Widowmaker Jones

by Brett Cogburn

  A couple of the men said something that sounded like approval and astonishment, but stopped when the tall one glared at them. He cocked his own pistol and nodded at Fonzo.

  The tall one didn’t even try to aim at the flying ball and simply held his pistol with his elbow bent at the waist. He missed and the ball fell into the corn stubble.

  “That’s one you owe me,” Kizzy said, and gave Fonzo the signal to throw again.

  She busted the second ball so quickly out of the air that it hadn’t time to reach the apex of its flight.

  “May I see your gun?” The tall Mexican held out his hand.

  She hesitated but finally handed him her pistol butt first. He opened the loading gate and pushed out a loaded cartridge, examining it.

  “No trick loads,” she said.

  “I thought maybe you use shot shells.”

  “I use them in the tent, but don’t really need them to hit anything. It isn’t that hard.”

  He put the cartridge back in her pistol and examined the pink pearl grips. “Pretty like a child’s toy. A woman’s gun.”

  “A gun that shoots better than yours.”

  He handed it back to her, frowning. The gunshots were beginning to draw more of a crowd, and he looked over his shoulder at the latest arrivals, frowning more.

  “Are you ready?” Fonzo asked.

  The tall one cocked his pistol. “Throw.”

  This time, he stretched his pistol out to arm’s length, squinting down the barrel and trying to find the flying ball in his sights, but missing again.

  “That’s two pesos,” Kizzy said.

  Fonzo gave her a look that she knew was meant to tell her without words that she should miss her third shot on purpose. The tall Mexican and his friends were bound to be sore losers, and it might be trouble to rub it in too much.

  But Kizzy had also taken note of the growing crowd, and she smiled at them before turning back to the business at hand and busting the third ball with her pistol in her left hand. The crowd clapped, and she was sure that the tall Mexican and his companions wouldn’t try anything rough with so many witnesses looking on. It would serve the bunch of drunks and thugs right to learn a little humility.

  The tall one cocked his pistol for a third time and, to his credit, managed to hit his target. His friends yipped and shouted high-pitched cheers.

  Some of his cockiness returned and he smiled at her again. “This gun, I think it shoots a little high, but I’m getting used to it.”

  She shattered all of her last three targets, while he never hit another. Among the clapping and cheers of the crowd, she also heard some whispering.

  The tall one reloaded his pistol while he stared at her, and there was no hiding the coldness upon his face. “You are a good shot.”

  She held out an open palm. “I believe you owe me five pesos.”

  He reached in his vest and pulled out a handful of coins and counted out five of them into her hand. “Maybe we shoot again sometime and I have a better gun.”

  She forced herself to smile at him. “Would you like to trade guns and shoot again? Double the wager?”

  If he had attempted to hide his anger before, he did no longer. His voice was icy when he leaned closer to her. “You like to play with guns? You like to play games with men? Do you know who I am?”

  “No, but I’ve seen enough to tell that you are an awful sport, a drunkard, and a man of atrocious manners. Isn’t that how you say it? Atrocious?” She thought for an instant that he was going to strike her.

  “I considered a kiss from you when I first saw you, but now I don’t think so. I think maybe you are a child.”

  Kizzy was still thinking about what to say to that when he turned quickly on his heels and shoved through the crowd. His friends mumbled a few things, but followed him away.

  Many of the people gathered came to congratulate her, and she talked with a few of them and said her thanks before they trickled back to wherever they came from. The last of them to go was an old man with sad eyes and a face like wrinkled leather beneath his straw sombrero.

  “You watch out for that one,” he said to her. “He’s bad.”

  “Who is he?” she asked.

  The old man looked surprised. “You did not know?”

  “Know what?”

  He nodded as if her answer explained something, and then he clucked his tongue sadly. “If I was you I would be careful tonight. That man is Javier Cortina.”

  “And who is that?”

  “He has killed many men. Stolen many things.”

