The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones

by Charles Neider

  And the sun was a sun you could really talk about—the same sizzling ball in that inky sky as it was out in the inland ranchos: Los Tularcitos out by Buckeye Ridge, Los Coches and Arroyo Seco south of Soledad, Posa de los Ositos near King City, and all the many other chunks of land that the Spaniards and Mexicans had handed out, not by acres, but by leagues, as though the land were endless. It was the same sun that burned Salt Slough and Tin House Spring and Horsethief Canyon and Quién Sabe Valley and Rattlesnake Creek. The summers I had been used to back around Franklin (now El Paso) and Las Cruces and Deming and Tucson and Phoenix had been so hot you could fry an egg on the top of your head. Nothing but desert there, while out on the Punta and on the ranchos to the north and south it was cool in summer and this was a great surprise to me. It was the sea breeze and the fog that cooled that country off.

  As for the fog, it made me feel fenced in and after a couple of days of it I’d get so jumpy I’d want to shoot the first thing that crossed my path, and if you think it was just me let me tell you it affected my sorrel the same way. I have always thought that you could not rightly understand those days unless you understood the effect of the land on a man. Out in the open country of New Mexico you could sit on your horse and ride and ride and camp alone when night came and ride again and sleep alone and ride again. So why should it surprise anybody that that kind of space, which rolls along like the ocean but which seems to have more secrets—down in the gulches and arroyos, in the hills, on the mesas and behind the buttes—could beat a man down until he was fighting mad, so that when he hit a little town he was so edgy it was best you let him be, asked him few questions if any and gave him plenty of room on the street, particularly if you had reason to believe that he liked his gunplay fast and sudden. Hell no wonder a man like that didn’t talk much. It was a wonder he knew how to talk at all after whiskey had loosened his jaws a bit. The fog was like that too unless I’m off my target.

  Let me tell you a little story they used to tell around there. One night a padre was walking up Devil’s Hill, carrying a sack containing a hen and seven chicks. He was bringing the hen and chicks to a poor family in Monterey. When he came to Devil’s Elbow it was thick with fog as usual, the clammy heavy fog that you swim around in. Along came a mal hombre and hit him over the head, then took the sack and went into town. But when he got to his house the sack was empty. He went up to the Elbow again and found the hen and chicks picking in the ground near the padre. He put them in the sack and went into town again. Again he found the sack empty. He went up to the Elbow again and saw the hen and chicks still picking in the ground. He felt the padre’s heart and saw that he was dead. Then he pointed his gun at his own head and killed himself. And ever since then the Elbow has been haunted and the mission grounds have been haunted too.

  I heard an old Indian tell that story. He also told some stories about the mission days. There weren’t too many Indians left in that country after what the mission fathers had done. The fathers had saved them and after that the Indians’ life was not so good. Once they were baptized they had to live the mission way and if they went back to their old life they were hunted by the soldiers from the presidio and if they were not killed they were brought inside the mission walls and flogged until they had changed their minds. And that’s the truth, regardless of what you may have heard.

  The death rate among the Indians, after the padres had saved them, was something even the padres worried about, but they did not worry very hard or hard enough, because the mission’s wealth and power kept growing, the mission kept getting more and more land, more livestock, more gold, and it did not make much of a difference for the Indians when the Jesuits were pushed out and the Franciscans came in, the death rate did not decrease and the Indians did not have their old life back, the only life that made any sense to them. What they needed was not baptism but guns. By the time the mission fell into ruins there were hardly any more Indians to save, they had slowly disappeared, like the wolves and grizzlies, only the wolves and grizzlies had moved back into the hills, but the Indians had moved back into nothing better than extinction. Maybe the padres hadn’t meant to push them out. Maybe they had just done a better job than they had wanted to or counted on. Anyhow that’s what I heard the old Indian say.

  *

  The Kid took off alone that morning of the thirteenth, went down the mission road, turned off onto the Punta and rode down to the plaza. He went into Nika’s adobe but she was not there. Then it occurred to him to go into the church. He led his horse over there, tied it to the fence and walked in. So this was the church she had got herself married in, with the padre, the Latin droning, the incense, the smoke of candles, the crucifixes and madonnas, the paisano paintings frescoed to the walls. They must have paid the padre to ride up from town, the bald fat padre on his sorrel in his cassock.

  He went out and rode over to the Big Meadow, then to Little Mound Meadow and over to the South Plateau, but he could not find her. He returned to her adobe and she was still not there. He stood in the doorway, waiting. He had passed several of the paisanos and they had waved to him—quietly, as if he were not a hunted man, as if he were not the Kid himself, as if he had never gone away. They were good people and he was glad to be back.

  He watched some men crossing the plaza, going barefooted on their leathery calluses or wearing rough sandals, carrying the great loads on their backs without grunting, one of them toting water in buckets slung on a pole over his shoulders. They scratched in the earth until they died in it and fished in the sea until they drowned in it but they always had time for a baile and for singing in their nasal husky voices and bad as their life was they did not think much about the next day or the next year.

