Streets of Laredo

by Larry McMurtry

"Oh no," Call said. "It's one thing I never tried. But you're married, and you're here.

  Your wife hasn't stopped you from doing your duty." "Why, Katie wouldn't care if I went to China," Brookshire said. "She's got her sewing, and then there's the cat. She's very fond of the cat." Call said nothing. He knew women were sometimes fond of cats, though the reason for the attraction escaped him.

  "So what will we do for a second man, now that your deputy has declined?" Brookshire asked. "Know any good gun hands in San Antonio?" "Nobody reliable," Call said. "I don't know what a gun hand is, but if I ever happened to meet one I doubt I'd want to hire him." "No offense," Brookshire said. "That's just what we call them in New York." "I would rather do the job alone than to take someone unreliable, particularly if we have to go into Mexico," Call said.

  "We might, I guess," Brookshire said.

  "He did rob that train with the governor of Coahuila on it. That was his worst act, after robbing Mr. Stanford." "I doubt he knew the governor was on the train," Call said. "That was just luck. I doubt he ever heard of Mr. Stanford, either. I hadn't myself, until you mentioned him." "Maybe I ought to wire the Colonel," Brookshire suggested. "The Colonel could raise an army, if he wanted to. I'm sure he can find us one man." "No," Call said. "I'll do my own looking. Your Colonel might find the wrong fellow." "I leave it to you, Captain," Brookshire said.

  Call didn't answer. The question of Pea Eye's replacement was not one he was ready to consider. He was still brooding about Pea Eye, the man who hadn't come. His temper kept rising, too. It rose so high that it took all his self-restraint to keep from stopping the train and going after Pea Eye. Part of his anger was directed at himself for having been so mild and meek in the face of plain desertion. Of course, in strict terms, it wasn't desertion; no war was on, he himself wasn't even a Ranger anymore, and neither was Pea. The man wasn't really in his employ, and they were just going to eliminate a bandit, no very glorious cause or glorious work, either.

  But then, none of their work had been glorious.

  It had all been bloody, hard, and tiring, from their first foray against the Kiowa until now. There were no bugles, no parades, and very few certainties, in the life they led as Rangers.

  Call had killed several men, Indian, white, and Mexican, whose courage he admired; in some cases he had even admired their ideals. Many times, going into battle, a portion of his sympathies had been with the enemy. The Mexicans along the border had been robbed, by treaty, of country and cattle that had been their grandparents'; the Comanche and the Kiowa had to watch the settlement of hunting grounds that had been theirs for many generations.

  Call didn't blame the Mexicans for fighting. He didn't blame the Comanche or the Kiowa, either. Had he been them, he would have fought just as hard. He was pledged to arrest them or remove them, not to judge them.

  But he did blame Pea Eye for not coming with him on the trip. Of course, the reasons Pea gave were not empty excuses: he did have a wife to care for, children to raise, and a farm to work.

  In Call's view, there was an obligation stronger than those, and that obligation was loyalty.

  It seemed to him the highest principle, loyalty. He preferred it to honor. He had never been exactly sure what men meant when they spoke of their honor, though it had been a popular word during the time of the War. He was sure, though, what he meant when he spoke of loyalty. A man didn't desert his comrades, his troop, his leader. If he did he was, in Call's book, worthless.

  Jake Spoon, a friend he had ended up having to hang--there was an example of a man without loyalty. Jake had rangered with Gus and Call. He was as pleasant and engaging a man as Call had ever known. But he had no loyalty, as he had proven in Kansas, when he ran off with a gang of thieving killers. When they caught him, Jake could scarcely believe that his old compa@neros would hang him--but they hung him.

  Pea Eye's case was far less extreme, of course. He hadn't thrown in with killers and thieves; he had merely married. Pea was not a man who could be said to be without loyalty. But he had changed loyalties, and what did that say?

  The whole point of loyalty was not to change: stick with those who stuck with you. Pea Eye had proven his loyalty countless times, on the old trails. But then he had chosen a new trail.

