City of Widows

by Loren D. Estleman

  John Whiteside is in most of the history books now as the man who opened up New Mexico to the cattle trade. Severely wounded at the head of his own regiment at Cold Harbor and mustered out, he got a head start on the other barons who went west after the war, rounding up the red-eyed, ladder-ribbed descendants of Cortez’s longhorns wandering wild in Mexico and booting them up into the territories, inventing a new business in the process. Comanches raped and killed his Mexican wife of six months and ran off his first herd, and when he got through fighting them the Apaches came and burned his headquarters and strung his partner head down over a mesquite fire until his brains boiled. Whiteside was still fighting them at the time I caught up with him in the summer of 1881, but his fame had not yet spread north of Taos and I didn’t know him from General Grant. He was just a short twist of rawhide seated on a wagon loaded with spools of barbed wire in a faded blue flannel shirt, canvas breeches, and a wide Mexican sombrero, holding the team while a trio of men in overalls and leather gauntlets spun the jacked-up left rear wheel to seat the wire around a fencepost. He had brown whiskers going gray around his mouth and restless blue eyes in a thicket of wrinkles. His left arm was gone above the elbow, the empty sleeve pinned back.

  “I require all the horses I have.” He’d glanced at me when I rode up, then returned to his seemingly aimless study of the horizon. If an irregularity appeared there he’d spot it.

  “I’m no hand at bargaining,” I said. “The truth is I stink at it. I’ll pay two hundred for that claybank in the corral.”

  “Murdock, is it? Mr. Murdock, I’m in the fence business. I used to trade in cattle but right now I spend most of my time restringing wire. I’ve strung this section six times. Billy the Kid showed the world how easy it is last October when he cut it the first time and spirited out five hundred head. Between the goddamn thieves and those Apache bastards and that greaser son of a bitch Don Segundo del Guerrero down in Chihuahua and every lost tramp who cannot be bothered to ride half a mile to the nearest gate I have strung more wire in this one corner than Western Union. You will pardon me if I don’t feel the necessity to add a livery operation to this here booming fence trade I have going.”

  “The sheriff gave me your name.”

  “Sheriff.” He snarled the word. “Dolan men counted the ballots. They were only just through counting when the first silver shipment to the bank in Socorro City went missing. It was Frank’s brother Ross done it and he has been behind all the others since. I supply beef to all the bigger mining companies in the territory and what injures them injures me. When I suggested taking this to Lew Wallace, Frank started arresting my best hands for shooting up Mexicans.”

  “He said something about it. He didn’t say your men were involved.”

  “My hands were swapping lead with Don Segundo’s vaqueros over the ownership of cows when the Baronet brothers were still abusing themselves to cigarette cards. Anyway I took his message. It isn’t my silver, and I need men to run a ranch.”

  “You must have choked on it.”

  “It wasn’t my first choice. However, times are different. Sooner or later some ass would decide to call in the army just like they done in Lincoln County. That is bad for business.”

  “The fence business.” I grinned.

  He turned his blues on me. They were as austere as the sky. “I see someone has used you.”

  I let the grin slide. “Baronet. I was foolish enough to give him a reason, but his real purpose was to warn me. I was there last night when a man named Boone caught him in a lie about his brother being dead in Mexico. He killed Boone later. He said it was an argument over cards, but he was the only witness.”

  “I don’t mourn Sidney L. Boone. Those land men are slicing up the country like a steer. Are you fixing to call Frank out?”

  “Fights are easy enough come by without provoking them. Anyway I haven’t time. I’m just passing through on my way to San Sábado.”

  “What’s in the Widow City?”

  “A place called the Apache Princess, and my signature on the operating agreement. Cattlemen welcome. Fence men too,” I added. “What about that claybank?”

  His attention hesitated on something, then moved on. An antelope or a low cloud.

  “Three hundred,” he said. “This wire costs money when you order it by the carload.”

  We shook on it.

  4

  “WELL, MURDOCK, I guess you have had your fill of the county seat.”

