Streets of Laredo

by Larry McMurtry

  "You should take care of your weapons, if you're going after a killer," she said. "I don't want you neglecting important things, even if I complain about you being smelly." "I don't want to go," Pea Eye said.

  "I just don't want to go, this time." There was a silence, broken only by August's whimpering, and the soft sucking sound the baby made as she drew on the nipple. Pea Eye had just said the words Lorena had long hoped to hear, but the fact was, she hadn't gotten her sleep out--she was drowsy and would have liked to go back to bed.

  It was a hopeless wish. August was up, and Ben and Georgie would be crawling out of bed any time.

  Whether she liked it or not, the day had begun.

  She had long resented Pea Eye's blind loyalty to the Captain but knew there was nothing she could do about it. Mainly, she just tried to shut her mind to it.

  Clara had told her that was how it would be, but Clara had advised her to marry Pea Eye anyway.

  "He's simple--sometimes that's good," Clara said. "He's gentle, too, but he's not weak.

  His horses respect him. I tend to trust a horse's respect.

  "He doesn't talk much, though," she added.

  "I don't care whether he talks or not," Lorena said. "I wouldn't marry a man just for conversation. I'd rather read, now that I know how, than listen to any man talk." "You're going to have to propose to Pea Eye, you know," Clara said. "He has no inkling that you want him. I doubt it's ever crossed his mind, that he could aspire to a beauty like you." Pea Eye had been working for Clara about a year, at that time. July Johnson, the former sheriff from Arkansas who had loved Clara deeply but failed to win her, drowned trying to ford the Republican River with a herd of seventy young horses. July had no judgment about horses, or water, or women, as it turned out. His son, Martin, was going to know more, but that was because Martin had her to teach him, Clara reflected.

  After Newt's death and the breakup of the Hat Creek outfit, Pea Eye had drifted south, meaning to descend the ladder of rivers until he got home to Texas. But, as luck would have it--the best piece of luck in his whole life, in his view--he showed up in Ogallala at a time when Clara was shorthanded, and she hired him on the spot.

  Out her window, as she was advising Lorena to marry him, Clara could see Pea Eye in the lots, trying to halter-break a young sorrel colt. Of course, Pea Eye was older; too old, in a way, for Lorena. But people couldn't have everything. Clara herself would have liked a husband.

  She considered herself to be reasonably good-looking, she attempted to be considerate, and thought she was tolerably easy to get along with. But she had no husband, and no prospects. Decent men were scarce, and she knew that Pea Eye was a decent man. Lorena had little to gain by waiting for someone better to come along, and Clara told her so.

  Looking at her husband, so shaky from the thought of leaving her that he could barely stand up, Lorena knew that Clara Allen had been right. He was loyal to her, and loyalty from men was a rarity in her life. Even Gus McCrae, her greatest love, had really been in love with Clara and would have left her to marry Clara, if he could have persuaded Clara to have him. Someday, Lorena imagined, some bandit would finally outshoot Captain Call, and she would finally have Pea Eye all to herself--if he could just stay alive, in the meantime.

  Coffee was still dripping off the table--Pea Eye had made a poor job of wiping up his spill. He patted August on the head and left the room. In a few minutes he came back, wearing his hat and carrying his slicker. He didn't have his guns.

  "Are your guns so dirty you're planning to leave them?" she asked, surprised. Never before had he left without his guns.

  "I won't need them," Pea Eye said.

  "I'm just going to the railroad, to tell the Captain I can't go on no more chases with him." Though it was exactly what she wanted to hear, Lorena felt a little frightened. Pea Eye had followed the Captain wherever the Captain went for many, many years, so many that she didn't know how many, and Pea Eye probably didn't know, either. Rangering with the Captain had been Pea Eye's life until she took him from it. For Pea Eye to end it now, just because the baby woke up coughing, represented a big change--indeed, a bigger change than she had anticipated having to face, on that particular day.

  "Pea," she said, "you don't have to do this just because of me. You don't have to do it because of the children, either.

  We aren't in any danger, and we'll all be here when you get back." Only lately had she been able to remember to say "aren't" rather than "ain't." She was proud of herself for remembering it so early in the morning, when she was sleepy.

