Longarm 244: Longarm and the Devil's Sister

by Evans, Tabor

  A rider could ride most any mount aboard any sensible saddle and he could only dress so many ways before he stood out more than he wanted.

  The West was awash with riders who favored cross-draw or the handy combination of a sidearm and saddle gun chambered for the same common Smith & Wesson Patent .44—40—200 rounds. So he’d have been a chump to pack weapons he was less familiar with, and there was just no way a tall, tanned hombre could make himself get short and pale without serious injury to his health.

  “If they’re sure, they’ll either run for it or come for me,” he told himself as he strode through swirls of smoke in the gloom of his lonely cell-like-hired room.

  If they ran they’d be long gone before he’d know they’d left. If they came for him, he knew Devil Dave on sight and those odds seemed to favor his more experienced gun hand. He had no idea how good the mysterious Hogan might be. It was hard to judge a man’s chances to win or lose at anything when you had no idea what he looked like!

  He blew smoke out his nostrils as he charged the open window with its view of nothing much and decided, They’ll know who they’re up against or they won’t. If they already know, my saying I’m me won’t make no nevermind.If they’re not sure about me, leaving them unsure might give me the whisker of anedge. They‘veboth thrown down on the innocent and unaware before. But they might not draw as desperate if there’s any chance I’m just some asshole they’re out to kill just to stay on the safe side.

  Once he’d made up his mind about that, and seeing he’d smoked most of that cheroot down, Longarm flopped atop the rumpled sheets to see if he could catch forty winks. For it was hell to throw down and aim with sleepy eyes. But as soon as his head hit the pillow, it filled up with other puzzles to ponder because as long as he hid his true self from the local folk, he couldn’t just ask questions that might have simple answers.

  The old lady who’d jumped up and run out of the room around the time they’d be holding vespers, or what some Protestants called Even-song services at that nearby church, could have suddenly got religious, or she might have spoke more English than she let on and had something she’d suddenly wanted to tell somebody else.

  He went over the conversation he’d had with the daughter of the house. They’d mostly talked about that Lincoln County War he hadn’t ridden in and a suddenly notorious young gun waddie he might or might not have met more recent up New Mexico way on another mission entire. Longarm couldn’t think of a thing he’d said about Billy The Kid that might interest Devil Dave or his dear little Mexican momma. She might have just felt tired of trying to follow a conversation in English. An old lady who’d gotten old in Texas without learning to speak English sounded like an old lady who couldn’t be too interested in the world around her.

  Then how come she’d been off somewhere after dark with that cowled monk, nun, or whatever? And who had they set that shotgun up to blow back out the postern gate?

  Longarm didn’t see how it could have been himself, no matter how two-faced anybody was. Both Devil Dave’s big sister and little mother had him set up inside the house, figuring to leave by the front gate, at the time the older one had scuttled off on her mysterious errand.

  That shotgun trap couldn’t have been set up to kill her because it hadn’t. He’d been watching as she’d opened the postern gate and gone on inside. Had she been worried about somebody following her?

  Or had it simply been customary burglar insurance, followed every night as they locked themselves in against all comers? Most American states had laws against such notions, but Longarm knew that back in some old countries it was lawful to set up man traps designed to kill or maim. A Lime Juicer riding for the Thompson brothers had once told Longarm about this English lord who’d set up dozens of powerful bear traps to catch kids poaching rabbits on his big, old, private woodlot.

  Spanish grandees had been known to have wandering gypsies shot on sight as trespassers whether they were acting suspicious or not. So it might be best to set that shotgun trap aside until somebody walked into it, and, as for that gun slinger popping out of the neighborhood church just after those evening vespers... The old lady wouldn’t have been allowed to stay after they were locking up, and had she hidden in some nook, as that Mission Apache might have, nobody from said church would have been escorting her home, unless...

  “We’re going to have to do some confessing to that priest and hope he’s good at keeping secrets!” Longarm muttered aloud.

