City of Widows

by Loren D. Estleman

  “To begin with, he is by now among the caves in Chihuahua. They are a honeycomb and have been known to swallow a platoon of cavalry for a week.”

  “You don’t know he’s there. You’re only guessing.”

  “In the second place, he has nothing that belongs to you. You have the lives of two of his compañeros, in fact. If anyone should be hunting anyone, it is he who should be hunting you. But you see he is not. This is because he is a man of reason.”

  “Tell me, does that star the city gave you mean anything?”

  “Sí, señor.” He gave one last tug. The stalk tore loose suddenly, leaving the root below the ground. He bared his teeth at the fragment in his hand, threw it aside, and sat back on his heels to take off the sombrero and drag a sleeve across his eyes. “It means five dollars a week and ten cents for every rat and stray dog I shoot in the city. Upon this and what I am paid for my work as a carpenter I put clothes on the backs and tortillas in the stomachs of eleven children.Por favor, look around you, señor. Do you see much carpentry work to be done? Do you see any?”

  “Your front door has a broken panel.”

  “I must be sure and pay myself to replace it. No, señor, San Sábado is not Socorro City. A man can live on the rats he shoots there. Here he must clean cisterns and hang doors and make repairs at the mission. He would sweep the floor there as well, except that is Yaquí work and if they catch him at it they will wait for him outside and cut his throat when he leaves. Having told you all this, I hope that you will excuse me if I do not spring into the saddle to run after a bandit who has not stolen anything.”

  “The families of eight Mexican muleskinners may not agree with that last part.”

  He crossed himself. “Lo siento, it was an infamous thing. But it is not my concern officially. That incident took place outside this jurisdiction. If I were to go after these swine, who would pay for the provisions?”

  “The Apache Princess will, along with a fee for your time.”

  “Your pardon, Señor Murdock.” He unfurled a lash of Spanish at a miniature version of himself urinating against the wall of the house at the end of the flower bed. The boy buttoned his fly hastily and ran inside, tears on his face. Ortiz sighed. “You have children, yes?”

  “None I know about.”

  “They are a treasure and a trial. If you spare the rod they will grow up to disappoint you. So will they if you employ it overmuch. These things I suppose are obvious. What is not so obvious is how little is too little, and how much is too much. This business of keeping the peace is simpler by far. I am told you were once a lawman, es verdad? You nod. Then you know that to track a man requires the existence of tracks. The Las Cruces pack train robbery is almost a week old.”

  “If you’re so sure about Chihuahua we can go down there and sniff around.”

  “You do not know that country. It is not just the caves. The place has sheltered brigands and revolutionaries since the time of the Aztecs. Everyone who lives there is either a bandit or the great-great-grandson of one, and strangers are their enemies. Have you ever seen a man cut to pieces by a machete?”

  “Sabers, in the war.”

  “I would not die such a death if it meant the lives of my children and their grandchildren. Chihuahua? No.”

  “Then what do you suggest?”

  “I? Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  He shrugged. I’ve seen all manner of men do that and I’m bound to say no man does it like a Mexican. “You have kept the peace. We may act only when the peace has been broken.”

  “That’s no good. Ross Baronet just made off with six thousand in silver. A man can stay underground a long time on far less.”

  “I see. You are in a hurry to apprehend this man whose actions have cost you nothing.”

  This time I shrugged, not as well. “If you like you can call it a defensive maneuver. He isn’t accustomed to failing, and we did cost him two men. I doubt he’s Christian enough to turn the other cheek.”

  “Your reasons are your own, señor. I am not refusing your offer. I cannot make adobe without mud.”

  I said nothing for a long time. I despised him thoroughly, not so much for his sloth as for the bare fact that he was right. I suppose I hated Judge Blackthorne too, for his deadline, but I was so accustomed to hating him I gave it no thought.

  “How can I get word to Don Segundo del Guerrero that I want to see him?” I asked.

