Streets of Laredo: A Novel (26 page)

"It might be pleasant." John Wesley Hardin was startled, and he wasn't a man who startled easily. This pup of a boy had just had an idea that he should have had himself: hang Roy Bean. That old fart had it coming to him, had for years.

"Why, that's original," Wesley Hardin said. "I expect that would make the newspapers.

Old Call might get fired, for letting it happen." "Do you know Famous Shoes?" Joey asked.

The old man was a tracker, a Kickapoo.

No one knew where he lived; somewhere in the Sierra Madre, it was thought. Billy Williams had known Famous Shoes for many years and thought him the best tracker who ever lived.

He even knew how to track birds, as they flew. Even the Apaches respected Famous Shoes, and the Apaches yielded up little respect when it came to tracking. They considered themselves the best, but admitted that if anyone was better than they were, it was Famous Shoes. Some Apaches thought that the reason Famous Shoes was such a brilliant tracker was that he was part eagle.

Someone had seen him bringing the eggs of an eagle down to his camp, where he ate them. It was because of the eagle's eggs, some thought, that Famous Shoes could see so well. No one in the West could see farther, or more clearly, than the old Kickapoo. In earlier days, he had been employed up and down the border by whites, Mexicans, and Indians alike, to help recover children who had been stolen, or sold into slavery. Famous Shoes never failed to find the children, even when he was put on the trail months late. He could not always recover the children, for his skill was only in tracking. But he always found the children. A man who could track the flight of birds and even follow eagles to their roosts, in order to take their eggs, would have no difficulty in tracking a raiding party that had come to take slaves.

"I have seen Famous Shoes a few times," Wesley Hardin said. "If I see him again, I'll kill him, and if I'd known he was around I'd have been out hunting for him yesterday." "Why?" Joey asked. "He's an old man. You wouldn't need to fear him." "He's an old man, but his eyesight ain't failed him," Hardin said. "Suppose I kill the wrong fellow, someone who ain't just scum, and the law comes after me again? If they hired old Famous Shoes, they'd find me, too, and if there's more of a damn posse than I could shoot, I'd be back in prison again. And next time, they'll beat me to death." He suddenly turned his back to Joey and pulled off his coat and shirt. His back was crisscrossed with scars, every inch of it.

"The time I went for the warden and tried to knock the sonofabitch's head in, they gave me five hundred lashes. I wasn't awake for but about two hundred of them, though." "They will not do that to me," Joey said.

Wesley Hardin stuffed his shirttail back in his pants. He turned to Joey and smiled.

"If they get you in jail, then they can do anything they want," he said. "If they want to beat you with a damn whip, they will." "They won't get me in jail," Joey said.

The sight of the man's scarred back had impressed him.

"Then you better kill Famous Shoes, and kill him next," Wesley Hardin said. "That's my recommendation." "Why him? I don't even know him," Joey replied.

"He's a hired hand. He tracks for anybody that'll pay him," Wesley Hardin said. "Woodrow Call might pay him to find you.

If he's set to find you, he'll find you.

Famous Shoes don't miss." Joey Garza smiled. "I don't miss, either," he said. Then he took his fine rifle and left.

When Famous Shoes decided to take a walk, it was usually a long one. He didn't like to walk where there were Federales, because the Federales killed Indians. The presence of Federales distracted him, and took away some of the pleasure of his long walk. To avoid them, he walked north through the Madre until he was out of Mexico, before turning east. He had decided to go to the Rio Rojo and live on it a few weeks, as his people had once done. He was an old man, and one day soon, he would have to give up his spirit. He thought it would be fitting to go to the Rio Rojo, where his people had once lived. It was his view that the Kickapoo people would be living along the Brazos and the Rio Rojo still, if the Comanche and the Kiowa had not been so hard to get along with.

But the Comanche and the Kiowa did not like the Kickapoo people, or any other people, and it was not easy to live with the Comanche or the Kiowa if they disliked you. They killed so many Kickapoo that the old men decided the tribe had better move, or soon there would be no tribe.

