Dutch Uncle

by Marilyn Durham

  ‘Do you think that’s all I could want from you, or all I might want to give you? Oh, you poor— But I can’t berate you now, can I? Just take my bed. I meant to sleep with Paco anyway, in case he does wake. If he doesn’t, neither of you will even know I’m here.’

  But shame at his clumsy error made Jake refuse again. He left her and walked the street, making a pretense at his job. The town was quiet and dark. Even the cantina lamp was burned out. Without the light of a half-moon, he would have been blind.

  He passed the Happy Apache and the pool hall, and decided to walk on beyond the edge of town. He saw there was at least one light burning, after all — at the Golden Moon. It was in Delia’s window, which couldn’t be seen from the street until he was past the house. He looked at it without the least desire to know why she was the only one still up.

  Beyond the Moon’s woodshed and privy, and the chicken yard that Angelina kept, the town ran out.

  He stopped and took out a cigar as he stared at the bleak gray path that Hassayampa Street became as it pushed its way out through the desert to the mines. To consider walking out of Arredondo was unreasonable, but at the moment he could imagine himself doing that as easily as staying and enduring tomorrow. He snapped a match to life and closed his eyes against the sudden painful flare of the light. The cigar took fire, and he drew a healing lungful of smoke.

  ‘Delia told me you was as regular as a banker’s watch with your patrollin’.’

  Jake started and turned quickly, but he was still half blind from the match. He could see little else but a shape that rose from a clump of weeds and moved toward him.

  ‘Keep your hands up where I can see ‘em, old man. I don’t want to have to kill you when I been waiting out here for so long just to make your acquaintance.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Jake demanded.

  The chuckle that answered him sounded genuine and pleasant.

  ‘Now, that’s bad manners, and you know it. But I don’t mind. I’m the man you’ve been playing banker for. Does that help you?’

  ‘Frank Becker.’

  ‘Delia said she thought you knew. Well, that’s fine, because it saves us both some time. You’re not going to believe it, but I’m downright pleased to meet you, and that’s a fact.’

  20

  ‘I think we met once before, didn’t we?’ Jake asked, taking the cigar out of his mouth with his left hand, leaving his right to look innocent, palm out to Becker, but dropping by slow fractions to his side. It didn’t work.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ Becker said plaintively, and Jake froze. ‘That’s right, we did, for a minute or two down the street. I was looking for somebody and you give me directions. You’re pretty sharp. I’m glad. It means we can do our business and go our way — except I’m just not going to get comfortable till you let that iron drop off your hip to where it won’t tempt you. Tell you what. You take that seegar out in your right hand, and open up your belt with your left and let her drop.’ Jake obeyed. ‘Whooee, ain’t that a doozy? Kick her over this way. I like old guns.’

  He shucked it out of the holster and put it in his belt. ‘Thank you kindly. Now turn around and put your hands behind your back. Pity to waste that seegar. I’ll be glad to take it for you in a minute. Just put it back in your teeth, right now.’

  Jake felt cold metal click around his wrists and took a last draw from the cigar before Becker reached over his shoulder and relieved him of it. ‘Irons come in right handy,’ Becker told him, ‘but I never thought I’d ever be putting them on somebody myself. Now we can talk easy. Just walk a little too, if you don’t mind. I got some horses down the road a piece.’

  They walked. ‘I got them irons off old George. You ever meet him?’

  ‘Once. Where is he now? Out there with the horses?’

  Becker laughed. ‘No. He’s holed up somewheres south of here.’

  ‘He your partner?’

  ‘Nope. Bounty hunter. Sonofabitch.’

  ‘You mean he was after you?’

  ‘Started out that way. You’re taking all this pretty calm. Delia tells me you used to be a gun, back in Kansas once. That right?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘I admire a good gun handler. Myself, I’m not too good with ‘em, so I always try for the easy places, you know. Hell, if I was to have to shoot you, you probably wouldn’t even die for two or three days. I’m not proud of it.’

  ‘Becker, if you’ve got anything to say, why don’t you say it now?’

