Buscadero

by Bill Brooks

  Ned Butcher and his two companions were hossing one another when Henry re-entered.

  “I just found my friend’s sorrel over in the stables. The Mexican said it was yours!”

  The three of them turned, their hands reaching for their pistols. Henry shot the fat man through the chest, the slug spanking up dust and slamming him against the plank bar, his weight snapping the board and spilling glasses.

  The quiet one had cleared his piece and snapped the trigger, but the move had been too quick and his shot went wide of its mark punching a hole through the side of the tent instead of the ranger.

  In a swift but deliberate move that took less time than a breath, Henry Dollar brought the Remington to bear on the tall man whose own finger was pressing the trigger of his pistol for the second shot. The ranger’s slug tore through jawbone on its way toward its final destruction. The tall man’s body fell atop that of his fat friend.

  The ugly one had dropped his own pistol in fear and was scrambling for the scattergun that the bardog kept propped up against the back wall of the tent. He swung it up, the twin black eyes coming to bear on the ranger, but it was way too late. The ranger’s shot took him dead center, spinning him around. He crashed into the side of the tent, his hands clawing at the canvas as he slid to his knees and then toppled over face down.

  A smoking pistol in each hand, the ranger brought his gaze to rest on the only man left in the whiskey tent—the pock-faced bardog. The man shoved both hands into the air.

  “I just serve them liquor,” he stammered. “I ain’t married to them!”

  The tent was filled with the acrid smoke of gunfire. The wind pounded against the canvas walls as though trying to get in. Henry knelt next to each of the dead men and searched their pockets.

  He found Jim McKinnon’s Texas Ranger badge in the vest pocket of the fat man. It had a smear of dried blood on it. Henry wiped it clean and put it inside his own pocket.

  He stood and eyed the sweating bartender.

  “You take whatever money you find on them and use it to get them buried,” ordered Henry. “Send your burying man out west of town to where a pile of rocks stand and have him dig a proper grave for that fellow there. Make sure he puts up a marker.”

  “What you want it to say?”

  “J. T. McKinnon. Texas Ranger.”

  “That all?”

  “That’s enough.”

  Chapter Two

  Johnny Montana dreamt of rivers—rivers that raged and roared and overflowed their banks. He dreamt of being astride a horse, trying to cross such a river. In the dream, the water tugs at his legs and keeps rising, churning, and swirling until it reaches his waist. The water is cold, like ice, and hurts like needles piercing his skin.

  He is in the middle of the river—the shore far away. He can feel the horse floundering beneath him, feel the panic set into the animal’s flesh and then his own. And then, the water is separating him from the horse, unseating him and he desperately tries to hold on.

  The horse rolls over in the current, surfaces again, its eyes white with terror, and then is swept away downstream.

  The turgid brown waters pull at him, his feet dancing below him trying to touch bottom, but there is no bottom. He regrets that he never learned to swim, feels a great sadness along with the terrible, terrible fear, and the waters suck him under, choking away his breath, choking away his hope.

  He struggled awake, sat bolt upright in a start. The light inside the jacal was dim. Through an open window on the east wall, he could see a thin blade of pearl light knifing across the horizon and realized that it was near dawn.

  His heart pounded wildly inside his chest; the dream had not left his mind.

  A woman stirred on the bed beside him; the corn husk mattress crackled with every movement. He reached for her. She came awake to his touch.

  “What... ?”

  He shook his head and reached for the bottle of tequila on the chair next to the bed, uncorked it, put it to his lips, and swallowed long and hard.

  “It’s the dreams,” he told her. The tequila burned his lips. “I was dreaming about a river. I was drowning it, same as always.”

  “It’s just a dream, Johnny,” she told him.

  “Dreams have a way of coming true,” he said, his gaze focused on the dawn coming through the small square window.

