The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4)

by Larry McMurtry

  “Why are you scared?” Joey asked.

  “I saw old Ben,” Beulah said.

  “He only hunts, he won’t bother you,” Joey said. He was hungry, and he wanted Beulah to settle down and cook his meat.

  “It ain’t Ben,” Beulah said. “Wesley Hardin’s here. He showed up yesterday and killed that nigger that worked for the blacksmith. Wesley put a gun to my head, once. I was in Fort Worth then.”

  “Why?” Joey asked. “So he wouldn’t have to pay you?”

  “He didn’t do nothing to pay me for,” Beulah said. “He just likes to see people look scared. It don’t matter to him if it’s a man or a woman. He just likes to see people look scared.”

  Later, Joey went to the saloon, carrying his rifle. He never left his rifle. In Crow Town, all the people were thieves, and he did not intend to risk his fine gun.

  A skinny man was sitting at the table next to his. It was the only other table in the saloon. The man wore a dirty black coat and had ugly skin, blotched and red, and it peeled in places from the sun and the wind. The man had thin, brown hair. Joey could see scabs on his scalp and on his hands as well. The man’s foot twitched as he sat at the table, drinking whiskey. He didn’t have a fine rifle, either, just a plain revolver, stuck in his belt.

  Nonetheless, the killer John Wesley Hardin was the first gringo Joey had met in a long time whom he didn’t take lightly. The man didn’t even look at him, when he came in with his rifle. Wesley Hardin was not impressed, or even interested, which was unusual. Few people in Crow Town, or even travelers passing through, missed any chance to steal a look at Joey Garza.

  But Wesley Hardin, the killer, didn’t look. He was chewing tobacco and spitting the juice on the floor, although the saloon was provided with two brass spittoons.

  Joey had barely sat down, when John Wesley Hardin looked up, but not at him. He looked up at the local blacksmith, whose name was Lordy Bailey. Lordy walked in the door, a large hammer in one hand, and went straight to Wesley Hardin’s table. The blacksmith was a large man with a heavy black beard that was so long, he had to tuck it into his overalls while working his forge. He was not afraid of anyone, including Wesley Hardin. When he walked up to the table where the famous killer sat, Lordy was frowning, though John Wesley Hardin looked at him pleasantly.

  “It’s costing me fifty cents to get a grave dug for that nigger boy,” Lordy said. “You shot him. I think you ought to pay the fifty cents.”

  “Why bury a nigger?” Wesley Hardin said. His voice had a tone in it that Joey hadn’t heard before. It was a crazy tone. Wesley Hardin’s eyes were cool, but he was scratching his scabby wrist with his other hand. Joey thought the blacksmith was very foolish, for speaking to the killer so brusquely. He would probably be murdered for his rudeness, and it would serve him right. His prices were high, and his work was not particularly skillful.

  “We all need to be buried,” Lordy said. “Do you think my nigger ought to just lay there and stink up the town?”

  “Drag him off a ways,” Wesley Hardin suggested. “That big pig might come along and eat him for you. It would save you the fifty cents.”

  “I paid fifty dollars for that nigger,” Lordy said. He began to flip the big hammer up in the air, and caught it when it came down, without even looking at it. He made the big hammer seem light as a twig.

  “I figure that’s fifty dollars and fifty cents you owe me,” he added. “Fifty dollars for the nigger, and fifty cents for burying him. Give it over.”

  “You’re a fool if you paid cash for a nigger, in these days and times,” Wesley Hardin said. “You don’t have to buy niggers, anymore. It’s not even legal. Abe Lincoln freed them. All you have to do now is take a nigger, if you see one you want.”

  “I paid for this one and you owe me,” Lordy insisted. “Give over the money.”

  “You’re an ignorant sonofabitch, and you don’t know the law,” Wesley Hardin said. He began to get worked up. His twitching foot twitched faster.

  “Here you buy a nigger you didn’t have to buy, and because I killed him, you come in here disturbing my morning,” he went on. “I could kill you seven times before you could drop that goddamn hammer on your toe. Don’t be playing with that hammer in here. The ceilings are too low. Go outside if you want to play with your hammer.”

  He took the plain revolver out of his belt and pointed it at the blacksmith, but the blacksmith was too angry to back down.

