by Bill Brooks
I spotted a lone cabin off the road to our right, up a trace that cut through the desert.
“Why don’t we pull off and see can we water the horses at that house yonder,” I said.
“Lead the way,” he said without debating me on it.
The house set back about a quarter of a mile and the trace was rutted with deep wheel tracks that had cut through the earth when it was wet from the rainy season and baked hard again with the sun, and each time the Cap’n’s wheels caught and jiggled the hack, his face took on the look of a man being punched in the gut.
We got within calling distance of the house—a combination of mud and wood with a tin roof run through with rust streaks, a small stone chimney at one end and a by-God gazebo in the yard. Off to the right was a couple of lean-tos, a wagon with the tongue laid on the ground. Farther on was a privy. Off to the left rear stood a pile of rusting cans.
I called the house.
Old man stepped out with a big bore in his hands down below his waist, not aiming but ready to use it if he had to.
“What you fellers want?” he said cautiously.
“Wanted to know if we could water our horses,” I said.
He looked from me to the Cap’n.
“Don’t figger you’re trouble,” he said. “Never known killers and troublemakers to go around in a hack. Water trough is out back.”
“You mind I step down and stretch my legs and maybe use that privy of yours?” the Cap’n said.
The old man nodded.
“Hep yourself,” he said.
I led the horses around back to the water trough and let them drink while the Cap’n trudged off to the outhouse, then pretty soon trudged back again. I heard him in there retching. Then I walked the horse back round to the front where the Cap’n now sat making palaver with the old man there in the shade of a partial roof of what could be considered the start of a porch, but I’d never bet it was going to get finished anytime soon, if ever.
“How you making it way out here?” Cap’n was asking the old man. Well, I say old, but truth be told, the old man was probably the same age as the Cap’n, just more gnarled, like a wind-twisted tree trunk.
“Making do as best I can,” the old man replied. “I come out here in ’50, back when it was still wild and overrun with Chirichua and Lipan Apaches. Met old Geronimo and Natchez and their bands right here, near my well yonder. We palavered some and I think they would have cut my head off and put it on a pike, except I was married to an Apache woman at the time and she spoke up for me, saying how I was a good man and friend to the Induns, and they said long as I was married to her I didn’t have nothing to worry about from them. That son of a bitch Geronimo had eyes like candle flames.”
“That so,” the Cap’n said. The old man nodded.
“You want a drink? I got some peddler’s whiskey in the house I could abuse you boys with.”
“Yes sir, we sure could use a drink of something stronger than well water,” the Cap’n said.
“You look as if you could. Wait here, I’ll go in and get the jug.”
Cap’n looked at me and nodded.
“You learn to talk to folks right, you can get along pretty well in this old life,” he said.
I looked off to where the sun was edging down behind some low brown hills, the rays of its light glancing upward and outward like the earth was catching fire.
“I bet that old boy has seen some things in his times,” the Cap’n said. “I heard Geronimo was a real bad actor. Heard they put him in a jail down in Florida, Natchez too and their whole band.”
“I bet he knows he’s a lucky man to still be living,” I said.
The old man came out, said, “My name’s Torvor, Waylon Torvor, ’case you was interested,” and handed Cap’n a brown glazed crock jug. The Cap’n took it up by the handle and hitched its bulk over his shoulder and tipped the neck to his mouth for a good long pull, then swung it over to the old man, who held it out to me. I stepped forward, and he grinned a dark brown–toothed grin through the grizzle of his maw and said, “You ain’t Mormons, are you?”
“No sir, we ain’t. What makes you think we are?”
“Nothing,” the old man said.
I took a pull and was surprised how top-notch the liquor was. I handed it back and he took a pull and said, “Goddamn,” and did a hitch step.
“You want another?” he said to the Cap’n.
“No sir, we got several miles yet to go and I’d not want to fall out of that hack and break my neck along that there lonely road and have to be buried so far from my home.”
“Where you hail from?”
“Texas,” is all the Cap’n would say.
“Texas,” the old man said, like he was tasting the word. “Now that’s a goddamn place and a half, it sure is. I once got married in Texas to a six-foot-tall whore—this was before I married the Apache woman, of course—who outweighed me by thirty pounds. This was in my wild youth. They grow everything big in Texas including their women.” He cackled and snapped the jug up to his mouth again, happy for a reason to drink and palaver. And when he finished, he wiped off his mouth with the frayed cuff of his shirt sleeve.
“I buy my liquor off a whiskey drummer comes through here in the spring and fall. Says he has it shipped in from Kentucky. It fortifies me against all illnesses and dark times.”
“Yes sir,” the Cap’n said, trying to be polite. He wasn’t a man to carry on an overlengthy conversation, nor listen to one either. He edged away from under the overhang and stepped toward his hack, and I could see it took every ounce of his strength to make it that far.
The old man called, “You boys is welcome to stay the night. Can camp out there in that shed if you like. Don’t make nothing to me if you do. Got water and feed for your hosses. Just charge you a dollar for the feed. Good straw in that shed to make you a bed.”
Cap’n looked at me.
“What do you think?” he said. The sky overhead had turned the color of sheet iron now that the sun had nearly gone out of it.
