City of Widows

by Loren D. Estleman

  The ungainly hands, shriveled and plainly rheumatic, came alive when they gripped a rifle—in this case the Springfield—drew back the breech to inspect the load, and slammed it home. Resting his elbows on the bench, he socketed the buttstock in the hollow of his right shoulder and sighted down the barrel with both eyes open. The rifle pulsed when he squeezed the trigger, but his grip remained as steady as a sunken post. He said, “Bah!” and laid the Springfield next to the gun with the brass barrel.

  The man standing next to him lifted and proffered one of the Hawkens. This was a plain-faced Mexican nearly his age, but in full possession of his legs, dressed in sandals and the white cotton uniform of the peasantry. He had a fringe of white hair around a bald head and a pair of moustaches that had never known a hammock, drooping like tired wings to cover his mouth and chin. Houseboys come in all ages.

  Don Segundo—the old man in the wheelchair could be no other—was raising the Hawken to firing position when Axtaca cleared his throat.

  “Sí, Miguel.” The don fired. I searched for his target but could detect nothing worth spending ammunition on as far as the Sierra Madres. I had been to Mexico before and had never seen anything to equal the price of an ounce of powder in the entire country; but that was just me. People as different as Cortéz, Louis Napoleon, and Montezuma the Great had chosen to gamble their fortunes on the place without taking me into their confidence.

  An exchange of Spanish followed between rancher and foreman, too rapid for me to catch anything beyond an occasional reference to cattle, while the old man inspected the Hawken’s hammer, working it back and forth. Apparently he was taken with the rifle. At length he laid it aside and sat back, fixing me from under the ruined straw brim with eyes as blue and clear as matched terrestrial globes. “¿Yusted?” It was less a question than a command.

  “No español, jefe.” It was the only phrase I’d acquired that had any use for me.

  “A grave error. In my eighty-one years I have spent a total of only six months in your country, and yet I took the trouble to learn the rudiments of the language.”

  His accent was heavy, but I suspected this was due not so much to ignorance as to lack of practice.

  “My range is Montana Territory,” I said. “I’m a good deal closer to Canada than I am to Mexico.” I told him my name.

  It meant nothing to him. “Are you a hunting man, Señor Murdock?”

  “Elk, a little. And men.”

  “Man, bah! As quarry he is truly overrated. He lacks instinct. His senses are inferior to the armadillo’s, who flees his own shadow. There is no sport in hunting men.”

  “I never did it for sport.”

  He didn’t pursue it. “Lions are the thing. You begin by hunting them, and if you are not watchful you find that they are hunting you. I have been entreated by tenants of my ranch to bring to an end the marauding ways of a certain cat that lives above the Río Santa Maria. He is a viejo, an old one that eats people because it can no longer outrun antelope. You see by this my meaning when I say that man offers no challenge. I am to prevent it from making away with any more small children.”

  “That’s rough country for a wheelchair.”

  “The chair is a poor enough substitute for a horse but more easily maneuvered inside a house. I shall of course be mounted. What my legs have forgotten my arms remember. Quita las otras, Jesús. I shall use the Hawken.”

  The old servant gathered the other rifles into his arms and carried them inside. Don Segundo picked up the Hawken, drew a bead on something in the distance, and snapped the hammer on the empty chamber. “Miguel informs me you are on a mission.”

  “One that may interest you. I want to arrest Ross Baronet and bring him to trial.”

  “And you have come to ask my permission?”

  “For your help. In order to make it official I need the cooperation of the marshal of San Sábado, but he’s reluctant. With the support of one such as you I think I can bring him around.”

  “Refresh an old man’s memory, Señor Murdock. I have not been across the border in more than forty years. Who is the marshal of San Sábado at present?”

  “A man named Rosario Ortiz.”

  He had been tracking something through the Hawken’s sights, sliding the barrel along the horizon. Now he lowered it. “I know this name. What has he to do with the man Baronet? What, for that matter, has La Ciudad de las Viudas to do with him? The ambush in which my vaqueros were slain took place near Las Cruces.”