  Back in Denver, Miss Morgana Floyd of the Arvada Orphan Asylum and that swamping cathedral on Capitol Hill had told him she went every Saturday to tell her father confessor about the fresh ways he’d been treating her, and so far she’d been given a tedious number of “Hail Mary’s” to recite, but not a word about her liking it with the lamps lit had appeared in the Rocky Mountain News. Few Protestants or Jews got to confess their sins and be forgiven before they could die and settle up with a higher authority.

  Longarm knew, as a lawman, that many a Mex bandit or Mission Indian had cheerfully confessed to murder, rape, and worse without getting turned in by their priests. But could a West-by-God-Virginia boy who’d dropped out of Sunday school early ask for the same deal? And what was that stuff about the same church offering Sanctuary to outlaws on the run?

  Longarm read more than he liked to let on. Reading alone in bed near the end of the month before payday had just being alone beat by a country mile. So he’d read that yarn by Mister Victor Hugo about a big swamping church in Paris, France, where the hunchbacked bell ringer had given sanctuary to a gypsy gal wanted by the law. So what if, all this time, Devil Dave and his pals had been hiding out in the belfry of that church near the family town house?

  That priest had said he hadn’t known the late Hernando Nana and had no idea what he’d been doing in the hallway, at least, of the rectory. Longarm had heard or read somewhere else that such men of the cloth were allowed to keep secrets from the law but not to lie outright to anybody.

  Longarm wasn’t supposed to tell fibs in the line of duty, either. Meanwhile, a church in the Mex barrio where rangers seldom prayed made a swell place to meet one’s momma when she had some money or information for you, whether you were sleeping on the premises or somewheres else the rest of the time.

  He decided he’d just have to risk a man-to-man talk with that boss priest come morning, and having made up his mind, he was soon in another bed—a four-poster—with the ready and willing Consuela Deveruex y Lopez, but for some damned reason, unable to get it in her tight little ring-dang-doo whilst she pleaded with him to chingate, which meant “Go fuck yourself” as soon as you studied on it, and made no sense in the context she kept saying it, whilst he tried in vain to fuck her. So he decided none of it made much sense and having seen he was in an impossible situation, woke up.

  He was glad that had all been a dream. Billy Vail would have had a fit if he’d really gotten it in Devil Dave’s sister. Yet it did seem a shame how you could only seem to get so far and never all the way in one of those so-called wet dreams. You probably had to be a determined celibate who never jerked off to have an all-out really wet dream. But a man who dreamed anything sassy about a possible arrest had a dirty mind he’d best keep an eye on.

  The sun was not only up but lancing through the one-slit window of his dinky cell. So Longarm washed up at the corner dry-sink with the brown soap, string rag, and olla of water provided. But he skipped a fresh shave with cold water lest somebody take him for respectable and put his trail-dusted jeans, shirt, and bolero jacket on over the clean underwear he’d snuck from a saddle bag.

  He put those flashy spurs back on his scuffed boots over clean socks nobody could see. He’d naturally cleaned his three guns before turning in the night before. He field stripped and wiped down all the parts of his sixgun, derringer, and saddle gun with a fresh patch, lightly oiled, because once upon a time a wise old ordinance sergeant had told young Private Long that you just never got to maintain a gun worth mention in the middle of
a gunfight, and a well-tended Springfield .52 rifled musket had saved his ass at Shiloh by going off just when his trigger finger had wanted it to, during an enemy trooper’s hang-fire.

  He left the fifteen shot .44—40 Winchester ’73 on the bed as he went to breakfast with his sixgun on his left hip and his double derringer in an inside pocket of his jacket, across from his cheroots and watch, with the usual gold-washed chain hidden away with his shoestring tie and other such notions.

  He had his fried eggs over a T-bone, with plenty of Tex-Mex black coffee and a slab of tuna pie for breakfast. He always ordered tuna pie when he was close to the border. Up Denver way they tended to look at you funny when you asked if they served tuna pie. They seemed to think you were ordering a pie made out of fish instead of the sweet red tuna fruits off cactus hedges.

  As he was washing the last of his tuna pie down, Ranger Travis came in off the street to declare, “I was hoping I’d run across you before we rode out. I don’t reckon we could interest you in scouting Indians for us, eh?”

