Friends (7 page)

I wrote a note crossways on the Bible page telling Clete which way to go and tied it to a rock and put it in a place he'd be sure to see.

Back where my man's track started again, it looked like he'd just dropped out of the sky. Close to there was where I saw his boot tracks for the first time since he'd left Nell's. He'd taken himself a good long piss before he mounted his horse again.

I knelt down looking at that boot track and trying to picture him in my mind, but I couldn't do it clear as I wanted to. He was a tall man, I could see that just by the size of his boots and the length of his stride. But he didn't weigh as much as me, and I'm not too heavy, never was. From the way he dragged his toe, leaving a little furrow in the sign, you could tell he had hurt his back or his left leg some time ago and it pained him still. More than that, he'd been chased a time or two, for his trick almost worked on me. This whole little jog up to where this stream emptied into the Missouri was just a purpose to throw me off the track. Yes, this boy had run before.

The man in the high-peaked hat slowed his pace to spare his horse. She
had
thrown a shoe and was getting sore-footed. The bony man knew she
had
only a few good hours left, and though he
had
covered his tracks back at Medicine Creek, he felt someone following him. An uncomfortable tickle on the back of his neck like the twiddling legs of an ant. He waited and watched the horizon with his glass for a while, but no rider appeared. About noon, he crested a rise and saw someone chopping wood in front of a soddy. In the corral, beside a stable made of willow poles, stood a fine-looking paint.

I had been looking for a place to camp by some water for more than an hour. The tracks was getting damn hard to see. Just as the sun was starting to set, I drew up on the top of a slope where the yeller Prairie Mustard was just coming into bud. Below, someone was trying to prove up on a claim. Whoever he was had dug himself into the bank and throwed up side walls of sod. The front was logs, and from where I sat my buckskin, I seen where he had cut them from beside the little stream that edged the valley on the far side. There was a pole shed, but there were no horses or mules. He'd started on another outbuilding, too. Neat little place, with what looked like real glass windows and whitewashed window frames. They'd had their troubles, though. A little patch of crosses was clustered on a low hill close to the stream. Probly some of their babies. Somebody was home, too, for feathers of smoke was lifting from the chimney, though I couldn't see no one out around the place.

My man had spent some time here watching. I found where he laid in the sandy soil-hadn't bothered with his ground cloth this time, though. I stretched out beside where he did and put my toes even with where his'd been. Where his elbows rested was a good eight inches ahead of mine, so he was about as tall as I figured from his boot tracks-close to six and a half feet. He'd burned enough time to smoke two cigarettes, so he was being careful about riding in. The tracks led right down to the house, though, so whoever lived there'd seen him, maybe even talked to him.

He could still be there,
I told myself, but then I argued against that notion-no horses. I mounted and rode down slow so as not to alarm nobody.

I had just stopped in front of the place when the door flew open and a rifle barrel poked out at me through the opening.

"Go away!" a voice warned.

I tried to spot the face behind the gun, but the shadows was too deep. "I'm just traveling through," I said. "Don't mean no harm." I just sat and waited after that.

"Ride in closer but don't get down!" It sounded like a boy.

Well, I did that, and in a minute the person who had the drop on me stepped out. But she certainly wasn't no boy. "You are not with that other man?" she ask.

"No, ma'm," I answered her right off, shaking my head. "But I'd sure like to catch him. Could you tell me which way he went, please, and how long ago he passed through?"

She studied on that and then lowered the rifle to her hip, but she still kept it on me. I was wishing I could see her face, so's I could figure out what was going through her head, but she had on a broad-brimmed black hat and I couldn't see nothing of her features. "What did he do to you?" she ask.

"He kin of yours?" I asked her back.

"No!" she yelled. "He stole our last horse!"

"Well, he shot my friend, the sheriff of Two Scalp, whose deputy I am, ma'm." I held out my badge for her to see, and I was glad then Clete'd made me keep it." Also, he killed two people while they laid asleep in their bed, a man and a woman. Burned them up, set fire to the house."

"I'm not surprised, the way he acted." I could tell she had eased off some.