“How far is it to Finger Bone?” I asked the old man.
“Oh, I’d say another twelve, fifteen miles, but you daren’t get caught out on that road after dark—too many highwaymen. They catch you out on that road, just the two of you, they’ll set on you like chickens on a june bug. Real bad fellers patrol that road at night.”
“I’m about tuckered out, Jim,” the Cap’n said.
“You want us to bed down here for the night, that’s okay with me,” I said.
He looked off toward the dimming sky.
“It’ll be dark before we got another two miles,” he said. “I don’t guess it’d make no difference if we get there late tonight or first thing in the morning.”
I couldn’t tell if his reluctance to push on was due to his feeling poorly or just that he knew what lay ahead of him, what he had to do once he got there.
“Maybe we ought to give it a rest then,” I said.
He nodded.
The old man said, “I got a pot of beans with some fatback cooking in the firebox. We can all sit down to eat whenever you’re ready.”
I walked over and paid him the money for the horses’ feed and then turned both animals out into the small corral he had there with his bunch of nags. I grained them down, then went and washed my hands and face at the pump and wiped off with my bandana.
The Cap’n was seated on one of the chairs the old man carried out from inside and set in the front of the house. The last of the sun was just then winking out beyond the smoke gray mountains off to the west. A soft dying wind ruffled the Cap’n’s striped shirt. I sat on the edge of the porch.
“You thinking about tomorrow, when we get to Finger Bone and get your grandson?” I said.
“I am, can’t help but to think about it.”
“I’ll do it for you if you want,” I said. “I’ll take care of that business for you.”
He looked at me with troubled eyes.
“I could
n’t ask that of you.”
“You don’t have to ask it.”
“Shit,” he said. It was one of the few times I’d ever heard him swear.
“You think about it,” I said. “It’s no skin off my neck you want me to do it.”
“You think you could, just shoot a man like that?” he said. “A kid who never did a thing to you and wasn’t trying to kill you back?”
“Put a gun in his hand if it will make you feel better.”
He grunted.
“Ain’t me that would need feeling better if you was to do it.”
“It wouldn’t make me feel better either way.”
“I keep wondering what would get into him so bad, make him do something like what he done to that woman.”
I shrugged and took out my makings and rolled myself a shuck, and it made me think of being out in the evening after supper with Luz, the two of us smoking and sipping liquor and talking.
“I sure wish I had a cold pear,” the Cap’n said suddenly, sipping another bit of the peddler whiskey. “I do admire cold pears. Ever since I got told what I had by the physician, I’ll get a craving for something now and then. The sweet kind you get in a can with the syrup in it.”
I knew he wanted to change the subject, and I did too. I’d kill the kid if he wanted me to. I’d do to save him the grief, but I sure as hell wouldn’t feel good about it and knew it was something I’d have to live with forever.
The old man came out with his kettle of beans and salt pork and set it on the ground and then went back in and came out with three tin plates and some spoons and another jug of whiskey.
“Dig in,” he said. “Ain’t nothing formal round here.”
So we ate till our bellies felt like they were full of buckshot, except the Cap’n didn’t eat but a spoonful or two.
“Ain’t it to your liking?” the old man asked.
“It is, I’m just not feeling up to snuff is all,” the Cap’n replied.
To be honest, I wanted to say it was about the worst meal I ever ate, but I held my tongue in order to be polite.
Afterward we smoked and the old man said, “What you all going to Finger Bone for?”
It wasn’t common for one man to ask another his business, but there wasn’t anything overly common about this old buzzard. I just supposed he was lonely for talk.
The Cap’n said, “Buy some horses.”
“Horses, huh?”
The Cap’n nodded as if to say, What part of that don’t you understand, old-timer?
The old man pushed the jug toward the Cap’n and he tipped it up, and I could see the liquor was beginning to take its effect on him from eating so little and drinking that hard whiskey.
“We best turn in,” I suggested. It was nigh on full dark now, stars beginning to sprinkle the sky and a half moon rising over the rimrock.
“Go on, make yourselves to home,” the old man said, standing away and stretching. Then he hooked a forefinger through the jug’s ear and took it up and swallowed what little was yet still in it and said, “You boys sleep well.” Then he trudged off inside his door and closed it.
“I’m about all in, Jim,” Cap’n said.
“Let’s go saw some wood then,” I replied, and we stood up and walked to the shed and pitched down some saddle blankets hanging from a nail hook onto the thicket of straw there.
“Boy, it feels like I’ve swallowed a belly full of bent nails,” Cap’n said as he lay down. “It’s pretty bad how life treats you when you get old…”
In a few minutes I could hear him breathing like a man will when he’s first asleep. I was myself tired but not so much, and I lay there in the darkness with only a little of the moon’s light coming in over the partial shed wall above my head.
I kept thinking about Luz, and how it would feel to be lying with her tonight in a regular bed and when was I ever going to get too old or tired of sleeping on the ground or some old man’s shed floor and finally settle down permanent? I vowed once I got back home again, that was it for me; it would take hell and high water to ever get me to do anything like this again. Jesus himself could ride up to my place and say he needed help with the Philistines and I wouldn’t go with him.
