Lawless Land

by Dusty Richards

  “We—”

  “I’ll take over here, sir,” the conductor said, coming down the car.

  “Listen, we never—”

  Sam T. turned to the man. “They got awfully foulmouthed.”

  “No problem, we’ll be stopping here in a minute. Get your gear and get ready to get off,” the conductor said, pulling their guns from their holsters.

  “But we paid—”

  “Who the hell are you, mister?” the hard one asked, holding his hand out to silence the others.

  “Sam T. Mayes. What’s your handle?”

  “That’s for you to find out, but if we ever meet again—”

  “You better come armed, mister. Better come damned well armed.” Sam T. watched them file forward. Satisfied they posed no threat, he moved the cylinder back so the empty one was under the hammer, then holstered the Colt.

  The conductor thanked him and herded them out. Sam T. watched the short cowboy move out of the car behind the other two, packing his war bag and saddle. The train braked for the next whistle stop. Several passengers nodded their approval when Sam T. came back up the aisle.

  “Weren’t you afraid?” Julia whispered when he took his seat.

  “No, it wasn’t my time.”

  “You mean to die …” She blanched under her creamy complexion.

  “Yes, ma’am, sorry I am so blunt.”

  “No, I just never knew a man before who considered that.” Then her face reddened. “I am being far too personal.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said to reassure her.

  He sat back and through the window studied the shriveled corn plants needing rain. Laid out in wide check rows, the field looked large, and in the distance someone cultivated with a team of grays, hoping to churn up moisture from the ground. No, God never meant for him to be a farmer.

  The quarter moon came up over Mount Lemmon. Jesus Morales stood in the white light and teetered in his sandals. He put his hand against the stucco wall for support. He felt woozy from too much drink. It must be two more blocks to his place. If he could only make it there. He set out again. His movement unsteady, he weaved his way down the street. Then his feet became tangled and he stumbled over something that grunted and soon a pungent odor rose in his nose. Pig shit. He had fallen in a hole dug out by some neighborhood sow.

  A force rose behind his tongue and soon he began gagging up violent vomit. His stomach turned inside out. He had to escape the pig wallow or he’d puke up his guts. In desperation, he managed to crawl twenty feet between vomiting and gagging, to fall face down and pass out.

  He awoke to someone kicking him lightly in the ribs. Blind, he swatted at it. Still his tormentor persisted. He tried to open his dry eyes. Then he could smell the musk. It wasn’t someone, it was some thing. A large black sow was trying to root him over. He kicked at her to get away. What time was it?

  “Get away, you stupid sow!” At his words, she backed up a little and glared at him out of small beady eyes.

  At last, he raised up. His shirt filthy and sour smelling, he kicked with impatience at the snuffling pig. “Go on!”

  Where were his sandals? He searched about in the shadowy darkness. It must be close to sunup, time for him to go to work at the adobe brickyard. His mind clouded and, dizzy, he fought to his feet. Where were his sandals? Lightheaded, he started back in the direction he had come from. He searched around the slop hole in the alley where women threw their wastewater and the pigs had rooted a place to mud-bathe. Too dark to see. Maybe they were in that slop hole.

  The thick odor of hog was strong on his clothes. He was filthy and coated with dried mud and shit. At last he gave up his search and went stumbling off to Raphael Ortega’s adobe pit. He couldn’t afford to miss any work; he was penniless. Gawdamnit, he smelled bad, like he had shit his own pants. He reached Green Street, crossed it and went up the alley to where the excavation some twelve feet deep had eaten up two city lots.

  “Whew, you smell bad,” Conteras said and backed away. “Did you make love to a pig last night?” The little man laughed at Jesus’ expense.

  Jesus mumbled something unintelligable and picked up the handles of a wheelbarrow. He pushed it down the ramp. The small steel wheel made a ringing sound that pierced his head. His day had begun. He lifted the pickaxe and made the first of ten thousand swings into the hard-packed brown clay. It crumbled slowly and he used the spade to load the wheelbarrow with it. When the small box was full, he glanced with dread at the ramp and began to shove it up the steep way. His shoulders hurt, his stomach growled and churned empty. At last he dumped the contents, went by the water barrel and took a gourd of the tepid liquid. He let the refreshing water slide down his throat and then he hurried back to his digging. He needed this job.

