Navarro

by Ralph Compton

  The major returned Navarro’s dark stare and growled with an air of warning, “He’s a killer, Tommy. Worse than the worst Apache, they say. Crazier than a tree full of owls. He’s armed with stolen Army munitions, and his gang numbers in the twenties, sometimes thirties.”

  Navarro turned back to the ceiling, folded his arms behind his head, and thoughtfully turned the cigar in his mouth with his tongue.

  “Doubtful even ‘Taos Tommy’ Navarro can bring this one down,” Bryson warned. He turned and went out.

  Navarro puffed the cigar. “We’ll see.”

  Chapter 15

  Navarro dictated a telegram to Paul Vannorsdell at the Bar-V, explaining the situation, then slept for the rest of that day and most of the next.

  When he woke up, he began playing poker for matchsticks with Captain Ward. Several of Tom’s off-duty admirers—soldiers and trackers who’d heard the “Taos Tommy” Navarro legends—drifted into the infirmary to play cards with their hero. Navarro played so much poker and cribbage over the next three days that he was holding, folding, and filling in straights in his sleep.

  He didn’t mind.

  He’d resigned himself to a mending period before he could set off after Karla again. Just lying on his cot, grinding his teeth as he stared at the ceiling, and imagining what he was going to do to Edgar Bontemps once he caught up with the bastard would have been like cutting off his own head with a rusty saw. Wouldn’t do him or Karla any good at all.

  The morning of his fourth day at the fort, he asked Dr. Sullivan for a crutch and something to shoot at.

  The doctor had just finished tending a rattlesnakebit woodcutter and was heading back to his office at the north end of the infirmary. Sullivan turned around, his heavy brows knit with incredulity, the eternal brown paper cigarette protruding from the right corner of his mouth. “Something to shoot at?”

  “A can, a little box, or a horseshoe. Hell, give me a whiskey bottle.”

  “Neither your leg nor you head is well enough for you to be gallivanting around the post shooting things, Mr. Navarro.”

  Wearing only his long underwear and socks, Tom hobbled out of bed and, bracing himself with one hand on the window, knelt on his good leg before the wooden footlocker beside it. He removed the lamp from the top, and lifted the lid.

  “I’m gonna shoot something, Doc. You can decide what . . . or I can.” He reached inside the locker and pulled out his .44 and cartridge belt.

  Sullivan cursed and disappeared into his office. He returned a minute later with a crutch in one hand, a square sulphate of quinia can in the other. With pursed lips and arched brows, he extended both to Navarro sitting on the bed and buckling his cartridge belt around his waist.

  Tom took the crutch and the can, pulled himself to his feet, and adjusted the .44 on his hip. He was a good distance from the washwomen of Suds’ Row, so he saw no need to don more than his balbriggans. “Where’s the best place to shoot without ruffling too many feathers?”

  “I would suggest the ravine behind the infirmary.”

  “Obliged.”

  Navarro draped his left arm over the crutch and ambled into the aisle between the beds. The crutch caught in a floor knot, and Tom stumbled forward cursing. Rushing toward him, the doctor helped him free the crutch from the knot and position it back under Tom’s right arm before he fell.

  Tom shuttled his weight back to the crutch and, with a wink at Captain Ward looking up from a game of solitaire with concern, continued hop-shuffling forward. “Close one—thanks again, Doc.”

  “Nice to know my education wasn’t wasted,” Sullivan grumbled. He grabbed the can from Navarro’s right arm, followed him out of the building and to the sun-blasted arroyo behind it.

  On the arroyo’s lip, Navarro leaned into the crutch and shucked his .44. He flipped open the loading gate, checked for pills, then flipped the gate shut and spun the cylinder.

  “Chuck the can, Doc.”

  With a disapproving chuff, Sullivan threw the can to the opposite bank, thirty yards away, missing the lip by a foot. The can rolled down two feet and snugged up against a rock, label out, nearly perpendicular to the bank.

  Navarro stared at the label, blinking. He slid his .44 from its holster, thumbed back the hammer, and extended his arm. Squinting one eye, he sighted down the Navy’s barrel.

  The gun popped.