  He nodded, as if he’d expected the question. “His foreman, Miguel Axtaca, is sometimes at the Mare’s Nest Friday night. He has a favorite there, Clara California.”

  “I know Clara. Axtaca doesn’t sound Spanish.”

  “It is not. It is Indian, very old Indian. He claims kinship with Montezuma the Great.”

  “I guess it’s too much to expect him to have forgiven us Cortez.”

  “It is difficult to picture Miguel Axtaca forgiving anyone anything, including himself.”

  “Friday night?”

  “When he is not attending to ranch business.” His eyes followed me as I got to my feet. “A word of caution, Señor Murdock. He is never without friends.”

  “Do these friends carry machetes?”

  “Por supuesto,” he said. “Of course. It is a dangerous land.”

  * * *

  Colleen was playing a hand of patience when I returned to the Princess. Her morning tea steamed at her elbow in a blue china cup on a saucer. I asked Irish Andy for coffee and he went into the back room for the pot.

  “No kibitzing,” she said when I brought my cup over and sat down opposite her. “It’s a game for one but everybody seems to have an opinion about how it should be played.”

  “You needn’t worry. I’ve never played it.”

  She paused in the middle of placing a black four on a red five. “Never?”

  “The use of it escapes me. What have you won when you’ve beaten yourself?”

  “Fifteen or twenty fewer minutes between you and the grave. That’s where we’re all headed anyway.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “You speak like a man with a system.”

  “You don’t win with a system,” I said. “You have to beat the system to win. You’re born, you grow up, you settle down, you have children, you die. Being born is something you have no control over, but if you avoid any or all of those in the middle you stand a better than even chance of avoiding the last.”

  “Don’t tell me. You chose not growing up.” She turned over the king of hearts.

  “I considered it. In the end I decided that playing games to live was for other people.”

  “Instead you played with guns.”

  “That wasn’t play.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  I met her blue stare. “No.”

  “Perhaps not.” She went bust and gathered in the cards. “I heard you had trouble with Indians.”

  “They had all the trouble. Jubilo told me he picked up the papers for Frank Baronet. Did you write them up the way we discussed them?”

  “Yes. Don’t you trust your partners?”

  “I trust Junior.”

  “You would. He’s a man.”

  “He hasn’t gone riding with Eille MacNutt.”

  She shuffled the deck the way she never did with rubes present, watching me over the blur. “Why don’t you say what you mean? You’re not concerned over any trouble with the Mare’s Nest in connection with our business arrangement. You wouldn’t be if Junior had proposed it.”

  I sat back, grinning over my coffee. Irish Andy had faded away at the beginning of the conversation. A discreet Prussian is a rare beast. He was undoubtedly listening from the back room.

  “You know, I think I like you better when you’re not smiling,” Colleen said. “It makes you look hydrophobic.”

  “There’s no help for it. I never met a woman who looked to her clothes and face and hair the way a gun man looks to his weapons and didn’t complain about how every man she spoke to wanted to
bed her. I think about that and before you know it my teeth are showing.”

  She fanned the deck. “I think you mix up comment with complaint.”

  “Who gave you the ring?”

  “Who did you go to see in Laramie?”

  I sipped from my cup. The conversation was becoming dangerous.

  “Quiet morning,” I said.

  “They are all quiet. It’s my favorite time of day in a saloon, when the air is still clear and the glasses are all polished and twinkling and the man behind the bar is crisp with starch and means it when he says welcome. Before the punchers and the miners and the tumbleweed tinhorns blow in all stinking of horse and lime water and the air fills with smoke and noise and stale beer. From heaven to hell in the space of a few minutes.”

  “You seem to handle it well enough when they line up at your table.”

  “It’s the old conflict.” She turned over the cards with a rippling movement of one finger and they were all black. “What you do to live versus what you live to do.” She rippled them the other way, and now they were all red.

  “You won’t live long if you do that in front of the customers.”

  “Since the only customer in the room just passed out in the middle of the free lunch I would say the point is moot. In any case when they come in this early, it isn’t cards they’re desperate for.”