  I exhaled slowly, letting some of the tension out with the bad air. After checking out of the hotel and packing my worldly possessions aboard my new mount I had hoped to clear the place without running into the sheriff. I’d begun to think I might succeed when I pulled over to let a buggy pass coming in from the east road and Frank Baronet drew rein to blink up at me from under the roof. He had on a linen duster over his town clothes and a Henry rifle that might have been the one I’d seen in the county office leaning against his thigh. The embroidered pillow was wedged between his lower back and the leather seat. I had dismissed that as a ploy to conceal his pistol, but since the handle of the Remington was visible in the notch of his vest I decided the pillow served another purpose.

  “I’ve been in town less than a day and already there’s been a killing and a pistol-whipping,” I said. “I left marshaling to get away from that.”

  “If that was your intention you should have gone back East, where I hear a man can wet his beak of a Saturday evening without a weapon on his person.” His eyes went to the claybank’s brand. “I see you took my advice and went to Whiteside. What that man knows about horses and cattle comes close to making up for what he don’t know about people.”

  It was a conversation I didn’t feel like getting into. “When I saw that rig I thought you were a doctor.” It was a handsome construction of pebbled black oilskin and good leather on yellow wheels, hitched to a patient-looking gray. Brass fittings caught the light.

  “A walleyed mustang threw me into a ravine in ’78. I haven’t been able to ride more than eight or ten miles at a stretch since the brace came off. Misery of the back is a hellish thing, worse than being shot. It has taken all the fun out of collecting taxes.” He adjusted the pillow and leaned back. Pain brushed across his features like a cloud. “Don’t forget to register with the marshal’s office when you get to San Sábado. It is required of new saloon owners.”

  “Your order?”

  He spread his moustaches. “When it’s one of mine I enforce it with enthusiasm, as I think you know.” He gathered the reins. “Buena suerte, Murdock. I will be in one day soon and try my luck at your table.” He rattled off.

  My destination was a day’s ride from Socorro City in gentle weather, slightly longer in the dead-blow hammer heat of August. The way led south along the foothills of the Oscuros and San Andres, broken peaks bleached white above the timberline like the molars of fighting dogs, through a region covered with cactus nettles and white alkali, charmingly named La Jornada del Muerto. I kept a weather eye, but of course I didn’t see Apaches. There never were enough of them in any one place to make a show of strength on a ridge like in the five-cent dreadfuls. Their strategy was to run among the rocks like those little hot-blooded lizards you saw in the tail of your eye and take you from behind. At dusk I made camp in the lee of an old rockfall with the claybank tethered to my wrist and my Winchester across my lap. In the morning I found the charred foundation of a house nearby and the rocky oblongs of four graves, their markers long since gone if there had been any to begin with. It was raw country, stolen many times from determined hands at great cost. The white man was only the latest in a long line of misguided thieves.

  You don’t haggle too hard over the price of a good horse in country where your life depends on what you’re riding, and the claybank was proving to be a wise investment. It was a gelding, fifteen hands high with a big rump and an arrogant manner, which meant a keen sense of self-preservation. This last was a credit, as a suicidal horse is less than
useful when scalp fever is abroad. Of course the beast hated me. All my mounts do out of instinct. They know I’ll shoot them for a breastwork the minute we fall short of room to run.

  Not missing San Sábado entirely required knowledge of the ways of open country. Coming over a rise I saw what looked at first like Indian mounds or a prairie dog town, but was in fact a collection of adobe buildings swept up around the base of a sixteenth-century mission, with a few frame structures straggled east like a thread unraveling, and everything baked the same dun color on a flat that hadn’t known shade since the last glacier. Something inside me sank at the sight. I felt like the consumptive who had come at last to the place where he would die, and it wasn’t Atlantic City, New Jersey.

