City of Widows (8 page)

“Hell's fire, Marshal, don't shoot one of us!” Junior stood cradling the bread tin in both arms.

All the customers were eager to report what had happened. I left them to it and went over to retrieve the Army pistol from under Colleen's table. The man in the duster had found a chair and sat in it now rocking to and fro, supporting his dripping right hand with his left and finding Jesus with every other breath.

“I understand Bill Cody is hiring precision shooters for his exhibition,” I told Colleen. “You will need to practice some before you can pluck a half-dollar from between a man's fingers.”

“I hadn't the luxury of taking aim. I wanted to hit the thickest part of him, but he hadn't any.” She was frowning at the ruined reticule. “This one came from Monkey Ward's. I waited three months for delivery.”

“It didn't go with that rig anyway.”

Having established that there was no need for it, Marshal Ortiz threaded the long barrel of the Walker Colt inside the waistband of his trousers, obliging himself to walk stiff-legged as he made his rounds among the witnesses. You had to smile at the sight. That swift-draw thing was mostly an invention of novelists of the Jack Rimfire stamp, but a man could have eaten the free lunch in the time it would take the fat Mexican to bring that big pistol back out into the open. He listened to the accounts with his head bent, nodding energetically when he comprehended something and lifting his sombrero to scratch at his forelock with a black fingernail whenever some point differed from the others. Several times he crossed in front of the man dying on the floor, being careful each time to avoid treading in the blood with his boots, which were old-time Mexican cavalry issue worn round at the heels but blacked to a high shine on the toes. At length he stopped before the wounded robber in the chair and said something in a polite tone that was too low to make out from a distance of six feet.

“You go to hell, greaser.”

Ortiz straightened with a sad look and came over to me. “I need your help,
señor.
”

“If you're deputizing me to ride with the posse I'm not interested,” I said. “I left all that behind when I came south.”

“Posse? No posse. I need assistance removing this man to the mission.”

I wasn't sure which man he meant. “Why there? Can't the padre come here? I never heard where the Last Rites in a saloon didn't take.”

“You misunderstand,
Señor
Murdock. San Sábado has no jail. When it is necessary to hold a man for the sheriff we use the mission cellar. It has a trapdoor. The old fathers and brothers hid women and children there from Indians in times past. The doctor can bind his hand here but I will require someone to help me get him down the ladder afterward. The shock, it makes a man weak.”

“Can't someone take care of that while you go out after the third man?”

He scratched his forelock.
“¿Por qué?
Why? You have your money.”

“That doesn't make what he did any less illegal.”

“The only reason to chase a man at night is to get back what he has taken, no?”

“What's to stop him from trying again? We don't even know who he is.”

“Oh, we know his name.”

“We do?”

The toothy smile behind his handlebars was eager to please in a way that made me want to push it in. “I apologize,
señor.
I forget you are new. The man with the hole in his hand is Abel Freestone. The man you have killed is called Dutch Tim. Everyone in this country knows who they favor with their company.”

I glanced toward the door the man with the Springfield had gone through. I remembered the vaguely familiar set of his features. “For a twin, Ross Baronet doesn't look that much like his brother, does he?”

“They are not, how do you say, identical.”

“Like hell they're not,” I said.

The man on the floor had stopped squirming.

8

T
HE BELL IN
the mission tower began to bang out Mass a few minutes before seven Sunday morning. The sun wedging its way over the San Andres was pretty but the color reminded me of the corruption we'd had to scrape off the floor of the Princess Friday night. The planks would still need sanding and a fresh application of sawdust to remove Dutch Tim's final traces. As for the rest of him, I'd given five dollars to the little Mexican who sheared hair at the barbershop to scratch a hole in the cramped patch of unconsecrated ground east of town and erect a board. He doubled as town undertaker.

He weighed the gold piece on his palm. “A board for a bandit?”

“I want his friends to see what his line of work got him.”

“You wish an inscription?”

