Rides a Stranger

by Bill Brooks

  She rose from the table and went to a cupboard and got down a bottle of liquor and three glasses. He looked at her when she poured some in all three.

  “Nora, when did you start drinking?” he said.

  “I guess when you decided to go save your ex-wife and get yourself near killed for your trouble,” she told him.

  We all three drank down what she’d poured. I don’t know it made any of us feel any better, but it probably didn’t make us feel worse.

  “Now what?” he said.

  “I’m going to go get her.”

  “Let it go, Jim. You did what you could, it didn’t work out. Next time he’ll kill you.”

  “You know, Chalk, I would do that very thing, just let it go. Except I can’t. It’s just not in me to do so.”

  “I can’t help you no more, Jim. I can’t help Antonia no more. I’ve got Nora to think about. And these hands of mine ain’t never going to heal right and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to use them for anything. I already paid all the price I can afford.”

  He looked broken in more than just his hands.

  “I’m not asking you to do anything more,” I said. “I just came to see how you were making out.”

  She poured us another glass each of the liquor and we sat and drank like three old friends even though we didn’t know very much about each other except we were all bonded by the same thing: injustice.

  “All I ever wanted in life was just to be a footloose puncher,” I said to neither of them in particular. “And I was fairly well content with my life till all this happened. I’d like for things to go back to what they were, and maybe they will eventually…”

  “Some things happen that change us forever, Jim,” he said, looking down at his hands.

  “You’re right, they do,” I said, and stood. “Take care of yourself, Chalk.”

  “You as well, Jim.”

  His wife looked at me as though she was glad I was leaving. I didn’t blame her.

  The night air breathed a cool wind and I walked over to the Bison and went inside where men tended to their needs and commiserated with their own brand of misery, lives not all lived in the way they’d hoped, just as my own wasn’t lived in a way I’d once dreamt of. They stood along the bar and gathered around the few tables. Bill was there at his usual spot behind the bar. I did not yet see Tom.

  I walked to the bar and took up residence near the far end and Bill came down and said, “I never thought I’d see you ’round these parts again. I heard you ran off with Johnny Waco’s woman, stole her after you delivered her up there from Pink’s hog farm…”

  “You just here to ask questions or do you still sell beer in this place?” I said, ignoring the comment.

  He moved down and pulled a tap till he filled a beer glass then walked it back and set it in front of me. “Takes some balls to show back up around here.” It was a caution not a threat. “They’ll be looking for you they hear you’re back in town.”

  “I’m supposed to meet a friend of mine here, fellow with his arm in a sling. You seen him?”

  “He was in a little while ago looking for a doc. I sent him over to Doc Flax’s place.”

  I drank my beer and watched four men at a table playing poker, listened to them grouse and tell jokes and lose money and win it. They were playing for low stakes, no more than a fifty cent limit. They weren’t the sort of men who would play for big money, just cattlemen and punchers looking to lose themselves from wives who were waiting home, or to avoid empty cots in a bunkhouse somewhere.

  I paid for my beer and told Bill that if my friend returned to tell him to wait for me and walked out again into the black night and looked to the far side of the tracks were a few lanterns were hung in the doorways and windows. A locomotive stood on the tracks, behind it a line of passenger cars, quiet and dark as a dead beast waiting the morning run.

  I walked across the dead line and reached Pink’s place. Inside I could hear a man’s laughter, and then a woman’s. I knocked on the door and Lorri answered.

  “Well, my my,” she said with a smile. I could see she was a little drunk. A fancy dude was sitting there on the horsehair divan across from the pimp, Pink Huston. They were passing a crystal decanter of what looked like some expensive whiskey back and forth.

  Pink looked toward the door and said, “Who is it?”

  “An old friend of ours,” Lorri said and stepped back to let me in.

  “The pugilist,” he said. It sounded more like a cuss word than a compliment. “You bring Antonia back to me?”

  The other man had thin graying hair combed over from a part just above his left ear. His face was red. His shoes were soft and black and polished. He was heavy as a grass fed heifer.

  “I’d come to see if she maybe had made her way back here to you,” I said.

  “Can I get you something, cowboy?” Lorri said. She was standing with her back to Pink and I could see the look in her eyes held the promise of more than just a drink if I wanted it and was willing to play a game of deception.

  “I just came to see about Antonia,” I said. It gave me a little satisfaction to say that to her, as though she and I were playing a game that only the two of us knew the rules to.

  “Oh, is that all?”

  “She ain’t here, and the way I see it, you owe me for her ser vices unrendered,” Pink said. He started to stand, I guess to make himself look tough in front of his friend, maybe in front of Lorri too.

  “You a slaver?” I said.

  That stopped him short, that and the fact he’d had too much to drink and was unsteady. He fell back down.

  “Slaver?”

  “The last I heard people were free to go where they wanted. Unless of course you’re a slaver, which would make you something illegal.”

  The other man was eyeing me with mild curiosity, maybe waiting for something bad to happen between me and Pink, a bloodletting perhaps.

  “T’fuck ya want here! Git him the hell out,” he shouted at Lorri.

