Dead Man's Poker

by Giles Tippette

  “Not a hell of a lot,” I said.

  “What is your name?”

  “Wilson Young.”

  He stood up. He said, “Well, Senor Young, I will take you to Tampico and see if we can put this matter to rights. I seem to have no choice.”

  Chulo said, “Selecion.”

  Reyes looked at him. He said, “What?”

  I said, “Don’t mind him. He’s correcting your English. You ready for that drink now?”

  He shook his head. He said, “No, many thanks. I have much to do. I have to find Rodriquez; he helps me on the boat. Hermano helps me too when we fish, but this time we will not be fishing, so Rodriquez and I can handle the boat.”

  I said, “You better not forget to send somebody to head off them vaqueros. I don’t know how many cattle you got back in those hills, but every one you bring into this town is a dead cow.”

  He said, “Yes, I will have to see to that immediately.”

  I said, “What about supplies for the trip? On the boat?”

  “Those will be attended to.”

  I got out a hundred-dollar bill and held it out to him. He looked at it. “What is that for?”

  I said, “The boat trip, I guess. You need more?”

  He said, in that proud way that high-class Mexicans have, “It is not necessary. I am sailing you to Tampico to help with our situation. If you do as you say you can, that will be pay enough.”

  I said, “Then to help with the supplies. We need some extra cartridges, and we need our horses looked after while we’re gone.”

  He said, “All that will be taken care of. We can have a reckoning when the matter is finally over. You should eat now. Go in the kitchen of the hotel and tell them to fix you what you want to eat. We are going to be sailing on the evening tide. That is no more than three hours from now.”

  I said, “I hope you understand that Chulo and I won’t be a damn bit of help on that boat. In fact I’m scared as hell.”

  Reyes said, “Don’t worry. You will be safe. I am as anxious as you to catch up with that Senor Sharp. Now I am angry.” He started to walk away, and then he stopped and turned back and looked at me and Chulo for a second. He said, “You are pistoleros, yes?”

  I smiled slightly. It had taken him long enough to notice. I said, “That’s right.”

  “Good,” he said. Then he turned around and walked out of the cantina.

  I looked around at Chulo. He was about as white as a black Meskin could get. He said, shaking his head, “Chulo don’t go on thees boat. Thees Chulo does not do. Sometime Chulo drink thees water. Sometime Chulo take thees leetle bath. But Chulo doan get in no leetle boat in thees beeg water.”

  I said, “Hell, Chulo, I’m scared myself. If you think I want to do this, you are crazy. But it’s the only way. We can’t ride back to Matamoros and take the train. Sharp is liable to be gone by then. And if we try and cut cross-country and intercept the train, we’re liable to kill a couple of horses and still not make it.”

  Chulo said, “I walk. I walk en my bare feets.”

  “Now don’t give me no trouble, Chulo.”

  “Hokay, I run. I run on my bare feets.”

  I said, “You are going to get on that boat whether you like it or not. I’m going to need you in Tampico. So you can just quit this whining and carrying on. You and I are going to get on that boat. You can put your head in a sack all the way or keep your eyes shut, but you are getting on that boat.”

  He looked away. He said, “Hokay, but I no can sweem, an’ that boat is going to seenk because Chulo is on it. So I am going to die en thees water.”

  I poured myself out a drink of brandy. I wasn’t feeling all that brave myself. I said, “You stop that line of talk. You hear me? I don’t want to hear any more talk about boats sinking. You say one more word about that and I’m going to shoot half your goddam nose off.”

  To kill some time we walked down to the corrals and looked at the cattle. Even though it had been just a short time, it appeared that more of the cattle were limping. I said, “Remind me to tell Senor Reyes that they ought to cut out a few of the cattle that aren’t showing the signs, so they can butcher them. I don’t recognize any fat folks around here, so I don’t reckon these people get over much to eat.”

  Chulo said, “I am standing on these ground for the last time.”

  I just gave him a look. Out on the rickety pier I could see that a couple of men had pulled the blue boat alongside and were on board working on her. Neither one of them was Senor Reyes, so I figured he was busy with other things. I said to Chulo, “Let’s don’t forget the rifles. Have they put our horses up yet? I didn’t notice.”