I thought. “‘God's finger touched him and he slept.'”

“More like a full load of double-ought buck,” said Junior when he heard about it.

That was Saturday morning. Now, after four hours' sleep on top of the Saturday night crush, I was in front of the Princess lashing my bedroll across the claybank's big rump. Junior came out yawning bitterly in his morning sheepskin and wideawake hat.

“You got a good day for it,” he said, leaning against a porch post.

“Yes. I can cook my noon dinner on a rock without having to make a fire.”

“Damn shame sending you back out into it. You just got here.”

“No help for it. Your feelings about the sheriff are too strong to negotiate with him and I doubt Colleen's purse pistol shoots far enough to keep her out of some three-legged buck's wigwam.”

“Baronet's bound to think Ross scared you into offering him a cut.”

“I disagree. Ross is out two men because of us.”

“Think he knew what Ross was up to?”

“Maybe. If he did he'll offer me special protection before I even bring up our proposition.” I checked the magazine of the Winchester and scabbarded it.

“Here come
las viudas.”

I turned in time to see the last of perhaps a dozen old women step off the boardwalk on the other side of the street and turn in the direction of the mission. They were dressed all in black from bonnets to shoes, their dark hems dragging like crows' wings in the dust of the street. One or two fingered rosaries; the rest clutched their shawls at the throat and stared straight ahead as they walked, moving with a kind of bicycling gait that raised a yellow plume in their wake. The group swept along like some low-hanging cloud and seemed to drain the life from everything it passed.

Junior said, “California has its swallows and we have our magpies. They gather at one or another's house at first light and go to Mass in a flock. That's how it's been every Sunday for as long as anyone can remember.”

“I thought it was just some leftover legend. I didn't think the widows were real.”

“In a few years they won't be. Eille MacNutt says when he came to town there was twice this many, and three times that many twenty years before that. This is what's left from the last vendetta. Any town that is running out of widows can't be all bad.”

“I'd feel better if I didn't think someone probably said the same thing just before the last vendetta.”

No sooner had he mentioned Eille MacNutt than two women came out the door of the Mare's Nest, tying on head scarves as they followed the widows. Their dresses were more subdued than what they would wear for work and cut for the parlor, but they seemed as bright as plumage against the group that had passed ahead of them.

“It's a sad day when a whore gets religion,” said Junior. “Next comes married and babies and then the Wednesday League to stamp out the things that bring them here to begin with.”

“That's civilization.”

“Now you sound like the old man. And every time he said it he jacked the ranch house up on rails and moved it farther back toward the mountains.” He tipped his hat back with a knuckle. “If that's civilization, what do you call this here?”

I followed the slant of his chin. Another woman had come to the corner from the side street that led to
Señora
Castillo's boardinghouse, paused to check for traffic, and turned in behind the women from the Mare's Nest. She was dressed in blue gingham and had a lace scarf tied under her chin, concealing her hair completely. If it hadn't been for that brief turn of the head I might not have recognized Colleen Bower. Just in case she was bound somewhere else I went on watching as she crossed the bridge over the dry creek and entered the mission behind the others.

“I'll be damned,” I said.

“What kind of odds you giving?” Junior asked.

*   *   *

Three Apaches mounted on slat-sided ponies trailed me most of my first day at a distance of five hundred yards, not even bothering to conceal themselves when I turned in the saddle to look back. That meant either they were just curious or had enough reinforcements nearby to make any action I might take a topic of conversation that night while they were waiting for my brains to come to a boil. Since they knew where I was anyway I built a fire after dark and cooked my supper, but when I turned in I led the claybank a hundred feet away from the embers and spread my blanket there. In the morning they were gone. Frightening the water out of lone white travelers is an Indian sport as old as Montezuma.

The streets of Socorro were crowded even for a town that size of a Monday. I threaded my way between the buckboards and buggies and stepped down in front of the livery, where Ole, the white-haired youth with the tired bones, was sitting on his bench in the shade of his flop brim.

