There was no place for him to run except along the back rails. I tossed my rope and let it fall over his head, then wrapped it twice around the snubbing post, and he kicked and screamed like a banker who was being robbed.
“You can raise all the damn hell you want,” I said. I waited till he settled into a stiff-legged stand.
Sometimes you fail at something and you can’t understand why you did. You figure you gave it all you had and it still didn’t work out and you’re ready to quit it all, figuring you got nothing left to give. Then something makes you try one last time. And this time you dig down deep into a place you never even knew was there, just an extra inch more, an extra ounce of strength. Your mind locks down tight on the thing you’re determined to do—and suddenly it’s just enough to get it done.
So I got my blanket and saddle on him and my bit in his teeth and swung aboard. The first few seconds forked on the stud was like riding a runaway freight train that had crashed off a gorge into a rocky canyon bottom. I thought he was going to snap my head off and pull both arms out of the sockets. But when he hadn’t thrown me on the first several tries, I got into a rhythm with him, and it was like dancing with a crazy woman. Only I felt even crazier this time. Whatever move the stud made I anticipated. It was like I suddenly was part of him and he was part of me.
He kicked down the rails and busted down the gate. He snorted and stomped and kicked and bucked all over what you might call a yard, and then suddenly there went my chicken fence and coop—those hens and that rooster scattering like ten sorts of hell was after them, the coop busted to boards. The stud was just a damn cyclone but I stuck and finally rode him down.
And then he just stood there under me, blowing hard, his whole body quivering, and I waited for him to make another go at it but when he didn’t, I touched my heels to his sides and walked him around with that Spanish bit in his mouth, and he learned fast what it was there for. I stroked his powerful sweaty neck and walked him over to the water and let him take a drink, then rode him all the way to the ridge and showed him off to Tom and Antonia. And for a time we just sat there with the wind in our faces. Then I rode him back down and the stud did everything I asked of him, though he still had a lot of strut to him, but that was okay—it was the way I wanted him.
I had myself a good horse.
And an old man who needed my help.
I went inside and packed a bedroll with a few extra clothes in it: shirts, socks, pair of jeans. Packed my saddlebags with razor, soap, comb, two boxes of shells for the Merwin Hulbert that was in my bottom dresser drawer, pocket knife, general things I’d need. I went and got my pistol and unwrapped it from the towel and slid it into the shoulder rig, then strapped it on before putting on my coat. I took the Henry rifle from the corner by the door and slipped it into a scabbard and walked outside again and rigged everything to the saddle. I looked around at my wrecked yard and thought I should probably try and round up those damn chickens and that rooster, but decided against it. You can always buy more chickens and a rooster.
I rode to Gin Walker’s place halfway between my place and town and stopped and asked him if he’d look after my stock—that I’d be gone a few weeks, maybe longer. I knew he’d do it because that’s what neighbors do for each other. He said no problem, and I could see him eyeing the brass butt of the Henry sticking out of the scabbard and probably wondering what I was up to, but he didn’t say anything.
I thanked him and headed for town.
It was a pretty day.
I figured I’d better stop and tell Luz I’d be gone for a time. It seemed only fair.
I just hoped that, unlike the chickens, she’d be there when I returned.
Chapter Four
He was sitting there in front of the station, in the shade of the eaves on a wood bench smoking a cigarette. He was leaned forward with his forearms resting on the thighs of his faded jeans, his mackinaw unbuttoned and hanging loose. The sun had come up and melted most of the snow that had fallen through the night, and now the streets and roads were just a reddish mud the horses and wagons slopped through as they passed up and down. Women held their skirts up above the tops of their shoes as they walked wherever there weren’t boards to walk on, and dogs stood grizzled with muddied legs, looking forlorn.
I rode up and stopped in front of the station, and he looked up and I could see just the merest recognition on his face and a sign of relief that I’d come. He looked at the stud and said, “I see you got him broke.”
“Not without some disagreement,” I said.
“You going to haul him along?”
“That’s the plan. What about you?” I said. “What you going to do for a horse once we get down to Tucson?”
He drew on his cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke, his fingers stained yellow from years of tobacco use.
“I’m going to rent a hack,” he said. “Can’t sit a horse no more. This burg they got Billy in is about fifty or so miles southwest of there, a place called Finger Bone. Train don’t go there.”
Stacked there beside him next to the bench was a small trunk and a Winchester rifle. He saw me glance at it.
“How’d you learn of him being in jail down there, Cap’n?”
Cap’n leaned his head forward and spit between his boots.
“Like I said, I got friends all over the Southwest.”
