A Noose for the Desperado (4 page)

At some unsure point half thoughts became dreams, and then the dreams
vanished and there was nothing for a while.

I don't remember when I first felt the pressure of the door on my
feet, but when I felt it. I was immediately awake, wide-eyed, staring
into the darkness. There wasn't a sound. Not even from the saloon
below. At first, as I lay rigid, I thought that I must have imagined
it, but then the door moved inward again, slowly, carefully.

For just a moment I lay there wondering who in Ocotillo wanted to
kill me. Kreyler? Maybe, but I didn't think he would try it while
Basset was trying to get me on his payroll. Could I have overlooked
somebody in the saloon that had something against me? A brother or
cousin or friend of somebody I had killed? That was possible. I managed
to roll off the mattress without making any noise. I wasn't scared, now
that I knew what was going on. I was awake, but whoever it was at the
door didn't know it. When he found out, he would be too close to death
for it to make any difference.

I eased the mattress away as the crack in the door widened. A figure
slipped into the room without a sound. I still couldn't tell who it
was. White moonlight poured on the bed, but the rest of the room was in
darkness, and for a moment that empty bed confused the killer.

I don't know why I waited. I could have squeezed the trigger and
killed him before he knew what hit him. But for some reason I didn't.

I saw a knife glint dully as he began to move forward. Then I saw who
it was.

I must have given a grunt of surprise, because the figure wheeled
quickly in my direction. I didn't see a thing, but instinct told me to
do something and do it in a hurry. I started to dive, and as I moved to
one side the knife flashed and glittered, cutting the air down over my
head. There was a sudden thud as it buried itself in the wall. I heard
the quivering, disappointed whine of well-tempered steel. Then I
slammed into a pair of legs and we crashed to the floor.

The would-be killer was Marta, the Mexican girl.

I heard clothing tear as we went down. I made a grab for her arms but
she jerked away and gouged bloody holes in my face with her
fingernails. I grabbed again and this time I got her down, my hands on
her shoulders and my knee in her stomach. Her body was smooth and hot,
and somehow hard and soft at the same time, like gun steel covered with
velvet. Neither of us made a sound. We had landed near the window, and
cold moonlight fell on her sweating face. Her blouse had come apart in
the fight, and from her waist up she was mostly naked. She twisted her
head to one side and sank those white, gleaming teeth in my wrist.

I heard myself howl as she broke loose and dived across the floor for
one of my guns. But I grabbed her hair and jerked her back, scratching
and clawing like some wild animal. I could feel warm blood running down
my arm, and when she tried to bite me again I hit her. I hit her in the
mouth as hard as I could. I felt her lips burst on my knuckles and
blood spurted halfway across the room.

“Goddamn you!” I heard myself saying. She was limp on the floor, but
I still had a hold of her hair, holding her head up. “Goddamn you!” I
let go of her hair and her head hit the floor like a ripe melon. She
was as limp as a rag, and I didn't give a damn if she never got up.

I fumbled around the dark room in my underwear until I finally found
my shirt and got some matches. After a while I got the lamp burning and
poured some water into the crock bowl and began washing the blood off
my arm. But I couldn't stop the blood that kept gushing out of the deep
double wound on my left wrist. The pain went all the way up to my
shoulder and down to my guts. Anger swarmed all over me like a prairie
fire.

“Get up, goddamn you!” I said. But she didn't move. I went over and
gathered up my guns and her knife, trailing blood all over the place.
Then I jerked off half her blouse and wrapped it tightly around my
forearm. Pretty soon the bleeding stopped.

After a while she began to stir. She lifted herself slowly to her
knees, shaking her head dumbly like a poleaxed calf.

“Get out of here,” I said tightly. “And stay out. So help me, if you
ever try a thing like that again I'll kill you.”

She looked at me for a long time with those stupid eyes. She looked
like hell. Her mouth was bloody and her lips were beginning to puff.
She didn't look so damned wild and deadly now.

I went over to the door and flung it open. “Go on, get out of here.”