“Give him oats and rub him down.” I held out the reins.

He tipped his head back carefully, as if it might fall off its hinge, and screwed up his face against the sun. “I thought the sheriff run you out last week.”

“I ran back. Oats. Rubdown.” I jiggled the reins under his nose.

“Well, I ain't certain we got the room. Lots of folks in for the hanging. I'll tether him out here for a dollar, though. Feed's extra.”

I chewed on it a second, then reached inside my pocket. His tongue bulged his cheek as he watched.

“Maybe two dollars,” he said.

Without taking my hand out of my pocket I hooked the heel of my right boot under the edge of the bench and shoved. He showed me two soles in need of repair and went right on over in a creditable somersault. Lying on his stomach on a patch of ground past due for shoveling, he spat out gravel. “I'm going to the sheriff!”

“Save the leather, Ole. I'm on my way there now.” I came up with a cartwheel and flipped it. It landed in front of his nose. “Rub him down good. I'll know if you give him anything but oats. Hay makes him windy. And I want him in a stall.”

“We're full up!”

“Give him your room. He's not choosy.”

The door to the county office was locked with a sign on it reading
EXECUTION TODAY.
I took the alley to the fenced-in courtyard behind the building. Jubilo No-Last-Name, the full-time deputy, was standing inside the gate. He had his Creedmoor rifle and any joy his half-caste face might have held had died in the shade of his flat-brimmed Stetson.

“Where's your invitation?”

“I didn't take one, remember? I didn't think I'd be in town for it. I need to talk to the sheriff.”

“He's a mite busy just now.”

“I'll wait.”

Nothing went on in his features. “Might as well wait inside as out.”

“Without an invitation?”

“We're hanging a man today, mister. I don't see nothing to joke about.”

“They're hanging someone somewhere every day,” I said. “I don't see anything but.”

He turned sideways to let me pass. It was a big yard, and popular as the condemned man might have been, Baronet could have spared himself worry about filling it. Even in a town as large and lively as Socorro, events worth attending and talking about after were separated by long quiet times during which many a frontiersman found leisure to wonder why he came west in the first place. Next to Shakespeare and a lewd woman an execution was the best excuse to avoid so much unwelcome self-knowledge. There was the usual ratio of three men to each woman, but plenty enough of the latter to warrant shaking the shelf creases out of the store suit and putting it on. In those days we duded up for hangings the same way we did for funerals and church, and in my trail clothes I was seriously underdressed for the occasion. Not that anyone paid me more than passing attention. That was reserved for the four men on the scaffold.

This was an impressive structure as such things went, it being low-bid business on the county budget and generally a good excuse for the builder to get rid of his warped and knotty lumber. The cornerposts were six-by-sixes, planed smooth as white siding, and appeared to have been set as many feet below ground as they stood above. There was a proper staircase of eight steps instead of a ladder, which as far as getting a man up it who doesn't want to go is no better than a rope, and the gallows itself was sixbraced to the platform and mortised at the yardarm. The whole thing looked as solid as a new barn.

Frank Baronet, in his black frock coat and gray pinch hat, shared the scaffold with a priest in full raiment including the swan's-neck headgear, a much less picturesque pudgy party with his shirt ballooning out under his vest whom I took for the hangman, and the guest of honor. Hernando Padilla would have made two of his Mexican barber counterpart in San Sábado, standing three inches taller than the sheriff and nearly twice as broad across the torso. He was in white shirtsleeves, striped pants, and stockings, with a leather harness strapped around his waist pinning his arms to his sides, and just before the hangman dropped the black hood over his head—standing on tiptoe to reach—I saw that his face was large and badly pockmarked, with the elaborately curled moustaches that are the signature of any tonsorial artist who takes pride in his profession. I wondered which he had used to dispatch Ernestine “Mexican Red” Grosvenor, a razor or just his big hands with their long, oddly graceful fingers. I found out later he had split her skull with a cuspidor.