I dismounted and went in and bought myself a ticket and stuck it in my shirt pocket, then came out and unsaddled the stud, and set the saddle along with my bedroll and kit there next to his things, and my rifle still in its scabbard next to his, and he looked at it and said, “I see you still favor the Henry rifle.”
“It was good enough for me in Texas,” I said. “I guess it’s good enough for me here in New Mexico.”
He drew on the smoke and shucked the nub into the muddy street, where it fizzled, and said, “I reckon so.”
I glanced at my pocket watch, and there was still half an hour before the train was set to come in.
“I need to go do something,” I said.
“Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll watch over your gear.”
I went up the street toward Luz’s place—a small adobe at the edge of town that had an ocotillo fence around it. She was there in the side yard hanging clothes from a wire line, white blouses and black and red skirts.
She turned when she heard me open the gate.
“I’ve come to tell you I’ll be gone for a little while,” I said.
The smile faded from her face as she brushed some loose strands of hair away from her forehead with the back of her wrist, a wet piece of clothing clutched in her hands.
“I thought you liked it here,” she said. “Did you just say the other night how you didn’t think you were ever going to leave here again?”
“Like it here more than anyplace else I’ve ever been.”
“Then why go?”
“No choice.”
She looked beyond me as if someone was standing behind me.
“We can choose to stay or we can choose to go,” she said. “If you’re going, it’s because you choose to go, because you want to go, not because you have no choice.”
I came up close to her. She was wearing a long-sleeved blouse and I could see the heaviness of her breasts loose inside, and I wanted to take them in my hands through the cloth and hold them and feel their firm softness once more. Something dark and troubling had been working at me ever since I first saw the Cap’n’s buggy black against the snow.
“It’s because of that man that came to your house, isn’t it?” she said.
“Yes.”
She crossed herself as if she’d just stepped into the little church at the other end of the street—the one by the plaza where bailes were held every Saturday night if the weather was decent—and had a bell in the tower that would ring in the believers. An old padre with one good eye preached there, and some claimed he could perform miracles.
“I knew it,” she whispered.
“He needs my help,” I said. “I owe him from the past.”
“What do you owe him?”
“My life.”
“And now he wants it back.”
“No. Not if I can help it.”
She shrugged in resignation, shook loose a wet skirt she’d been holding, and hung it on the line.
“It’s none of my business what you do,” she said. “When and where you go and come. I’m just the woman who cleans your house.”
“And sleeps in my bed,” I said.
“Yes, and sleeps in your bed.”
“I just wanted you to know,” I said. “I figured I owed it to you to tell you.”
“And now you have told me.”
“Yes.”
I turned to leave. She called my name.
“Jim.”
I turned back, and she came close to me and pressed the palms of her hands against my chest.
“I’m afraid for you,” she said. “I’m afraid you will go away and I will never see you again.”
“You don’t have to worry; there’s nothing to this. I’m just going to ride along with the Cap’n while he does some business. You were right about him looking sick. He is. He’s dying and is worried he won’t get his business done before he passes on.”
“What sort of business needs you wearing this?” she said, patting the bulge under my left armpit.
“You know how it is out here in this country,” I said.
“Yes, I know how it is.”
“I best get on,” I said.
“I’ll wait for you until the spring,” she said. “After that I’ll stop waiting for you.” I wanted to laugh at her foolishness.
“I shouldn’t be more than a couple of weeks at the outside.”
“Do you want me to go and feed and water your horses?”
“No, I’ve asked Gin to do it.”
“What about the chickens, should I go collect the eggs?”
“They’re scattered all over hell,” I said. “I broke the stud earlier and he kicked down the coop and fence and everything. I reckon those chickens could be in Colorado by now.”
She smiled. I kissed her, then walked back up the street to the station.
Cap’n looked up when I approached like he knew something.
“You let her know you’re going off?”
“Yes.”
“You think you might end up marrying her?”
“It’s possible.”
“She strikes me as a good woman besides being real easy on a man’s eyes. Women like that are hard to come by way out here in this frontier. Even no-account ugly women are hard to come by, but especially the real good-looking ones.”
“There’s more women than you might imagine if you like the Mexican kind,” I said.
“I got nothing at all against Mexican women,” he said. “They work hard and laugh a lot from what I know of them. I imagine yours does too.”
I reached inside my coat pocket and took out the pint bottle of forty rod and handed it to him because he looked like he could stand a drink, and I sure as hell knew I could.
He looked at it before taking hold of it and pulling the cork, then he put it to his mouth and swallowed. Then he looked at it again and handed it back to me, and I took a pull and plugged it and put it back inside my coat pocket.
