Streets of Laredo: A Novel (65 page)

Then it struck her that maybe there was only one miracle. Maybe Joey had killed Pea Eye before escaping.

"Your husband is wounded," Famous Shoes told Lorena. "On a horse it will take you a day to go to him. I don't think he is wounded too bad, but he was shot in the hip. He can't walk good. He has the big shotgun, though. I don't think Joey will go back and bother him." "I'm going now. I'll take him a horse," Lorena said. "I'll take the buckskin, and I'll lead Blackie. Pea Eye can ride Blackie back here." "Wait for daylight. I'll send Billy with you," Maria told Lorena. "He'll find your husband." Lorena felt awkward--it was her own husband who had wounded and maybe even killed Maria's son. But before Lorena could even thank her for offering help, Maria had gone out the door to catch the chicken she had promised Famous Shoes.

Maria stood in the darkness for a while, feeling a mixture of fear, sorrow, and shame. She wondered where her son was and what condition he might be in. She had come to like Lorena, in large part because of the kind interest she had shown Teresa and Rafael. She had asked Lorena to wait and had offered Billy as a guide, because she knew Joey was out there somewhere. Shotgun wounds rarely killed, and if Joey was not mortally wounded, he would just be angry. He would make short work of Lorena. Even with Billy along, it would not be a very safe trip.

Only three mornings earlier, Maria had discovered from Teresa that Joey had been to their village. He had caught Teresa near the field and told her that he would return soon and take her and Rafael away. He told her he would take them to a high cliff in the mountains and throw them off.

Teresa had no fear of the world, nor of her brother. She thought Joey was telling her a scary story, merely to tease her. Maria knew that what Joey had told Teresa was not just a story. She had gone in and told Billy Williams not to let the children wander to the field again.

She told him not to drink whiskey, and to keep his weapons handy. She also told him why she was so concerned, for she knew her son meant what he had said. Joey had always been jealous of his brother and sister; once he had put spiders in Teresa's bed, and had also put a small rattlesnake in Rafael's blankets. But the spiders had not bitten Teresa, and the little snake had crawled away without biting anyone.

If Joey said he would throw Rafael and Teresa off a cliff, then he would try to do it.

Joey was clever, as evil people sometimes were.

Maria knew she would have to be very watchful to forestall her son. She didn't want to kill him; she could not bear the sorrow that would fill her if she had to kill her own child. But she meant to frighten him. Joey had seen her call up her rage, and he knew her rage was no small thing.

But she would have to be very watchful, always. Joey was sly. Only Teresa had known, when he was near the village. He had come and gone, undetected, and had only revealed his presence to his blind sister. But the message he had given to Teresa was for his mother, not his sister. He wanted Maria to know that he meant to harm his brother and sister.

When Maria heard that Joey had been wounded, she wondered why she could not wish him dead. Some lawman would kill him, sooner or later. Why not let it end? Why was the bond so strong that it was a kind of torture? Joey hated her, though she did not know why. She had done nothing to deserve her own child's hatred. Maria had given up trying to understand the hatreds Joey felt. His hate was just there, as fire is there, as blood is there, or desire, or sorrow, or sadness, or death. For her, the fact that Joey hated her was one more painful sorrow, like Teresa's blindness, or like Rafael's poor sheep's mind.

But what if Joey was mortally wounded? If he brought his wounds to her, she would try to heal them, even though the lawman who had been hired to kill him, and the woman whose husband had wounded him, were both in her house. Joey was still her child.

In the morning, watching Lorena ride off with Billy Williams ahead of her, Maria wondered what the two travelers would find.

Famous Shoes said Joey had shot the deputy three times. Lorena might ride up the harsh river, only to find that the husband she had come so far to save was already dead. At times, Maria wondered if life would be so full of sadness had she been born in some other place.

Too much of the sadness of the world seemed to pass through Ojinaga, which, after all, was only a very small village. In cities there must be more sadness, because there were so many more people. She wondered how the people in cities could bear the weight of all the pain around them.