  “He looks like an outlaw. If he’s so well known, why doesn’t the law arrest him?”

  The old man clucked his tongue again. “The alcalde is his cousin, and because Cortina is dangerous, the rurales stationed here look the other way and act like they don’t see him. Maybe if Cortina was by himself they would try, but not with men to help him.”

  “We’ll be careful,” Fonzo said.

  “Thank you,” Kizzy added.

  The old man nodded. “If I was you I would keep a close guard on my horses. There is nothing Cortina likes better than a good horse, and he doesn’t pay for them.”

  Before she could ask any more questions the old man left.

  “Maybe we should wait until dark and then try to slip out of town,” Fonzo said later beside their fire. “I don’t like the sound of what that old man had to say.”

  “Whatever we do, I think he was right,” she said. “At the very least, one of us had better stay up and keep an eye on things. We can take turns sleeping and keep the fire built up high.”

  Fonzo went to the wagon and procured a pistol and their father’s long shotgun. “I would have felt better if I had these when that Cortina and his men were here.”

  “You are a terrible shot.”

  “They were close enough it wouldn’t have mattered,” he said. “And what were you doing hitting every one of your targets? Were you trying to make trouble?”

  “I didn’t like him.”

  “So you make him mad on purpose? We don’t need any more trouble.”

  She held out the five coins. “I made this.”

  “And what were you going to do if he tried something? Do you think Cortina carries a gun only to shoot glass balls?”

  “He was a poor shot. I outdid him easily.”

  Fonzo shook his head again. “And you call me the foolish one of us. For someone so smart, sometimes you don’t get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “Yes, you outshot him, but you didn’t have anyone shooting back at you while you did it.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic. We’ll leave this place and never see him again.”

  Chapter Nine

  A day later they were resting the wagon teams and taking a midday siesta on the side of the road to Monterrey. Fonzo took a nap under one of the wagons, but Kizzy was too hot to sleep. The river paralleling the road looked invitingly cool and too tempting to miss. Kicking off her sandals and hiking her skirt to her knees, she waded into the shallows and made her way along the willow-shaded bank, liking the cool mud bottom against her bare feet and bending over to cup an occasional handful of water and rub it against the back of her neck. Up the hill closer to the road, her dogs were busy trying to dig an armadillo out of its den, wagging their tails happily and sending dirt flying.

  She remembered the times when they were a whole family, and her father used to stop at such places as this and all of them would swim in the river, laughing and splashing one another and him always the one to start the roughhousing. He had been a playful, mischievous man: quick to laugh, never met a stranger, and talkative to the point that he was silent only when sleeping or when he was daydreaming about one of his grand schemes. Who would have thought such a kind man would end as he had?

  She pushed away the harsh images that crowded in on the good memories and found a seat in a patch of grass with her feet still in the river. Good things were the only things worth spending your time on. That�
�s what he had always said. Waste no time with what is done. Move on and leave it behind.

  They hadn’t even buried him, and left him like that. She and Fonzo had to take him down, carrying him away in the early light of morning while his tormenters slept after a night of so much evil, peacefully as if they felt no guilt or would ever realize the good man they had done so wrong.

  You move on. Dig your graves, bury the hurt, and move on. One last look behind you and that is all. But some things follow you.

  She waited for the silt in the river water to settle and studied her face in the mirror of it. Amber, almond-shaped eyes stared back at her, slightly distorted in the current, and looking older and sadder than she would have expected. She didn’t feel sad. Most times she felt happy, except when it came to her how alone she and Fonzo really were. Nothing but each other in the whole wide world—each other and the road. Lots of people, but all strangers and nothing more than an audience to stand before, to pass before, clapping or leering. Gypsies, Roma, didn’t mingle with the gadje, the outsiders.

  She brushed her hair with her mother’s mother-of-pearl brush, the feel of the heirloom soothing as it moved slowly through her long black locks, lost in thought while dragonflies dipped and darted out over the water.

