Widowmaker Jones (8 page)

“Tell him to stop.” Fonzo eared back one hammer on his shotgun.

The mounted rurales shouldered their rifles as one, all pointing at him and Kizzy.

“I don't think you want to do that,” the officer said.

Vlad was almost beside himself, alternating between growling and whimpering, but thus far obeying Kizzy's command to stay where he was.

“I will shoot your dog if he growls again,” the officer said.

Kizzy kept her pistol pointed in the general direction of the rurales, but knelt over Vlad and took hold of his collar. The two rurales from the equipment wagon came back shaking their heads, as if they had found nothing worth their troubles. They stopped before the officer, casting glances at the living quarters wagon as if waiting for his permission to search it, too.

“Are you smugglers?” the officer asked Fonzo.

“We are circus people,” Fonzo replied.

“Circus?
¿Payasos?
”

“What?” Fonzo didn't understand the word.

“I think you are clowns.”

“You're no better than Cortina.”

“This police business, it don't pay so good. My men need food for their bellies and cartridges for their guns. These things we must get if the roads are to be safe.”

“Tell your men to come back with our mules.”

The officer looked up the road. His men and the mules were already a quarter of a mile away. “They don't hear me. You come back to Piedras Negras. We settle this there. The court will decide, if you want.”

“You've left us nothing to get there.”

The officer's demeanor changed and his speech became slower and more filled with malice. “We've left you everything when we could have taken all. Go back across the river and be glad we were kind to you. Consider this a lesson.”

The officer gave another order and rode away with his men in double file behind him. Fonzo stepped out into the road behind them.

“They can't do that,” he said.

“I'm afraid they can.”

“We should have fought them. I should have fought them. I am sorry that I am a coward.”

“You are no coward, no more than I. They would have killed us, as sure as the world.”

“I don't know what to do.”

“What we always have done. Make do.”

Fonzo turned and went to the one horse remaining to them, standing in the traces beside its dead teammate. “I will go after them.”

“There were too many, and they are the law.”

“Not the rurales. Cortina,” he said. “He can't go far before night, and I can catch him if I ride hard.”

“And what then? Will you fight him and his men? Will you go wandering off like
vadni ratsa
and get yourself killed and leave me alone?”

He calmed slightly at the mention of the old Romani legend of the wild, wandering goose. “I will ask for help in Piedras Negras.”

“You saw how Cortina walked openly there. Who will help when he is feared? The rurales? They just robbed us.”

“Yes, they have no honor, but what would you have me do? I am the man of this clan.”

“We are but a clan of two. Listen to me and go catch that mule while I bury Bullsar. And then we will hitch it to the wagon with our last horse.”

“What about the equipment wagon?”

“We will leave it for now. Maybe we will pass someone who can watch it for us while we are gone. Perhaps we can hide it by the river and cover it with brush.”

“Someone will find it and steal it while we are gone. I think everyone in Mexico must be a thief.”

“And who will not tell you the same about Gypsies?”

“True, that, but must we always suffer such bad luck?”

“The droppings of the flying bird never fall in the same spot.”

“Father may have said that, but they have landed on us too much of late for me to believe it.”

“As I said, we make do. Maybe the wagon will be okay if we aren't gone long.”

“Gone to where? Back to Piedras Negras? And after who? The rurales or Cortina? What if they go different ways?”

“We might make it without the mules and perhaps sell the living quarters wagon or trade it for a team to replace them, but we have no show without your horses.”

“I want to kill them all.”

“That is your temper speaking. You have a temper like Mother, but you aren't a killer. We must be smart. Think this through and get your horses back.”

“And what else, all-knowing, all-wise sister of mine? Will you tell me how this ends happily?”

“A story is no story until it has an ending.” Her face changed to a look not at all like the wistful, lip-biting expression she had borne while she was thinking things over.

H
e practiced with the unloaded pistol every night—standing before the campfire and drawing it from his holster slowly and methodically and cocking it and dry firing it at targets he picked at random; learning the feel of it balanced in the hard heel of his fist and the long barrel of it a slight counterweight to the snap of the trigger and fall of the hammer. In the quiet, alone, he held the revolver close to his ear and cocked and recocked it in order to listen to the internal working of its springs and notches clicking into place, and the cylinder rotating with paw and ratchet meshing and locking together with precise perfection and an order that was at odds with the rest of the world around him.

His second day out from Fort Stockton he crossed the Texas Pacific Railroad tracks at Sanderson, Texas. The painted sign nailed to one end of the depot house was the only reason he knew where he was. Nobody greeted him, and only a few of the town's hardy patrons paused in their tasks to watch him go by or stood in their doorways with shaded eyes and took his measure.

He had heard that a year before there had been two thousand booted men camped on the site, grading roadbed, laying iron, and raising hell on payroll days. But the railroad crews were gone, and nothing was left but the rubbish of where their tent city had lain and dust devils dancing in and out of the handful of buildings scattered along the tracks.