  He said, “I doan see nothing but all thees water. Et look bad.”

  I had to kind of agree with him. When we’d first come, I’d thought the little fishing village was kind of pretty and I’d admired the blue of the water and enjoyed the lapping sound of the little waves. But now, realizing I was actually going out on the stuff, way the hell out, maybe so far out I wouldn’t be able to see land, it didn’t look at all pretty.

  Well, this business had certainly taken a turn. I had set out to collect some money a man owed me and to pay him back for a hole he’d put in me, and now I was worrying about a bunch of sick cattle that didn’t have any more to do with me than did the people that had them on their front porch. And I was fixing to get in a boat to go and try and get another boat and sail in it so I could get my money back, and I was either going to or not going to shoot the man who’d put the hole in me.

  You talk about an hombre being off his range. I was that man.

  CHAPTER 11

  It was late at night, about eleven o’clock. We’d been sailing since around six, having left on what Romando had said was the evening tide. I was sitting with him in the back of the boat, on a bench that ran along each side of what he called the cockpit. He was steering the boat with a helm, which looked to me like a wheel with spokes sticking out of it. Chulo and Rodriquez were in the cabin. Rodriquez was in there on a bunk getting a little sleep before it came his turn to steer the boat. Chulo was in a bunk because he was so sick. Romando said it was mal de mar, seasickness. He said some people got it and some didn’t. He said it was caused by the motion of the boat. I was privately convinced it was caused by all the rum Chulo had drunk just to get on the boat. The reason that I felt that was he had come near to crying when Romando made us take off our boots. High-heeled boots weren’t the best footwear to wear on a boat that was pitching and rolling around. Even I could see that. But Chulo had taken on like he was being made to cut his last tie with the land and horses and shooting people and robbing banks and all them things he’d grown to love. I swear he got actual tears in his eyes when I had to finally order him to take off his boots. Right after that, maybe an hour, he got sick as a dog and spent considerable time leaning over the rail. Now all he was doing was laying on a bunk in the cabin and moaning. I’d been concerned at first, but Romando assured me it would pass and that Chulo really and truly would not die, even though he, right then, thought he was going to.

  I went down into the cabin, walking carefully, and got a bottle of brandy. After Chulo’s example I’d been a mite skittish about downing too much of the spirits. I didn’t favor hanging over some railing and trying to throw up my toenails.

  The cabin was lit with a small kerosene lantern. It was bigger than I’d expected. There was four bunks and even a kind of little kitchen with a stove and a supply of fresh water. I took the bottle of brandy and went back up into the cockpit and sat down by Romando. It was a nice night, pleasant and with a good breeze blowing that was causing both sails to stay bellied out and throwing out a nice wake at the back of the boat. It was a cloudless night with a three-quarter moon and a sky full of stars. I asked Romando if he steered by the stars or used a compass. He shrugged. He said, “For this trip the way is in my head.” He tapped his temple. “We are sailing further out into the Gulf to avoid the little current that runs south
to north along the coast. Coming back, I will sail close to the land so that the current will help me. But, yes, sometimes I look at the compass. But not often.”

  I was learning considerable about sailing and wasn’t minding it near as much as I’d thought I would. I’d figured we were going to be rocking and splashing all over the place, but the boat gave a body a nice solid feel. We had them two sails up. The front one was connected to the pole that stuck out from the bow, the bowsprit. The other one was the mainsail, and Romando had told me that the big pole that came out perpendicular from the mast was the boom. It was secured by ropes, but it still swung back and forth over our heads as Romando changed directions, zigging and zagging to get a better handle on the wind.

  I said, “This ain’t bad at all. Hell, I almost feel like I could run one of these gadgets myself.”

  Romando laughed. He said, “You are very lucky. For your first voyage you have drawn an almost perfect sea.”

  I said, “Ain’t it always like this?”

  He laughed again and looked around like he was hoping somebody was there to share the joke with. He said, “I hope you don’t get a chance to find out. I think you would join your friend very quickly.”

