City of Widows

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Does that mean you’re still in?”

  “Ask me again after I meet our new partner.”

  “That will be Friday when the stage comes in. I won’t tell you any names until then. You’re ripe for a surprise, partner. Eille MacNutt too, though not one so pleasant. He has the notion that string of whores of his makes him king of the alkali flat.”

  “I won’t run whores,” I warned him. “Keeping the peace for Judge Blackthorne is as low as I’ve crawled or ever plan to.”

  “Whores are trouble I don’t require. You feed them and put clothes on their backs and pay the doctor when they catch a cold in their pantaloons and then they run off and marry the first drunk cowboy who asks. I say let them get drunk here and take their proposals down the street.”

  My steak came, trailing black smoke off a blue china plate. It crunched like hardtack when I chewed, but I finished it and washed it down with whiskey. Not counting a pemmican cake at my cold camp the night before, my last meal had been a tortilla and chili peppers in Socorro City; a mistake, as I’d found out after two hours on the trail.

  I pushed away the empty plate. “I feel I should explain this Satan’s Sixgun business.”

  “I always heard he carried a pitchfork.”

  There was no irony in his expression. The phrase meant nothing to him. I felt my face grinning. “I may just take to this place after all.”

  “It grows on you. It does for a fact.”

  “I didn’t see a hotel or a boardinghouse on my way in. Where do I sleep?”

  “Your room’s over the faro game, thought you’d appreciate that. Mine’s over the bar. The stairs are outside. I guess you want to put up your boots.”

  “After I visit the bathhouse. Also the marshal’s office. The sheriff says I have to register there.”

  “The son of a bitch. I don’t know which is worse for business, him, his brother, or the Apaches. At least the savages don’t smile at you when they’re cutting your balls off.”

  “He claims Ross is dead.”

  “That’s horseshit. He stays below the border where the American authorities can’t arrest him and plans robberies of pack trains from the mines. Does a little rustling too, but that’s practically legal around here. After each silver robbery Frank sends out posses in every direction but the right one. Them James boys up in Missouri could learn something from watching the Baronets.”

  I changed the subject. “What kind of man is the town marshal?”

  His face lightened. “Oh, you have a treat coming in Rosario Ortiz. He is the biggest thing to hit this place since Billy the Kid shot the blacksmith.”

  We talked for a little while longer and then I went up to drop off my things in my new quarters. I was thinking that just a few days ago I had never heard of Billy the Kid, and now I was sick of the name.

  5

  THE COMBINATION BARBERSHOP and bathhouse that couldn’t make up its mind whether to stay adobe or go wooden was just as undecided inside. There was a clear joint where the new tongue-and-groove floorboards met the old worn planks with cracks between them into which a careless barber could sweep ears and things, and someone had tacked up tent material to keep out the weather where the original mud wall didn’t quite bunt up against the fresh studs. The proprietor was a small dour Mexican who scraped my face with half a dozen expert strokes. Mexicans are generally good with razors and don’t bore you with conversation.

  The room I returned to from the shave and a bath was clean and smelled of sawdust. It had a clothes-press, a basin, a bed with a feather mattress, and a lantern on a nail. The inevitable Indian rug lay on the floor waiting to deaden the noise from downstairs, of which there was none at that hour of the afternoon. The soft enveloping mattress was a poor choice for the climate, but I stripped to the skin and slept two hours without interruption. Instant oblivion, in my late line of work, was a prize you either won or failed to acquire and learned to function at half your natural capacity three quarters of the time.

  I put on my town clothes and stepped out under a rusty sky to present myself to the local law. I didn’t look west. The color spectacle would go on for the best part of an hour, and I had seen enough of them lately to last my life. I would have to stop missing the sudden sunsets in the Bitterroots before I called this place home.

  The building I had been directed to by Junior Harper stood at the north end of town on the other side of a plank bridge over a dry riverbed, inconvenient to everything but the ancient mission in whose shadow it spent twelve hours of every day. It was small, adobe of course, built in the old Spanish style without brick reinforcing, and patched many times with mud and clay that dried to varying shades, its roof poles extending two feet into the desert air for the purpose of stringing up hides and reluctant Roman Catholics. The stick door hung as crooked as an Indian agent.