  “The crime I intend to charge him with is the attempted robbery of the Apache Princess, a saloon in San Sábado.”

  “How many were slain in this attempt?”

  “Two. Both belonged to Baronet.”

  “I think I understand. Dinero takes precedence over eight Mexican lives.”

  “I didn’t say that, sir. Once he’s in custody he’ll likely be charged with the assault on the pack train, if there’s evidence to place him at the scene. My interest is the saloon robbery. I own a one-third interest in the Apache Princess.”

  The magnificent moustaches twitched. “This I do understand. A man protects what is his. Tell me this. What have I to gain from this transaction? I have access to a thousand men at arms. I hardly require the assistance of one gringo and a soft city lawman.”

  I threw the dice.

  “If you thought he was hiding out anywhere in this country, you’d have run him down and strung him up by now, in which case you would have sent me on my way before this. That means he’s up north, and you have too many ties with Mexico City to risk sending an armed force across the border and giving the United States Army an excuse to come down here and try out its new Napoleons in a war with Mexico. But with a duly appointed city marshal and a former United States deputy marshal—that’s me—riding up front, the entire affair can be represented as a joint action involving two friendly nations equally concerned about the lawlessness along their frontiers. Instead of an invasion, it would be an act of diplomacy.”

  Miguel Axtaca and the two vaqueros were watching us both through all this. Francisco and Carlos were plainly confused, not so much by my blinding example of logic as by all this English. How much the Aztec was following I couldn’t say. He was a stone idol.

  “You are a lawyer, Señor Murdock?” Don Segundo asked after a long silence. His gnarled old hands were folded atop the long rifle resting across the arms of his wheelchair.

  “I rode for the federal court up in Montana Territory for six years. I guess some of that speechifying was bound to rub off.”

  “You have stated your case well.”

  Again I waited. Jesús, the manservant, came out carrying a heavy brocaded rug and draped it across the old man’s shoulders. The landscape beyond the porch was swimming in heat.

  “I invite you to stay here tonight. Dolores is an ordinary cook, but I think you will enjoy her tortillas more than the camp food you have been eating. In the morning I shall tell you what I have decided.”

  Without waiting for a response, he returned the Hawken to the bench and nodded at Jesús, who turned and pushed him into the house. Axtaca and the vaqueros glanced at me—high praise, but then I had become one of the anointed—and followed.

  As a cook, Dolores del Guerrero was Mexico’s best-kept secret. Her tortillas were thin enough to read a newspaper through, yet strong enough to hoist a plateful of chili peppers without crumbling, and they melted on contact with the human tongue. The wine was blood-red and strong, poured by Jesús from a green bottle whose label bore the Diamond Horn crest. All the food was served by the woman. Axtaca, who on the trail would have outstarved a Spartan, filled his plate three times and drained the bottle into his glass when the rest of us had had enough. Francisco and Carlos were absent, probably sharing a table with the other vaqueros in the bunkhouse.

  The foreman appeared to be a favorite with the woman of the hacienda, who seemed to know no English but was extremely vocal in her native tongue, addressing Axtaca softly but aiming sharp barbs at
her husband, whose one small portion of food washed down with plain water was evidently a nightly habit and interpreted by La Doña as a comment upon her abilities in the kitchen. By contrast, his responses, if they were responses, sounded conciliatory, even meek. It was clear enough that while the White Lion of Chihuahua held full reign over an area of land larger than the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the den belonged to his mate. I earned a shy approving smile from her direction by accepting a second helping gratefully.

  Jesús gave up his quarters for a cot in the bunkhouse and I passed the night on a straw pallet under a heavy quilt—welcome in the cold of the desert at night—in a tiny room at the end of the house. It was just big enough to contain the pallet and a portable altar with a candle guttering before a miniature painting of the Virgin and Child, inestimably ancient, in a frame three times its size. Outside, coyotes yipped, mourning the loss of the moon. I went to sleep fast and didn’t stir until I smelled breakfast cooking.