"I want to give him some frijoles. He needs to eat," Teresa said.

"Who?" Maria asked. "Your goat?" "No!" Teresa replied, annoyed. "I don't feed my goat frijoles. I mean the old man. I want to feed him." "He's very sick, I don't think he will eat," Maria said. Call had awakened only once since the operation. He was very weak and had shown no interest in food.

But Maria was surprised, a little later, to see her blind daughter sitting by Captain Call's bed, feeding him tiny bites of frijoles with a spoon.

"I wish your husband had kilt Joey on the spot," Billy Williams said, as he guided Lorena up the Rio Concho. He had led a safe life for the past few years, and he had forgotten the feel of danger. But he felt it that morning, as they rode through the gray country leading two extra horses: one for Pea Eye, and one for Mr. Brookshire's corpse.

Call had awakened as they were getting ready to leave. Lorena told him that he had killed Mox Mox, but the Captain didn't seem to be able to take in the information.

"Who was it?" he asked; most of the names in his head were vague. He knew he ought to be clearer, but he could not make his head sort out the names. His brain was a jumble of memories, and he could not sort them out, although once in a while one name would come clear.

Brookshire was one name that came clear. When Lorena told him that Brookshire was dead, Call felt such sadness that tears rolled out of his eyes. In his years as a Ranger, he had rarely cried at death, though he saw much of it.

But he could not stop himself from weeping about Mr. Brookshire, and he whispered a request about the body. He wanted it brought back so Brookshire could be buried decently.

Brookshire had died for the railroad, and the railroad ought to pay to bring him home to Brooklyn, the place he ought not to have left.

"It was my mistakes that led to it," Call whispered, weakly. "I let him come, but I didn't protect him, and Pea Eye couldn't, I guess." That Pea Eye and not himself had been the one to wound Joey Garza was another thing that churned in his brain and would not settle itself clearly. Pea Eye had always been a corporal; now he was a hero, though he might not be alive to know it. He himself had failed, but Pea Eye had succeeded, or nearly; he had paid a price, but he had succeeded. It was strange knowledge. At moments he was proud of Pea, for he had gone a long way toward finishing the job that Call had started. Pea hadn't wanted to undertake it, and had been sent into danger with inadequate instructions and very little support; yet he had prevailed. Call tried to imagine the fight, but his brain wasn't working well enough. Three or four times as Lorena and Billy Williams were getting ready to leave, Call forgot about Pea Eye entirely and asked them where they were going. Then he remembered Brookshire, and he cried again. Lorena knelt by the bed where Call lay and tried patiently to explain about Mox Mox, but the Captain couldn't grasp it. She mentioned Charles Goodnight, and Call remembered him, but he could not get his mind around Mox Mox.

"The Indian said Joey was badly wounded.

Maybe he died," Lorena said to Billy Williams.

"No, Joey ain't dead, or I wouldn't be this jumpy," Billy Williams said. "I don't get jumpy for nothing. Joey's here somewhere, and he's got his rifle. We better use what cover we can find." Lorena wasn't frightened. She wanted only to find her husband. No killer was going to stop her now. Pea Eye wasn't far away. By the next day, she would have him back in Ojinaga, safe.

Famous Shoes had assured her several times that Pea Eye's wounds weren't mortal. Still, she wanted to hurry. She didn't want to arrive and find that the wounds had been more serious than the old Indian thought. She wanted to hurry, and she grew impatient with Billy Williams, who zigzagged from ridge to ridge and bush to bush.

Billy spent too much time looking around, when what they needed to do was hurry.

Billy knew Lorena was impatient, and he couldn't blame her. But Maria had put her in his care, and when Maria entrusted him with something or someone, he tried to do his best to carry the task through responsibly. Maria was not a woman who trusted lightly; Billy knew she had not had reason to trust, in view of the course her life had taken. Whenever she did repose trust in him, whether it involved watching her children or looking out for livestock on days when she was washing, he tried to do his best. He meant to bring Lorena back alive, and her husband, too. That meant watching as best he could for Joey Garza.