  On Jesus’ third trip up the ramp, Conteras came out and told him it was time to mix the clay and straw. He hated that worse than mining the dirt. The sun stood high in the morning sky. He shoveled the four-by-four mixing bin half full of clay, added water and began to fork straw on top. Then, by treading it with his bare feet, he mixed it. The hotter the day grew, the worse the smell came from his clothing. It was a deadly mixture of sour puke, pig manure and his own foul body odor. He finally had to quit stomping the mixture and went to relieve himself in the small outhouse.

  The stifling-hot privy buzzed with flies, and the smell wafting up from the pit underneath only made matters worse. He finally finished and tumbled outside to gasp for fresh air.

  “Why do you use it?” Conteras came over and asked. “You smell like you already shit on yourself.”

  He ignored the man and went back to tramping the adobe. If he let Conteras get to him, he would probably kill the man. Then what would he do for work? Even prison might not be as bad. They had a new prison at Yuma. It couldn’t be much hotter than this hole. He daydreamed of the cool Sierra Madre, the White Mountains, under the Mogollon Rim in the north, when he was an army scout, not an adobe mud mixer.

  “Work that straw in better. Some of that batch you made last week broke on the builder. He wanted his money back,” Conteras said.

  Jesus looked over at the little man. He resembled a small feisty dog, only inches shorter than Jesus. Still the man lorded himself over Jesus. He hated his thin mustache, he hated Conteras’ fat wife, Corita, who brought bean-filled tortillas every day. No meat in them. It was Jesus’ only meal of the day because the fifty cents Conteras paid him each day went for something to drink. More than anything else, he hoped the cheap liquor he could afford would get him through the night and part of the next day as well. So he would dig some more clay and mix some more with straw and then pack it in the forms to set up. In two days, he pulled those. forms and stacked the still-damp bricks, each one tipped on the next one in long rows to dry for a month. Ortega owned two more lots beside the pit where they dried the bricks.

  Jesus tamped the forms full and the sun grew higher. Soon his boss’s wife came. She had a ponderous belly under a thin dress and he could see the rosette of her nipples, big as silver dollars beneath the material. Corita reminded him of that alley sow; he hated her.

  “Time to eat,” she announced and he stopped his work.

  “You smell bad,” she whined. “Stay downwind.” With her pudgy fingers she directed for him to go around her.

  Maybe he would kill her with his bare hands. Instead he took the wood slab with the two burritos on it and stepped aside. Conteras was in the next yard arguing with a builder.

  “You must have rubbed on a pig,” she said, busy feeding her face. Then she grimaced at him. “Don’t come around me stinking like that. Whew, you smell awful.”

  “Go to hell,” he mumbled.

  “You talk to me like that, you won’t get any more lunch.”

  Who cared? It was slop that she brought him anyway. Besides, Conteras made her bring him something to eat. It wasn’t out of her generosity that she fed him. In fact, all she did was insult him. If she thought he cared about her fat butt, she w
as stupid. He would make love to a cow first. Oh, many times he had seen her fat thighs when she sat with her legs spread apart and acted like she was hot. They appealed to him like that pig did rooting him in the Green Street alley. He hated her.

  The food only upset his stomach. He sipped some water and began to swallow his own spit. Something an Apache woman taught him: A man’s own saliva was better than any medicine to settle his stomach. Soon he was back to work shoveling the wet mixture in the wooden forms to make more bricks. The work was hot and he was slow.

  Conteras came back and grumbled he wasn’t working hard enough. Jesus told him what he could do and went on tamping the forms full.

  “First thing in the morning, we will pull the forms on those you did yesterday. There better not be any broken ones,” Conteras warned him, then he went and laughed with his fat wife about something. Maybe about Jesus.

