The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones

by Charles Neider

  Tijuana in those days was just a sleepy border town and not the small-time Coney Island it is now: no night clubs for the gringos, no fast divorce mills, and no kohinoors sold on the main streets. It was smaller, quieter and just as dirty but there were some good haciendas around and not half the scum you find now, from both sides of the border. We stayed clear of the town and lay out in a small hacienda about eight miles south, where we had friends, and where we took our time resting up, but we came into town in the evenings and you would have thought the Kid was a conquering general the fuss the greasers made over him. The news of his great escape had of course spread even down there.

  We played faro and monte but without luck. The Kid had always been lucky at cards but the Mexican air didn’t do him any good. Once, while he was losing, he said to me out of the corner of his mouth:

  “That Bob has jinxed me. He’s been jinxing me ever since I broke out of jail. I’m going to put some lead into that muchacho one of these mornings.”

  I said nothing.

  When Bob said to me later, “How’s your luck? Changed any?” I turned to him and said, “Bob if I was you I’d take off somewhere.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why.”

  “Suppose you tell me.”

  “I’m just trying to do you a favor hombre. The Kid thinks you’re jinxing him. I wouldn’t buck my luck if I was you.”

  “It’s the Kid who’s bucking his luck.”

  “All right. I’m just warning you.”

  “I know him a hell of a lot better than you do.”

  “Forget I mentioned it.”

  “I will,” Bob said. He was pretty sore.

  We went to some cockfights and to one bad bullfight and then the Kid got restless and we moved down the coast to Ensenada, about sixty miles below. I had never seen such beaches, with great dunes from which you could look far out into the ocean. The Kid at this time was not planning to return to the States—there was hardly a place in the States where he would not be hunted—but he had not made up his mind yet what he would do down in old Mex. We were just resting but I could see that the Kid was beginning to feel like a fish out of water. He had always operated in the States and back there was where he had his real reputation. Mehico was just a little too brand new for him. That was why he got restless in Tijuana, I think. The bad bullfight sort of clinched it. There was this tall American trying to make passes and getting thrown all over the arena and the Kid sneered and I could see it was a bad omen. And the fellow made a mess of the killing and the people shouted and threw bottles. So we went to Ensenada, where we had a few friends, and lay around down there for a while.

  Ensenada was only a village and life was very quiet. The Kid got several business propositions in the lines of rustling, smuggling and counterfeiting and so we had no worries about money. Our own money was still holding out. But something was going sour among us and we knew it. The Kid kept to himself a lot and I could see he was mulling over something. And then we started getting sick—Bob first, then the Kid and then Harvey. I didn’t get it. They lay around on the little rancho south of Ensenada, throwing up, chasing out to the outhouse, and running a fever and cursing the whole of Mehico for doing it to them. I’ll never know to the day I die why I didn’t get it too. I’ve got a pretty tough stomach but it’s nothing to the cast-iron one Bob used to have.

  Well the Kid got fed up with all this and one morning he said, “Boys I left some unfinished business up north and I’m going up there to finish it.”

  “What kind?” Harvey asked.

  “Dad Longworth business. I’ve got to go up there and pay him a courtesy call. It’s not right my not saying goodbye when I took off. I’m going to tree that town and shoot Dad in the ass. You fellows stay here. It’s not your play.”

  “The hell it isn’t,” I said. “I got a couple of calls to pay myself.”

  “That’s right,” said Harvey.

  “What about you Bob?” asked the Kid.

  “I don’t think we ought to go,” said Bob.

  “Sure,” said the Kid.

  “Well you asked me.”

  “I did.”

  “There’s a price on your head up there. Dad’ll be itching to have you come back. He’s just hoping you will. Let’s stay put for a while.”

  “Kid it isn’t Nika you’re going up there for is it?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Now look Kid I’m with you to the finish,” said Bob. “You know that. If you’re going up there so am I.”

  The Kid stared at him a minute, then said, “Sure Bob.”

  “What makes you think she’ll come back with you?” I asked.

  “She only married Miguel to gravel me. She’ll do what I tell her.”

  “Jesus and I was just beginning to feel half alive again,” I said.

  “I haven’t asked you to come along.”

  “I know,” I said, “but where would you be without papa?”

  He laughed.

  “Christ what a ride,” I groaned.

  And so we started that killing trip all over again.

  7

  It took us eleven days to make that trip south and twelve to make it back. Counting the fifteen days we spent in old Mex, we were away from the Monterey country thirty-eight days. We left on Friday, June third, and returned on Sunday, July tenth. We spent twenty-three days on horseback and I can tell you I was more saddle-sore on July tenth than I have ever been in my life. I hate to think of how many miles we rode. All I know is that although riding was more natural to us than walking we were not fit to do much hard riding for the next couple of weeks. For myself, I remember that the inside of my thighs and legs were raw, that walking was painful and that my left shoulder blade sometimes woke me at night with its aching.