  “My daddy told me dreams never do come true,” said the woman. She was pretty, her hair long and auburn, but dark in dim light. She had milk white skin, small breasts, and slender legs. The sound of her voice carried with it the mellow sweetness of the South. She raised her hand and stroked his hair, which was damp with sweat.

  “Your daddy don’t know anything!” he told her, his voice edgy and tense. Dreams have a way of coming true, at least in my family they do.”

  He swallowed more of the tequila and sat up on the side of the bed, letting his feet dangle just above the earthen floor. In spite of the hour, the air was warm and still.

  He continued the litany on dreams: “All men who live by their wits and their guns have it in them to read dreams. Jesse James had it. John Wesley Hardin had it, too. My family’s got it, and I got it. Only a fool would ignore his dreams!”

  She could smell his fear and it made her fearful, too.

  “I tell you, Kate, I’m going to drown in a river someday, and there ain’t nothing going to save me when that day comes.”

  She did what she could to calm him.

  “You won’t die, Johnny, if we don’t cross anymore rivers,” she told him.

  “Don’t cross anymore rivers!” His anger came out in hot, sour gasps. “Hell, woman, how are we going to travel if we don’t cross anymore rivers! This whole dern country is full of rivers!”

  She was fully awake now. He could be mean to live with when he was upset. She touched the bare skin on his back with her finger tips.

  “We could just go around any rivers we come across,” she said, believing in the logic of it.

  He swallowed more tequila and leaned back against the cool adobe wall of the jacal.

  “Katie, I know you mean well, but there are some things you don’t know a thing about.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like crossing rivers. You just can’t go around every river you come up on—some of them dang things is hundreds of miles long.”

  She knew he wouldn’t let the subject rest until a solution could be found.

  “Well, maybe we ought to just find a place and settle down, someplace where we don’t ever have to worry about crossing rivers.”

  “Well, maybe we ought to!” he told her, drinking the last of the tequila, feeling its fire in his throat.

  “But, right now we can’t do that—we’re wanted all over the territory. Outlaws don’t just quit running and settle down when they want to and not ever cross rivers again. Heck, we tried something like that, the law would be on us like ticks on a festered hound.”

  “What are we going to do then, Johnny?” she asked, feeling uncomfortable with what he was telling her. She was struck with how much things had changed in the last three months, from the time she first met him until now.

  “If you are afraid to cross rivers, and we can’t settle down, what are we going to do?”

  “I didn’t say I was afraid to cross rivers,” he said bitterly. “I said, I hated crossing them. That’s a big difference.”

  Johnny Montana was the handsomest man that Katie Swensen had ever met. He was tall and dark and sported a thin, neatly trimmed moustache, and he had midnight black eyes. He was particular about his person; he shaved regularly, put rosewater in his hair, and preferred clean shirts when he could get them, which wasn’t often because they were on the trail so much of the time.

  It had all happened so suddenly, their meeting. She considered it destiny.

  He had come into her daddy’s dry goods store where she clerked—Tallapoosa County, Alabama—to try on hats. He was leaning toward a short-brimmed Stetson when he first caught he
r eye, and she his.

  “How do I look?” he asked. He had a smile that would melt ice.

  Later that same day, they found themselves eating ice cream in a small confectionery store named WENZE’S, and that was when he had told her how pretty she was.

  “Ain’t never seen anything like you,” he said. “A woman like you could steal a man’s heart without even trying.”

  They talked until it had grown dark and then he walked her home. When he came again the next day to the store she wasn’t at all that surprised. She was already in love with him.

  “I guess I can be a pest,” he had said. And then he asked her a question that changed everything about her life.

  “You planning on sticking around these parts the rest of your life?” She knew instantly that if he asked her to go, she would: Men like Johnny Montana did not come through Tallapoosa County every day.

  They left in the late hours of a warm evening, her daddy snoring in the other room. It all seemed like such a grand adventure.

  It wasn’t until days later, after a few stickups along the way, that he told her about having killed a man back in Alabama. The news cut her like a knife.