  Jesus recalled how it was when he was an army scout. Never, even on the worst days when he scouted, did an entire bad day compare to ten minutes on this job. The sad part was they didn’t need scouts anymore. The Apaches were on reservations. No more bronco Apaches, no more raids to Mexico. The midday sun grew hotter as he tamped the filled forms. Someone came to see about adobe bricks, and as Conteras walked by he made a comment about Jesus’ work. Jesus considered clubbing him to death with the shovel. Tonight he would really get drunk, so he could face the two of them the next day.

  “Cool in the Madres,” he mumbled in singsong fashion, to take his mind off of the heat, filling the forms with the mixture.

  “Why don’t you go there, then?” Conteras asked, passing by him.

  He silently snarled at the man’s back. He would if he could. But he had no money. There was no way to get any and nothing to ride. Besides, what would he do there? Live like some bronco Apache? Tonight, he would drink himself silly and forget it all. That he wanted to do more than anything else—forget it all.

  Major Gerald Bowen returned from his latest meeting with Governor Sterling and kissed his wife Mary on the cheek. “I’m going to Tucson tomorrow. I should be back in five days. If Sam T. Mayes arrives here while I’m gone, have him take a room and tell him I’ll return shortly. I want to arrange it so he has some help waiting in Tucson and can get right after those outlaws.”

  “So Governor Sterling is going to allow your marshals?” she asked.

  “He is. I don’t think he’s all that much in favor of them, but he’s going to let me hire a few men. He wants this Border Gang stopped worse than anything else. They are marauding all over southern Arizona.”

  “Gerald, you aren’t going down there after them by yourself?”

  He shook his head. “No, my dear, my experience is not in pursuing criminals. I suspect I have delegated authority too long to get back on the trail. And I know Sam T. will need a good sharp man to help him. If I can hire him, Jesus Morales is the man for the job. But he may have a much better job than I can afford to outbid. That’s why I’m going down there.”

  “He was one of your scouts at Fort Grant, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, and he’s loyal and hardworking. I hope I can locate him. I have no idea what he’s doing these days.”

  “Where will you look?”

  “Tucson.” He shrugged, uncertain where he would find the ex-scout. His concern was if he could hire him when he located the man.

  “Don’t drink any bad water,” she reminded him and busied herself gathering his extra clothing for him to take along. “When do you leave?”

  “First thing in the morning on the stage.”

  “For how many days?”

  “Five or six,” he said, taking his well-oiled Colt from the wooden case in his desk drawer. He decided he’d better start packing it on his person.

  Up the street in the Harrington House, Ella Devereaux wondered why Major Bowen purchased a round-trip ticket to Tucson on the stage line. A few moments before, Sassy had brought her the note from the young man who worked in the stage line office. She reread it: Major Bowen bought a two-way ticket to Tucson today.

  “Missy,” Sassy interrupted from the doorway. “Mr. Killian is here to see you.”

  For moment she considered where in the house she should meet with the city councilman. Would an intimate meeting in her apartment be necessary? It might not be a bad idea, if Governor Sterling’s actions were close to shutting her down.

  “Show him up here,” she said, then fluffed the front of her dress, made a close examination of her breasts and cleavage. Satisfied that she looked presentable, she rose when Sassy brought the tall thin man into the room.

  “Why, Horace, so good to see you. What brings you here? Oh, Sassy, go get some brandy for the councilman. You do like brandy, don’t you, Horace?”

  “Be fine, Miss Ella.”

  “Here, take a seat.” She showed him to the overstuffed chair behind the wind-fluttering lace curtains, then sat down opposite him.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “It’s come to our attention …” He trailed off when Sassy returned to the room with a tray, decanter and glasses.

  “Set it here and I can handle it.” She dismissed the girl after Sassy placed the tray on the small table between them.

  Ella poured them both a drink. “Continue, sir. Sorry you were so rudely interrupted.”

  “Aw, that ain’t nothing. The city council needs to hire a new marshal and he’s going to cost forty dollars a month—”

  “Your council wants Harrington House to underwrite his salary?” She posed a warm smile for the man as if his request pleased her.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” he said in relief.

