The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4)

by Larry McMurtry

  “Why, this is the Bible. It tells you about Jehovah and his angels,” Roy Bean said, when Famous Shoes handed him the book. Roy Bean was drunk; this was often the case, and he was not really eager to enter into conversation with a talkative Indian.

  “What is an angel? I have never seen one,” Famous Shoes replied.

  “Nobody ain’t. That is, they ain’t if they’re alive,” Roy Bean informed him, testily.

  “Where is heaven?” Famous Shoes asked.

  “It’s the place you go to when you die, if you’ve been good,” Roy Bean said. “You ain’t been very good, and I ain’t, either, so I doubt either one of us will ever see an angel.”

  After a little more questioning, Roy Bean let slip the exciting fact that angels were men with wings. Famous Shoes had always suspected that there might be men with wings, somewhere. If he had been willing to risk freezing to death when he was near the edge of the world, he might have looked over the edge and seen these men with wings, flying around. Perhaps they would have helped him grow wings himself, so that he could fly off the edge of the world, as the great eagles flew off the cliffs of the Madre.

  Then Roy Bean got so drunk, he couldn’t talk. Before his tongue grew too thick to manage, Roy Bean became irritated with Famous Shoes for referring to the words in the Bible as tracks. It did seem to Famous Shoes that they resembled certain tracks, such as the track of the centipede, or of certain delicate birds who skimmed the water’s edge for their prey.

  “They’re words, not tracks, you damn Indian!” Roy Bean insisted. “They’re words, like I’m saying to you, now.”

  “But words are made from breath. How can they live in such a thing as this book?” Famous Shoes asked.

  He might as well have asked his question of an eagle, or of the moon, for Roy Bean had not only lost interest, he had lost consciousness as well.

  Famous Shoes kept the book for several more years, but he never learned to make much of the little tracks. Finally, he left the book on the ground, and a golden eagle came and tore out many of its pages to use to line its nest. That was a good use for such a book, Famous Shoes thought.

  Later, though, he learned from the great Captain Marcy, for whom he had scouted when he was younger, that Roy Bean had been right: the little tracks in the book were words. Even when he learned this, Famous Shoes didn’t regret giving the book to the golden eagle. The eagle had made better use of it than he had.

  Seeing Pea Eye’s track made him remember that Pea Eye’s woman was a teacher, who well understood the words in books. This gave Famous Shoes an idea. He might go and stay with Pea Eye for a few weeks, and ask his woman if she would teach him how words got into books, and how to know one word from another, simply by its tracks. It should not be too different from knowing each animal or lizard by its tracks. It might be that Pea Eye’s woman could explain words to him, and even help him understand the ways of the god of whites. Among his people, the Kickapoo, respect for the gods caused most people to behave well, at least to behave well most of the time. But the same did not appear to be true of whites, most of whom behaved as if they knew no god and had no guidance stronger than their own passions, when it came to deciding how to behave.

  When he found Pea Eye’s track, in the little creek on the Quitaque, Famous Shoes saw that Pea Eye was about a day ahead of him. He knew that, as a traveler, Pea Eye was rather lazy. He was timid about snakes, and did not really like to move around in the darkness, which was necessary if a man wanted to cover much country. Also, once Pea Eye went to sleep, he didn’t wake up quickly. Thus, though Pea Eye was mounted and had a day’s start, Famous Shoes reckoned to catch him somewhere near the Clear Fork of the Brazos. And he did.

  He walked quietly into Pea Eye’s camp early one morning, when the stars were still out and the moon was about to go to sleep. Famous Shoes did not like to disturb anyone, so he sat quietly until Pea Eye began to stir. As was common with whites, Pea Eye had made a much larger campfire than was necessary. Several coals were still glowing. Famous Shoes fed twigs and small branches to the coals, until the fire itself woke up and burned again.

  When Pea Eye heard the fire crackling, he managed to open his eyes. Famous Shoes sat beside the campfire, looking at him. He was a tiny old man and was wearing the same dirty bandanna around his head that he had been wearing the last time Pea had seen him, several years before.

  “Would your woman help me learn to read?” Famous Shoes asked, to get the conversation started.

