Between Hell and Texas (30 page)

“I see,” said Suzzette, as if Snead’s words had just made her mind up about something. Angel caught the change in her voice, but Snead didn’t. “Hang on, Angel,” she said sidelong, quietly between them. Then she said to Snead, “You want to hear some screaming? Then let’s get this rig rolling. I’ll get you there the quickest way I can.”

“Hey, damn it, slow down!” Snead said as the wagon began rolling faster and faster along the high trail.

“Slow down?” Suzzette said in a tight voice. “I thought you were in a hurry to do some killing!” She raised a whip from its place beside the seat and swung it out to snap above the horses’ backs, speeding them up.

“Cut it out, or I swear,” said Snead, “I’ll put a bullet in her!”

But as Suzzette glanced over her shoulder she saw Snead’s hat blow off his head as he rocked back and forth unsteadily on his knees in the wagon bed. Seeing Snead turn around and watch his hat sail away, Suzzette turned in her seat, raising her right
foot, saying, “I’m sorry, Angel! You’re getting off here!”

“Suzzette, no!” Angel shouted. But it was too late. Suzzette’s kick sent her out of the wagon and tumbling across the rough, rocky ground.

“Stop, you crazy whore!” Snead shouted, bouncing back and forth in the wagon bed. “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

“Fire at will, Henry.” Suzzette laughed with abandon. “This is one day no
man
is going to make his demands on me. You wanted to hear screaming, start screaming!” she shouted, giving the horses the whip, sending them off the trail and across the rocky ground. The wagon bucked high in the air and slammed down with bone-shattering force. Henry could barely hang onto his pistol, let alone aim and fire it.

Staring forward as the wagon pitched and bucked in its dizzying speed, Henry saw where the broken land ended. He knew that beyond this rocky stretch of land lay nothing but thin air and a drop of over two hundred feet, straight down. “Oh, no!” he screamed. “God, no! Stop it!” But as he screamed he froze, dropping his pistol and clutching the sides of the wagon as if doing so would bring it to a halt.

A hundred yards away Angel Andrews stood in her torn, dirt-streaked dress. Her hand to her bloody head, she watched the wagon sail out off the edge of the earth. For a second the horses appeared to swim in midair. But then gravity took hold and the poor animals went down, their dying screams intermingled with Henry Snead’s.

“Suzzette!” Angel screamed, limping as she ran toward the spot where the wagon had left the earth. Among the rocks along the edge of the cliff she saw
Suzzette’s dress flutter on a hot Texas breeze. “Oh please, Suzzette!” she cried. “Please be alive!” She raced past strewn luggage that had spilled from the bouncing wagon. Coming to a halt among the broken, jagged boulders lining the cliff, she saw Suzzette lying motionless. “Oh no!” she said, her hands to her face as she moved forward slowly. “Oh, Suzzette. Why did you do this?” She saw Suzzette’s eyes turn to her as she kneeled down beside her. “Why, Suzzette?” She sobbed. “The baby!”

“Shhh…” Suzzette managed to put a bloody hand on Angel’s forearm. “There was…no baby, Angel. I made…it up. I wanted Crayton so bad…I thought maybe…” She struggled to find the right words, but couldn’t. “Well, you know…how it is.”

Seeing her friend fade, Angel said, “Suzzette hang on! Please! Don’t die!”

Suzzette found the strength to say, “Tell Cray that he
really
missed out on something…when a whore loves a man…she’ll go all out for him, eh?” Her eyes drifted in a weak gesture toward the edge of the cliff and at the luggage strewn everywhere. She offered a thin, dying smile, then said, “No…don’t tell him anything…except that I’m glad…for him.” She sighed and said, as if she were speaking to him, “Oh, Cray, it hurts so bad…”

Angel watched Suzzette’s eyes roll slightly upward, then close as if she’d fallen asleep. For a long time she sat as if in a trance with Suzzette’s head in her lap, until finally she felt a firm, gloved hand on her shoulder and heard the voice of Alvin Decker say, “Ma’am…let’s get the young lady up from here and take her home, all right?”

Angel wept as Decker helped her to her feet. “She
and I were going to Missouri,” Angel said brokenly. We were quitting the business, you know?”

