Brian Garfield

by Tripwire

  “Boag you’re incredible. Look, I’m heading south. Anywhere we can drop you?”

  “Just so you don’t drop me too hard, Captain, there’s a ranch down south of here belongs to Don Pablo Ortiz.”

  “I think I know where that is.”

  “You going that way?”

  “We can make a little detour.”

  “That’s mighty kind of you, Captain.”

  “You’re a hell of a soldier, Boag. If you pull out of this I’ll want to talk to you again.”

  “Still trying to recruit me, hey?”

  “I need a segundo with his head screwed on straight. My God, Boag, you don’t know how bad I need that. Who put that slug in you? Rurales?”

  “Prison guard, I reckon.”

  “Must have been a .45–90. Big sonofabitching hole in you, Boag.”

  “Well it’s the second time this year I’ve been shot up on Mr. Pickett’s account.”

  “Third time they won’t shoot you up, boy, they’ll shoot you down.”

  “There won’t be no third time until I’ve got Mr. Pickett under a gun, Captain. I promise you that.”

  “You just get some rest, Boag. We’ll rig a litter for you.”

  2

  He didn’t remember much of that trip either. They rigged a travois behind one of the horses and that was all right dragging on the pine needles but when they got down into dry country the damn thing started bouncing on rocks in the ground and it was holy hell. Boag passed out and didn’t come to until nightfall.

  Coffee with molasses in it. Some kind of thin soup. Toasted corn fritter. He got most of it down before he went under again.

  Captain McQuade had some kind of Mexican medicine man who claimed to have been a medical orderly under Juarez. A wizened up old man with a deerskin pouch on a lanyard suspended from his neck. Herb potions and for all Boag knew crow-entrails. But when the son of a bitch cauterized Boag’s wound with a fire-hot running-iron Boag was ready to kill him except the pain knocked him out before he could figure out how.

  Next day at noon camp they pried his jaw open to feed him some solid meat in little tiny chunks. Captain McQuade said, “Almost there, Boag. Sometime tonight.”

  “Don’t you boys ever sleep?”

  “We’ve got a train to meet down on the Yaqui.”

  “You’re always going to meet trains, Captain, ever’ time I see you.”

  “Boag, there’s nothing quite so satisfying in this life as the sight of a federal armored train blowing sky high off the tracks. It makes a marvelous potion for a jaded man. You want to try it sometime.”

  “Well that do sound like plenty of fun.”

  “Yes indeed it is. Those scabbed-up holes down in the calf of your leg, that the other time Pickett shot you?”

  “That’s right, Captain. They ain’t very good shots as you can see.”

  “They hit you, didn’t they?”

  “They didn’t kill me, and that was their mistake.”

  “Boag, you keep giving them enough practice and they’ll get good enough to kill you.”

  “How come you keep trying to talk me out of this?”

  “Because I think you’re a damn fool to keep after Jed Pickett. You’re biting off more than ten men can chew. I don’t want you dead, Boag, I want you in my army.”

  “Must be plenty of mustered-out Buffalo soldiers you could hire, Captain.”

  “I’m sure there are. But you were the best combat soldier in the Tenth Cavalry. That’s not flattery, that’s God’s truth. I even heard General Crook himself remark on one occasion that we could either send a squad of soldiers out to do a certain job or we could send Sergeant Boag.”

  “I never heard that before.”

  “Nobody wanted to give you a swelled head. When a man’s a superb fighter you don’t need to tell him about it, he knows it for himself.”

  “Yes sir, I know what I’m good at.”

  “You’re good at soldiering. Right now I’m the only army you’ve got, Boag.”

  “You ain’t the only war I’ve got.”

  “Why you’re just doing this for the sheer hell of it, aren’t you?”

  “Captain, Mr. Pickett murdered my friend John B. Wilstach. I expect he owes me something on that account, not to mention some gold bullion we got in dispute.”

  “I recall Wilstach. Spent more time in the guardhouse than out.”

  “Well he was my friend, Captain.”