  Someone knocked at the door while I was pulling on my boots. Jesús, looking none the worse for his night outside the house, entered at my invitation, inclined his head, and informed me in halting English that Don Segundo requested my presence in his bedroom.

  “Thank you, Jesús. I am sorry to have come between you and Mary.”

  His eyes went to the icon and he crossed himself. “None can do that, señor.” He bowed again and withdrew.

  The room, two doors down from the one where I had slept, was not much larger and filled almost to the walls by a four-poster of ornate old carved mahogany with a brightly colored counterpane of native workmanship folded at the foot. The old man, attired in a plain linen nightshirt, sat propped against a number of embroidered pillows with a footed tray across his lap supporting a thick slice of corn bread and a pot of steaming coffee. He was pouring some of its contents into a yellow china cup when I entered. Without the hat, he displayed a fine head of creamy white hair brushed straight back behind his ears from a dark widow’s peak. The ends of his moustaches continued to defy gravity, and I was more sure than ever that he wore some kind of device to support them while he slept.

  “Breakfast is corn bread and hotcakes with honey,” he said without greeting. “Jesús has a cousin in Sonora who keeps bees. I cannot abide it myself. Once you have eaten, Miguel will escort you as far as El Paso del Norte, where you may cross the bridge to the American side and ride the stagecoach from there to San Sábado. Miguel has a way with the Apaches. They will not harass you.”

  “You’re turning me down?”

  “Hear me out before you speak. I am sending you home to make your arrangements with Marshal Ortiz. On the twenty-second of this month you will go to Las Cruces and meet with my vaqueros under Miguel’s command. Together you will ride to the place where this dog Baronet is hidden.”

  “You talk as if you know where that is.”

  His disconcerting blue eyes nailed me over the rim of the cup.

  “But of course. He is with his brother, the sheriff of Socorro County. I supposed everyone knew this.”

  17

  I’VE DONE A fair amount of traveling in my time, very little of it under ideal conditions. I’ve frozen in the leaking holds of sailing clippers, sweltered by the fireboxes of tramp steamers, counted the joints in the rails between Dodge City and Abilene on the floor of a cattle car, lashed oxen through blizzards with a wagonload of stoves behind waiting to burst their moorings on the downgrade and crush me like a tick, and rubbed sores in my person on the backs of all manner of horses from racing thoroughbreds to a gunnysack full of bones and bad temper. In 1914 I even took a spin in a kitelike contraption built of sticks and canvas and held together with piano wire that lifted me above the Colorado Rockies and deposited me in a tangle of torn fabric and broken ribs in a place called Fair Play. You could say I’ve seen the elephant from all five sides. But even in my present extremity I’d choose any one of those methods of transportation over twelve hours in a Butterfield coach.

  They called them Bozeman bone-breakers, and for once they weren’t exaggerating. The leather straps upon which the body of the vehicle was suspended were designed for the comfort of the horses, not the passengers, and the four of us—a Creole lawyer from New Orleans named Dupont who smelled of trade whiskey and lavender, a grizzle-bearded Texas ferryman wearing a stiff new Stetson and linen duster over his only suit, an old woman named Newkirk in a sturdy dress and one of those cinderproof tie-down hats who claimed a daughter and son-in-law in Fort Sumner, and me—jounced and swayed and caromed off the mud wagon’s ironwood frame all the way from El Paso to the City of Widows, sickening of the pervasive dust, one another, and above all our own company before we’d gone ten miles. When the ferryman learned Mrs. Newkirk was bound for the place where Billy the Kid was slain, he honored us with his firsthand account of the time the Kid stuck up a bank that was holding the mortgage of a destitute widow, gave the money to the widow so she could settle the mortgage, then stuck up the same banker again as he was leaving the widow’s house with the money. The Bonney legend seemed to be taking a new turn, from efficient killer to crafty saint. If I hung around long enough I’d hear of him changing the Alamosa River to wine.

