Pablo came in and showed him an old deck of cards.
“Poker?”
“Great,” the Kid said. They began to play, Pablo sitting on the chair and keeping his hands low, so that his right hand would not have to travel far toward his gun.
“You any money?” he asked.
The Kid nodded and squinted through the smoke that rose up against one eye. They were playing with chips.
“Dad knows where my money is,” the Kid said. “Don’t worry. My credit’s good. He’ll pay you.”
They played stud.
“I can’t make you out,” Pablo said.
“What am I supposed to say to that?”
“Me I wouldn’t feel so good in your boots.”
“You’re not in my boots,” said the Kid, studying his cards. Pablo was dealing.
“No.”
“You’re on the other side.”
“Nothing wrong in that.”
“No?”
“What?”
“Don’t ask me. It was you who said it.”
Pablo shook his head, puzzled. “I been thinking about it but I can’t make you out.”
“Don’t strain it.”
“Christ I got to get you your dinner. We’ll play after dinner.”
“When do you get yours?”
“When Lon comes back.”
“Good. We play.”
Pablo brought him the dinner and they played until Lon returned from Charley’s. Pablo left for the night.
The Kid, alone, went to the plaza window, then came back to the bunk. He fell asleep. When he awoke it was night. He went to the window again and watched the moon. He wished he could see the bay. He thought of Nika. Figures on the plaza. They moved away. No lynching tonight. Dad came in and they played draw poker, Dad winning.
“What time is it?” asked the Kid.
Dad looked at his vest watch. “Almost nine.”
“I’m going to turn in.”
Dad left. The Kid lay down. He thought of nothing, just lay there with his eyes half open, watching the ceiling. Then he fell asleep.
3
You’ll hear people say Dad Longworth was a great sheriff, also a great gunfighter, a greater fighter than the Kid. That’s hornswoggling. He was an honest sheriff, I’ll say that for him. And he was no coward. You don’t find many fellows like the Kid, who don’t have nerves at all and who like to risk it for the hell of it and to test their luck. Dad knew he stood a good chance of being killed by the Kid, but it didn’t keep him from going after him after the Kid skedaddled. He was a fellow who knew his duty. You might say his having a wife and two kids made all the difference. Maybe. But I’ve known plenty of sheriffs who were dishonest and who had more kids than Dad ever had.
As for his being a great gunfighter, he was not a bad one, you understand, but not in the Kid’s class. His luck happened to be very good when they met in Hijinio Gonzales’s adobe that moonlit August night. It was nothing you could have planned. It is just plain stupid to believe he lay in wait for the Kid to ambush him. He was doing his duty and the Kid walked onto him. Luckily for Dad he was in the pitch-blackness of Hijinio’s room when the Kid walked in and the moonlight was behind the Kid and on his legs and that was all there was to it. Once the Kid sensed there was someone in the room besides Hijinio, Dad was a dead man if he didn’t shoot first. That was the way the play went and there’s no changing the falling of the cards.
Even Dad himself used to say afterward, “It was pure luck boys. For a minute my spine said, ‘Dad you’re going to get it,’ but before I knew it I had shot him. Hell nobody knows that better than me.”
“Tell me this,” somebody once said. “Did the Kid have a gun?”
Dad shook his head angrily and said, “Boy you’re sure going to make me mad. There were witnesses. Sure he had a gun. I could see it glinting in the moonlight. He had a gun and a meat knife and I could see both of them glinting. Besides I’d have shot him anyway, just on the chance he had one. What would you have done? Come to think of it you wouldn’t have been there in the first place would you?”
“I’m not a sheriff.”
“I guess you’re not.”
“Hell Dad I didn’t mean no harm,” said the fellow. “I was just asking. And I’m not the only one.”
“That’s just it. You’re not,” said Dad angrily.
As I say I didn’t know him very well but we knew each other by hearsay and that was a lot. Practically everybody knew everybody else in that way in those times.
I once said to him, “Dad what was the Kid like in the old days?”