  “You owe me, give over the money,” he repeated, for the third time.

  “You sonofabitch, I heard you,” Wesley Hardin said. “If you want to live, get gone. If you’d rather die, flip that hammer again.”

  “I don’t think you’re the killer you claim to be, Hardin,” Lordy said. He was wondering if he was quick enough to smash the man’s head in with the hammer before he could pull the trigger.

  “I don’t claim nothing,” Wesley Hardin said. “I don’t claim one goddamn thing. Last time I was in jail, they kept me in nine years and whipped me a hundred and sixty different times. I stood it, and here I am. They whipped me because I wouldn’t submit, and I won’t submit. I hated the goddamn jailers, and I could kill you and nine like you and never even belch. I’ve left about forty widows so far, I guess, and I’ve killed a few bachelors, too. You’re welcome to try me any time you want to try me.”

  Lordy decided that, after all, the risks were unwarranted.

  “I’d like to smash in your goddamn skull, but I’ll leave the pleasure of killing you to Captain Call,” Lordy said. “I don’t know if he’ll choose to bother about a scabby old turd like you.”

  “Woodrow Call?” Wesley Hardin asked. “Why would he want to kill me? He arrested me once, but it was just because of a little feud I got into in Lampasas. Call ain’t the sheriff of Crow Town. He don’t even live here.”

  “No, but he’s coming,” Lordy said.

  The news seemed to excite Wesley Hardin, the killer. His tone got crazier.

  “Coming to Crow Town, Captain Call?” he said. “Why, that’s bold, for an old shit his age.”

  “He’s coming, but he ain’t after you,” Lordy said. “You ain’t important enough, anymore. You’re just an old killer waiting to die.”

  “Why’s he coming, then? Does he expect to clean out the town?” Wesley Hardin asked.

  “He’s coming for the güero,” Lordy said. “He’s coming for Joey, here.”

  Joey didn’t smile, or even indicate that he had heard the conversation. But he felt pleased. Billy Williams had told him many tales of Call’s exploits. He had no fear of the man, though. No old gringo, however famous, was likely to interfere with his plans, not for long, anyway. But it interested and pleased him, that he had robbed enough and killed enough so that the Americans were sending their best bounty hunter after him. That was satisfying. It meant he had scared the Americans, and hurt them by taking their money.

  John Wesley Hardin had noticed Joey come in. He was certainly a pretty boy, too pretty to last, Hardin thought. His clothes were too clean. In such a place, it was irritating to see a boy with clothes that clean. The rifle he kept with him was certainly exceptional, though. John Wesley had never killed with a rifle. He usually killed at close range, with his revolver, firing two or three shots right into the midsections of his enemies. He liked the way the heavy bullets kicked the life out of them. He liked their looks of shock, when they fell down and saw the blood spreading underneath them. He also liked to be looking at them when they died. That way, they would know that John Wesley Hardin had killed them personally. He had never killed a man from ambush, or from any great distance at all.

  The notion that Woodrow Call would come all the way to Crow Town for this boy, this güero, was interesting, though. The boy must have vexed the rich men a good deal for them to call out the old Ranger.

  He looked at the boy and met a pair of cold, blue eyes.

  Lordy Bailey, the blacksmith, was still standing there, with his hammer. Joey thought the man was a com
plete fool. He should go, while he was alive.

  “You still owe me,” Lordy said. “There’s no reason I should give you a nigger to kill.”

  “I hate idiots like you,” John Wesley Hardin said. He cocked his revolver and shot the blacksmith right in the gut. Then he shot him again, at about the point where his beard tucked into his overalls. He cocked the gun a third time, and shot the man in the gut again.

  Lordy staggered backward, but didn’t fall. He felt surprised. Hardin had seemed to be calming down. Lordy had not really expected him to shoot. Now he had been shot three times. He felt puzzled; he had meant to leave, but had waited a little too long. He didn’t feel anything, just puzzled.

  Joey Garza didn’t move. It did not surprise him that the scabby old man had shot the blacksmith. He himself would have done it much sooner. But he knew better than to call attention to himself while the scabby killer had a gun in his hand.

