Duster (9781310020889) (8 page)

Jesus guided us out, pulling at Stardust's
reins like a proper teamster. This time I wasn't about to go dozing
off for a nap—I was too busy watching our back trail for some sign
of Texas rustlers coming after us. I wasn't real positive what we
could of done had I seen any so it is a good thing we weren't
followed. It seemed a long time before we got back to the road.

By the time Jesus broke his way through the
last of the thorn and got both mules pointed down toward Fort Ewell
again, the sun was up well enough to make the road smell all heat
and dust and dry. After being in the brush so long it seemed
strange to hear the mules plopping quiet-like in soft dust instead
of having the rattle and snap of breaking brush around us when we
moved.

We kept the pace up and had got maybe a mile
down the road when we come up on a rider moving toward us. He was a
stranger to me, but he looked like a real important man. He was up
on the biggest, prettiest bay mare I'd ever seen—which, of course,
pretty well meant he wasn't no cowman even if his clothes hadn't
already told us that. A cowman won't hardly ride anything but a
gelding. Then, too, his rigging was built for pretty and not for
using as it was all carved and conchoed and had one of them
Californy-style center-fire cinches that you never see on a working
pony in Texas.

He was a big man and rode real stiff and
straight up like he was daring that mare to mess with his dignity.
To make it even plainer he was dressed in a fancy, dark gray suit
that fit his shoulders too fine to have come off any rack, and
there was a neat, black string tie slipped under a collar that
hadn't even begun to wilt (which was maybe from him carrying his
chin so high, for I never otherwise seen a collar so neat so far
out from anywhere). He topped the outfit off with a narrow brim hat
about the color of a dove's belly—pearly gray, I think the
storekeepers call it—that had never thought to be used for watering
a horse or wiping sweat off a worn-down animal.

Jesus hauled at the reins until we was over
to the side of the right-of-way and stopped to show respect. Jesus
glanced at me like he expected me to say something, but I shook my
head just enough for Jesus to see, and the rider went by without
bothering to howdy us or even throw his nose in the air to snub us.
I wasn't used to something like that from a stranger and might of
said something if I'd been bigger.

After the fellow was gone on down the road
where he couldn't hear, you can bet I told Jesus something.

"Just what kind of dummy do you think I am?"
I asked him. "Looking at me like that. I may not be growed and
muscled yet, but there's more than bone between my ears."

"Well," he said, "I didn't know ..."

"Well you ought," I told him. "I know as
good as you that Juan Estrada may be a sneaky, thieving, no-account
Mex rustler. But he saved our hides back there an' it'd be pretty
poor of me to tell on him after a trick like that."

"I just thought you might of knowed that
fella going past and mighta told him or something."

"Now, just how do you figure I'd know a
fancy dude like that? Or want to know anyone'd pass without
speaking?"

Jesus sort of grinned a little. "I figured
if I knowed who he was you might be a speaking 'quaintance."

That got my curiosity up, but I sat quiet
for a while, not wanting to give in and ask him who it was had
passed us. Jesus just rode on looking straight ahead though he
tricked himself by letting a bit of a smile tickle the corners of
his mouth from time to time. He was busting to show off knowing who
that fellow was.

Now, if there is one thing I can say about
myself without bragging, it's that I can be just about as set-down
stubborn as anyone else once I take a notion to it. I was already
plenty riled about that uppity stranger going by us like he was
better than anyone else in the whole of South Texas, and then with
Jesus so smug about knowing something I didn't, well, it set me
off. I wasn't about to ask Jesus anything right then. I wasn't even
going to give him the satisfaction of looking his way. But then I
decided it would be better if Jesus knew I wasn't going to let him
get away with being so uppity, so I looked over at him and said,
"Well, I just don't care who that fella was, and you can set there
and keep it to yourself from now until the Frio freezes over, for
all I care."

Jesus grinned and said, "I'll do that." He
said something more in Mex, but I couldn't understand it.