He screwed his face up in that way of his, frowning hard, and shrugged.
“He a crack shot?”
“Sure. At fourteen,” he said.
“When he kill his first man?”
“Fool me.”
“Pretty young?”
“So they say.”
“You’re not sure.”
“Look I’ve heard too many sides. I’ll tell you this: he was always good. Even when I met him. A nicer kid then come to think of it. Didn’t care about a thing except to laugh and raise hell and whore around. He’s changed. Who hasn’t? Me I had enough of that life. Fellow has got to settle down. Take the Kid.”
“Not the type.”
“I want to have an old age.”
“What you want to be sheriff for then?”
“It’s not that bad. Times are changing.”
“Yeh I guess they are at that.”
*
I remember the first thing I noticed about him—his posture: his broad almost rigid back, heavy neck, and the sort of rigidity of movement in his whole body. I understand he had been sickly as a child and had gone in for exercise and in his youth had worked on a river boat loading bales. At the time I knew him he was still very strong, too strong for his present work, so that sometimes he complained his muscles ached just from want of something to do. I remember also the two great silver rings he wore on the index and middle fingers of his left hand and his huge silver buckle with the chunk of polished jasper in the middle. The rings had ovals of polished agate. He had made them all himself back in the Navaho country. The rings were really tremendous and they seemed to dwarf even Dad’s huge rough hairless hands.
When I first met him he was sitting behind a table in a saloon in Salinas and I thought, Jesus this is a big boy. But when he stood up I saw he was only of middle height, shorter than myself, for his legs were short, and bowed at that. And he was nervous: his hands shook slightly when he rolled and lit a cigarette and he frowned heavily whenever he spoke. As a matter of fact he had difficulty speaking as I recall, except when he was joshing somebody or being joshed. I never met a man who liked joshing the way he did. His hair was light brown and wavy, his eyes a dirty blue, and his heavy face was seamed and brown. He was in good shape, all right, and fairly quick on the draw, and good in the saddle and a good all-around cowhand. Too bad he got killed that way.
Dad was part Navaho and proud of it, although aside from his heavy cheekbones there was little Indian to see in him. His wife was Mexican and his kids very dark and pretty. They spoke Mexican better than they spoke English. Dad spoke Spanish pretty well himself and some Navaho too and he was happy with his wife and two boys over in Salinas. He was older than most of us, being then about thirty-two or -three, and intent on making a good settled life for himself. I think he planned on going into some business for himself and there was no reason why he couldn’t have succeeded.
He liked to kid you at any time of day or night. He liked to come up and shout, “Hi Doc what’s up?” and slap you on the back and tell you about his pappy back in Dodge City and how his pappy had an old muzzle loader that he shot from his porch at the rabbits.
“Are you really part Indian?” I once asked him.
“You bet boy,” he said. “You can see it can’t you damn it?”
“I guess I can at that.”
“Hell if you know Indians you can. What’s
the matter? You don’t look so snappy today.”
“Maybe there’s a reason for it.”
“Reason? Go on.”
“Maybe it’s because I don’t feel so snappy.”
He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder.
“Hell boy,” he said, “even I don’t feel so snappy now and then.”
He was built like a rock and I doubt he ever had a bad day but for some reason he was nervous. When he’d be shaky somebody would say, “How you doing Dad?”
“Not so good.”
“What’s the trouble?”
“Not my day I reckon.”
“What you been up to?”
“Not a thing. That’s what makes me so damned mad.”
“Take it easy boy.”
“Hell that’s what I’m trying to do,” he would say.
In a way it was too bad Whitey Pearce went and killed him, for Dad was not a bad fellow, not half as bad as some of the fellows who went on living year after year. I hated him for a while after he killed the Kid but I was never one to hold that grudge against him, seeing as how I knew it was more the Kid’s fault than Dad’s and seeing as how Dad had no choice in the matter anyhow. I think the Kid liked him and I understand Dad really liked the Kid, and the only sorry thing about it was that they were no longer operating on the same side. Dad’s wife married again the year after he was killed. A woman didn’t believe in being a widow for long. She needed a man to protect her and to take care of her kids. She married a fellow, I heard, who had never been married before and folks said it was decent of him to marry her, her with the two boys. But then she was a pretty girl and still young and it was a Mexican who married her and I understand she was very strong and worked well in the fields.