  A fat Mexican in overalls and a cavalry coat, so stained and weather-faded I couldn’t tell which army it had belonged to, knelt in a strip of loam protected by rocks next to the door, probing for feathergrass roots with a bayonet that had seen all its glory days and cursing softly in that bastard border dialect you heard all over that territory. A snaggle of yellow roses that were more thorn than blossom appeared to be the beneficiaries of all this industry. They hardly seemed worth it, but then I had seen a man lose his life defending his wife’s imported china from a group of drunken buffalo hunters in a restaurant in Cheyenne. In a land of spines and diamondbacks some men will go to any length on behalf of beauty.

  “Marshal’s office,” I said.

  The Mexican started, shielded his eyes up at me, and stood, snatching off his sombrero. His gray hair was cut in a bowl and his handlebars, untrimmed and tobacco-stained at the ends, underscored a twenty-weight of pockmarked jowls. His nose was the size of an avocado.

  “Allá, mi jefe.” He gestured toward the door with the sombrero. “In there.”

  “Gracias.” I pulled the latchstring. The door flopped open.

  As soon as I was inside I knew the Mexican had misunderstood my question. It was a house like a thousand others in and around old Mexico, decorated with bunches of dried chili peppers hung from the ceiling and straw pallets on the dirt floor. There was a dugout fireplace with a trivet for cooking, a square plank table stained all over and scored many times by knives used to slice meat and tortillas, and on the other side of it a piano stool that had been rescued from a wagon trail or some white family’s trash, discharging horsehair out of its burst seat. A naked child no older than two sat there trying to spin itself sick. The little house, in fact, was filled with children of every age and both sexes, all of them engaged in something destructive that required noise. One, a boy of about six, had discovered that the back wall had a timber frame and was busy chipping away adobe with a carving knife to expose it further. The din was enough to make you yearn for the serenity of a slaughterhouse in St. Louis.

  I was turning to leave when the fat Mexican stepped past me and barked a single syllable that knocked dust out of a rafter. It was like the last shot at Appomattox. The children stopped what they were doing and turned as one to stare at the entrant with large dark shiny eyes like wet olive pits. He strode through the silence, accumulating authority as he went, and paused by the table.

  “Josefina.”

  This time he spoke gently. The naked child slid off the stool and scampered around behind him, peering out at me as from the cover of a post. He shooed it away with a pat on its split behind, straddled the stool with a grunt and a sigh, and fished inside first one, then the other side pocket of the cavalry coat until he came up with a bent star and hung it on the tobacco pocket in front.

  “Buenas tardes, señor,” he said. “What can I do for you this day?”

  “You’re the marshal?”

  “Sí, part of the time. By trade I am a master carpenter. I am called Rosario Ortiz.” He didn’t offer to shake hands. His were filthy from the flower bed.

  “Page Murdock.” There was no reaction. “I’m
new part owner of the Apache Princess.”

  He smiled with all his teeth. It was like a sunburst. “The Princess, sí. I do the roof right. The other fellow, he makes privies.” Suddenly he stopped smiling.” The roof has a leak? I fix it for free. Ortiz stands behind his work.”

  “I’m sure it’s fine. I’ve come to register.”

  “Register?” He blinked. “Oh, sí, sí. Yes. By order of the sheriff.” He looked around, including under the table, lifted his sombrero off the top and put it down. Finally he shot a stream of Spanish at one of the children, a grave-faced boy of fourteen or fifteen, who said, “Sí, Papa,” and went out the open door at the back.

  “I apologize for my worthless children.”

  “I’ve seen worse,” I said, “though not so many in one place.”

