Valdez Is Coming

5

“He’s dying,” the segundo said. “Maybe before tonight.”

The Mexican was on his back at the edge of the loading platform where they had taken him off his horse and laid him on his back. His eyes looked up at the segundo and at Frank Tanner standing over him. He could hear the people in the street, but he did not have the strength or the desire to turn his head to look at them. He heard the segundo say he was dying and he knew he was dying, now, as the sun went down. He was thinking, I should have gone past him and turned and shot him. Or I should have shot him as he came up, before he saw me. Or I could have gone higher and used the rifle. He wished he could begin it again, do it over from the time Valdez started up the trail, but it was too late. He could see Valdez raising the gun, the blunt double barrels looking at him; he could see Mr. Tanner looking at him, the mouth beneath the moustache barely moving.

“What else did he say?”

The Mexican who was dying stared up at Mr. Tanner, and the segundo said, “Valdez is coming. That’s all.”

“How do we know it’s the same one?”

“It’s his name.”

“There are a hundred Valdezes.”

“Maybe, but it must be the same one,” the segundo said. “You said he killed the Negro with a shotgun.”

“A farmer gun,” Tanner said.

“I don’t know,” the segundo said. “The way he used it.”

Tanner looked up from the Mexican, his gaze lifting beyond the square, beyond the adobes to the ridge of hills in the distance, to the cold red slash of sky above the shadowed slopes. This Valdez killed one of his men up there and said he was coming. For what? It couldn’t be to help any dead nigger’s Indian woman. He couldn’t come in and pull a gun to get money. He’d never get in or out. Then what was he doing? Who was he?

The segundo followed Tanner’s gaze to the hills. “He’s gone. He wouldn’t be there waiting.”

“Send somebody and make sure.”

“He could be anywhere.”

“Well, goddam it, you’ve got people who read signs?”

“We’ve got some, sure.”

“Then send them,” Tanner said. “I want people all over those hills, and if he’s there I want him brought in, straight up or facedown. I don’t care. I want some men sent to Lanoria to look every place he might be and talk to anybody knows him. I want a sign put up on the main street that says Bob Valdez is a dead man and anybody known to be helping him is also dead. You understand me?”

“We start the drive tomorrow,” the segundo said.

Tanner looked at him. “We start the drive when I tell you we start it.”

The man lying on his back dying, with the wet stain of his blood on the platform now – thinking that this shouldn’t have happened to him because of the life in him an hour ago and because of the way he saw himself, aware of himself alive and never thinking of himself dying – looked up at the sky and didn’t have to close the light from his eyes. He saw the beard on the segundo’s face and the under-brim of his straw hat, and then he didn’t see the segundo. He saw Mr. Tanner’s face and then he didn’t see Mr. Tanner anymore. He saw the open sky above him and that was all there was to see. But the sky wasn’t something to look at. If he wasn’t on the hill tonight he would be in the adobe that was the cantina, with the oil smoke and the women coming in, lighting a cigar as he looked at them and feeling his belly beneath his gunbelts full of beef and tortillas, bringing a woman close to him and drinking mescal with his hand on the curve of her shoulder, touching her neck and feeling strands of her hair between his fingers. But he had done it the wrong way. He should have looked at the three guns on the man and known something. But he had thought of the man as he had remembered him from before, against the wall and with the cross on his back, and he had listened to the man talk even while he planned to kill the man, being careful not being careful enough, not giving the man enough. He should have thought more about the way the man stood at the wall and watched them shoot at him. He should have remembered the way the man got up with the cross on his back and was kicked down and got up again and walked away. Look – someone should have said to him, or he should have told himself – the man wears three guns and hangs a Remington from his saddle. What kind of man is that? And then he thought, You should know when you’re going to die. It should be something in your life you plan. It shouldn’t happen but it’s happening. He tried to raise his left arm but could not. He had no feeling in his left side, from his chest into his legs. His side was hanging open and draining his life as he looked at the sky. He said to himself, What is the sky to me? He said to himself, What are you doing here alone?

“Ask him if he’s sure it’s the same one,” Tanner said.

The segundo stepped close to the Mexican again. He knew he was dead as he looked at him, though the man’s eyes were open, staring at the sky.

