The Horses

by Bill Brooks

  The mere mention of horses sent the half-wit into near spasms. He shook his head again, harder.

  “Nah, nah, nah…”

  Then he kicked his heels into the ribs of his horse and galloped off down the road in the direction they’d been riding.

  Cicero looked again longingly at the house, thinking of possible opportunity, money kept in coffee cans, guns, horses, maybe a hot, home-cooked breakfast cooked by a fine-looking woman, and if she had a husband so what? He could make her a widow right quick, tell her when he done it, “The Mortician was here.” See the look on her face. Him standing there all in black like death itself, his belly full of her breakfast, his desire all spent, that coffee can money stuffed in his pocket. He was as hungry for a woman as the half-wit was for food—woman and violence.

  But shit, that half-wit Ardell was going to go and get himself lost or get into some sort of trouble. It was worse than watching after a two-year-old. One last quick glance toward the house before he spurred his horse.

  Could be, too, there is some old coot living down there easily spooked and shoot me out of this saddle, he told himself to justify the decision to go on after Ardell instead of riding down to the house. If wishes were fishes, and he rode after the half-wit calling, “Hold up, you knothead.”

  It looked all around like a pretty day with the snow shriveling under the sun’s heat and a warm southern breeze blowing up from the river. It could have been made more pleasant were it not for the half-wit’s spookiness.

  Maybe an accident will befall that boy, Cicero thought. I mean what could I do about it if it did?

  Chapter Seven

  They rode north at a good pace until they spotted a dugout resting along the high bank of the Pecos near the confluence of the Rio Hondo.

  “That’s him there, fishing,” Trout said.

  A lone figure sat under a large straw hat, a cane pole in his hand, the line dipping into the current.

  The breed looked up sleepy-eyed at their approach, like an old turtle blinking in wonderment from beneath the brim of his sombrero.

  “He claims he used to be a fierce warrior in his day, but look at him now, nothing but a sot who has to resort to catching mudcats out of the river to feed himself. But he’s the best goddamn tracker I know of around these parts.”

  Trout reined his horse to a stop just there by the water’s edge, and Jim sat alongside him.

  “He can be an obstinate old bastard,” Trout said, looking down at the breed.

  Hairy Legs was dressed in a dirty blue cavalry jacket punctured with what looked like several bullet holes. Half the brass buttons were missing, and there were sergeant’s chevrons on only one sleeve. He wore baggy wrinkled trousers made of canvas and patched with pieces of flour sack, the trouser legs several inches short of the tops of scarred brogans. His flesh was as brown and wrinkled as a walnut. But Jim could see the man had one brown eye and one blue. He didn’t fail to notice, either, a fair-size butcher knife tucked in the red sash tied round his waist.

  “That’s a big knife,” Jim said to Trout.

  “Hell of a big knife. You thinking he done it, killed your horses?”

  “Why don’t we ask him.”

  Trout spoke to the Indian in a mixture of Spanish and Apache with some hand signals thrown in. Spoke in exaggerated tones, his voice overly loud.

  Hairy Legs looked from Trout to Jim, both of them still mounted as he remained seated on the grassy bank, somber, his fish tugging the placid flowing river. But when it flooded during the winter and spring months, the river’s personality changed to fury, a boil of tumbling, turbulent water force that had the power to wash away trees, houses, cattle, horses, humans, and even graves. One of the Pecos’s more notable victims had been the house of Pete Maxwell in Fort Sumner, in whose bedroom Garrett had fed the Kid a bullet for supper. They buried the Kid and his pals—including Charlie Bowdre whose house Jim now owned—in the military graveyard in Fort Sumner. Some claimed the river’s flooding had swept Billy and Charlie’s bodies away, along with many others. A man in Las Cruces claimed to have the Kid’s trigger finger in a jar, and a medicine show claimed to own the rest of the young killer’s skeleton. What was true and what wasn’t was left for conjecture. In this country, Jim knew anything was possible.