Now the Comanche were gone, and the Kiowa, too.

Famous Shoes could go visit the land of his fathers without unpleasantness. He walked east, toward the pass of the north. In a few days, he would be on the great plain. He wanted to visit the several forks of the Brazos--the Salt, the Clear, the Double Mountain fork and the Prairie Dog fork-- to see if the river had moved far from where it had been when he was a boy. He had known the Brazos when he was young. He liked to watch it wander, and make itself new channels.

While Famous Shoes was walking east near Agua Prieta, he crossed a track that frightened him so much that he wanted to crouch down. It was a track he had not seen in many years: the track of Mox Mox, the manburner. The Apaches called him The Snake-You-Do-Not-See, for his habit of catching people unawares, and burning them.

Particularly, he liked to burn young children, but he would burn anyone he could catch, when he wanted to burn.

Mox Mox, The Snake-You-Do-Not-See, had stopped to urinate along the trail Famous Shoes was walking. Famous Shoes thought he had better hurry on to the Rio Rojo before Mox Mox found him. He walked for two days, sleeping only a few minutes at a time.

When he came to the Rio Rojo, he walked east along its wide, sandy banks for two weeks. On the old river, he felt better.

The Snake-You-Do-Not-See had not struck him.

He wanted to make contact with the spirit of his grandfather, if possible. His grandfather had lived and died on the low, sandy banks of the Rio Rojo.

Though Famous Shoes walked for days along the river, he did not meet the spirit of his grandfather. The old man had not liked the Comanche, and Famous Shoes decided that his grandfather's spirit had become impatient for the Comanche to be taken; so impatient that his spirit left its home and went to live somewhere else. Probably, he would make contact with his grandfather as he walked south, amid the forks of the Brazos. But that might not work, either. His grandfather had been an unpredictable man, and all his wives had complained of his impatience and unpredictability. He left when he felt like leaving, and told no one where he was going or when he might return. He was apt to walk south and then change his mind and walk north. There was no confining the man. Famous Shoes, too, was in the habit of walking where he chose and when he chose.

He might get up one morning and walk for three months.

Once, when he was younger, he had decided to walk north, to the place the ducks and the geese came from and returned to every year. He knew the birds could travel much faster than he could, and that he would have to get a big jump on them if he was to visit them in their home in the north. He started early in the spring, thinking he would be in the place the birds returned to, when they returned. He had been told that they nested at the edge of the world.

An old Apache man who, like himself, took an interest in birds, told him that. The old Apache believed that the ducks and geese, and even the cranes, flew to the edge of the world each fall, to build their nests and hatch their young.

Famous Shoes wanted to see it. In his dreams, he saw a place where all the ducks and geese came to nest. It would be noisy, of course; so many birds would make a lot of racket. But it would still be worth it.

What defeated the plan was that Famous Shoes did not really enjoy cold weather. It was cold enough in the Madre, and even colder on the plains, north of the Rio Rojo. But those colds were as nothing to the cold Famous Shoes began to encounter as the fall came, in the far north. He had walked to the top of the plain, and into the wooded country. As the days shortened, he began to see strings of geese overhead, and thought that he must be getting close to the great nesting place at the edge of the world.

But then, it seemed to him, he reached the edge of the world without getting to the nesting place. He passed through the great forests, and came to a place where the trees were only as tall as he was, and Famous Shoes was not tall. Ahead, he could see horizons where there were no trees at all, and only a few plants of any kind.

There seemed to be only snow ahead of him. He survived by knocking over fat birds and slow rabbits, but the snow was becoming painful to his feet, and the diminishing vegetation worried him. With no wood to make fires, he knew he might freeze. Also, it was only fall. The real cold was ahead.

