Rides a Stranger

by Bill Brooks

  “This is it,” he said and stopped in front of the cantina. I slid off the horse and handed him his sack and he dismounted and lashed it behind the saddle horn.

  A woman sweeping the street in front of a small casita eyed us suspiciously.

  “We’re probably the only white men here,” he said.

  “You know I didn’t even get your name,” I said.

  “Tom Twist,” he said.

  “Jim Glass,” I said.

  “You think it matters?” he said. “The names they give us?”

  “I guess it’s how we know when to pay attention,” I said.

  He seemed to consider it.

  “I guess,” he said.

  He was stranger than the New Mexican wind.

  “I guess as long as I’m here I’ll see about restocking some of my supplies,” he said. Then he paused and looked at me. “You have any money?”

  “No. Like I said, they took that too.”

  “No money, no horse,” he said. “You’re in quite a fix, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know when I’ve been worse off.”

  “Here,” he said, taking a twenty dollar gold piece from his pocket and extending it toward me.

  “I’d like to be able to decline your kindness,” I said. “But under the circumstances I can’t.”

  “Take it,” he said, and I did.

  “Well, I wish you luck, Jim Glass—on your journey, wherever that might lead you.”

  “Same here, Tom.” We shook hands and I watched him go up the street to a small trading post with a number of dark-skinned men sitting out front wrapped in colorful blankets.

  I went inside the cantina. You want to know anything about a town, bartenders are the best people to ask.

  The man behind the bar was singing to himself. That hour there weren’t any drinkers. Singing and rubbing glasses with a hand towel.

  “Señor,” he said. He was short and fat with hair combed down over his forehead and large ears.

  I was torn about buying a drink knowing every dime I had of the twenty dollar gold piece was critical to my survival.

  “You speak English?” I said.

  “Sí. Poquito—a little, yes.”

  “Anyone in town sell horses?”

  “Cabellos? Sí. Caesar Hernandez—he have horses sometimes.”

  I asked directions and he told me this Hernandez had a corral at the edge of town and I thanked him and went out.

  I found Hernandez squatting on the sun side of his corral, his eyes closed. He was old, his skin leathery, threads of black hair growing from his upper lip and chin. He was mumbling to himself and running a string of rosary beads through his crooked fingers.

  I coughed and he opened his eyes and looked at me like an old turtle.

  “I’d like to buy a horse,” I said.

  “I maybe have one to sell,” he said.

  “How much?”

  He shrugged and sized me up. The wind shuffled his black hair. “You have gold or silver?”

  “Gold.”

  That seemed to suit him and he stood up, using his hands on his knees, and shifted his serape over his shoulders and pointed to a gray inside the corral that didn’t look too bad.

  “That one,” he said.

  “How much?” I said again.

  “For heem, I take forty dollars gold.”

  “I’ve got twenty,” I said, showing him the double eagle.

  He shook his head solemnly as though I’d just insulted his sister and was contemplating what he was going to do about it.

  “Twenty, señor…ayiee. It is not enough for heem.”

  “What have you got for twenty?” I said.

  He shook his head again. “Nothing,” he said. “Maybe you could buy a big dog, eh?” He seemed to take pleasure in his own joke. I didn’t think much of it.

  “Let me ask you something,” I said. “You know of a place called Refugio?”

  “Sí.” He pointed a crooked finger toward a set of brown hills covered in juniper. “It’s that way. Beyond those hills.”

  “How far?”

  He shrugged. “Pretty far,” he said.

  Goddamn if it didn’t look like he was right.

  I remembered just then the reason I was standing here trying to negotiate a horse I couldn’t afford: Antonia. What had happened to her? Where was she now? It was something I didn’t want to think too hard about. Thinking about it just made matters worse. But I’d made her a promise and I intended to keep it.

  I headed back up toward town. Somehow I had to raise more cash.

  Tom Twist was just coming out of the trading post, his sack weighted down and slung over his shoulder.

  “You look as lost as I feel,” he said.

  “Tried to buy a horse, but twenty dollars doesn’t buy you much in this town.”

  “Wish I could help you out more, my friend, but I’m pretty well empty-pocketed myself now.”

  “No,” I said. “You’ve done way more than enough.”

  “What were you going to do if you got yourself a horse?” he said.

  “Get a gun and then probably go kill some men.”

  He shook his head. “Bad karma,” he said.

  “What?”

  “It’s something I learned in India. Bad actions this life make your next life more difficult.”

  “This is the only life I intend to live in,” I said. “And I intend to get even with a few people while I can. If there’s another life after this one, I’ll worry about it when I get there.”

  His smile was close to pitying.

  “Well, maybe you’re not wanting a horse bad enough,” he said. “And maybe the reason you don’t have a horse is because it is not meant for you to seek revenge. Maybe that’s not why you’re here.”

  “You talking God, or what?” I said.

  “God could be a part of it. I think it’s a lot more complicated than that.”