  Closer up, things were more encouraging. The bell in the mission tower began to swing, the thud of its clapper humming along the ground and shaking loose activity behind windows and inside the covered walkways. That would be the end of the noon siesta. There was, in addition to another saloon besides the Apache Princess, a livery, an emporium, and a combination bathhouse and barbershop, the last in a building that had started out adobe, then split in the middle like some kind of hybrid grass and wound up clapboard with a shake roof. Best of all, a harness shop advertised itself in two windows on the second floor of the livery. That meant cowboys. The bare fact that I would welcome that obstreperous lot was evidence enough I had stopped thinking like a lawman and started thinking like an entrepreneur.

  Other windows, particularly those in the old mud huts, were less cheering. Muslin curtains stirred but did not open. Behind two of them I glimpsed the black weeds of the widows who gave the town its popular name.

  I stepped down in front of the livery, removed my necessaries from behind the cantle, and told the Yaquí who came out from inside to rub down the claybank and give it water and feed. The Indian, short and thick in peasant dress with his hair cut short and no shine in his black eyes, took the reins and said nothing. That breed got most of its talking and all of its laughing done by age ten.

  THE APACHE PRINCESS was painted in circus letters two feet high across the windowless false front of the last wooden building in the row. They would have flared out in bright barn red when they were new, but in just six months the New Mexico sun had dulled them the color of dried blood. I pushed aside a half-door on a leather hinge and stood inside the dim interior, blinking like Frank Baronet. The sudden shade chilled the back of my neck.

  “Page! Goddamn!” A chair scraped back and my hand was seized by a narrow wiry one crackling with nervous energy. “The red bastards didn’t scalp you after all. There’s a bet won.”

  “It’s good to see you, Junior.”

  I did see him now, all five and a half skinny feet of him, splendid in lilac-colored shirtsleeves with red plush garters, paisley vest, and a green silk cravat stuck with a ruby pin. His collar was too big by half and his fingers stuck out of the cuffs like a child’s. He looked as out of place in the rig as he had in range clothes when we both worked his father’s spread in Montana. Junior Harper had fair hair darkened with pomade and slicked flat to his skull, large luminous eyes, and a long rectangular jaw like a sewing machine treadle that slid to the side rakishly when he showed his big horse teeth. At first glance, and maybe at all the others, he looked like a hereditary failure beside Ford Harper’s bull shoulders and red beard shot through with iron gray, and in fact two physicians, including a specialist whom Ford had brought in from Saint Louis for a second opinion, had predicted Junior wouldn’t live to see twenty; but he had made them both liars by fifteen years and counting and there wasn’t a hand who had worked with him who didn’t have some story attesting to his strength and endurance. He was a pale reed with a taproot that went clear through to China.

  “You’re some older,” he said, stepping back to take me in from hat to heels, “but you are still one mean-looking son of a bitch. I’m guessing Geronimo took one look at you and hared right back to Arizona.”

  “You look like Christmas Day. Is that what they’re wearing on the border this year?”

  He grinned his sloppy sideways grin and stuck a hand inside his vest like an oil painting. “Men of property don’t dress like spring roundup. I hope you aren’t fixing to deal cards in that kit.”

  “I had a suit fitted before I left Helena. It’s probably following me right now. Is your mother still living?” I remembered a frail brown sparrow, small-boned like her son and withered beyond her years in Ford’s shadow.

  “She’s well and in Chicago. She moved in with my aunt after the old man died. You heard he was dead.”

  “Apoplexy, I heard.” My bet had been on either the Shoshones or a fall from a mad horse. He’d continued to insist on breaking his share of the string well past his sixtieth birthday.

  “I sold the ranch to pay his debts. Ma got most of the rest and I put down what was left on the Princess. That’s why I needed a partner, to buy the fixtures and inventory. What do you think of her?”

  My eyes were adjusting to the dusty light coming in through the windows. The room was larger and simpler than the Orient in Socorro City, with wood chips on the plank floor and the standard lithographs razored out of eastern publications and framed on the walls, racehorses and boxers. The bar itself was plain pine and lacked a rail. The mirror behind it was a giveaway, carrying an advertisement for the Hermitage Distillery of Franklin County, Kentucky, dressed up a little with red-white-and-blue bunting. There were eight tables, including a faro layout in the corner, and three hurricane lamps swinging from the ceiling.