  Could he convince her to do what he wanted her to do? She was like a cat and might out-think him all along the way. But what would she want to stay around here for? Without him there was nothing here for a woman with fire and pepper like her and she would only grow old, her face getting more bony, or she would grow fat and the fat would drown the fire in her. He would take her down there and that would be the end of it. Why had he gotten mixed up with her in the first place? What was wrong with the white ones? (What wasn’t wrong with them?) They sure must look funny together, he with his sandy head and she with her jet hair, he only a little taller than she and looking a little like a girl himself except for the muscles, and she with her man’s face and hard body and brown skin. But he liked the feel and smell of her and could not understand why he had changed her for Juanita, even if it had been a joke, which he wasn’t sure about.

  He decided he would pay Miguel Gomez a visit. He led his horse across the plaza and tied him to the post in front of Miguel’s place. Then he entered the darkness and coolness and saw a man lying on a bunk with the window light falling over his shoulders and at first he thought he had come into the wrong place because the man did not look like Miguel at all and not even like a thinner brother of Miguel. He did not look like anybody at all, only like somebody who had been dug up out of a fresh grave.

  “Hi Miguel,” he said quietly. “What you want to go and get yourself kicked by a horse for? That’s not a smart thing to do.”

  “Hi Kid,” said Miguel weakly, smiling. “I been expecting you.”

  “Me?” said the Kid.

  Miguel had hollow cheeks and hollow eyes and his forehead looked too large and his mustache seemed to have wilted and the face and arms that had been a reddish brown had a yellow tinge and the large eyes were dull and had lots of yellow in the whites. He had been a good-sized fellow, with a plumpish face and good color and sharp eyes and a clean shining mustache, and now look at him.

  “How’s it been with you Kid?” Miguel asked, in a voice which was hoarse and unlike the voice the Kid remembered.

  “Pretty good. You?”

  “Not so good.”

  “So I hear. Too bad.”

  “That was a great escape,” Miguel said.

  “It was nothing.”

  “You
couldn’t do better. No other man could do better.”

  “I’m sorry about Patron.”

  “Yes that’s bad. But now everybody says you couldn’t help it. They found the gunroom door broke open and figured out what happened.”

  “How have things been back here?”

  “The papers were full of it. They say it was in papers back east too—Missouri, Kansas. They looked for you in the hills and below but found no trace of you. How you like Mehico?”

  “How’d you know I was coming?”

  “Who said I did?”

  “You said you were expecting me.”

  “Sure but I didn’t know the day.”

  “You knew I was coming back?”

  “Sure.”

  “How come?”

  “What would you do down in Mehico Kid? A fellow as light-skinned as you. This is where you make your play.”

  “How’s Nika?”

  “Changed. I’ve changed she’s changed you’ve changed. Lots of changes lately.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Depends on how you look at it.”

  “Should you be talking so much?”

  “No that’s a fact. You been to her place? You been there? Then she’s up at Hijinio’s, helping to plaster an adobe.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Talk to her.”

  “Sure.”

  “See what she says.”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s this business you got with Longworth? You better leave him alone Kid. He’s mad as hell—like a bull.”

  The Kid shrugged.

  “Hombre you watch yourself. You’ve changed too,” Miguel said.

  “I know. I’m getting fed up with the whole thing.”

  “Still drinking that rotgut?”

  The Kid nodded.

  “That’s bad.”

  “Everything’s bad. Your getting kicked by a horse is bad.”

  “You’re driving yourself hard. Where you going?”

  “You tell me,” the Kid said, smiling.

  “Funny way for you to talk.”

  “I talk the way it comes.”

  “How’s it down there?”

  “The old country?”

  “Yes.”

  The Kid shrugged. “How should it be? Same everywhere—people living, dying.”

  “Long trip?”

  “Too long.”

  “Maybe too long for the business you’ve come for.”

  “No. I’ve come on the business of my life.”

  “Big words. I never heard you talk like that.”

  “A fellow changes.”

  “Up or down?”

  The Kid smiled. “It happens in the dark.”

  “Some can see in the dark.”

  “I’m one of the daytime boys.”

  Miguel laughed softly, watching the Kid.

  “How’d you know I was back?” asked the Kid. “You knew didn’t you?”

  “News travels fast. What do you expect?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s good. It’s the best way to live.”

  “And to die.”

  “You know I’m dying then?”

  “You? Nobody told me.”

  “Why should they?”

  “Are you really dying?”

  “Why? Is death so surprising to you?”

  “Sometimes,” said the Kid.

  “That’s funny.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “A dumb story. One of my cousin’s mares kicked me in the chest. A week later I began spitting blood. I guess it was the kick that did it.”

  “How’d you let a mare kick you?”

  “I don’t know. I was working in the stable and was going to pass her. She reared up... and hit me in the chest. It threw me down. I thought she was going to come for me but she shied. Went to a corner. I guess it frightened her.”

  “It can happen.”

  “I never got kicked like that before. Not like that. In the shins, in the thigh, but nothing serious. It wasn’t a bad kick just kind of grazed me. Didn’t break anything but I didn’t feel good. Then I began spitting blood.”

  “Ever spit blood before?”

  “When I was a kid. Also when I was about eighteen.”

