Streets of Laredo: A Novel (72 page)

"The great eye that Joey used," Famous Shoes replied. "It is tied to his saddle." "Oh, that old spyglass," Pea Eye said.

"Nobody's using it--I sure don't want to drag that thing around. I guess you can just have it, if that's what you want." Famous Shoes could scarcely believe his good fortune. Billy Williams was at the cantina.

Lorena had gone to the river with Rafael and Teresa to wash clothes. He went at once to the little shed and took the great eye.

Captain Call had his eyes shut, and he breathed hard, like a sick calf. White men had the habit of staying alive too long, in Famous Shoes' opinion. Captain Call ought to send his spirit on, now. It was time for him to visit the other place. He might find his leg and his arm, if he went there.

Without delay Famous Shoes left for the Madre, carrying the great eye. Now he would be able to see as well as the eagles; now he could track them through the sky.

Pea Eye was through with his crutch before the Captain attempted to use his for the first time.

Call was so sad that it was hard to be around him.

Lorena finally cleaned out the little room that had been Maria's, and made him a bed in there. Too much had to be done, in the other room. She had to cook and clean, tend to the two children, feed Billy and Pea and the Captain--when the Captain would eat.

Having to walk around the silent, suffering old man every time she needed to do something was beginning to get on Lorena's nerves. When they got him home to the farm, Pea would have to build him a room of some kind, away from the house. With two more children in their home, there would have to be some expansion anyway. Lorena accepted that they would have to care for Call--he had no one else--but she didn't want him sitting in her kitchen, hour after hour every day, looking as if he hated life. It would be bad for her children, and her own nerves couldn't take it. She ran a happy household, usually; she was not going to dampen her children's liveliness because of Captain Call's grief.

Once she installed him in Maria's bedroom, things were better. Teresa became his sole attendant: she didn't like for anyone but herself to go into Call's room, and Call didn't welcome others, either. Pea Eye would come in once in a while and attempt to talk to him, but Call scarcely responded. The events of the past weeks were twisted in his mind, like a rope that had not been coiled properly. He wanted to remember things clearly, to backtrack through the pursuit of Joey Garza until he located the moment of failure. But the effort was discouraging; he had followed up the available clues and deployed his resources in what seemed like an intelligent way. Perhaps he should not have let himself be distracted by Mox Mox. If he hadn't, though, Jasper Fant's two children would have died, and others as well, very likely. By most reckonings, Mox Mox was worse than Joey Garza had been.

What it came down to, Call concluded, was this: on the morning when he was injured, his eyesight had failed him. He hadn't once suspected that the buckskin horse was hobbled. He ought to have been alert to that possibility, but all he had seen were two horses grazing. His eyes had simply failed him. Horses moved differently, when they were hobbled. Earlier in his life, his eyes would have detected the difference. As it was, they hadn't.

He should have had spectacles, but it had never occurred to him that his vision had fallen off so. He had always trusted his senses and had not expected any of them to fail him. To reflect that a cheap pair of spectacles might have prevented the loss of his arm and his leg was bitter knowledge, and he could not stop himself from brooding about it. His eyes had cost him himself: that was how he came to view it.

Because of his untrustworthy eyes, he had been reduced to what he was now, a man with two crutches, a man who could not mount a horse.

Some days, all the Captain did was wait for Teresa. When she was with him, he sometimes stopped thinking about his mistakes. Teresa would be outside with the goats and the chickens, and would come back to him with news of their activities. The old hen with the broken beak had caught a large lizard. One of the little goats had stepped in a hole and a snake had bitten it. Now, they were waiting to see if the kid would live or die. Rafael was upset, and they listened to his moaning through Call's little window.

"Do you think it will die?" Teresa asked him.

She had brought him his coffee.

"Probably it will, if it was small," Call said.

"If it dies, I hope it will see my mother," Teresa said. "She is with the dead. My mother will take care of Rafael's goat." "I expect she will," Call replied.

It was almost another month before Captain Call became strong enough to travel the rough wagon road to Fort Stockton. Pea Eye was in a fever of impatience to get home to his children. In all his years with the Captain, he had never known him to be sick. Of course, he realized that being shot three times with a high-powered rifle would set a person back considerably; he had been shot himself and knew what it was to feel poorly. But he was so accustomed to seeing the Captain well and hardy that it was difficult for him to accept the fact that Call simply would not become hardy again.

Pea Eye asked Lorena so often when she thought the Captain would be ready to travel that she finally lost her temper.

"Stop asking me that!" she snapped. "You ask me that five or six times a day and I've been telling you five or six times a day that I don't know. I don't have any idea when he can travel. All you have to do is look at him to know he's not able, yet. When that will change I don't know!" "I won't ask no more if I can help it, honey," Pea Eye replied, meekly.

"You'd better help it!" Lorena told him.

The thought of taking the old, ruined man into her household worried her more and more. Teresa cared for him almost entirely. Call made it clear that he didn't welcome anyone else's help. Her boys were no respecters of others' wishes, though --they had always been curious about Captain Call, and they were not likely to be easily shut out. They would have to build Call a room of his own --but where the money would come from, Lorena didn't know.

Rafael had been more affected by Maria's death than the little girl seemed to be. Lorena had taken a liking to Rafael, and he to her. Every morning he would milk his goats and bring the milk in a little pot for Lorena. Often she noticed Rafael peeking into Maria's old room, looking for his mother; she would see him searching for her outside, amid the goats and chickens and the few sheep; sometimes he would search by the river, where Maria had gone to wash their clothes.

It made Lorena sad, to see the boy looking so forlornly for his mother. He was a large boy, but sweet; his main problem was that he could not attend to himself very well. He was always spilling things on his clothes, or sitting down in puddles, or forgetting to button his buttons in the mornings.

