Streets of Laredo: A Novel (42 page)

She thought about the things she talked about with the women of her village, when they were washing clothes together or cooking for a little fiesta. Those were times when she and the women were apt to get bawdy and talk about the embarrassments or the rewards of love. None of the women huddled between the fires looked as if they had known love recently. Men might have used them, especially the young ones, but that was different. The women might not be able to remember a time when love had been an exciting thing, but Maria decided she wanted to make them try. It was a long time until dawn, and they had nothing but three small, sputtering fires to get them through the night. There had to be something more. Maybe she could get the women to tell stories about their lives.

Maybe the memory of times when life had been exciting would make them want to live through the freezing night.

"Tell me about your first man," Maria said.

She addressed the question to Beulah.

"What?" Beulah said. She thought she must have heard Maria wrong.

"I want to know about your first man," Maria said.

Then she looked at Cherie.

"I want to know about yours, too," she said.

"My first man was a vaquero. He came riding into town, and when he got off his horse and walked to the cantina, his spurs jingled. From the time I heard his spurs, I knew I wanted to be his woman." "Oh, Lord," Cherie said.

Maria waited. Marieta and Gabriela paid no attention; they had not even heard Maria's words. But the oldest woman in the group, a thin, old woman named Maggie, showed a spark of interest. Maggie had been one that Maria had to go back for several times. Once, Maria had found her kneeling by a little bush. She was crouched behind the bush as if she expected it to keep the cold wind from biting her.

Yet Maggie had recovered a little. She looked at Maria with curiosity.

"Did you get the vaquero?" Maggie asked.

"Yes, he was my first husband," Maria said.

"We had good times--but then, he got mean. I still remember the sound of his spurs, the first time I saw him. When I think of him now, it's the spurs I remember." "I was married to a circus man, first," Maggie said. "Mostly, he was a juggler. He could keep seven barbells up in the air at the same time, when he was sober." "Where did you live?" Maria asked.

"Boston, for a little while," Maggie said.

"Then he took me to New Orleans. He was going to marry me, but he never did. Them mosquitoes in New Orleans was bad. I'd get so I wanted to drown myself, rather than be bit by them mosquitoes." "They're bad in Houston, too," Beulah said. "It's swampy down there in Houston." "Jimmy drunk too much to be a juggler," Maggie said. "He'd drink all night and then the next day, he'd miss two or three of them barbells." Maggie chuckled, at the memory.

"Them barbells are heavy," she said. "I couldn't even juggle two. If one was to crack me in the head, I wouldn't be able to walk straight for a week." "You can't go off with men and expect them to marry you," Beulah said. "That's the mistake I kept making. Now, here I am, an old maid." Several of the women looked at her when she said it. Beulah realized that her last remark must have sounded a little odd. She smiled at herself.

"Well, I mean, I never married," she explained.

Maggie, now that she had begun to talk, wasn't interested in listening to anyone else.

"Jimmy cracked himself in the head so many times that he got where he couldn't walk the tightrope," she said. "He wasn't no tightrope walker anyway, but he wanted to be the star of the show. I told him to stay off the dern tightrope, but he didn't listen to me. I started up with a trick rider about that time. Jimmy found himself a high yellow woman, but she had a temper, and Jimmy didn't want nothing to do with women who had tempers." "Didn't you have a temper?" Maria asked.

"No, I was just a girl then," Maggie said.

"I was all in love, and I wanted to do whatever Jimmy wanted me to. I didn't put up no fight, but that high yellow woman did." All the women, even Marieta and Gabriela, were listening to Maggie. Maria had not expected it to be Maggie who talked; she thought Maggie was too far gone. But that proved to be a misjudgment. Maggie had some spirit left. She knew everybody was listening to her, and she liked the attention.

"What was the trick rider like?" Maria asked.

"He was just a trick rider," Maggie said.