*
As for Lon Dedrick, he was just a loudmouthed fourflusher and about as dangerous, out in the open, as a kingsnake, but we knew from experience a fellow like that could be dangerous in the dark corners. He was the kind that operated best when a man’s back was turned or when the man was unarmed or shackled. I wonder if there was a man alive outside of his two brothers who had any use for Lon. Lon was just plain lowdown and the whole town thought so. But they gave him leeway in memory of his father, who had been a butcher in town and had died about five years before from a stroke, and because of his mother, a quiet churchgoing woman who now lived alone and supported herself by doing odd chores and by laundering for a few of the good families. Even his mother had no use for him. After Lon was killed a couple of women went to tell her about it and she said, “I’m glad. That boy was no good. I’m sure he’s gone straight to hell.” It got around town and shocked a lot of people and set a lot of others to laughing. The truth was, lots of people felt that way about Lon’s death and lots of them said so, but no one expected a fellow’s own mother even to think it, much less say it. That was the sort of fellow Lon was and that was the kind of mother he had.
The family had come out from Georgia when Lon was about ten and had come straight to Monterey because the father had a cousin there, who shortly afterward removed and died. Back in Augusta the father had had himself a meat store and they had struggled along. Lon was no good from the start. He had been larger and heavier than most of the kids his age and had long ago got himself a reputation as a bully. He had had a third brother, who had been killed in a fall from a horse during a roundup in Texas. As a kid Lon had worked in his father’s store in Monterey but then had gone off to work on the nearby ranchos, where he was not a bad cowhand. How he got to be a deputy I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter—anybody at all could get to be a deputy in those days. He had killed a couple of men but I think it was always without giving them a fair break. Once he walked up to a fellow he was supposed to be friendly with but who had rubbed him the wrong way the day before and he said, “Hello Ace” and stuck out his hand to shake hands. He caught the fellow’s right hand with his left, jerked his gun and killed him. The Kid would sometimes taunt him by saying, “The only men you ever killed were shot in the back. Why don’t you reach for your gun?” But that was when the Kid was free. Now it was a different story.
He was sure one lunkhead, with his horseteeth and his self-satisfied grin and the way he had of shaking his head from side to side when he talked and not looking into your eyes, and laughing first at his own jokes, and bragging about the women he had, and that curl of his lips when he smiled, and those murky eyes and wet hands, and his bad feet and the way his dark hair grew low down on his forehead, and his claims to being a badman. They sure rang no bells in that town when Lon took off.
As for Pablo Patron, I never did know much about him. I know he lived in a small adobe on the southern edge of town, with a yard full of mission figs and sunflowers, and that he liked his job and that Maria Jesús washed clothes for some of the white families, and I guess Pablo hoped some day to be a full sheriff, maybe down in some smaller town or down in old Mex—but that’s about all I can remember about him, although I probably knew much more back in those days.
*
It was quite a town, that town the Kid was jailed in and was due to hang in. Not like Salinas—dry, dusty, nothing but fields around it, away from the sea and with nothing elegant going on. A good town, lying between the horns of the bay, its whitewashed adobes gleaming in the sun. Much of it poor—shacks of fishermen and of the Chinese colony that shipped dried abalone home, and of the whaling men and miners who worked in the inlets and hills. Streets narrow and dirty, muddy in a rain. The broader ones avenues of dust in the dry season, with a few horses waiting with lowered heads, and natives squatting in the shade or peering from behind adobe walls: these and the hangdog-looking dogs.