  The dogs barking jerked her from her reverie. At first she thought they were only barking in excitement or frustration over the armadillo they had cornered, but then she realized that they had left their game and were farther away. The sound of running horses on the road above her caused her to stand and turn back toward camp.

  The willows between her position and the wagons were too thick to see through, but loud voices carried to her, and among them was her brother’s. She had slipped back into her sandals and was washing her hands when the first of the gunshots cracked through the trees, so loud that she flinched as if struck by a bullet. She ran for the wagons with her heart racing in her chest.

  She barely reached the road in time to see the men come flying past her. They were the same ones who had bothered her and Fonzo back in Piedras Negras, and they had Fonzo’s white horses roped together and leading behind them. All five of them laughed at her when they saw her on the edge of the road, and one of them tried to stop his horse, but it was poorly trained and ill broke and took the bit in its teeth and threw a runaway with him jerking cruelly on his bridle reins and cursing in Spanish.

  The tall one in the spotted vest, Cortina, loped leisurely along behind the rest of them. She thought he would stop when he reached her, but he merely gave her a tip of his sombrero brim and a smirking smile. He veered his horse around the body of one of her dogs, dead in the road, and loped away.

  She knelt over the dog. It was the smaller of the two—Bullsar, the brown one. His body was bloodied with multiple bullet wounds, and the tears were already brimming in her eyes when she looked up to watch Cortina and his men disappear into the dust. Her fingers lingered in the dog’s wet fur while she took note that Fonzo was nowhere in sight. She ran again for the wagons and feared that they had killed him also.

  The first thing she saw was the white dog, Vlad, with its hackles raised, teeth bared, and growling deeply where it stood at the end of the living quarters wagon. And then she noticed one of their draft horses was dead in its harness, its mate standing trembling beside it. Fonzo must have been hitching them to the living quarters wagon when Cortina showed up.

  The mules were scattered in a meadow on the edge of the road not far away, grazing calmly as if nothing had happened. Nothing seemed much disturbed other than the dead horse and the growling dog. Not a thing overturned or ransacked, and the pot of soup over their midday fire bubbling and steaming.

  And then she saw the bullet holes in the side of the living quarters wagon. She traced that line of holes, punctured through the painted circus scenes and revealing the white, splintered pine beneath. One of the bullets had punched dead center through the depiction of her mother’s crystal ball. Kizzy had always thought it was a horrible and corny portrayal of a fortune-teller, and her mother had never worn a veil over her head or such gaudy bangles, and the dress more fitting to a harem girl. But you gave the crowd what they wanted if you intended to make a profit, and such was the way most gadje imagined a Gypsy fortune-teller to look.

  She spoke to the dog, letting it hear her voice and comforting it. It took two steps forward, its head dropping and wagging its tail uncertainly, almost as if it were ashamed of what had happened and thought it was to blame.

  Something stirred in the wagon, and she tensed until Fonzo stumbled down the steps at the tailgate, holding his head and groaning.

  “Are you hurt?” she asked.

  “Ran my head into something diving in the wagon. They almost got me.” He rubbed the bloody knot above one eyebrow and grimaced.

  “They took your horses.”

  “They came up so fast I couldn’t do anything. I ran for the wagon and a gun, but they were all shooting at me. I lay down in the floor and I think they emptied their guns at me. I don’t know how they didn’t hit me.”

  She looked again at the bullet-riddled wagon. It did seem a miracle that Fonzo wasn’t hit. The sides of the wagon were one-inch pine planks, and little shelter from the storm of bullets he had obviously endured.

  Before they could bemoan their misfortune any more, the sound of running horses came again and another dust cloud rose up from a bend in the road to the north, in the opposite direction from where the bandits had fled. Both of them scrambled for the wagon, running into each other in their haste to arm themselves. By the time Fonzo shoved his shotgun out of the back door their newest arrivals had already pulled up their lathered horses in the middle of the road facing their camp.