“I understand,” Alvin Decker said softly, walking her a few feet away while Barney Woods scooped Suzzette’s pale, limp body into his arms and carried her back toward their horses.

“We only saw the tail end of it,” said Barney Woods to Cray Dawson back at the
hacienda
. He spoke quietly while Carmelita attended to Angel Andrews’s cuts and scrapes with a clean, wet towel. “But it was that snake, Henry Snead. I recognized him right before she kicked this woman out of the wagon. We just couldn’t get there in time to do any good. The next thing we saw was her whipping them horses toward the edge of the cliff, then we saw her throw herself off of it at the last second. But it was going awfully fast by then. I don’t know why a woman would do something like that. She had to know it was traveling too fast for her to jump off.”

Dawson stood over Suzzette’s body with his head bowed. “This poor, good woman,” he whispered. “She did it to keep from bringing Snead to me. She wouldn’t take a chance on him killing me.” Dawson shook his head slowly.

“Maybe this ain’t the best time to bring it up,” said Woods, but the fact is, things ain’t going to get no better around here until somebody takes care of Lematte and his bunch. He knows there’s vengeance coming for what happened to Bouchard and the boys.” He gestured toward Suzzette’s body. “This
sort of thing will keep on happening till we get settled up.”

Dawson looked at Woods for a moment, then lowered his eyes back down to Suzzette. He lifted her cold, limp hand and held it in his. “She was put on the wrong side of this thing the minute Lematte saw that she knew me. Any way you cut it, I played a hand in her death.”

A silence passed as Woods and Decker looked on. Dawson laid Suzzette’s hand gently down at her side and said to the two drovers, “Where were you two headed when you saw them?”

Woods and Decker looked at one another shyly. Then Decker said, “All right, we’ll be honest with you, Crayton. We got fed up and was headed to Somos Santos.”

“Without Shaney and the rest of the men backing you up?” said Dawson. “You would have gotten yourselves killed.”

“We did wrong,” said Woods. “Now that we’ve settled down we realize it. But then, look what happened here.” He looked down at Suzzette and shook his head slowly. “We all waited; now this poor woman is dead.”

Dawson looked over at Carmelita, then said to Woods and Decker, “You’re right. We’ve waited long enough. Go tell Shaney and the rest of the men that we’re going into Somos Santos tomorrow. We’ll ride in at noon while the sun is high overhead.”

“Now you’re talking!” said Woods, getting excited at the prospect. “We’ll be here to get you early in the morning and ride in without stopping.”

“I’ll be ready,” said Dawson. As if in afterthought he said to Decker, “Alvin, I need you to do me a favor.”

“Just name it, Cray,” said Decker.

“I need another horse. Stony has been favoring a hoof. Can you leave your horse here and ride a saddle mule back to the Double D? He’s out back in the barn.”

“Sure thing,” said Decker. “I’ll go get him and leave my horse at the rail.”

“Much obliged,” said Dawson. “Now get on out to the Double D and let Shaney know our plan.”

“We’re on our way,” said Decker, raising his hat and putting it on as the two turned and headed to the door.

No sooner than the two drovers had saddled the red mule and ridden out of sight, Carmelita came over and stood beside Dawson as he stared down at Suzzette Sherley’s body. “Tomorrow, you and the Double D men are riding into Somos Santos?” she asked in a lowered voice.

“Yes,” said Dawson, “tomorrow. You heard those two. They were headed there today on their own. It’s got to be settled before anybody else dies.”

“I know,” said Carmelita. “I only asked so I will know when to light a candle.”

“Tomorrow,” Dawson said. Still looking down at Suzzette he said, “This woman loved me, Carmelita. She loved me, and all loving me did was bring her pain, and get her killed…her and her baby.”

“Don’t think that way,” said Angel Andrews, hearing Dawson. She stood up and walked over closer. She started to tell him that there
was
no baby, but at the last second she decided against it. It was not something Suzzette would want her to tell him in front of Carmelita, she decided. “I mean…it doesn’t help to think that way,” she said. “What’s done is done.”

