Rides a Stranger

by Bill Brooks

  “Where do I fit into all this?”

  “I want to hire you to help me deliver her to him.”

  “Me? Shit, what’d I do to piss you off?”

  “That your idea of humor?”

  “No, seriously, why me?”

  “Like I told you, I get hunches about people. My hunch is you’d be a good man to have on my side.”

  “Good and dead, I reckon, if the threat in that letter holds any water and you can’t get Waco’s wife back to him.”

  “How’s five hundred dollars sound?”

  “I miss something about this place?” I said. “I never met a lawman yet who made over thirty a month.”

  “Special case,” he said. “I can get the money.”

  “What makes you think I’m any sort of man for this?”

  He looked at the butt of the Merwin Hulbert riding my hip.

  “The way you wear that hogleg,” he said. “Like a man that can use it.”

  “Could be I just want folks to think that.”

  “Well, do you know how to use it?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do. Don’t mean I will, though.”

  He eased back in his chair.

  “You’re half as good with a gun as you are your fists then you’re worth the money.”

  I weighed my options. I could turn him down and go bounce drunks and peckerwoods at the hog farm and probably get plenty of free quim for my troubles as well as a steady paycheck, or I could make a lot of money fast and probably get killed before I could spend it. Or I could get on my horse and ride the hell out of there and forget I ever heard of Coffin Flats. Thing with the bouncer job was, if this Waco did come riding in with a bunch of men and burned the town to the ground, my bouncer job would get burned with it, especially if Waco’s wife was working for Pink. So that was no good. Leaving was probably the smartest thing to do—after all, I had over sixty dollars in my pocket. But five hundred sounded like a lot more than sixty if I remembered the mathematics right I’d learned in a West Texas schoolhouse when I wasn’t daydreaming about girls, horses, and fighting Indians.

  “Who else you got to help you on this?” I said. “I mean if things don’t work out getting Waco’s wife back to him?”

  “Got two deputies I don’t know if I can count on.”

  “Maybe you should fire them then and get you someone you can count on.”

  “I don’t want to sit around here bullshittng, Mr. Glass. You’re either in or out. We can’t pull this off, this whole town is going to burn and maybe a few good folks will die.”

  “Including you.”

  “I’m not afraid to die,” he said. “I’ve been close to it a dozen times already. But I got this sick wife…”

  “I get the five hundred either way it turns out—long as I’m around to collect it?”

  “Either way long as you don’t cut and run.”

  “So if we can get the woman and deliver her to Waco, we’re aces.”

  “That’s the size of it.”

  “Where’s this old boy’s place?”

  “A full day’s ride from here.”

  “Why the hell doesn’t he just come and get her is the question bothering me. The one you says got a long story behind it. I don’t mind putting my neck on the line long as I know what I’m putting it there for.”

  Chalk sipped his coffee and stared into the cup.

  “Because he wants me to do it.”

  “You want to level with me or just sit here pulling my dally rope?”

  “It’s complicated,” he said.

  “I already figured as much. How is it complicated?”

  “Antonia and I were engaged to be married once—a long time ago, before she met Waco. But I went off to fight in that goddamn war because I thought it was my duty and I got hurt and lost in my head and didn’t come back when I could have. I was gone two years longer than the war lasted. And when I did come back, she was with Waco. She thought I was killed—lots of men were and their families never knew it. Waco had money and could provide her a life I couldn’t even think about even if I had come back—”

  Somebody shouted from across the room and Chalk looked up suddenly, saw it wasn’t anything but some drunk being a drunk.

  “Sounds like maybe you didn’t lose all that much in losing her.”

  He looked at me hard then.

  “You don’t know anything about her,” he said.

  “You’re right, I don’t. So Waco took up with her, but how the hell did it go from that to where she’s at now—moonlighting at Pink Huston’s hog farm?”

  “Time I come back here, I was a drunk myself, run-down and wasted. She was married to Waco. I met Nora and she pulled me out of the bottle and I hired on as a deputy, stayed sober, and when the marshal quit, I was offered the job. Thing is, I’d run into Antonia now and then when she’d come to town. We’d talk—privately. She wanted me back. I told her I couldn’t, even though I was still weak when it came to her. I messed up this once with her and later she told me she was pregnant with my child. I said I was sorry, I’d do what I could but I wasn’t leaving Nora. She tried to kill herself but all she managed to do was kill the child with the poison she drank. Afterward she got hooked on the laudanum Doc gave her to keep her sedated—found out she liked the world better when she wasn’t sober. When she couldn’t get laudanum, she got into opium and booze. Christ! I have to explain all this to you?”

  “I can pretty much guess the rest. Pink kept her in dope in exchange for her working for him.”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”

  “I still don’t get why Waco just doesn’t come and shoot Pink and take her back.”

  “He blames me, thinks I run a game on her to get her to leave him. She must have told him about the child. Believes if I hadn’t come back, none of this would have happened. He’s probably right, none of it would have happened. He wants to embarrass me, make me pay for my sins—show her what sort of no account I am.”

  “Why not just tell him to go to hell?”