  “Making an ass out of yourself won’t bring him back, will it?”

  “I believe maybe it’ll make him feel a little bit better, wherever he is.”

  “That’s a pretty wild assumption to die for.”

  “You’re sure as hell a stubborn man, Captain.”

  “Not half as stubborn as you.” Captain McQuade got up on his feet. “Time to move out.”

  “Do me one more favor, Captain? Put me up on a saddle? That travvy’s fixin’ to shake me to pieces.”

  “I’ll talk to the medico. If he says it’s all right.”

  The wizened old medicine man came. Boag showed his distrust. The old man grinned through a few bad teeth that remained in the caved-in remains of his mouth; cackled and went away, and Boag felt very depressed but when they came to pick him up they put him on a blanket-draped saddle and Boag looked more kindly on the medicine man.

  After the column started moving he changed his mind. If the travois had been pain, this was agony.

  3

  He was in and out of delirium for days. Afterward he decided it had something to do with safety, the disappearance of challenge. There was no immediate threat to him and so it was safe to go loose, to let the body take over; and simple impatience wasn’t enough to overcome that. Every fiber went slack and he despised himself; he had never tolerated weakness in himself.

  He dreamed frequently of the señora; he imagined her—naked, pink-brown, tender; his hands remembered the feel of her hard tight little ass and her velvet breasts.

  “Stop that,” she said. “Not now.” She pushed his hand away.

  He blinked up at her. He felt hung-over as hell. “Did I have a good time last night?”

  “What?”

  He recognized the room and recollection trickled into him. “Uh. How’s Don Pablo?”

  “He is the same.”

  “How am I?”

  “You ought to be dead but you are not.”

  He didn’t want to twist his head to look down at himself. “Is it mending?”

  “Yes.” She smiled slowly; her cross act had been fraudulent. “You have a very tough body.”

  “It’s that black hide. Tough as armor.”

  He yelped when she pinched him. “Tough as armor,” she said.

  Then he slept again, warmed by the echo of her laughter. She must have bathed him because the prison stench was no longer in his nostrils. He had a picture of that scene and he wished he had been awake at the time.

  Sometimes when he opened his eyes she was there; sometimes she wasn’t. Sometimes there was daylight at the window. He had no way of counting the nights and days. He hovered in a kind of daydream for a very long time, not unconscious and yet not awake. Fevers sweated him and at times he was frozen through to the bones.

  Once she said to him, “I am so glad you asked your friends to bring you back here.”

  “There was no other place to go. I’m sorry to be a burden. Now you have to look after two sick men.”

  “When I was a whore I dreamed of being a nurse.” Her hand rested on him with a natural intimacy.

  On another day Don Pablo came into the room and smiled when he saw Boag was awake. “You feel better now?”

  “Getting better all the time,” he said and instantly regretted it because it mocked Don Pablo’s condition and he hadn’t meant that; but an apology would only make it worse so he let it drift away uncorrected.

  “Dorotea is very glad you chose our house for refuge.”

  “She said that.”

  “In a stran
ge way I am glad too.”

  “Why?”

  “We have very few friends any more. You chose this house because you thought of us as friends. It was the señora of course, it was not me; but nevertheless I am gratified. Can you understand this?”

  “I think I can,” Boag said and it occurred to him that with the possible exception of Captain McQuade—who had an axe to grind—he also had no other friends.

  Then he thought of Pilar-Carmen, the little Yaqui girl. Was she his friend also? Perhaps she was. I should look her up sometime.

  He said, “I owe you a debt now.”

  “Not at all. You have done us a kindness, as I have just explained.”

  “What if the troops come here looking for me? They find me here and you’ll both be arrested.”

  “They will not look here. Why should it occur to them?”

  “Suppose they arrest one of Captain McQuade’s people and make him talk?”

  “I think they seldom arrest the rebels any more. They do not take prisoners, Pesquiera’s troops. They have an arrogance, they think they do not need to question prisoners any more; they expect to terrorize the province into obedience.”

  “Maybe.”

