Big Bend

by John Benteen

  “We git water,” Concho said.

  “Where?”

  Concho gestured vaguely. “There water out there, I know where. We find it all right.”

  “No,” Ramsey said. He picked up the canteen, slung it over his shoulder and held its strap in a tight grip.

  Concho looked at him and the canteen with hatred. Then he said hoarsely, “Awright. You go where you want to. I goin’ after Nora.” He turned his face from Ramsey and began to walk.

  It was a travesty of a walk, a swaying, lurching, tortuous, loose-jointed process of lifting one foot with the utmost effort, then the other; and even as he did it, Concho had to brace himself on the wall of the canyon with a hand. Ramsey stood motionless and watched him. Concho could not keep that up longer than a minute or two; then he would collapse. Ramsey thought: It’s hopeless. I should have gone on last night.

  And yet, amazingly, Concho refused to fall. Five steps, ten, twenty. Ramsey could hear him panting and see the sweat on his head and neck and his naked torso where it showed through the rags of the shirt and the bandage. But instead of weakening with each step, he seemed to be gaining strength, and suddenly, with a decisive gesture, he pushed himself away from the canyon wall and shambled slowly on without support. He stumbled down into the dry stream-bed that ran through the canyon, and Ramsey heard him grunt. But he did not fall. Swaying, lurching, he kept on, lifting first one foot and then the other and planting them carefully in the sand of the wash.

  Now, without even looking back at Ramsey, he was about to round the turn. Ramsey stood there frozen for a moment longer; then, hardly realizing what he was about, he ran after Concho.

  “All right,” he said when he caught up with Concho. “Damn it, all right.”

  Concho said, without looking around, “You coming?”

  Ramsey took Concho’s arm. “You better lean on me,” he said. Then he said, “You better not be lying about the water. If we don’t find it, we’ll both be dead by tomorrow night.”

  “We find it somewhere,” Concho mumbled. He shook off Ramsey’s grasp. “I kin walk by myself,” he said.

  Ramsey stared at the glittering wasteland ahead of them. As well die, he thought, going in one direction as another; and slowly he and Concho left the canyon and marched on into the merciless sunlight.

  It was not long before Concho, despite his protestations, needed Ramsey’s help. As they crossed a flat strewn with rock and gravel, bristled with yucca and cholla and prickly pear, Concho swayed and would have fallen into a tangle of cactus if Ramsey had not caught him. With an effort, as Ramsey steadied him, Concho stiffened his buckling legs, clinging to Ramsey with his right arm about the other’s shoulders. Concho’s breath was hot and foul in Ramsey’s face, and Concho’s eyes were half-glazed. But the Negro muttered savagely, “I all right.”

  “Like hell,” Ramsey croaked. He had not allowed himself any water, either, and his lips were swollen and split. His mouth felt as if it and his throat were clogged with dust. In addition, the high-heeled boots, never made for walking, had already rubbed his heels raw. He blinked into the glare of a cloudless sky and then dragged Concho to the dubious shade of a small boulder. Its shadow covered only their heads, as they sprawled on their backs. Ramsey unplugged the canteen. “You’d better take a drink,” he gasped, passing it to Concho.

  The Negro did not protest, as Ramsey had expected. He put the neck of the canteen to his mouth and took two cautious swallows. Ramsey found himself watching closely, jealously, greedily, to make sure Concho did not drink too much. Then he wiped the canteen’s neck and took a single swallow himself, letting the tepid water sluice deliciously around his dry mouth before he swallowed it.

  Closing the canteen, he also closed his eyes. “We’ll never make it,” he said, “unless the next water’s close. Where is it?”

  After a very long moment, Concho husked: “I think there some at a place called Cartridge Springs.”

  “You think? You think?” Ramsey hoisted himself on one elbow.

  “It run dry sometime. Not very often.”

  “How far?”

  Concho lay with eyes closed. “Ten miles,” he said. “Maybe twelve.” He paused as if gathering strength to talk. Then he pointed toward a mountain rearing above broken country across a huge expanse of heat-shimmering, gently rising flat. “Yonder. Foot of Rosillo Mountain.”

  Ramsey stared despairingly at the jumble of peak and ridge and arroyo. “Christ,” he whispered. “We’ll never make it, shape you’re in.”