  Going south was one thing. We had been leaving danger behind us with each day. Going north was another. We could be betrayed by some of the people we had to do business with—one of our friends even—who could send a telegram north to tip them off we were coming. By now there was a nice little price of $1,000 on the Kid’s head, which made many a trigger finger itchy. But none of us cared about this except Bob. All the way north he kept hinting to us of the danger of going back but the farther north we went the happier we were. One night Bob said, “Kid it’s murder to go up around that Punta.”

  “Is it?” asked the Kid. “You scared Bob?”

  “Kid why do you keep riding me?” Bob asked.

  We were all sitting down. The Kid looked Bob over carefully and said, “I’m not riding you Bob,” in a voice as soft as velvet. “I love you Bob.”

  And he laughed in a way which made my back shiver. I thought: Bob you’d best not hang around much longer if you’re aiming to stay alive. Bob looked kind of funny and then glanced at me. The Kid walked off into the dark.

  “What’s eating him?” Bob asked. “What have I done?”

  “You know the answer to that one better than we do,” Harvey said.

  “I’ve done nothing,” said Bob angrily.

  “Look Bob,” I said, “if I was you I’d just go back to Tijuana and wait until this thing blows over. It’s not exactly healthy your riling him.”

  “I’m not riling him,” Bob protested angrily.

  “No?” Harvey said.

  “Now look Bob,” I said.

  “No,” he said.

  “Bob listen,” I said.

  “No!”

  “All right. You’re a big boy.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “What would I mean? We just got enough trouble the way things are. Haven’t we Harvey?”

  “Christ,” Harvey groaned.

  “Well let’s forget it,” I said.

  But of course it was easier said than done.

  *

  One evening before supper when I was alone with Harvey I said, “Hey French you notice any change in the Kid?”

  “What do you mean?” he said, looking at me.

>   “He seem the same to you?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well if you don’t know what are you asking for? What you got on your mind?”

  “Nothing. I just wondered.”

  “Doc where were you when they handed out the brains?”

  “I was ahead of you Frenchy.”

  “Bob been talking to you?”

  “No. Why?”

  “He’s got some crazy notion. I don’t know what’s got into Bob.”

  “We’re none of us in any too good shape,” I said.

  “You can say that again Doctor.”

  Afterward Bob got hold of me and took me aside and said:

  “Did I hear you say he wasn’t bucking his luck? Well boy when you start playing the game like that there’s only one kind of finish and you know what I mean. That calabozo must have done something to him.”

  “Look Bob,” I said, “let me give you a little piece of advice. You’re getting to be a pain in the ass.”

  “You watch your tongue Doc or I’ll cut it out for you.”

  “Not you Robert. You’re not big enough. And don’t go pushing me because as it is it won’t take much for me to cut you in two. I’d be doing the Kid a favor come to think of it.”

  “All right,” Bob said. “You fellows are against me. I don’t know what I’ve done but I see the way the cards are stacked.”

  “If something happens to the Kid’s luck he’s going to swear you jinxed it. In that case I wouldn’t want to be in your boots.”

  “All right,” said Bob. “I’ve said all I’m going to say. I wash my hands of the whole thing. I’ve said my piece and that’s it.”

  “Now you’re getting smart,” I said.

  That same evening, around the supper fire, the Kid suddenly startled us by saying, “I’ve got it!”

  “What?” I asked.

  But he went into a burst of laughter, with his head back, his face purple, his lashes very blond, almost invisible, and his strong teeth gleaming. Then he sat there smiling, the muscles playing around his mouth as if they were out of control.

  “I’m going to tree that Dad—but good,” he said.

  “How?” Harvey asked.

  “You’ll find out.”

  “Tell us now,” I said.

  “No.”

  “You sure?” I asked.

  “You going to kill him?” Harvey asked.

  “You’ll find out,” said the Kid.

  We laughed about it, even Bob, and kept wondering what the Kid had in mind for old Dad.

  *

  Well when we got back to the Monterey country we lay around Old Man Richardson’s ranch. He was a big fellow with wiry gray hair and a killer mustache, about forty and a bachelor. He had a small place with a number of Mexican hands. It was a couple of miles south of the Punta and up in the hills a way east of the mission road. He was always friendly to us and we did business with him on a number of occasions. We lay around the first couple of days, even the Kid, just stayed put and slept and ate and slept some more, not caring if it was day or night, and we rubbed ourselves down with whiskey where the skin could take it and with olive oil where the skin was raw. Bob was in bad shape. The thing had got him in the gut again and now he took to his bunk and stayed there. He could not drink anything stronger than water but Harvey and I put away quarts of wine, feeling good only when we were so drunk we could not see straight enough to tell a pumpkin from the moon. The Kid would not touch that stuff but had to throw down that rotgut they called whiskey in that country. The boy was doing his best to ruin himself, that’s for sure.

