by Bill Brooks
He tucked his shirt in and said, “Whatever your interests are here, you’d be wise to get on your nag and ride away.”
“Shit, I’m already gone,” I said.
He looked at me and I knew those eyes had seen a lot of bloody things but I don’t know if they’d ever seen a man branded and his hands broken with a hammer.
He walked away shaking his head.
I just hoped Antonia remembered the plan and stuck to it.
Chapter Eight
I needed rest bad and I went to my hotel, and the old man, Raford, was behind the desk again still reading that same book about Don Quixote and grinning as he followed his finger underneath the sentences. He looked up when he saw me enter and stopped grinning.
“You tell Chalk Bronson I was John Wesley Hardin?” I said.
He shook his head.
“I’ve been known to kill men for less than lying.”
The color drained out of his face.
I held my gaze on him then said, “Don’t be running my business out on the streets, you hear me?”
He nodded.
I went up to my room and undressed and lay down on the bed and for once I didn’t sleep like a dead man—only a half-dead man.
I woke and there was still a little light in the room coming through the window and I rose and got dressed and armed myself and carried my Henry downstairs. The old man was still there only he avoided my gaze. I went out and slipped the rifle into the scabbard of my horse and walked him down to the livery and told the man to feed and rub him down and I’d be back later for him.
I walked to the town’s only restaurant and went in and it was full of diners and I had to stand by the door to wait for an empty table. Then the waitress came over and said, “The lady over in the corner wondered if you’d care to join her?” I looked and it was the prostitute, Lorri, Pink Huston’s woman. She was looking twice as beautiful as the last time I saw her—and sober and without the cat.
I worked my way past tables and said, “Nice of you to offer.”
She smiled up at me. “Well, a man has to eat, right?”
“Right.”
I took off my hat and set it on the floor next to my chair opposite her.
“Where’s your…what should I call him, Pink?”
“Whatever you like. The steaks here are wonderful,” she said.
So that’s what I ordered, a steak and a glass of beer. Lorri was eating a small round steak, cutting it into delicate pieces. Her eyes were large and wet looking. She looked like she was dressed for the opera, with a black beret decorated with small white beads, a white blouse with lace tatting and black bone buttons and ruffled cuffs. I couldn’t see without being obvious exactly what sort of skirt or shoes she was wearing, but her fingers were bejeweled with a variety of rings, mostly silver with rubies and other precious stones. She looked like something you’d want to keep.
“So, how are you and Antonia getting along?” she said as I waited for my meal.
I shrugged, said, “Antonia?”
She sipped from her wineglass and tilted her head far enough back to make it seem she was looking down her nose at me.
“I know she went to meet you the other morning after you’d come to the hog farm,” she said.
“What else do you know?”
She smiled coyly and cut herself another little piece of steak and chewed it in a way I’ve never seen a woman eat anything before.
“I know she hasn’t come back to the hog farm and Pink’s more than a little pissed he’s lost one of his best girls.”
“I thought you were his best girl?”
She stopped chewing.
“I’m my own woman,” she said. “I’m with Pink because I choose to be with him, not the other way around.”
“Seems like an odd pairing, you don’t mind the observation,” I said. “You and Pink.”
“Call it convenient,” she said.
“You can tell him Antonia probably isn’t coming back,” I said.
“And can I also tell him why that would be?”
“She’s gone back to her husband Johnny Waco.”
I watched her mull that one over as she took another sip of her wine.
“I guess I’m a little relieved,” she said after she set her glass back down again. The waitress brought my steak and I dug in right away, my belly crawling with anticipation. She waited until I took a break.
“What?” I said, from the way she was looking at me.
“I thought maybe Antonia and you had taken up together. I never thought she’d ever go back to Johnny Waco.”
“Me?”
She smiled.
“And if she had taken up with me, so what?”
“I’d be disappointed.”
“Why is that?”
“I sort of thought about taking up with you myself,” she said.
It was my turn to smile. “Yeah, I bet a dollar you did.”
Her hand reached across the table and rested atop mine, the one I held the knife with.
“You’d lose if you did bet a dollar,” she said.
“It’s a tempting offer,” I said. “But my dance card is sort of full right now, Lorri.”
She removed her hand slowly.
“You don’t find me attractive?”
“Quite the opposite.”
“Then why not act it and ask me to leave with you right now and go back to your hotel room?”
“I’d like that,” I said. “But I don’t need trouble with Pink, and I’ve got something I have to do tonight.”
“Funny,” she said. “I never figured you for a man who would be afraid of Pink. Maybe I misjudged you, Mister…I guess I don’t even know your name.”
“Jim Glass,” I said. “That’s my name, and you can think whatever you want about me. It doesn’t matter—not really.”
I finished eating my steak and she watched me and it was damn tempting to just say to hell with it and take her back to my hotel room. But I kept seeing Chalk’s battered face, those smashed and broken hands, the wounded look on Antonia’s face when she was being ordered around by Johnny. I kept smelling the stink of flesh burnt by a branding iron.