  Approaching San Sábado, the coach slowed for a bootjack and I spotted a familiar lumpy figure on hands and knees atop the unfinished roof of a frame building that hadn’t existed when I left. I shouted to the driver to stop, hopped out without a word of farewell to my fellow passengers, and hobbled on pins and needles to the back to untie the claybank. The shotgun messenger threw down my saddle, bedroll, and Winchester, the driver snapped the reins, and the whole improbable waste of good firewood rattled off towing a plume of New Mexico topsoil. I hadn’t been so glad to see the back of anything since the mustering-out camp in Maryland.

  Rosario Ortiz, trapped out in his customary work kit of overalls, cavalry coat, and stained sombrero, sat back on his heels on the rooftree and spat a mouthful of nails into the palm of his hand.

  “Buenas tardes, Señor Murdock! Shake the hand of my worthless eldest son Arturo, whom I despair of ever teaching a trade.”

  I accepted the strong grip of a black-haired youth of around sixteen who had been engaged in passing planks up to his father. Gaunt where the other was fleshy and more guarded in the face, Arturo nonetheless possessed the Ortiz eyes—large, dark, and all-absorbent—and the tonsorial bowl of a big family with plenty of hair to cut and not much time to observe the current modes from the East. I saw too a potent strain of rebellion, barely masked by the perfunctory politeness. I wondered if he was one of the pair who had burned down the schoolhouse.

  “Not another saloon, I hope,” I said to the marshal.

  “Better than that, señor. Colonel Ripperton’s harness shop has outgrown the second floor of the livery and he has secured a loan from the bank in Socorro City to build and stock a new store on this spot, where the cattle companies will see it first thing as they enter town. There will be rooms to let upstairs and space in back where the ladies may purchase hats and gingham. This is progress, yes?”

  “I hope he plans on stocking plenty of black.”

  “A merchant can starve serving the widows. He is preparing for the ladies to come. Everyone is talking about the sheriff’s investment in the Apache Princess. It is said that he can smell gold. There is talk of a hotel and a theater, and perhaps even the railroad will come to San Sábado someday. If all this comes to pass I shall have to hire an assistant. Arturo is less than no help at all, and his brothers and sisters are worse.” He removed his sombrero and mopped his coatsleeve across his forehead. It must have been hot enough to fry bacon up on that roof.

  “Anything new in town?”

  “I do not know. I have not been there in five days.” He pointed at a bedroll spread out on the floor of the half-finished building. “I think no one has been shot, or someone would have come out and told me.”

  “Ortiz, how did you ever come to be marshal?”

  He clamped the nails betwe
en his teeth and spoke around them as he lined one up between thumb and forefinger at the end of a joist. “The old padre, he says, ‘Rosario, you have served in the Army of Mexico, you can shoot a gun, yes?’ I say yes, but it has been a long time. ‘Rosario, at night the coyotes come down from the hills. They dig in the church garden looking for moles, drop their waste in the cemetery, and get in fights outside the door during Mass. I appoint you marshal so that you may shoot them. The city will pay you five silver dollars at the end of each week for keeping the peace and ten cents for each coyote you shoot inside San Sábado.’ The carpentry business, it is not so good at this time I am speaking of. I say yes. This was five years ago. Now the old padre is in the cemetery and the coyotes no longer come down from the hills, but I still go to the back door of the church at the end of each week and there the new padre hands me a sack containing five dollars and counts the dead rats I have brought and gives me a dime for each one. The coyotes ate the rats, you see.” He pounded the nail home with his hammer.

  “Can you come down from that roof? My neck is stiff enough from the ride without having to look up at you while I talk.”

  “Lo siento, I cannot. I have but two hours of daylight in which to work. The colonel wants to move in Sunday.”

  “He’ll have to wait. I’ve got marshaling business that has nothing to do with rats or coyotes.”