  "All I ever asked is that you be careful," she said. "Help this man if you want to. Just don't get killed for him." "I ain't going to get killed for him, because I ain't going," Pea Eye said. "I've got too many obligations here. This chasing bandits has got to end sometime." He walked out to the little smokehouse and got a slab of bacon. When he returned to the kitchen the three boys, Ben, Georgie, and August, were all propped up in their chairs, looking sleepy and eating bread soaked in the warm milk Clarie had brought in. It was their usual breakfast, although sometimes, if Lorena was up early, she made porridge. Clarie sat on a stool, churning--they had run out of butter the night before.

  "You boys help your ma, while I'm gone," Pea Eye said, forgetting that he wasn't really going, this time.

  Lorena turned to look at him, wondering if he had changed his mind. That would have been unlike him. It might take Pea Eye a while to make up his mind, but once he made it up, he rarely doubled back on himself.

  "Oh," Pea Eye said, realizing from Lorie's look that he had made a slip of the tongue.

  "Help your mother this morning," he said. "I'll be back this afternoon." "Daddy, buy me a gun," Ben said. Ben was nine, and fascinated with firearms.

  "No, he's not buying you a gun," Lorena said. "You'd just shoot Georgie, and I can't spare Georgie." Georgie, seven, was straw-headed and buck-toothed, but he was Lorena's favorite, anyway. She couldn't help it. Every time she looked at Georgie, she felt her heart swell. He had a bit of a stammer, but he would grow out of it, probably.

  "I'll shall-shall-shall-shoot have-have-him," Georgie countered.

  Pea Eye picked up his slicker, and put on his hat. He looked at Lorena, who met his eye. She didn't say anything, but there was something disquieting in her look. Of course, that was nothing new. There was something disquieting in most of Lorena's looks.

  Pea Eye tried to think of something more to say, but failed. He had never been a man of many words, and being married to a schoolteacher hadn't changed him much. Hundreds of Lorie's looks, like this one, left him baffled.

  "See you for supper," he said, finally.

  "If you don't show up, I'll know you changed your mind," Lorena said. "He might talk you into going yet." "No, he won't talk me into going," Pea Eye said.

  All the same, loping across the plains, he dreaded the meeting he was riding to. It was a fine, crisp day, but Pea Eye didn't feel fine. He had never said no to the Captain, and now he would have to. The Captain wasn't going to like the news, either--the Captain definitely wasn't going to like the news.

  When Captain Call saw Pea Eye standing by the railroad track, with no duffle and no firearms, he knew that the moment of change had come. It was an unpleasant shock, but it was not a surprise. Lorena had been tightening her hold on Pea Eye year by year. In the last two years, particularly, Pea Eye's reluctance to accompany him had been evident, and had even begun to affect his work. Half the time on their trips, he was too homesick, or woman-sick, to function as skillfully as he once had, and his skill had its limits, even when he was a young man.

  "Well, I guess I've stopped this train for nothing, if you ain't getting on," Call said.

  He was annoyed, and he knew Pea Eye knew it, but since Pea Eye had arrived without his equipment, he saw no profit in forcing the issue.

  "I'd better just go," Call said. "Good luck with your farm." He shook Pea Eye's hand and got back on the train, which, in a moment, left. Soon even the
caboose had vanished from Pea Eye's view, swallowed up by the sea of grass as surely as a boat would have been by the curving sea.

  Pea Eye walked slowly over and caught his horse; it had grazed some distance away. He felt stunned: the Captain was gone. The Captain hadn't even argued with him, though he had looked a good deal put out. Of course, he noticed immediately that Pea hadn't brought his guns.

  "Forget your arsenal?" the Captain asked, when he first stepped off the train.

  "No, I didn't forget it, I just left it at home," Pea Eye said. A man in a fedora had been looking out the window of the train, at them. Pea Eye was uncomfortable anyway, and being stared at by a man in a fedora hat didn't help.

