Dutch Uncle

by Marilyn Durham

  He was up and across the room with his hand on the door in an instant, but he didn’t open it.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Tío?’

  The sensation that prickled through his flesh at the sound of that voice was almost as nasty as fear. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he breathed, eyes closed. Then he opened the door. They stood close together in the dim hall in their rusty black clothes with an anxious shepherd behind them.

  ‘The ticket agent said they were left on the stage by mistake, but he must have meant they just came in earlier than you expected. They were down at the stage office for a couple of hours before they told the clerk they had an uncle here in the hotel. I guess you’ve been worried about them.’

  Jake Jake let them in. The clerk handed him their mother’s frayed old carpetbag, examining him with fresh curiosity at the same time. Jake didn’t see how anybody could mistake him for a spick’s uncle, but it seemed to be happening again.

  ‘The ticket agent didn’t know your name, and the funny thing is they couldn’t tell me what it was, either. But they’re pretty small to be traveling by themselves. I guess they were just scared and tired. I knew they had to be yours, though. You’re the only new gentleman in here tonight.’

  Jake closed the door with the briefest thanks and turned to look down at the children. He wasn’t even angry, he realized. Of course they’d turn up on him again, like a couple of bent pesos. He should have known the damned driver would be watching to see if he came back. Even if he had forgotten about Jake, the Gringo Kid here would have told everybody that his tío had just gone off to see a friend in town.

  He had felt it all the time. It must have been the reason for his unease.

  ‘Get off that bed!’ he snarled at the little one, who was just starting to make a nest in it. ‘If you piss in the bed you’re not going to sleep with me!’

  They watched, heavy eyed, while he snatched off the covers and folded them up to make a pallet on the floor. He threw in both pillows for good measure, because this time he had put his money belt under the mattress.

  While he sat hunched on the edge of the bed, they pulled off their shoes and socks and obediently lay down together on the pallet. Jake was trying to remember something he had heard once, about a poor bastard who unwittingly committed some kind of crime and had to go around for the rest of his life with a dead bird tied to his neck. It didn’t make any sense.

  ‘Are you mad at us, tío?’

  ‘No, I’m not mad at you. But why in the hell do you keep calling me tío? You don’t even know me.’

  ‘Mama said. We got a lot of tíos. Mama says they like it better than when we called them all papa.’

  ‘Yeah. I guess. Well, my name is Jake. You call me that.’

  ‘Chake?’

  ‘That’s close enough.’

  ‘My name is Paco Robles.’ He was the bigger one, with the missing teeth. He looked about the right age for them to have come out naturally instead of having been kicked out, which Jake felt would have otherwise been a reasonable assumption.

  “How about your brother over there?’ He had never heard the little one speak; only hum or cry.

  The older one laughed.

  ‘He ain’t my brother. She’s my sister, tío! She is Maria Concepción, that Mama calls Urraca because she like to hide every damn thing she can find. Mama says—’ He stopped under the intensity of Jake’s stare. ‘You mad at me now?’

  Jake groaned and leaned over to blow out the lamp, then stretched himself out on the bare bed fully clothed.

  ‘Chake?’

  ‘Shut up and go to sleep.’

  There was no more talk from anyone. Surprisingly enough, Jake himself was asleep in five minutes.

  3

  Paco Robles was curled up like a cub at the foot of the bed when Jake woke. The smell emanating from his sleeping sister explained his daring. She had sopped their pallet again. Jake stepped over her and shoved open the window to let in some fresh air. The sound woke Paco with a start, but after a careful examination of Jake’s deadly morning face he confined his ever-ready tongue to a ‘Good morning, tío,’ which Jake did not answer.

  The girl woke while he was shaving, and the two of them watched him perform the ritual in a rapt silence. They were not used to the presence of men in the morning. Their chins lifted in unison as Jake lifted his and carefully scraped himself from Adam’s apple to chin. When he was finished he looked critically at Maria Concepción.

