We went to a little café about three blocks from the waterfront. It was small, but it was about as clean as could be expected. Chulo and I ordered eggs and tamales with chili gravy, and Rodriquez and Romando had chorizo sausages and eggs. Everybody but Romando had beer. He just drank water.
I could see he was itching to know what we were going to do, but I didn’t say anything while we were eating. My first concern was going to be where Mr. Sharp was. I finally pushed my plate back and said, “Romando, is that ship big enough to live on? The Dolphin?”
He said, “But of course. What do you mean, señor?”
I said, “If you was on her, would you have a big enough cabin to be comfortable in or would you go to a hotel?”
He said, “On such a ship the captain’s cabin would be quite large. And why pay for a room in a hotel if my business was on the docks?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t care where Sharp is; I just want to get my hands on him. Let’s go back to the docks.”
I paid the score for the breakfast, and we wandered back toward Romando’s boat. It sure as hell looked small lined up with all the big two- and three-masted ships. We went on board and sat around in the cockpit. At least me and Chulo and Romando did. Rodriquez went into the cabin and busied himself getting the place shipshape, as sailors said.
Romando said, “What do we do?”
I said, “First, we got to find out where Sharp is. I can’t go up there because Sharp might see me and recognize me. I can’t send Chulo because his English is awful and he looks too mean. So I reckon you have got to be the one to walk up there and ask after Mr. Sharp.”
He was nodding, getting excited. He said, “And what will I say to him if he is on board?”
I said, sharply, “You won’t say nothing to him. You’ll get the hell back here as fast as you can and report to me.”
A little disappointment showed in his face. He said, “We are the wronged ones. My village.”
I said, “Now, listen, Romando, you sailed the boat. But the rest of it is my kind of business. You just go up there and ask whoever is on deck if Mr. Sharp is on board. If he himself is on deck, and you recognize him, you just keep walking.”
“What do I say if they ask me what my business is with this Sharp?”
I said, “Tell whoever it is that you are from the village of Bodega and that you have some questions. If they ask you to come aboard, you suddenly remember some papers you forgot and you get on back here and tell me. If they say he’s not there, you ask where you can find him or when he will be back. Get as much information as you can but don’t go on that ship! I don’t want to have to come get you off. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” he said, but he said it stiffly. He wasn’t much of a hand for taking orders. He said, “Do you think that this Mr. Sharp is trying to buy sick cattle here? In Tampico? Because I don’t think he will find them. The rancheros kill such cattle before they can spread the disease.”
Now I had my chance to laugh at him. He’d laughed at me all the way down the coast on that damn boat. I said, “Romando, see, he’s got all the sick cattle he needs. He’s still expecting one of his other ships to pick up the cattle at Bodega. Once it gets here, all he’s got to do is put three or four head in with the healthy cattle he’ll put on board the Dolphin, and they’ll all be sick by the time he gets them to Cuba.”
“Aaaah,” Romando said.
I said, “Now go on down there and find out what you can.” I looked him over. He was kind of sea-worn. I said, “I wish you looked a little better. You didn’t bring no other clothes, did you?”
He shook his head. “I did not think of it.”
I said, “You look like one of these waterfront rats. I need you to look more like a well-to-do Mexican businessman.” I took out my roll and peeled off a damp twenty-dollar bill. He didn’t want to take it, but I insisted. I said, “You can pay me back when we come to the reckoning. Now go buy yourself some better clothes. And get a shave. But make it fast.”
He said, “What of yourself?”
I smiled slowly. I said, “Mr. Sharp ain’t going to be concerned with my appearance so much as the fact that I have appeared.”
He said, “But what is the plan?”
I said, “Goddammit, if you ask me that again, I’m going to shoot your ears off. I can’t figure out a plan until I know where Sharp is. Now get going.”
He started to leave the boat, but I suddenly called him back. I said, “Give me that gunbelt. It looks silly on you.”
“But I must have protection.”
