Rio Bravo

by Leigh Brackett

  “Look. Let’s get one thing straight. There’ll be no more sitting in a chair outside my door. I told you that—”

  “Oh,” she said. “I know. You told me. I’ve given that up. Anyway, I have a better idea. You sleep in my room tonight. Anyone looking for you wouldn’t look there first. You’d have more time if anything did happen.”

  She started for her own door, leaving him with his jaw hanging open. Then she paused and looked back.

  “Besides, there’s a rocking chair in my room. It’s much more comfortable.” She turned away. “It’s just an idea. You can think about it. I wouldn’t have mentioned it if you hadn’t insisted.”

  She went into her room and shut the door firmly.

  Chance stared after her. He began to laugh. “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  From somewhere outside, thunderous in the quiet night, the blast of a shotgun sounded, and a man’s voice cried out.

  The voice was Dude’s.

  SIXTEEN

  The lobby downstairs was in partial darkness. Carlos had put out the lamp on the desk. He was standing by the door, peering out. The customers in the bar were starting to gang up behind him. Chance went through them fast and hard.

  Carlos said, “The shot was from the jail.”

  Chance ran past him into the street. He stayed low, keeping in the shadows. It was very quiet now. Even the Deguello had stopped. He could not see anybody moving.

  The door of the jail was open. He ran toward it. “Dude!” he yelled. “Dude, are you all right?”

  Dude answered, “Watch out!”

  Chance saw him then, almost invisible in his dark clothes, crouched against the wall of the jail beside the door.

  In a thin, saw-edged voice Dude shouted, “Tell that goddamned idiot to stop shooting!”

  Chance got out of a direct line with the door and went up alongside it. He yelled to Stumpy. “It’s us, Stumpy. Chance and Dude. Don’t shoot.”

  Stumpy yelled back from inside, “Why didn’t you say so before?” Chance could hear the old man cursing and grumbling. “All right, come ahead in, I won’t shoot you.”

  Chance waited for Dude to get up and join him. He still had the package under his arm. They went in together. Dude was holding his hat in his hands, looking at the crown which was full of holes where the shot had torn through. His face was white and scared.

  “For Chrissake, Stumpy!” Chance said. He slammed and locked the door, his own hands shaking as bad as Dude’s. “You were shooting at Dude.”

  “Dude!” Stumpy was staring at him through the barred door. “I didn’t know it was you.”

  “Almost blowed my head off,” Dude said. “If you hadn’t of aimed too high.”

  “Got rattled,” Stumpy said. “I’ll remember next time.” His voice went up to a kind of enraged whine. “How’d I know it was you? Goddamn it, you go and get yourself all dolled up like a fancy woman and come stickin’ your nose in here without saying a word—how was I supposed to know?”

  “Look at this hat.” Dude shook his hat in Stumpy’s face, sticking his fingers through the holes. “Just look at it!”

  “I still ain’t sure it’s you,” Stumpy yelled. “I’m minded to take another shot at you just for luck. You ain’t been cleaned up for so long that nobody remembers what you look like.” He stopped. “Oughta remembered,” he said, and Chance thought he was going to cry. “Knowed you long enough.”

  “Ah, shut up,” Dude growled. “Wasn’t your fault, I should’ve warned you. You just scared me, that’s all.” He shoved the package through the bars. “Here’s your stuff.”

  “Hell,” said Stumpy, looking at it. “It’s all dirty.”

  “That’s just dust I got on it trying to get out of your way.”

  “And look at that door,” Stumpy said. “Look at all them holes in it. It’s gonna be cold in here now. There’ll be a draft along the floor and I can’t abide drafts. Ain’t gonna fix it, neither; damned if I will. It was your fault, Dude coming in here without …”

  “I’ll fix it,” Dude said. “I’ll fix it if you’ll just quit talking.”

  Stumpy grinned. “Figured you would. Funny what a man can get by talking.” He went away down the corridor.

  Chance scowled at Dude. “Why didn’t you wait for me?”

  “I thought you were busy.”