  “Well, more than likely,” Pea Eye said. “She’s been meaning to teach me, but I’ve got so much farming to do that I ain’t learned yet. I know my letters, though.”

  “I will go home with you, then,” Famous Shoes said. “We can learn to read together.”

  “You sure did slip in quiet, didn’t you?” Pea Eye said. “I guess if this was the old days and you was a Comanche, I’d be scalped by now.

  “There’s coffee there, if you want to make some,” Pea Eye added. Famous Shoes was not a Comanche, nor a bad Indian of any kind, and he himself was in no danger of being scalped. The thought made him feel so relaxed that he figured he might just doze for another minute or two, while Famous Shoes made coffee. He did doze, but when he finally woke up, the sun was in his face and he had the feeling he might have dozed for more than a minute or two. A jackrabbit was cooking on the fire, and he himself had certainly not provided any jackrabbit. Famous Shoes must have caught one, skinned it, and cooked it, a process that would have taken more than a minute or two, although the old man had always been efficient, when it came to camp chores.

  “If you are chasing somebody, I don’t think you are going to catch up with them, unless they are crippled,” Famous Shoes said. “When you eat this rabbit, we should go.”

  “Okay, you can come with me,” Pea Eye said, hastily shaking his boots, in the hopes of emptying out whatever bugs or scorpions might have crawled into them during the night. It would have been safer to sleep with his boots on; but when he did that, he got cramps in his legs, often such bad cramps that he had to get up and stamp around in order to loosen the cramps.

  “The thing is, we’ll have to put off the reading lessons for a while. I ain’t headed home,” Pea Eye said. “I’m going to look for the Captain. I got a late start, and don’t have no idea where he is. You’d be the perfect compañero because you could track him if we ever cross his tracks.”

  “He likes to keep his money,” Famous Shoes said. Captain Call had never paid his scouts very liberally. “I’m not sure he would pay me, if I help you find him. He might think I’m too old to need money.”

  “It wouldn’t be his money, though. He’s working for the railroad now,” Pea Eye said, uneasily. “There’s a Yankee with him. I expect the Yankee would pay you.”

  Pea Eye did remember that the Captain, though respectful of Famous Shoes’ great skill in tracking, thought the man put too high a price on his services. There had been more than one dispute over money, and in the end, Famous Shoes stopped tracking for the Rangers.

  Memories of this old conflict made him feel uncomfortable, and just when he had been enjoying a feeling of comfort, the first he had experienced since leaving Lorie and his children. It would be nice to travel with Famous Shoes; he didn’t mind doing the cooking, and he would be a great help in locating the Captain.

  Still, there had been that friction, in the past. The Captain might not be altogether pleased to have him show up with Famous Shoes.

  “Where do you think the Captain is?” Famous Shoes asked.

  “On the border, somewhere,” Pea Eye said. “He’s supposed to catch a bandit named Joey Garza.”

  “Oh,” Famous Shoes said. “Maria’s son.”

  “Whose son?” Pea asked.

  “She is a woman in Ojinaga,” Famous Shoes said. “Joey is her son. I think he went bad.”

  “I guess he did,” Pea Eye said. “Charlie Goodnight says he’s killed over thirty people. If Charlie Goodnight says it, I expect it’s tru
e.”

  “I was in Ojinaga when the Federales killed Maria’s first husband,” Famous Shoes said. “She is a good woman, but she does not have good luck. I’m afraid the hard sheriff will kill her someday.”

  “What hard sheriff?” Pea Eye asked. “Does the woman live in Texas or Mexico?”

  “In Mexico, but the hard sheriff doesn’t care,” Famous Shoes said. “He kills many people who live in Mexico. He wanted to hang me once for stealing a horse, although I don’t ride horses.”

  “Why’d he think you stole it, then?” Pea Eye asked.

  “I was eating part of it when he caught me,” Famous Shoes replied. “A snake bit the horse on the nose, and its nose closed up and it died.”

  “I’d need to be half starved before I’d eat a snakebit horse,” Pea Eye said.

