by Bill Brooks
“It’ll have to wait,” Buck said. “I ain’t never been married before, but I have been an outlaw many times over. And Hannibal here is to be my best man. I guess if you can’t wait until after Saturday, you’ll have to go rob that bank by your lonesome.”
“Well, I reckon a few days won’t matter all that much. I doubt any other outlaws will come up with my same plan. Most of ’em ain’t all that smart.”
“I thought you was a train robber by trade,” Buck said.
“Was, ain’t no more, not since what happened to Jake Crowfoot.”
“Who’s Jake Crowfoot and what happened to him?”
So Dirty Dave ordered them all a round of drinks and told them the story of Jake Crowfoot falling under the Union Pacific train—embellishing it somewhat since he never actually knew Jake Crowfoot or the exact circumstances of his life and tragic death—and pausing just long enough to deliver the punch line about how much littler Jake became and how he wasn’t a loud talker no more.
The boys laughed like hell.
And Dirty Dave did too.
Chapter 10
Teddy stopped by the Wright House after leaving the Lone Star. He wanted to see Mae, to explain he wasn’t like all the other men, the ones she’d referred to with her last comment. But as he got closer, he realized that maybe he was like all the other men, like every man who ever lived. He had too much pride even to suit himself. He felt badly about having beaten Bat in the ring in front of the people who knew and trusted him as their county sheriff. He should have turned down the challenge, told Bat to go to hell and go it alone and gotten on a train and gone back to Chicago, where he probably really belonged.
He paused in front of the Wright House. What was the point of his going in and trying to convince Mae of something he wasn’t?
To hell with it.
He walked on to his hotel, and went up to his room.
The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced he should leave. He began packing his valise.
What had coming to the West gained him, really? A few years of being a cowboy. And now he was a wanted man, and doing work he wasn’t even sure he was qualified to do. He packed his shirts. Socks. Then he found the silver flask he’d put in the drawer with his spare clothes. The flask Cody had given him out of gratitude. He stroked it with his hand, his knuckles scraped and swollen from the fight.
COL. WFC was etched into the side of the flask. He unscrewed the cap and took a pull of Cody’s best liquor, and all it did was remind him of Anne and death there along the Dismal River.
He took another pull, draining the last of it, then screwed the cap back on and tossed it into the valise along with his shirts and socks. Came a knock at the door.
He opened it. Mae was standing there.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
“You win your fistfight?” she said.
He nodded, stepped aside so she could enter the room.
He watched her as she looked around, saw that she saw the open valise there on the bed.
“Leaving, huh?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“You get into a fistfight and leave town. You sound like a cowboy,” she said.
“I was a cowboy at one time. Maybe some of it’s carried over.”
“I doubt that.”
“Why do you doubt it?”
“I’ve been around enough to know a thing or two.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I know you’re not just some cowboy who drifted into town. Meaning I think you’re a lot more than what you represent yourself as. You like others to think there’s not much to you, but I think there is.”
“Well, maybe you don’t know as much about me as you think you do.”
She cast her gaze toward his hands. Shook her head.
“Was it worth it, the fight?”
“I thought it was necessary at the time.”
“Jesus, you’re such a fool,” she said, and came and put her arms around him and kissed him.
It was a kiss of sanctuary. A place he could retreat into for a long full moment.
She pulled back, looked at him.
“This is what you wanted, right?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe you need to think about it some more,” she said, kissing him again.
He tried hard not to let thoughts of Anne or Kathleen creep in, found it impossible to keep them out, then became completely lost in Mae’s passion for him. Everything seemed to turn and turn there in the room as they embraced, as though the world was circling around them. She sighed when he returned her kisses.
“It’s been a long time for me,” she whispered.
He guided her to the bed.
“You’re leaving…” she said as he began to unbutton her dress, she his shirt.
He kissed her into silence, felt the fluttering of her heart as he laid his hand gently on her breast. She drew him closer to her.
“You’re leaving…” she repeated.
He kissed the words from her lips.
And later they lay together beneath the blankets, she in the crook of his arm, her head resting on his shoulder, her body melded to his as though they’d become one person sharing the same heart, the same flesh and blood.
They lay like that a long, long time. Light retreated from the room and it grew dark and he said, “Do you want me to light the lamp?”
“No,” she said. “Don’t move.”
He felt her hands tracing over his body, as though she were a blind child exploring an unfamiliar landscape. The scent of her hair was a memory of the summers he’d spent as a boy, that distant flowery scent that always seemed to be in the air where gardens grew.
“There are so many things I want to tell you,” she said.
“Go ahead and tell me.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re leaving.”
He wasn’t sure if he was leaving now or not.
She kissed the sore knuckles of his hand and her lips were like butterflies touching them.
“I feel sometimes like I don’t belong anywhere,” he said. “I guess that’s why I’m always ready to leave one place for another.”