  And then, on the morning of Wednesday the thirteenth, he just couldn’t keep away from the Punta. To tell the truth I myself wanted to see it again. That tongue of land fascinated all of us, I guess.

  When I first got a look at it I wondered why anybody in his right mind would want to live on a place like that and I understood why they had named it Devil’s Point—Punta del Diablo, as the natives called it—it being so craggy and wind-beaten and fog-blown, with only one good spring on the whole of it, with crazy wind-shaped trees, and with the bellows of the sealions (seawolves the paisanos called them) heard all over the place when the wind was blowing right. But when I found out that it had small meadows where the grazing was rich and that they did not tilt up on the hills which came pouring down toward them from the east and which ended abruptly just the other side of the mission road, and when I learned that it was a good clean place with good fishing and with several good beaches on the southern side I was ready to believe that my first impression had been wrong.

  But even these advantages didn’t strike me as being enough to offset the bad points and of course nobody but the very poor would have thought of living there, Indians and greasers and a few Japs and Chinks. I wondered if the poor ever have an ounce of brains in their heads. Some years back a few whalers had used the larger coves for processing whales but that was over with now and only parts of whale skeletons and two gray wooden shacks remained to show they had ever been there. The place didn’t make sense for all-around living but even if it didn’t there it was, the handful of adobes around the plaza and the occasional adobes out in the meadows and the very rare ones up in the high heads, such as those we lived in, on Hijinio Gonzales’ property.

  The plaza itself overlooked the largest cove and it was just a flat square piece of land that had been trampled down into hardness by feet and hooves. The dirt was sandy and had crushed shells in it but the loam on top had made it hold and it lay quiet like a cement and hardly ever raised a dust even when a horse stopped suddenly and kicked dirt flying. That was all it was, an old plaza, like so many of the kind you found in the west and south of the border, and it sat on a rise of ground with the adobes thinly spread around it and with walks and trails winding among the houses out to the rest of the sloping meadow. On the northern side of the plaza, closest to the water but with its back to it, was an old adobe larger than the others, with a cross on top and with a yard picket-fenced around it. This was the church, serviced by a padre from the town who came up on a sorrel twice a week. The yard was a burial ground no longer used for that, with old wooden crosses sticking up here and there over the mummyshaped mounds and occasionally a chunk of stone. When you crossed the plaza going to the church you saw the cove spread out blue behind it.

  Nika’s adobe was one of those facing the plaza, a middlesized adobe from the door of which you got a view of the rolling green-yellow meadow backed up by the stand of young pines and behind this the olive Santa Lucia hills. On the left was the church—she married Miguel in it, sick as he was—the inside of which was cool and earth-smelling on the hottest days, with the crisp odors of incense and hot wax. On those hot days the plaza lay shimmering in the bright heat, a flat packed naked square of ground trampled out of the large meadow. Across the plaza, on a slight diagonal from Nika’s, was Miguel’s place and on the right was the long Vicente adobe, all white, with its long portico facing the plaza.

  As for ourselves, we lived as I said on one of the high heads—on the highest one, matter of fact, and the one farthest out into the ocean. It was a spectacular place but you can fool me why anybody would want to build up there. Everything you brought in there had to be carted uphill and the road was not good. I remember asking Hijinio why in hell they had built that place there, with the adobes, barn and so on, but he did not know either. It reminded me of places you read about in Spain, built on hills and mountains as a kind of insurance against anybody jumping you, and come to think of it maybe that’s why they built that place like that. There wasn’t hardly a spot up there that didn’t jut out fifty or a hundred feet over the water and there wasn’t a beach anywhere around where you might hide a boat and go out when the going got rough—providing, that is, that you could make it down to the water in the first place, the likely fact being that you’d lose your footing and go smashing down to make food for the gulls and cormorants, or,
if you were slow, get yourself a bullet in the back. I had pointed all that out to the Kid on more than one occasion but I might as well have saved my breath for all the good it did. Of course as far as I was concerned the whole damned Punta was a death trap, being a headland, and so I don’t know why I bothered to make a fuss about that old cypress head.

  There sure were some pretty spots around there—meadows full of paintbrush, coves full of shallow canyons and glassy pools, the thunder of the surf, the starfish lying steaming on the rocks, the big anemones and the big purple urchins, locoweed, sagebrush, buckwheat, lava-gray beaches, bright black and glass-green water—and all the time the smell of fish and seawolves and rotting kelp and fog and birddroppings, rolling in on the seawinds under the burning light.

  *

  The Punta was like a thumb sticking out into the Pacific or like a flattened lizard, the head and legs frayed, with countless coves eaten by the sea. And yet in places it was as sweet and soft as you could dream about. When it was winter in other places it was just a lovely spring there, never any frost or hardly ever, although the nights were cold and the ocean icy. In winter you would find delicate flowers coming up out of a ground that you expected, over and over, to be frozen, and in the summer you almost always got fooled by the ocean when you jumped in.