  “Who supplies the stock?” I asked.

  “Distributor in El Paso. We’re on the route. That bar’s temporary. I put in a bid on a honey in El Paso del Norte across the border. Mexico City closed the place down for treating with enemies of the republic. This here’s Irish Andy. He won’t tell me his other name. I hired him right out from under the Mare’s Nest down the street.”

  I shook hands with the man behind the bar, blue eyes and a sheared head on a buffalo neck with shoulders to match, aproned from his neck to his knees. He had one of those fixed smiles you wanted to trust but knew better. I asked him what part of Ireland he was from.

  “Frankfurt.” His accent was as thick as a Prussian lance. “What can I pour you?”

  “Bet you could eat the asshole out of a skunk,” Junior put in. “We got a stove in back.”

  “I’ll have a steak and a bottle.”

  Andy stood a bottle and a glass on the bar and went through the curtain in back. Junior and I sat down at a table out of the sunlight. He folded his blue-veined hands on the table and watched me drink. “Ever throw a lip over any whiskey smoother than that?” Liquid eyes pleaded.

  “I’ve had loads worse. I guess you still can’t drink hard liquor.”

  “Ties my guts in square knots.” He kneaded his hands. “Page, I’m sore glad you came in with me. To tell you the truth I never thought you would when I wrote you. I figured after all this time you had that star tattooed on.”

  “Six years is as long as I do anything. I was grateful you kept the offer open. It took me three months to make up my mind.”

  “You pulled me out of more than one bog. I calculated I owed you that much time and then some.” He chewed the ends of the moustaches he’d been nurturing for as long as I’d known him. They disappeared in strong light. “Shit, whose hind leg am I pulling? The Lord’s truth is I didn’t have no other takers.”

  The thing that had sunk in me when I got my first look at the town sank again. “You swore to me it was a sound investment.”

  “Oh, the Princess is a hell of a lot more than just that. We got the Butterfield coming through four times a month and there’s talk the Atchison might run a spur out here, and until then we have those trail herders stealing Mexican beef, which is thirsty work. I just don’t inspire confidence. Folks that don’t know me look at me and think I am bound to crumple under the first hard rain.”

  “They don’t know you for cert
ain.”

  “Well, there you have it. I was thinking of selling out to Eille MacNutt at the Mare’s Nest when the wire came with your end. That money came in handy, I can tell you.”

  A whiff of hot grease reached my nostrils from in back. My stomach started to gnaw. I poured whiskey into it. “When’s the next herd come through? It’s been a long time since I played with house money. I need to practice.”

  “That’s the other thing. You won’t be the only one playing with house money.”

  “You hired a dealer?”

  “No. No, not exactly.” He looked down at his hands.

  I stuck the cork back in the bottle. “Who’d you cut in and for how much?”

  “Now, Page, I had expenses. The carpenter I hired never done a roof before. It leaked and I had to bring in somebody else to do it right. Lumber’s dear. The wholesale price of whiskey went up. Then the note came due on the town lot. There was other things. It’s all in the ledger.” He pried his hands apart and laid them palms down. “It was a third interest.”

  “You sold half of my half without telling me?”

  “You’ll get your end.”

  “It isn’t that I’m concerned about. I came all this way thinking I owned fifty percent of something and now I find out I’m part of a syndicate. We had a deal, Junior.”

  “You want out?”

  “What if I said yes? That ruby stickpin wouldn’t bring today’s interest on what you owe me.”

  “I’ll go back to ranch work if I need to. My old man would pay you your time in the middle of a stampede if you asked, and I am his son. If it takes twenty years I’ll settle the debt.”

  “Hell.” I took the cork back out and refilled my glass. “For all we know they won’t even honor cash money come the new century. Sheep will be the coin of the union. That or silk hats.”