She managed to get to her feet, swaying, almost falling on her face
again. She put one foot out, as if it were the first step she had ever
taken. Then she tried the other one. After a while she made it to the
hallway. I slammed the door and locked it.

I don't know how long I sat there on the springless bed, nursing my
arm and letting the anger burn itself out. But finally the red haze
began to lift and I could think straight again.

She had tried to kill me! That was the thing that got me, when I
began to think about it. But why? I didn't know enough about women to
answer that. A lot of people had tried to kill me at one time or
another, but, before tonight, never a woman. Maybe she was just plain
crazy. I remembered that Kreyler had said that when I had asked him
about her. Maybe Kreyler knew what he was talking about.

My wrist was still giving me trouble. The pain was no longer located
in any one particular spot; the whole arm throbbed and ached all the
way to the marrow of the bone. I got up and washed it again in water
and tried to do a better job of bandaging it, but I couldn't tell any
difference in the way it felt. That was when I heard somebody on the
stairs. Footsteps in the hall.

I found my pistol and blew out the lamp. When the footsteps stopped
in front of my door I was ready. I jerked the door open and stepped to
one side, my pistol cocked.

It was the girl again, Marta.

She had washed the blood off her face but she was still a long way
from being a beauty. Her face was swollen, her lips were split and
puffed all out of shape. But she had found a clean blouse from
somewhere to replace the one I had torn off of her—and in her hands
she had a bottle of whisky.

“Whisky good for arm,” she said flatly. “I fix.”

There was no fight left in her. Her eyes had the vacant, weary look
that you see in the eyes of very old people, or perhaps the dying. I
felt like a fool holding a gun on her, and in the back of my mind I
suppose I felt sorry for what I had done to her, even if she had tried
to kill me. What could I do with a girl like that? I couldn't hate her.
I couldn't feel anything for her but a vague kind of pity.

And I was dead tired and maybe I did need the whisky.

“All right,” I said. “Wait until I light the lamp again.”

I lit the lamp and she came into the room, almost timidly. She took
the bowl of bloody water, threw it out the window, and filled the bowl
up again from the pitcher. “Come,” she said.

She unwrapped my arm and washed the wound again. Then she opened the
bottle and poured the whisky over my wrist and I almost hit the
ceiling.

“Bad now,” she said, “but good tomorrow.”

“If I live until tomorrow. At the rate things are going, there's a
good chance that I won't.”

She began bandaging the wrist again, without saying anything. I
turned the bottle up and drank some of the clear, coal-oil-tasting
fluid. It was the raw, sour-mash stuff that the Mexicans make for
themselves, and when it hit my stomach it was almost as bad as pouring
it in the wound.

“Where did you get this?”

“My house.”

“It may be fine for wounds, but it's not worth a damn to drink.”

“Papacito drink,” she said.

“You like saloon whisky, don't you? Saloons and saloon whisky and
gringos. Why don't you stay in your own part of town?”

For a moment she looked at me with hurt eyes, then went on with her
bandaging. I didn't give a damn what she did. I was just talking while
the whisky cooled in my stomach. It occurred to me that it was a crazy
trick, letting her back into the room. Maybe she had another knife
hidden on her somewhere.

“That good?” she said.

She finished with my arm, then poured some whisky on a rag and
cleaned the blood off my face.

I had a look in the mirror. “That's fine. My face looks like
something left on a butcher's block. I might as well throw away my
off-side gun, for all the good it's going to do me. What the hell's
wrong with you, anyway? Are you just plain crazy or did you have a
reason for trying to get that knife into me?”

She looked down and said nothing.

“Out with it,” I said. “I'm not mad now, I just want to know what
you've got against me.”

She still didn't say anything, so I grabbed her arm and jerked her
around. Then I got a handful of her hair and snapped her head back.

“Tell me, goddamnit! Did somebody pay you to try a trick like that?”

We stood there breathing in each other's faces. Finally she said,
“No.”

“Then why?”

She shrugged. “I hate you—for a little while. You shove Marta away.
I think maybe I kill you.”

It took me a minute to get it, and after I finally did get it I
didn't understand it. Just because I hadn't wanted to go to bed with
her, she tried to kill me!