I reached in my pocket and my fingers felt the fat envelope—half a thousand dollars. Riding money, or riding around money? It was something I needed to decide. But then again, I’d already decided.
I called for the bill—both bills—Lorri’s and mine, and paid for both our meals and left a nice tip because I was either feeling magnanimous or suicidal.
“Jim…” she said.
“Maybe another time,” I said.
“I won’t count on it,” she said.
I stood and adjusted my hat and looked at her one last time. She really was beautiful and I really was a goddamn fool.
I went out and it was still raining softly and the night sky had that red to it—that faded red that feels ominous. The rain pattered off my brim as I walked back down to the livery and had the man saddle my horse. I said, “I’d like to buy a spare horse from you and a saddle.”
“I got one I could let go for forty dollars, saddle included.”
He showed it to me, a smallish mare that seemed sound after I ran my hands over her. “Lace her up,” I said.
I undid my bedroll and took out my slicker and put it on then tied things back together and mounted my horse and took the reins of the spare after paying the man.
“Piss poor night to go riding,” he said.
“Don’t remind me.”
I rode over to Chalk’s place and tied both horses off out front then stepped up under the overhang and shook off my hat before knocking on the door and waiting for Chalk’s wife to answer.
She stepped aside to allow me entry.
“How’s he doing?” I said.
“He’s awake, but I just gave him a spoonful of laudanum.”
“Maybe I should just go and see him later,” I said.
“No, he said earlier if you came ’round he wanted to
talk to you.”
“Okay.”
She opened the bedroom door for me and then closed it. He was on his back on the bed, his hands bandaged, and when she closed the door he turned his head and looked at me, the lamp’s light glittering in his half-swollen eyes.
I pulled up a chair next to the bed. His voice was raspy when he asked me where things stood.
“I’m on my way back there now,” I said.
“You saw what he did to me,” he said. “He’ll do worse to you if he catches you.”
“Unless she changes her mind, I should be okay.”
“Where will you go—the two of you?”
I shrugged. “Someplace far away from here. Better you don’t know.”
“I don’t—” He coughed and you could see it hurt him to do that. “I don’t know why you’re doing this,” he said.
“The money,” I said. “Why else?”
“You could just let it go…long as she stays with him, he won’t do anything to this town…”
“Yeah, I could, couldn’t I?”
His eyes shifted behind the swollen lids. They went from my eyes to his ruined hands then back again.
“I made her a promise,” I said. “I took your money so I guess I made you a promise too.”
“You see what it cost me…”
“Yeah. I’m sorry I didn’t do anything.”
He shook his head. “He’d have killed you.”
“Some things can be worse than dying.”
“No,” he said. “They can’t…”
The door opened again and his wife said, “Chalk, are you needing anything, honey?”
He shook his head.
I stood away from the bed.
“I was just leaving, ma’am.”
She seemed relieved. She walked to the front door with me.
“There’s more going on here than you’re telling me,” she said.
“No ma’am.”
“I’m not so young and naive I don’t know when a man is lying to me, Mr. Glass.”
“No ma’am, I didn’t reckon you were.”
“Please don’t come back around here anymore.”
“Yes ma’am.”
She closed the door, and it was just me and the two horses and the rain outside and a long road back to a dangerous place.
I saddled up and took the reins of the spare and headed back to Johnny Waco’s spread. I had the little map Antonia had drawn for me there in the hotel room when she agreed to my plan—the map to where she would meet me. I had to get there by tomorrow night—to the grove of trees she’d drawn on the paper, by a stream a mile from the main house.
“It’s the only place I can hide for a short time,” she’d said. “I’ll wait until Johnny’s asleep and sneak out—let’s say midnight—and wait for you there. But if you’re not there by one in the morning, I’ll have to go back or he’ll send his drovers for me. Bring a horse. A good fast horse.”
Words wrote on paper but like words branded on skin, far as I was concerned. I figured to ride steady till daylight and beyond, stop and rest till it got dark then make my way in the night to the grove and be there waiting for her. After that I thought we’d figure out together where to go—Texas, maybe.
The rain let up and pretty soon the moon broke between clouds that looked like black silver in the night sky and helped light the road ahead of us like it was something meant to be.
I could have spent the hours thinking of all the things that could go wrong, but what was the point? Either things would go right or they wouldn’t. Either I’d live to someday tell the story or I wouldn’t. The way I looked at most of life was that in a hundred years nobody would care what you did or didn’t do. The only thing that mattered was what you knew for yourself you did or didn’t do.
This felt like the right thing to do.
It was a little like what the late Mr. Lincoln said about religion: “When I do right I feel right, and when I do bad I feel bad, and that is my religion.”
I guess it was my religion too.
