City of Widows (15 page)

“He's got a point.” I held out a hand.

This time Colleen shook her head. “Firearms cost money. You lawmen are always taking them off people and never giving them back. It's no wonder there are coming to be so many of you out here. You can eat for the rest of your life on what you make off the resale.” She seated the hammer and returned the revolver to her purse. “I shot a police officer in the lip in El Paso. I might as well have finished him for all the yell they put up about it. I've got a policy against running foul of the law twice in one season or you'd be colder than my tea.”

“Why the lip?”

“I was aiming between his eyes but the floor was slanted. What kind of errand are you running for Blackthorne?”

“We haven't established I'm running any kind of errand.”

“I know it's not me. I haven't shot any federals lately. A stray card or two isn't worth your train fare. Anyway you didn't know I was going to hook up with the Princess.
I
didn't know until I messed up that policeman's lip.” She pushed her tea away untasted. “It's Baronet you're after, isn't it? Frank, not Ross. Bad lawmen always did upset your appetite.”

We were speaking too low to be heard from the bar, but I leaned back in my chair and told Irish Andy to go home. I said I'd clean up. He took off his apron, got his mackinaw from the back room, said goodnight—more for Colleen's benefit than mine—and went out.

“That wasn't necessary,” Colleen said. “You can trust Andy not to carry stories. Not because he's loyal. He just doesn't care.”

“That's why I don't trust him.” I got up and went behind the bar. Under the top, covered by a mouse-chewed feedbag, was the bottle of sour mash whiskey that Andy ordered special from the distributor every month and kept hidden. I filled two glasses and brought them to the table. When I sat down we touched rims and drank. “When Judge Blackthorne took over in Helena he found a man sitting in the city jail waiting to hang for killing a Wells Fargo express agent during a robbery. The man claimed it was his partner who shot the expressman, but he was the only one caught. After interviewing witnesses, Blackthorne wrote to the president, got him to authorize a new trial, and acquitted the man for lack of evidence. The man's name was Cocker Flynn. You never saw it in a newspaper or a dime novel, but he was the first deputy marshal appointed by Judge Blackthorne and he was the best peace officer I ever knew. Everything I know about the work I either learned from him or didn't and went and found out later he was right.”

“I assume this story has a point.” Her face was unreadable, her success at cards being in no way dependent upon the natural distractions of her person.

“Just that the Judge didn't much care if an outlaw turned lawman, or for that matter a lawman turned outlaw, unless he had something to gain or lose from it. My standards are no different. In any case the situation in Socorro County, New Mexico Territory is of no concern to the federal court in Montana.”

“If your aim is to convince me that saloonkeeping is your only interest in San Sábado, you went the long way around the barn for nothing.”

“I didn't say that.”

She turned her palms to the ceiling. “Call.”

I told her then, starting with Harlan Blackthorne's intestines lying on the ground at Monterey and finishing with his vow to avenge the murders of Sergeant Uriah Spooner's son and daughter-in-law by the Baronets. I didn't tell it as well as the Judge, but then he was the kind of man you didn't interrupt, and I had to talk fast to get it in between questions from the other side of the table. When I'd finished, and didn't need it anymore, she gave me silence.

“It doesn't signify,” she said finally. “For it to do that, I would have to credit the Iron Jurist with humanity. Everything I've ever heard about him says he pounds that gavel to circulate his blood in place of a heart.”

“I'd never play cards with the Judge. But I believe him in this case. No other explanation covers it.”

“I hope my taxes are not financing this personal vendetta.”

“You never paid a tax in your life.”

She took another drink and rolled it around, appreciating it. Most of the stock we sold was best rustled past the tongue like doubtful cattle across a border. “What are you going to do about the Apache Princess?”

“I've been thinking about it. If I apprehend Ross Baronet I'll no longer require it as a cover. Junior offered to buy me out the day I came. I'll sign over my end and you can reimburse me later, possibly out of Frank's end.”