  “I didn’t eat its nose,” Famous Shoes said. The whites, even nice ones like Pea Eye, had absurd prejudices. The only danger the dead horse had caused him came from Doniphan, the hard sheriff. Doniphan had marched him back to Presidio, meaning to hang him, but a fire broke out and burned up the saloon and part of the church. Doniphan had been afraid that the fire might burn his jail. It was a windy day, with smoke blowing everywhere. In the smoke and confusion, Famous Shoes escaped. It was Maria Garza who had given him a little jerky, so that he might hurry back to the Madre, where the hard sheriff would never come.

  “Where’d you get this rabbit? I didn’t see one all day yesterday, or I would have shot it,” Pea Eye said. It was a tasty rabbit. He thought about the border. It was far away, and he had to pass through some bleak country, too. It would be real handy to have a traveling companion such as Famous Shoes, a man who was adept at catching game, and cooking it too.

  There was another factor to be considered, too, and that had to do with his own deficiencies as a tracker and a plainsman. Charlie Goodnight told everybody he met that he had never been lost, day or night, rain or shine. But this was certainly not a claim Pea Eye could make. He himself had been lost all too often; in particular, he had a tendency to lose his bearings on cloudy days. In truly rainy weather, he was even worse. He had even been known to confuse north and south, on rainy days. He thought he could find his way to the border simply by counting the rivers. But once he got to the border, then what? He would have no way of knowing which direction the Captain was headed, or even whether he was in Mexico or in Texas. In normal times, he could locate the Captain simply by asking the locals. The Captain was a man people noticed. But along much of the border, there were no locals. If the Captain was in Mexico, Pea Eye had his doubts about his skill in finding him. That problem had made him anxious from the moment he left home. What if he had left the farm and upset Lorena and the children and still didn’t manage to locate the Captain in time to help him? What if the Garza boy outsmarted the Captain and wounded him or something, while Pea Eye was still miles away, looking in the wrong place? The Captain might even be killed, and if that occurred, Pea knew, he would never forgive himself.

  With Famous Shoes along, some of that anxiety would be removed. Famous Shoes could find anybody, anywhere in the West, and could find them more quickly than anyone else. Even the Captain, who thought Famous Shoes too expensive, was quick to admit that the old Indian was without equal, when it came to tracking.

  “I think it’s eyesight,” the Captain said. “He can see better than us.”

  That remark had been made on a nervous occasion, when everyone in the Ranger troop thought they saw Indians kneeling in the prairie grass far ahead. Everyone, including the Captain and Gus McCrae, had peered hard across the prairie and concluded that there were Indians ahead, preparing an ambush. Famous Shoes took only one quick look and shook his head. “Not Indians,” he said. “Sagebrush.” And so it had proved to be, when they reached the point where they thought the ambush had been planted.

  “Come with me to the border,” Pea Eye said. “If the Captain won’t pay you enough, maybe I can trade you reading lessons or something, when we get back.” He said it, hoping that Lorena wouldn’t mind too much when he actually showed up with the old man.

  “Good,” Famous Shoes said. “If your woman will teach me to read, I won’t take wages from the Captain.”

  It was such a relief to know that the matter of the expense had been settled, or settled, at least, until Lorena had her say in the matter, that Pea Eye finished the tasty jackrabbit and was saddled and ready to go within ten minutes. It was a bright day, and the gray plain south of him for once didn’t seem so bleak.

  Famous Shoes, as usual, walked far ahead.

  17.

  “I DIDN’T LIKE the War,” Brookshire said. “I never understood why it was happening. Nobody ever explained it to me. They just stuck me in uniform and sent me off. My mother cried, and my sister cried, and my father told them to dry up, I was just doing my duty.”

  They were camped far out on the monte, in Mexico. Call had decided to swing west, toward Chihuahua City. They had run into a small troop of Federales, who told them Joey Garza had been seen in Chihuahua City. Call didn’t necessarily believe it, but he swung west anyway, to put some distance between his party and the river. Too many people traveled the river country, or lived in it. Even in the long hundred-mile stretches where there were no villages, there were still people—Indians, travelers, prospectors. In his lifetime on the border, Call reckoned that he had run into at least fifty people, lost souls mostly, who were looking for Coronado’s treasure. Call didn’t know much about Coronado, just that he had been the first white man to travel through the region. He had made the trip a long time ago, and Call had never been certain that he knew exactly where Coronado had gone. Some reports put his route as far west as the Gila, but others thought he had just gone straight up the Rio Grande. A few even argued that he had started at Vera Cruz and come out at Galveston.