"He could stand on his head on a horse, with the horse running full speed, but he wasn't no good with women. I got tired of the circus life and ran off with a smuggler. He was my first husband, and he took me to sea. We'd be rollin' around in one of them narrow bunks and sometimes we'd roll one way and the ship would roll another, and we'd go sailin' right out of that bunk." She cackled at her own memory. "That was forty years ago, that I married Eddie," Maggie said. "I'm surprised I can still remember him. He got caught smuggling niggers, and they hung him." "Was it a crime to smuggle niggers?" Cherie asked. "I thought back then you could buy them and sell them any time you wanted to." "You could, but Eddie wasn't buying them," Maggie said. "He was smuggling stolen niggers.

I can still remember them nigger women, howlin' down in the bottom of that ship. Eddie and the boys would lash 'em good, trying to get them to shut up when they was coming into port. But they would keep on howlin'.

That was how Eddie got caught. I told him he ought to just smuggle buck niggers. The bucks didn't howl as much. But Eddie never listened to me, and he got his neck stretched, as a result." "Men don't listen," Beulah agreed. "I could have made Red Foot rich, if he'd listened to me when we were in the saloon business, in Dodge. I told him it was time to go to Deadwood. They say nearly everyone who opened a saloon in Deadwood in those days got rich.

There's just more loose money where there's miners.

"But we come to Crow Town instead," she added.

"Red heard it was booming, but there sure wasn't no boom when we got there." Maggie was so eager to talk by this time that she could hardly check herself and wait for Beulah to shut up.

"The circus was in St. Louis when Eddie got hung," Maggie said. "I went up to Vicksburg on one boat, and then I rode on another boat that had a train on it." "A train?" Cherie asked. "Why would a train be on a boat?" She decided the old woman was telling lies and nothing but lies. She had thought as much back in Crow Town, too.

Old Maggie did nothing but lie. Cherie didn't resent it, particularly. Maybe the old crone actually believed everything she said.

Anyway, listening to her brag about all the men she'd had was something to do while they were sitting and freezing.

"It wasn't the whole train, it was just the locomotive," Maggie said. "They were taking it upriver somewhere. I couldn't sleep because I got to worrying that the locomotive would bust loose and sink the boat. We got to St. Louis, though, and the first person I saw when I got off the boat was Jimmy. He had almost cut his nose off. It was sewed on, but it didn't look right, and it never did look right after that." "Was it a woman that cut his nose off?" Maria asked. She had heard that among the Apaches, such things occurred.

"No, it was the tightrope," Maggie said.

"Jimmy kept trying to walk it, but he was wobbly from hitting himself in the head too many times with them barbells. He fell off the tightrope, and it hit him right under the nose and nearly cut his nose off." "What's a circus?" Marieta asked. She didn't understand the talk of barbells and jugglers.

"Did you ever get up to Deadwood?" Beulah asked. "I still have a hankering to go." "No, I worked on a riverboat," Maggie said. "I went up and down the river I don't know how many times, until I got tired of hearing the water slosh. Then, I married another fool who got hung, and then I married Ross. I was soon wishing they'd hang Ross. He beat me so bad, I couldn't turn over in my own bed.

Ross had fists like bricks." "How did you get rid of him?" Sally asked.

Sally was about Beulah's age. She had two big moles just above her upper lip.

"Ross stepped on a nail and got blood poisoning and died," Maggie said. "It saved me. He would have broken every bone in my body if he hadn't stepped on that nail." Maggie smiled, and cackled again. She looked like a wicked old woman, but she was still alive, and she liked to talk.

"I didn't go to Ross's funeral. I didn't figure I owed Ross nothing," she said. "But a few days later, I went to the funeral of one of my girlfriends. Three days later, the preacher that preached it came up and asked me to marry him. That's how pretty I was, when I still had my looks. I never knew preachers liked women that much, until the Reverend Jonah got ahold of me." "They do--one got after me, too," Beulah said.

As Maggie and Beulah talked on, a tiredness began to come to Maria. She had kept the women going for three days, leading them, encouraging them, going back for them. She had gathered most of the frozen wood they burned, and she had made the fires. She heard Maggie talking about her preacher, and Beulah about hers, but Maria began to lose the names that went with the stories. The sound of the women's voices lulled her. It was better to hear women talk, even if she was too tired to listen, than to have only the silence and the cold.

Maria would have liked to be fresh, to tell some of her own stories too, but it would have to be another time, when they all reached the railroad and were safe.