  Hairy Legs had two fat carp on a stringer floating belly-up in the lazy current. His luck had obviously been good this day. Two fat fish for his supper would taste real good smoked over a fire.

  “I asked him did he get drunk and kill some horses last night,” Trout said after his first sharp and quick parley with the breed. “He said he didn’t. Said he’d never kill a horse because horses were the brothers to the wind.”

  “You think he’d confess if he had done it?”

  “No, I don’t trust Indians no farther than I can throw a piano, having encountered my share along life’s travails. And this one is part Apache—the worst sort of Indian. Add in that hot Mex blood and you don’t know what you get, but whatever it is, can’t be purty.”

  Then Trout engaged the breed again, who in turn shook his head and uttered a grunt of something. Trout repeated whatever he said a second time, and finally the breed took out his knife and handed it up to Trout, who tested the edge with the ball of his thumb.

  “He could have done it with this,” Trout said. “You want to just go ahead and shoot him in the nuts or something? Because I don’t reckon we’re going to know the truth even if I arrest him and have him stand trial. You know those white people and those Mexican people who will sit on a jury, aren’t none of them sympathetic to a breed. To the Mexes, he’s Apache and to the whites, he’s either one. Whatever the truth, he’ll be found guilty whether he did it or not, but then what? Unless you want to see him hanged over it—killing your horses, I mean?”

  The breed’s long hair was full of stickers and burrs and pieces of grass, no doubt from having slept on the ground, and he looked ragged and worn out besides being half drunk. His wrinkled old face held the history of his life: defeated and beaten down at every turn—forced to catch trash fish instead of hunting game, his soul stolen by liquor, like what remained in the bottle by his right leg there in the grass.

  Jim let himself venture a private guess: Maybe if he had killed my horses, he probably thought of it as some small way of getting even with a white man for whatever misfortune he has suffered at the hands of white men. But still, that blue eye—now that was something to behold, spoke of white blood, or high Spanish blood. Somewhere in this old man’s heritage was more than just bad blood.

  “Ask him what he thinks of white men?” Jim said.

  Trout looked at Jim as though he was the biggest fool he’d ever seen.

  “Ask him,” Jim repeated.

  Trout spoke even more forcefully and motioned with his hands pointing toward him and Jim.

  The breed turned his gaze toward Jim and let it rest there for a long hard moment, then smiled and spoke something guttural again before turning his attention back to the river.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said white men fell from the sky like hard rain and drowned the Indians the same way they stole Texas from the Mexicans—that there was nothing the Apache or the Mexes could do about it because the whites came with such force. He said the white man is a plague to anyone who ain’t white. I asked him if he would help track whoever killed your horses. He said he was too busy and had to catch three more fish. I’d say he’s guilty as sin.”

  “Ask him who gave him that blue eye.”

  “He won’t tell you.”

  “Ask him.”

  Trout did the asking and the old man simply ignored the question.

  “Let’s go,” Jim said.

  “You don’t want to shoot him in the nuts?”

  “He didn’t do it.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Whoever did it was strong, powerful; he don’t look like he weighs more than a hundred pounds if you put rocks in his pockets.”
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br />   Trout sighed and turned his horse around after Jim turned his around, and they rode southwest cross-country to Jim’s place, cutting up through Sandy Pass to save time. Within a mile of getting there, Trout said, “I do believe I smell chicken frying.”

  Jim sniffed the air but he didn’t smell anything.

  “You’re invited to stay to dinner. That is if you don’t already have a more pressing engagement.”

  “No, sir. I sure don’t.”

  “First things first,” Jim said as they neared the corral. “Around here a man has to work for his meal.”

  “I got a bad backbone.”

  Jim rode over, leaned and opened the corral gate, the double strand of wire looped to hold it shut.

  Trout saw the miserable sight of six dead horses and spat his disgust, saying: “Jesus what is wrong with people?”