I said, “From the way you are wearing that rig, it don’t look like no protection to me. Now take it off and hand it to Chulo.”
For a minute he thought he was going to refuse. Then he looked at Chulo. Chulo nodded and held out his hand. Chulo said, “Es the best por usted. Leeve the guns por mi an’ Señor Weelson. We choot them like chou sail de boat.”
He took off the gunbelt, if it could be called that, and handed it to Chulo. Then he said, “I will be as fast as I can.”
We watched him go off down the waterfront. Chulo said, “How come chou call heem a Mexican an’ you call me a Meskin?”
I said, “Because he gave me some medicine before we got on the boat so I wouldn’t get sick like you. And he didn’t give you any.”
Chulo reared his head back and stared at me for a moment. Finally he decided that I was joshing him. He said, “Awwww, chit!”
We waited through the long morning. Rodriquez, like a sensible man, went into the cabin and took a siesta. Chulo and I just sat in the sun like we didn’t have any better sense.
Chulo said, “Have chou made up chou mind?”
“What?”
“Are chou goan to choot thees Meester Charps?”
I shook my head. I said, “I don’t know. It is a quandary.”
“What es thees quan—What chou say?”
“Quandary. That is when you have two women you can screw. One of them is very beautiful, but she has three brothers who will surely kill you if you touch her. The other one has no brothers, but she is very ugly.”
Chulo shrugged. He said, “That es no quontree. Chou wait unteel et es dark an’ then chou make the satisfaccion weeth the ugly one. Or maybe chou geeve the brothers some moneys.”
I looked at him. I said, “Chulo, sometimes you ain’t as dumb as I think you are.”
“Chure. Chou make thees Charps geeve you thees money he owes chou an’ then chou choot heem.”
That seemed like a simple enough solution to me. If I were Chulo.
But we still weren’t on that boat, and we still didn’t have Philip Sharp under our guns. We were closer than I’d been in eight or nine days, but there was still a ways to go.
I sat there thinking about what to do. Finally I said, “Chulo, we ain’t got a deck of cards, do we?”
“Chure,” he said.
“Where?”
“En the saddlebaga.”
I gave him a sour look. I said, “The goddam saddlebags are on the horses, and the horses are a hundred and fifty miles from here. Go find me a deck of cards and be damn quick about it. Do not stop in any cantinas or whorehouses. Just go get the cards and get right back here. We could be going to see Mr. Sharp at any minute. Whenever Romando gets back.”
I would have bet money that Chulo would be a half an hour behind Romando, knowing his habit of hurrying as well as I did. But Chulo was back within the quarter hour with a new deck of cards, and there was still no sign of Romando. I got out my watch. It was going on for eleven o’clock. He’d been gone nearly two hours. I said, “Where the hell can that boy be?”
Chulo sat down in the cockpit with me. He said, “We goan to play cards?”
I gave him a look. I said, “Hell, no. Why would I want to play cards with you? I win all your money and then I just have to give it back. What the hell good is that?”
He said, “I let chou ween sometimes.”
I just looked at him. There
wasn’t anything to say to such a remark.
Noon came and went and there was still no sign of Romando. Rodriquez brought us up some bread and cheese for lunch. While we ate, I began to be convinced that he had been fool enough to go aboard the Dolphin, and now Sharp and his seagoing villains had him and were beating the truth out of him. If that were the case, there would be no surprising Philip Sharp now. We were going to have to assault the goddam ship. “Damn that boy!” I said. I took a nip of brandy. “That dumb little son of a bitch! I told that dumb Mexican not to go on that ship.”
Chulo said, “What es thees talk?”
I told him what I was afraid of.
He furrowed his brow. He said, “He es not that estupid. Thees Charp will know heem an’ he will ask heem what he es doin’ en Tampico. He doan be that estupid I doan theenk, to go on that chip.”
“Then where in hell is he? It’s nearly one o’clock.”
Chulo shrugged. “Quien sabe?” he said. Who knows?