  “’Cause I never mentioned any of this to Nora, for one thing. Now she’s sick, and if I lose her, I’ve got nothing to live for. And for another, I’ve swore to protect these folks and this town. I guess as much as I messed up, I owe somebody something.”

  I studied on it and what I saw was a worried man—but worried more about others than himself—and I knew all about that, having been down that road myself a time or three.

  “It sounds like a lot more than wanting to embarrass you,” I said. “It sounds like pure revenge.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It does, but so what?”

  “No matter what, you lose.”

  “Probably so.”

  “You could always take your wife and just ride away and not look back.”

  “That wouldn’t end nothing. He’d come and burn this town and then he’d come after me. He just wants me to grovel awhile before he puts his boot on the back of my neck. Maybe I give him back what he wants he’ll let things go. Then Nora and I can leave and find someplace to ourselves.”

  “Tell you what,” I said. “I’m supposed to go see Pink about that job. Let me go see what I can find out with regards to Antonia. Then I’ll find you and see we can’t work something out.”

  “You want the job or no?”

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  “I should go over there with you.”

  “And do what?”

  His gaze dropped to his coffee cup; a small black mirror that reflected a troubled face.

  “Where can I find you when I come back?”

  “I’ll be right here.”

  I stood and went out into the cool night. You could feel the seasonal change, and the sky looked like it had holes poked in it with silver pins. I rode down to the railroad tracks—the dead line—and could see the lights on in some of the bagnios and crib joints. Behind those doors and walls and windows, there was some serious action going on and everybody was playing the hand they’d been dealt.
>
  I tied off in front to Pink’s place and knocked on the door and it was answered by the woman, Lorri. She was wearing a green silk dress and holding that same cat.

  “You come back to play with my pussy?” she said, smiling, stroking the fur between the cat’s ears. The way she said it made me want to.

  “I’ve always been a cat lover,” I said.

  She smiled and held the door wide for me to come in, and there were several women of various ages and sizes lounging on the furniture. Pink was there at his little desk, dressed in a silk smoking jacket and smoking a cheroot like some Arab sheik watching over his harem.

  “Ah, the pugilist,” he said. “Y’ve come for the job then, laddie?”

  “Tonight,” I said, “I’ve come simply for the pleasure.”

  “Certainly, take yer pick—anyone but me and Lorri, that is.” The two of them exchanged looks.

  “Somebody told me that a gal named Antonia was a good choice,” I said.

  “Ah, right you are. Step forward, my angel, the man has requested your ser vices.”

  A thin strawberry blonde lifted herself unsteadily from one of the horsehair divans and wobbled forward. She was pretty, with a thin emaciated face and dark shadows under both eyes and hollow cheeks, and I’d bet a dollar she used to be a lot more attractive.

  “Tell you what,” Pink said. “It’s on the house tonight, in spite of what you cost me already. Just to show you I’m a generous bloke.”

  She took me by the hand and we went up a carpeted stair to a room that was narrow with striped wallpaper. The flame from a small lamp by the bedside danced inside the glass chimney.

  “What’s your pleasure, cowboy?” she said without the least bit of enthusiasm, and began to undress from the robe she was wearing. The robe fell away and what was left was a too thin woman with sallow flesh covering her ribs and bony hips. I picked up the robe and wrapped her in it.

  “Hey…”

  “I just want to talk to you,” I said.

  She sat wearily on the side of the bed. “You got anything to drink?”

  “No.”

  “I could use a cigarette.”

  “I don’t smoke,” I said.

  “Jesus, what are you, a damn priest?”

  She rested her face in her palms.

  “I came to see you on behalf of Chalk Bronson,” I said.

  She looked up, her eyes red, tired, half closed.

  “What’s he want?”

  “He needs to take you back to Johnny Waco.”

  “Yeah, like hell.”

  “Look, you’ve got the man between a rock and a hard place, miss.”

  Her mouth twisted with displeasure.

  “Cowboy, what I do is fuck, I don’t talk, and I don’t care if he’s between a rock and a mountain.” She started to rise but I put a hand on her shoulder and pushed her back down again.

  “Waco is going to burn the town down if the marshal doesn’t bring you to him,” I said.

  She looked at me like I wasn’t there.

  “Well, it’s going to be a tough place to make a living then,” she said. “Because no way in hell am I going back to Johnny Waco.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  She shrugged. “Why not.”

  “You happy with this situation?”

  She looked at the flame dancing in the glass chimney of the lamp, the light catching in her eyes.

  “It beats living with Johnny Waco.”

  “I can make it better.”

  “How?”

  So I told her the plan—the one I’d just made up there on the spot. The one that was mostly desperate and probably would get me killed and maybe her too. But what the hell were the choices? Okay, so I knew I could still ride away and not look back. But it isn’t always that simple. Maybe if I’d never known what would happen, it could have been easier, but now I knew and I’d have to live with it—whatever I did or didn’t do for a very long time. And if I could pull something off that maybe saved some lives, maybe a lot of lives, then maybe it was worth a try.

  When I finished telling her, she said, “You call that a plan?”

  Chapter Five

  She had been waiting forever it seemed.