She was looking down again. Her eyes still had that dull, beaten look
in them, and I had a queer feeling that she was crying and the tears
were falling on the inside. I didn't know what to make of her. It made
me uncomfortable just looking at her.

She said flatly, “I go now.”

“That's fine.” I went over and opened the door. She waited a long
minute, watching me, as if she thought maybe I was going to change my
mind and ask her to stay.

I didn't. All I wanted was to get her out of here and never see her
again.

After she had gone I lay a long while trying to figure her out. But I
couldn't do it, and along toward dawn I lost interest and tried to get
some sleep. And at last I did sleep, and dreamed restless dreams,
mostly of my home in Texas.

Fiesta was over when I woke up the next morning. Most of the Mexicans
had gone back to their one-mule farms or their sheep herds, or wherever
Mexicans go when fiesta is over. My room was a mess, with blood all
over the floor, and the bed knocked around at a crazy angle, and
everything I had scattered from one corner to the other. My wrist was
swollen stiff and hurt like hell.

I picked up some of the things, shirts and pants and a change of
underwear that had been kicked out of my saddlebags in the scuffle, and
put them back where they belonged. I stood at the window for a while,
looking down on the gray scattering of mud huts that was Ocotillo, and
for a minute I almost made up my mind to get out of there. The place
was crazy, and everybody in it was crazy. I didn't want any more to do
with it.

But where would I go? Back to Texas and let some sheriffs posse
decorate a cottonwood with me? To New Mexico or California, and take my
chances with the Cavalry or United States marshals?

I didn't think so.

It looked like Ocotillo was the end of the line, whether I liked it
or not. And that proposition of Basset's—I'd have to listen to that,
too, whether I liked it or not, because I didn't have any money and I
didn't know of anybody that I could go to for help.

For a week, maybe, I thought. Or a month at the most. I could stand
it that long. When I got some money together I could find a place to
hole up until the law lost interest in me. Maybe I'd go across the line
into Sonora, or Chihuahua, or some place like that. But it would take
money.

There was one pretty thing about this business of Basset's. Robbing
Mexican smuggling trains wasn't like robbing an express coach or a bank
or anything else that the local law had an interest in. The law didn't
give a damn if a smuggling train was robbed. They probably took it as a
favor.

But it's funny the way a man's mind works on things like that. I had
never had anything to do with robbing people. Killing—that was
different. A man had to kill sometimes in this wild country. In the
bitter, hate-sick Texas that had been my home, it had been the accepted
way of settling arguments between men. Life was cheap. The lank, quiet
boys of Texas had learned that when they rode off to fight for the
Cause and the Confederacy, when most of them didn't even know what
Confederacy meant, or care. Killing had become a part of living. But
robbing people—that was something new that I had to get used to.

There were only the bartender and one other man in the saloon when I
got down there. The bartender was kicking the wreckages to one side and
making a few passes with a broom, the other man was eating eggs and
side meat at the bar. The place was dark and sick with the stale, sour
smell of whisky and smoke and unwashed bodies. The man looked at me
quietly as I came in and stood at the end of the bar. The bartender
glanced at me and said:

“Eggs?”

“Fried on both sides, and some of that side meat.”

The man smiled wearily and pushed his own plate away half finished
and stood up. “Eggs and side meat,” he said. “Side meat and eggs. It
wouldn't surprise me if I didn't start cacklin' like a chicken before
long, or maybe gruntin' like a hog. Sometimes I think I'll get myself a
Mexican woman, like some of the other boys, and let her cook for me.
But I can't stand that greaser grub, either.” He smiled a thin, pale
smile. “Lordy, what I'd give for a mess of greens and a pan of
honest-to-God corn bread!”

“Eggs sound good to me,” I said, “after living out of my saddlebag,
on jerky, for a spell.”

He smiled again, that sad, faraway smile. “Wait till you've choked
'em down as long as I have.”

The bartender went back to the rear somewhere and I began to smell
grease burning. The man who didn't like side meat and eggs glanced
lazily at my scratched face and bandaged wrist, but his pale eyes made
no comment.