The next thing he saw was his former horse tied to the rail in front of the Cottage Bar and hitched to a wagonload of wool. The horse's new owner was a Basque sheepherder who had bought the horse from Cortina six days earlier. He had also bought Newt's pack mule, but claimed that it had fallen in a ditch and broken its neck.

No matter. Newt lacked the money to repurchase his old horse, or the mule, either one, even if he had've been of a mind to buy a dead mule. He spent a half-dollar from the stake Matilda Redding had given him on a pair of cold, grease-soaked tamales and a mug of beer in the Cottage Bar. By high noon, he was riding again, following the railroad tracks east in the direction the sheepherder claimed Cortina had ridden.

The railroad tracks lay in the bottom of a narrow valley rimmed with low ridges and buttes to the north and south. In places the cactus-riddled and rocky floor of the valley gave way to patches of drift sand, and it had blown until it almost buried the iron rails. The Circle Dot horse was so marked with streaks of sweat salt and caked in the dust of the land that it appeared a pale, gaunt ghost of itself.

Where the land along the Pecos to the north had been relatively flat, the farther southeast he went from Sanderson the more broken it became. Low, bald mountains, buttes, and twisted, deep canyons and arroyos lay for miles and miles and for as far as he could see, with desolate stretches of short-grass plains in between. The only trees to be found were a few scattered mesquites and some occasional cottonwoods, willows, and elms in the bottom of some shady canyon. It was a devil's maze that the railroad cut through, and Cortina was somewhere ahead of him. It was as fitting a country for a bad man as Newt had ever laid eyes on. You could have hidden a whole horde of killers and thieves in one of those cuts, along with the bones of those without the good sense to ride wary, and none of them might ever be found.

* * *

Langtry, Texas, almost two days down the track, was as unimpressive as Sanderson had been, unless one were to consider that it had two saloons instead of one. The Circle Dot horse walked up to an empty hitching rail in front of the first one and stopped without being asked. Newt sat still in the saddle, contemplating, while the horse let out a sigh, lowered its head, and took a resting stance beneath him.

Apparently, the saloon the horse chose was the more popular of the two, for although it was yet morning, there were already four horses standing at the hitching rail in front of it. One of the horses had a blanket-wrapped corpse tied on its saddle.

Newt dismounted, slipped his cinch, and walked over to the horse bearing the corpse. He folded back the blanket to reveal the dead man's head and lifted it gently to take a look at the face to see if it might be Cortina. The bloated, pale face staring back at him was that of a young Chinese man. Newt covered the head again and stepped up on the saloon porch.

To his surprise, a small black bear was chained to a few steps off one end of the porch. It wore a wide leather collar and sat on its haunches leaning against the post and staring at him. It batted at the flies swarming around its head and rubbed one of its matted eyes. The poor animal's hair was tangled and worn away in some places, as if it had the mange or some other skin affliction.

The Circle Dot horse opened his eyes long enough to glance at the bear and pin one ear, but then closed his eyes again, to all appearances intending to nap. The first thing Newt had come to learn about the horse was that it never missed a chance to rest. In fact, it slept more than any horse he had ever known.

Whoever had built the saloon was obviously not as much a carpenter as they were a bear lover. Not a single board was sawn to fit correctly or cut square, the bungalow roof sagged, and one wall of the building was well out of plumb, as if the wind had given it a permanent lean. The whole ramshackle affair was cobbled together out of weather-dried scrap lumber haphazardly nailed together and rusty sheet iron the owner had probably been able to salvage from the railroad construction crews, but it did have a pleasing sign nailed to one porch post.
ICE BEER TEN CENTS
.

Newt dismounted and slipped his cinch. The thought of a cold beer to wash the dust out of his mouth was enough to make him ignore the voices from inside the saloon, obviously in a heated argument of some kind. He trudged up the steps and through the open door.

The argument ceased immediately when he entered. The four men leaning against the bar turned as one to face him, and the bartender they had been talking to earlier placed both hands on the bar top and squinted at him out of one eye without turning his head, as if looking through a set of rifle sights.

“Welcome,” the bartender said.

Newt found a place at the near end of the bar. “That sign out there true?”

“Which sign, and who you calling a liar? I wouldn't nail anything up on my property that wasn't true,” the bartender said. He was a stocky man of barrel chest and a hint of a belly held back and kept in check by his belt. A neatly trimmed and heavy beard covered his face beneath his derby hat, and one of his shaggy eyebrows sagged down over his eye like a wilted leaf, giving him the appearance that he was always facing the sun or giving a conspiratorial wink.

“I'll take one of those cold beers, then,” Newt said.

The bartender reached under the bar and brought out a brown bottle that he wiped the dust off with a dirty rag and uncapped and stood before Newt. “That'll be ten cents.”

Newt wrapped his left hand around the bottle and found it warm to the touch. “Sign says ‘ice beer.'”

“Some days, but we're out of ice.”

One of the men at the bar laughed. “You don't ever have any ice. You're too cheap for that.”

The bartender scowled at the man, but turned his attention back to Newt. “I was going to build an icehouse, but I can't find anyone in town willing to work. All they want to do is stand at my bar and sass their betters. You expecting a discount because we're out of ice? I won't sell on the cheap. This here is a cash-and-carry business.”

