A Noose for the Desperado (9 page)

The pitcher was empty, so she had to go around to the back of the
saloon, where the pump was. In a minute she was back, and I dipped a
rag into the water and washed the blood off Bama's face. He still
didn't move. “Is there a doctor in this place?” I said. She shook her
head. She came over to the bed and put a hand on his chest, on his
throat, on his forehead. “No need doctor. Too much tequila.”

Maybe she was right, but it made me uneasy seeing him stretched out
there, not making a move, hardly breathing. I hadn't meant to hit him.
But, goddamn him, why couldn't he have kept out of my way? Why did
people always have to make my business their business? If they got hurt
they had nobody but themselves to blame.

“Well, I guess there's nothing else we can do. Maybe he'll sleep it
off.”

I sat on the bed, staring at nothing, thinking of nothing.
Downstairs, they were probably dragging the Indian out and maybe
getting ready to bury him, but it didn't mean a thing to me one way or
another. The Indian could never have been born, as far as I was
concerned. I had no feeling for him at all; no hate, no anger. And in
the back of my mind I knew that somebody—Basset, Kreyler, one of the
Indian's friends—was probably planning a way to kill me. That didn't
seem important either. I was getting out of Ocotillo. I was getting out
tomorrow. The girl was standing there beside me, looking at me and not
saying anything. She was still smiling, but it was a different, sweet,
almost holy smile: It reminded me of old women on their knees in front
of altars saying their prayers. It made me uncomfortable having her
look at me that way.

I got up and went out of the room and went into Bama's room and lay
across the bed in the darkness. I knew that she would be there in a few
minutes. And she was.

She didn't say a word. She just lay down beside me and pressed that
hot animal self of hers against me and waited. We both waited, and
nothing happened. She came closer and those soft arms crawled over me,
and then she was breathing her hot breath in my face and mashing her
bruised mouth against mine. Still nothing happened. I could have been
kissing a stone statue and it would have been about the same. For a
while we just lay there. Maybe she thought that it was the excitement
of the fight that made me the way I was, but it was more than that. She
just wasn't what I wanted. After a while she went away.

THE NEXT MORNING I awoke to the sound of sloshing water behind the
thin partition that separated Bama's room from mine. I got up and
sloshed water on my own face, drying it on the tail of one of Bama's
shirts. Then I went into the hall and knocked.

“Bama, are you up?”

He opened the door, bleary-eyed, licking his cracked lips. “Well,” he
said. “I was wondering what happened to you.”

“I spent the night in your room. It seemed easier than trying to move
you. How do you feel?”

“Fine,” he said thickly. “Like I always feel on mornings like this.”
He touched the knot behind his ear and winced.

“That's where I hit you.”

“I know,” he said. “You didn't bring a bottle along, did you?”

“Don't you think it's about time to lay off the stuff for a while?”

He looked at me hazily. He sat on the bed, holding his head as if he
thought maybe it would roll off his shoulders if he didn't. “God,” he
said flatly, “what a rotten, lousy life. You killed the Indian, didn't
you?”

“The sonofabitch asked for it.”

Then he thought of something. “The girl—Marta— where is she?”

“How should I know? I guess she went home, down in the Mexican
section. I don't care where she went.”

“She—she wasn't with you last night?”

“Not after we got you up here.”

He thought for a while, then he said a funny thing. “Maybe there's
some hope for you, Tall Cameron. As unlikely as it seems, maybe there's
some hope for you, after all.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

But he seemed to have forgotten what he was talking about. “Sometimes
I think that memories are the only things that are real. I wish they
were. Are you sure you haven't got a bottle?”

Then I remembered that bottle of greaser poison that Marta had used
oh my wrist. I dug it out from under some dirty clothes and poured him
a small one. “I'm sorry about that lick I gave you,” I said. “But you
butted into something that was none of your business.”

“Yes,” he said, “I suppose I did.” And then he polished off the drink
and shuddered. “But that temper of yours,” he said when he got his
breath, “you ought to learn to control it. It'll turn on you like a bad
woman, and that will be the end of Tall Cameron.”