  The boy returned carrying a green ledger stuffed with loose pages. Ortiz spread it open carefully and leafed through it until he came to the page he wanted. He went through the ritual search once more and said something to another child, a girl this time who had begun to develop breasts under her white cotton shift. She went to a painted cabinet with a bucket on top, opened a door, and came over to the table with a horsehair pen and a bottle of purple ink. He unstopped the bottle, dipped the pen, and turned the ledger to face me, holding the pen out.

  “Your signature please, Señor Murdock. Your mark will be sufficient if you cannot write.”

  I accepted the pen and scratched my name between ruled lines. There were only two others on the page: Ford Harper, Jr. and Eille MacNutt. Someone had neatly printed MacNutt’s name next to a ragged X. I handed back the pen.

  “The registration fee is five dollars.”

  I whistled. The marshal looked apologetic. “I keep not a penny, señor. It all goes to the county seat.”

  “The county seat being Frank Baronet’s faro bank.” I flipped a gold piece onto the table. It bounced and he caught it against his chest. He bit down on it, studied the result, and entered the transaction next to my signature.

  “A carpenter can work anywhere, and I do not care to keep the peace,” he said. “I would leave, but my wife is buried behind the mission.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It is not your sorrow. I am the one who shot her.”

  He placed the coin inside the ledger, closed it, and returned the star to his side pocket. Rising and giving me a slight bow, he set the sombrero on his head and went out to tend his roses. As soon as he crossed the threshold the children resumed their loud destructive activities.

  * * *

  The faro equipment at the Apache Princess was strictly basic. The layout was an oilcloth with the card denominations crudely painted on it and there was no cue box. Instead the dealer was obliged to keep a running tally of the cards dealt with a pencil and paper or by transferring chips from one stack to another with each deal. The cards were worn and the painted tiger on the card box had had so many thumbs run across it the stripes were all rubbed off. I played three miners, slab-faced failed farmers in flannel shirts beaten clean on rocks, traces of black clay crusted behind their ears, but they all left before I could get a rhythm going either way. Even the one that quit ahead looked as glum as if he’d lost his grubstake. Junior, who had been tending bar while Irish Andy ate his supper in back, flipped him the towel and came over and sat down. “Odds against the house tonight?”

  “Who could blame them? I saw fresher decks in Leadville, where they threw the slops in the street.”

  “I have a trimmer here somewhere.”

  “I arrested a man once for shooting a man for owning a card trimmer. Some places that’s all the evidence they need to lynch you.”

  “I never heard evidence was required. Anyway, not everyone uses them to shave cards, just to tidy up the fuzzy edges. New decks are expensive out here, especially when you order them by the case. Who cares if the jack of diamonds has a clean collar?”

  “Let me ask you this.” I dealt us each a hand of poker. “What makes a cowboy come to a place like this and gamble?”

  “That’s an easy one, to win money. Two.” He discarded two pasteboards from his hand. I replaced them and stood pat.

  “Wrong. He can do that back at the bunkhouse without having to put on a clean shirt. What makes that same cowboy come to a saloon and pay for his whiskey by the glass when he can buy a bottle for less and drink it at home?”

  “You’re the one making the point. What are we playing for?”

  “Education.”

  “In that case I call.”

  I turned over four sixes. He threw his hand into the deadwood. “Deal another.”

  I shuffled and dealt. “He comes here for the noise and colors and things going on. Music, if there’s any, but there doesn’t have to be. Other men and loud talk and the naked lady on the couch in the picture over the bar. Something he doesn’t have at home. Dealer takes one.” He did the same. “Gambling’s no different,” I went on. “He likes to hear the counters click and slide his fingers over the wax on the cards and he wants that tiger on the box to look so real it might take his arm off if he bets wrong. Call.”

  He laid his cards face up. He had a ten-high straight. I showed him a heart flush.

  “One thing he don’t want.” Junior sat back. “He don’t want them cards coming off the wrong end of the deck. If you’re fixing to keep on doing that in here, you best get a whole lot better at it fast. John Whiteside’s hands will sew you up in a green hide and leave you out in the sun to cogitate on your sins.”

  “I only cheat when it doesn’t count. How about a new layout?”