  “Maybe the kick had nothing to do with it.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Miguel sighed and looked at his hands, which were lying still and bony on the blanket. Then he glanced up at the Kid. The Kid had been standing at the foot of the bed, his hands in his back pockets.

  “I been waiting for you Kid,” he said. “I knew you’d come. I knew it all the time, ever since I saw I wasn’t going to die right away.”

  “You think I came back just for Nika?”

  “I don’t know. I wonder if you’d have come back if I had died or if I hadn’t gone and married her.”

  “I’d have come back.”

  “Kid the padre made her mine. The padre’s word is God’s. I took her in the sight of God.”

  “Sure. I haven’t said a word.”

  “But I didn’t expect to live. Only I wanted to marry her and leave her the little I’ve got. It’s not my fault I didn’t die. But you know something? She won’t go back with you now, not while I’m alive. Listen. Go back. You’ll get your death here. She’s wild. Like you. You need a tame one. She’ll get you killed. She can do that to a man. But me I’m her cousin. And I’m dying anyway.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “I can feel it. Listen. I’m sorry now I did it. I’m no husband to her. There were two things I counted on—you dying and me dying—and we’re both alive. Ah Christ. I loved her a long time without telling her. There was always some fellow or other but she didn’t seem to want to marry them and I guess now it was because of one thing but it’s not for me to say what. A woman will seem to do strange things if you don’t know what’s in her mind. You understand?”

  The Kid nodded.

  “She says she loves me. I believe her. Love can come from suffering just as easy as from fun. We’re cousins. That counts with us. You know—she’s always feeling blue because she doesn’t have much kin. Her brother Modesto’s the only one who’s really close to her except me and I’m a second cousin. Her mother had three children. One died young. Nika was the second. They lived in that adobe on the plaza and a couple of years ago her father got drowned—he was a fisherman—and her mother (God bless her, she was a good woman and she always worried about me) died a couple of months after—a stroke. That left Nika alone with her brother. She was always talking about leaving the Punta but she never did. I sure didn’t want to see her go.”

  He paused. “You see what I mean?”

  “Sure,” said the Kid.

  “But it makes no difference.”

  “That’s right,” said the Kid.

  “Well she had a house and she worked here and there and I thought of asking her to marry me but she was a wild one and had other fellows and anyway after my wife died I didn’t want to marry anybody for a long time. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I guess when a man has nothing better to do than to spit blood and try to hang on to his life he talks more than is good for him. It’s good to see you. I’m glad they didn’t hang you.”

  “Me too.” The Kid laughed.

  “You better go up and talk to her.”

  “Sure. Well so long.”

  “Adiós Kid. Look out for the Dedricks.”

  “I will. Take care of yourself. Adiós.”

  As he mounted his horse and rode up toward Hijinio’s he could not help remembering how Miguel had looked in the old days. Such a nice fellow then, brown-skinned, sharp black eyes, lots of curly black hair, and a very good build on him, not too much fat for a fellow his age. But a funny fellow Miguel. He had never worn a gun in his life. Never owned a gun. Said he never needed one. That was taking a lot on trust wasn’t it? Too bad he was dying.

  *

  After the Kid took off that mo
rning I went over to Harvey and said, “Harvey you know what? You and me ought to follow him a bit just in case there’s any trouble and anyway we ought to scout around a bit.”

  “Good idea,” said Harvey, and we got on our horses and rode off north. The surprising thing was that it felt good to be on a horse again.

  We rode on past the Punta and then, not knowing exactly what we were there for or what to do, I said, “Let’s go over to the Pescadero and Punta Pinos.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “All right let’s go,” he said.

  He was about twenty-two and tall and thin and had a narrow face and gray eyes that were very shiny and a brown cowlick and a clump of hair that hung down over his eyes and he was a very good cowhand but not so good at staying alive. Because the day we took that ride was the day he got himself killed. One thing about Harvey I can never forget—the way he had of laughing. He would lie down on his stomach and writhe and make hacking noises as if somebody was cutting him up with a knife. What will make a fellow develop a habit like that?

  “Harvey,” I said as we rode along, “what do you aim to do when this blows over?”

  He scratched his head. “You got me Doc,” he said. “What do you say we hit the beach?”

  “All right.”

  We turned off near the mission and rode onto the beach. The horses didn’t like that. They began to rear and buck and we hit them with our reins and made them quit it. There was nobody on the beach, only the muddy flat where the river joined the bay. We splashed through it, the water going into our boots. We climbed the hill there, with the view of the bay, the mission ruins and the Punta, and the horses breathed hard, their sides heaving, and they farted and stopped a minute and we waited for them.

  It was good country in those days, full of eagles and hawks. You never got tired of riding around in it. One minute you’d be riding through those mossy trees and the next you’d be skirting a head and watching a line of cormorants sitting black on a rock or you’d see the black water in the rock scars and wonder how deep it was down there and if anybody had been thrown in there. Or you’d pass the long snaking brown lines out near the kelp beds and hear the blowing water and watch the crazy cypresses that the poet said look like a witch’s fingers, pale gray, with blue shadows.