“Let me worry about my temper,” I said. Suddenly I began to get an
idea—or rather, an old idea that had been floating around in the
cellar of my mind suddenly came to the top. I said, “Bama, if you hate
this place so much, why don't you get out of it?”

He just looked at me.

“What's holding you here?” I asked. “Take your cut of the silver that
we got off the smugglers and go down to Mexico somewhere like I'm going
to do.”

I was telling Bama something that I hadn't even admitted to myself. I
was telling him that I was tired of being alone, that I was even afraid
of being alone. I was asking him to ride with me. God knows why a man
like me would want Bama with him. He would be no earthly good, and his
drinking would probably cause trouble wherever we went.

Then it hit me that maybe I could feel the day coming when I would
look around me and discover how far down I had gone. When that day did
come I would want somebody around that I could still look down on. And
that somebody was Bama.

I think he could see the way my mind was working, but there was no
anger in his eyes, except possibly an old anger at himself. He started
to say something, but he changed his mind at the last moment and had
another drink.

“Think it over,” I said. “Maybe I could use some company if you want
to ride along.”

Looking at the bottle, he said, “Do you really think you'll get out
of Ocotillo?”

“Why shouldn't I? I've got enough money coming to keep me below the
border for a while. After that, something will show up.” Then I said,
“Speaking of money, I think I'll go down and pick up my cut from
Basset. Do you want to come along?”

He reached for the bottle again. “I think I'll just sit here for a
while, if you don't mind. Anyway, I got my cut last night.”

So I left him sitting there, getting an early start on the road to
nowhere.

The bartender was leaning on a broom, contemplating a dark brown
splotch on the saloon floor, when I came in. I said, “I want to see
Basset,” and his head snapped up as if he had never seen me before.

“Sure. Sure,” he said. “Wait a minute, I'll see if Basset's up yet.”

He went back to the rear of the saloon, where I guessed Basset had a
sleeping room next to his office—he struck me as being the kind of man
that wouldn't like to get too far away from his business. After a
minute the bartender came back.

“It's all right. He's in the office.” He was still sitting, fat and
sweaty, behind his desk when I went in, looking exactly the same as the
last time I had seen him. “Well,” he wheezed, “I guess you came by your
reputation honest. You can handle guns, I'll say that for you. You've
got a bad temper, though. You'll have to learn to hold onto that if
you're going to work for me.”

“I'm not going to work for you,” I said. He sat back, blinking folds
of fat over those buckshot eyes. “Now, look here,” he panted. “What's
the matter?”

“I don't like wholesale murder and I don't like robbing people,” I
said. “I just want to get out, like I told you. Now if you'll just
figure out my cut of the silver...”

He lurched his hulk over in the chair and sat there blinking those
eyes at me, breathing through his mouth. “Well,” he said. “If that's
the way you feel about it. Sure, you can have your cut. No hard
feelings.”

He pulled out the big bottom drawer of his desk and opened a
strongbox with a key. He took out a heavy-looking, clanking canvas bag
and shoved it across the desk toward me.

“Here it is,” he said. “You sure you don't want to change your mind?”

“I'm sure,” I said. I didn't bother to count the silver. I just
picked it up and walked out, hoping that I had seen the fat man for the
last time.

I went back up to my room and Bama was still there, drunk, as I had
expected. I heard him talking to somebody as I came up the hall, and
when I got to the door I saw that it was Marta.

“What's she doing here?”

Bama shrugged, “Maybe she's in love with you,” he said, waving his
arms. “Maybe she can't bear to have you out of her sight.”

“She'd better start getting used to it, because I'm going to put
Ocotillo behind me.”

I threw the sack of silver on the bed and she stood there looking at
me. She seemed to come and go like night shadows, and every time I saw
her she seemed to be a different person. I tried to remember how she
had looked the first time I had seen her, there in the dusty street
with fiesta going on all around us. I couldn't remember.

“I think the girl's got the wrong idea about you,” Bama said. “She
thinks you killed the Indian because of her. It wasn't that at all, was
it, Tall Cameron?”

