A Noose for the Desperado (3 page)

“Ha-ha,” Basset said again. “Let me tell you something, Cameron. I
knew Pappy Garret. If you can handle guns the way he could, I'll make a
rich man out of you. A rich man.”

“I don't hire my guns,” I said.

I'd had about enough of Basset. Watching his enormous, shaking belly
made my skin crawl. I made a move to get up, but he waved me down.

“Just a minute,” he wheezed. “Let me tell you about our charming
little village here, Ocotillo.” He settled back, smiling and breathing
through his mouth. His lips were red and wet and raw-looking, like an
incision in a piece of liver. “Ocotillo,” he said again. “It was just a
little village of Mexican farmers, a few sheep herders, until a few
years ago, when some sourdough thought he had discovered a vein of
silver up in the foothills. Overnight, you might say, civilization came
to Ocotillo. You wouldn't believe it, but two years ago this whole area
was covered with tents and shacks and wagons, and fortune hunters
crawled over the hills as thick as sand lice.”

He chuckled for a minute, remembering.

“Well, it turned out there wasn't any silver there after all, except
some 'fool's silver,' traces of lead ore and zinc. Before you knew it
Ocotillo was as empty as a frontier church. The fortune hunters all
moved on, and for a while I'll admit I was worried. You saw the wood in
my bar out there? Redwood from California. My wheels, pool table,
gambling equipment, shipped clean from New York around the Horn and
freighted across the desert. Cost thousands of dollars, this saloon,
and for a while it looked like it wouldn't bring a penny.”

I rolled a cigarette while he talked. As I held a match to the
corn-shuck cylinder, Basset smiled and nodded.

“I remember Pappy used to smoke his cigarettes Mexican style like
that. Anyway, here I was with this saloon and nobody for customers
except a few poor Mexicans. Then one day I got another customer.”

He slouched back in the chair, smiling, waiting for me to ask the
question. “And this customer was...” I said.

“Black Joseph,” he said with satisfaction.

I wasn't particularly surprised. I hadn't heard of the famous Indian
gunman for a year or more, so I knew that if he wasn't making buzzard
food of himself he had to be in New Mexico or Arizona. I had never seen
him, but I knew him by reputation. The artists' drawings on “Wanted"
posters always showed him as a hungry-eyed, hawk-nosed, Osage, with a
battered flat-crowned hat pushed down over his black, braided hair. He
had been a scout for the Union Army during the war, but it seemed that
even the bloody battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga hadn't blunted his
craving to kill. He was supposed to be fast with a gun. According to
some men who ought to know he was the fastest. I didn't know about
that, and I didn't care. Black Joseph didn't have anything against me,
and I had nothing against him.

Basset seemed to think that the Indian's name should have done
something to me. Maybe I should have started sweating, or loosened my
guns, or something. When I didn't, the fat man seemed slightly annoyed.

“You've heard of Black Joseph, haven't you?” he panted.

“I've heard of him,” I said.

That seemed to make him feel a little better. “Well,” he said, “I
began to get an idea the minute that Indian murderer rode into
Ocotillo—not that I've got anything against him,” he added quickly.
“It's just that he doesn't bother to think before he shoots. Anyway, I
figured maybe there were a lot of boys like him, things getting too hot
for them back in Texas.”

He smiled that damp smile, as if to say, “You ought to know,
Cameron.”

I said, “Has all this got anything to do with me?”

“That depends on you,” Basset said carelessly. “Now, you look like a
man on the run. Would you like to have a place to settle down for a
while and give the United States marshals a chance to forget about you?
Would you like to be sure that you won't run into my cavalrymen? Would
you like to have some insurance like that?”

“You can't get insurance from a United States marshal,” I said, “or
the Cavalry, either.”

Basset lurched forward in his chair, got a cigar from a box on his
desk, and rolled it between his wet lips. “You just don't know the
right man, son,” he said, breathing heavily. “The Cavalry—no. But,
then, the Cavalry is busy up north with the Apache uprising. There's no
call for them to come down here unless somebody like a federal marshal
put them up to it.”

And what makes you think that some deputy marshal won't do just
that?”