  “He was just some ol’ pig farmer I got into a row with,” was the way Johnny Montana put it to her. “He may have been good at raising hogs, but he wasn’t worth a tinker’s damn at gambling.” She wanted hard to believe him and to take his side in it, but still it blunted something about the way she felt about him.

  “Anyway, it don’t matter—it was a fair fight, everyone saw it, said so. I just wanted you to know that’s all.”

  She wondered at the time why he told her. She came to understand more fully after she witnessed him pulling a robbery along the road of man travelling alone and on horseback.

  She wept and he tried comforting her. He told her it was all necessary and the worst was simply that he had relieved somebody of a few dollars and that no one would be the worse for it.

  “Johnny, I don’t know if I can live this way,” she said after the first time she waited in the bushes while he stepped out in front of the horseman and robbed him.

  “It’s only a temporary thing,” he told her. “Only until we get to Texas. There’s lots of opportunity in Texas and I won’t have to do this sort of thing anymore.”

  She wanted to believe him. He had won her heart so completely, and she wasn’t the kind of person just to give up on the man she loved, so she stayed with him and sometimes cried because of her loneliness for her papa back in Tallapoosa County.

  They crossed country and made it to Ft. Smith, Arkansas. She didn’t care much for the place, it was full of rough men, smelly air, and wildness. She urged that they keep moving.

  “You said you wanted to go to Texas,” she told him, but it was just the sort of place he took to. He rented a room and put her in it.

  “I think I can double our money, and if so, we’ll go to Texas in style,” he said. She knew what he meant. Aside from road agentry, Johnny was a gambler. He lost everything that first night and they had to sneak out of the hotel in the dark because he had no money to pay the bill.

  It was later that same day, several miles outside of Ft. Smith, that Johnny paused and said he thought he heard someone coming down the road. He took out his silk handkerchief and laid it on the ground and put his ear against it.

  “Somebody’s coming for sure,” he said. “Climb off into those weeds yonder and wait.”

  A man came riding a beautiful Arabian horse with a dish face. The man was well-dressed and wore a broad beaver hat. Johnny stood there holding his arm as though he had been hurt. She watched the whole thing from the tall grass she had gone to stand in.

  When the man reined his horse up to where Johnny was standing, she heard the man say, “Are you alright, mister?” And then Johnny pulled out his pistol and told the man to throw up his hands because he was being robbed.

  Instead of putting his hands into the air, the man started to reach for something inside his coat, and Johnny shot him. She saw the man slump from the saddle and drop to the ground, heard him groan once and try to get up.

  “Damn fool!” Johnny shouted as he grabbed the reins of the Arabian in one hand before it could run off. He had aimed his pistol at the man’s head by the time she came running out of the weeds.

  “Don’t you shoot that man again, damn you!” she shouted at him. Her horror over what she had witnessed left her angry beyond belief.

  She saw how he looked up at her, his face a mask of confusion, of uncertainty at the hellcat that was running out of the bushes toward him, screaming and waving her arms.

  “You shoot him again,” she shouted, “I’ll leave you and go back to Ft. Smith and tell them what you have done!”

  He didn’t quarrel with her. Instead, he lowered his pistol and told her he was sorry any of this had happened. She wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not.

  “If you was watching,” he said, “you know I didn’t shoot him on purpose. He was reaching for his gun to shoot me!” He said it like a little boy scolded and trying to defend himself. She looked from the dark smoldering eyes of Johnny to the ashen face of the man lying on the ground.

  “We have to do something,” she said.

  “Ain’t nothing we can do except get out of here fast,” he ordered.

  “We can’t just leave him, he’ll die out here—look how he’s bleeding.”

  “Someone will come along and help him. It can’t be us. They’d put us both in jail, sweetie. That’s something you don’t want to have to experience.” The whole time, he searched the man’s pockets, producing a wallet and a small nickel-plated pistol.

