Valdez Is Coming (12 page)

With the first light this morning they had found tracks, fresh prints of two horses that showed the horses were walking. They weren’t sure of this man they were following; he didn’t try to keep to rocky ground or cover his tracks, and he walked the horses, maybe thinking he had enough time. Still, when they came to the flat open stretch with the trees in the distance, they were careful, knowing he could be waiting for them in the trees. So they made a plan as they crossed the flat stretch: they would spread out before they got to the cover and come up from three sides and if he was in there they’d have him. But they never got to the trees.

“Listen, it was flat open,” the man with the shattered arm said, “out to the sides as far as you could see and a mile in front of us. There was no cover near, hardly any brush to speak of. So it was like he rose up out of the ground behind us. He says, ‘Throw down your guns and come around.’ This voice out there in the middle of nothing. We stop and come around, keeping our iron though, and there he is standing there. I swear to God there was nothing for him to hide behind, yet we’d come over the ground he was standing on just a moment before.

“He says, ‘Go back and tell Mr. Tanner we’re waiting for him.’ That’s what he said, waiting for
him
. Meaning he wasn’t talking to anybody else. Then he says, ‘Tell Mr. Tanner I got something to trade him.’ We looked, but she wasn’t anywheres around. Just him, and three of us. I guess we all had it in mind to bust him and he must have saw it. He says again, ‘Throw down the guns.’ We don’t move. He says it again and this time when we don’t move he brings up the Colt gun in his right hand and puts one through my arm.”

He looked toward the dead man and the man who was lying on the ground shot through the lungs. “They went for theirs with the sound of his piece, and he brings up this little scatter gun in his left hand and lets go both barrels and them two boys take it square. This here boy partly in front of the other, a little closer, and it killed him in his boots.

“Then he says to me, ‘You tell him, he wants his woman, come out here with five hundred dollars.’

“I say to him, ‘Well, where’s Mr. Tanner supposed to come? You going to have signs put up?’ And then he points.”

The man with the shattered arm, standing by the loading platform, turned half around and raised his right arm, his finger extended; he moved it gradually southwest.

“There, you can see it,” the man said, “though it was closer where we were at and you could see it better — twin peaks, the one a little higher than the other. He says for you to point to them and he’ll get in touch with you.

“I say to him, ‘Well, what if Mr. Tanner don’t feel like coming?’

“And he says, standing there with the shotgun and the Colt gun, ‘Then I kill his woman.’ ”

Frank Tanner stared at the twin peaks ten miles in the distance. After a few minutes, when he became aware that he was sitting in a rocking chair on the loading platform and his people were below him in the square, waiting for him to say something, he waved his hand and they cleared out, taking the dead man and the lung-shot man and the man with the shattered left arm, who thought Mr. Tanner might say something to him personally. But he didn’t — just the wave of the hand.

The segundo stayed; he was the only one. He waited awhile, getting the words straight in his mind. When he was ready he said, “You go after him, we don’t make the trip.”

He waited, giving Mr. Tanner a chance to say something, but the only sound was someone working the pump handle, a rattly metal sound in the heat settling over the village.

“We go out there and look for him,” the segundo said. “Sure, we find him, but maybe it take us a few days, a week, if he knows what he’s doing. We’re out there, we’re not in Sonora giving the man the things he’s paying for. How much is he paying?” The segundo waited again. He said then, “He pay plenty, but nobody pay you to go up in those mountains.”

The segundo stood in the sun waiting for Mr. Tanner to say something. He could stand here all day and this son of a bitch Mr. Tanner might never say anything. The segundo was hot and thirsty. He’d like a nice glass of mescal and some meat and peppers, but he was standing here waiting for this son of a bitch Americano to make up his mind.

So he said, smiling a little, “Hey, what if you don’t go out? You let him kill her.” His smile broadened and he gestured as if to say, Do you see how simple it is? He said, “Then what? You get another woman.”

Frank Tanner, sitting in the rocker, looked at his segundo. He said, “If you were up here I’d bust your face open. And if you wanted any more I’d give you that too. Do you see the way it is?”