  She took me by the elbow and guided me to the door, stepped outside with me, pulling her red silken robe tight to her against the cool night air.

  “Why don’t you come back later, after Pink’s passed out. No sense in all of us having a lousy night,” she said.

  “You know, if it were a different time and I was in a different mood, I’d probably take you up on that offer,” I said. She reached down and took my hand and placed it inside the robe.

  “You sure about that?” she said.

  She was warm and soft and round where my hand touched, like a dream you want to fall into on a cold night. I let it linger there for a second then withdrew it.

  “Oh, that it were so simple,” I said, and turned and walked away.

  “Oh, but it is,” I heard her say.

  I walked back up to the Bison and Tom was there. Standing alone, looking out of place.

  “How’d you make out at the doc’s?” I said.

  He looked down at his arm.

  “He said I was on the mend and there wasn’t much more he could do for me than what had already been done. He gave me these pills…” He reached in his pocket and took out a small envelope. “For the pain. I took one and now I’m feeling sort of okay.”

  “Cocaine pills,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “They’ll do the trick.”

  “So I’m finding out. How about you, you see your friend?”

  “Yeah.”

  I ordered us a beer then said, “You drink beer, don’t you?”

  “Sure, why not? I’m a two-gun killer and a doper now. What harm’s a little glass of beer?”

  We drank slowly.

  “What’s your plan?” he said. “You got one yet?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  He flexed the fingers on his bad hand.

  “They don’t hurt so bad,” he said. “Nothing does.”

  “That’s why people like those pills,” I said.

  We sipped our
beer.

  I didn’t notice the four punchers that came in until Bill eased down to our end of the bar and said, “Those boys that just came in—down the other end of the bar—those are some of Waco’s boys.”

  They were hard-looking men in long coats and chaps with their hat brims set down low over their eyes, and they stood at the end of the bar without talking, just drinking their beer.

  “They see you here they’ll run back and tell Johnny and he’ll come with even more of ’em and probably tie you to a horse and drag you till you’re nothing but raw meat and rags.”

  “When’d you start to worry about guys like me?” I said.

  “Ain’t you I’m worried for, I just don’t want my place tore up he finds you here.”

  I looked at Tom and he looked at me.

  “They look like working boys to me,” I said.

  “Waco pays ’em regular if that’s what you mean,” Bill said. “But he pays ’em for whatever he wants done and not just running his cows and mending fence.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess we’ll have to see,” I said.

  Tom slipped his revolver out with his good hand and held it just inside his duster and said, “Go ahead, I’m right behind you.”

  He followed me down to where they stood drinking and I said, “You’re off Johnny Waco’s outfit?”

  They turned their heads to look at me and Tom.

  “I’m not looking for a fight with you boys,” I said. “I just wanted to know if he got his wife back all right.”

  The one, a knotty fellow you could see had some bulk to him, gave me a hard stare.

  “What business would that be of yours?”

  Before I could answer him another one, a tall hook-nosed, sandy-haired puncher said, “That’s the old boy was with Chalk that day, you remember, Hank?”

  The knotty one rubbed his chin.

  A smile parted his rough beard.

  “I’m a mother’s son,” he said. “You run off with ol’ John’s woman then bring your sorry ass back here. Mister, you must have a death wish.”

  “No,” I said. “I just came back to see if she got home again safe and sound.”

  “Goddamn,” another one said. “You believing this?”

  They all four grew grins.

  “Maybe we ought to truss him up and take him back with us as a early Christmas present. Ol’ John would probably put something extra in our stockings.”

  They were laughing but you could feel the tension.

  “It’s just a simple question,” I said. “Is she out there with him now?”

  The knotty one shoved me away suddenly, nearly causing me to lose my balance, which only added to their perverse humor.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “Git on your goddamn nag and ride clear out of the territory and we’ll forget we even seen you. And take that lame arm sissy standing there with you.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right,” I said. “I should do that.”

  Then I hit him so hard I couldn’t tell for a moment whether it was my hand that shattered or his skull. And when the other three started to make their play, Tom brought out his gun and said, “I got enough pills in this to give you two each. Sleeping pills, and death is a long sleep. My friend asked you a civil question and he’d like an answer.”

  They looked from the barrel of Tom’s fancy pistol down to their friend who lay cold as stone at their feet. His head had struck a spittoon and turned it over onto himself so that along with the blood there was the stain of tobacco juice and old chewed plugs and wet cigar stubs.

  “She’s out there,” the hook nose said. “I don’t see where that’s no business of your’n.”

  I stepped over the one I hit and said to the three, “You boys don’t know how close you come to dying tonight. That one there,” I nodded toward Tom, “is John Wesley Hardin, and most generally when he pulls his piece somebody ends up dusted.” I don’t know if they believed one damn word but at this point Tom and me had gotten the upper hand on them and the answer I’d wanted and that was enough.

  We watched them pick up their smashed friend and carry him by the arms out the door, presumably on their way back to Johnny Waco’s to tell their tale, which was exactly what I wanted. If I knew anything at all about Antonia, she was a woman who could read a plan even if it wasn’t completely spelled out for her.