  He bent over and began to brush dust off the knees of his pants. Across the street the piano started up again, playing the Deguello.

  Chance went and sat down behind the desk. He rolled a cigarette and smoked it, brooding. He should have been thinking about Nathan Burdette and the Cutthroat Song but instead he was thinking about the girl.

  It was late when he went back to the hotel. Everything was quiet. Even Raton had gone home. But there was still a light in the bar and Feathers was making a great clatter with beer mugs and glasses.

  “Hi, Sheriff,” she said. “They’ve been keeping me busy.” She leaned her elbows on the bar and smiled at him as he came up. “You through for the day? Going to bed?”

  He said noncommittally, “I thought I would.”

  “That’s a good idea. Can I make you some coffee first?”

  “No thanks.”

  “How about a drink, then?”

  He nodded. “I’ll take a drink.”

  She fetched a bottle out from under the bar. “Carlos told me this one is for special guests.” She poured a large drink and handed it to him. “You’re tired, aren’t you?”

  He couldn’t deny it.

  “I can fix you a nice hot bath,” she said. “Or rub your neck. Or—”

  “I just want some sleep.” He put the glass down.

  She turned it around in her fingers, not looking at him. “Then this is all I can do for you.”

  “I thought you said I could think about it.”

  “You’re right, I did. Well, in case you make up your mind, I left my door open.” She added heartily, “Get a good night’s sleep.”

  She wasn’t helping him any, and he said so.

  She laughed. “Oh, John T., sometimes I say things like that just so I can see that funny look on your face! Forget about it. Good night.”

  She turned her back and began racking up the glasses again. Chance looked at her, wondering why she always managed to rile him and why he always came back for more. She had buttoned the pink shirt up higher. That was something.

  Just the same it annoyed him to see her behind the bar, and it annoyed him even more that he should be annoyed. He decided to go to bed.

  Consuela met him at the foot of the stairs. He was sure she had been lurking in the dark dining room, watching. Her eyes were lustrous with pleased excitement.

  “Do you wish some supper?” she asked. “I fix for you.”

  “Thanks, Consuela. I had some.”

  “Señor Stumpy cooks for you, eh? He will poison you.” She came closer to him and whispered conspiratorially, peeping past him at Feathers. “We give the girl a job—a good thing, no? You think so?”

  He did not know quite what to say about that, so he said, “Sure, Consuela.”

  She showed her magnificent teeth and giggled. “I know you like, I see how you look at her. I am sure. Carlos he is not sure, he say maybe you got too much to do, not enough time.”

  “Well,” said Chance, “Carlos is—”

  “I say men always say that,” Consuela said delightedly. “Always talk, talk, but never mean it. Always time for …”

  “Well,” said Chance, getting red in the face, “you—”

  “I am right, eh? Yes! You like, you not got too much to do. I tell Carlos I am right and he is wrong. Buenas noches, sleep well!” She managed to include Feathers in this wish. She disappeared into the darkness still giggling. Chance felt his face and neck burning. Damn these women, always—oh, hell! He turned and climbed the stairs.

  He went to his door and unlocked it, but he did not go in. Instead he went to Feathers’ door and tried it.

  It was not
locked.

  He stood with his hand on the knob and the door open for quite a long moment. Then he shut the door. He almost slammed it. He went back to his own room, locked the door behind him, hooked a chair under the knob, removed his hat and boots, and went to bed with his rifle propped against the wall beside him.

  He was tired and oppressed with worries. All he wanted to do was sleep. But he could not sleep. The night was full of noises: wind blowing, the creak and snap of boards as the walls of the hotel lost the day’s heat and contracted, the half-hearted braying of a mule in the corrals. Then the coyotes began their shrill lonesome yapping beyond the edge of town. Chance tossed and turned. He wondered if Dude was really cured—he hadn’t had even a beer since the shooting in the Rio Bravo Saloon. He wondered what Nathan was going to do. Perhaps he had beaten Nathan by that threat to shoot Joe. Perhaps the Deguello was only an empty gesture. He would have liked to think so but he didn’t. He turned and tossed, and then suddenly he started up reaching for the rifle. Somebody was coming up the stairs.

