I once saw Modesto with his right hand bleeding from practice. The Kid would not even let him wipe it. Another time I saw him with his shoulder aching so hard he could barely lift his arm, but the Kid said, “Up there up there. Let’s develop those muscles,” and Modesto winced and did what he was told.
They say that great gunmen are born great. All I know is that I practiced almost every day and that the Kid practiced and that Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday practiced.
“Go ahead. Some more,” said the Kid.
Modesto had the posture of a matador, with the bent shoulders and flat chest and the curve in the back of the neck, and when he practiced drawing he reminded me of one.
Modesto began to laugh.
“What are you laughing about?” asked the Kid, smiling.
“Remember how you made me wear this forty-five for fourteen hours?”
The Kid smiled.
Modesto turned to me. “He made me wear it everywhere I went. When I took it off my right leg sort of kicked around. Without your gun you feel empty. Savvy?”
I laughed. “Savvy muchacho.”
“I don’t like the Dedrick boys talking like that,” Modesto said.
“To hell with the Dedricks,” said Harvey. “How about knocking them off Kid?”
“That’s not a bad idea,” said the Kid.
“Hunting’s good I see,” said Modesto, studying the buck.
“Stay for dinner,” said the Kid.
“Sorry but I got to be back.”
“Listen,” said the Kid. “One time a fellow came looking for me, saying what he was going to do to me. He was in a tendejón, bragging, and sent a man to find me and tell me what I was going to get. So I went over to this tendejón to see the fellow. But I didn’t hurry. The more this fellow talked the more of his fight he was using up. He was a good fighter out of Abilene and I had to be careful. I checked my gun and loosened it in the holster. ‘You the Kid?’ he asked me. ‘That’s what they call me.’ ‘I’m going to kill you.’ ‘Well make your play and get it over with,’ I said. And I started walking toward him, watching his right hand, waiting for it to telegraph something to me. But it froze. He couldn’t get himself to draw. I grabbed him by the seat of his pants and threw him into the street and told him if I saw him in that town again I’d kill him. He went.”
“Why didn’t you kill him?” asked Modesto.
The Kid shrugged. “Sometimes it’s better not to. By making a monkey out of him I hoped to discourage somebody else who might be thinking of killing me for a reputation.”
“But he might have shot you next time he got a chance.”
The Kid shrugged again. “That would have been his good luck.”
*
By the time Modesto left it was late afternoon and we roasted and ate some of the buck and napped for a while. Then the Kid said he was going to the Punta and I knew it was to see Nika again. Harvey and I said we would go along because we wanted to check our stores and arms. We rode onto the Punta and separated, the Kid going down to the plaza and Harvey and I going up to the cypress head. We went over to Hijinio’s and told him what we were there for then went to the barn behind his adobe. We had enough stuff there to hold off a small army and as you know that head was full of caves, almost impassable trails, mesquite and sheer drops, where it would be hard to smoke out a man with a gun.
We went back and chewed the fat with Hijinio. He had the biggest adobe up there, overlooking the cove. The one farthest out was the Kid’s. I stopped in to check the Kid’s and it looked the same—just an empty adobe with a bunk and a few odds and ends and a madonna. My own adobe was just to the right and somewhat behind the Kid’s. Harvey and Bob shared one behind the barn. Hijinio had a nice place up there— corrals, a stable and some meadows.
We rode beyond Mound Meadow and climbed down to one of the beaches. There was a kind of pebbly sand there and the water was calm and there were sea caves and sandstone buttes and mesas and castles and no mosquitoes and sometimes the fireflies came and the children ran and laughed. We talked about what we would do in a couple of years. Harvey said he would probably quit this territory and go someplace and get himself a ranch. I said I had similar ideas, only I also wanted to go prospecting.
“Only thing is,” I said, “I got a hunch I’m not going to stay alive long enough.”
“Jesus I haven’t had me a woman in years,” Harvey said.
“What about that tamale in Tijuana? What you call that?”
“She bites. Wonder what Nika’s doing for a man now.”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
“She good in bed?”
“How would I know?”
“Who you kidding? I know more than you think I do.”
I stared at him. “You must have been eating some of that locoweed.”
He laughed. “You think I was born yesterday? You were sleeping with her when he was in that Salinas jail.”
I smiled. “Guessing games,” I said. But he was right.
“How about going up and talking with Francesca? Get the news.”
“All right,” I said.
We found her in her son-in-law’s adobe on the plaza, where she lived.
“Hello boys,” she said.
“Hi Grandma,” Harvey said.
“What you know that’s good?” she asked.
“Nothing much,” I said. “Have you seen the Kid?”
“How should I? He’s too busy with that whore.”
“Is that a way to talk?” asked Harvey.
“What would you call her?” she asked me.
“Me?”
“She’s a whore. You know it.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Well you do Harvey. Is she a whore?”
“Don’t put the finger on me Grandma. I don’t know a thing about it,” he said.
“Somebody should have slit her throat long ago.”
“What you got against her Grandma? I thought you forgave her for marrying Miguel,” Harvey said.
“She’s no good that’s all.”
“So I gather,” I said.