“I cannot believe you think that transaction will go through.”

“Why not? There's profit all around. Frank knows a good deal when he sees it and you and Junior might as well have the use of his money for as long as he's at large. Gold itself isn't wicked, only its source.”

“When were you going to tell Junior and me about this plan?”

“When Frank and Ross Baronet were standing side by side on the scaffold in Helena.”

“The conundrum to me is whether marshaling made you the bastard you are or you took to marshaling because you were born a bastard.” There was less heat in this than the words implied; yet there was heat. She finished her whiskey, picked up her purse, and rose. Looking down at me: “You didn't say what happened to the man Flynn.”

“A fugitive shot him last year. He died while I was talking to him.”

She considered it. “Was that better than the rope? I'm curious about your answer.”

“It was later, anyway.”

“Serves me right for asking.” She started toward the door.

“Where are you headed?”

“
Señora
Castillo's. It's late.”

I reached for my hat. “I'll see you get there.”

“I have the Remington for that. Your day tomorrow starts early, or have you forgotten?”

I let her go. There's no worse company than an angry woman, unless it's one who is right.

*   *   *

A bluish glow, the kind that edges sharpened steel, limned the broken peaks beyond the Jornada del Muerto when I led the claybank from the livery to the Mare's Nest, where Miguel Axtaca's vaquero companions were slouched against the hitching rail, passing a cheroot back and forth.

In the saffron light of the lamp that had been burning in the front window for as long as I had been associated with the city, they looked even larger than they had the night before, their shadows stretching nearly as far as the boardwalk on the opposite side of the street. I couldn't believe they were just cowboys. They had on last night's clothes—I wouldn't have given odds that they had ever had them off—with the addition of burlap serapes and dull brown sombreros that from the looks of them had held many a horse's fill of water. Their stovepipe boots were caked with dust and from crown to heel the two men were the same dun color with nary an inch of exposed metal to catch the light. Even an Apache would have been hard put to spot them at any distance in the desert. A trio of well-fed sorrels were hitched nearby, loaded down with gear, including water bags and Mexican Winchesters on two of them and the ubiquitous machetes, slung from the saddle rings in special scabbards. The animals all bore the same brand, an inverted
V
inside a square tipped up on one corner.

“Cuerno Diamante,”
said the more garrulous of the pair when I asked about it. “Diamond Horn. It is the sign of Don Segundo as it was of his father and his father's father, the crest of the Guerrero family, a gift from King Philip at the time of the great Armada.”

“The Armada sank, I heard.”

For answer he drew deeply on the cheroot and handed it to his partner. They were a sharing party. I swear that after one inhaled the other blew smoke.

Presently Axtaca emerged from the building, carrying what looked like a bundle of sticks eighteen inches long bound in a rawhide wrap with symbols painted on it. He too had thrown a serape on over his peasant dress, but it was more elaborate than those of his fellows, embroidered with a fine design in dusky red that would nonetheless be invisible beyond a hundred yards. He wore no hat, only a plain bandanna around his head. Seeing him upright for the first time I realized he was no taller than I, long of waist but short in the legs and bowed unheroically at the knees, and I might have been reminded of an orangutan I'd seen in a medicine show in Helena but for the overall dignity of his bearing. Without a word or a glance in my direction he tied the bundle across the throat of the saddle belonging to the nearest of the three sorrels, the one that carried neither machete nor rifle, untied the reins, and stepped into leather. The less talkative of the two vaqueros threw away the cheroot and the pair followed his lead.

Straddling the claybank, I thought I recognized the bundle as a distant relative of the medicine bags carried by some of the northern tribes. It was a talisman against mishap and, so far as I could determine, the closest thing to a weapon that Don Segundo's foreman carried on his person. In that rough country he was either the bravest man I'd yet encountered, or the most arrogant.