He went on smiling, holding a match to his cigar, puffing until it
was burning to suit him. Then he threw the match on the floor and
shouted, “Kreyler!”

The door opened and the big, slab-faced man came in. The last time I
saw him he had been headed out of the saloon—but when Basset called,
he was there.

“Yeah?”

“Show this boy who you are, Kreyler,” Basset said.

Kreyler frowned. He didn't like me, and whatever it was that Basset
had on his mind, he didn't like that either. But he didn't have the
guts to look at the fat man and tell him so. Reluctantly he went into
his pocket and came out with a badge—a deputy United States marshal's
badge.

“That will be your insurance,” Basset said, as Kreyler went out, “if
you choose to stay with us here in Ocotillo.”

The whole thing had kind of taken my breath away. I had only known
one United States marshal before. He lived, breathed, and thought
nothing but the law. I hadn't known that a man like Kreyler could worm
his way into an office like that.

Suddenly I began to appreciate the kind of setup Basset had here. In
Ocotillo a man could live in safety, protected from the law, his
identity hidden from the outside world. I thought of the long days and
nights of running, afraid to sleep, afraid to rest, forever looking
over my shoulder and expecting to see the man who would finally kill
me. Here in Ocotillo I could forget all that—if I wanted to pay the
fat man's price.

Basset smiled, puffing lazily on his cigar.

I said finally, “Insurance like that must come pretty high.”

“Not for the right men, like yourself.” He bent forward, his jowls
shaking. “Have you ever heard of the Mexican smuggling trains?”

I shook my head.

“There are dozens of them,” he said. “They come across the
international line, taking one of the remote canyons of the Huachucas.
Thousands of dollars in gold or silver some of these trains carry. They
trade in Tucson for merchandise that they smuggle back across the
border, without paying the heavy duty, and sell at fat profits. In a
way,” Basset smiled, “you might say that Kreyler is upholding his oath
to the United States, for he is a great help to us in stopping this
unlawful smuggling of the Mexicans.”

I was beginning to get it now, but I wasn't sure that I liked it.

“Take your time,” the fat man said. “Make up your mind and let me
know. Say tomorrow?”

“All right,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

I was glad to get out of the office. The bath that I'd had not long
ago had been wasted. I felt dirtier than I had when I first rode into
the place.

I stopped at the bar on my way out and had a shot of the white poison
that the Mexicans were drinking. Business had picked up while I was in
the office. Most of the fancy girls had found laps to sit on, and their
brassy, high-pitched giggles punched holes in the general uproar like
bullets going through a tub of lard. I studied the men in the place
with a new interest, now that I knew who they were and what they were
doing here. I didn't see anybody that I knew, yet I had a feeling that
I knew all of them. Their eyes were all alike, restless, darting from
one place to the other. They laughed hard with their mouths, but none
of the laughter ever reached their eyes. I didn't see anybody drunk
enough to be careless about the way his gun hand hung. And I knew I
wouldn't. My friend Kreyler, the deputy United States marshal, wasn't
around. Probably he was in some corner, waiting for Basset to yell for
him.

I stood alone at the end of the bar, wondering where I was going to
sleep that night and listening to three Mexicans sing a sirupy love
song in Spanish, when she said:

“Hello, gringo!”

I don't know where she came from. But now she was standing next to
me, grinning as if nothing had happened.

“Get away from me,” I said. “When I get tired of living I can get
myself killed. I don't need your help.”

She didn't bat an eye. “I think you plenty fast with gun,” he
grinned. “You don't be killed.”

“I'll be killed if you keep telling people I'm a government marshal.
What the hell did you do that for, anyway? And after that, why did you
bother to warn me that somebody was waiting for me? Do you just like to
hear guns go off and see men get killed?”

She threw her head back and laughed, as if that was the best one
she'd heard in a long time. “Maybe you buy Marta drink, eh?”

“Maybe I'll kick Marta's bottom if she doesn't leave me alone.”

But I didn't mean it and she knew it. She laughed again and I poured
her a drink of the white poison. She poured salt in the cup between her
thumb and forefinger, licked it with her tongue and then downed her
drink in one gulp. She looked more at home here in the saloon than some
of the fancy girls. And she was a lot better looking than any of the
doxies. But I noticed a funny thing. None of the men looked at her.
They seemed to go to a great deal of trouble
not
to look at her.