Chapter Nine
When the stranger offered her salvation, she took it. For enslaved she was and enslaved she knew she would forever be. But she’d rather be enslaved to her vices than to a man like Johnny Waco. She would rather be dead than to be enslaved to Johnny Waco. So she’d taken the man’s offer, that he would come for her and that he would take her to a place called refuge. All she had to do was say she wanted it. And so she’d said it, hopeless as it might seem.
She craved the dragon more than she craved life. But the dragon would not come as long as she was in the clutches of Johnny Waco. He would have Maria tie her to her bed, as he had done before. And she would wretch up her insides and her head would hurt until she was nearly blind from the pain. Maria would force cold soup down her and call her privately a puta in disdain and stare at her with eyes as cold and calculating as a snake.
She suspected Maria of being Johnny’s puta, of wanting to replace her as his wife. She cared not for Pedro, her dark, slump-shouldered and meek husband. She treated him cruelly and ignored his efforts and criticized him in front of Johnny.
She’d heard Maria whispering one time—the two of them, Johnny and she—and noticed the way Maria’s demeanor softened whenever Johnny was near. She was openly flirtatious, even when Pedro was there; especially when Pedro was there. She flaunted her heavy breasts in low-cut blouses, the weight and shape of them like large loose fruit.
She was surprised that Maria did not slap her face when she was ill from the sobering effects.
So she tried to escape down the dark tunnel of her dope-filled dreams, escape reality for a different reality. She knew that if she did not try and leave, she would end up dying in the household of Johnny Waco. He would kill her slowly and indirectly.
In fact he had said to her not long after her secret bloody visit to Dr. Flax, “Was it mine, the child you lost?”
Dr. Flax had betrayed her no differently than she had been betrayed by any other man.
“No,” she said. “It wasn’t yours.”
“Then I’m glad you lost it.”
At that moment she knew she could not feel any more hate for anyone than what she felt for Johnny.
“I’m glad I lost it too,” she said.
He slapped her hard across the face. It was nothing compared to the pain she’d already felt.
“Hit me again.”
He hit her again, with his open hand. The sound of it was like someone letting a screen door slam shut.
The taste of her own blood gave her a private satisfaction. Would that he crucify her and make the act complete. Would that he shoot her, she could not have wanted more from him.
Instead he called Maria and told her, “Take care of my wife!”
“Sí, señor, Johnny.”
That bit of familiarity that had become so common, shared between them. She saw the looks the two of them exchanged and was sure of her suspicions.
Now she’d gone back to him again, at the request of the stranger.
She was already making plans.
If he failed her, well, what surprise was there in that? She had her own plan. She did not trust completely even the stranger, but there was one man she felt she could trust, and she had summoned him earlier that day of her planned escape.
“Pedro,” she said. He was standing in the shade of the house, smoking a cigarette. Maria was somewhere in the kitchen preparing supper at the opposite end of the long house.
He looked up at her, his eyes sorrowful from what she guessed was long years of marital misery. His rough straw hat was broken in places.
“Sí, señora.”
“I want to ask you a favor.”
She took the money and put it in his hand.
“I want you to do me a favor you cannot speak of to Maria or Señor Waco…”
He looked at the money. It was a lot of money.
“It is not necessary,” he said, handing it back, but she refused to take
it. “The money isn’t only for the favor,” she said. And when he continued to look baleful, she said, “It’s for everything you’ve done until this moment. Do you understand?”
He nodded. “Yes, I understand,” he said.
She wanted him to get her a gun from Johnny’s cabinet and bring it to her unseen.
He demurred at first.
“Will you do it?”
“Yes. But I don’t want your money…”
“No. You keep it. You don’t have to say anything to Maria about the money either.” His gaze revealed nothing, whether or not he’d do it, whether he’d tell Maria, whether he’d tell Señor Johnny, his boss. Pedro was inscrutable.
“Something small,” she said. “And loaded.”
Chapter Ten
I made steady time, and after what seemed forever dawn broke over the prairies bright and clean as a new penny. I knew from what Chalk had told me before that I was well onto Johnny Waco’s spread and I’d need to keep an eye peeled for any of his hands. Here and there windmills clattered and shifted around in the uncertain morning wind pumping up groundwater that spilled from lead pipes into water tanks. I took advantage of them to water the horses and wash my face and neck, and to try and awaken my weary senses.
I climbed one of the wood towers to get my bearings, and way off in the distance I could see the tin roofs of the buildings gleaming. I swung my gaze wide of them, following the directions on Antonia’s hand-drawn map until I spotted the grove of trees—like the bristles on a paintbrush now that the leaves had shed off them. Then I climbed down and looked for a likely spot to hole up till nightfall.
There’s something consoling about the sound of the blades of a windmill clacking in the wind.
I rode off in the general direction of the grove, taking my time, looking for a lay-up. I finally spotted an old line shack with the windows all busted out and the door missing and chose it.
Tired as I was I knew I had to be on my guard for any of Waco’s men. I led the horses inside with apologies to them then settled down for the long day to unwind.