“No,” I said, “it wasn't.”

“See?” Bama said, waving his arms again, as if he had just proved
something.

The girl didn't say anything. She just stood there looking at me, and
I had a feeling that overnight she had grown from a wild animal into a
woman. And not a bad-looking woman, at that.

But I still wasn't interested. “You really ought to do something
about her,” Bama said. “Tell her to go home. It's not decent the way
she walks in and out of this place any time she gets the notion.” Bama
lay back on the bed, holding the empty whisky bottle before him,
staring into it as if it were a crystal ball and he were about ready to
give us the beginning and end to everything. But, instead, he dropped
the bottle and dozed off.

I began digging in my saddlebags, getting my stuff together. “Why
don't you do like he says?” I said. “Go home or somewhere. Why don't
you stay down in the Mexican part of town with your own people?”

“You need Marta,” she said.

“I don't need anybody.” But she didn't believe me.

And I didn't believe myself, for that matter. An old, half-forgotten
memory began to shape in my mind, and I remembered what Bama had said
the day before. “Why don't you tell me about the girl you left in
Texas? The girl you grew up with and loved and planned to marry—”

For a moment bright anger washed over me, a hurting, twisting anger
that made me want to kill Bama as he lay there in his drunken stupor.
But then I remembered Bama's own lost love and the anger vanished. We
weren't so different, at that, Bama and me. We both lived in the past,
because men like us have no future.

The mood hung on and I couldn't shake it off, and I felt completely
lost. A bundle of loose ends dangled in a black nothingness. There was
no turning back, and I wondered if maybe Bama had found the answer in
whisky.

It even occurred to me that maybe Marta was the answer for me, that
maybe she was right and I needed her. But that wouldn't work either,
and I knew it. The best thing to do was to get out of Ocotillo.

I threw some more stuff into the saddlebag, then I went over to the
bed and rolled Bama over to give me room to count the silver. I hadn't
bothered to guess how much my cut would be, but I had seen the pile of
money we had got off the smugglers and I knew that a fair cut would be
enough to take care of me for quite a while.

Bama grunted and lurched up in bed as I untied the sack and dumped
the contents on the blanket.

For a minute I just looked at it. There were some adobe dollars
there, all right, but there was a lot of other things too. I scattered
the stuff around and picked up a handful of round brass disks with
holes in the middle. On one side they had the names E. E. Basset
stamped on them, and on the other side there were the words “Good for
One Dollar in Trade.”

For a minute I thought there had been a mistake and Basset had given
me the wrong sack. But then, from the look on Bama's face, I knew that
it was no mistake. This was the way the fat man paid off: He collected
the silver and gave his men a pile of worthless brass buttons. Quickly
I scattered the stuff some more and sorted it out, and when I had
finished I had thirty-five adobe dollars and sixty-five pieces of
brass.

Finally I straightened up, and what was going on inside of me must
have been written on my face.

Bama seemed suddenly sober. “Take it easy, kid.”

“Is this the way Basset pays all his men?”

“I thought you knew,” Bama said.

“Look at that!” I kicked the bed and brass and silver went flying all
over the room. “Is that what he calls a fair cut? I saw the money they
sacked up on that raid— fifteen thousand dollars, at least. Maybe
twenty thousand. And he hands me thirty-five dollars and sixty-five
pieces of brass. Even if it was all silver. It would still be a long
way from a fair cut.”

By the time the money hit the floor, Marta was on her knees gathering
it up in her skirt. Bama sighed deeply.

“That's the way it is when you work for men like Basset. That's why I
was wondering how you meant to get out of Ocotillo. Anyway, that brass
is as good as the silver, if you spend it in the saloon.”

“I don't intend to spend it in the saloon,” I said. Then I wheeled
and headed for the door. Marta was standing there, the silver and brass
in her skirt, holding it out.

I said, “Keep it. Spend it on saloon whisky, or take it home, or
throw it to the chickens. I won't need it.”

Her eyes lit up and she smiled a smile like a kid who had just found
a wagonful of candy.