  “I have the catalogue. Pick out what you want and we’ll order it. No billiard tables, mind. You will find all you need strung out along the Jornada del Muerto, complete with the bones of the wagoneers that tried to slide them past the Apaches. Those killers have got a Philadelphia Ladies League mad on against that game. Old Cochise must have had him a snookering.” He watched me laying out a hand of patience. “Did you make the acquaintance of our local James Butler Hickok?”

  “Oh, Marshal Ortiz and I are old friends. He showed me his children and his roses.”

  “Ten years from now those kids are going to make Quantrill’s raiders look like East Lynne. We had the frame up on a schoolhouse when two of them burned it down. Almost wiped out San Sábado. Rosario only has the job because he will work for found. Did he tell you he killed his wife?”

  “It came up during the conversation.”

  “It generally does. It’s the only thing ever happened to him worth talking about. Story I heard when I came was he caught her on the floor between pews in the mission with a Yaquí mine worker, missed him, and shot her clean to hell. Personally I think he done it by accident while seating a charge in that old ball-and-percussion pistol he uses to shoot stray dogs and coyotes. If them kids can’t get him mad enough to beat the devil out of them I don’t see how his wife could do it just by misplacing her vows.”

  “You never married, I guess.”

  “Did you?”

  “I thought about it. I can see how it could make you mad enough.”

  “Hell, yes, you. Not Ortiz.”

  I placed a red deuce on a black trey. “Did he soak you five dollars when you registered?”

  He nodded. “Eille MacNutt too, and a dollar for every whore besides. Our sheriff must have enough to retire on registration fees alone, when you figure in all the saloons and sporting houses in the county. Then there’s the percentage he gets for collecting taxes.”

  “That’s a job of work. Cattlemen are a rough cob when it comes to paying their fair share.”

  “Not when you have an assassin like that deputy of his siding you,” he said.

  “Jubilo? He didn’t strike me as the kind.”

  “Nobody knows a Mexican but another Mexican. The talk is a firing squad’s waiting for him across the border. Then there was that business up in Lincoln with both Baronets. Ross or Frank killed this poor dumb rancher, but they say Jubilo done f
or the wife. Spooner, their name was. Dave and Vespa. Shot dead in front of their own house.”

  “I heard Frank might not have been in on that.”

  “Ross never done a thing that Frank didn’t know about it. If he wasn’t there you can be damn sure he told Ross where to put the slugs. All them Spooners done wrong was to side with Chisum against Dolan and Murphy. I guess they were what you would call an example.”

  “The sheriff seems to favor those.” I touched the swelling along my temple where he’d laid the barrel of his Remington.

  “Frank done that? I noticed but I didn’t want to ask. What did you do that stirred him up?”

  “Not much. I threatened to kill a stable hand.”

  He grinned and shook his head. “I swear, Page, you always did draw fire. I remember that time in Missoula—”

  “So do I.” I went bust and gathered up the cards. “I sure do shine at picking a spot to settle down.”

  6

  I WASN’T IN town Friday when the stage came in from El Paso. A saloon is a low place to be mornings, with sunlight lying on the cheap stain that passes for elegant mahogany at night and the human debris hunched in the corners over the first glass of the day with their buttons all undone because their hands are shaking too hard to fasten them. No one is gambling, at least not with anything as meaningless and as much fun as money. I put on my trail clothes and rode out for some target practice in the bright blue open. The trigger pull of the Deane-Adams needed sweetening from time to time and so did my aim. Marshaling wasn’t the only profession that required those things up to the mark. There were a lot of bad gamblers out there who weren’t aware that money was meaningless and as much fun to lose as it was to win.

  The claybank liked the snappy cold of a desert morning, arching its long neck and cocking its legs high as if running involved less effort than standing still. I tethered it to a low piñon tree and walked away fifty yards to pot at stones and elbows on branches, watching out the corner of my eye for its reaction to gunfire. It snapped up its head after the first shot, then reached back to bite an itch. John Whiteside, who had fought Indians and Mexicans and Johnny Rebs both on foot and from horseback, had trained it well.