  "Oh, that's Brookshire, he's with the railroad," the Captain said, glancing around at the man. "He'll have to replace that hat, if he expects to travel very far with me. A man who can't keep his hat on his head won't be much help, in Mexico." "I guess I won't be being no help in Mexico neither, Captain," Pea Eye said.

  "I've got a wife and five children, and one's a baby. The time's come for me to stay home." Though Call had been expecting such a decision from Pea Eye for some time, hearing it was still a shock. He had paid Pea especially well on the last few trips, hoping to overcome his reluctance--it took money to farm, and what little Lorena had inherited from Gus must have been long gone by now.

  But Call knew Pea Eye too well to suppose that money, or anything else, would prevail much longer. Pea Eye was through with rangering, and Call had to admit that what they were doing was only the shadow of rangering, anyway.

  Call always felt angry when he anticipated Pea Eye's desertion--and, in his eyes, it was desertion--but, there by the train tracks, on the windy plain just north of Quanah, he swallowed the anger down, shook Pea Eye's hand, and got back on the train.

  The woman had won. In the end, it seemed they always did.

  Brookshire was startled when he saw the Captain come back alone. The man looked testy. Then the train pulled away, leaving the tall man and the grazing horses behind, on the prairie.

  "What's wrong with your man?" Brookshire asked. "Was he sick?" "No, he's not sick, he's married," Call said. "Running down bandits don't tempt him no more." "But I thought it was arranged," Brookshire said, more than a little alarmed. His instructions from Colonel Terry had been to let Call bring his man. Pea Eye himself was a legend, in a small way--Brookshire had been looking forward to meeting him. It was said that he had escaped from the Cheyenne Indians and had walked over one hundred miles, naked, to bring help to the other famous ranger, Augustus McCrae. Not many men could have walked one hundred miles naked, in Cheyenne country, and survived. Brookshire doubted that he could walk one hundred miles naked across New Jersey, and yet New Jersey was settled country, and his home state to boot.

  He had hoped to meet the man and hear about his adventures. So far, he was certainly not hearing about many of Captain Call's. It would have been entertaining to hear about the hundred-mile walk, but evidently, it was not to be.

  "I apologize--he's always been a reliable man," Call said. "He served with me more than thirty years--he's the last man I would have thought likely to marry. He never sought women, when he rode with me." "Oh well, I married myself," Brookshire said, thinking of Katie's fat legs. Those legs had once had great appeal to him, but their appeal had diminished over the years. There were times when he missed Katie, and times when he didn't. When he wasn't missing her, he sometimes considered that he had been a fool, to tie himself down. Indeed, he was hoping that one bonus from his long train trip might be a Mexican girl. The popular view in Brooklyn was that Mexican girls were pretty, lively, and cheap.

  "Who'll we get to replace him?" he asked, remembering that Colonel Terry expected results--and not next year, either.

  Joey Garza had struck seven times, stopping trains in remote areas of the Southwest, where trains were rarely bothered. He had killed eleven men so far, seemingly selecting his victims at random. Seven of the dead had been passengers; the rest, crew. Four of the seven trains had been carrying military payrolls, and one of the seven had Leland Stanford aboard. At that time, Leland Stanford was thought to be the richest man in California. The boy had taken his rings, his watch, and the fine silk sheets off the bed in his private car. He also took his diamond cuff links. Leland Stanford was not a man who took kindly to having his sheets removed by a young Mexican not yet out of his teens. It was Stanford who stoked the fire under Colonel Terry, prompting him to hire expensive help such as Captain Woodrow Call.

  It disturbed Brookshire that their plan had already gone awry, though they were still hundreds of miles from the border, and no doubt, many more hundreds of miles from where Joey Garza was to be found, if he was found.

  One thing could be said with certainty about Colonel Terry: he did not like for plans to go awry. If some did go awry anyway, someone invariably got blamed, and most of the time that someone was Brookshire.

  "I'll be lucky not to get fired," Brookshire said--he was mainly just thinking out loud.