Maria's eyes grew so heavy she could not watch the fire. She slumped over, and her serape slipped off her shoulders.

Sally, who was the closest, got up and wrapped the serape back around Maria, pulling it tight so it would not slip off again. She fed the fire a few sticks, from a pile Maria had gathered. Maria had come back for Sally when Sally was freezing, and Sally didn't want her to sleep cold.

"She's tuckered out," Maggie said. Then she went on to tell the women about some of the peculiarities of the Reverend Jonah, the preacher who had loved her in St. Louis, long ago when she still had her looks.

When Lorena got off the train in Laredo, the first thing she saw was a funeral procession, and the first person she spoke to was Tinkersley. As she stepped out of the little railroad station and stopped to watch the funeral procession--it seemed as if everyone in town was following the wagon that had the coffin in it--a tired-looking older man in a slick, brown coat looked at her, and stopped and looked again.

"Why, Lorie," he said. "Could it really be you?" Lorena supposed the mayor must have died. She had never seen such a lengthy funeral procession, in a town the size of Laredo. Even in Ogallala they would have had a hard time getting so many people to march behind a coffin. She looked again at the man who had called her by her name. He had few teeth, and bags hung halfway down his cheeks. He wore a sporty hat, but it was not new. A rat or something had chewed a piece out of the brim.

"Lorie, it's me, Tinkersley," the man said. "It's you, ain't it? Tell me it's you." "I'm Lorena, I'm married now," Lorena said. Tinkersley ran whores and gambled. No doubt he was still running whores and gambling, though not so prosperously as he had been when she knew him. Tinkersley had brought her to south Texas, when she was a young whore. In a San Antonio hotel room, during a fight, he had bitten her on the upper lip, leaving a faint scar that she still had.

Now here he was in Laredo, watching a lengthy funeral procession. She saw a familiar light come into his eyes, from looking at her. She wanted to immediately put it out.

"I've come here to look for my husband. He's with Captain Call, or at least, I hope he is," she said. "Who died?" "Her name was Doobie Plunkert. She was well liked in the town," Tinkersley said. "I liked her myself, although we only met once.

That's why I lent my whores, for the singing.

"I run the whores in this town," he went on.

"They wanted a big singing for Doobie, so I lent them six girls. I just kept back two, to take care of the customers until the funeral is over." Lorena saw the whores, in a group, well behind the coffin hearse, with some more churchly-looking women marching just ahead of them, right behind the wagon.

"I'm surprised they'd let whores sing at a proper funeral," Lorena said. "Was the woman a whore?" "No, she was the wife of a deputy sheriff.

He's gone with old Call, too, like your husband," Tinkersley said. "Sheriff Jekyll raped Doobie, and she took poison and died.

It's a pity. The man could have bought a whore, and spared poor Mrs. Plunkert." The young woman must have felt hopeless, Lorena thought. She hadn't wanted her husband to find out what happened. Lorena set down her valise, leaving it on the railroad station platform, and began to walk along with the funeral.

Tinkersley, after a moment's hesitation, fell in with her.

Lorena didn't try to stop him. What Tinkersley did didn't matter. She supposed it was even rather nice of him, to let his whores sing at the funeral. He probably charged the church a fee, or tried to, but at least he let them sing.

"What kind of poison?" Lorena asked.

"Well, rat poison. She drank most of it in water," Tinkersley said. "They found her by the river. She wasn't quite dead at the time. It was the doctor who noticed that her drawers were torn, and that somebody had hit her a lick or two. They found a little ribbon from her dress in a cell in the jail, and that's what nailed the sheriff." Lorena regretted that the train had come in when it did. She would rather not have known about the death of Mrs. Plunkert. They had never met, of course, but Lorena had been alone, in south Texas, in rooms that were no more than jails, with men who were no different from the sheriff, and who were certainly no better. She had no way out then, and only one way to survive; many times, it had seemed to her a close bargain. In even worse times, when she was taken by Blue Duck and given to the men of Ermoke's band, and then threatened with burning by Mox Mox, she had been reduced to one wish: that there was some way to be dead, and be dead quickly. Although the circumstances of Mrs.