  I took a little drink of brandy and lit a cigarillo. When I had it drawing good, I said, “Romando, I taken note that you brought a sidearm along with you. A gunbelt. What is the purpose of that?”

  Even with just the moonlight I could see his face get grim. He said, “I am very angry at this man you call Sharp.”

  I said, “Romando, let’s get something straight. On this boat you are running the show. You tell me where to sit and I’ll sit there. You tell me to jump up and down and I’ll do that. But when it comes to this business with Sharp that’s another story. There’s going to be guns involved, and that’s where me and Chulo take over. You ain’t going to need that gun.”

  He said, stubbornly, “I have a sense of honor from my father. The people of the village look up to me. I am going to make the face-to-face with this Sharp myself.”

  I drew on my cigarillo. I said, “How old are you, Romando?”

  “I have twenty-six years.”

  I said, “Well, if you want to have twenty-seven, you had better leave this business to me and Chulo.”

  He moved the wheel, and the boat heeled over and took a slightly different direction. Over my head the boom swung toward me on its short tether. He said, “They are too many for you. I saw myself when they came to Bodega that there were five or six others besides this Sharp.”

  I said, “Yes, and if you get mixed up in this, that will just be one more that I have to worry about. You asked me if Chulo and I were pistoleros. We are very good pistoleros. I have used a gun since I was fifteen years old. Against other men. That is many years now. Take my advice on this matter. Honor is a pretty expensive commodity. We get your village their money and get those cattle handled, that will be honor enough to go around for everyone.”

  He said, “We will see.”

  I could see he wasn’t convinced. I was sure hoping I wasn’t going to have to knock him in the head to keep him out of the way. But like all them high-quality Mexicans, he set a great deal of store by honor. It had killed many more of them than Sam Houston.

  I let it lay. I knew what was eating him. He figured a gringo had come in and played him and all his village for fools. A Mexican will sometimes stand for being made a fool out of by another Mexican, but he won’t put up with it from a gringo. There are some Mexicans who can actually like a gringo, Chulo being one in my case, but they are few and far between. The biggest mystery in their lives is how come the damn gringos have got so much more money and better horses and better cattle and just about better everything when a blind man can see that a Mexican is a much more superior human being to a damn gringo. Of course you wouldn’t get one in a thousand to admit to the facts of the matter, but that’s the way they think.

  I said, “You get them vaqueros word to quit bringing in cattle?”

  “That was seen to, yes.”

  “The people in the village ought to slaughter some of those steers that ain’t got sick yet.”

  “Ten steers are being slaughtered. Most of the meat will be smoked and jerked. They are probably having a big feast right now. They are simple people.”

  I knew we were well fixed for provisions on the boat. Rodriquez had brought aboard a big batch of jerked beef and a wheel of cheese and a big pot of beans and a hell of a flock of corn tortillas. Romando had said, when I’d commented on the amount of food, that on a voyage you always planned on being gone twice as long. He said, “Very many bad things can happen on the water. It is best to be ready, to have more food and water than you need.”

  As we sailed along, I asked Romando how his little village managed to survive. I figured smuggling must have entered into it, but he said no. He said, “Our main income is from dried and salted fish that we take to inland markets by ox cart and sell. We sell some dried beef, we sell some corn, we sell whatever we can. Occasionally, as I have said, a boat comes from Cuba and buys some of our cattle. But you can see for yourself that they are very poor cattle.”

  I said, “As little as there is for a cow to eat back in those hills, I’m surprised you got any cattle at all. Yeah, I can see where y’all got plenty excited when this big man in his big boat come in there talking ten dollars a head. I bet y’all nearly made a fiesta.”

  “We thought it was a miracle,” Romando said. His voice was tight. He said, “You may find this a strange thing, Senor Wilson, but I am not a poor man. My father did well in Corpus Christi in various businesses. But I chose to live in the village and help the people of that village.”

  “Not like Mr. Sharp,” I said.

  “No,” he said.

  “You got five hundred dollars, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. And then the other ships would have come if you had not stopped them. And they would have come with a lot of big gringos with guns, and they would have taken the cattle and what else they wanted. Now I think I will do a little taking.”