  “See, I told you he was going for his gun!”

  The revolver was a .36 caliber Navy Colt pocket gun with fancy scroll work and the words Presented To The Hon. W.F. Gray engraved on the butt strap.

  There had been nearly one hundred dollars in the wallet.

  “I guess we lucked out,” said Johnny. “This fellow must’ve been important.”

  Later, Johnny sold the horse for five hundred dollars, and after that, they took a river boat up the Sabine River. Johnny gambled and spent freely, so that by the time they landed in Magnolia Springs, they were nearly broke again.

  He spent what little they had left on a pair of poor saddle horses. Texas was what Johnny had wanted, and she hoped that now that they had arrived, things would be different. He had talked it up so much.

  But as they travelled west, it seemed as though Texas was a lot more of the same, only hotter and more desolate.

  One night they stole crabapples from back of somebody’s homestead and got cramps from eating them. A day later, Johnny robbed a man waking his mule along the dusty road they were on. The only valuable the man possessed was a nickel-plated Elgin pocket watch and two dimes.

  Three days later, in Boleweevel, Texas, Johnny walked into a Chinese Laundry and stuck the fancy pistol in the sallow face of the Celestial that worked there. Again, the pickings were poor: a jar-full of Indian head pennies and some boiled shirts.

  She thought Texas was the worst place she had ever been.

  As the days wore on, and the nights turned black and cold as they lay on bedrolls on the ground, she began to feel sorry she had ever taken up with Johnny Montana. But it all seemed too late to change, and in spite of her remorse, there was still something about him that drew her to him.

  But most of the time, it was hard for her to just keep drifting, and one evening as they sat around a fire of cow pies he had gathered, she felt forced to say something to him.

  “I’d like it if you were to find a regular job, Johnny. You know, so we could settle down. I’m plain weary of always wandering. Even if you was to get some sort of cowboy work, I wouldn’t mind so much.”

  “Cowboys!” he yelped. He had been trying to pull off his boots when she said it. Now, he ceased that effort and stared at her across the flickering firelight.

  “Honey, I ain’t no cowboy! Working for wa
ges, looking at the back end of a cow—that ain’t what Johnny Montana was born to do. If I had a been a cowboy to start with, you wouldn’t have given me a second look the first time we laid eyes on one another. So don’t talk to me about cowboys!”

  Three days later, Johnny Montana robbed a small bank in Rawly of three hundred dollars. She would have to leave him soon.

  She got up from the bed and walked to the window. The light was a soft gray, the air silent and still. She thought of her papa and wondered what he must be doing. What would he think of her, if he knew where she was at and what had happened in the space of the past few months? It made her sad to think of him.

  “Come on back to bed, sweetie. Let ol’ Johnny bring you some comfort, bring us both some comfort.” Now that the tequila had washed away the last remnants of the dream, he was feeling better.

  “I’m thinking that New Mexico territory is the place to go,” he said. “Santa Fe, maybe. Lots of charm in Santa Fe. Pretty country I hear. Maybe I was wrong about Texas. It don’t seem like we’ve had much luck at all.”

  She only half listened as he talked in that loose rambling way of his. She had grown weary of that, too. The dreams, the idle talk of better things ahead. She told herself that she could have even accepted the fact he was loose-footed and a dreamer. But, she could not be with a man who shot and robbed people and probably always would find it easier to take from others than to earn his own way.

  In that sudden instant, she decided to tell him to go on without her. She turned away from the window just as a chunk of adobe casing blew up. Instinctively, she fell to the floor. A second shot whizzed through the open window and slammed into the wall just above the bed knocking pieces of mud plaster down into Johnny Montana’s dark hair.

  “Come on out with your hands empty!” shouted a voice from outside. “We are Texas Rangers, and you are completely surrounded! You’ve got about a minute before we cut loose!”

  Johnny Montana had taken refuge under the bed, his pistol in his hand.