  “We got to rope and drag these horses out away from the house,” he said. Trout looked crestfallen. All he could think of was a hearty meal of fried chicken, maybe some gravy and biscuits to go along with it. And after dinner, a nice little snooze in the shade of some mimosa tree if he could find one.

  The lawman followed Jim’s lead and loosed his rope from where it hung on his saddle. He and Jim roped the dead horses by the hind feet acting as a team, and dragged them off to an arroyo a mile from the house and dropped them in. It was mean work no matter how they thought about it, but there wasn’t anything more to be done about it other than do it.

  By the time they finished, Trout’s belly was growling with hunger in spite of the ghastly chore.

  He followed Jim’s suit in dismounting, and they washed their faces and hands in the cold groundwater pumped up by jerking up and down on the red pump handle there just outside the house, then wiped themselves dry on a hand towel hanging from a loop of wire wound round the pump head.

  “That’s the sorriest work I ever done,” Trout said.

  They went inside and sat around the table and ate fried chicken and candied yams and roasted ears of corn, washing it down with black coffee. No biscuits, no gravy, much to Trout’s disappointment. Mostly Jim and Luz watched Trout eat like he didn’t have no bottom to him. Five ears of corn and most of the chicken and yams.

  “Jesus and Mary,” Trout said when he gnawed the last of the chicken meat off a drumstick and wiped his fingers and swallowed the last of his coffee. “But I do believe I’ve never et anything that tasty in my whole life.”

  Luz forced herself to smile. She wondered if Trout’s skinny whore ever cooked him a meal and doubted she ever did.

  Then they all took their leave out on the porch where Jim poured each a short glass of whiskey and Luz rolled them cigarettes, Trout declining, saying he never had took up the habit because he couldn’t see no sense in spending good money on tobacco just to roll it up in paper and smoke it. Jim and Luz smoked as low white clouds gathered over the Capitans like a shroud of sorrow.

  “Whoever done this thing,” Trout said, “more or less put you out of business, didn’t they?”

  Jim nodded.

  “Least for now they have.”

  “I still think it could have been old Hairy Legs who did it. That knife of his is big enough to saw off a man’s leg.”

  Luz said she knew of the breed, had seen him around Domingo.

  “He’s just an old man,” she said. “Why would he do a thing like that?”

  “Who’s to say what goes on in a breed’s mind,” Trout said.

  The sky turned the color of sheet tin, and off toward the arroyo they could already hear the coyotes and wolves cussing over the carcasses of the horses.

  Jim felt a grim hatred for whoever had killed those animals, but he was pretty certain it wasn’t old Hairy Legs. He imagined the old man sitting on the bank of the Pecos River eating his fish skewered over a hot little fire, washing it down with rotgut. A man like him had to feel like he was the last of his kind on the face of the earth, and Jim could relate to that.

  Finally Trout reckoned he’d worn out his welcome, which he more or less had, because a little of Trout always went a long way. He stood and thanked Luz again for her hospitality and went and brought his horse up to the side of the porch in order to make an easier mount. Luz watched him with a certain wonderment, felt sorry for his horse, to have to carry all that weight around.

  “I’ll keep sniffing around for your horse killer,” Trout said, his bulk settling down onto the saddle. “But I can’t promise you whoever it was will ever get caught. Even human killers hardly ever get caught in these parts. Lincoln County is attracting the worst of the worst because those criminal heathens know there’s not enough law to cover it all. Somebody like the Kid gets put down like the dog they are, and there are three more just like him, or worse, to take his place.”

  “I appreciate your riding out with me today,” Jim said.

  Trout belched and looked at Luz now sitting silent, her attention focused toward the arroyo. She was almost ghostly in her presence, he thought, but a beauty nonetheless. It was too bad about Hector; the fact that he’d left behind a fine young woman. Jim was one lucky son of a bitch, because Luz also owned her own place there in town. Trout imagined himself with a land-owning young widow like her. It would be a real sweet deal.