  She raised the glass and tried to hide her relief. “A done deal, sir. Tell Chief Wallace it will be in my regular envelope next month.”

  The man looked as if a ton of weight had been taken from his shoulders. He smiled and sat back in the chair. “I told them boys at the meeting last night that you would understand the need for more enforcement. Why, those rowdy cowboys and miners become more than a handful anymore.”

  “Anything to make Prescott more respectable,” she said and toasted him with her glass.

  “You sure have a fine place here, Miss Ella.”

  “We try to please. Do you have any need? I mean, a personal one?” she asked in low voice.

  “Well …”

  “Don’t be bashful, now. What could I arrange for you?”

  “Middle of the day and all …” He shrugged.

  “How about I find, say, a fiery redhead?”

  “Oh, yes, but I have to be back—”

  “Come, my dear.” She rose and offered him her arm. Then they strode from her room down the hall.

  She knocked on the closed door. “Strawberry, my dear. I have special company.”

  “Just a minute, Missy.”

  Ella turned and smiled at the man. “I am certain that she won’t detain you too long.”

  Strawberry appeared in the doorway in a white shift. “Oh, good day, councilman. Come in.” Then, with quick look of I’ll handle this behind the man’s back, Strawberry closed the door after him. Ella went back down the hallway, satisfied Horace would be well taken care of in there.

  If the council expected her to pay for the new town law, then they weren’t planning on shutting her down in the near future. Her other concern, though, was about Bowen going to Tucson. Why? Perhaps she should wire Senator Green and warn him. Back in her room, she sipped her brandy and considered the governor’s mansion half a block away. Things were happening fast in this new territory and she needed to keep abreast of them.

  CHAPTER 6

  BOWEN hopped aboard the stage in the predawn light and. arrived in Tucson twenty-four hours later. Groggy and sore from the stiff ride, he took a room at the Congress Hotel. In the hotel bar, he asked if anyone knew of Jesus Morales’ whereabouts. The Mexican waiter promised to find out and let him know if anyone knew of Morales. In return, Bowen promised him a dollar reward for the information.r />
  Bowen ate a breakfast of ground pork, eggs and peppers’ with tortillas, then went upstairs and tried to sleep a few hours in the hot room. Despite the open windows, the air in the room proved stifling. After a short while the heat grew worse, so he rose, took a sponge bath and went downstairs.

  “Señor, señor. They say that Jesus Morales works at an adobe pit off Green Street,” the waiter said aloud when he spotted him.

  “What does he do there?” Bowen asked suspiciously. Adobe brickmaking hardly sounded like something the suave Morales would be involved in. “Does he own it?”

  “No, Raphael Ortega owns it. He is a worker there. The pit, it is across town.” He made a vague wave of his arm.

  Bowen paid him. Uncertain this could be the right man, he bought himself a whiskey at the bar, then ordered some lunch and took a seat at a table. What would Morales be doing there? Probably a blind alley, but he would go see this Morales after his meal.

  When he went outside the hotel, he found the driver of the cab knew the location of Ortega’s adobe pit. Bowen climbed in, reset the Colt at his waist under his coat and squinted against the too brilliant sun. The man drove slowly through the residential district’s narrow streets and cur dogs yapped at his lanky horse’s heels.

  He drew up in an alley. Beside them, rows of lightcolored adobe bricks ran side by side like snakes to the back fence. A short man with a mustache came from under a palm ramada and smiled.

  “Ah, you need some bricks, señor? We have some good ones.”

  “I am looking for Jesus Morales. Does he work here?”

  “Sí.” The man acted as if he knew little about the matter. A simple yes and that was all.

  “I need to talk to him. Where is he?”

  “In the hole.” With that said, the man turned on his heel and went back to the ramada.

  Bowen frowned and then headed for the obvious pit, for he could not see into it from where he stood. He looked over the edge and discovered one man swinging a pick in what he figured must be an oven from hell.