I was thinking all this when I must have drifted off to sleep, for I suddenly started awake when I heard the crunch of boot just outside the shed.
Chapter Eight
The Boys
Billy said after the funeral of their stepdad, Jardine Frost, when he and Sam went off behind the saloon in town after asking the drunk, Thompson, to buy them a bottle and giving him a dollar to do it: “We ought to skin out of this town.”
Sam, barely fourteen, was still weighing the loss of the only daddy he knew with an ounce of kindness in him. Jardine never beat them, never laid into them, real soft-spoken sort and good to their ma as well. Would come riding home some days after his job as a horse trader with bouquets of wildflowers he’d stop and pick and sometimes bags of rock candy for the boys. One time he came home with a baseball for them. It was a treat to wait for Jardine to come home from his work.
But then one day he didn’t come home till some men brought him home in the back of a wagon wrapped in a tarp, saying how he’d gotten into an argument with a fellow over a horse the fellow claimed Jardine sold him that had the bloat and how Jardine refused to refund the fellow’s money and how the fellow went up the street and got drunk and came back with a long barrel pistol and shot Jardine through his rib meat, the first round, and the second through the back of his “goddamn skull” to quote the fellow who shot him. The fellow was arrested and a quick trial was held and the fellow was found innocent of murder in the first degree and every other degree because nobody could prove one way or the other whether it was a justified shooting or not, seeing as how the horse in question actually had the bloat and in fact died only one hour before Jardine was himself shot.
So there he now lay in a cold dark grave with nothing but Billy and Sam’s memory of him photographed in their minds, this mild-mannered fellow with eyes blue as ice water, closed forever against the stain of the world wherein men could shoot you over practically nothing at all and get away with it.
“Where would we go?” Sam asked when Billy suggested they leave Tascosa. “And what about Ma?”
“Ma can make out a lot easier she don’t have our hungry mouths to feed. We’d be doing her a favor.”
“How’d we make a living and feed our own hungry mouths?” Sam asked.
“Hell if I know, but we’ll make out one way or the other.”
Billy was nineteen, and growing up as he had, with a mother who couldn’t pick the right man till she picked Jardine, or rather, Jardine picked her, had made him grow up fast.
He passed the whiskey bottle to Sam, and Sam took a hit off it while Billy rolled them a shuck and smoked it first, then handed it to Sam when Sam handed him back the bottle.
“You know that son of a bitch Longly that killed Jardine and got away with it ought to pay something for his sin,” Billy said.
“How you mean?”
“I mean he ought to pay something.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, but we ought to ride over there and make him pay something to Ma, and to us.”
“How we gone do that? We ain’t even got no horse to ride over there with.”
“We got the keys to the padlock that holds the gate to those horses Jardine was trading for that man in Uvalde.”
“You mean steal us some?”
“You think that fellow from Uvalde when he gets here is just gone give us two horses for showing up and asking him?”
“No, I don’t reckon he would.”
“We got Jardine’s pistols,” Billy said. “We’ll need ’em.”
Sam remembered the Remingtons Jardine kept in a red velvet–lined case made of mahogany he’d shown them once from his old days of being a town marshal in Dallas. The citizens there had given him the set for his faithful duty of keeping law and
order. They were even inscribed on the backstraps with J. R. Frost.
“His prize pistols?” Sam said.
“You think he’s gone need them anymore?”
“No, I reckon not.”
“Time we went out on our own, became men,” Billy said. “Pass me that shuck.”
They drank half the whiskey before Sam puked up his portion and slumped down green. Billy, nearly fallen-down drunk, laughed at his little half brother.
That night after they’d all gone to bed, Billy woke Sam and told him to pack some things and off they snuck out the back door with Jardine’s prize pistols stuck inside their belts and walked clear to town where Jardine kept the man from Uvalde’s horses locked up in a corral with a big brass padlock.
Billy undid the lock with Jardine’s key, and they slipped inside among the horses, some of whom slept standing, their heads down. Billy picked his way through the small herd to where some saddles and bridles were kept next to a big grain bin.
“Pick you out one,” Billy whispered.
The each took a bridle and saddle and picked them out a horse and slipped the headstall over their horses’ heads and the bit between their teeth and saddled them up, then walked them out slow through the gate, with Billy dismounting and locking the gate again before remounting, telling Sam to take it slow, to walk up the back alley behind the town’s buildings till they hit the road leading south.
It was half a moon that night, enough to see by but not easily be seen unless somebody was looking for them.
When they reached the south road Billy said, “Okay, let’s ride these sons a bitches like they was horses we just stole.”
“We did just steal them,” Sam said.
“My goddamn point exactly,” Billy said with a grin.
The found Longly’s place easy enough. Just a lone little shack looked like a shadow in the half light of night, sitting just off the road three miles outside of town.
“What if he keeps a dog?” Sam said. “And it sets to barking loud.”
“Then I feel sorry for that old dog,” Billy said and pulled the Remington out of his waistband, and holding it like that, knowing what he might end up doing with it, gave him a whole other feeling than he’d ever had before.