  “At any rate you shall stay as long as you need to. Do not feel any urgency about that.”

  “How long have I been here anyway?”

  “Ten or eleven days, I forget exactly. I myself tend to disregard dates.” Dorotea’s husband touched Boag’s arm and then walked to the door; paused there, and said before he left the room, “She is in love with you. I am sure you know that. I hope you will not grieve her. She should not have to lose both of her men at the same time.”

  “You sound like Captain McQuade,” Boag growled, but the door was shut and he heard Don Pablo retreat through the courtyard, his retching cough sounding as though it were ripping the lining of his lungs away.

  4

  “I suppose the days give you time to think,” Dorotea said. She lay against his good side and her cool hand slid up his chest.

  “Well I get out of here, I expect I’ll have to work out some way to find Mr. Pickett.”

  “Have you thought about why you do this?”

  “I just have to, that’s all.”

  “No, I do not think you have to. It is not pride and I do not really think it is revenge either.”

  Boag hitched himself up on one elbow and winced. “Everybody keeps telling me what I’m after. Don’t you think I know? Your husband told me I was scared and he said I hated being scared so much I had to keep going out and proving it wasn’t true.”

  “And?”

  “He was wrong. I get scared—who doesn’t?”

  “But you invite it don’t you? I mean who would care if you simply forgot about this gold and this man Pickett?”

  “I’d care.”

  “Why? Does it really matter about the gold bullion or your friend who died?”

  “Or Mr. Pickett’s friends that put this bullet through me? Well maybe it don’t. Captain McQuade keeps telling me I want an army to fight with.”

  “You are a fighting man. That is what you are.”

  “All right. But the war Captain McQuade’s offering me, that ain’t my war.”

  “And the war with this Pickett, that is your war?”

  “Like I told Captain McQuade. It’s the only war I’ve got.” He reached for her hand and closed the big fist over it. “You been a kind of a slave, you know you just don’t let them shove you around any more. That’s what it is.”

  “Then your freedom is being in motion and keeping ahead of the bullets, is that what you mean?” She lay back against his arm; he thought she was smiling. “You are my adventurer,” she said. “Big black soldier-of-fortune Boag.”

  5

  By the second week of June it was full summer-hot and the grass was going yellow on the high plains. Boag was out of bed moving around as much as he could to rebuild the strength that had drained out of him as if a plug had been pulled. His right hip moved with a stiff awkwardness as if the ball didn’t fit right into its socket any more: the .45–90 had taken some chips out of the hipbone. It didn’t make him limp; it was more of a lurch.

  Dorotea was amused. “You are the wreckage of a man. Now you have been shot in both legs.”

  “I’m lame but I’m still on my feet.”

  “And so brave,” she breathed with wide-eyed mockery.

  “Aagh.”

  He took one more turn around the courtyard and stopped at the front gate. Miguel stood there, ever vigilant, watching the valley through the view-port in the door. The old man’s eyes were squinted in close-focused attention and Boag said, “Somebody coming.”

  “See for yourself, Señor.”

  Miguel stepped aside lugging his shotgun and Boag looked through the hole.

  It was a crowd of riders in a hurry.

  “Coming straight for us.”

  “They ride like soldados,” Miguel said and Boag saw the sweat on his wrinkled face.

  Boag felt himself tense up. The riders were still better than a mile out but they were drumming forward like a big locomotive at full throttle. A banner of dust raveled high in their wake.

  “Where’s my two pistols, Miguel?”

  “Under the bed where you sleep.”

  Then Boag’s shoulders dropped an inch. “It’s all right. That’s Captain McQuade.”

  “You have very good eyes, Señor.”

  Dorotea crossed the court and Boag saw Don Pablo appear at his door on the veranda. Boag stepped through the gate and stood just outside it and waited for the horsemen.

  They swirled to a halt. Hoofs churned up clots that spattered the adobe wall. Captain McQuade’s grin cracked the coating of dust on his face. “So you made it. I expected you would.”

  “I’m still takin’ nourishment,” Boag acknowledged. “Light and set a while.”