Finally, just about the time I figured I was going to have to go out looking for him, Romando came hurrying down the dock and then jumped into the cockpit of the boat. He looked considerably better with a shave and new clothes, but I was mad as hell. I said, “Where the devil have you been? You should have been back here three hours ago. Did you go on board the Dolphin?”
“No, no, no,” he said. He was very excited. “I have been watching the Dolphin to see how many crew we will have to deal with. I hid very carefully and watched for a long time so I would not count the same men twice. I watched so that I could recognize each man.”
I said, somewhat mollified, “How many?”
“Six. The six that I see on board. Of course I am not counting this Senor Sharp.”
My anger started back up. I said, “What about him? That was what you were sent to find out.”
“He is in the town. I presented myself to a man at the gangplank just as you said. I told him I was there to see Senor Sharp about some cattle business. He said that the senor was in the town. I asked him when he would return, and he was not sure. He thought late in the afternoon, las tardes, but he wasn’t sure. He asked me if I had some cattle for sale and were they near here. I said I had two hundred head of steers and they were just outside of town. He said I should come back. He said I should come back about seven or eight o’clock. That Senor Sharp would surely be back by then.”
“You didn’t tell him you were from Bodega?”
He shook his head. “No, no. I think if I do that, he is going to ask me about the other ships. If I have seen them. I think I just act like I am a ranchero from Tampico.”
I nodded slowly. “Six, huh?”
“Yes. And there is always one guarding the gangplank. And they all have either pistols or knives in their belts.”
I was thinking of how many we might have to deal with. Patterson said Sharp had sailed off with six helpers or sailors or whatever you called them, but that might not have been an exact count. Sharp was off somewhere for the day. I would have bet money to marbles he was meeting in some hotel with a bunch of local rancheros, arranging for a few hundred cattle for this trip to Cuba, and a whole lot more in future, once he got Cuba in the midst of a severe cow shortage. More than likely he had a man with him. Sharp just struck me as the kind of pantywaist that would go knocking around a rough town like Tampico with some help by his side. I decided to figure on seven more besides him. And it might be smart, I thought, not to set a figure at all, but just expect more than had been counted.
I was still thinking about what I was going to do with Sharp. I had promised I’d help clean up the mess the sick cattle posed, and there wasn’t much could be done about that except to take the Dolphin back to Bodega, load the cattle on board, sail out to sea, and pitch them overboard and let the sharks eat them. They couldn’t turn the cattle loose, and they sure as hell couldn’t let them die where they were. The place would smell bad into the next century. And they couldn’t drive them into the Gulf; they’d just wash ashore. So it looked like the Dolphin and I were going back to Bodega no matter what I did about Sharp. I said, to Romando, “Can you sail that big boat?”
“Of course,” he said. “It is not very different than mine except it is bigger and square-rigged.”
I wasn’t going to ask him what “square-rigged” meant because I didn’t care. But I said, “That ship ain’t exactly facing the right way to sail out of here. How do you get the damn thing out of the harbor?”
He said, “You drift it out with the tide. Then when you are clear of the harbor and you have a breeze, you put the sails up and off you go.”
I said, “What time is the tide?”
He pursed his lips. He said, “High tide here will be a little later than Bodega. I can ask, but I think it will be about seven o’clock.”
“How long does it last?”
He shrugged. “That depends on the depth of the harbor. Two hours maybe.”
It would be enough time, I calculated. I said, “But look here, how are you going to sail the Dolphin and your boat at the same time? Can Rodriquez sail your boat?”
He said, “Oh, no. I will need Rodriquez. We will tie my boat on behind the Dolphin, and the big ship will pull my boat.”
I said, “Will you need any of Sharp’s crew to help?”
He looked at me. He said, “Are you thinking of not taking them back?”
I shrugged. I said, “Might be they won’t be real happy to see us. I can’t tell you for certain what is going to happen. They might get to cutting up ugly, and we might have to calm them down some.”