"Would you mind not pointing that rifle at me no more?" I ask her. "I'll be happy to drop this here Henry if it'd make you feel any safer."

"There is no need of that," she said, lowering the lever-action. "And you can step down if you please."

Well, I felt a whole lot better then. She come forward and took off her hat, and I dismounted.

I had no time to be prepared for the face that I saw then, and it made me feel more uneasy than having her rifle pointed at my chest. To tell the truth, she was the prettiest damn woman I ever seen. A gal I knowed once in Texas would come close, but not real close. Now, I must stop and explain myself here, for when men speak of a beautiful woman, it brings up a picture of blue eyes and fair hair and skin, maybe dainty little hands and whatnot, at least to me it does. But she was not like that at all. To begin with, she wasn't even a white woman.

Not entirely, anyway, though you could tell some of her was. She was dark, not like Spanish women, but dark like some slave women who had their owner for a daddy. Her cheekbones was set high in her face. We stood in her dooryard, looking at each other. Her eyes was on a level with mine, maybe even a shade higher, so she was a tall woman, not one of those little things. Once you got over the slant of her eyes and how clear they was, they made you think of that half-wild look you see in the eyes of an Indian. Like varnished walnut they was. The white in her come out mostly in her nose, I guess you could say, for it was straight and thin and a little pointy.

A breeze'd been blowing all day and it moved a lot of her hair across her face. That big gal's hair hung in ropes and rings around her shoulders and down her back a long ways. Not wooly like a slave's or straight as an arrer like an Indian woman's, but shinier and blacker than both, like new-mined coal.

It wasn't 'til then that I noticed how young she was, not more than a year or two older than Corrie Sue's sister Jenny. I guess she saw how taken back I was, for she blushed a little, making her face glow even more than it was before, there in that orangy sunset light. But it didn't bother her long, for she stuck out her hand and without thinking I took it.

"I'm Amanda Boudoin," she said. "My folks called me Mandy." Her smile was so pretty I felt uncomfortable.

"Well, I'm Willie Goodwin, the deputy sheriff of Two Scalp, as I said before, I guess. And I'm pleased to make your acquaintance." I must have held on to her hand a little too long because she started to blush again. Of course, I let go soon as I noticed.

"I was just about to have dinner when you rode up," she said. "Will you join me, Mr. Goodwin? It's the least I can do after welcoming you that way." She laughed such a musical laugh then that I thought of a New Orleans cathouse, though I was secretly ashamed of myself for thinking it.

Of course, I needed some food, no question, and I had already thought of stopping for the day, since I could no more follow tracks in that light than I could dance. "I would be pleased to take dinner with your family, Miss Amanda, ma'm. If you could just show me where to clean up?"

She pointed out a bucket of water and a basin by the door. "You can wash there, but I have no family, Mr. Goodwin," she said, and then went into her house. I used the little piece of soap she had there and thought things over while I washed myself.

Then I stepped into the doorway to talk to her. "I'm going to ride across the valley a piece to make sure my man isn't still around here," I told her. "I'll find a place to camp over by your stream while I'm at it-if you don't mind, of course. Then I'll come back and eat."

"As you please," she said, bent over a pot that hung just out of the fireplace from a chimney crane. "But I don't think he is still close to here."

Well, I rode across the valley and across the stream and went to the top of the far rise, and because of it getting dark, that was as far as I could follow his tracks. He was still headed west, riding the girl's horse by now and trailing his own and making good time once again.
Damn
but I was tired, all day in the saddle and no sleep the night before. It was near dark 'til I started back toward the soddy, the evening star up pretty, and I fed myself a story about coming in from the fields to my new bride waiting for me. Eating supper with her in our own snug little house. Did no harm, far as I could see, to amuse myself so.

She had the table pulled up in front of the fireplace when I got back and apologized for being out of lamp oil and candles, but I said it didn't matter. It was a tidy place for a soddy, even with the dirt floor. Whoever'd made it had dug it down far enough so you didn't have to stoop over all the time, like you did in most I've been in. All one room, of course, with the bed to one side and the fireplace dug into the back wall and dry-masoned with cut stone. Whitewash over the sod walls and the back made it cheerful and bright, even in the little light we had. Curtains at the windows, just like in town.