That's a funny thing. Everybody figures just
because you grow up in a place where a bunch of Mexicans live you
can just naturally speak Mex, but it don't work that way. There's
been Mexican families living around this part of Texas since just
about forever, I guess. They was here before us and maybe they'll
be here after us too ... I don't know. But we never saw much of
them, since we 'most never got to town and sure never had money
that we could afford hired hands to work for us.

I guess things had been some different
before Pa left for the war, 'cause I can remember hearing about the
house raising just after Ma came out from East Texas carrying me
along in a wagon with her to join Pa at our new ranch near Dog
Town. Pa got along pretty good with just about everybody, and I
remember hearing that some of Jesus's own kin had helped raise our
house with cottonwood logs hauled all the way out from along the
Frio.

Later, when a lot of the men had gone off,
Mex bandits started coming all the way up into McMullen County
looking for something to steal, and the men that was left to home
for one reason or another started taking it out on the Mex families
that was their neighbors. I guess it was easier to beat up on
somebody close to home. It saved them a ride down to the border,
and I guess some figured one Mexican was about as guilty as the
next.

That didn't do a whole lot toward making a
spirit of neighborliness, and for a while there Mexicans and Texans
rode shy of each other.

There wasn't much of that
going on right around Dog
Town, but
between everybody being just a little bit cautious about folks who
talked different than them and of course us keeping off to
ourselves at the ranch anyway, I just didn't know much at all about
Mex talk.

Now that I think on it, it was maybe odder
that Jesus could speak English so good than for me to not speak
Spanish. Yet, I never once knowed a Mex who couldn't talk pretty
good English when he wanted to. Maybe they tried a little harder
than us ... I don't know.

Anyhow, Jesus shut up after that and rode on
real quiet, not doing much of anything but watching the road and
smirking to himself from time to time. That really did get me mad,
and I decided I wasn't going to give in no matter what he done.

For a time it was all right going on that
way, but after a while I commenced to get thirsty again. And Jesus
had the water gourd. I went on without saying anything, though, for
most of the morning until I was getting worried that if I didn't
ask for the water pretty soon I wouldn't be able to talk. Once that
dumb Jesus, looking just as smug as ever, took the gourd off his
saddle and drank a big swallow out of it, then put it back without
offering it to me nor even glancing my way. It was enough to make
me mad all over again.

I thought on it some, though, and after a
while I saw that the only thing I had to fuss with Jesus about was
that dude we had passed in the morning, and as long as I didn't ask
about him there wasn't no reason I couldn't talk to Jesus about
other stuff.

"Jesus," I said finally, "there's no need
for you to hog all that water."

He grinned over at me like he had won
something off me even though the water hadn't anything to do with
any of it. "Why, sure," he said, "all you got to do is ask. Any
time at all." He reached behind him and fished up the gourd and
passed it over after taking the plug out for me.

I mean to tell you that water tasted good.
It wasn't very cool, but it really hit the spot.

After I give him back the
gourd, Jesus said, "You're just
an awful
lot like that mule you're riding. You're both stubborn, and you're
both ugly. But I think I got you figured out."

Well, I sure wasn't going to ask him about
that, not after all the other troubles I had with him, so I kept my
mouth shut.

Jesus pulled the mules off to the side of
the road and let them crop some curly mesquite grass that was
beginning to show in patches along the way. When the mules were
rested we went on, and before long we could see that the brush was
getting thinner and the grass more frequent. Finally, just a little
after noon, we broke out of the brush altogether and there wasn't
nothing in front of us but dirt and grass and low, scrubby stuff.
That and the old wood bridge on the Nueces.

That bridge and the mud huts on the far side
of the river looked almighty good to me right then.

"Eeeeeya," Jesus hollered. "Duster, even if
these old mules drop dead right here we've made it to Fort
Ewell."

I gave Stardust a good thump, and him and
Gert took off across that last stretch as hard as they could go.
They got so carried away with smelling water or something that they
actually trotted most of the way across the flat.