  The light footsteps passed his door and he relaxed. It was only Feathers. He heard her door open and close. He lay down again and buried his face in the pillow, determined to sleep.

  He could not sleep and he could not even think about his troubles any more. All he could think of was Feathers. In his mind now he saw her in her pink shirt standing in a warm blaze of light, and on the other side there was blackness and Nathan hid in it, and there was death there and a great cold. He wanted the light and the warmth.

  He wanted Feathers.

  Once more he started up with a confused memory of having heard some stealthy sound, and he realized that he must have dozed off. He listened, but he could hear nothing now. Moonlight slanted in through the window. He sat up, wide awake, and then he thought he knew what the sound must have been. In spite of his orders Feathers had come to watch again outside his door.

  He rose and crossed the room, going softly without his boots. He moved the chair and unlocked the door and opened it.

  The hall was empty.

  He frowned, listening. The hotel was silent as a tomb except for a man’s rhythmic snoring from behind one of the closed doors. Presently he padded down to Feathers’ door. It was open a crack and he pushed it wide. There was no one in the room. The bed had been unmade but not slept in.

  Chance turned and went down the stairs.

  In the dark at the foot of the steps he stood still, his head cocked on one side. There was a faint, light sound of breathing. He located it and went toward it. Enough moonlight came in to show him where the tables and chairs were. He did not make any noise at all. He reached the bar and looked behind it.

  Feathers was sitting on the floor behind the bar, wrapped up in a blanket. She had taken Carlos’s big revolver from his desk. It lay in her lap and her hand was on it. Her head was leaned back and her eyes were closed.

  He spoke her name very softly, and she opened her eyes and smiled, dazed with sleep. He went to her and kneeled down. He took the gun out of her hands and put it on the shelf under the bar. Then he lifted her up, blanket and all, into his arms and she was warm and sweet-smelling and pleasantly heavy. She put her face against his neck and kissed it.

  He carried her quite swiftly up the stairs and she was no burden at all.

  SEVENTEEN

  Dude had had a rough night, with nothing to relieve it.

  It had taken him by surprise. He felt good. He was clean-scrubbed and clean-shaven and his hair was cut and his clothes were all in one piece and his own. He kept touching them, remembering how and when he had got them, how much he had paid. He kept looking at his boots, shiny and handsome, with no cracks in them. He kept caressing his guns and the fine belt that held them. He felt good. After Chance left the jail he talked and laughed with Stumpy for a while, and the laughter came easy just like it used to. He was himself again, Dude Walton, a whole man. There was a pitcher of beer on the shelf. He had watched Stumpy drink some of it and he felt like God because he did not have any desire for it himself.

  He was not ready to sleep. He wanted time to enjoy the way he felt. So he took the first watch and Stumpy stretched out in the cell next to Joe and the jail got quiet. Dude smoked. Then he got up and paced around, checking the windows, the front door, the inner barred door. He practiced a few fast draws and decided that his left hand was a shade slower than it used to be. He was one of the few gunfighters who could use either hand equally well. With most of them the left-hand gun was not much more than an empty boast, and few bothered to pack one. Dude remembered how he had practiced every day to keep that fine edge, the perfect co-ordination of hand and eye, and he was amazed that his reflexes were still as good as they were after …

  After.

  That was when it started.

  Stumpy had begun to snore. The remote and doleful sound only emphasized the silence of the jail. There was the lamp on the desk, turned low, and there was the shadowy room with Dude in it, and all around the room outside there was the town locked in night and sleep, and all around the town there was the dark plain with nothing in it but thousands of miles of wind and star-shine. Dude was alone at the hub of the world.

  Alone and thinking.

  The thoughts came like a horde of rats in the quiet dark with nothing to turn them aside.

  He had turned them aside before with whisky, but now he did not have any whisky and there was not enough beer in the pitcher nor in the world to do him any good.