  ‘Has she got any extra clothes in that bag?’

  ‘Yes, Chake.’

  ‘Well, get them out. She smells like a coyote’s pantry.’

  While they were busy rifling the carpetbag he slipped his money belt out from under the mattress and put it on, tucking his shirt in hastily as he caught the little girl’s mouse-bright eyes watching him over her brother’s shoulder. He buckled on the shoulder holster and put on his coat while Paco buttoned up his sister.

  ‘What should I do with the old wet stuff, tío?’

  ‘Leave it here.’ It would be his gift to the management for surprising him last night. He picked up his own leather valise and reached for their old carpetbag. It seemed unusually heavy for being half empty. ‘What the hell have you got in here, a cannon ball?’ He looked inside, but there was nothing except the usual things: underwear, the woman’s purse, and a cheap jewel box full of worthless trinkets. He closed it again.

  ‘Let’s go find some breakfast,’ he said.

  When they were replete enough to begin licking the dark molasses from between their fingers Jake asked a few necessary questions.

  ‘Who are you going to visit in Arredondo?’

  ‘Tía Deel,’ said Paco.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Tía Deel. Mama’s fren’. We gonna live in her house.’ Jake remembered something the Tucson deputy had said about a name and address in the woman’s purse. He opened the bag again and took out the beaded, fringed pouch. Inside it there was a bottle of something that smelled like licorice, a packet of thin Mexican cigars, and an envelope. No money at all, not even a stray penny.

  The envelope was addressed to Mrs Rosana Robles in care of the postmaster in Yuma. There was no return address, no postmark, and no letter inside. On the back someone else had scrawled, in an illiterate hand, ‘The Golden Moon.’

  He put the empty envelope in his vest pocket and threw the purse back into the bag. Once again he weighed it on two fingers hooked through its handles, then put it down with a slight frown.

  ‘Who is this Tía Deel, your mother’s comadre?’ Paco looked blank. ‘I didn’t think so. Is she a relative? Have you got any relatives?’

  ‘What’s a relative?’

  ‘Your mama’s family — her brothers or sisters. Her mama and papa.’ Paco blinked twice at the novel thought. ‘How about your papa? Do you know who he is?’

  Paco brightened. ‘We got two papas. Urraca’s runned off a long time ago with a skinny bitch and Mama hopes he got the clap, and—’

  ‘Hey, that’s no way to talk in front of your sister!’

  ‘— and my papa is with the devils in hell,’ Paco finished. ‘I didn’t say nothing bad to Urraca. Anyway, she don’t listen. She watches,’ he explained as an afterthought.

  ‘What’s Urraca mean?’ Paco was again at a loss. ‘I mean why do you call her Urraca if her name is Maria whatever?’

  ‘Oh. Mama says she’s like some kind of a little bird that steals stuff and hides it and cusses out all the other birds. Only Urraca don’t cuss.’

  ‘Does she talk?’

  ‘She don’t any more. Not since Mama got so mad at her for crying so much when she got her fingers mashed in the door. Man, she sure yelled and hollered then! Mama closed the door because a tío was there, and Urraca was right behind it. Mama pick her up and tried to hush her up, but she wouldn’t stop crying. Then Mama got mad and yelled, and Urraca yelled louder, and the tío got up and went away. So then Mama got really mad and boom-bam!’ He clapped himself over the
ears in demonstration. ‘Mama can hit you pretty damn hard when she gets mad, man.’

  Jake looked at Urraca guzzling sugared coffee, his distaste for ‘Mama’ and the whole family growing rapidly.

  He had never had the slightest contact with children before. He scarcely remembered even his own childhood, except that it ended when his father died and his mother took him to live on a Pennsylvania farm with her brother. His uncle had worked him there as hard as he worked his mules or himself, and had beaten him regularly by way of instruction, until the day Jake slammed the back of a manure fork into the old man’s lean belly and ran off before his tormentor could start breathing again. He had never returned.