Worse than his apprehensions for Lorena and himself was the fear that Joey would slip around them and strike at Maria in their absence. He would probably strike at her by taking one of her children, as he had threatened to do; one of the children, or both of them. He might even attack his mother. Joey had always been devilish, but he had not always been what he had now become.

"I don't know why Joey went so bad," Billy said to Lorena, as they rode. "I guess he just went bad, and then got worse." When Billy Williams talked to her about Joey Garza, Lorena's only thoughts were of Maria, the mother, and how terrible the knowledge must be that her child had turned out a killer. Lorena could muster no interest in the young outlaw. He had almost killed the Captain and had wounded her husband. The world was full of mean people; trying to explain why they were mean was a waste of time. Better to accept it and guard against it. In her years as a whore, it had been brought home to her over and over again, in varied and painful ways, just how mean some men were. Some were only mean enough to hit, but plenty were mean enough to do worse things. It was not a long road from a beating to a killing, in her view. She had known several men who had taken that road. The sooner all of them were dead, the better place the world would be. But it wasn't her husband's job to bring them to justice, not anymore.

Pea Eye was crouched in the creek when he heard the horses coming. He was nervous; it might be the vaqueros who had killed Ted Plunkert, in which case he would be easy pickings. His hip was paining him terribly, and he couldn't walk. Running him to ground would be an easy thing. He cocked the big shotgun, got out his pistol, and put his rifle near at hand. Of course, the horses had been rather far away; perhaps they would pass him by. But he had to be ready, in case they didn't. Famous Shoes had promised to go tell Lorena where he was, but Famous Shoes was not entirely to be counted on.

When he drove off Joey Garza, Pea Eye had felt elated. The odds looked good that he would live to see his wife and children again. But, in the long nights and long days, his confidence had slowly ebbed. He could scarcely move, and he had lost considerable blood. He had nothing to bandage himself with, and no way to go toward Lorena.

He could only wait and hope; and as he waited, feeling weaker by the hour, his hope began to fail.

He tried to hold up--after all, he was alive and he had driven off the young bandit--but despite himself, deep fears assailed him. It might be that in leaving home to come with the Captain, he had made a mistake that was too serious to correct. He had left his family, and the penalty for that might be a bitter end. He might have to die without speaking to them again. His deepest wish was to be able to make his feelings into words, words that could travel across the distances into the minds of his wife and his children. He wanted them to know his regret. If there was some way they could know how he felt, then dying would not be as bad. But he couldn't do that. The regret was with him, and the distances were real and they were great.

Pea Eye pulled a piece of horsemeat out of his shirt and began to gnaw on it. Several times in the days since Famous Shoes left, he had begun to give up and then had pulled himself back from giving up. He must not give up; Lorena would expect better of him than that. It was hard to choke the dry horsemeat down, but he had to try. He had to take what nourishment he could, to give himself the best chance if there was another fight.

Pea put the strip of horsemeat down for a moment in order to ease himself a little farther back against the creek bank. His hip pained him so that he dreaded any movement. The horses had come quite near. He only heard two. Their slow hoofbeats gave him the feeling that he was being hunted. He had the shotgun tilted upward. When he tried to sit up straighter, his hip hurt so badly that he passed out for a few seconds. He had done that once before on his long walk in Montana. He had passed out from hunger and fatigue, even as he kept walking.

As he walked, he had the sense that Deets, the black cowboy, had come back from the dead to guide him. This time, though, he was not walking--he was only hoping to sit up straighter so as to get off a good shot at whoever approached, in case they were enemies. He took one hand off the gun for a second to pick up the piece of horsemeat and put it back in his shirt. It was no time to be eating, but he didn't want to waste the food, either.

Listening hard, Pea determined that there were four horses coming, not two. That was a bad sign, and it frightened him. He got the strong sense that the horsemen were hunters and that he was the hunted.