Reluctantly, Famous Shoes stopped when he reached the place of the last tree. He looked north, as far as he could see, wondering if the edge of the world was only a day or two away. A day or two he might risk, but he knew it would be foolish to go to a place without wood, when the great cold was coming. Overhead, the sky was thick with ducks and geese, going to the place Famous Shoes wanted to go. He heard them all night, calling to one another as they neared their home. He was annoyed with the geese, for he felt that they should appreciate how far he had walked, out of an interest in them, and that some great goose should come down and help him go there. The old Apache man claimed that he had once seen a white goose big enough for a man to ride. Famous Shoes didn't know if the story was true, for the old Apache man had been a little crazy, and was also fond of mescal. He might have been drunk, and the liquor might have made the goose grow into a goose that a man could ride. But if there was such a goose somewhere, it too must be on its way home.

Famous Shoes waited a whole day by the last tree, his feet aching from the snow, hoping the great goose would see him and recognize his appreciation of the greatness of birds and alight and fly him to the big nesting place. Also, while he was there, he meant to look off the edge of the world and see what he could see.

But no great goose came, and Famous Shoes was forced to turn back, before his feet were frozen.

A few days later, by great good luck, he killed a small bear. He made moccasins from the bear skin and hurried south, hoping to get to a place where there was good firewood before the blizzards came. Three days later, when he had just made it into the forests, a great blizzard did come. Famous Shoes had carried much of the meat of the little bear with him, and he ate it while the blizzard blew.

Months later, when he was still far from his home in the Madre, Famous Shoes saw the geese and the ducks overhead, flying south again. It seemed to him that their calls mocked him, as they flew above him. For a time, he became bitter, and decided he didn't like birds, after all. They didn't care that he had walked a whole year, just to see their nesting place. He resolved to take no more interest in such ungrateful, unappreciative creatures.

But once back in the Sierra Madre, watching the great eagles that lived near his home, Famous Shoes gradually lost his bitterness. In the presence of the great eagles, he became ashamed of himself. Two or three of the eagles knew him, and would let him sit near them; not too near, but near enough that he could see their eyes, as they watched the valleys far below. Their dignity made him feel that he had been silly, to expect the ducks and geese, or any birds, to take an interest in his movements. He knew himself to be a great walker--he was not Famous Shoes for nothing --but what was that to any bird? The geese and the great cranes could fly in an hour distances it would take him a day to cover. The eagles and the hawks could see much farther than he could, and even the small birds, the sparrows and the cactus wrens, could do the one thing he couldn't do: they could fly. That was their greatness, not his, and his walking must seem a poor thing, to them.

Famous Shoes was grateful to the eagles for letting him sit near them and recover himself from his long journey. He needed to recover from the vanity of thinking that he was as special as the birds. He did not deserve to see the great nesting places, nor to look off the edge of the world. He was only a man, of the earth and not of the sky, and his skills were not the skills of birds.

It was on his return from the Rio Rojo, across the Quitaque, that he came upon the track of a horse carrying his old friend Pea Eye, in the mud of a little creek. Famous Shoes had known Pea Eye for a long time, since the days when the Rangers rode the border. He could tell Pea Eye's track anywhere, because Pea Eye favored his left stirrup and the horse track went deeper on the left side, particularly on the rear hoof. It puzzled him to discover Pea Eye traveling south, for he understood that Pea Eye had a woman and several children, and a farm.

Yet, he was leaving. Famous Shoes knew that Pea Eye's woman was a teacher. He meant, someday, to have her teach him to read the strange tracks in books. Those were the only tracks he had never been able to master. For many years, he had carried a small Bible with him. It had been given to him by an old man who carried many such books in a wagon, and gave them to Indians.

The old man's name was Marshall. He had come among the Apaches when Famous Shoes was there, trying to persuade an old medicine man named Turtle to give up a little white girl he had captured in a raid. Turtle wouldn't give up the girl. His own wife was shriveled and had no interest in him, and he needed a young girl. The money Famous Shoes offered, money provided by the little girl's family, was not as important to Turtle as the little girl herself. Turtle patiently explained this to Famous Shoes, who understood it well enough. His own wife had lost interest in him, forcing him to find girls at a time when he would rather have been concentrating on other things.