“Another one, gringo?” she said, holding up her empty glass.

“Not for me.” But I reached for the bottle and poured her another
one. She downed it the same way she had the first one.

“Where you go, gringo?”

“To find a bed. There's a big desert out there and I've been a long
time crossing it. I'm tired.”

She took my arm and pulled me toward the door. “Come with me, I fix.”

“Isn't there a hotel over the saloon here?”

“You no go there. You come with Marta.”

God knows she made it clear enough, and she was the best-looking girl
I had seen for longer than I liked to remember—but there was something
about it that went against me. I felt a sickness that I hadn't felt in
a long time, and memories popped up in my mind, sharp and clear like a
magic-lantern show I had seen once. We were outside now, on the dirt
walk in front of the saloon. At the end of the building there was an
outside stairway that went up to the second floor, and on the corner of
the building there was a sign: “Rooms.” For no particular reason I
began to get mad. I gave her a shove, harder than I'd intended, and she
went reeling out into the dusty street.

I headed for the livery barn to get my saddlebags and she cursed me
every step of the way in shrill, outraged Spanish. But I didn't hear. I
was listening to other voices. And other times.

Other times and other places.... I went through the motions of
looking after my horse and getting my saddlebags and going up the shaky
stairs over the saloon to see if I could get a room, but they were like
the motions that you go through in a dream. They didn't seem to mean
anything. I remembered the big green country of the Texas Panhandle,
where I was born. I remembered my pa's ranch and the little town near
it, John's City. And Professor Bigloe's Academy, where I had gone to
school before the war, and the frame shack at the crossroads between
our place and John's City called Garner's Store where I used to listen
to the bitter old veterans of the war still cursing Sherman and Lincoln
and Grant, and reliving over and over the glories of the lost
Confederacy. And, finally, I remembered a girl.

But she was just a name now, and I had said good-by to her for the
last time. Good-by, Laurin. I had hurt her for the last time, and lied
to her for the last time, and I tried to be glad that she was married
now and had put me out of her life. Maybe now she would know a kind of
quiet peace and happiness that she had never had while I was around. I
tried, but I couldn't feel glad, or sorry, or anything else. Except for
an aching emptiness. I could feel that.

At the top of the stairs I pounded on a door and woke up a faded,
frazzle-haired old doxie, who, for a dollar, let me have the key to a
room at the end of the dusty hall. The room was just big enough to
undress in without skinning your elbows on the walls. There was a
sagging iron bed and a washstand with a crock pitcher, bowl, and
coal-oil lamp on it. A corner of a broken mirror was tacked on the wall
over the washstand. There was an eight-penny nail in the door, if you
wanted to hang up your clothes.

It wasn't the finest room in the world, but it would do. I raised the
window and had a look outside before I lighted the lamp. I was glad to
see that there was no awning or porch roof under the window, and there
was nobody out in the street that I could see. I lighted the lamp, took
the straw mattress off the bed, and put it on the floor in front of the
door. I was dead tired and I didn't want any visitors while I slept.

Automatically I went through a set routine of checking my guns,
putting them beside me on the mattress, stretching out with my feet
against the door. If that door moved I wanted to know about it in a
hurry. Small things, maybe, but I had learned that it was small things
that kept a man alive. Trimming a fraction of a second off your draw,
filing a fraction of an inch off your gun's trigger action, keeping
your ears and eyes and nerves keyed a fraction higher than the next
man's. A heartbeat, a bullet. They were all small things.

For a long while, in the darkness, I rocked on the thin edge of sleep
while almost forgotten faces darted in and out of my memory, flashing
and disappearing like fox fire in a sluggish swamp. Laurin's face. And
Pappy Garret. The fabulous Pappy Garret whose name was already
beginning to appear in five-cent novels, and history books, and maybe
even the Sunday newspaper supplements back East. My pal Pappy, who had
taught me everything I knew about guns. I tried to imagine what Pappy
would say if he could see how famous I had become. Would he smile that
old sad smile of his if he could see the bright look of admiration in
small boys' eyes as they read the “Wanted” poster?