  Longarm shoved his plate away and reached for a smoke as he soberly replied, “Not hardly. I told you Judge Dickerson of the Denver District Court wants Devil Dave Deveruex dead or alive. Hogan sounds like a sort of Irish name and Hogan’s the last of them three who busted the kid out of Judge Dickerson’s courtroom. He might be a breed. I take it you ain’t talking about hunting breeds, just now?”

  The Texas Ranger shook his head and said, “Victorio, with up to a hundred Bronco Apache who’ve joined him in the Candelarias. The Mexican federales are working with Texas and the U.S. Army for a change. So we have that ornery Apache bouncing around like spit on a hot stove and a hundred Texas Rangers have been detailed to scout for the Ninth Cav. Ain’t that a bitch?”

  Longarm shrugged and said, “The Ninth and Tenth are both good outfits to fight alongside, despite or perhaps because of their complexions I know some former Union officers refuse to lead colored troops. But a heap of ex-slaves seem anxious to prove themselves, and none of those colored regiments have the desertion rate of some whiter ones.”

  The Texican snorted, “Hell, I ain’t worried about riding against old Victorio with colored boys who’ve fit Comanche and won. I just don’t cotton to the notion of leaving you here on your own. If I was you I’d at least level with the town marshal and have him covering my back.”

  Longarm offered a cheroot to the ranger and stuck the other betwixt his own teeth as he said, “You ain’t me. I wouldn’t have told you who I was or what I was doing here if you hadn’t already known. It ain’t that I distrust all other lawmen. I’ve just found it troubles my mind less to worry about myself alone as I wander down dark alleyways, and nobody can betray any secrets you just don’t tell them. I’ve already got more balls in the air than my head can juggle sensible.”

  He brought the ranger up to date on his adventures since they’d spoken the night before. Travis allowed that Mexicans often rigged up the hen-house door with a shotgun trap and seemed to feel it cut down on chicken stealing. He said they’d already figured the old widow woman was what his Irish kin called a “Shawlee” or one of those sad little women you saw haunting Papist churches betwixt services, mumbling their rosaries sort of mindless, touched in the head or perhaps just lonesome and afraid.

  Longarm said he hadn’t known what sort of name Travis might be.

  The Texican said, “Travis is the Lancashire spelling of gatekeeper man. My English granther traveled to Texas where he rescued a young lady of the Hebrew persuasion from the Comanche. She was pretty, even in old age, and being the same Comanche had killed the gent of her own faith who’d sent east for her, they got hitched, and so, according to Torah, my daddy, having a Jewish momma, was a Jew named Travis who prayed Episcopalian ’til he married my Irish-Mex momma, who tried to raise us in her two varieties of The True Faith. The most educational part for me was the way the different branches of my family mean-mouthed one another’s religions without knowing all that much about any. You might say it left me with an open mind.”

  Longarm said, “I’ve been looking for somebody like you to tell me how much I might be able to trust that priest we met up with last night. Would he be honor-bound to keep it under his hat if I told him who I was, and do you know how Rome feels about that Sanctuary stuff?”

  The Protestant, Jewish, Catholic ranger shrugged and said, “I reckon nine out of ten priests respect secrets confided to them alone. As for the granting of Sanctuary, they ain’t supposed to shelter common felons, and they’re supposed to inform the local authorities they’ve given the Sanctuary of the Church to a want, no matter what he or she might be wanted for.”

  Longarm insisted, “Are you saying no priest would hide Devil Dave or his pals without telling us he was doing so?”

  The ranger who claimed to know shook his head and said, “What Rome says and what a particular man of the cloth might do ain’t the same tidy package at all. Like I said, you may be able to trust your life to most such sky pilots. But Our Lord only had to trust His life to that one bad apple out of a dozen to end up in a mighty mean situation!”

  Chapter 13

  You had to play such chips as you had left with the cards you were dealt, unless you aimed to just get up and leave the table, safe and dumb. Longarm hadn’t found anyone in Texas who was willing to own up to the whereabouts of Devil Dave and the less distinct Hogan, wanted on that same murder warrant after shooting up that Denver courtroom.