“I feel that way too.”
“Tell me one thing about you I don’t know,” he said.
“Not right now.”
“If not now, when?”
“Soon,” she said.
She kissed him and her kiss felt like resurrection. Time took wing as their passions again consumed them.
Sometime during the night they must have fallen asleep.
Their sleeping was disturbed by another knock at the door. Instinctively Teddy reached for his pistol as Mae stirred half awake next to him.
“What is it?” she muttered as he climbed from the bed.
“Nothing,” he said, pulling on his trousers. “Stay put.”
He opened the door just far enough to see Frenchy LeBreck standing there, dark and fidgeting.
“What do you want?”
“I came to see you about that work you said you sometimes do.” Frenchy tried looking past Teddy into the room but Teddy blocked his view.
“I’ll come see you,” Teddy said.
“We could discuss it right now.”
“No, now’s not a good time.”
“You’ve got someone with you, is that it?”
“Name a time at your place,” Teddy said.
“Tomorrow, anytime after noon or so.”
“Fine.”
Teddy closed the door and went back to the bed.
“Who was that?” Mae said.
“Man who wants to offer me a job.”
“I thought you were leaving Dodge…”
“Maybe not.”
“Because someone offered you a job?”
Teddy slipped into the bed beside her.
“No, not because of a job,” he said.
She gathered herself against him and he didn’t mind it
that she did. Her skin felt warm and smooth, an invitation.
“Listen,” she said. “I don’t want you to change your plans on account of me, us, what happened here tonight.”
“Shhh…” he said.
Her mouth and flesh were soft and warm as a south Texas night and he felt at ease with her there, next to him, beneath him. And when the first morning light flowed into the room, he found she’d gone and he wasn’t sure if he’d dreamt her visit or if she’d really been there with him.
He closed his eyes, telling himself it hadn’t been a dream and, as he did, he remembered other loves, other places, and other times.
Chapter 11
To John Sears, it seemed like time passed a lot slower since Teddy had gone north again. John was by his very nature a loner, but he’d come to rely on the younger man for companionship, someone to drink with and talk to, and most important, someone to trust.
Everything seemed a little less promising without Teddy around. He owed the younger man much for saving his life back up in New Mexico. It was as close as he’d ever come to dying, and the worst part about it wasn’t the dying but the knowing when it would happen.
He thought about the woman he’d shot, dreamt about her, and the dreams were always sad. He’d done a lot of hard things in his life, but shooting the woman had been the worst, in his book, even if it was more or less accidental.
Sometimes the priest came and sat with him and drank and talked about the old times.
John would ask the priest what he was before he’d become a priest and the priest said, “I was a sailor, John.”
“You miss it?”
“Sometimes I do.”
It struck John that the priest never got drunk no matter how much tequila he drank, and John tried hard not to get drunk either, but sometimes he couldn’t help it.
“How’d you lose your thumb, John?” the priest asked him one time when they were drinking in the shade of a jacale.
“Gunfight,” John said, looking at the nub of flesh.
“Did you do much of that, fight with guns?”
“When I was younger I run with a pretty bad crowd, Padre.”
“I suppose it’s hard to handle a gun without your thumb,” the priest said.
“It puts a crimp in your style.”
The priest smiled, the evening sun glowing in his weathered face. John could imagine him on the foredeck of a ship, the wind in his face.
“What made you want to become a priest?”
“I had an empty place inside of me, John. It’s a thing that’s hard to explain. I tried every which way to fill it, but nothing did. Then one bad night it came to me what I needed to do to fill that place.”
John said, “I think I know what you mean.”
The priest looked at him as he took up the olla of tequila and sipped from it and then handed it over to John.
“I guess I always knew you did since that time you made your confession about shooting the woman,” the priest said.
The boy Chico came down the street with his donkey. They both looked dusty and tired and the priest called the boy over and spoke to him in Spanish, and John knew enough to understand the priest had invited him to come to supper, had told him to go wash himself and put on a fresh shirt and come to the little hacienda where he and the woman stayed and to tell her that the priest had invited him to supper.
The boy smiled and John could see there was a certain sad pride in the boy’s dark eyes, as though he knew the truth about the priest being his father but knew also he had no right to mention it or make claim to such a thing.
“Gracias,” the boy said and led off tugging the rope tied to the donkey’s halter.
“He’s a good boy, that one,” the priest said.
“What happened to his folks?” John asked.
The priest didn’t answer John’s question but instead sipped some more of the tequila and said, “I better get on back and help Selena with supper.”
And John once more felt alone as the brown sky grew darker now that the sun was setting off to the west.
It wasn’t long after Teddy had gone north again that the woman began coming around. At first John just thought she was being pleasant, bringing him freshly made tortillas and sometimes fruit.