  Sullivan removed the quirley from his mouth and looked at the can. He turned to Navarro. “Missed it.”

  “Clean.”

  “You can’t see it.”

  “It’s some fuzzy, but I can see it,” Navarro said, flipping the gate open and removing the spent shell. “As a matter of fact, I can see two of ’em.” He plucked a fresh shell from his cartridge belt, thumbed it through the loading gate, spun the cylinder, and returned the .44 to its holster.

  “When I can see only one, and hit the son of a bitch, I’m heading to Mexico.”

  That night, Major Bryson came by with a bottle and two tumblers. He did nothing to convince Navarro not to go after Bontemps. The major knew he had no jurisdiction in the matter, beyond friendship, and even if he had, convincing Navarro to give up his search would have been like trying to reroute a river with a handful of sand.

  When he’d finished his cigar and had signed a requisition to supply Navarro with two Army horses—a packhorse and a saddle mount—the major raised his glass in salute. “To a safe journey, Tom. But frankly, I don’t expect you’ll have one.”

  They touched glasses, and drank.

  The major ambled back to his lonely quarters feeling owly and depressed—the frontier was losing too many old salts like Tom Navarro—and turned in early with a dime novel and a bottle of cheap whiskey.

  The next morning, Navarro took another shot at the medicine can. Again, he missed his target but noted there were only 1.5 cans now instead of two, and he was getting closer to blowing the Q out of QUINAE. He celebrated with a drink at the sutler’s saloon, then hobbled toward the stables to see about his horses.

  He was ambling along the path through the sage and saguaros, sweating in the hot sun, when two young privates—a freckle-faced towhead and a lanky kid with a limp—headed toward him from the quartermaster’s barn and corrals.

  The two soldiers saluted and smiled as they approached. Navarro nodded back. The path was narrow, and the two privates made way for him, but the kid with the limp moved back onto the trail too quickly, his right foot clipping Tom’s crutch.

  Losing the crutch and tripping over a sage bush, Tom cursed and, limbs akimbo, fell in a heap.

  “Oh, gosh, oh, shit, Mr. Navarro!” the gimpy kid lamented, scrambling back and forth between Tom and the fallen crutch, not sure which one to pick up first.

  “Look what ye done, Dwight, ye damn fool!” the towhead admonished. “Ye done tripped, Mr. Navarro!”

  “Oh, jeeze!”

  “Fool! Grab his crutch, for christ’s sake!” The towhead crouched over Navarro. “You all right, sir? Should I send for the doc?”

  Tom had propped himself on an arm. “No need for the doc, fellas. No harm done.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Navarro,” the gimpy kid said, reaching for the crutch and fumbling with his duck-billed forage hat, doffing it, dropping it, picking it up, and holding it across his chest.

  “Give him the crutch, you moron!”

  “Here, Mr. Navarro—and let me give ye a hand. . . .”

  Navarro shook his head. “No harm done.” He maneuvered the crutch beneath his arm and, as the towhead helped from the other side, levered himself to his feet.

  “You sure you’re okay, sir? I’d be happy to—”

  “I’m fine. Fit as a fiddle. Tight as razor wire.”

  “Dwight here don’t move along so well his own-self,” the towhead explained, sliding his blue eyes toward his friend. “Since he took that ’Pache arrow last month, he’s had a gait like a three-legged horse trottin’ over hot coals.”

  “My sympathies, son. They have you on
a recovery string?”

  The lanky kid nodded and bunched his lips. “Yeah, can’t do much. The sergeant’s got me cleanin’ windows some, but mostly I just whittle and hobble around chattin’ up the girls over to Suds’ Row.”

  “You could do worse than chat with the ladies on a soldier’s salary,” Navarro said, giving the lanky kid an encouraging shoulder pat, then turning to continue down the trail.

  “See you, Mr. Navarro,” the lanky kid called behind him. “Again, my apologies.”

  “Be well, sir,” the towhead yelled.

  Navarro threw his right arm up and hobbled around a dogleg in the hard-packed trail.

  The two privates continued in the opposite direction, walking side by side. As they approached the parade ground where the guidon snapped and popped in the breeze and a sergeant dressed down a corporal for drunkenness, the lanky kid suddenly lost his limp.