  “How shall we kill time until the rush?” I asked.

  “There is always blackjack.”

  “Not with your deck.”

  “I haven’t marked a card in four years,” she said. “I am too good to have the need.”

  “The last three card-markers I shot all said the same thing. I have a deck upstairs.”

  She did the trick with the reds and blacks one last time, then stacked them and smoothed the edges. “I’ll help you find it.”

  Upstairs, in the half-light edging in around the crooked window shade, I managed all her hooks and buttons but had trouble with the stays, which she undid herself with a deft movement. She had put on weight since the last time, but not much, and she wore it well. We started out awkward and unsure, and the feather mattress was no improvement on the one in Breen, but we found the middle ground together and she cried out softly, once. Later she watched me open the bundle that had come on the stage and put on the new shirt and the suit of clothes I’d had made to my measurements before leaving Helena. The coat was a simple charcoal-gray frock with stepped lapels from which I’d had the black satin facing removed on the same principle that prevented me from wearing a star, to avoid drawing fire. The only other adjustment involved a double-reinforced inside breast pocket designed to carry the Deane-Adams. In the wavy mirror over the basin the sober material lay flat across my shoulders like a good saddle blanket. The trouser cuffs broke at the insteps of my boots and the low-cut vest hugged my ribs without constricting them when I moved. This attention to movement was remarkable on the part of this particular tailor, who had an exclusive contract with Judge Blackthorne’s court to provide burial clothes for officers slain in the line of duty. It was probably the first suit he’d made in years that didn’t fasten loosely up the back.

  “What’s your opinion?” I tugged at the hem of the coat and adjusted the string tie. I could load a revolver in the dark with my teeth but I couldn’t tie a cravat straight to preserve the Union.

  “It’s wrinkled in back. You should have hung it up as soon as it arrived.”

  “The sleeves are too short. I told him not to show more than an inch and a half of cuff.”

  “No, two inches is what they were showing the last time I visited Saint Louis.”

  “I look like a crooked banker.”

  “The suit isn’t that good.”

  “Aside from all that.”

  “Do you need a compliment that badly?”

  “I need truth. If I were going out after someone for the first time I’d ask someone who knew about it if I had everything I needed. I never ran a saloon before.”

  She was sitting up in bed with the counterpane tucked under her arms, resting a hand with a cheroot smoldering between two fingers on one raised knee. With her black hair undone she looked younger, girlish. “Not bad for an aging mankiller,” she said.

  “I mean the suit.”

  A pillow whipped past my head and flattened against the door, coughing feathers out a burst seam. “Clear out while I get dressed.”

  “I’ll wait for you outside.”

  “Why?”

  “You won’t let me wait inside.”

  She took in smoke and didn’t let any out. “This didn’t signify anything. Breen’s an empty spot along the U.P. right-of-way. So is everything that happened there. It’s not even history.”

  “I didn’t hear myself proposing.”

  “That’s just as well. Whatever you think of me, I only marry one man at a time.” She threw the cheroot at the basin and slid out of bed, stark naked. “Make sure the latch catches.”

  Junior was behind the bar in his shirtsleeves when we entered the Princess a few minutes later. He looked at us and said, “Well, I’m glad there’s one man in town doesn’t depend on the Mare’s Nest for his entertainment.”

  13

  I DON’T KNOW why even now, but somehow I knew Miguel Axtaca wouldn’t be at Eille MacNutt’s place that Friday night. Probably it was my lack of faith in my good fortune. I went there anyway, and stretched half a bottle of gin over three hours listening to MacNutt’s mulatto pianist making a hash of Gilbert and Sullivan on an upright someone had salvaged from a wagon trail and buying the occasional drink for Clara California and Adabelle. The latter was easily the least resistible of the string, five feet and eighty-two pounds, most of it bust, in a tight shift with nothing but perfume between it and her, and short coppery hair that hugged her head like a bright helmet. If she was as frigid as Clara claimed, there was a thaw on that night; she accidentally brushed my arm with her breast at least a dozen times and insisted on cleaning up the debris by hand after she upended a dish of hard candies into my lap. She was either dedicated to her work or the clumsiest woman I’d seen in a long time.