  First there was the wait for him to come home again from the war. And when he didn’t, there was the wait of mourning. The wait of mourning was followed by wait for light to come into her life again after all the long lonely dark nights.

  Then came the wait for new love, if there was such a thing.

  It had not come exactly as she had hoped. But then what great love could repeat itself?

  Johnny Waco wooed her. He was wealthy and in some ways larger than life. But he was a great mystery to her as well. He had a reputation as a hard man without forgiveness toward his enemies, and later he would prove to be a man who kept his secrets secret, a man of interminable silence. But in the beginning of his courtship, he showed her none of that. He arrived in carriages pulled by pretty horses and took her for long rides and showed her the width and breadth of his holdings.

  He arranged picnics beneath large cottonwoods that guarded clear running creeks and rivers. He could be wildly generous and often was. He once bought her a hat on a whim—a hat she knew she’d never wear—that he’d ordered from a catalogue simply because he thought she would like it. It had ostrich feathers.

  He let her know from the outset his intentions to marry her. He professed his love and his desire for her. Even if he wasn’t Chalk Bronson, it was still flattering in a way.

  There was no one else that came even close to being marriageable. Just old men, punchers, gamblers, the occasional drummer selling tinware or elixirs from the back of a medicine show wagon.

  She’d told him no at first, said she wasn’t ready for marriage. Her heart still longed for the man who’d gone away and never came home again. Dead, lost, disfigured, out of his mind? She couldn’t be sure. No word had come. He had been simply swallowed by a distant war she only read about in the newspaper. Time left her without answers.

  Johnny Waco was a force in his own right. Tall and good-looking with smoke-dark eyes, a man who did not hesitate to brag that he always got what he was after.

  He seemed just decent enough, and after a time her resistance broke down; it was easier to marry him then to keep finding reasons not to. They were wed in the church by the priest even though Johnny made no claim to any particular religious belief. He would do what was right by her. And afterward there was a huge wedding feast prepared by his hired help, Maria Montero, his housekeeper, and her husband, Pedro, along with some of the hired hands who carried out long tables into the yard for guests to sit at, decorated with white crepe.

  They took the train to San Francisco for a honeymoon.

  The ocean startled her. The ships in the harbor seemed to be waiting to take her to exotic places. Weeks after their return to the desert she could still hear the creak of ropes, see the lighthouse light floating on the black water at night. The hotels in San Francisco had electric lights.

  Their lovemaking was for her the hardest part. She still remembered the hands of Chalk Bronson, the scent of his skin, the landscape of his body. Everything with Johnny Waco was different, hurried, and in the end unpleasant. She told herself she would give it time, that she could not expect him to be her late lover. Men are as different as horses are different, as the days are different, the seasons.

  But time did not ease her unease around him. And by the time of their return home again, she felt as if he found pleasure in her for only one reason.

  His personal bar is where she developed her taste for liquor—a glass in the early afternoon relaxed her. Another at supper made the long hours leading to bedtime seem less dull. Later she would learn to calm her mind after he had fallen asleep by going to the cabinet and pouring herself a glass of brandy. It made her feel less stained.

  After two years of this new but unhappy life she heard news that nearly stopped her heart: Chalk Bronson had suddenl
y appeared in town. It was exactly as though a dead man had risen from the grave—the shock of it.

  She fought the urge to go and seek him out. Her husband warned her against such indiscretions.

  “If he thinks he’s come back for you,” he said, “he’s badly mistaken.”

  She vowed that she no longer could love a man who would abandon her for so long. How could she? Posing such a question to Johnny Waco seemed to calm him.

  But then she went. And she found him staggering drunk down the street. She hardly recognized him. His face was haggard, his cheeks hollow and grizzled with graying beard. He’d lost a great deal of weight. He wore moustaches long and unkempt.

  He seemed just as surprised to see her.

  They were formal at first, like strangers being introduced. Her heart ached to touch him and make him new again. He ended up weeping into his rough beard.

  “I’m sorry,” he said over and over.

  Whatever they had once had was broken and they both knew it.

  She rushed home and locked herself in her room and wept. She’d never felt such anguish. And that afternoon she got fully and maddeningly drunk for the first time, and her husband found her huddled in the corner of the room raving in her anguish.

  “You saw him, didn’t you? Against my wishes, you saw him!”

  She didn’t bother to try and explain.

  He warned her again to stay away.

  “Will you beat me if I do not?” she said.

  “No, but I will beat him in ways you will not like.”

  The next time she went to town she planned carefully, waiting until he had gone away on a cattle buying trip.

  She learned where Chalk Bronson was staying, which room at the hotel, and went up the back stairs and knocked on his door, and he opened it, standing there wearing just his trousers, his hair tousled, his eyes red and anguished.

  He let her in and they talked.

  Their talking eased them beyond many of the old barriers that had been built up in his absence. He confessed he still loved her. She asked him why he hadn’t come home after the war.

  “I can’t explain it,” he said. “It changed me. I felt like I’d lost myself. I needed to find who I had once been and went in search of it. I couldn’t bring myself home to you the way I was. You wouldn’t have cared for what I’d become.”