Newt took a sip of the lukewarm beer and noticed that the men down the bar from him had nothing but empties in front of them. He pulled the last of his money from his pocket and counted it. Three dollars.

“How about a round for these men?” He laid fifty cents on the bar.

The bartender picked up one coin and examined it, as if it might be counterfeit. “Big spender, eh? First you insult my beer and now you want to buy a round. You're contradicting yourself.”

One of the men at the bar sauntered to the door and looked down the street. “Look there. Your competitor must have seen the horses tied in front of your place and decided to open early so he doesn't miss a chance at business.”

“What?” The bartender scowled again and strode quickly across the room to stand in the doorway and watch a little Mexican man pass before him on the far side of the street, heading toward the settlement's only other saloon.

“By God, I'll show him.” The bartender jerked a Colt pistol out of his waistband, and after he fumbled with it a bit, leveled it on the little Mexican outside. But the man beside him knocked his gun arm down.

“Go easy, Judge. You can't shoot Torrez, no matter how cranky you are this morning.” The man kept his hold on the bartender's gun arm and gently and slowly pried the pistol free.

“He's breaking the law. I done told him several times, but he won't listen.”

“What law?”

“Opening his saloon before noon without a permit.”

The man beside him kept a smile on his face. For the first time, Newt noticed the badge pinned on his vest—a round badge with a star cut out in the center. Texas Ranger. He looked at the other men and noted that they, too, were wearing the same badges.

“You're open before noon,” the Ranger said, coming back across the room and laying the bartender's pistol on the bar.

“I got a permit,” the bartender said, remaining in the doorway.

“And who issued it?”

“Me. I'm the by God justice of the peace. If it weren't for me, that Mexican would have this place run to hell. You've got to have a little law and order or you bring the tone of a place down in no time. That's civilization—somebody making rules and somebody else following them. You should have let me shot him, and spare us the trouble of trying him.”

“You stay sore at Torrez because he steals your customers. Could be because he actually sweeps up every now and then.” The Ranger scuffed one boot in the litter of peanut hulls, cigarette butts, dead flies, and filthy sawdust on the floor.

“I hear he's running against you in the next election,” another of the Rangers said, acting as if he were studying his beer bottle but watching the bartender out of the corner of his eye.

“He doesn't have the sense God gave a goose,” the bartender said. “Might help my business if you Rangers didn't leave dead men out in the sun in front of my place. That corpse is beginning to stink, and the train's due in a little while.”

“Gives off the impression that folks are dying to get into your saloon,” said the Ranger.

“Who is it?”

“I don't know. Some Chinaman,” the Ranger said. “Found him about three miles down the river, shot in the back. Thought you might want to look him over and hold an inquest.”

The bartender reared back his head and sneezed loudly. “Son of a bitch,” he said as soon as he finished.

“Bless you,” said the Ranger who had taken away his pistol.

“Gracias.”
The judge wiped at his nose with his bar towel. He took a big breath and then let it out in a grunt. “Quite a horse you have there, mister.”

Newt realized that the bartender was talking to him, and walked to the doorway with his beer in hand. The Circle Dot horse had lain down on his side and was asleep, even though the rein was tied short to the hitching rail, and his neck was bent and contorted and suspended off the ground.

“Did you ride him to death, or is that horse some kind of contortionist?” the bartender asked.

“He likes his siestas.”

“I'm partial to them myself, but don't look comfortable. Does he always do that?”

“I've quit guessing about him.”

“You ought to kick him until he gets up. I wouldn't tolerate such out of a horse. Seems like he's spoiled. What if you needed him in a hurry, and he was lying there sleeping like that?”

“That horse and I have a deal. I don't kick him and he doesn't kick me.”

“How's that deal working out?”

“It's worked so far.”

The bartender grunted again and went back behind his bar. He gathered Newt's empty beer bottle and those of the others. “Another round?”

Newt nodded and reached in his pocket for more money. The bartender shook his head.

“Pay up when you leave.” The bartender lined up the empties at the far end of the bar. “I'll count the bottles when it's time to settle your account.”

Newt took a second beer and propped one boot on the rail at the foot of the bar. He adjusted the Smith on his hip until it was at a more comfortable location, and one of the Rangers glanced down at it. He turned to the men beside him and said something so low that Newt couldn't make it out. All of them looked at his pistol and then leveled their eyes on him.

“That's a fancy set of grips you've got,” the nearest Ranger said.

Newt took a slug of beer instead of answering.

“Judge, you see this man's fancy shooting iron?” the same Ranger asked.

The bartender tiptoed and leaned out over the bar so that he could see. “Yep, that's Amos Redding's gun. Know it anywhere.”

The Ranger nodded. “And I remember Amos wearing a fancy hatband like that one.”

Newt took careful note of the fact that the Ranger speaking had his hand resting on his pistol butt and that the other Rangers were spreading out and stepping away from the bar. He could already see what was coming.

“What's the problem?” he asked, stalling for time.

The bartender smiled coolly. “The problem is, son, you ain't Amos Redding.”