She seemed shy, curious as a cat, moved like a cat, quiet and stealthy, her eyes ever watchful of him.
Even though she was a mute, John liked talking to her.
“These folks around here give you much grief over being the priest’s woman?” John asked one time after he felt like he had gotten to know her well enough. But soon as he asked the question he was sorry he had. It wasn’t any of his business.
“Hell, I guess I shouldn’t be asking such things,” he said apologetically.
She shook her head no. He wasn’t sure if she was saying no, the folks in the village didn’t give her any grief, or if she was saying no, it was okay for him to ask her.
“He’s a good man, the priest is,” John said.
She nodded.
John wondered what it was that brought her around so often to visit him. He chalked most of it up to simple curiosity, but one day he said, “He ever mind you come and visit me?”
She hesitated a moment then shook her head no.
“No, I guess there’s no reason he would. He knows I’d never try nothing with you.”
John saw something flash through her eyes.
“I just mean it’s not that you’re not an attractive woman or anything, Selena—you are. I just meant to say the priest knows how much I respect him and out of that respect I wouldn’t…”
John didn’t know how to explain it right.
After that day Selena didn’t come around for nearly a week and it troubled him that she didn’t and he didn’t know quite what he should do if anything. Thing was, he missed her visits and he wasn’t sure in his own mind that he should even feel that much toward her.
Then when she did return finally, bringing him some shirts he’d paid her to mend and wash, he felt glad to see her. He made her some tea and they sat and drank it and John said, “I’m gonna just sort of keep my mouth shut from now on, for every time I open it, I stick my boot in.”
The way the light fell through the window that day, the way it fell on her black silken hair and across the side of her face made John realize how pretty she was and he had to look away not to stare.
And later after she left and he went to put his mended shirts on a shelf he found the little note tucked in between them.
It read: He doesn’t mind. I want to be your friend.
John sat down on the edge of the cot and read the words a thousand times, trying to decipher the full meaning behind them.
He told himself nearly as many times the note was innocent. How could it be otherwise?
The boy watched the woman coming and going from the priest’s hacienda and each time it troubled him.
Chapter 12
The Rose had come to Frenchy LeBreck that night seeking mercy, seeking refuge. He took one look at her and gasped, even as hard a man as he was and even having seen a thousand terrible things in his life.
“Come in,” he said and meant it.
She sobbed when she tried to tell him of the brutality laid on her by the hands of Bone Butcher.
“Shhh, shhh,” he said. “Have a drink,” and poured her some cognac, for it was better for the spirit than the harsh frontier liquor most out in this rough country sought succor from.
She took to it like medicine that could cure the bruises and more, the deeper hurt. She took to it like it was a salve and mother’s milk, which she had not had since she was a child.
“Isn’t that better?” he said after a time of watching her.
“Yes, better,” she said.
“Why come to me?” he asked when at last the sobs stopped lurching through her and she stopped shivering like a frightened kitten. He had lit a single lamp and its light fell on her in a soft saffron glow that helped disguise the more
obvious bruises.
“I heard you was kinder than most,” she said.
He wanted to laugh, to ask her who would say such a thing when the general consensus was he was like all the others, out to make a dollar any way he could in a town that swallowed whole the beguiled and foolish and would pick clean the pockets of any unsuspecting soul with a bit of loose change. He had no compunction to do otherwise. It was, after all, a world in which one either survived or did not.
“Oh, I don’t guess you heard right about me,” he said. “I’m no different than any of the others.”
She looked at him, one eye swelling darkly colored as a plum.
“If I go back now, he will only beat me worse. He suspects I’ve cheated him in every way a woman can cheat a man, this in the face of what I do for him, what I do to survive…”
He put a hand upon her shoulder and she leaned toward him like a slender willow bending toward a flowing creek and reached for him with tender arms that were like limbs reaching for the sun. He understood her need to survive and admired it. He wasn’t sure what to do, but knew what he’d like to do, knew what he’d always thought about doing whenever he saw her, even knowing that she was the property of one Bone Butcher, a murderously jealous man. He oft thought of her as a flower owned by a man who had no appreciation for flowers but who kept her in spite of his lack of understanding and appreciation.
“I can put you up for the night,” he said.
She kissed the hand he’d laid upon her shoulder and held it tightly in her own as though she would never release it.
He did not mind. He allowed it to be held and felt the warm fine bones of her hand as some sort of comfort against all the black days and nights he’d lived since leaving Louisiana and before there the South of France, vowing even as he left those places that he would return someday. The West was a ragged and wooly place without a single drop of culture, but a place too where a man who was shrewd enough could make a small fortune from the misfortune of others.
“Would you like more cognac?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said demurely; all of the harsh realities of who she was and what she had been and who it was who claimed her gone now out of her, drained away in that tender moment. To Frenchy LeBreck, the Rose of Cimarron was a pure flower.