  “We’ll make it,” Concho rasped. “Drink good, fill the canteen, then we wait for night, head on down Tornillo Creek to Chilicotal. That where your horses are; Sheep Kelly and Nora be there, too. Don’t worry, we make it somehow.” He touched the wound on his side. “Anyhow, it ain’t bleedin’. And if it ain’t started up by now, it ain’t goin’ to.”

  Ramsey said, “You got a shattered rib in there. It must be givin’ you hell.”

  “I can stand it,” Concho said. After a moment, he said, “I can stand anything I got to stand. You want to help me up? Layin’ here ain’t gettin’ us no closer to Cartridge Springs.”

  The rest of that day was as much delirium for Sam Ramsey as it must have been for the tortured Concho. It turned out that when the Negro was on his feet, try as he would, he could not walk without bracing himself against Ramsey. But with his arm around Ramsey’s shoulder, he could make stumbling progress. That was the way they traveled.

  By noon, they had made perhaps three miles, maybe four, and they were both exhausted. The sun was like a hammer pounding at them fiercely and without cessation. The heat sucked the water out of their bodies greedily, but their shirts never became wet; evaporation and the occasional dust-swirling furnace wind that blew dried all wetness immediately.

  Rosillo Mountain seemed no closer than it had been hours before. Ramsey’s stomach was beginning to growl with hunger, but thirst was, of course, the real torment. Next to the thirst, hunger and even the pain of his raw-rubbed feet shrank to minor inconveniences. It was the first time he could remember that his whole body had been thirsty. He wanted not only to drink water, but to plunge into it, wallow in it, let gallons of it soak in through his pores.

  Instead, inexorably, it oozed out. What they allowed themselves from the canteen replaced not one twentieth of what they lost through perspiration. Ramsey’s very eyeballs felt dry and harsh.

  They nooned in the scant shade of two yuccas growing fortuitously close together and five feet tall. They did not dare wait too long, though: Now they were in a race with complete dehydration. When whatever scanty water remained in their bodies was gone, they would not be able to travel at all. And Cartridge Springs was a lifetime away. Seven miles, maybe eight, Concho said. Alone, even with his raw feet, Ramsey could have made it in three hours, anyhow. But Concho’s weakness slowed their pace to half the normal walking speed of even a weary man, and the exertion of supporting the big Negro’s body sapped Ramsey of his own strength and made his fatigue far deeper than it should have been by now.

  They arose and went on. Presently they crossed the windblown ruts that comprised all the road there was into this part of Big Bend; by the road, said Concho, it was twice or maybe three times again as far to water at this time of year. They left the road and inched on toward the blue mountains, so near and yet so far away; and now the country was becoming rougher and more broken; there were deep arroyos to circle and draws to climb, their graveled bottoms and sides treacherous footing. Ramsey lost track of time; all he knew was that the sun, the damnable sun, was drying and shriveling him like a prune, and that if there were not water in Cartridge Springs, they were finished. By this time tomorrow, if not dead, they would no longer be conscious.

  They wasted no breath on talking. But once, in mid afternoon, Concho’s voice, seemingly from far away, impinged on Ramsey’s mind. “It ain’t hurtin’ so much. My side. It ain’t hurtin’ near as much.”

  Ramsey had no strength left to answer. Bu
t he thought vaguely that Concho was probably growing numb and faint, and that was why the pain was less.

  Somehow it had become late afternoon. The sun, downslanting, was still hot and terrible, but less so than before. The mountain loomed ahead of them now, peak and hogback and hump; and it was changing color. They stumbled across a dry-wash, and then Ramsey’s grip on Concho’s arm tightened.

  “Look,” he whispered, unable to speak aloud. “That’s it, ain’t it? Ain’t that it?”

  Ahead, in a draw at the foot of the mountain, there was a faint mist of greenery. It made startling contrast to the brown and red of rock, the drab hues of creosote and cactus. Cottonwood and willow brush, Ramsey thought, hope rising in him and strengthening him almost like water itself. “Oh, God,” he said, “that’s gotta be it. Come on, Concho—!”

  But the Negro neither answered nor quickened his pace. Ramsey turned his head, stared at the black face six inches above his own. It was ashen, the cheeks were sunken, and there was no more sweat on Concho’s skin. “Concho,” Ramsey said hoarsely.