  He snickered. “Did you see the old bastard fall?”

  The towhead laughed and exclaimed in a mocking rasp, “So sorry, Mr. Navarro!”

  “How good you think he can shoot with only one leg to balance on?”

  “ ’Bout as well as he could outrun a jackrabbit.”

  The soldiers chuckled.

  The lanky kid sobered. “Tonight, we see how well he can outrun a bullet.”

  When Navarro had picked out a long-legged bay for riding and a thick-hammed, white-socked dun for packing, he spent some time buttering up the remount duty noncom, a prickly, red-bearded Norwegian named Jasper Dahl, by complimenting the man on the cleanliness and orderliness of the barn, hay-loft, and tack room.

  “A place for everything and everything in its place,” Navarro commented, nodding with approval. “Why, hell, I’d drink out of those water troughs myself!”

  “Horses perform better when they’re well-cared for,” Dahl said. A fuzzy kitten was crawling on his broad shoulders. “It’s the Army way. You seen the barns at Fort Bowie? I don’t mean to stab no one in the back, but the quartermaster over there has gotten a little sloppy. These horses shit, and I or my boys is right there with the shovel.”

  They chatted over a cup of coffee, Navarro offering his appreciation for the horses, buttering the man up further. Though the middle-aged Norski didn’t actually own the animals himself, Navarro had never known a remount man who didn’t consider the horses his own. Besides, Navarro wanted the bay and the dun fed plenty of oats and corn tonight and ready to ride at dawn the next day, when he hoped to leave.

  “That won’t be a problem, Mr. Navarro,” Dahl said, shaking Tom’s hand when he’d grabbed his crutch and stood up from the sergeant’s battered card table. “I’ll give ’em a little extra and throw a few pounds in a feed pouch.”

  “Much obliged, Mr. Dahl.”

  “Oh, watch that dun’s right forefoot if you’re on a narrow trace somewheres—in the mountains, say. He tends to throw it out to the side. Hate to see him end up in a canyon. That’s the best packhorse in my remuda.”

  Navarro waved and thanked the man again as, leaning into the crutch, he split the barn doors and headed back to the parade ground, where he bought a shave and a haircut in the post barbershop.

  After stripping and removing the bandage from his lower right leg, he lounged in a tub in the barber’s back room. Lifting the leg from the soapy water, he ran his right thumb across the wound, probing and inspecting it.

  The entry and exit holes looked like hell, stitched and swollen, but the wound looked a lot better since the last time Sullivan had lanced it. The puss had dried up. More important, Tom could put full weight on his calf. He’d mostly been using the crutch to hasten the healing, so it wouldn’t be as apt to open up once he was on the trail.

  It was his head that had grieved Navarro the most, but while the frequent headaches were still blinding, they were short-lived, and his vision was only occasionally blurry. He hoped riding wouldn’t set him back, but he had to chance it.

  Every hour took Karla another hour beyond his reach. . . .

  “Hear you’re goin’ after Edgar Bontemps,” the barber said as Navarro was leaving. The man shook his bald head and clipped away at the auburn-curled lieutenant in his chair. “Only a polecat woulda mammied that skunk.”

  As Navarro turned left on the boardwalk outside the barbershop, he caught someone staring at him out of the corner of his eye. Shuttling his gaze across the hard-packed, hoof-pocked parade ground, he saw the towhead who’d run into him earlier, standing with several other soldiers around a Murphy freight supply wagon before the officers’ adobe duplexes.

  The soldiers were taking a smoke break. Leaning against the massive left rear wheel, the towhead looked quickly away from Tom. Seeing that Navarro had spotted him, the kid turned back and flicked a hand in a halfhearted wave, flushing and showing his teeth through a grin.

  Navarro returned the wave and maneuvered his crutch toward the post trader’s store, where he bought food, coffee, tobacco, and new trail duds—including a hat, to replace the one he lost on Gray Rock.

  When he’d picked out a new Winchester rifle and had stocked up on ammo, he arranged for the trader’s son to deliver the goods to the infirmary. Heading that way himself, feeling fatigued, he promptly collapsed on his cot for a nap.