The Mexican had reached the village, his head hanging, letting the horse take him, but he seemed to be still alive as he entered the street between the adobes.

You can die any time after you tell them, Valdez had thought, watching through the field glasses at the top of the trail. He had nothing against the man except a kick in the back and the certainty the man had wanted to kill him. He knew the man would die, and it would be better if he did; but he didn’t wish the man dead. It would happen, that was all.

Soon they would come out. They would come out in all directions or they would come strung out across the graze toward the trail into the hills. As the Mexican had reached the adobes, Valdez had climbed higher, off the trail now, leading the buckskin up into the rocks. From here he watched the three riders coming first, letting their horses out across the open land. They came up through the ravines and went down the switchbacks on the other side, not stopping. Three more came behind them, but not running their horses, taking their time. They climbed over the trail looking at the ground; coming to the place where Valdez had shot the Mexican they dismounted.

There were others coming out from the village, fanning out, not knowing where they were going. They were nothing. The three looking for his sign were little better than nothing; they had less than an hour of light and no chance of catching up with him. He counted seventeen men who had come out of the village. There would be others with the herd and perhaps others somewhere else. There was no way of knowing how many still in the village. There was no way of knowing if Tanner had come out or was still in the village. He would have to go there to find out. And if Tanner was not in the village he would have to think of another way to do it and come back another time. There was no hurry. It wasn’t something that had to be done today or tomorrow or this week. It could be done any time. But you’d better do it tonight, Valdez said to himself, before you think about it too much. Do it or don’t do it.

Do it, he thought. He took a sip of the whiskey and put the bottle back in the warbag that hung from his saddle.

Do it before you get too old.

He took the reins of the buckskin and began working down through the rocks toward the village. He would circle and approach from the trees on the far side, coming up behind the burned-out church.

The clerk from the Republic Hotel, as soon as he was off duty, went over to De Spain’s and asked if the three Tanner riders had been there.

Hell, yes, they had. They’d been here and to Bob Valdez’s boardinghouse and the Hatch and Hodges office and had stuck their heads into almost every store along the street. They moved fast and didn’t waste any questions and you could tell they wanted him bad. Bad? Did you see the sign out in front? Nailed to the post?

It was a square of board, and one of them had lettered on it with charcoal: BOB VALDEZ IS A DEAD MAN. ANYONE HELPING HIM IS ALSO DEAD.

That was how bad they wanted him. They were going to kill him.

If they ever found him. Where the hell was Valdez? Nobody knew. Nobody remembered seeing him in days. The last time was Saturday when he rode out to see Tanner. No, somebody said, he had made the run to St. David the next day. How about since then? Nobody could recall. Maybe he’d been around; maybe he hadn’t. Bob Valdez wasn’t somebody who stuck in your mind and you remembered.

Mr. Malson said to Mr. Beaudry, “If he’s got Tanner on him and knows it, he’ll be seven hundred miles away by now.” “Or farther,” Mr. Beaudry said. “If he don’t know it,” somebody said, “then he’s a dead man, like the sign says.” “There must be something wrong with his head,” Mr. Malson said. “Christ, we should have known it the minute he started talking about the Lipan woman something was wrong with him.”

R. L. Davis didn’t say anything. He wanted to, but he still wasn’t sure what people would say. They might say he was crazy. If he’d pushed Valdez over in the sun, then what had he gone back for?

They’d listen to him tell it. “Sure, I pushed him over. I was teaching him a lesson for coming at me with the scatter gun the other day – after he shot the nigger.” They’d look at him and say, “You killed a man like that? Like a Indin would do it?”

And he’d say “No, I was teaching him a lesson is all. Hell, I went back and cut him loose and left him a canteen of water.” And they’d say, “Well, if you cut him loose, where is he?” Somebody else’d say, “If you wanted to kill him, what did you cut him loose for?”

And he’d say, “Hell, if there’s something between me and Bob Valdez, we’ll settle it with guns. I’m no goddam Apache.”

But he had a feeling they wouldn’t believe a word of it.

All right, three days ago he’d left Valdez in the meadow. And this evening Tanner’s men come in looking for him and write his death sentence. So Valdez must have gone back and done something to them.

Valdez hadn’t been here; at least nobody remembered seeing him. So where would he have been the past three days? Not at his boardinghouse.