The segundo had killed five men in his life that he knew of and had probably killed more if some of them died later or if he wanted to count Apaches. He had hanged a man he caught stealing his horses. He had killed a man with a knife in a cantina. He had shot a man who once worked for him and insulted him and drew his revolver. He had killed two Federales when the soldiers set an ambush to take the goods they were delivering in Sonora. And with others he had wiped out an Apache
ranchería
, shooting or knifing every living person they found, including the old people and the children. But the segundo was also a practical man. He had a wife in this village and two or three more wives in villages south of here, in Sonoita and Naco and Nogales. He had nine children that he knew of. Maybe he had eleven or twelve. Maybe he had fifteen. He had not wanted to kill the Apache children, but they were Apache. He also liked mescal and good horses and accurate rifles and revolving pistols. He was number two and Mr. Tanner was number one. He was thinking,
Shit
. But he smiled at Mr. Tanner and said, “Why didn’t you say so? You want to get this man, we go get him for you.”

Frank Tanner nodded, thinking about the woman.

The time he was in Yuma he thought about women every day. He’d thought about women before that, but not the same way he did in that stone prison overlooking the river. He remembered how the men smelled at Yuma, breaking rocks for twelve hours in the sun, working on the road, and coming back in to eat the slop. That’s when they’d start talking about women. Frank Tanner would think, They don’t know a real woman if they see one, except for some whore who’d smile and laugh and give them everything and rot their insides. No, when he was at Yuma he pictured a blond-haired girl, real long hair and a pretty face and big round breasts, though she wouldn’t be too big in the gut or the hips. The hips could be more than a handful, but she’d have to have a nice sucked-in white gut. That’s the one he pictured at Yuma, after he and Carlisle Baylor got caught with the goddam branded cows they were running into old Mexico without any bill of sale. Three years picturing the blond golden-haired woman. Two years more raising money and buying stock to sell across the border, buying and selling horses and cattle and dynamite and about anything he could lay his hands on they didn’t have down there. He’d bought twenty-five-year-old Confederate muskets and sold them. He bought a few old Whitworth field pieces and sold them too. He’d made money and met people who knew people and pretty soon he was even selling remounts to the United States Cavalry at Fort Huachuca. And that was where he saw the woman, the girl or woman or however you wanted to think of her, there at Huachuca, married to the drunk-ass sutler, who never went a day without a quart of whiskey or a bottle of mescal or even corn beer if he couldn’t get any mescal. There she was, the one he’d seen every day at Yuma and about every day since, the blond golden-haired girl who was built for the kind of man he was, sitting in their place talking to the drunk-ass sutler and looking at the woman every chance he got. A year of that; a little more than a year. Talking to her when he wasn’t around and trying to find out things about her, about them. Trying to find out if she felt anything for the drunk or not. She felt something when he beat her — sometimes you could see the bruises on her face she couldn’t hide with powder — but maybe she liked it. You could never tell about women.

He would have taken her away from the drunk alive, and once he was dead there wasn’t anything else to think over. He took her and she came with him. He would marry her, too, but he had things to do and she’d have to wait on that; but in the meantime there wasn’t any reason they couldn’t live as husband and wife. She saw that and agreed, and she was better than he ever imagined in Yuma she would be. She was real now and she was his, and there wasn’t any goddam broken-down Mexican nigger-loving town constable going to run off with her into the hills and threaten to kill her. Valdez, or whatever his name, was a dead man and he could roll over right now and save everybody a lot of time.

Tanner was looking off at the hills that climbed into the Santa Ritas and the twin peaks, far away against the hot sky.

“What’s up there?” he said to the segundo.

“Nothing,” the segundo answered.

“Why would he want us to track up there?”

“I don’t know,” the segundo said. “Maybe he’s got a place somewhere.”

“What kind of place?”

“An Apache camp he’s been to,” the segundo said. “He knows the Apache — the thing he did to the three of them in the open country, hiding where there’s no place to hide.”

“He didn’t seem like much,” Frank Tanner said.

“Maybe,” the segundo said. “But he knows the Apache.”