  “Wait—don’t die,” Wesley Hardin said to Lordy Bailey. “You forgot to tell me how you knew Call was coming.”

  He was mildly annoyed with himself for having shot the man fatally before securing that piece of information. Most men, once shot a time or two, were so shocked to find themselves dying that they lost their power of speech.

  “Famous Shoes told me,” Lordy said. For a moment, the fact that he could still talk reassured him. Perhaps he hadn’t been shot, after all. It was such a comforting thought that he believed it, for a second. He dropped his hammer, and reached down to pick it up. But his hand wouldn’t grip. He could see the hammer, but he couldn’t grasp it. At that point he sat down, being as careful as possible. All he wanted to do was pick up his hammer and leave.

  “Don’t sit there and die, you damn bastard,” Wesley Hardin said. “Go outside and die. Nobody wants you dying in here.”

  “Oh,” Lordy said, disturbed to have been caught in a breach of etiquette. He started to sit up, but instead, slowly toppled over and lay on his side, on the dusty floor.

  “I thought I told you not to die in here, you ugly sonofabitch!” Wesley Hardin said. His temper was rising. The blacksmith had done nothing but vex and disobey him.

  “If you weren’t already nearly kilt, I’d take a bed slat to you—it might teach you some manners,” he added.

  Lordy Bailey realized he had made a serious error, bringing the black man to a town Wesley Hardin frequented. He was well known to dislike black men.

  “Ought not to have . . .” he said, but then his tongue stopped working, and he felt a great loosening inside himself. He rolled on his back and stared upward until the light became dark.

  Patrick O’Brien, the bartender, walked over and looked at Lordy.

  “He’s dead, and we’re without a blacksmith,” Patrick said.

  “Good, I disliked the bastard,” Wesley Hardin said. “He thought I ought to pay for his nigger, the damned idiot!”

  “Drag him out, boy,” he said, addressing the order to Joey. “He’ll soon stink up the place if we leave him long.”

  Joey met the scabby man’s look, but didn’t speak.

  “Goddammit, is everybody stubborn in this town?” Wesley Hardin asked, his face splotchy with anger.

  Patrick O’Brien felt a little worried. Many of his customers had killed a man or two, but not since he’d opened the bar had he had two men in it who were as dangerous as Wesley Hardin and Joey Garza. Between them, they had killed a fair number of men. It was early in the day, but already a man lay dead on the barroom floor.

  It occurred to the saloonkeeper that Wesley Hardin, a selfish fellow who didn’t take much interest in other people, might not realize how dangerous Joey Garza was.

  “This is Joey Garza,” he said. “He’s the one they sent Call after.”

  Joey looked Hardin straight in the eye. He wanted to study the man, and would rather not have to kill him. But that was up to Hardin. He would kill him, if it became necessary, with his bowie knife. He had watched Hardin shoot the blacksmith. Hardin had managed it, but he was quite slow, Joey thought. An Apache would have killed the man with a knife, in half the time or less, and Joey modeled himself on the Apache when it came to killing. Joey knew he could slip behind Hardin and cut his throat with one move and one stroke.

  But he didn’t want to kill the man, and he also knew it would not be wise to underrate him, just because he was a scabby old gringo. Wesley Hardin had killed many, many men; the fact that he had been a little slow with the blacksmith didn’t mean he would be slow if his own life was really at stake. The blacksmith had posed no threat. But Hardin was a killer, like himself. He should not be underestimated.

  Wesley Hardin got up, picked up the blacksmith’s legs, and slowly dragged him outside. The crows set up a-cawing the minute the door opened. The blacksmith was a heavy man. Hardin had to stick his revolver back in his belt and use both hands, in order to drag him out.

  “O’Brien, get your donkey and drag that heavy bastard off,” he said, when he came back. He was winded from his effort, and his face had gone pale.

  “Wes, you need to hold your temper,” Patrick O’Brien said. “That was the only blacksmith within a hundred miles.”

  Wesley Hardin didn’t take kindly to censure. He frowned at the Irishman.

  “I might shoot every man, woman, and child in this stinkin’ nigger-bird town, and then you wouldn’t need a goddamn blacksmith. How’s that?” he asked.

  Wesley Hardin turned to Joey with an angry look.