  “Maybe these men are why Cortina didn’t stay longer,” she said.

  “It’s all right.” Fonzo stepped down to the ground. “They’re rurales.”

  Kizzy stood on the tailgate that served as a rear porch for the wagon and surveyed the dozen men sitting their horses before her. She was less comforted than her brother by their arrival, but she had to admit that she had never seen their like.

  All of them were dressed in the charro style with wide sombreros upon their heads and wearing gray uniform blouses draped with rifle bandoliers, red neckties, pinstriped pants, and leather leggings that reached from their ankles to their knees. The big spurs they wore on their boots rattled as their horses stamped and shook bridle chains.

  Despite the matching dress, no two of them were armed alike. A few of them had sabers hanging from their waists or from their saddle swells, and in their hands were everything from Winchesters to muskets. Some wore as many as two and three pistols—everything from muzzle-loaders to modern cartridge revolvers.

  They looked more like wild vaqueros, revolutionaries, or brigands than policemen. True, Porfirio Díaz had increased the number of such lawmen since he had taken over the country once again, but their reputation in many parts of Mexico was little better than that of the renegade Indians and bandits they were supposed to pursue.

  She kept the pistol she had managed to grab hidden in her skirt and studied the rurales with her other hand shading her eyes. Vlad growled beside her, and she commanded him to lie down. He did, but the hair on his back was standing straight up again.

  “Thank goodness you’ve come,” Fonzo said.

  The man who must have been their officer rode his horse a couple of steps out from his men. He looked at the dead horse and then back to Fonzo. His eyes last landed on Kizzy.

  He asked something in Spanish, and though both she and Fonzo had picked up a smattering of the language in their time on the border, she couldn’t understand what he said, for he spoke too fast.

  “What happened here?” the rurale officer asked again in broken English.

  “Brigands,” Fonzo replied. “They stole six of our horses and likely would have killed us if you hadn’t come along. They must have seen your dust or known you were behind them.”

  The officer
grunted and looked up the road to the north.

  “His name was Cortina,” Fonzo said. “He followed us from Piedras Negras.”

  “Yes, it was Cortina,” the officer said. “He was seen this morning and we hoped to catch him on the road.”

  “Well, go after him.”

  The officer said something to one of his men and that man started his horse in the direction that Cortina had fled. The others waited.

  “¿Cuántos hombres?” the officer asked.

  “There were six of them,” Fonzo said, his voice growing impatient. “You can catch them if you hurry.”

  “¿Cómo?”

  “Hurry. Pronto. Vamonos.”

  “We will catch Cortina in time.” The officer sat slumped in the saddle with his posture as languid as the tone of his voice. To hurry was obviously the last thing he intended, as if his body had taken on the tempo of the hot day. “Are you alone?”

  Fonzo gave Kizzy an uncertain look. “It is only us.”

  The officer grunted again and nodded at Kizzy. “Your woman?”

  “My sister.”

  The rurales exchanged looks, all of them smirking and saying things too low and fast for her to understand. The officer gave orders and four of the rurales broke off and loped their horses to the meadow where the mules grazed. They circled the mules and began loose herding them toward the road. The mules, so calm before, went back to their usual, difficult antics when it was plain that the lawmen were intent on capturing them or taking them someplace other than the lush grass of the river bottom.

  “Thank you for the help. I could use some help hitching those mules. We only traded for them recently, and they can be difficult to handle,” Fonzo said. “And maybe some of your men could help me roll this dead horse out of its harness.”

  The officer continued to stare while the men he had sent after the mules finally managed to rope all but one of them. They gave up on catching the last one, the most crafty of the team, as it made it to the timber along the river, where pursuing it on horseback was futile. When they returned with the mules in tow the officer waved them past him and down the road back in the direction of Piedras Negras.