  ‘I want that money of mine that you got. You got it on you?’

  ‘No, and I don’t know where it is.’

  ‘That’s what I thought you’d say. That’s why I didn’t ask you.’

  ‘I’m not stalling you. I don’t know where it is. It’s supposed to be in that carpetbag, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Well, the bag disappeared. I’ve been looking for it myself for a week, and I haven’t found it.’

  ‘Sure thing.’

  ‘The farther we get from town, the farther we are from that money.’

  ‘But if we turned around now you’d lead me right to it, huh?’

  ‘I told you—’

  ‘I know what you told me. Keep walking.’

  *

  Becker’s animals were picketed out of sight behind a clump of some twisted desert tree a mile off the road north of Arredondo. By the time they reached them, Jake’s feet were beginning to feel heavy. Two nights of lost sleep and the emotional strain of the day were taking their toil. Becker swung into the saddle easily and took the reins of the second animal.

  ‘Come up here and put your foot in the stirrup and I’ll grab your arm. You got long enough legs, I think you’ll make it if you give yourself a good push. Just remember, if you try anything you’re going to have to depend on luck more’n you ever did in your life. You believe in luck, Jake?’

  Jake didn’t. He made it into the saddle with Becker’s help, at the expense of a bruised breastbone scraped against the horn. Becker led them away in a wide swing around the western edge of Arredondo until they crossed the stage road again and headed south.

  They ran into what must have been Hassayampa Street where it became a wagon-rut trail again, leading to the southern extremities of the Hassayampa Mountains. Becker was cheerful. He whistled the tune to ‘The Bullwhacker,’ occasionally breaking into song on the refrain, ‘Root hog, or die.’ It seemed to be the only line he was sure of. Jake rode in silence, partly from fatigue, partly because he felt Becker was playing with him, expecting him to talk; bargain for his life; try reason or lies. There was something Becker wanted as much as he wanted his money; maybe the pleasure of evening up his score against the world by making somebody sweat. Jake wished he knew something more about the man, something to gauge him by. He still hadn’t even had a good look at him.

  When they had ridden for what seemed like an eternity but was really no more than two hours at a walk, holding on to his silence became an almost unbearable strain. If the bastard was going to kill him he’d had plenty of time and room to do it in for the last hour and a half. Even closer to Arredondo, anyone hearing a shot at this time of night would think it was only a miner disputing with a coyote. Either Becker really believed Jake had the money or knew where it was, or he didn’t. If he did, why hadn’t he searched him for it at once? As he asked himself that, he realized that if he was searched Becker would find his own money in his belt. He hadn’t given it a thought until then because the belt was as much a part of him as his arms and legs, which he also didn’t think about as long as they worked properly.

  He began to worry in earnest, and while he did he made a quick mental inventory of what else he might have on him that could be useful.

  Nothing. The .36 was back in his valise in the jail. Not that it would do him any good with his hands manacled, even if it wasn’t picked off him the second Becker got him in a good light.

  What else? His inside vest pocket held two more cigars and a partial bl
ock of matches. His right outside pocket held his watch; the left pocket, his spending money, or what was left of it after he had given Clem back his salary. It couldn’t be much. Then why was it so full? He could feel the bulge, now that he was concentrating on that area.

  Paco’s pocketknife. He remembered picking it up from the table at Delia’s and putting it back in his pocket. He’d forgotten to give it to the kid again.

  Well, that would be gone as soon as he was searched. He had nothing to use against Becker except his head, and that was empty of useful ideas and being slowly filled with nothing more than the need for sleep.

  ‘You gettin’ tired?’ Becker asked. Jake’s head came up from where it had been bowing toward his chest, but he didn’t answer. Let Becker do the talking, since he was so fond of it.

  ‘We’re almost to where we’re going,’ Becker said, ‘I’ll help you get off. Just remember what I told you about stretching your luck.’ Getting off was easier than getting on, except that he lost his balance at the same moment Becker let go of his arm, and staggered back against Becker’s horse.