  We walked out after the punchers rode off and stood there in the night air.

  Tom said, “You’re going to get me killed, aren’t you?”

  “I’m going to try my best not to. That’s why this is where we part company, my friend.”

  “You’re going to try and do this alone?”

  “Look, two against all them or one against all them, it isn’t going to matter. We’re too few in number, me and you, Tom. Even if you were John Wesley Hardin it wouldn’t matter. Waco will send as many men as he needs to. I can’t outfight them all and I don’t plan to. People don’t live as long as we do because we’re tough, we live as long as we do because we’re just a tad smarter than the other guy. At least I’d like to believe that.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Let’s get us some rooms and then you head out first thing tomorrow in case they come early.”

  He nodded. Somewhere a dog barked. Somebody laughed from inside the saloon. Lights from across the tracks beckoned the lonely. The town was heading toward sleep.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  She held the bottle of mercury in her hands, the one she’d gotten Pedro to get her the last time he’d gone to town. For days she’d been struggling with the decision: life, or death?

  Maria, had, if anything, become more cruel toward her, had chided her at every opportunity, and she’d had no will to fight back. The only one who showed her the least bit of kindness was the old man, Maria’s henpecked husband, Pedro.

  On the day she’d asked him to buy her the mercury, he’d been grooming one of Johnny Waco’s favorite horses, a tall roan with a coat like polished mahogany.

  She could tell that Pedro felt a kinship to the animals, for he spoke to them lovingly whenever he groomed them.

  When she pressed the money into his hand and asked him to buy her the mercury, he tried to refuse.

  “Por favor, no pida el de mí, missus.”

  “You’re the only one I can ask such a favor of, Pedro.”

  He acted at first as if he hadn’t heard her, ran his brush down over the haunches of the big horse until she stopped him by touching his wrist.

  “Please,” she said.

  He nodded finally and took the money and had brought the bottle under his serape when he returned from town and gave it to her with the saddest eyes.

  “What will you do with it?” he asked her, though he was pretty sure he already knew, for he’d seen a prostitute in Nogales drink it when he was a young border outlaw, before he took a bullet to the hip and gave up his wild ways. In death her lips and flesh were as blue as winter ice.

  “Está de ninguna consecuencia,” she said. It’s of no consequence.

  He crossed himself, though he was no longer sure if God paid any attention to him because of all the bad things he’d done in his youth. And he was sure that as part of his punishment, God had given him Maria, who, among her other distasteful actions, had lately taken to sneaking up to the jefe’s house late at night. His Maria had turned him into something less than a man. It was only the jefe’s wife, Antonia, who treated him with respect. But he knew he had to be careful and not show her too much attention or deference, or Señor Waco would do to him what he’d done to the gringo lawman.

  Still, he liked her and was willing to take some risk, just as he had done when she’d asked him to get her a gun the last time she ran away. It was a pity to see her brought back by an armed man and handed over once more to Señor Waco; if anything, Antonia looked even more pitiful and sad than she had before she ran away.

  Every night in their bed, when she had not snuck off to the big house, his wife complained t
o him about Antonia. “That woman!” she called her. “She’s no good for Mr. Waco,” she would say. “He needs a good woman, not some puta who will run off the minute he turns his back.”

  He told her to hush her harsh talk, which only incited her all the more. He had come to conclude there was no use arguing with his wife, that he had no more power over her than he had over anything else. His time had come and gone with the coming and going of his youth. Old age had left him a man simply waiting for the end to come and to take him to whatever heaven or hell awaited men like him. He had thought when he married such a younger woman it would somehow return to him at least a little of his youth, but instead it had done the opposite, made him feel even older and more useless.

  It gave him a good feeling to help the woman, even if it was to kill herself, he thought when he’d handed over the bottle of mercury. At least he would help her escape whatever misery she was in. Such beauty, such a waste. If only I were a young bandit again, I would steal her away for myself.

  She heard the commotion downstairs and went to the door and listened. Some of Johnny’s hands had come in talking loud, telling him, “That fellow was with Chalk that day—the one who stole your wife, Mr. Waco—well, we by God run into him at the Bison Club. He was in there bold as brass.”

  Another of them said, “He hit Rolle straight in the mouth, knocked him cold as the bottom of a well. Show him where your tooth is missing, Rolle.”

  Her heart raced a little. Was it even possible Jim had come back for her?

  “He had to know we’d come tell you, Mr. Waco. You know if we’d been armed we’d taken care o’ him for you, don’t you, Mr. Waco?”

  “You get some of the boys, a dozen or so, and have them ready to leave here first light. Tell them I want them armed, pistols and rifles.”

  “Yes sir,” they said. She heard them shuffle out and went to the window and saw their shadows crossing the ground toward the bunkhouse.

  She heard him call her name.

  “Antonia!”

  She did not answer. She heard his heavy steps ascending the stairs.

  “Antonia,” he said again as he approached her closed door. She slipped the bottle of mercury under a satin-covered pillow there on her bed.