  Although his feet moved on, in their slow, uncertain rhythm, Concho gave no sign of hearing. Ramsey used his other hand to catch Concho’s chin, turn the face around. Then he gasped. The eyes were sunken in the skull, glazed and unfocused. An eerie chill went up Ramsey’s spine. This man was dying—and yet he did not, would not, stop walking.

  A half mile, Ramsey thought. Surely the spring could be no more than a half mile. He halted; when he did, Concho’s feet kept moving. But Ramsey slid out from under the long, ropy arm and then he caught the lanky, rawboned body as it collapsed.

  As gently as he could, he lowered Concho to the ground. The Negro lay on his back, eyes open, staring at the sun. His chest rose and fell with his shallow breathing. Ramsey looked at the bandage. There was a small but growing spot of fresh, vivid red on its dirty surface.

  Ramsey pulled Concho’s sombrero over the Negro’s eyes. Then he unslung the canteen and shook it. Three, perhaps four swallows of water, carefully hoarded, left in it. He unplugged it, took one small swallow that was more delicious than anything he had ever tasted in his life. When he had at last allowed it to trickle down his throat, he felt sad. If there were not water over there, if the spring had died, only its last faint moisture keeping the greenery alive, this would be the last drink he would ever take.

  Then he raised Concho’s head and carefully poured the rest of the canteen’s pathetic burden into Concho’s mouth.

  It was not enough to revive the Negro. But perhaps it would keep him alive until he, Ramsey, could get back from the spring. Ramsey got uncertainly to his feet, slung the canteen once again, and, feeling strengthened by relief from Concho’s weight, hobbled on burning feet toward where the spring should be.

  Truly enough, he saw, as he reached the mouth of a narrow draw, there was a clump of willow and cottonwood. Suddenly, too, there was grunting and snorting and the clatter of little hooves on gravel, and from the bushes exploded a half-dozen javelinas, the little wild pigs of the desert, bristles erect, tusks gleaming. As Ramsey shrank to one side, they scuttled down the draw, poured past him so close he could catch their rank and musky odor, and then were gone. His heart pounding from the sudden fright and from hope and yearning and desperation, Ramsey stumbled on up the draw. At last he reached the screen of brush, parted it, and forced his way through.

  The pigs had muddied the water; but it was there, a gallon or two in a shallow rock tank hollowed over the years by the slow seepage from a face of solid rock. What overflow there was traveled not a yard before it was totally lost in dry sand. Ramsey crashed down in the brush until he was lying flat, and then he buried his face in the tepid, foul, and blessed liquid.

  It was nearly a half hour later before he got back to Concho. It had taken that long for his own strength to revive. The Negro lay on the desert, exactly as Ramsey had left him. The red stain on the bandage was much bigger now. For a moment, Ramsey could detect no motion of Concho’s chest or belly and was sure the Negro was dead. But when he put his hand over Concho’s heart, he could feel a faint but surprisingly steady rhythm.

  Ramsey got the Negro’s head up on his own knees. When he took off the sombrero, Concho’s eyes were still open, dull and vacuous. Ramsey put the canteen to Concho’s mouth, let water seep slowly in, trying to be careful not to strangle the man. When a half pint had disappeared, Ramsey poured perhaps a quart over Concho’s face. Then he gave Concho another drink and sat down, himself exhausted once again, and lit a cigarette.

  Presently Concho’s chest moved with a deep breath, and Concho said gently, almost absently: “Nora?”

  “Wake up, Concho,” Ramsey said.

  Concho blinked. “Who that?”

  “Ramsey.”

  “Oh.” Concho at last closed his eyes. Then he said, “I ain’t thirsty no more.” His voice was a whisper. “We at the spring?”

  “Almost,” Ramsey said. “It’s a half mile over yonder.”

  Concho lay quietly and in silence for perhaps three minutes. Then he said: “Gimme a hand up. I can make it.”

  Chapter Eight

  The damnable thing about the desert, Sam Ramsey thought, was the way it could fry you all day and freeze you all night. Now that the sun had gone down, it was bitterly cold at the springs. The wind that swept across the flats without hindrance almost had a touch of ice in it; they were, after all, at an altitude of nearly three thousand feet here.