  ‘Hup, hup, ho, there!’ The horse was under control and the gun on full cock in an instant. Jake stood perfectly still. There was a little wheezing sound from Becker. Jake thought he might be laughing.

  It was very dark. He thought it should be nearly dawn. He hadn’t looked at his watch after Carrie woke him behind the jail or since, so he couldn’t tell, except that the moon was down now but the sun wasn’t up yet. There was only the faintest graying of the night in the east, if that distant, jagged paling of earth was the eastern Animas Mountains.

  The ground they walked was rough, uphill, and barren of trees or bushes. Tufts of thin grass brushed their legs and whispered in the dry wind. Becker let out the animals’ tethers and anchored them to the ground with a rock, which he found handily without taking his attention away from Jake.

  He seemed to know where he was, anyway.

  ‘Up the hill a little way, now.’ He got behind Jake and guided him with gentle prods of the gun barrel. ‘Slow, now. We’re here.’ He scrabbled in the rocks to one side of Jake. There was a metallic clink, a rusty creak, and the scrape of a match. He had a hand lantern hidden there. He lifted it, and Jake saw a black hole roughly four feet square yawning at their feet. He felt himself stiffen with apprehension, but he turned his head to get a good look at Becker and asked, ‘Did we come all this way to see a hole in the ground? What is it, a mine?’

  ‘Well, like my old grandpappy used to say, “She used to was, but she ain’t no more.” ’ He had the look of a kid who had just given someone a surprise and was waiting to see the reaction. He didn’t look much like the old poster picture. He had grown a mustache and lost the baby fat forever. There was something else wrong with him, but Jake couldn’t remember what it was. Becker’s face became solemn.

  ‘Now, we got a problem. I can’t let you go down by a ladder with your hands shackled, and I can’t hardly let you go down with ‘em loose, so there’s only one thing to do.’ Jake waited. ‘You got to jump,’ Becker finished.

  ‘The hell! How far?’

  ‘Oh, maybe fifteen feet.’

  ‘I’ll break my damned neck! Then what good will I do you?’

  ‘That’s why I say we got a problem.’

  ‘Why do we have to go down there anyway?’

  ‘Because that’s where George is. Now, when you jump, as soon as you feel your feet touch the ground, bend your knees and roll. Never mind which way. I ain’t got time to tell you how to do it good, just how to do it.’

  As he spoke he gave Jake a shove that sent him into the pit. He hit the stone floor with such suddenness that he had no time to think about bending his knees and rolling. They buckled without his aid, and his left shoulder and his head hit the ground. There was a snap of bone he could hear; a white hot flash of pain seared him from left to right and ran up his neck to join the stunning pain in his head. He thought he might have yelled.

  He passed out for a few seconds or minutes, though the echoes of agony were still running riot in his skull and body. They were joined by the hollow sound of Becker’s voice coming down the rock shaft from above.

  ‘That’s the way George did it. Now, myself, I’ve got to take a ladder.’

  There was silence for a while. Jake lay still, wondering whether he had broken his neck, his back, or just his arm. He couldn’t move; he couldn’t localize the agony. Then he realized his feet and ankles hurt as much as the rest of him. He could feel them. You weren’t supposed to be able to do that if your spine was snapped. He tried to move them and succeeded at last, at the expense of fresh hurt to his shoulder and chest. His arm or collarbone was broken, then. Not so bad.

  Jesus, he thought. Not so bad as what? He was fifteen feet down in a hole, out in the wilderness, with a crazy man coming after him, and he couldn’t use his arms.

  There was a scraping noise over the top edge of the hole, followed by a heavy thump. Light appeared with Becker, coming down a long, crude wooden ladder that looked silver with age and dryness, like driftwood.

  ‘Hurt yourself in the fall? Afraid you might, but I couldn’t see no way around it.’ He reached the bottom and held up the lantern. ‘Leg?’

  ‘Collarbone, I think,’ Jake breathed. He had heard a grating sound there when he tried to roll over onto his right side.