What was different about it was the roof. Not a shed roof, either. The big timbers was bowed, just the crooked way they growed, I suppose, and they humped up a place there in the middle. From the ladder that went up, I guessed it was a sleeping loft for children. Course, a lot of dirt would fall on them from the sod roof when they slept up there, but it would have anyway if they'd laid on a pallet on the floor, like most sodbusters' young ones did.

She'd baked a big pile of biscuits in her Dutch oven and got me started on them while she fussed with plates and spoons and the like. In a few minutes she brought a pot of something with beans and carrots and some kind of meat, though it wasn't beef or pork.

"This is mighty good," I said. "What kind of meat is this in here, anyway?"

"Rabbit," she said. "I shot it this morning. Is it all right?"

"It's fine." And it was, too. She had spiced it up a lot, made it nearly as hot as my mother's chili, but it had something else in it that made me think of Cathay or India or some other far away place, though it make me think of the smell of fresh dirt, too, but it was good, bad as that sounds.

"Would you mind telling me what you can remember about the man who stole your horse, Miss Mandy?" I ask after we started eating. "Did you talk to him?"

She looked kind of sheepish then. "Yes I did. I was chopping wood when he rode down the hill." She fiddled with her fork.

"Tall man?" I ask. "Walked with a limp?"

"Yes," she said after a minute. I could see she was trying to fix him good in her mind. "Almost a head taller than me. 'Tall as an asparagus,' my father would have said, which means that he was also very thin. I didn't notice his limp then, but I believe he had one. He was the first person I've seen in months, and I wasn't being very careful, I'm afraid. Not as careful as I should have been."

"You live out here all by yourself? All winter?"

"Since January, I have been alone. My father and my brother died in November. My mother I buried in January."

She said that so flat, like she could have been talking about making cheese. I didn't know what to say.

"He was strange looking. Ugly, you know? But I was glad enough to see him. He asked me if I had coffee, and when I came inside to make him some, he took Suzie. I heard the horses and ran out, but he was nearly to the stream by then. I shot at him once, but I knew it was too far. He stopped and looked back, but then he kept going."

"You're lucky," I told her. "He could have killed you-or worse." It took a minute for her to catch my meaning, but when she did she surprised me. She throwed back her pretty head and laughed.
"Or worse,
Mr. Goodwin? You think a woman would rather be murdered than raped?" She got up and got a jar of jam out of the cupboard and opened it. "If I had my choice, I would take neither. But if it had to be one or the other, I would not take the death, I can tell you. I watched my mother and my father and my little brother die, and nothing could be as bad as that." She was quiet then for a time, and I thought she might cry, but she didn't. "Besides, it means nothing, the sex, not if you don't want it to. Just a natural thing, like eating a meal. Would you like to taste the jam, Mr. Goodwin?" she ask, sticking her finger into the pot and then offering it to me.

I guess I looked pretty bewildered, for she laughed again and then sucked it off herself, smacking her lips over it. I had a feeling for a minute there that she was a lot older than I'd figured her for, but her face was smooth like only a young girl's is. "How was he dressed?" I ask.

"A tall, soft hat–black. His rifle had a tube on it, but I didn't see his pistol. He wore one of those long riding coats, only it was dark. Brown, I think. A lean, scrawny man. His teeth were bad and he stunk, but I had already decided to ride away from here with him if he would take me. As soon as I saw him riding down the hill I knew I would ask him."

I spread some jam on a biscuit and ate it, but I don't remember what it tasted like.

I'd mostly gotten over the way she looked and her boldness, I guess, while we sat having our dinner together and talking, but afterwards I couldn't help myself from staring at her. She was dressed more like a man than a girl, but it didn't do her appearance no harm. The firelight twinkling off her black hair and shining in her eyes. I looked at her young body when she bent and moved the pot of coffee closer to the flames, and I cursed myself for doing it.