“Sun’s pretty on the snow on them mountains yonder,” he said.
“It is, ain’t it.”
Way off in the distance we heard the train whistle blowing.
“She’s coming,” he said.
I pulled my watch and checked the time.
“Way early,” I said.
“Lucky we’re here then or we’d of missed it,” he said.
“Ain’t we though.”
He stood slowly as though he had to fit everything into place, all his bones, before he could move properly.
“You don’t owe me nothing,” he said. “I don’t want you to go on you thinking you owe me because of what happened that time in Caddo.”
“I’m not thinking nothing like that.”
He stared hard at me then.
“’Cause if that’s the case, I don’t want you helping me. I don’t operate like that, figuring a man owes me anything because of the past.”
“Look, maybe it is some of that, but so what? You saved my skin in Caddo and if it wasn’t for you killing those two bandits, I’d have been planted and no chance to help nobody or eat a nice breakfast this morning or spend my nights with a good woman. So maybe it is a little of my thinking I owe you for something. But it’s not just that.”
“What is it then?”
The whistle grew louder, and you could see the black smoke of its engine chuffing into the air off in the distance like a small dark cloud.
“I guess you already know.”
He nodded.
“I always just did my job, Jim, keeping you boys alive, you and the others. I didn’t always, that’s a natural fact, but I did the best I could because it was my job, that’s all.”
I couldn’t say I thought of him like he was my own daddy, which he’d just about had been when I first joined the Rangers. I couldn’t tell him that, nor would he have wanted me to. Men like him and me don’t talk about such intimate things, but it didn’t mean we didn’t feel them.
“You did more than your job, Cap’n, a lot more.”
He looked off again up the tracks.
“Here she comes,” he said.
I held the reins to the stud. He was jumpy at the sight and noise his iron brother was making. I stroked his muzzle and spoke to him gentle. “Don’t raise no fuss and make us have to go through what we did earlier all over again,” I said. The stud tossed his head and whinnied.
“Maybe we ought to have another sip of old Mr. Fortifier,” Cap’n said. “Before we get on that train. Maybe you ought to give that half-broke horse a swally too so he won’t kick out the sides of his car when they put him aboard.”
I took out the bottle and handed it to the Cap’n, and he bit off a piece and handed it back.
“I used to be a teetotaler when I was married up with JoAnn. She was a righteous woman and wouldn’t let me keep none in the house, and so I just gave it up along with every other wickedness when I got with her. She got me to being baptized standing waist deep in the Canadian Riv
er by a tongue-speaking preacher. She cleaned me up pretty good from what I had been. But I never claimed not to miss a good glass of whiskey or a good smoke, and now I just look at it as the best medicine a man can get himself.”
“You don’t need to explain nothing to me,” I said.
“I know I don’t.”
Then we stood there waiting for the train to shudder to a stop.
Chapter Five
The Cap’n slept on and off as the train rolled through countryside that was mostly tan hills shaped like the crowns of sombreros, and laced with ocotillo that glittered in the sun like the white of an old man’s hair. The red country turned to brown and the creek beds and washes we crossed were mostly dry, strewn with rocks and boulders—here and there thin streams of water laced down through the sandy draws.
Once I saw a herd of antelope way off in the distance grazing contently, their tails swishing the flies.
The Cap’n would wake every now and then and say, “Where are we, Jim?” And I would guess and he’d nod and then close his eyes again, and I thought, You must be plum wore out, Gus, go ahead and sleep in peace while you can.
His coat was parted open and I saw the familiar pearl grips of his Smith & Wesson Russian model—something he’d always carried ever since I’ve known him. It was a .44 caliber that had seen its fair share of work. I knew because I’d seen it in action up close and personal on more than one occasion. The Cap’n was a dead shot even under fire. I asked him about that, how he never missed.
He said, “You just can’t think about it, you just aim and shoot what you’re aiming at. You start thinking, you’re probably going to hesitate, and that can be a fatal mistake in a gunfight.” He proved his point that time in Caddo when we ran this half-breed gang to ground. We’d been dogging their trail for weeks over some robberies and killings they had committed in the Panhandle. Our party of Rangers took them on in a last stand they’d made there in that little town, and we killed five of them and they two of us.
We thought we’d killed them all, and while the Cap’n went to send a wire to our headquarters in Fort Griffen that the Juarez Gang was no longer, the rest of our party licked its wounds and set about burying our dead. Then when that was complete, we allowed as to how we needed to rest our horses a day or so before starting home. I took the opportunity to go into the town and get myself a haircut and shave.