  “Can’t, Sergeant, we’re in a little bit of a hurry.”

  “You got federates on your ass?”

  “I think we shook them off. But there’s a good big fight shaping up north of here. I’d hate to miss out on it.”

  Boag grinned.

  “You well enough to ride?”

  “It still ain’t my fight, Captain.”

  “That’s too bad. I’ll talk you into it one of these days.” Captain McQuade swept off his hat and dragged the crook of his elbow across his forehead. “There’s two of Pickett’s rawhiders hanging around the town of Tres Osos,” he said, and replaced the hat square across his eyebrows.

  “Thank you kindly, Captain.”

  “Well take it easy, Boag.” And then they were moving: a rise and fall of Captain McQuade’s arm, a looping wheel of two dozen horses, a thunder of hoof-fall.

  Boag stepped inside and shut the door against the dust. Looking through the view-port he had a glimpse of the drag riders in Captain McQuade’s troop: they were hauling a gun-cart and there was a ten-barrel Gatling gun mounted on it. Captain McQuade must have won a battle and taken that as part of the spoils.

  In the twilight Don Pablo struggled down the stairs to the dining room where Miguel had set the table with their few plates and glasses arranged in formal patterns on the bare wood. Dorotea served up a meal that tasted very good to Boag.

  Don Pablo was looking a little stronger than he had; it was possibly because there was color in his cheeks but that might have been the flush of fever, it was hard to tell.

  Boag said, “How long before they throw you out of here?”

  “Perhaps the end of this month. Perhaps my creditors will be kind and extend us a few weeks before we are dispossessed.”

  “Then I might as well get moving.”

  Dorotea rolled her eyes toward him. Don Pablo said, “You are not strong enough yet.”

  “I’m strong enough to ride. The rest will take care of itself in the saddle.”

  “But are you fast enough?”

  “I never was fast. Just steady.”

  “You will
need a little money I think. I have a little for you.”

  “You need to feed yourselves.”

  “There is enough for both.”

  “Then I won’t dispute it. I’m obliged.”

  “It is we who are obliged,” Don Pablo said.

  But in the morning when Don Pablo came down one step at a time to watch Boag saddle the horse he said, “You will recall what was said the last time you rode away from here.” He bent over to cough. “It still pertains.”

  “Other words, if I don’t get some gold in my pockets you don’t want me to come back.”

  “Not for Dorotea.”

  “Well you’re her husband.”

  “I used to be,” Don Pablo said. “Now I am her friend. I would not wish her to follow a dirt-poor Negro from town to town.”

  “What about a dirt-poor Castilian?”

  Don Pablo considered it. In the end he conceded, “You have a point.”

  Boag smiled and went to say his hasta luego to the señora.

  6

  He didn’t push himself; he used up four slow-riding days getting to Tres Osos. It was one of those mestizo towns high in the Sierra where most of the people had no Spanish, they talked an Indio dialect that Boag didn’t understand.

  The village welcomed him spectacularly: it was a Saturday afternoon and there was a wedding. The fiesta was accompanied by an earsplitting spectacle of Mexican fireworks and the entire population was turned out in elaborate costumes the women had probably spent a year making. It was a profusion of movement and color and noise. Boag sat on a rock up in the trees above the village, holding the reins of his horse, watching. He tried to disregard all the wheeling color; he was looking for two gringos not partaking of the festival.

  He didn’t see them for two hours. The village was a loose assemblage of huts that crawled down the corkscrew sides of a narrow canyon shaded by ranks of enormous pines that marched down the mountain like lancers with their weapons at the ready. The road ran close along the bank of the dry creek, wandering from one side of the canyon to the other. In seasons of heavy rain or during the spring thaw he expected not only the stream but the road also ran a foot deep in rushing water. Right now it was two months since the thaw and he didn’t know of much rain since then, and the whole forest looked ready to go up in flame but the villagers were happily flinging their fireworks in the air with frivolous abandon and Boag watched with alarm as some of the sparks arced into the woods.