  That night, after taps, Tom played a final game of poker with Captain Ward and Doc Sullivan on a small table beside Captain Ward’s cot. A hanging lamp offered a murky light made murkier by the men’s cigar and cigarette smoke. The building’s shutters were open, awaiting a breeze to stir the heavy desert heat.

  Navarro and Ward were the only two patients left in the infirmary, one wounded soldier having died from the Apache lance he’d taken through his spleen. Having mended, the others had been sent back to their platoons.

  Ward would have to spend another two weeks in the infirmary before he could be sent back to his company at Fort Bowie.

  “You still hitting the trail tomorrow, Mr. Navarro?” Ward asked as he studied his cards, his right leg inclined. The captain sounded disappointed.

  Navarro nodded and shoved three matchsticks toward the center of the table.

  “Only if he can blow the ‘Q’ out of the quinine can,” Sullivan said.

  “I’ll hit the sumbitch,” Navarro growled, wishing he’d never mentioned the personal challenge. He intended to leave in the morning, blown “Q” or no blown “Q.”

  “What about your leg?” the doctor asked.

  “If my head’s goin’, the leg doesn’t have any choice but to tag along.”

  After lights out, and after Ward had gone to sleep, snoring softly on the other side of the aisle, Navarro slipped out of bed and wrapped his cartridge belt around his waist. He left his boots under the cot and the crutch propped against the wall. He padded barefoot to the door, cracked it, and peered outside.

  The parade ground was dark, the windows of the encircling buildings unlit. Nothing moved but a silk streamer hanging from a nearby porch beam, stirred by a subtle breeze.

  Satisfied the coast was clear, Navarro stepped through the door, closed it softly, listening for the click, then slipped to his right along the boardwalk and hunkered down in the shadows on the other side of an iron-banded rain barrel.

  Navarro unholstered his .44 and held it between his knees, curling his right index finger through the trigger guard.

  He waited.

  Chapter 16

  Navarro didn’t have long to wait.

  Twenty minutes later, he heard running feet on his left. He leaned back and stole a look between the rain barrel and the building, toward the front door, but he couldn’t see anything. The sounds had come from off the north end of the infirmary, out of sight.

  Navarro held the pistol. He waited, listening to the crickets and the yammers of a lone coyote somewhere south of the fort.

  Finally, a strained breath. A movement at the northeast corner of the building, on the other side of the barrel. A tap of a heel, then the squawk of a floorboard as a man mounted the porch. Boots thud
ded softly. Breaths roiled out from tensed lungs.

  The doorknob turned with a faint chirp.

  Navarro looked over the rain barrel’s lip, saw the infirmary’s front door squeak slowly open. A tall figure passed into the building. From this angle, Navarro could see only a billed forage cap. Another, shorter figure followed, leaving the door open behind him.

  Navarro remained behind the barrel, holding his .44 in both hands. Staring across the parade ground before him, he yawned, stretched the kinks out of his neck.

  He heard the two men approach the door again, walking on the balls of their Army-issue brogans. When they’d both slipped onto the porch and pulled the door closed behind them, one whispered to the other, “Where the hell is he?”

  “The privy?”

  “Let’s check.”

  Navarro rose slowly and extended his .44 over the barrel. The men had turned their backs as, moving left of the door, they were about to swing around the side of the infirmary, heading for the privy out back.

  “I got you both dead to rights,” Navarro said tightly. “Any sudden move, and they’ll be throwin’ dirt over you come sunup.”

  The towhead and the taller soldier, who didn’t seem to have the limp anymore, both froze. The tall one stood just off the end of the boardwalk, half turned left. The towhead was still standing at the edge of the boards. They both held Army-issue .44s in their right hands hanging low at their sides.

  Both men tensed, turning their heads slightly to get a glimpse of the man behind them.

  “Stand still. You two little jiggers know what I look like.” Navarro stepped to the barrel’s right side and place his left hand on it for support; his left leg was weak from nonuse. “Toss those pistols down.”

  When the soldiers hesitated, Tom thumbed his .44’s hammer back. The ratcheting click was loud in the silence.

  The towhead tossed his Colt Army into the yard ahead and right of the taller kid, who followed suit.