But, goddam, Diego Luz had been to his boardinghouse! He could see Diego again coming out of it and the funny look on the man’s face when he realized he’d been spotted.

What would Frank Tanner say about that? R. L. Davis said to himself. If you could hand him Bob Valdez he’d hire you the same minute, wouldn’t he?

Go up to Tanner and cock the Walker in his face and say, All right, give me the money, Valdez was thinking. Not asking him, telling him this time. A hundred dollars or five hundred or whatever he had. Take it and get out and don’t think about later until later. He would have to leave Lanoria and go someplace else and maybe worry about Tanner the rest of his life – because he had wanted to help the woman; because he had started it and gotten into it and now was so far in he couldn’t turn around and walk out. You must be crazy, Valdez thought. Like Inez had said. Or an idiot. But he was here and was going through with it and he wasn’t going to think about why he was here.

He was behind the church, bringing the buckskin along close to the wall, then into the alley that led to the yard of the church. At the far end of the yard was the building with the loading platform. Past the low wall of the churchyard he could see the square and the water pump and stone trough. There was no one in the square now. Farther down the street, in the dusk, he could make out people in front of the adobes, a few of the women sitting outside to talk; he could hear voices and laughter, the sound clear in the silence.

Valdez left the buckskin in the yard. He went over the wall and through the narrow space between the platform and two freight wagons that stood ready for loading. He mounted the steps at the far end. On the platform he looked out at the square again and at the church doorway and the fence across the opening. There were a few horses inside; he wondered if one of them was his claybank. Maybe after, he would have time to look. He crossed the platform and went into the building, into the room crowded with wooden cases and sacks of grain. Maybe this wasn’t Tanner’s place. Maybe he would have to work his way down the street, hurrying before it was full dark and they gave up looking for him. It was already dark in the room. He had to feel his way at first, moving between the cases to the stairway. The boards creaked and his boots on the stairs made a hard, sharp sound that Tanner would hear if he was upstairs; he would be ready or he would think it was one of his men. Valdez reached the hall and opened the door in front of him.

The room was still and seemed empty, until the woman moved and he saw her profile and the soft curve of her hair against the window. She watched him cross the room and open the door to the bedroom, waiting for him to look toward her again.

“He’s not here.”

Valdez walked toward her. He stopped to look out the window at the square below. “He went with them?”

“I guess he did,” the woman said. “He didn’t say.”

“Are you his wife?”

She didn’t answer for a moment, and Valdez looked at her.

“I will be his wife, soon.”

“Do you know him?”

“That’s a strange question. I guess I know him if I’m going to marry him.”

“Well, it’s up to you.”

There was a silence between them until she said, “Are you going to wait for him?”

“I don’t know yet – wait or come back another time.”

“He won’t give you another time. You killed one of his men.”

“He died. I thought he would die,” Valdez said. “Unless you had a doctor.”

She watched him look out the window again. “Did you come here to kill Frank?”

“It would be up to him,” Valdez said.

“Then what do you want?”

“The same thing as before. Something for the woman.”

“Why? I mean why do you bother?”

“Listen,” Valdez said. He hesitated. “If I tell you what I think, it doesn’t sound right. It’s something I know. You understand that?”

“Maybe you’ll kill him,” the woman said, “but you won’t get anything out of him.”

Valdez nodded slowly. “I’ve been thinking of that. If he doesn’t want to give me anything, how do I make him? I push a gun into him and tell him, but if I have to shoot him, then I don’t get anything.”

“If he doesn’t kill you first,” the woman said.

“I’ve been thinking,” Valdez said. “If I have something he wants, then maybe we make a trade. If he wants it bad enough.”

She watched him and said nothing. He was looking at her now.

“Like I say to him, ‘You give me the money and I give you your woman.’ ”

She continued to look at him, studying him. “And if he doesn’t give you the money?” she said finally.

“Then he doesn’t get his woman,” Valdez said.

“You’d kill me?”

“No, the question would be how much does he like you?”

“He’ll outwait you. He’ll put his men around the building and sooner or later you’ll have to go out.”

“Not if I’m already out,” Valdez said. His face went to the window before he looked at her again. “Listen, if you want to take something with you, get it now.”