  In the thirty or more years since that day he had acquired a number of aversions other than those he had to manual labor and relatives. These two voracious whore’s whelps embodied most of them.

  He had little use for Mexicans or Indians and, whatever Paco’s mother had told him, these two were about as gringo as Montezuma. He disliked helpless things and maimed things. The sight of beggars or cripples was enough to make him cross the street to avoid them. He had nearly starved after he ran away from his uncle’s farm, wandering from place to place like a stray dog, looking for work he was able to do. He had slept in barns and haystacks in the country, and in alleys and doorways in the towns all one winter until he was as lame as an old man from the cold. It was a memory he had buried under years of deliberate forgetfulness, but one that still affected him with a black shame when he thought of himself in such a condition. He had taken care of himself afterward — so well that in later years he never admitted to having had a day’s illness in his life.

  Now here he was saddled with two creatures he didn’t care to call human. One of them was either deaf or witless, and the other — it was as if a dog could talk! Some callous whim of fate had decided he had to be stuck with them for a little while, but the end was almost in sight. Arredondo, whatever else it might be, was going to look like one of the seats of mercy to him. They should reach the place sometime tomorrow, and there he would leave them to whatever kind of blowsy madam it was that lived at an address like ‘The Golden Moon.’

  *

  Arredondo was like a hundred other mining towns in the territories in every respect but one. All of them were founded on the labor and shifting whim of the earth’s most fickle yet most persistent economic agents: the minero, the cantinero, the ramera, and the jugador.

  Ordinarily, the minero was the founder of such places, wandering there with his pick, his mule, and his quenchless optimism. At his hoarse call to wealth the others came, and a new spot was marked down on the maps for a time.

  The cantinero followed wherever there were thirsty men; dispensing whiskey from the back of a wagon or from under a tent until he could get his saloon roofed. Without his comfortable retreat, even an El Dorado looked like barren ground.

  When the saloon doors were on their hinges the jugador swung through them, his pockets full of dice and cards, his baggage a dealer’s box, a keno layout, a bird cage, or a Hieronymus bowl. He made the wealth seem real by taking it away from the miners.

  Hard on his run-down heels, or even there already to meet him, was the whole herd of whores, the rameras; crowding into the miners’ dreams with bright eyes and hard laughter; pandered by the legend that there was a soft heart hidden in their easy flesh.

  And when the ore ran out they left in reverse order. The gamblers and whores went first, sensing a lessening of the tide of fortune sometimes even before the miners themselves knew it. The saloonkeepers followed later, and with regret, being property developers. But they had to be on the alert for the next coming thing, the next big strike; the next promise of permanence, somewhere.

  The only difference between Arredondo and the rest of such places was that there the cantina had come first. Built at the crossing of two ancient trails, it had been there longer than the few original inhabitants could remember.

  It seemed to be a remnant of some larger building, but what kind no one could say. Some thought it must have been a church, others a fort, others even a monastery. Whatever it had been, it was now pared away by ruinous time to a peculiarly graceful though shapeless tower of adobe, two stories high, with walls a yard thick; a large, cool, gloomy court of a room on the first floor, and a rabbit warren of small, ugly hiding places overhead.

  It had no particular name. It was la sola cantina a la redonda — the only place around.

  When the Texas and California Stage Company opened its line of stations, gringo ears misunderstood that claim and entered the place on the map as Arredondo. The company built stables next to the adobe building and put its proprietor on the payroll as a station keeper. For the benefit of travelers, even he answered to the name Arredondo.

  One day a passenger with a long memory passed a few minutes there, waiting for the change of team, and asked the man if he was related to the famous Mexican inspector general Don Joaquín Arredondo, who had created his own version of the Black Hole of Calcutta in San Antonio thirty years before, for the insurgents of the Texas Rebellion. The cantinero, whose real name was Hernando Sánchez, amiably confessed that he was that don’s great-nephew.