  He was by any account the oddest duck I’d ever come across.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what,” I said. “If I have to make a horse out of sticks and mud and a gun out of straw, I’m going to make sure the score gets evened.”

  He retied his sack to the horn of his saddle then slipped a foot into the stirrup and swung himself onboard.

  “I wish you well in your journey,” he said and touched heels to his mount and rode to the end of the street, where a small adobe church with whitewashed walls stood. I watched as he dismounted and, taking off his hat, went inside. It gave me pause—thinking about stealing his horse did. But I couldn’t do it, after what he’d done for me.

  I went into the trading post. It was cool inside with a low ceiling of plaster and ocotillo sticks. Cool and dim and I went to the counter and asked the Mexican behind it if he had any guns for sale.

  “Pistolas, or rifles?”

  “Pistolas,” I said.

  “Sí.”

  He took out a tray with four revolvers on it. Two of them had pitted barrels and another had loose works. The last one was a Colt Thunderer—something the size a woman might carry. It had hardwood grips.

  “This used to belong to Billy the Keed,” he said. “I bought it from heem.”

  “How much you want for it?”

  “Fifteen, señor.”

  “Five.”

  He shrugged and shook his head. “Twelve.”

  “Ten and you throw in a box of shells.”

  “Okay, but only half a box.”

  I loaded the chambers before I left and put the rest of the shells in one pocket and the last of the money in my other. I walked back down the street to the corral. The caballero looked at me like I was a lost child that had found my way home.

  “You come back for the horse, eh?”

  “Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll bet you this gun for that horse.”

  He looked at the gun. “It’s just a gun,” he said.

  “It used to belong to Billy the Kid.”

  “So what?”

  I t
ook out the ten dollars I had left.

  “How about the gun and the money?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not much, not enough.”

  I showed him my boots—new ones I’d purchased that spring in Ogallala—and the spurs to go with them. The boots had roses stitched into the shafts.

  “I’ll throw in my boots and spurs,” I said.

  “What’s the bet?” He was by now nothing if not curious.

  “You have a peso?”

  Again he shrugged.

  “You toss it in the air and if I can hit it on one try, you sell me the horse for ten dollars, and if I miss you can keep the gun, my money, my boots and spurs.”

  He reached in his pocket and took out a peso. The damn thing looked smaller than I’d imagined it would.

  “One try,” he said. “Not two.”

  “That’s right, one shot.”

  He knew it was a sucker’s bet and I could see in his greedy little dark eyes he was already feeling his feet inside my boots whether they fit him or not, and my ten dollars in his pocket and the pistol and all the rest.

  He stepped away from the building so that we stood in sunlight.

  I held the pistol in my right hand down alongside my leg.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  He flipped the peso high in the air and I let it land in the dirt then took aim and shot it.

  “Hey,” he cried. “You don’t shoot it in the air.”

  “I never said in the air, I said I could hit it with one shot. And that’s what I did.”

  His face bunched into brown anger.

  “The hell, you’re still getting ten for a horse not worth twenty,” I said. I bent and took off my spurs and handed them to him. “Just to show you my heart’s in the right place.” It seemed to ease his pain at being suckered.

  He called me a fucking gringo in Spanish as he led the horse out and handed me the halter rope.

  “Gracias,” I said.

  Then he called me an asshole.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A gun, a horse. What more did a man need to get by in this cruel old world? I asked myself. I probably looked pretty damn silly to the locals, riding a horse bareback with a pistol stuck down the waistband of my britches. I headed for those brown hills way off in the distance. I rode until nearly dark. The wind blew cold and I was damn near to shivering and hungry as a wolf. Ahead lay a deep purple veil of nightfall and something else. The wink of a campfire.

  I rode toward it.

  “Hello the camp,” I called.

  “Come on in, friend.”

  The voice sounded familiar.

  It was Tom Twist there in the light, his Dutch oven steaming.

  “You following me?” I said jokingly.

  “Maybe I am,” he said.

  “Hell of a technique you have—following a man by staying ahead of him.”

  He offered me a plate of food.

  “See you found yourself a horse after all.”

  “I guess I wanted it bad enough, or God wanted me to have it,” I said a little sarcastically.

  “Maybe so,” he said with some degree of confidence.

  We squatted on our heels within the heat of the fire and ate.

  “You figure out where it is you’re going yet?” I said after eating the stew he’d ladled onto a plate for me. It had potatoes and carrots and onions and some sort of meat chunks.

  He shrugged. “Not yet, not exactly.”

  “Well, I’m told the way you’re headed—I’m headed—will take us both right to Refugio.”

  “Where you were when those lawmen got hold of you,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “And it’s them you’re going to kill?”

  “Kill, or use pretty hard,” I said. “They’ve got my horse, saddle, rifle, pistol, money, and some of my blood. I figure they owe me and I aim to collect.”

  “Might not be worth it,” he said. “Results could be the same as they were last time, maybe even worse.”

  “They’ve got something else they took too,” I said.

  He looked at me, the light jumping on his face.