  I sighed and looked up at the moon. I had a dedicated zealot on my hands. I didn’t know of anything much more dangerous except a drunk with a loaded pistol. Hell, I figured I was as fair as most folks, but this matter was my business. I didn’t need no zealot or a village full of peons getting in the way. I’d see that they got a fair shake, but I was going to take care of the matter at hand first.

  I looked down at my feet, noticing how white they were next to Romando’s. We had all rolled our trousers up, except Chulo, on account of the amount of seawater that kept breaking over the bows and then swishing around in the bottom of the cockpit. Romando said it was supposed to run out the back through some kind of sea-cock, but it never did. But even though I was pretty damp, it wasn’t all that unpleasant. It was one hell of a lot better, I thought, than taking two horses through thorn thickets, and getting them torn to ribbons, to catch a train that was coming when we didn’t know. I figured, unless we drowned before we got to Tampico, that I had made the right choice. I knew Chulo was never going to agree.

  About one o’clock in the morning Rodriquez came up out of the cabin without being called. He was a little, dark Mexican who never had much to say either in Spanish or English. He was wearing a torn shirt and tattered pants, cut off just below the knees. He had a knife in his belt. Romando got up from behind the helm, and Rodriquez slipped into his place. Romando just said one word: “Sud.” South. Then he started down the steps into the cabin. He stopped and looked back at me. “You should sleep,” he said.

  I shook my head. I said, “I ain’t never slept on no boat. I ain’t sure I could sleep on a boat. Kind of scares me.”

  He gave me a funny look. “It scares you to sleep on a boat?”

  “Yeah. The son of a bitch could turn over in the middle of the night, and I could drown to death without ever waking up.”

  He laughed. He said, “If the boat turns over, you may depend that I will wa
ke you up. Look at the sea. It is calm, no? Look at the sky. Do you see any clouds? Without clouds there can be no weather.”

  I said, “I reckon I’ll stay up here.”

  “Can you swim?”

  “If I’ve got one hand on a horse, I can swim him across a river.”

  “You have no horse here. You had better rest if you are going to fight.”

  Well, he might have been a kid who thought honor was some big shakes, but he made sense. A man don’t want to lose that split-second timing because he’d tired. I got up and followed Romando down into the cabin. He flopped on the forward bunk on the high side of the boat, and I did likewise on the one nearest the door. Chulo was in the forward bunk on the low side of the way the boat was tilting. I didn’t know if he was asleep, but he had at least quit moaning, for which I was grateful. I lay there on the bunk, on a rough blanket, and stared up at the ceiling, watching the lantern swing gently back and forth. It had been trimmed down so that it just put out a low glow.

  Just about the time Romando said it, I had already reached the same conclusion in the pit of my stomach. He said, “Don’t watch the lantern, Senor Wilson Young.”

  I turned over on my belly and listened to the boat creak and slosh around. Romando had said the boat was well founded. I didn’t know what that meant, but I intended to ask him sometime. But even as I was thinking the thought I was drifting off to sleep.

  I came awake with the feeling that somebody was pitching me all around a room. I felt like I was landing on the floor and the ceiling and the side walls. When I finally come fully conscious, I was half in and half out of the bunk and was banging my head against the side of the boat. I’d been on the high side when I’d gone to sleep, but now the boat had heeled over and I was on the down side of the hill. I come scrambling to my feet, grabbing hold of anything I could get my hands on. Chulo was on the floor, but I didn’t pay him any attention; the boat was pitching and jumping and jolting like a monstrous bucking horse. As best I could, I made my way up the stairs to the cockpit. Romando was at the wheel, but he looked to be having a hell of a time holding it. The wind was shrieking and the boom was swinging back and forth wildly. I could hear the wind and I could hear the sails and the ropes and all the rest of the boat, but I could see the ocean. There were waves rising up at us that were taller than a tree. The boat would climb up one wave, get to the top, and then fall straight down on the other side with a thud you’d have thought would tear the bottom out of her. Where in hell had all those gentle breezes and calm little waves gone?