"My mother isn't by the river," Teresa told Lorena. "She is among the dead. Rafael doesn't understand where the dead live." "I don't understand that too well, myself," Lorena said. "I know they're somewhere you can't see them." Later, she felt bad about the remark. She had made it to a little girl who had never seen her mother.

"I dream of my mother," Teresa said. "I dream she is with me and my rooster."

Billy Williams drove them to Fort Stockton, when Call was finally strong enough to make the trip. Billy knew a bartender in Presidio who owned a wagon he didn't need. He persuaded the bartender to lend it for the journey, promising to bring it back loaded with cases of whiskey.

"You ought to come with us to the Panhandle," Pea Eye told him. He and Billy had become fast friends, during the period of Call's convalescence.

"Come to the Panhandle. I'll make a farmer out of you," Pea Eye said.

"Nope, I imagine I'd miss Old Mex," Billy replied.

Gordo, the butcher, was annoyed when the wagon pulled away. Lorena had allowed Rafael to bring two goats. Teresa had her rooster, and three hens. Gordo didn't care how many goats and chickens the gringos took away; he was annoyed because they took the little blind girl. She was almost as pretty as her mother had been, and soon she would be old enough to marry. Of course, she was blind; she might be a poor housekeeper, and she might not cook well. But he could cook for himself, and cooking and housekeeping were not the only things to consider. The butcher thought he might have liked to marry the girl, if the gringos hadn't taken her away.

Call hardly spoke during the wagon ride to Fort Stockton. He held on to the side of the wagon with his one hand. The bullet in his chest still pained him, and it pained him even more when he was jostled, as he was when they crossed the many gullies along the way.

Now and then they met travelers, cowboys mostly. Call dreaded such meetings; he dreaded being seen at all. Fortunately, though, the travelers weren't much interested in him. They were far more interested in Pea Eye. His victory over Joey Garza was the biggest thing to happen on the border since the Mexican War, and none of the cowboys were old enough to remember the Mexican War.

Pea Eye felt embarrassed by all the attention he was getting. What made his embarrassment even worse was that he was getting that attention right in front of the Captain. Pea Eye had always been just a corporal--it was the Captain who had killed Mox Mox and six of his men. He didn't feel right being a hero, not with the Captain sitting right there in the same wagon.

The Captain didn't seem to mind, though. He didn't even appear to be listening most of the time. But Pea Eye was still embarrassed.

"Mox Mox was worse than Joey," Pea Eye told Lorena.

"Yes, he was worse," Lorena agreed.

She started to tell her husband that she had been Mox Mox's captive, but she caught herself.

That had happened before Pea Eye was her husband.

He didn't need to know about it.

They rolled into Fort Stockton beside the railroad. When they came to the dusty, one-room station, they saw a private car sitting by itself on the track.

"I wonder what swell came in that?" Lorena said.

They soon found out. The stationmaster emerged from the little building with a short, white-haired man with a curling mustache and a quick, restless walk. The two came right out to meet the wagon, though by the time they got there, the white-haired man was twenty yards in front of the stationmaster.

"I'm Colonel Terry, I've come to look for Brookshire--why ain't he with you?" the white-haired man said to Pea Eye.

"He started with you, I know that much, because I ordered him to," Colonel Terry said, before Pea Eye could think of a nice way to inform him that Mr. Brookshire was dead.

"It was a foolish order," Call said. The Colonel's manner irritated him. Lately, Call had used his voice so seldom that what he said came out raspy.

"What's that? Who are you, sir?" the Colonel asked.

"I'm Woodrow Call," the Captain replied. "Your man's dead. Mrs. Parker brought the body out, at considerable risk to herself.

Mr. Brookshire's at an undertaker's, in Presidio." "Well, his sister's been raising hell, trying to get us to find him--so much hell that I came here myself," the Colonel said. "Did the man do his duty?" "I reckon he did," Pea Eye said.

"I wouldn't be here driving this wagon, if he hadn't bought that big shotgun." "If he did his duty, then his sister will get the pension," the Colonel told them.

"It was a foolish order," Call repeated.

"Brookshire was no fighting man, and he should not have been sent to chase bandits." He looked at the Colonel and noticed a detail that had escaped him at first: the Colonel's empty right sleeve was pinned neatly to his coat.

"Now hold on, Call--I sent Brookshire to keep the accounts," Colonel Terry said. "You were the man sent to catch the bandit, and from the looks of you, you made a botch of it." Pea Eye nearly dropped the reins. Never in his life had he heard anyone speak so bluntly to the Captain.

To his amazement, Captain Call smiled.

"That's accurate," Call said. "I made a botch of it. But Mr. Parker is an able man, and he finished the job for you." "Grateful," Colonel Terry said, glancing up at Pea Eye briefly. His custom did not run to extended compliments.

"If Brookshire did his job, where's the ledgers?" he asked.

Call didn't answer, and Pea Eye wasn't too sure what the Colonel was referring to.

"Oh, them big account books?" he said, finally. "We used them to start fires, back when it was so cold. We was in a country where there wasn't no kindling, and very little brush." Call looked over the side of the wagon at Colonel Terry. He recalled that after Brookshire's first little panic at the Amarillo station, the man had been an uncomplaining companion. He did not intend to let the Colonel abuse him.

"Where'd you lose your arm?" Call asked him.

"First Manassas," Colonel Terry said.

He looked into the wagon and saw that Call had lost not only an arm, but a leg as well. He had been about to rethink the matter of the pension.

An accountant who burned the account books because of a little weather was not doing his job, in the Colonel's view. At least, he wasn't doing it well enough that his family could simply expect to get his pension. But Captain Call was a frosty sort. It was known that he had killed the manburner, Mox Mox, another sizable threat to the security of paying customers.