A woman who belonged to one of Tanner’s men saw them leave. She had gone to the water pump in the square and stood looking at them as they came out to the loading platform: the woman of Mr. Tanner with a blanket roll and the man carrying a grain pack with something in it and an empty water skin. She looked at them and they looked at her, but she didn’t call out. She told Mr. Tanner she was afraid the man would do something to her or to the woman of Mr. Tanner.

“Go on,” Tanner said. “Then what?” He was still mounted, standing with his segundo and several of his men in the lantern glow of the square – the lantern on the seat of a freight wagon so Tanner could see the woman while she told what had happened.

“They went to the yard of the church,” the woman said to Tanner. Then the man came over the wall toward her and told her to get a horse from the church, asking for a particular claybank horse if it was there. The woman brought out a horse but was not sure of its color in the darkness of the church and it wasn’t the claybank but a brown horse. Then he told her to bring a saddle and bridle and a half sack of dried corn.

While this was taking place, the woman of Mr. Tanner was astride a horse in the churchyard, sitting in the saddle as a man does, though she was wearing a dress. “I think a white or a gray dress,” the woman said. When Valdez was ready and had mounted the brown horse, he rode into the churchyard and told the woman of Mr. Tanner to follow him.

“Did she say anything to him?” Tanner asked.

“Not that I heard,” the woman said.

They left through the alley next to the church. The woman waited until they were in the alley and followed, but by the time she reached the back of the church they were gone.

“Could you hear them?” Tanner asked.

“I think going toward the river,” the woman said.

“To reach cover,” the segundo said. He was sitting his horse close to Frank Tanner. “Then maybe south into the mountains.”

“How long ago?” asked Tanner.

The woman thought about it and said, “Not long. They would be maybe two or three miles away only. Or a little more if they ran their horses.”

“You know what to do,” Tanner said to the segundo. “Whoever’s here, send them out again.”

“In the dark,” the segundo said, “how do we see them?”

“You listen,” Tanner said. “Somebody could run into them.”

The segundo waited, about to speak, but looked at Tanner and then only nodded. It was Tanner’s business. No, his business was in the morning with the arms and grain and cattle, taking it all across the border and coming back without being killed. That was his business.

But in the morning the freight wagons stood empty, and Frank Tanner waited on the loading platform for his men to come in. Some of the women stood in the square, watching him, waiting to see what he was going to do. The men came in singly and in small groups and would talk to the segundo while they watered their horses and while the women watched. It was almost midmorning when the three trackers came in. One of them was dead, the other two were wounded.

These three who came along the street single file, one of them facedown over his saddle, were the segundo’s best hunters and trackers. They had been in the Army and had lived through the campaigns against the Apache. But now one was dead and another would soon be dead.

Tanner sat in a rocking chair in the morning sunlight and watched them brought in: another dead man on the loading platform and a man coughing blood and a third one, luckier than the first two, shot through the left forearm, the bone shattered, and there was no doubt about that. This one could talk and he told what had happened, his the only voice in the stillness. Tanner listened to the man and did not interrupt. He heard how the three had put themselves in Valdez’s place and decided he would follow the river south into the hills of the Santa Ritas, then maybe work his way west around toward Lanoria or maybe not, but they’d take a look.

With the first light this morning they had found tracks, fresh prints of two horses that showed the horses were walking. They weren’t sure of this man they were following; he didn’t try to keep to rocky ground or cover his tracks, and he walked the horses, maybe thinking he had enough time. Still, when they came to the flat open stretch with the trees in the distance, they were careful, knowing he could be waiting for them in the trees. So they made a plan as they crossed the flat stretch: they would spread out before they got to the cover and come up from three sides and if he was in there they’d have him. But they never got to the trees.

“Listen, it was flat open,” the man with the shattered arm said, “out to the sides as far as you could see and a mile in front of us. There was no cover near, hardly any brush to speak of. So it was like he rose up out of the ground behind us. He says, ‘Throw down your guns and come around.’ This voice out there in the middle of nothing. We stop and come around, keeping our iron though, and there he is standing there. I swear to God there was nothing for him to hide behind, yet we’d come over the ground he was standing on just a moment before.