  “You’re a lucky son of a buck,” Trout said. “Have you a woman like that.”

  “I know it.”

  Trout clucked the horse into a trot and rode off toward Domingo.

  “I never cared much for that man,” Luz said when they sat back down again, Jim watching the shrinking shape of the lawman as he went trotting up the road toward town.

  “Trout’s all right,” he said. “If you can get past his mouth.”

  She put her hand on his knee and let it rest there. It was a comforting thing to have it there.

  “You want to go inside?” she said.

  “Not just yet.”

  “I hate that this has happened. That you lost all your horses.”

  “I’ll find others.”

  “Still…”

  “I know.”

  They sat there for a while longer in the cooling air now that the bank of clouds had partially blocked the heat of the sun. A gentle wind played along the porch. It was hard if not impossible to say what the night would bring, weather-wise or otherwise.

  “I was thinking of asking you to marry me,” he said. He said it so casually, she wasn’t sure if she heard him correctly, or if it was just something she imagined him saying.

  There was an awkward moment of silence. Then a meadowlark trilled and the silence was broken.

  “Is this something you’ve been thinking about for a while, or just today,” she said.

  “A while. I was going to say something this morning, but then we sort of got wrapped up in other things.”

  She saw a smile playing at the corners of his mouth as he stared off like they were just this long coupled couple talking about how the garden or something was doing.

  “There is something I’ve never asked you,” she finally said.

  “What is that?”

  “If you’ve ever been married before.”

  “I never was,” he said. “Never even came close. Seems I always fell in love with the wrong women when I fell at all—which I want you to know wasn’t that often.” Then he looked steady at her and added: “Till now.”

  “And you think I’m the right woman?”

  “I could use another cigarette, and maybe a little bit more of this whiskey, only without so much water in it, couldn’t you?”

  She waited silently until he went in the house and came out again carrying the half-empty bottle and his makings.

  “You want a refill?” he said.

  “No, I’ve still got some.”

  He poured himself a little, then set it on the floor of the porch while he fashioned himself a cigarette and lit it.

  “You don’t have to give me an answer right away,” he said. “I just thought you should know what I’ve been thinkin
g about.”

  “Are you straight out asking me if I’d marry you?”

  “I guess that’s what I’m asking, yes.”

  “I’d like to think about it a little.”

  “I figured you would. Just thought I’d mention it so you could begin thinking on it case you needed the time.”

  “Yes, well…”

  He smoked his cigarette and she smoked hers and they sipped the whiskey and listened to the savagery way off toward the arroyo—the growls and snarls as the predators had at the bodies of the horses. Something dies, something lives, he thought. It’s the way it is. And they were grateful for each other’s presence when all the rest of everything seemed to be ravaged by the teeth of the hungry and wanting.

  “Maybe we should go inside now,” she said.

  His heart felt heavy as she led him into the bedroom and undressed. The last of the day’s light sliced through the window to caress her body, to shimmer in her black hair. He knew he had to let go of the one thing in order to enjoy the other.

  But it wasn’t until she touched him that he could.

  Chapter Eight

  When he went out in the morning the old breed, Hairy Legs, was there on the porch, sitting cross-legged, a ratty wool blanket pulled round his shoulders, the big ratty-looking straw sombrero perched on his head.

  “The hell,” Jim said, surprised to see him there.

  “It was a long walk,” Hairy Legs said in surprisingly good English, his voice rattling like gravel in a pail.

  “No shit. You had to have walked all night to get here.”

  “Plenty of moon to see by. No problem.”

  “Didn’t know you spoke the white man’s tongue.”

  His slash of a mouth drew into a wry smile as much as he was capable of it.

  “The white devil who wears the metal star likes to show off when we talk, uses half-assed sign language and Mexican with a little Apache thrown in, so I let him. You got something to eat for a poor old Indian? I’m hungry.” He rubbed his belly.