R. L. Davis got drunk trying to work up nerve to tell what he did to Bob Valdez and never did tell it. He went over to Inez’s, but they wouldn’t let him in. Then he didn’t remember anything after that. He woke up in the Maricopa bunkhouse when a hand came in and poured water all over him. God, he felt awful. So it was afternoon by the time he got out to Mimbreño.

There seemed to be more activity than the time he was here before, more men in the village sitting around waiting for something, and more horses and more noise. He rode up the street not looking around too much, but not missing anything either. He hoped Mr. Tanner would be outside, and he was, the same place he was the last time, up on the loading platform. The problem was to tell him before Mr. Tanner gave any orders to have him run off or tied to a cross or whatever he might do; so he kept his eyes on Mr. Tanner and the second he saw Mr. Tanner’s gaze land on him, R. L. Davis yelled out, “I know where he is!”

They looked at him, all the people standing around there, and let him ride over toward the platform where Mr. Tanner was waiting.

“I think I know where he is,” R. L. Davis said to Mr. Tanner.

“You think so or you know so,” Tanner said.

“I’d bet a year’s wage on it.”

“Where?”

“A place up in the mountains.”

“I asked you where.”

“I was thinking,” R. L. Davis said. “Let me ride along and I can show you. Take you right to it.”

Tanner kept looking at him deciding something, but showing nothing in his face. Finally he said, “Step down and water your horse.”

6

Most of the day the woman, Gay Erin, rode behind Valdez as they climbed out of the flatland and across sloping meadows that stretched toward pine timber, in the open sunlight all morning and into the afternoon, until they reached the deep shade of the forest. She noticed that Valdez seldom looked back now. When they had stopped to rest and he stood waiting as the horses grazed, he would look north sometimes, the way they had come, but he stood relaxed and could be looking at nothing more than the view.

Earlier this morning, once it was light, he had looked back. He stopped and looked back for some time as they were crossing flat, open country. When they reached the trees he made her dismount and tied their horses to a dead trunk that had fallen. She watched him walk out of the trees, out across the flats until he was a small figure in the distance. She watched him squat or kneel by a low brush clump and then she didn’t see him again, not for more than an hour, not until the three riders appeared and she heard the gunfire. He came back carrying his shotgun; they mounted again and continued on. She asked him, “Did you kill them?” And he answered, “One. Maybe another.” She asked, “Why didn’t you tie me? I could have run away.” He said to her, “Where would you go?”

They spoke little after that. They stopped to rest in a high meadow and she asked him where they were going. “Up there,” he answered, nodding toward the rock slopes above them.

Another time she said to him, “Maybe you don’t have a natural call to do certain things, but I do.” He smiled a little and told her to go ahead, he wouldn’t look. She stayed on the off side of her horse and didn’t know if he looked or not.

At first she wondered about him, and there were questions she wanted to ask; but she followed him in silence, watching the slope of his shoulders, the easy way he sat his saddle. In time the pain began to creep down her back and into her thighs; she held on to the saddle horn, following the movement of the horse and not thinking or wondering about him after a while, wanting this to be over but knowing he wasn’t going to stop until he was ready.

When they reached the edge of the pine timber he dismounted. Gay Erin went to the ground and stretched out on her back in the shade. She could feel her lips cracked and hard and dirt in the corners of her eyes. She wanted water, to drink and to bathe in, but more than water she wanted to stretch the stiffness from her body and sleep.

She heard Valdez say, “We’re going to move. Not far, over a little bit.” Looking up at the pine branches she closed her eyes and thought, He’ll have to drag me or carry me. She could hear him moving in the pine needles and could hear the horses. She waited for him to come over and tell her to get up or kick her or pull her to her feet, but after a while there was no sound, and in the silence she fell asleep.

When she opened her eyes she wasn’t sure where she was and wondered if he had moved her. The trees above were a different color now, darker, and she could barely see the sky through the branches. She stretched, feeling the stiffness, and rolled to her side. Valdez was sitting on the ground a few feet away smoking a cigarette, watching her. She pushed herself to a sitting position. “I thought we were moving.”