  He tried to fight but there was no strength in him. Perhaps he was betraying himself with some secret corner of his mind, knowing that this had to come sometime and it might as well be now. Whatever it was, he had no further defences. He put his face in his hands and let it come.

  Three years.

  Because of a woman, a no-good woman and what she had done. And why? Because he was crazy about her and could not bear to lose her? Or because it killed him that any other man in the world could look good to her after she’d had him?

  Three years.

  Dude with the fancy clothes and the way with women. Dude with the fast gun, the best gun on this part of the border.

  Dude down on his knees beside a barroom spittoon.

  Borrachin.

  He was disgusted. He was sick to vomiting with disgust.

  He was not a man at all. He never had been a man. He was only a big hole, a nothing with some skin wrapped around it to give it shape. Not even any bones. Certainly no backbone. And no guts.

  Three years, and he’d have been dead and shoveled under like an animal if it hadn’t been for Chance.

  He hated Chance. He was sorry he hadn’t killed him. It wasn’t right for one man to do that for another. If your friend turned out to be no man at all but just an empty skin filled up with drunkenness you ought to shoot him and throw him away somewhere in a deep barranca where he would never have to wake up and realize what he was.

  And have to be grateful.

  He did not think he could ever face Chance again.

  He thought he would go out, locking the jail door securely behind him, and get on his horse and ride. He didn’t do it. He sat where he was, in the chair behind the desk, without strength to do anything. After a while the shakes came back on him. He dragged himself to the shelf and got the pitcher and drank all the beer in it. It did not help the shakes any. It only made him feel sour and dirty inside. But it dulled his mind. He was exhausted, wrung out like an old rag. He woke Stumpy, and when the old man asked him what was wrong with him he snarled so savagely that Stumpy didn’t even answer back. He lay down on the floor of the office, rolled in a blanket, and he could feel himself cave in. He passed into a kind of half-sleep that was mostly nightmares from which Stumpy kept waking him.

  Toward morning he slept more quietly. The smell of coffee roused him finally. Stumpy was boiling the big pot on the stove back in the cell corridor. He came with a mug of it and handed it out through the bars. Dude tried to drink some but it nauseated him. He wanted
to get away out onto the road before Chance came. He needed more time to think alone, before he decided whether or not he would come back.

  He went out, but Chance was up early too. He saw him come out of the hotel and stand a moment on the porch, stretching, his head tilted back and his hat pushed forward. Then he came toward the jail, walking with his long, easy, slouching stride, the rifle swinging in his hand. Dude got his horse. He tightened the cinch, pretending that he did not see Chance at all. Then he swung up onto the saddle so that when he spoke to him he would not have to face him directly.

  Chance smiled. There was something vague and abstracted about him. He looked tired, happy, and at peace with the world. “Morning, Dude,” he said.

  Dude thought bitterly, “He’s been with her. And maybe she’ll turn out no better than Virgie, and him no better than me.” He could not bear to look Chance in the eye.

  “Morning,” he said.

  “You don’t look like you slept very good.”

  “And you do.”

  “What the hell kind of a comment is that?”

  “Take it any way you want to,” Dude said and clapped his spurs in so hard the horse nearly jumped out from under him.

  The watcher was in his place on the porch of the Rio Bravo Saloon. The opening notes of the Deguello came to Dude as Raton started his long day’s work. The horsemen were on the clifftops. Burdette was in his heaven and all was right with the world. Hunched and hollow in the saddle, Dude rode down to the old stable.

  He looked around, but there was nothing to be seen out of the ordinary. He rode into the stableyard. The street and the Mexican quarter both were now closed from his view, one by the stable itself, the other by the thatched shelter and an adobe wall. He tied his horse. The air was very fresh and clean but the sun already had a burning kiss. Dude felt terrible. He thought maybe he was feverish, and there was a foul taste in his mouth. He went over to the horse trough, taking off his hat. Stumpy had made a mess of that hat. The crown was all ragged now, sticking up in a funny way. But Dude was too sick to care. He hung the hat on the pump and bent over the trough, wanting the cold water on his head.