  When he got over to the rectory that same old priest seemed to have been expecting him. He ushered Longarm into a Spartan study, sat him in a comfortable leather chair, and rang for refreshments as he helped his ownself to a straight-back seat left over from the Spanish Inquisition and said, “I have wondered when you would get around to us, El Brazo Largo.”

  Longarm started to deny it. Then he smiled sheepishly and allowed, “That’s what comes of having every Spanish speaker in town attending the same church, I reckon.”

  The older man sighed and said, “If only. Let us be frank with one another, Deputy Long. The late Benito Juarez was of pure Indian blood and had little use for a church he felt had repressed his own Zapotec ancestors. Perhaps it had. I know little of the religious practices of the Zapotec. When Cortez entered Ciudad Mejico he had an army of Indian rebels following him and his few Spanish men-at-arms. The Aztecs your Yanqui schoolbooks feel so sorry for had terrorized the country coast-to-coast with their demands for slaves and human sacrifices. Our Mother Church put an end to this. Aztec priests wearing human bones and painted with human blood were executed as murderers by the new Spanish rulers, and you may have heard how complex a man we had in our own Archbishop Juan De Fonesca, no?”

  Longarm said, “No. I ain’t never seen a warrant sworn out against a gent by that name, Padre.”

  The priest smiled thinly and replied, “Perhaps that is because he died some time ago. Ferdinand and Isabella authorized him to look after their new subjects in New Spain. De Fonesca spoke up for the Indians and had laws passed for to protect them from being exploited. He also burned many Aztec books and a good many Aztec priests. To protect the Indians from forced labor he authorized each Spanish family to import up to twelve Africans who were already slaves. As you may have guessed, that did not work out exactly as planned. Thousands of Africans who had not been slaves until then were rounded up and transported to the New World while the Indians were exploited just the same.”

  Longarm asked, “Why are you telling me all this, Padre? I’m having enough trouble understanding Mexico in the here and now!”

  A Mex gal in a maid’s uniform brought a tray in, piled with pastries, a pitcher of sangria, and cut glass goblets. As she served the two of them the Mexican priest said, “The Mexico of today is left over from the Mexico of yesterday, so close to Los Estados Unidos, so far from God, with so many mistakes by well-meaning fools and deep-dyed sinners still haunting her and her people.”

  He indicated that Longarm was to dig in as he continued. �
��Is impossible for most Mexicans to really understand the mess we call Mexico. I only wish for you to understand my own position a little. Was a priest by the name of Hidalgo who first led an uprising for Mexico’s liberty in 1811. They killed him, of course, and took unjust revenge on the rest of us, as the winners always do. So those churchmen who survived tried for to, how you say, patch things up with the Spanish ruling class and, perhaps, some went a little too far.”

  Longarm sipped some sangria, noting this batch had been mixed with finer wine, and allowed he’d heard Juarez had confiscated a heap of church property once his working-class party got to running things.

  His host sighed, “Then that fool, Napoleon the Second, sent an even bigger fool called Maximilian in with the French Foreign Legion to put things back the way they’d been, and the next time Juarez won he was really mad! The persecution of priests, monks, and nuns that followed was an ugly chapter our current liberals do not wish for to talk about. When Juarez died, one of his generals, Porfirio Diaz, took over in perhaps an irregular manner.”

  Longarm growled, “You mean he stole La Revolucián, the ruthless son of a bitch!”

  The old priest nodded in agreement but demurred, “A ruthless smart son of a bitch who does not like surprises. He has made friends up in Washington and along your Wall Street by restoring law and order in a country sadly lacking either. His position with regard to the Church of Rome has been, how you say, a compromise. He and his strongarms in gray sombreros leave us alone and we, in turn, leave them alone. My official position, as far as a known enemy of the Diaz Government is concerned, is that I have no wish to aid or abet this Yanqui wildman called El Brazo Largo by so many of my poor misguided people.”