Valdez Is Coming: A Novel

by Elmore Leonard

  He would have taken her away from the drunk alive, and once he was dead there wasn’t anything else to think over. He took her and she came with him. He would marry her, too, but he had things to do and she’d have to wait on that; but in the meantime there wasn’t any reason they couldn’t live as husband and wife. She saw that and agreed, and she was better than he ever imagined in Yuma she would be. She was real now and she was his, and there wasn’t any goddam broken-down Mexican nigger-loving town constable going to run off with her into the hills and threaten to kill her. Valdez, or whatever his name, was a dead man and he could roll over right now and save everybody a lot of time.

  Tanner was looking off at the hills that climbed into the Santa Ritas and the twin peaks, far away against the hot sky.

  “What’s up there?” he said to the segundo.

  “Nothing,” the segundo answered.

  “Why would he want us to track up there?”

  “I don’t know,” the segundo said. “Maybe he’s got a place somewhere.”

  “What kind of place?”

  “An Apache camp he’s been to,” the segundo said. “He knows the Apache—the thing he did to the three of them in the open country, hiding where there’s no place to hide.”

  “He didn’t seem like much,” Frank Tanner said.

  “Maybe,” the segundo said. “But he knows the Apache.”

  R. L. Davis got drunk trying to work up nerve to tell what he did to Bob Valdez and never did tell it. He went over to Inez’s, but they wouldn’t let him in. Then he didn’t remember anything after that. He woke up in the Maricopa bunkhouse when a hand came in and poured water all over him. God, he felt awful. So it was afternoon by the time he got out to Mimbreño.

  There seemed to be more activity than the time he was here before, more men in the village sitting around waiting for something, and more horses and more noise. He rode up the street not looking around too much, but not missing anything either. He hoped Mr. Tanner would be outside, and he was, the same place he was the last time, up on the loading platform. The problem was to tell him before Mr. Tanner gave any orders to have him run off or tied to a cross or whatever he might do; so he kept his eyes on Mr. Tanner and the second he saw Mr. Tanner’s gaze land on him, R. L. Davis yelled out, “I know where he is!”

  They looked at him, all the people standing around there, and let him ride over toward the platform where Mr. Tanner was waiting.

  “I think I know where he is,” R. L. Davis said to Mr. Tanner.

  “You think so or you know so,” Tanner said.

  “I’d bet a year’s wage on it.”

  “Where?”

  “A place up in the mountains.”

  “I asked you where.”

  “I was thinking,” R. L. Davis said. “Let me ride along and I can show you. Take you right to it.”

  Tanner kept looking at him deciding something, but showing nothing in his face. Finally he said, “Step down and water your horse.”

  6

  Most of the day the woman, Gay Erin, rode behind Valdez as they climbed out of the flatland and across sloping meadows that stretched toward pine timber, in the open sunlight all morning and into the afternoon, until they reached the deep shade of the forest. She noticed that Valdez seldom looked back now. When they had stopped to rest and he stood waiting as the horses grazed, he would look north sometimes, the way they had come, but he stood relaxed and could be looking at nothing more than the view.

  Earlier this morning, once it was light, he had looked back. He stopped and looked back for some time as they were crossing flat, open country. When they reached the trees he made her dismount and tied their horses to a dead trunk that had fallen. She watched him walk out of the trees, out across the flats until he was a small figure in the distance. She watched him squat or kneel by a low brush clump and then she didn’t see him again, not for more than an hour, not until the three riders appeared and she heard the gunfire. He came back carrying his shotgun; they mounted again and continued on. She asked him, “Did you kill them?” And he answered, “One. Maybe another.” She asked, “Why didn’t you tie me? I could have run away.” He said to her, “Where would you go?”

  They spoke little after that. They stopped to rest in a high meadow and she asked him where they were going. “Up there,” he answered, nodding toward the rock slopes above them.

  Another time she said to him, “Maybe you don’t have a natural call to do certain things, but I do.” He smiled a little and told her to go ahead, he wouldn’t look. She stayed on the off side of her horse and didn’t know if he looked or not.

  At first she wondered about him, and there were questions she wanted to ask; but she followed him in silence, watching the slope of his shoulders, the easy way he sat his saddle. In time the pain began to creep down her back and into her thighs; she held on to the saddle horn, following the movement of the horse and not thinking or wondering about him after a while, wanting this to be over but knowing he wasn’t going to stop until he was ready.

  When they reached the edge of the pine timber he dismounted. Gay Erin went to the ground and stretched out on her back in the shade. She could feel her lips cracked and hard and dirt in the corners of her eyes. She wanted water, to drink and to bathe in, but more than water she wanted to stretch the stiffness from her body and sleep.