  Whichever route the man had actually taken, Call doubted that he had come up with much in the way of treasure. He might have collected a little silver, if he got into the Navajo country, but Call himself, in nearly forty years on the border, had encountered mostly poor people who had no treasure.

  Avoiding the river made sense to him. Also, he had never traveled very deeply into Mexico, and he wanted to see it. Brookshire worried, and the more he worried, the less Call hurried. He kept an eye out for tracks. Deputy Plunkert tried to help, but it soon became evident that he was no tracker. About all he had ever tracked, before the expedition, was lost milk cows. More and more, the deputy missed the comforts of home; in particular, he missed Doobie’s biscuits, which she made every morning and had ready for him, hot and buttery, when he got up.

  “How come you to miss the War, Captain?” Brookshire asked. The likelihood of combat, sometime in the near future, had stirred old memories. He remembered the screams of the men whose limbs had to be amputated, quickly, on the battlefield. He remembered the sound the saw made, as the surgeons cut through bone, and the dull groaning of the men in the hospital tents as they awoke every morning, to face another day without an arm or a leg, or both legs, or an eye, or whatever part was missing. Those memories had ceased to trouble him, during the quiet years in Brooklyn.

  “Somebody had to stay around and keep the Comanches in check,” Call said. “Otherwise, I guess they would have driven the settlers back to the sea. They drove them back nearly a hundred miles as it was, with us after them all the time. There was trouble from the south, too.”

  “Still is. We should just take Mexico and be done with it,” Deputy Plunkert said. “If we owned it, we could make the people abide by the law.”

  Call ignored the remark. He thought it ignorant.

  “I wish I could have fought in the War,” Deputy Plunkert said. “I would have been happy to kill a few Yankees.”

  “That’s not polite, there’s a Yankee right here at this campfire,” Call said. “Mr. Brookshire fought for his side. You can’t blame him for that.”

  “Why, no, I meant other Yankees,” the deputy said. It embarras
sed him that the Captain had dressed him down in front of a fat little Yankee such as Brookshire. The man had lost a little bit of his girth, once the diet had dropped to frijoles and not much else. But he hadn’t lost any of his Yankeeness, not in Plunkert’s view.

  “That damn Abe Lincoln oughtn’t to have freed the slaves, neither,” the deputy said. He was feeling aggrieved because no one was taking his side, not even the Captain, the man he had left home to assist.

  “What was your opinion on that question?” Brookshire wondered, looking at Call.

  “Oh, I grew up poor,” Call said. “We would never have had the money for a slave.”

  There had been a time when Gus McCrae had wanted to abandon the Rangers and rush back east to fight Yankees, for he had gotten it in his head that Southern freedoms were being trampled, and that the two of them ought to go fight; this, despite the fact that they had more fighting than they could handle, right where they were.

  Call himself had never caught the fervor of that War. The best man he had working with him at the time was black—Deets, later killed by a Shoshone boy, in Wyoming. He had known people who had owned slaves and mistreated them, and he would certainly have fought to keep Deets from being owned by any of the bad slaveholders; but he could not have fought with the North, against his region, and was content to stay where he was, doing what he was doing. No one in his right mind would have wanted fiercer fighting than the Comanche were capable of. Gus McCrae’s problem was that he liked bugles and parades. He had even tried to persuade Call to hire a bugler for the Ranger troop.

  “A bugler?” Call said. “Half these men don’t have decent saddles, and we’re lucky if we have forty rounds of ammunition apiece. Why waste money on a bugler?”

  “It might impress the Comanche. They’ve got some sense of show,” Gus retorted. “That’s your problem, Woodrow, or one of them. You’ve got no sense of show. Ain’t you ever heard of esprit de corps?”

  “No, what is it, and how much does it cost?” Call asked.