  Thinking about the matter caused Call to alternate between anger and sorrow. One minute he wanted to ride over to the Quitaque and order Pea Eye to get his rifle and saddle and come; but the next moment, he felt he ought to respect Pea Eye's choice and leave him in peace with his wife, his children, and his farm. He himself would have enjoyed the trip south a great deal more if Pea had been along, but then, he was not in the business for enjoyment, he guessed. He was in the business to make a living. Once, there had been more to it than that, or at least, he had convinced himself that there was more to it. The politicians said that the killing he had done was necessary. Call was no longer so sure it had been necessary. But even if it had always been, in the main, a way to make a living, loyalty to one's own was still the first duty, and he felt a painful pressure in his breast when he thought of Pea Eye's defection.

  Brookshire looked at the long plain outside the train window and sighed. The train seemed to creep. There was nothing but the horizon to measure its progress by, and the horizon was just an endless line. He remembered that he had some books in his valise--dime novels he had provided himself with in Kansas City, in case he came down with the doldrums during his travels.

  There was also a pack of cards in his valise.

  On the whole, he preferred card playing to reading. Card playing didn't wear the mind down so.

  "Captain, are you a card-playing man?" he asked, hopefully. A good game of cards would go a long way toward relieving the tedium of train travel.

  "No," Call said.

  "Well, I didn't really think you were," Brookshire said. He sighed, and rummaged in his valise until he found the dime novels. He pulled them out, glanced at them, and put them back where he found them. After a little more rummaging, he located the pack of cards.

  "I reckon it'll be solitaire, then," he said, with another hopeful glance at the Captain.

  Captain Woodrow Call didn't say a word.

  On his way home, Pea Eye made a detour in order to ride by the schoolhouse. The little building was perched on a low bluff overlooking the Red River. He could see it, in spots, from fifteen miles away.

  Pea rarely went to the school. On the few occasions when he did show up there, Lorena made it plain that he should state his business and then go on about it. The school was her place. On an active day, she had as many as thirty children to manage, and she needed to pay attention. Clarie was so good with spelling, and also with arithmetic, that Lorena sometimes let her daughter help her with the little kids. But she was the schoolmistress, and most of what had to be done, she did.

  Still, Pea Eye felt an urgent need to see his wife, even though he knew she would not be at her most welcoming. At first, when Captain Call politely shook his hand and got back on the train, Pea felt relieved. The Captain didn't seem quite himself, but at least he hadn't been angry, and he had not attempted to insist that Pea Eye go with him.

  But Pea Eye's relief scarcely lasted until he was out of sight of the train. He felt good for a few minutes, but then he began to feel strange. It was as if he were leaking--emptying out, like a bucket that had bullet holes in it. He began to feel sad--the same sadness he had felt in bed the night before. He had lain beside Lorena then, warmed by her body, wishing he didn't have to go anywhere. Now, it was clear that he wouldn't have to go. He could be with his wife and children, and get on with his many chores. The spring winds had blown a corner off the roof of the barn. All summer and fall he had meant to get it mended, but he hadn't. Now, he could attend to it, and to other much needed repairs as well. He could do whatever he wanted to, around the place.

  Yet he felt so sad he could hardly keep from crying. His memories were getting mixed up with his feelings. Thinking of the barn with the leaky roof re
minded him of the barn that had belonged to the Hat Creek outfit, way south in Lonesome Dove.

  That barn had no roof at all, for years. Of course, it seldom rained in Lonesome Dove, so the stock didn't suffer much, as it would have if that barn had been in the Panhandle. But the stock wasn't really what was on Pea Eye's mind, or in his memory. What was on his mind was the old Hat Creek outfit itself--his old compa@neros, the men he had ridden withfor years.

  Captain Call, of course, and Gus McCrae and Deets and Newt and Dish Boggett, old Bol the cook, and Jake Spoon; Soupy and Jasper Fant and all the rest. Now they were scattered, not merely all over the cattle country, but between life and death as well. Gus had died in Miles City, Montana, of gangrene in his leg. Deets was killed by an Indian boy in Wyoming; Jake, they had to hang in Kansas. Then the boy Newt, a good boy whom Pea had always liked and respected, had the life crushed out of him by the Hell Bitch, way up on the Milk River.