  "Why? Pea Eye was never your responsibility," Call said. "You never even met the man, and can't be blamed for the fact that he married and settled down." "I can be blamed for anything," Brookshire assured him. "I'm one of those people everybody blames, when there's a misfortune." For several minutes he sat with his head down, feeling sorry for himself. It seemed to him that life was nothing but one misfortune after another, and he got blamed for them all. He had been the seventh boy in a family of eight children. His mother had blamed him for not being the little girl she had hoped for; his father blamed him for not being able to go out in the world and get rich. His brothers blamed him for being a runt; and in the army, he was blamed for being a coward.

  That one was fair, he had to admit. He was a coward, more or less. Fisticuffs appalled him, and gunfire alarmed him violently. He didn't like storms or lightning, and preferred to live on the first floor of apartment buildings, so escape would be easier in case of fire. He had been afraid that Katie wouldn't marry him, and once she did, he began to fear she would leave him, or else die.

  But of all the things he had managed to be frightened of in his life, Colonel Terry's anger was unquestionably the most powerful.

  Brookshire feared the Terry temper so much that he would rather bite his tongue off than give the Colonel even the smallest particle of bad news.

  Call didn't doubt what Brookshire said.

  A man who couldn't even control his hat was likely to attract a lot of blame. In that respect, Call reflected, Brookshire was not unlike Pea Eye himself. Pea had a strange tendency to assume that any bad turn of fortune was probably his fault. On the long cattle drive to Montana, various things happened that could not easily have been prevented.

  One morning the little Texas bull that all the cowboys feared got into a fight with a grizzly.

  The grizzly definitely didn't fear the bull; the fight was more or less a draw, though the bull got much of his hide ripped off, in the process of holding his own.

  For reasons that no one could fathom, Pea Eye decided the encounter was his fault. He felt he should either have roped the bull, or shot the bear, though neither, in Call's view, would have been sensible procedure. If he had roped the bull, it might well have jerked Pea's horse down, in which case the bear would have got them both. If Pea had tried to kill the grizzly with a sidearm, the bear might have turned on the cowboys, instead of on the bull.

  Five years and more later, Pea Eye was still worrying about his role in the encounter. What it showed was that people weren't sensible, when it came to assigning or assuming blame.

  People were rarely sensible about anything, in Call's opinion. He had taken, he thought, a sensible approach to Pea Eye's desertion while he was actually in the man's presence--but now that he wasn't actually faced with his old corporal, Call found that his anger was rising. He had taken Pea Eye into his troop of Rangers when the latter was no more than a boy, too young to be an official member of any military organiz
ation.

  But, because the boy looked honest, Call had bent the rules, which were more bendable then than they would become.

  Now, it seemed, Pea Eye had deserted him in favor of matrimony, and the desertion left a bitter taste in his mouth. Call had supposed that if he could count on any of his old troop, he could count on Pea. Yet it turned out to be Lorena, once a whore, now a schoolteacher, who could count on Pea.

  Call had no doubt that Clara Allen had been behind the match, and though fifteen years had passed, he still resented her interference. It was one thing to educate Lorena; whores had as much right to improve themselves as anybody else. But it was another thing to arrange matters so that the girl could take his most trusted helper.

  Dish Boggett, the best of the Hat Creek cowboys and far better on horseback than Pea had ever been, had mooned over Lorena for years. Why couldn't Clara have nudged the girl into accepting Dish? Up to that time Pea had shown no great inclination to domesticity, though he briefly courted, or was courted by, a rather bossy widow in the village of Lonesome Dove.

  The trail drive had ended that, if there'd been anything to end.

  Because of Clara's meddling, or Lorena's boldness, or a combination of the two, Call was riding south with only a Yankee office worker, to go after the most enterprising young bandit to show up on the border in a decade or more.

  It galled Call--when he next encountered Pea Eye, he intended to make that clear.

  "I regret now that I didn't force him," Call said to Brookshire. "It leaves us shorthanded. It's just that I never expected to have to force Pea Eye. He's always followed me, before." Brookshire noticed that the Captain looked a little tight around the mouth.

  "How long has your friend been married?" he asked.

  "Fifteen years, I suppose. He had a number of children, though I have not met them," Call said.

  "You have not married yourself, I take it?" Brookshire asked, cautiously. He did not want to annoy the man, as he clearly had earlier in the day by asking him how long he had been a lawman.