"Don't stop 'til you get to the water
barrel, Gert, and then you best stand back and let me in first," I
yelled.

We clomped and stumbled our way down the
road and onto the bridge. The mules didn't much like the hollow
sound their hooves made on the wood of the bridge and they shied
just a little. Maybe they'd never before been any place where there
wasn't good, solid ground underneath them, but a tap on Stardust's
backside woke him up to the idea that there was more solid
territory ahead and we hustled on over to it.

That bridge was something new for me, too.
I'd heard about the Nueces just about all my life, and up toward
Dog Town it wasn't really very far south of us since the Nueces
took a bend north to Three Rivers where it and the Frio and the
Atascosa all come together. But somehow I'd never seen it—staying
close to home like I had.

The way most folks talk about the
Brasada—the big brush thicket down below the river—you'd think the
Nueces was the dividing line between hell and Texas. To hear them
tell it there wasn't much south of the Nueces except murderers,
rattlesnakes, and thorns.

When we got right up on the bridge so we
could see down to the water, I was about half-expecting to find the
river-banks made of brimstone and to see Old Scratch himself
peeking out of the mesquite.

What we found, of course, wasn't so special.
The Nueces was a sort of ordinary stream running nice and quick and
not even carrying enough clay then to make it look bloody. It was
something of a disappointment after all the buildup.

"Is not so different than our Frio, eh?"
Jesus said, like he was reading my mind.

"It sure ain't what I expected," I admitted.
"It seems awful tame."

"I seen it lots of times before," Jesus said
with a touch of brag in his tone like he'd been everywhere from St.
Louie to New Orleans.

"Well, now I seen it too."

By then we were all the way across and
walking on the Brasada side of the river. In truth it didn't look
the least bit different from our side, and Fort Ewell didn't look
much different than Dog Town except for being some smaller and only
having one log building; everything else was 'dobe.

"We'll go on up to the store and see will
they tell us where to find my cousin," Jesus said.

"Long as they got some water that's fine
with me."

It was plain enough that the wood building
was the store. It had a big old plank nailed up across the front
with "General Mercantile and Transit" printed on it. The sign was
weathered, but it was plain enough to make out at a pretty good
distance.

I noticed Jesus setting up some straighter
in the saddle and reaching up to tug at his hat.

"Oh, I reckon you're pretty enough already,
Jesus," I said.

"Good enough for you maybe, but this here's
a place that may have a pretty little senorita somewheres. I got to
look spruced up jus' in case we are lucky."

"Fat chance you'd have getting any decent
girl to look your way twice, unless it's to laugh at you," I said.
"And you smell 'most as bad as me, and that's 'most as bad as these
mules."

"We'll fix that up as quick as we can find
my cousin's house," he promised.

Jesus plow-reined us to a stop in the
general neighborhood of the store building, and we slid to the
ground. I got to admit I didn't feel a whole lot of regret getting
off that mule for the last time. Forty miles and one night just
isn't long enough to make me attached to an animal that ugly.
Though maybe I was getting sort of used to the one-eyed beast. I
mean, she didn't look quite as bad now as she had in Dog Town.

I set to dipping some water from a barrel
and pouring it into the trough for the mules while Jesus got them
tied up good. It wouldn't do to have them run off now that we'd got
them all the way to Fort Ewell. Then the both of us went inside the
store.

It wasn't much of a place, but it was all
the store there was in Fort Ewell. I'd heard somebody say once that
it had been here off and on since back during the Mexican War when
some American dragoons had camped in the area. They'd named it Fort
Ewell though as far as anyone could recall there hadn't been a
trooper in blue or gray near the place since.

Anyway I could sure believe the store had
been around that long. I could tell that from the smells of bacon
and long-gone beef and Mex peppers and a bunch of other stuff that
I couldn't figure out right offhand. The place was sort of dark and
cool and seemed to wrap around us with all those old, warm smells
and a real quiet yellow-brown light that managed to get through the
greased paper set in windows up under the eaves.