“He says, ‘Go back and tell Mr. Tanner we’re waiting for him.’ That’s what he said, waiting for him. Meaning he wasn’t talking to anybody else. Then he says, ‘Tell Mr. Tanner I got something to trade him.’ We looked, but she wasn’t anywheres around. Just him, and three of us. I guess we all had it in mind to bust him and he must have saw it. He says again, ‘Throw down the guns.’ We don’t move. He says it again and this time when we don’t move he brings up the Colt gun in his right hand and puts one through my arm.”

He looked toward the dead man and the man who was lying on the ground shot through the lungs. “They went for theirs with the sound of his piece, and he brings up this little scatter gun in his left hand and lets go both barrels and them two boys take it square. This here boy partly in front of the other, a little closer, and it killed him in his boots.

“Then he says to me, ‘You tell him, he wants his woman, come out here with five hundred dollars.’

“I say to him, ‘Well, where’s Mr. Tanner supposed to come? You going to have signs put up?’ And then he points.”

The man with the shattered arm, standing by the loading platform, turned half around and raised his right arm, his finger extended; he moved it gradually southwest.

“There, you can see it,” the man said, “though it was closer where we were at and you could see it better – twin peaks, the one a little higher than the other. He says for you to point to them and he’ll get in touch with you.

“I say to him, ‘Well, what if Mr. Tanner don’t feel like coming?’

“And he says, standing there with the shotgun and the Colt gun, ‘Then I kill his woman.’ ”

Frank Tanner stared at the twin peaks ten miles in the distance. After a few minutes, when he became aware that he was sitting in a rocking chair on the loading platform and his people were below him in the square, waiting for him to say something, he waved his hand and they cleared out, taking the dead man and the lung-shot man and the man with the shattered left arm, who thought Mr. Tanner might say something to him personally. But he didn’t – just the wave of the hand.

The segundo stayed; he was the only one. He waited awhile, getting the words straight in his mind. When he was ready he said, “You go after him, we don’t make the trip.”

He waited, giving Mr. Tanner a chance to say something, but the only sound was someone working the pump handle, a rattly metal sound in the heat settling over the village.

“We go out there and look for him,” the segundo said. “Sure, we find him, but maybe it take us a few days, a week, if he knows what he’s doing. We’re out there, we’re not in Sonora giving the man the things he’s paying for. How much is he paying?” The segundo waited again. He said then, “He pay plenty, but nobody pay you to go up in those mountains.”

The segundo stood in the sun waiting for Mr. Tanner to say something. He could stand here all day and this son of a bitch Mr. Tanner might never say anything. The segundo was hot and thirsty. He’d like a nice glass of mescal and some meat and peppers, but he was standing here waiting for this son of a bitch Americano to make up his mind.

So he said, smiling a little, “Hey, what if you don’t go out? You let him kill her.” His smile broadened and he gestured as if to say, Do you see how simple it is? He said, “Then what? You get another woman.”

Frank Tanner, sitting in the rocker, looked at his segundo. He said, “If you were up here I’d bust your face open. And if you wanted any more I’d give you that too. Do you see the way it is?”

The segundo had killed five men in his life that he knew of and had probably killed more if some of them died later or if he wanted to count Apaches. He had hanged a man he caught stealing his horses. He had killed a man with a knife in a cantina. He had shot a man who once worked for him and insulted him and drew his revolver. He had killed two Federales when the soldiers set an ambush to take the goods they were delivering in Sonora. And with others he had wiped out an Apache rancheria, shooting or knifing every living person they found, including the old people and the children. But the segundo was also a practical man. He had a wife in this village and two or three more wives in villages south of here, in Sonoita and Naco and Nogales. He had nine children that he knew of. Maybe he had eleven or twelve. Maybe he had fifteen. He had not wanted to kill the Apache children, but they were Apache. He also liked mescal and good horses and accurate rifles and revolving pistols. He was number two and Mr. Tanner was number one. He was thinking, Shit. But he smiled at Mr. Tanner and said, “Why didn’t you say so? You want to get this man, we go get him for you.”

Frank Tanner nodded, thinking about the woman.