  She heard Valdez say, “We’re going to move. Not far, over a little bit.” Looking up at the pine branches she closed her eyes and thought, He’ll have to drag me or carry me. She could hear him moving in the pine needles and could hear the horses. She waited for him to come over and tell her to get up or kick her or pull her to her feet, but after a while there was no sound, and in the silence she fell asleep.

  When she opened her eyes she wasn’t sure where she was and wondered if he had moved her. The trees above were a different color now, darker, and she could barely see the sky through the branches. She stretched, feeling the stiffness, and rolled to her side. Valdez was sitting on the ground a few feet away smoking a cigarette, watching her. She pushed herself to a sitting position. “I thought we were moving.”

  “It’s waiting for you,” Valdez said.

  He led her on foot along the dark-shadowed edge of the timber. Off from them, in the open, dusk was settling over the hills. They walked for several minutes, until she smelled wood burning and saw the horses picketed close below them in the meadow. The camp was just inside the timber, in a cutbank that came down through the pines like a narrow road, widening where it reached the meadow and dropping into the valley below.

  At times she looked at him across the low fire, at this man who had taken her up a mountain and let her sleep for a few hours and then served her pan bread and ham and peppers and strong coffee. When they had finished he took a bottle of whiskey from a canvas bag. She watched him now. She could see Jim Erin with his bottle every evening, saying he was going to have a couple to relax and pouring a glass and then another glass, smoking a cigar and taking another drink, his voice becoming louder as he talked. Sometimes she would go out, visit one of the officers’ wives, and if she could stay long enough he would be asleep when she got home. But sometimes he wouldn’t allow her to go out and she would have to listen to him as he pretended he was a man, hearing his complaints and his obscenities and his words of abuse; the goddam Army and the goddam fort and the goddam heat and the goddam woman sitting there with her goddam nose up in the air. The first time he hit her she doubled her fist and hit him back, solidly in the mouth, and he beat her until she was unconscious. For months he didn’t take a drink and was kind to her. But he started again, gradually, and by the time he had worked up to his bottle an evening he was slapping her and several times hit her with his fist. She never fought back after the first time. She was married to him, a man old enough to be her father, who perhaps might grow up one day. Sometimes she thought she loved him; most of the time she wasn’t sure, and there were moments when she hated him. But he didn’t change; he beat her for
the last time and no man would ever beat her again.

  It surprised her when Valdez offered the bottle. “For the cold,” he said. “Or to make you sleep.” She hesitated, then took a sip and handed it back to him. Valdez raised the bottle. When he lowered it he popped in the cork and got up to put the bottle away.

  “I’ve never seen a man take one drink,” she said.

  Valdez sat down again by the fire. “Maybe it has to last.”

  “I was married to a man who drank.” He made no comment and she said, “He was killed.”

  Valdez nodded. “I see.”

  “What do you see?”

  “I mean you were married and now you’re not. What’s your name?”

  “Gay Erin.”

  He was looking at her but said nothing for a moment. “That’s your marriage name?”

  “Mrs. James C. Erin.”

  “Of Fort Huachuca,” Valdez said. “Your husband was killed six months ago.”

  “You knew him?”

  He shook his head.

  She waited. “Then you heard about it.”

  Valdez said, “You were in Lanoria Saturday when the man was killed?”

  “Frank said an Army deserter was shot.”

  “No, he wasn’t a deserter. Frank Tanner said it was the man that killed your husband, but when he looked at him dead he said no, it was somebody else.”

  Gay Erin said, “And the Indian woman, the widow——”

  “Was the wife of the man we killed by mistake.”

  She nodded slowly. “I see.” She said then, “Frank didn’t tell me that.”

  Valdez watched her. “But you’re going to marry him.”

  “What difference does it make to you?”

  “I like to know how much he wants you—if you’re worth coming after.”

  “He’ll come,” she said.

  “I think so too. I think he wants you pretty bad.” Valdez placed a stick on the fire and pushed the ends of the sticks that had not burned into the center of the flame. “You know what else I think. I think maybe he wanted you pretty bad when you were still married.”

  The flame rose to the fresh wood. He could see her face in the light, her eyes holding on his.

  “He knew my husband,” she said. “Sometimes he’d come to visit. Anyone who was at the hearing knows that.”

  “And after it you go to live with him.”

  She was staring at him in the flickering light. “Why don’t you say it right out?”

  “It’s just something I started to wonder.”

  “You think Frank killed my husband.”

  “He could do it.”

  “He could,” the woman said, “but he didn’t.”

  “You’re sure of that, uh?”

  “I know he didn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I killed him.”

  She had come from Prescott with her nightgowns and linens to marry James C. Erin, and five years and six months later she fired three bullets into him from a service revolver and left him dead.