  “A woman.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Well a woman certainly does add to the drama.”

  So I told him the whole story, about Antonia and Johnny Waco and all the rest and that what I was trying to do was something good for somebody and it had ended up costing me.

  “We never do good simply for good’s sake,” he said. “You want some coffee?”

  I nodded and he filled two cups and handed me one.

  “How so?” I said.

  “We mostly do good so we feel better about ourselves,” he said. “Yes, we might help another person, but we don’t do it for that reason alone. We do it because it makes us feel good. So it’s not entirely unselfish.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Probably not.”

  “I’m guessing you were in the God business at one time or the other.”

  He simply smiled and said, “We’re all in the God business.”

  Somewhere in the darkness I heard a dove coo. A moon like a china plate lifted into the night sky. Wind whispered to the fire and the fire whispered back.

  “I saw you go into that church today.”

  “A man needs respite and replenishing sometimes,” he said.

  “From anything in particular?” I said.

  “Most often it is from ourselves,” he said. “But today was for the something else.”

  “You on the dodge, Tom? I mean it doesn’t matter one way or the other if you are. What you did for me. That’s what matters.”

  “No,” he said slowly, sipping his coffee, his brim down low over his eyes. “I’m not running from anyone except maybe myself.”

  “Running or searching?” I said.

  “Sometimes it’s the same thing.”

  “Sometimes it is, yes.”

  A star shot across the sky so quick you couldn’t be sure it had.

  “That a wedding band?” I said.

  He looked at his hands, the ring on his finger.

  “Yes.”

  “A woman just adds to the drama,” I said.

  He smiled. “That it does,” he said.

  “You want, we can ride as far as Refugio together,” I suggested.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  I lay down by the fire, a coat and hat not much for a bed, but it was what I had. When I closed my eyes, the last thing I saw was Tom Twist squatting there holding his coffee cup between his hands, blowing on it then sipping and staring into the flames, and I wondered what all he was made of and how a man like him had drifted so far from whatever or wherever he had been.

  I slept like I always did, like the dead.

  “How will you do it?” he said the next morning after we’d eaten a light breakfast and cleaned the camp and mounted the horses.

  “Do what?”

  “Take on those lawmen by yourself?”

  “I don’t have all the details worked out yet,” I said. “I sort of plan things as they come to me.”

  “Shouldn’t that be important, the planning?”

  “It should. I never did brag I was any sort of genius. I go along to get along, as they say. But then sometimes these things happen to you you didn’t plan and you have to make it up as you go along.”

  “I don’t think violence is the answer, Jim.”

  “Maybe you should tell them who committed it on me that,” I said. “Wouldn’t be no violence in their future if they hadn’t done some in their past. I can’t just let it go. And besides, there’s the woman I owe.”

  “You can’t be responsible for their behavior, only your own.”

  “We’re square on that,” I said.

  We rode along.

  “Turn the other cheek, is that it?” I said after thinking about it for a while.

  “It takes a man of some character to turn the other cheek,” he said.

  “Which I don’t pretend to have—character
.”

  “Will you feel better about it later, after you’ve wrought violence upon them?”

  “Some, I reckon. Better than I’d feel if I just let them get away with it.”

  We reached this side of the brown hills late that day with clouds folding in on themselves in a low sky and the threat of rain or maybe even snow, as cold and damp as the wind was.

  “We should make camp early,” he said.

  My whole backside was sore from riding bareback. I didn’t fight him on the idea.

  We made a fire and he set up his cook pot and boiled water from a clear running little stream and spilled in some beans to boil and sliced off a couple of good chunks of salted pork. We didn’t talk much.

  We ate and his silence was complete, as though he was preoccupied with something.

  About the time I was set to lay down by the fire again he spoke.

  “My wife…” he began. I sat there listening. “She was murdered.” Wind rose and fell around us like some great beast breathing and sighing.

  “It happened almost a year ago,” he said, and bent and poured himself more coffee. “The men who killed her were never captured as far as I know. They’re still out there somewhere…” His gaze looked toward a darkness as vast as an ocean.

  “It’s got to be hard knowing that,” I said.

  “It is,” he said. “Annalee was a decent and kind woman. It was her kindness, I think, that cost her her life. The way it looked, what I could ascertain was, she’d let the men into the house, probably thinking to do them a kindness. There were four plates on the table, the food half eaten, muddy boot tracks under it. They probably came by and asked for a meal and she never thought anything but to feed them. She was that way—a Quaker. Peaceful woman without an ounce of hate toward anybody.”

  I tried imagining her, wondered if she was anything like Antonia, who I guessed was probably a good woman at one time, as all women were probably good at one time.

  He reached inside his pocket and took out a silver frame and stared at it.

  “That her, your wife?” I said.

  He nodded and held it out and I took it and tilted it toward the light and saw the photograph of a sweet-faced woman with light hair and eyes that seemed to stare into vast nothingness; an innocent stare, it was.

  “She was twenty-three,” he said as I handed the picture back to him.