  Pea loved his wife and children, and he couldn't imagine life without them. He hadn't wanted to go with the Captain, and he still didn't. But, despite that, he missed his old partners of the trail. The boys would never ride out together again; they would never be an outfit again. It was sad, but it was life.

  He knew, too, that the Captain must have had a hard time holding his temper, when he discovered that he would have to go after Joey Garza alone. The matter of the bandit didn't worry Pea Eye, though. He couldn't imagine a bandit that the Captain couldn't subdue. That was just the order of things. It was Lorena, though, who kept pointing out that the order of things could change.

  "Nothing's permanent," she insisted. "We'll get old, and the children will grow up." "I'll get old first--I guess I'm old now," Pea Eye answered. "You won't get old for a long time." "I don't know about that," Lorena said.

  "I've borne five children. It don't make you younger." Now, riding beside the pale river with its wide sandy bed, occasionally catching a glimpse of the schoolhouse where his wife spent her days, Pea Eye had to admit that the order of things had changed. This was one of the days when it changed.

  Lorena saw Pea Eye coming, through the glass window of the school room. The glass had to be ordered from Fort Worth, and the whole of the Quitaque community was proud of it. Few were the settlers who could afford glass windows for themselves.

  "Here comes your pa," she said to Clarie. "I wonder if Captain Call lit into him?" "He better not have. He don't own my pa," Clarie said. She deeply resented the Captain, a man she had never met. He had never even come to meet her and the other children, yet he loomed in her life because of the power he had to take her father away. She knew her father felt obligated to the Captain, but she didn't know why. It wasn't the Captain who had given her mother the money to buy the farm. Her mother resented the old man, too. Clarie knew that, from eavesdropping on her parents. Half the arguments she had overheard as she was growing up had to do with Captain Call. They were not arguments, really. Her father didn't know how to argue, or didn't want to, but her mother certainly knew how to argue. Her mother said many ugly things when she was mad. Mostly, her father just quietly obeyed her mother. He tried his best to do what she wanted him to do. The only times he didn't was when the Captain needed him. Then, he just saddled up and left.

  "I thought he went with the Captain," Clarie said, surprised to see her father coming.

  "No, he didn't go," Lorena said. "He finally stood up to the man." "Goodness!" Clarie said. It was a big shock, a big change. "Are you glad, Ma?" "I will be when I know I can trust it," Lorena said.

  She had been about to test some of the older children in multiplication, but she closed her arithmetic book and went to the back door of the school. Pea Eye rode up, looking a little hangdog. He knew she didn't really like for him to show up at the school. She didn't like to see him looking hangdog, either, though--it made her feel that she must have been mean to him. She didn't want to feel that she had been mean to Pea. In the years of their marriage he had never raised his voice, much less his hand, to her in anger. He knew she wasn't an angel, and yet, year in and year out, Pea treated her like one. A man that steady was rare, and she knew it.

  Still, the fact was, she was busy. She had an arithmetic class to teach, and few of her pupils were adept at arithmetic.

  "Well, the Captain left without me," Pea Eye said quietly. He felt out of place; he always did, when he visited Lorie at the schoolhouse. He wasn't really even sure why he had come. He felt sad inside, and just wanted to be with his wife for a few minutes.

  "Did he fuss at you?" Lorena asked.

  She was touched, that Pea had come. She lived with many doubts, but she never had to doubt that Pea Eye needed her. If he needed anything, he needed her. At the moment he looked gloomy and pale; lately he had been waking up with bad headaches.

  "Are you sick, honey?" She asked, softening suddenly. Why was she so stiff with him, so often? He just seemed to bring it out in her, for no better reason than that he loved her to distraction.

  She liked it that he loved her, but she wished, sometimes, that he wouldn't be so obvious about it.

  "No, he just shook my hand and left," Pea Eye said.

  "Have you got one of those headaches?" she asked.

  "It's pounding," Pea admitted. "This horse has got a stiff trot." It isn't the stiff trot, it's the stiff wife, Lorena thought to herself--no point in saying it to Pea. He usually didn't know he was being punished, even when he was being punished severely.