  Yet, they did not dare risk a fire. The temperature would not drop low enough to threaten them, not if they kept to the shelter of the draw, which broke the worst impact of the wind. Here, in darkness, nagged by hunger, they lay sprawled as best they could arrange themselves on gravel and rock. Ramsey had rebandaged Concho’s wounds, and the seepage of blood had apparently stopped. Despite the chill, Concho had fallen asleep almost immediately, and he had slept nearly without moving, a deep, drugged slumber. Now he had awakened, and Ramsey, who had slept only fitfully, heard him drinking from the canteen.

  Ramsey sat up, lit a cigarette, and had a drink himself. Overhead, the sky was salted with stars. Occasionally, down the draw, there was a startled snort, as one of the deer flocking to the spring caught their scent and retreated. Ramsey said, “How you feeling?”

  “Better,” Concho said. “A whole lot better. I be ready to travel again tomorrow.”

  “We aren’t traveling tomorrow,” Ramsey said.

  “The hell you say!” Concho snapped. Ramsey heard the clatter of gravel as Concho, groaning slightly, propped himself up on his elbow. “I tell you I’m all right. And I ain’t gonna let Kelly—”

  Ramsey said, coldly, cruelly: “Whatever Kelly wants to do to her, he’s already done by now.”

  Concho’s indragged breath made a shuddering sound in the night.

  Then Ramsey went on, still in that cold tone. “It shouldn’t make much difference anyhow, considering the place Stewart married her out of.”

  Concho said in a strangled voice, “Goddam you—”

  “So why would it matter to her?” Ramsey said. Then his voice went on, brutally beating at Concho. “I dragged you here, by God. Another mile and you’d have never made it, you’d be dead by now, and maybe me with you. Those holes in your side have got to have time to heal. You may be big and tough, but you ain’t made out of iron. The way it is now, we could walk up on Kelly and his outfit tomorrow, and after we’d made a day like today, they wouldn’t even have to shoot us. They could knock us over with feathers. Long as you’re in the shape you’re in, you ain’t worth a damn to yourself or me or her, either one. And neither am I as long as I got to drag you.”

  “You won’t hafta drag me,” Concho said ferociously.

  “You think that now. It’ll be another matter, noon tomorrow.” Ramsey’s voice was flat. “You go on, you go by yourself. I don’t aim to be bothered with you anymore. Not until you’re strong enough to take care of yourself and pay your own way.”

  There was silence. Then C
oncho’s voice said, subtly, “Your hawses are at Chilicotal Springs right now. We wait, they’ll be across the Rio, another coupla days.”

  “I’m not thinking of my horses,” Ramsey said; and he was surprised to find that it was true. He paused a moment, examining that in his own mind before he went on. “I’m thinking about Nora Stewart.”

  “After what you said about her—”

  “It’s true, ain’t it?”

  Silence. Then Concho letting out a gusty breath. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s true.” His voice quickened; there was urgency in it, almost pleading. “But you got to understand about it. She was not like any of the other girls. She a lady—”

  “Sure,” said Ramsey.

  “She born a lady,” Concho said. “She come from a good family in Baltimore, only ... she got mixed up with a worthless no-account man when she not really old enough to know better. Her family come between ’em and she ran off with him.” His voice harshened with hatred, bitterness, a score long unpaid. “When he tired of her, he run off and leave her in Baton Rouge. She don’t know how to do nothing to earn a living and she don’t dare go home and ... Miss Annie’s a high-class place. It a lot better than starving.”

  “That’s where you met her?”

  Concho’s voice was soft. “Yeah. That where I met her. I work for Miss Annie, tend bar, bouncer, I see right away Miss Nora ain’t no ordinary hog-ranch girl. I ... I make it my business try to watch over her best I can.

  “Then Hank Stewart come along. He fall for her and ask her to marry him. She say it wouldn’t be fair to him. I tell her, he know what he is doing. Then she say, it still wouldn’t be fair, she didn’t love him. She say she don’t think she ever gonna love any man again in her whole life.” His voice tapered off. Ramsey could hear his breathing in the darkness. “But I make her see at last it her only chance. She go ahead and marry him and he bring her here. He not the best man in the world, but he not a bad ’un, either. And she ... she got thoroughbred blood in her, all right. Ain’t no man could ask for a better wife than she made him.”