“What do I care about her? How you like Mehico you fellows?”
“Only one trouble down there,” said Harvey.
“What?”
“Too many Mexicans.”
“Crazy. You’re crazy to come back so soon and let him hang around here. What you trying to do, get him killed?”
“He’s no baby.”
“What you standing out here for? Don’t you want to come in?”
“What’s the matter with outside?” said Harvey.
“They’re over on that hill right now. I heard them arguing. That’s what happens. It goes to your head and then you start making mistakes and first thing you know they’re throwing dirt in after you.”
“What are you so gloomy about?” I said.
“I’m just telling you. There have been fellows up from town, snooping around. Spies.”
“Can you prove they’re spies?” asked Harvey.
“What kind of question is that? We ought to shoot them. That’s what we’ll do.”
“Good,” said Harvey.
“No it’s bad. The Kid ought to lay out. They never do. They keep coming back until they get killed.”
“All right. We all will,” I said.
“I don’t give a damn about you,” she said. “The Kid’s different. I don’t want him to get killed.”
“Well maybe none of us will,” said Harvey.
“That I’d like to see,” she said and started laughing.
*
Francesca was old enough to be the Kid’s grandmother, which was something you could tell by just looking at her. None of the natives knew her age and nor did Francesca but she was plenty old. I suppose she was seventy at the time she laid the Kid out for his wake and that would have made her a child when the mission was still pretty new. Anyhow she had a square flat face, a very dark face, with little bunches of loose fat and thousands of
fine wrinkles and although it was not a pretty face it was a good one and by that I mean you could look at it for a long time without its turning sour on you. Although it was a square face it had no sharp lines to it, everything being round, like the roundness of her forehead merging into her eyes, and the roundness of her nose against the roundness of her cheekbones, and the roundness of her chin against the roundness of her jaws. She was an Indian woman and some of them have faces like that.
I can remember her clearly, almost always sitting (she used to say, “How long you expect one pair of legs to carry an old no-good woman?”), and with a calico dress of no color or pattern that went down to her ankles and that hung around her like an old sheet and that could have stood some washing, and with the old wrecks of shoes, and with no stockings, and with the old brown fine-wrinkled dirty hands with the long nails that were black, and with the hidden eyes in the round brows and round cheekbones and with the deep soft voice that surprisingly enough did not show much age.
You can search me why the Kid and she ever took to each other but they did. He would always call her Grandma and she would call him Kid and My Kid and Chivato and you could see them sitting in front of her daughter’s adobe and talking together, the children running around them dirty and half naked. Sometimes, after a long ride, the first thing he did on hitting the Punta was to look her up. He would ride up to her adobe, his horse sweating and he himself dusty and wearing the black woolen trousers and the scuffed boots and the black woolen shirt and the black sombrero with the trimmings mostly gone from wear, and he would let out a whoop and she’d come out into the light, squinting and grinning, waddling out in that way of hers, like an old goose, and she would shout, “Hey Chivato!”
And he’d say, “What’s new Grandma?”
“I’ll tell you what’s new boy,” she’d say. “My Chivato is back. Hop down and eat something.”
And he would tie up his horse and go in and have some tortillas or enchiladas or some frijoles which she would make for him. And they’d have coffee together and talk, him stinking from the long ride. This habit of seeing Francesca first used to irritate Nika and she would say, “What do you see in that old Indian bitch?” He would laugh and light a cigarette and say nothing. She would say, “Well you can answer can’t you?” but he would only laugh. And if she pushed him beyond that he would turn his back on her and, still laughing, walk away, his guns hanging loose and his spurs clanking softly and his small hips swaying almost like a woman’s.
After visiting Francesca he would go to his own place and clean up, get dressed in the soft-collared white shirt and the black string tie and the black cutaway jacket and black woolen trousers and the fancy soft-skinned boots. With his hair wetted down, and rolling a cigarette, he would stroll about the place, ready to listen, saying little, and always wearing the guns and never standing or sitting where his back would make a good target. During the times we lived in the hills he liked to come down to the Punta like that. And in the old days he liked to come into Monterey like that and to sit in the plazas or have a coffee in a small dark shop or to listen to someone talking in an enclosed garden. He liked the braided trousers and the cloaks of the men and the little newspaper and the servants and the adobes that were long and complicated and that had two floors and the New England porticos in front.
I remember once how he bought Francesca a new dress.
“You think I’m going to fool myself up with that?” she said.
“Take it.”
“What for? So you dress me in it when I’m dead?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t die that soon.”
“Well give it to somebody.”
She took it but never wore it.
He also bought her several long strings of silver beads, with crucifixes, and these she wore all the time.
There was one thing about her I didn’t like and that was the lies she was always telling. She claimed, for example, that the Kid’s first load of buckshot had not killed Dedrick and that the Kid had said, “Well Lon how’d you like another?” And she claimed that the Kid had killed a man for every year of his life. Lots of people took a lie like that for the gospel truth. He had killed only sixteen men at the time and even that figure was uncertain, for some of the men he had left for dead might have recovered. She said he kept notches on his gun. Another lie. Any real gunfighter knew that a notchkeeper was another word for a fourflusher. She said he had a beautiful singing voice which spellbound all the senoritas. The only thing she left out was the guitar. He had a nice voice but nothing special. And what did he need a beautiful voice for when it was his hands that were remarkable, the way they flashed up out of nowhere and never seemed to aim and yet always hit a mortal mark. In the end she had her way and many of the lies stuck. Now when I hear the stories about him I can’t believe that anybody in his sound mind would be willing to believe they could all be about just one human being.