“
Si
,” Carmelita said. “Things happen in this life that are out of our control.” But as she spoke she saw that there were things Angel needed to say to Cray Dawson. After a second of pause, Carmelita said quietly to Angel as she took her hand off of Dawson’s shoulder, “I will go get some fresh water from the well. We will wash her and dress her and bury her this afternoon. I will say the rosary over her.”

Angel stood close to Dawson, and when Carmelita had left the room, she told him that there had been no baby. She also told him how Suzzette had called out his name in her dying breath. “Whatever mistakes she made,” said Angel when she’d finished, “it wasn’t done to bring anyone harm. I suppose she knew that you would want to help her get out of this business if you thought she was carrying a child, even if it wasn’t your child.”

“She was right,” said Dawson. “But I would have helped her get out of the business anyway, Angel. She should have known that. She didn’t have to make up a story.”

Angel shrugged. “Well, she thought she had to.”

“Yes, I suppose she did,” said Dawson. They stood in silence until Carmelita came back in with a gourd full of fresh water. Then Dawson turned and left the room as Carmelita and Angel began to unbutton Suzzette’s torn dress.

“Carmelita,” said Angel, almost in a whisper, once Dawson had left the room. “What happened to Suzzette and me today isn’t causing him and the Double D men to go to Somos Santos, is it?”

Carmelita considered it for a moment as the two of them undressed Suzzette. “In some ways perhaps it is, Angel,” she said. “But in more ways it is not. I
think there must always be more than one reason for men to kill one another. Perhaps tomorrow each man will have in his heart a different reason why someone must die.” She handed Suzzette’s dress to Angel and dipped the clean, soft towel into the water gourd.

When the two women had finished their solemn task, Suzzette lay atop the dining room table with her hair brushed and her bruises covered by a clean dress Carmelita found in her dead sister’s closet. Without benefit of a coffin, they wrapped Suzzette in a plain brown wool blanket. After Carmelita said the rosary and Dawson read appropriate lines from a Bible, they buried her beneath the thin shade of a white oak tree behind the
hacienda
and walked back, each silent in their own thoughts, Carmelita carefully avoiding any mention of the following morning and what she knew lay before Cray Dawson and the Double D riders.

In the late evening, after Carmelita and Angel had both gone to their respective bedrooms, Cray Dawson sat in a circling glow of lamplight and took his Colt apart. He cleaned and inspected each moving part, then reassembled the gun piece by piece, carefully wiping each part with a soft white cotton rag. When he’d finished, he raised the gun close to his ear and turned the cylinder slowly, listening to each precision click of metal against metal. Satisfied, he examined each cartridge and loaded the pistol round by round. Having loaded it, he slipped the pistol into his holster lying on the table and slid the pistol in and out a few time, feeling the ease and smoothness of the motion. Then he laid his gun belt aside and cleaned his Winchester repeating rifle in the same meticulous manner.

He stood up quietly and slipped the gun belt up
onto his shoulder. Carrying the lamp he walked to just inside the bedroom where Camelita lay sleeping. For a moment he stood there listening to the faintest sound of her breathing. Then he whispered softly, “Good night, Carmelita.” He turned out the lamp, set it on a small table beside the bedroom door, and backed silently out of the room.

In the night Carmelita awakened twice, once as she heard Dawson speaking softly to her from the doorway, then again at the end of a troubled dream when she reached a hand over to his side of the bed and realized he wasn’t there. She threw a robe around herself and went from room to room looking for him. Then she slipped on her boots and walked to the barn, but by this time it was only to confirm what she already knew. She sighed, holding the lamp up to the empty stall where Dawson had stabled the horse Decker left for him. Next to that stall Stony stood quietly, only twitching his ears as the lamplight spread upon his stall.

Cray Dawson had no intention of riding into Somos Santos at noon with the Double D men. He was on his way there now. Suddenly it hit her that Dawson had ridden Decker’s horse only because he thought he wasn’t coming back and he didn’t want Stony to fall into the wrong hands. “
Santos nos protegen
!” Carmelita whispered to herself, making a hasty sign of the cross. Then she hung the lamp on a post, grabbed Stony’s bridle from a peg, and hurried into his stall.