  “You could help me wipe this nigger-bird shithole off the face of the earth, if you’re such a killer,” he said to Joey. “You kill the men, and I’ll take care of the women and the brats.”

  “Wes, there’s only two children in town, and they’re mine,” Patrick O’Brien said. He had meanwhile taken the precaution of arming himself with a shotgun. When Wes Hardin was in one of his irritable moods, it was wisest to be armed.

  “I wasn’t speaking to you, you damn pig!” Wesley Hardin said, giving the man a violent stare. “I was speaking to the notorious young killer, here.”

  For all Hardin’s jumpy manner, his eyes, when he looked at Joey, were clear. He might twitch, but he wasn’t really agitated, not in the part of himself that sized up men and situations.

  The boy, the güero, gave back an empty gaze. Joey let his eyes meet Hardin’s, but in Joey’s eyes there was nothing. Only distance, a distance deep as the sky.

  “Why would they send Woodrow Call after a pup like you?” Hardin asked. But he let no insult into his voice.

  “Because I steal money from Americans,” Joey said.

  “You’re right—it’s the money, not the killing,” Wesley Hardin said. “They don’t care who gets killed, out here in the baldies. It don’t cost the damn pigs a cent for us to kill one another out here. Why would they care? Out here west of the Pecos, it’s fine to kill, but you better not steal from no trains coming from the east, where the damn Yankees keep their money.

  “How much did you get?” he inquired, in a calmer tone. “I heard it was a million, and I heard it was the Army’s money.”

  Joey looked at the man coolly, with his distant eyes. Did the old killer really expect him to tell how much money he had stolen?

  In fact, he had buried the payrolls only a few miles from where he stole them. He didn’t know how much he had taken, he just knew that the money was too bulky to carry very far. He was not such a fool as to bury it all in one place, either. He hid it in snake dens; the Apaches had taught him how to find them. They often ate snakes, when they could get nothing better.

  He didn’t have the time to carry so much money to his cave, nor did he want to. The money was not very interesting to him. His cave was for beautiful things. Everything he stole, he wrapped well. He had taken two hundred gunnysacks from a hardware store in Piedras Negras, to the puzzlement of the man who owned the store. The man could not understand why anyone would take gunnysacks, when there were guns and axes to steal.

  Joey took the sacks because he needed th
em to wrap his treasures. That was also why he had taken the fancy sheets from the rich man who had the fur coat. He didn’t want to sleep on the sheets; he wanted them for wrapping, so that his many silver objects would not grow dingy in the cave. At another hardware store in San Angelo, he found some excellent wooden barrels, and he hired an old man named José Ramos to help him take the barrels on donkeys into the mountains. He left them in one cave, an empty one, to fool old Ramos, and later came back and carried them, one by one, to his own cave, which was three days away.

  Then he packed his well-wrapped treasures in the excellent barrels, where they would be safe from rats and varmints. He already had more than one hundred watches, and nearly as many rings. One of his regrets was that there were so few women on the trains, because women had nicer things than men. They had beautiful combs of ivory, and necklaces and bracelets, even jewels to hang in their ears. Joey kept all the women’s things together. When he went to his cave, he would spend whole days unwrapping his treasures, one by one, holding them and letting the light play on them. They were far more interesting than the money.

  Knowing that he had the treasures and that he could go there and enjoy them was a deep satisfaction to Joey. Lately, he had begun to steal things with little value—ladies’ hairbrushes, or letter openers—simply because he liked to touch the ivory or shell that they were made from.

  The quality of his treasures was not something he intended to talk about to a killer such as Wesley Hardin, though. He decided he didn’t like the nosy old gringo, who asked the kind of questions his mother asked. The killer was a man to be watched, that was all.

  “I guess you’re feeling closemouthed today, are you, boy?” Wesley Hardin asked. Of course, he had not expected the güero to tell him how much money he had taken from the trains.

  “You’d do better to talk to yourself, Wes,” Patrick O’Brien said. “My ears get tired, just from listening to you cuss when you’re in a temper.”

  “Be glad you can hear me—it means I ain’t shot you yet, Pat,” Hardin said. “I can cuss old Lordy now, as much as I want to, but he won’t hear a whisper.”