  Tell this man about it, she thought. The time in the draw at night, a single moment in her life she would see more clearly than anything she had ever experienced. She had told no one about it and now she was telling this man sitting across the low-burning fire, not telling him everything, but not sure what to tell and what to leave out.

  She began telling him about Jim Erin and found she had to tell him about her father and the years of living on Army posts and her mother dying of fever when she was a little girl. She remembered Jim Erin when she was younger, in her early teens, and her father was stationed at Whipple Barracks. She remembered Jim Erin and her father drinking together and remembered them stumbling and knocking the dishes from the table. A few years later she remembered her father—after he retired and they were living in Prescott—mentioning Jim Erin and saying he was coming to see them. And when he came she remembered Jim Erin again, the man with the nice smile and the black hair who had a way of holding her arm as he talked to her, his fingers moving, feeling her skin. She remembered her father drinking and cursing the Army and a system that would pass over a man and leave him a lieutenant after sixteen years on frontier station. Now a sutler was something else; he had a government contract to sell stores to the soldiers and could do well. Like his friend Jim Erin. The girl who gets him is getting something, her father had told her, leading up to it, and within a year had arranged the marriage. A year and a half later her father was dead of a stroke.

  A lot of men drink, but their wives don’t kill them. Of course. It wasn’t his drinking. Yes, it was his drinking, but it was more than that. If he wasn’t the kind of man he was and he didn’t beat her it wouldn’t have happened. This was in her mind, though she didn’t try to explain it to Valdez. He put wood on the fire, keeping the flame low, while she told him about the night she killed her husband.

  It was after Frank Tanner had left. He had come to see Jim Erin on business, with a proposition to supply the sutler’s store with leather and straw goods he could bring up from Mexico.

  She stared into the fire, remembering that night. “They were drinking when I left to visit for a while,” she said. “When I got back Frank was gone and Jim was out of whiskey. He couldn’t borrow any. No one would lend it to him, and that night he didn’t have enough money to buy any. So he said he was going out to get corn beer…”

  “He liked tulapai, uh?”

  “He liked anything you could drink. He said someone not far away would sell him a bucket of it. I told him he was too drunk to go out alone, and he said then I was coming with him if I was so concerned. Jim got his gun and we took the buggy, not past the main gate, because he didn’t want anybody questioning him. There was no stockade and it was easy to slip out if you didn’t want to be seen.

  “I don’t know where we went except it was a few miles from the fort and off the main road. When we finally stopped Jim got out and left me there. He said ‘here,’ handing me his gun, ‘so you won’t be scared.’ He didn’t mean it as kindness; he was saying ‘here, woman, I’m going off alone, but I don’t need any gun.’ Do you see what I mean?”

  She looked at Valdez. He nodded and asked her then, “Was he drunk at this time?”

  “Fairly. He’d had the bottle with Frank. He stumbled some, weaving, as he walked away from the buggy. There wasn’t a house around or a sign of light. He walked off toward a draw you could see because of the brush in it.

  “It must have been a half hour before I saw him coming back, hearing him first, because it was so dark that night, then seeing him. He was carrying a gourd in front of him with both hands and when he got to the buggy he raised it and said, ‘Here, take it.’ He put his foot up on the step plate to rest the gourd on his knee, but as he did it his foot slipped and he dropped the gourd on the rocks. He looked down at the broken pieces and the corn beer soaking into the ground, then up at me and said it was my fault, I should have taken it. He started screaming at me, saying he was going to beat me up good. I said, ‘Jim, don’t do it. Please,’ I remember that. He started to step up into the buggy, reaching for me, and I jumped out the other side. I ran toward the draw, but he got ahead of me, turning me. I said to him, ‘Jim, I’ve got your gun. If you touch me I’ll use it.’ I remember saying that too. He kept coming, working around me as I faced him, until I was against the side of the draw and couldn’t turn. I said to Jim, please. He came at me and I pulled the trigger. Jim fell to his knees, though I wasn’t sure I had hit him. He picked up something, I guess a rock, and came at me again, and this time I shot him twice and knew I had killed him.”

  Valdez rolled a cigarette and leaned into the fire to light it, and raising his eyes he saw the woman staring into the light. She sat unmoving; she was in another time, remembering, her hands folded in her lap. She seemed younger at this moment and smaller, this woman who had killed her husband.

  Valdez said, “You didn’t tell anyone?”

  She shook her head sl
owly.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know. I was afraid. I went back to the post. The next day, after they found him, they asked me questions. I told them Jim had gone out late, but I didn’t know where. They told me he was dead and I didn’t say anything, because I couldn’t pretend to be sorry. When I didn’t tell them then, I couldn’t tell them later, at the hearing. They decided it must have been the man who deserted, a soldier named Johnson who everybody knew was buying corn beer from the Indians and selling it at the post.”