  "Wait a minute," she said, turning back into the schoolhouse. Clarie was comforting a little boy who had wet his pants. The child's mother had gone berserk that winter and had to be sent away. Two days out of three, the little boy wet his pants in the schoolroom. He missed his mother badly.

  "Clarie, you better go home with your pa," Lorena said. "He's feeling poorly." "But Ma, Roy and I were going to study together," Clarie protested, looking across the room at Roy Benson. Roy was the tallest boy in the school, by several inches, and he was also the nicest.

  He was nearly as tall as her pa--maybe that was why she liked him so.

  "You can study with Roy tomorrow--your pa needs you today," Lorena said.

  "But who'll help you with Laurie and the boys, on the way home?" Clarie asked, trying hard to come up with a good reason why she should stay.

  Roy's folks were thinking of taking him out of school, since he couldn't be spared from the ranch work much longer. She hated to miss even one day with Roy. The Benson ranch was fifteen miles from their farm. Clarie felt she would never get to see him, once he left school.

  "Since when have I not been able to get home with my own children?" Lorena asked, a little impatiently. She was anxious to get Clarie and Pea Eye gone. The children were beginning to act up, as they always did when her attention wavered for more than a minute or two. Roy Benson was usually the instigator, too. He was a bright boy, but full of the devil.

  "Well, you can take care of them, but Laurie is my sister and I like to help with her," Clarie said.

  "You do help, but now I need you to help your father," Lorena said. "I wouldn't ask it, if I didn't need it." Clarie gave up. The look in her mother's eye was a look you didn't argue with, if you were smart.

  "Can I just go tell Roy I can't study with him today?" she asked.

  "I'll tell him," Lorena said. "He ain't made of air, Clarie. He'll be here tomorrow." "Ma, you said "ain't,"" Clarie told her, startled. Her mother's grammar only slipped when she was angry, or in a hurry.

  "Yes, because you're vexing me," Lorena said.

  "You know I slip up, when you vex me." "Roy might not be here tomorrow," Clarie said, returning to the original point at issue.

  "His folks might make him work, and then I'll never get to see him." She felt bitter. Roy was the only nice boy she knew, and now his folks might make him leave her, in order to help with the cow work.

  But, bitter or not, she knew it was unwise to provoke her mother past a certain point, and that point was not far away. With another futile glance
at Roy--he was teasing a little kid and did not see her--she went outside and obediently climbed up behind her father. Windmill, her father's big gray horse, grunted, but at least didn't break wind. For some reason, hearing horses break wind embarrassed her keenly; at least it did when there was a man around, even if the man was her father.

  "Pa, do you like Roy Benson?" she asked, as they were trotting homeward.

  "Roy? He's gangly, but then so am I," Pea Eye said.

  Billy Williams had to walk the last five miles into Ojinaga because he lost his horse. It was a ridiculous accident. It was sure to hurt his reputation as the last of the great scouts, and his reputation had been slipping badly, anyway.

  The horse became misplaced as a result of the fact that Billy had to answer a call of nature. He had been riding at a sharp clip, all the way from Piedras Negras--the news he had was so urgent that it prompted him to neglect the call until disgrace was at hand.

  Then, he failed to tether his mount properly and the horse wandered off. Perhaps because of the sharp clip he had maintained, or the tequila he had drunk while maintaining it, Billy relaxed so much in the course of his call of nature that he dozed off for a few minutes, still squatting. That in itself was nothing new, since he often nodded off for a few minutes while squatting in response to nature's call. Squatting was a position he found completely comfortable; in fact, it was one of the few that he did find comfortable. When he stood up straight, he coughed too much. His diagnosis was that a couple of his ribs were poking into a lung, the result of an encounter a few years back with a buffalo cow that looked dead but wasn't.

  Lying flat on his back was not a good position, either. A headache usually accompanied that position, probably because Billy never lay flat on his back unless he was dead drunk.

  The fact was, his horse wasn't very far away; Billy just couldn't see him. His vision had once been so sharp that he could see a small green worm on a small green leaf, at a distance of thirty yards. Now, he couldn't even see his own horse if the horse was thirty yards away. It was a sad state for a great scout to have come to.