The time he was in Yuma he thought about women every day. He’d thought about women before that, but not the same way he did in that stone prison overlooking the river. He remembered how the men smelled at Yuma, breaking rocks for twelve hours in the sun, working on the road, and coming back in to eat the slop. That’s when they’d start talking about women. Frank Tanner would think, They don’t know a real woman if they see one, except for some whore who’d smile and laugh and give them everything and rot their insides. No, when he was at Yuma he pictured a blond-haired girl, real long hair and a pretty face and big round breasts, though she wouldn’t be too big in the gut or the hips. The hips could be more than a handful, but she’d have to have a nice sucked-in white gut. That’s the one he pictured at Yuma, after he and Carlisle Baylor got caught with the goddam branded cows they were running into old Mexico without any bill of sale. Three years picturing the blond golden-haired woman. Two years more raising money and buying stock to sell across the border, buying and selling horses and cattle and dynamite and about anything he could lay his hands on they didn’t have down there. He’d bought twenty-five-year-old Confederate muskets and sold them. He bought a few old Whitworth field pieces and sold them too. He’d made money and met people who knew people and pretty soon he was even selling remounts to the United States Cavalry at Fort Huachuca. And that was where he saw the woman, the girl or woman or however you wanted to think of her, there at Huachuca, married to the drunk-ass sutler, who never went a day without a quart of whiskey or a bottle of mescal or even corn beer if he couldn’t get any mescal. There she was, the one he’d seen every day at Yuma and about every day since, the blond golden-haired girl who was built for the kind of man he was, sitting in their place talking to the drunk-ass sutler and looking at the woman every chance he got. A year of that; a little more than a year. Talking to her when he wasn’t around and trying to find out things about her, about them. Trying to find out if she felt anything for the drunk or not. She felt something when he beat her – sometimes you could see the bruises on her face she couldn’t hide with powder – but maybe she liked it. You could never tell about women.

He would have taken her away from the drunk alive, and once he was dead there wasn’t anything else to think over. He took her and she came with him. He would marry her, too, but he had things to do and she’d have to wait on that; but in the meantime there wasn’t any reason they couldn’t live as husband and wife. She saw that and agreed, and she was better than he ever imagined in Yuma she would be. She was real now and she was his, and there wasn’t any goddam broken-down Mexican nigger-loving town constable going to run off with her into the hills and threaten to kill her. Valdez, or whatever his name, was a dead man and he could roll over right now and save everybody a lot of time.

Tanner was looking off at the hills that climbed into the Santa Ritas and the twin peaks, far away against the hot sky.

“What’s up there?” he said to the segundo.

“Nothing,” the segundo answered.

“Why would he want us to track up there?”

“I don’t know,” the segundo said. “Maybe he’s got a place somewhere.”

“What kind of place?”

“An Apache camp he’s been to,” the segundo said. “He knows the Apache – the thing he did to the three of them in the open country, hiding where there’s no place to hide.”

“He didn’t seem like much,” Frank Tanner said.

“Maybe,” the segundo said. “But he knows the Apache.”

R. L. Davis got drunk trying to work up nerve to tell what he did to Bob Valdez and never did tell it. He went over to Inez’s, but they wouldn’t let him in. Then he didn’t remember anything after that. He woke up in the Maricopa bunkhouse when a hand came in and poured water all over him. God, he felt awful. So it was afternoon by the time he got out to Mimbreno.

There seemed to be more activity than the time he was here before, more men in the village sitting around waiting for something, and more horses and more noise. He rode up the street not looking around too much, but not missing anything either. He hoped Mr. Tanner would be outside, and he was, the same place he was the last time, up on the loading platform. The problem was to tell him before Mr. Tanner gave any orders to have him run off or tied to a cross or whatever he might do; so he kept his eyes on Mr. Tanner and the second he saw Mr. Tanner’s gaze land on him, R. L. Davis yelled out, “I know where he is!”

They looked at him, all the people standing around there, and let him ride over toward the platform where Mr. Tanner was waiting.

“I think I know where he is,” R. L. Davis said to Mr. Tanner.

“You think so or you know so,” Tanner said.

“I’d bet a year’s wage on it.”

“Where?”

“A place up in the mountains.”

“I asked you where.”

“I was thinking,” R. L. Davis said. “Let me ride along and I can show you. Take you right to it.”

Tanner kept looking at him deciding something, but showing nothing in his face. Finally he said, “Step down and water your horse.”