Look, I knew him better than most. I fought side by side with him, killed with him, watched some of our boys die with him, lived with him on the grub we had in the hills. Francesca said he was a great man because he shared his wealth with the poor. I’m not aiming to cut the Kid down but just what wealth was she talking about? If he gave a native a cow did that mean he was sharing his wealth? There was plenty more where that had come from and he hadn’t worked very hard to get it. The truth is the truth and we might just as well keep it fixed in the record.
*
The Kid found Nika squatting like an Indian woman outside her adobe, making tortillas in the little round clay oven. Christ, what the hell do I want with her? he thought.
“I saw Modesto just a little while ago,” he greeted her as he rode up.
“Hi Hendry,” she said.
He dismounted and held the reins loosely.
“He’s in good shape,” he said. “How come you’re making these things so late?”
“It’s not so late.”
“Can I talk to you?”
“Sure. Look I’m sorry about the way I spoke to you.” She glanced up at him. She was still squatting and using her hands.
“That’s all right.”
“I didn’t expect you back so soon.”
“I didn’t have much to do at Richardson’s. Not much for me and the boys to do at the moment.”
“How you fixed for money?” she asked.
“Need some? I can get you some.”
“You think I’d take money from you?”
“Now don’t get sore.”
“No. Don’t get sore,” she said.
“We’re all right. Just resting up. Not in business at the moment, you might say.”
“What you do down in Mex?”
“Nothing much.”
“I’ll bet,” she said.
“Sure. I was a good boy.”
“Sure.”
“Well what do you say?”
She stood up and looked at him seriously.
“Look Hendry,” she said. “You think I can just leave him? Even if he said I could, if he said, Forget we were married, we had no right to do it while the Kid was still alive. Even then I couldn’t.”
“Why?”
“Because I love him. You just wanted to use me. To have fun with. But Miguel doesn’t think of me like that.”
“He must be sick bad,” said the Kid.
“He sure is.”
“What exactly’s the matter with him?”
“God only knows,” she said.
“You have the doctor up from town?”
“Sure.”
“What’d he say?”
“Gave him some powders.”
“Those doctors,” the Kid said. “How’d he let a horse kick him like that?”
“I don’t know. You know he works for his cousin up in the hills. Probably working too hard. That damned Christiano. It was a Friday, the thirteenth. A black day. Miguel was not feeling so good. That’s when one of the mares kicked him. And then on the nineteenth, the
following Thursday, he began spitting blood. The spitting was bad but after a couple of days it stopped. Then, on Tuesday, the day I was supposed to come see you, he woke up with a fire in his lungs and we thought he was dying. He asked me to stay with him. I couldn’t refuse. Then he asked me to marry him. You were going to die anyway and it didn’t seem like much for me to do for him. He’s my cousin. I would have done it only for that and because he was dying, but I respect him and now I know I love him. His first wife died while having a baby. Baby died too. It broke Miguel up that thing. And me—you know I can’t have kids. What? You didn’t know? It’s always been like that with me. Well that’s the story. Except I swear I was going to come to see you on Friday, the day you escaped.”
“I’m sorry about Miguel—about everything,” he said. “Look how about taking a walk?”
She glanced ruefully at the oven, wiped her hands on a rag and went with him toward the hill west of the plaza, he leading his horse. When they reached the top of the hill they could see the coves and the bay. They stood there awhile saying nothing.
“Well that’s that,” he said.
“I’m sorry Hendry,” she said.
“But I didn’t come back to haunt you like you said. Miguel’s no husband to you. Hell I’ll marry you too if that’s what you want. And I’ll be a man to you and won’t lie around dying and spitting blood when it’s a man you want to make love to you at night.”
“You stop that!”
“What you got that body for?”
“You know nothing but your own pleasure.”
“It’s good enough for me.”
“Listen it’s time you heard a few things,” she said angrily. “You said I counted on your being hung. Well it’s not my fault they caught you and not my fault you got away. Listen. I’m no good for you. I never was. We were made to hurt each other. With Miguel it’s different. You know what all the paisanos were saying? That I was dragging you down the street of bitterness. That I was making you old before your time, ruining you with too much loving and bad whiskey. That I was going to get you killed. It’s true.”
“I pay no attention to what other people think.”
She turned away.
“Nika,” he said softly.
She turned to face him and began to cry, covering her face with her long hands. She had not expected him to speak so softly and to look so much older and so tired. Her thoughts were in a whirl. So much had happened... and now she was Miguel’s wife... and she had loved the Kid... and he had made a great escape... and now was back again... and looking so old... and she knew that if she didn’t go south with him he would stay and get himself killed...
The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones Page 12