  The place was finished off with flocked wallpaper over plaster and complicated further with framed steelpoint engravings of nymphs and satyrs going about their traditional business in pastoral settings and embroidered pillows scattered among the skirted sofas and lamps with fringed shades. MacNutt made no appearance. The responsibility of greeting customers fell to a small, straight-backed woman in a plain gray dress buttoned to the throat and her hair in a bun who shielded her weak eyes behind rectangular spectacles with tinted lenses. I hadn’t seen her before, but this was my first time inside the establishment during business hours, and when she introduced herself as Phyllis MacNutt I assumed she was the proprietor’s sister, although it developed in conversation later that she was his wife. What she thought about her husband going riding with someone like Colleen Bower was well concealed behind those opaque shards of glass.

  I got out of there around eleven with what was left of my virtue intact. I spent the next week letting my new suit grow acquainted with my angles and hollows while I dealt faro and spelled Irish Andy behind the bar and took Colleen upstairs twice. Neither the gold ring she wore nor the reason for my trip to Laramie came up again. Both times she was affectionate and eager, but with the exception of a good poker reader like Junior Harper anyone who saw us together downstairs would have thought we were no more than partners.

  And he’d have been right. Whatever intangible thing that had existed between us in Breen was as gone as that town itself, torn up along with the timbers and siding when the economic balance shifted and transported farther down the line in the hands of strangers. Taking her to bed was like playing a friendly game of cards with someone you once had much in common with and don’t anymore; then the cards were just an excuse, and now it was just the cards.

  And September crept along in its sluggish way, growing golden everywhere but in that desert climate, where th
e days melded together without a seam and everything was the color of adobe and dried blood.

  On the second Friday I reported to the Mare’s Nest just as the last rusty streamer was spiraling down behind the Cristobals; and I knew as soon as I opened the door, before my eyes adjusted to the dim interior, that he was there. A pungent mix of old sweat—layers of it dried in separate sheets—and open-air wood-smoke abraded my nostrils. It was a stink I knew well and had worn often enough myself, the kind that accompanies men who haven’t spent a day under a roof in weeks.

  I spotted them over Phyllis MacNutt’s shoulder, three men seated in kitchen chairs along the back wall facing the door and passing a bottle of mescal back and forth. Clara California was sitting on the floor near the one in the middle with her feet gathered under her, stroking her cheek with his left hand.

  Three identical pairs of obsidian eyes observed my approach. “Miguel Axtaca?”

  The question floated like a feather descending a mine shaft. Then the man on the left spoke. “Who is asking?”

  I gave him my attention briefly. He was thick through the torso in a white peasant shirt and canvas trousers with an ammunition belt slung slantwise across his left shoulder. The man on the right was dressed the same, and the two looked enough alike to be brothers. Both had large brown faces scored all over, shaggy moustaches, and masses of black oily hair that they combed straight back with their fingers, the tracks of which showed as clearly as furrows in fresh loam. Their machetes leaned against the wall beside their chairs, thonged grips close to hand.

  “Page Murdock.” I was addressing the man in the center. “I’m part owner of the Apache Princess down the street.”

  He said nothing. There wasn’t anything Spanish about him. He was lean for a Mexican in his middle years and his features resembled primitive architecture. A block of brow rested like a lintel on the thick post of his nose, his mouth slicing straight across underneath. He wore his black hair in bangs chopped off square above the eyes. The rest stopped just short of his shoulders, as coarse as broomstraw. His costume matched those of his companions except for the lack of a cartridge belt or any other indication that he carried a weapon of any kind. That was worrisome. I knew he had one, I just didn’t know what it was or where he kept it. A man who arms himself in secret is a man who will come at you from behind.