“You mean there will be shooting?”
I shrugged again. I said, “Man don’t want to go to predicting them kinds of things in advance. What time do you reckon it’ll start getting dark around here?”
He looked up at the angle of the sun. He said, “Perhaps six, six-thirty. Mexican time.”
There was an hour’s difference between Mexico and the United States. Or at least Texas. It was an hour later in Mexico. I said, “Good dark?”
“For sure by seven. Perhaps a little earlier.”
I said, “Then I reckon we’ll start their way a little before seven. Maybe they’ll just be sitting down to supper and will invite us to eat with them.”
Chulo said, “Maybe I chould go up to the cantina an’ ask some questions.”
I said, “Maybe you better go down in that cabin and take a siesta. You ain’t getting off this boat until I do. I know you. Just about the time I need you you’ll be laying up in some crib with a puta about half-drunk. And don’t go to whining. It ain’t going to do you a damn bit of good. It’s already after two o’clock and ain’t that much longer to wait.”
Romando said, “Does this make you nerbous?”
I smiled. It didn’t make me “nerbous,” but it sounded like it was making him that way. I said, “Listen, while we got time, I need you to give me the layout of that boat. Do you know anything about it?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “When it was in Bodega, I boarded it and was shown around. This man that you call Mr. Sharp showed it to me like I was a peon who knew nothing of boats. He wanted me to understand how they could carry cattle on a ship.”
I said, “Well, tell me about it. I got to know where they can be hid, where the nooks and crannies are.”
He pulled a face. He said, “It is a very simple ship because it is not intended for long voyages and it carries cattle. So it does not need much for the crew, and most of its space is for the cargo.” He leaned over and sort of sketched out on the wood of the cockpit, with a wet finger, the general outline of the ship. He said, “At the back is the main cabin. It is all of the way across the stem of the ship. Half of it is a big cabin for the captain. The other half is for the meals.”
“It’s the kitchen?”
“No, no,” he said. He pointed to the middle of his little drawing. “Just here, right at the second mast, is a little shack. That is the galley, what you call the kitchen. If they c
ook meals, they do it there and then take them into the little salon for the eating.”
I said, “Where does the crew sleep?”
He pointed at the bow. He said, “Forward. There is a little cabin under the top deck. In the hold, if you understand. That is also where most of the cattle will be kept.”
“Not on top?”
“Some of them, yes. But some go below.”
“How they get them down there?”
He said, “There is a big hatch almost at the rail. Then there is a big ramp. They are driven down that and then back up it at the destination. If some of the cattle are down, they are hoisted out.” He pointed down the dock. “Like that.”
I looked down to where a big pole-like affair, with a cable running from it, was hovering over a ship. While I watched, a team of horses, with a man whipping them, strained forward, and the line rose out of the hold of the vessel, pulling up some big crates that were too large for men to handle.
But I could tell it was getting close to siesta because much of the furious activity that had been going on along the dock was slowing down as men quit their chores and went off to either nap or take a visit to the nearest cantina.
Chulo said, “I theenk I chould go get some cigarillos.”
I said, “I think you should get down in that cabin and get some sleep. You may have to be awake all night. Now go on!”
He got up, grumbling and cussing softly under his breath, but I knew, in five minutes, he’d be asleep and would sleep for six hours if somebody didn’t fire a cannon by his head. He’d been sitting out in the sun for about three hours, and there ain’t never been a day in his life when he could do that without going to sleep.
Romando watched him as he stumbled down the cabin stairs. He said, “Does he work for you?”
“Chulo?” I laughed. “Work for me? Chulo doesn’t work for nobody.”
“But he obeys you.”
“Well, he does that for three reasons. He’s my friend, he knows I’m smarter than he is, and he’s afraid of me.”
“Afraid of you?” His voice seemed to be saying, “That big, ugly, mean-looking Mexican is afraid of a little gringo like you?”
Dead Man's Poker Page 24