What would a young fellow find to interest him in a town like that? Well it wasn’t everywhere you could find sailors and ships and fishermen. And although there were fine haciendas in the hills they couldn’t sport, even the best of them, the kind of houses you saw in Monterey town or the quiet company or the gardens, the walls of fuchsias, the espaliered trees, the moss-grown brick walks, the pepper trees, willows and Japanese plums, the acacias, the adobe walls topped by tile, the bits of whalebone sidewalk, gray and webby. You always found the finest things in town: Chinese teakwood tables with marble tops, Japanese tortoiseshell bowls with eagles and herons inlaid with gold; English ironstone china; mantillas of Chantilly lace; the mantones de Manila, the Spanish shawls embroidered in China and brought across the Pacific by way of the Philippines; satin dolmans worn over taffeta gowns; Dutch and English clocks; and all the rest of such stuff.
It was good to sit in that town after the hills and Punta, to sit in a plaza and listen. Cries on the bay; bark of a dog; rattle of carts; clopping of hooves; voices laughing and shouting. It made us wonder how it would be to live in a place like that, with all the houses and faces and business and all the smells—grapes being pressed, eucalyptus trees, pine smoke, roses, meat curing, cheeses drying, and the perfume you caught as you passed a lady on the street.
*
It was good too to ride toward town from the Punta, taking Devil’s Hill slow through the pines and enjoying the bay like a saucer ahead of us, the adobes glowing in the light, the yellow sandhills running north, the pines speckled above, the clouds lying over Santa Cruz in the far distance, and the whole thing obscured by patches of gray fog which crept or scudded. And good too to lean back in the saddle and stretch our legs against the wooden stirrups and smoke a fresh-rolled cigarette and feel our horses under us, taking their time, looking around to study something, twitching their ears and neighing, sighing now and then as if they’d worked all day, and smelling strong of sweat and fields and hard-worked leather.
You understand that when we went into town in the later days it was not by invitation. To show you that town had class all I have to say is they didn’t run or hide but went about their business, knowing how to do business with everybody, even those who wore guns. The law said you had to leave your guns outside of town but we wore them on our hips and stuck them in
our saddles. To do anything else might have meant an ambush or we might have been shot down right on the Calle Principal. I’m talking about the time before the Kid’s escape; after it we could not have gone in unless we had a cannon with us.
We would walk down the Calle Principal or the Calle de Alvarado and study the shops. We liked to go down to the Customs House and lounge under the portico or visit the Washington Hotel for a supper with trimmings—linen, silver, fingerbowls—or Simoneau’s for something Frenchy, and sometimes it felt as though we were the only ones on foot in that town, for most everybody rode, even if it was only a couple of streets they had to go. We knew it was not a great town. We had been to Frisco and had seen the difference. But it was a good town and had been a great town in its time, in the days of the Spaniards. The gold rush had ruined it but it was a matter of opinion what you meant by ruined. Some people, the traders, thought it had been ruined but others, such as the natives, thought it had been saved. A quiet town, although once in a while somebody like Tiburcio Vasquez or Joaquin Murietta or the Kid stirred it up a little.
We had a couple of friends over on Calle de Montenegro and would go there to dine, as you might say, two of us guarding the front and back of the house. A fine house of two stories, with a dance room downstairs and a billiard room upstairs and a chamber pot in every room. Heavy timbers in the ceilings and wide oak boards, adzed and stained, on the floors. Walls four feet thick. A carriage house, stable, garden. Blackberries and mission figs in the garden as well as a plum and an apple tree and a grape arbor, all smelling of herbs—camomile, lemon verbena, sage, rue, lavender. Sometimes we spent a night there. I had a little room with wide milled boards painted white, one window with square panes and a thick ledge, a low chair with a cushion center, a wooden bedstead, a fireplace, a small hip-high green cabinet, an embroidered footrest, an oil lamp and a white washbowl and pitcher. Chinese straw matting on the floor. On one wall a painting—of a yellow-haired girl in a white dress with a high waist and naked shoulders, wearing white stockings and high black boots. She sat beside a fawn. In her left hand she held some red and yellow roses. Her face looked frozen and stupid.
The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones Page 4