  ‘Well, that being the case, you might as well stay where you are for a while. Just turn your head a little bit and look over there and you can see old George again, though.’ Jake looked where the lamp directed. George Ramey was slumped against the wail. The old bloodstains dried on his shirt indicated he had been shot. He was Unconscious. Becker walked over to him and kicked him lightly in the side. Ramey gave a sharp cry and opened his eyes weakly.

  ‘George, I brought you some company. This here’s Dutch Hollander. You heard of him? Sure you have. You two have got a lot in common. Yes, sir. You both had my girl, and you both want my money. I thought it was about time you two bastards got to know each other better.’

  He sat down on the upper edge of a boxlike thing that was the remains of an ore wagon and put the lantern on the floor beside him.

  ‘Now, where’s Rosie and where’s my money?’

  Jake frowned into the light. ‘Delia told you everything else. Didn’t she tell you that?’

  ‘Never mind what Delia told me! You tell me. Where is she?’

  ‘She’s dead. In Tucson.’

  Becker looked at him without expression. ‘You kill her?’

  ‘No! I didn’t even know her. I just happened—’

  ‘Mister, when you’ve been down here as long as old George has, you might get tired of tellin’ lies, if you can still talk at all, that is. Might save a lot of grief if you just quit now.’

  ‘I’m not lying to you! Ramey must know she’s dead.’ He saw that Ramey’s eyes were closed again. He also began to see that Ramey might not know Rosie was dead, if he had had to depend on hearing it from Delia. He still didn’t know who Ramey was, or how he had been involved with the others. ‘You can check me on it. Ask Delia. Ask the sheriff in Tucson if the county didn’t bury a woman named Robles last month and sent her kids on to Arredondo with me.’

  ‘How am I going to ask a sheriff?’

  ‘Send him a wire from the express office back in town.’ Becker blinked at him for a second. ‘All right, make Delia send the wire for you. That wouldn’t make anybody suspicious. Rosie was on her way to see her.’ He waited for Becker’s reaction. Even to him it sounded like a lame-brained suggestion. Looking at Becker, he remembered now what else it was about him that was different from the poster picture.

  It was the scar. It pulled down the corner of his right eye, so that side of his face looked perpetually sad and bewildered. Looking at him was like trying to watch two different people at once.

  ‘All right, then,’ Becker said quietly. ‘You tell me about her.’

  Jake told him about her, from the moment she go
t on the train at Yuma. He was brief, but he left out nothing of importance that he could remember, including his reluctance to be saddled with her kids, his efforts to get rid of them at Delia’s, his suspicion that there must be something hidden in the carpetbag other than what appeared, and his discovery that Delia thought so, too.

  Becker heard him out and asked a few questions to test details of the story. After that he sat with his head bowed, thinking about it. Jake couldn’t tell whether he believed any of it or not.

  There was no sound in the pit but that of their own breathing. He began to feel cold and sick; as if he might pass out again. His right arm was tortured by the weight of his body on it, and he didn’t dare move, for fear of creating more havoc with the broken bone. His left ankle was throbbing, too, more than the other one. If he hadn’t broken it, he had sprained it severely. He rested his forehead on the cold stone floor trying to stay conscious. Whatever Becker was going to do to him, he wanted to see it coming.

  ‘George,’ Becker said at last, starting echoes down the tunnel behind him. ‘If you’re such a good bloodhound, how come you didn’t know about this?’ George didn’t answer. Becker woke him with a louder call and repeated the question.

  ‘I didn’t know nothing, Frank. I swear I didn’t. I told you Rosie got away from me while I was making arrangements for you to get free. She was scared of you. I couldn’t help that. And I told you, I didn’t let on to Delia that I even knew Rosie. I thought she’d come in from wherever she was hidin’ in a week or two, and I’d just wait for her. That goddamned Delia wouldn’t hardly let me stick my head out the door while I was there. She knew there was paper on me, and she said he’ — moving his eyes in Jake’s direction — ‘might start asking a lot of questions. He was jealous of her, she said.’

  ‘Oh, hell,’ Jake breathed.

  ‘But you knew what Rosie’s kids looked like. You lived around ‘em for months. How come you didn’t say nothing to me about them bein’ in town?’