  It was a moment of peculiar satisfaction to both the antiquarian and Sánchez, who afterward made such frequent mention of his noble ancestor — whose name he had never heard until that day — that he almost came to believe in the relationship himself.

  The addition of the stage line didn’t increase Sánchez’s business greatly, because of the vast expanse of uninhabited land between the terminal points of the route. But when the miners found silver in the hills surrounding his old ruin Sánchez’s life was changed.

  He imported a dozen or more ignorant country women from the outlying starving villages and opened a laundry for his new customers. The women lived in a row of kennels behind the lavanderia and attended to their clients more directly in the rabbit warrens of the second floor at night.

  They were not a very attractive pack of whores, but they were the only available women for fifty miles around. In recognition of this distinction, and because he was a lenient man at heart, Sánchez allowed them to keep one-eighth of all they could earn from both their jobs.

  Meanwhile the railroad was opening up the territory from the north for those fortune hunters who were weary of harsh Colorado winters.

  Strike towns began to bloom and fade like cactus flowers from Santa Fe to the Mexican border, and suddenly merchants were jerry-building their false-fronted stores along the old north-south trail that had become Hassayampa Street because it led the way to the Hassayampa Mine, the first and still the biggest in the area.

  Sánchez was in no way the mythical lazy indio. The competition of the Anglos whetted his appetite for trade. Expanding on the stage business, he opened a livery stable, employing a cousin who was a farrier. It was said that his horses were the safest in the territory because they were so poor and dispirited not even the Apaches would steal them. The horses were certainly elderly and calm, but Sánchez had an understanding with the Apaches that he didn’t care to advertise.

  When the Wells Fargo express company first proposed, in addition to its usual services, to freight in perishable foods daily from the approaching railhead, Sánchez’s fertile brain labored and brought forth the notion of a wagon train loaded with ice and fresh produce hauled in from the Sonoran mountains by his tribe of cousins.

  The ice sold for five cents a pound, a stiff price; but the fresh fruits and vegetables went for a pittance — to the ice customers only. The express company protested, outraged, and even went so far as to drop its own produce prices as much as good sense allowed. Sánchez smiled and continued to make three-quarters-of-a-pittance profit on the sale of his groceries.

  The Anglos of the community were both ungracious and ungrateful. They bought his low-priced goods, to the ruin of the express business, but they loathed him for beating out the freighters at the old American game.

  In
spite of the Apaches, in spite of the extremes of heat and cold there, and in defiance of the probability that the strike would peter out before they got their rooftrees nailed up, the people of the great silver hunger rolled into Arredondo. The trail crossing filled with raw pine shotgun stores, ramshackle lean-tos, cabins, shanties, tents, and even massed wagons. The noise of hammers day after day made the thin air quiver at the madness of industry in the Anglos. They labored from first light to dark as if there were no burning sun searing their pale skins scarlet. Siesta was a word of contempt to them.

  What they were building was not yet a town. It was a concentrated busyness in the eternal torpor of the desert. It had no government, no school, no church, no set of laws, and no recognition from the territory in which it thrived.

  There were more than five hundred people on the spot by the end of the first year after the strike was made. Fewer than two dozen of them were children. Fewer than fifty of them were wives, strictly or casually.

  When Jake Hollander forced himself out through the narrow stage door and looked on the place for the first time, he saw it having one of its good days.

  The street was full, as if for a holiday. The hammers were awake and singing. The sun was up in an unblemished sky. For all of a day the wind had not blown. The temperature was a benign eighty~ degrees, and the people were taking advantage of it, and each other. He looked out on a complex of human aspiration and human greed that would have sent philosophers to their dictionaries and theologians to their knees for a definitive word. But Jake was neither of these.

  ‘Naked Ass Alley,’ he said under his breath to the haphazard collection of saloons and grab shops before him.

  4

  He ran a businessman’s eye along the saloon fronts of Arredondo. They were the most-represented markets on the main street, all well advertised with brightly painted signs. But the Golden Moon wasn’t among them.