15

I
T WAS
S
EPTEMBER
everywhere in America except along the Journey of Death. From the time the molten-copper sun cleared the San Andres, the air grew warmer by the minute. The tiny fiery blossoms that opened to drink the condensed moisture by dark and blazed in the early bright curled in on themselves under the mounting heat and vanished like the stain of breath on glass. My coat and my companions' serapes came off early and went behind our saddles. Within minutes I felt the first pricking drops of sweat where my hat met my forehead. You don't wipe away the first sweat of the day in the desert; you let it cover you in a transparent sheet like thin varnish. Another day, another layer, curing your hide in the salt of your own system until it was as scaly as a lizard's back. You can build a house from the human bones you will find bleaching in the desert, but you won't see a gila monster's skeleton.

I was traveling with a silent crew. The most open of the three would have been considered laconic in any company I had ridden with, and some of those would have made a monastery sound like Independence Day. He at least answered questions, although the pauses before his responses were long enough for me to forget what I had asked. The others were as stony as the buttes that appeared and began to multiply as we moved farther south, and he was too polite to reply to a comment not addressed to him directly. His name was Francisco. He took pains to point out that it was not to be shortened to Pancho, Saint Francis having some specific importance to his family whose nature I wasn't able to draw out of him. As I'd suspected, the other vaquero was his brother, younger by ten months, called Carlos. The surname was a mix of Spanish and Indian I could neither pronounce nor remember. They had come to work for Don Segundo when the counterrevolution against Juárez failed, having fought for it with machetes, loyalty, and little else in some backwater of Mexico's remotest province so wild it appeared as only a blank on the best maps. Miguel Axtaca had accompanied them, or rather they him, and it was clear from the outset that their pledge was to him and that he held a position in their regard somewhere between
El Cristo
and the old gods. They would no sooner depart from his course than two drops of water would leave the Bravo to start their own river.

By midday I had begun to think fondly of the winter I had spent in a dugout in the Rockies trapped under twenty feet of snow, wondering if I would have enough toes left to walk out when the thaw came. The sun was a white coin nailed to a naked sky, and when the hot wind gusted I felt the glue that held my joints together drying out and cracking. Even the claybank hung its vain head. I stopped twice to give it water from my cupped hand and to take some for myself, but the others kept riding without touching their water bags. I'd heard tales of Apaches and their mounts subsisting on sun and dust and nothing else and had charged them to the same kind of frontier storytelling that had grangers in windy Wyoming feeding their chickens buckshot to keep them from blowing away, but here were three men who could outparch any of those mythical Indians. I hadn't felt this far out of my class since the day I tracked a white scalphunter into a railroad owners' banquet in Denver.

When night came we camped south of Las Cruces, where the others watered at last, built a small fire for warmth, and handed around twists of jerked beef. They didn't offer me any and I didn't ask. From the outset it was clear I was just someone who happened to be going in the same direction they were, and if I expired for lack of provisions or water, the occurrence had no more to do with them than the czar's assassination. I opened a tin, ate sardines, drank the juice, and wished for coffee.

The next day was more of the same, with the addition of a few new flat spots on my body thanks to a night spent on the hard earth. If I was adjusting to the heat, that heat was yesterday's; we were nearing the border now and the oven of Chihuahua. Already the scenery looked alien, dotted with plants and bushes I had no name for and corrugated like a brown ocean frozen in mid-roll. And I felt something undefined, an inner caution born of being foreign and alone.

I noticed a change in my companions as well, but in the opposite direction. As we continued south, some of the tension seemed to go out of their posture and they began to look around, not so much in the way of a small party expecting trouble as of travelers noting the changes and samenesses in country they called home. Now they talked among themselves in that boundary mix of Spanish, English, and Indian, and once one of them laughed, a deep open male guffaw that said as clearly as if I understood the language that some mention had been made of a woman. I knew then, from my position not only outside their circle but outside the great vast space that their circle now encompassed, something of how these three men and all their kind felt when they crossed the border heading north.