Streets of Laredo: A Novel (36 page)

The hooves did not immediately bring her death, though they broke both her hips and crushed one hand.

"She's still stirring--ride again," Mox Mox said. The seven men wheeled their horses and rode again, and again. Because they couldn't see, the horses were frightened. Soon the men stopped racing. They merely spurred their mounts, causing them to jump into the broken branches. The rotten buffalo robes were soon kicked away, the mesquite branches broken.

"I guess that will teach her," Hergardt said.

He was German, the largest of the seven men. He was also, by common consent, the dumbest. Hergardt was so dumb he often put his boots on the wrong feet. He was strong and would pull his boots on without looking, as easily as most people pull on socks. Later, he would wonder why his feet hurt.

Hergardt rode a big bay horse. The other men dismounted and began to pile the broken mesquite limbs into a pyre, but Hergardt kept riding his horse back and forth over the body of old Naiche.

"What will it teach her?" Mox Mox asked him, looking at the body of the dead woman. A hoof had broken her neck. "I could cook you for a week and it wouldn't make you smart," Mox Mox said. "Being burnt just teaches you that you're burnt." Mox Mox had found Hergardt in San Francisco, when he returned from his years on the sea. He had gone to sea to escape Goodnight, who had pursued him all the way to the Great Salt Lake. Mox Mox knew he could not go back to the Southwest for a while.

Goodnight had been too persistent. Mox Mox put out the story of his death at the hands of the Ute, and went to sea for seven years.

Hergardt was making his living as a wrestler when Mox Mox docked in San Francisco. He wrestled all comers for a dollar a bout. Mox Mox began to promote him and soon had the price up to ten dollars a bout, although Hergardt was far from invincible. Many smaller, quicker men beat him.

"You deserve to be burnt, but it wouldn't teach you nothing," Mox Mox observed. "Stop riding over her. She's dead. It's time to light the fire, Jimmy." Jimmy Cumsa lit the branches. He was a Cherokee boy from Missouri, very quick in his movements; almost too quick, in Mox Mox's view. Mox Mox liked to have a sense of how his men worked together, if there was a fight. Six of them he could keep up with, but Jimmy Cumsa--Quick Jimmy, they called him--was so swift that Mox Mox could seldom anticipate him. He would see Jimmy in front of him one minute, and the next minute, Jimmy would be behind him.

"Watching you burn people would teach me something, Mox," Jimmy said. "It would teach me not to stay around you too long." "You been around me for a year. What keeps you, if you don't like my ways?" Mox Mox asked.

Jimmy Cumsa didn't answer. He was watching the hut burn. The old woman's thin garments began to burn too.

He knew it irritated Mox Mox, when he didn't answer a question, but Jimmy Cumsa didn't care. He did not belong to Mox Mox, and didn't have to answer questions. Jimmy was careful of Mox Mox, but he was not afraid of him. He had confidence in his own speed, as a rider, as a runner, and as a pistol shot. He was not an especially good pistol shot, but he was so fast it fooled people, scaring many of them into firing wildly, or doing something else dumb, that would cause them to lose the fight.

Mox Mox killed short people because they reminded him of himself--that was Jimmy Cumsa's theory.

He killed tall people because he envied them. He could be a killer, but he could never be tall. He could never be blond, because he had red hair; and he could never look you straight in the eye, because one of his eyes was pointed wrong. It looked out of his head at an angle. Mox Mox hated being short, regretted that smallpox had scarred his face, and was sorry that he was not blond, but the thing he hated most about himself was his crooked-looking eye. His greatest, most elaborate cruelties were reserved for people with well-set, bright blue eyes.

When Mox Mox caught such a person, male or female, he tended to do the worst things to the eyes. If the person with the perfect blue eyes was tall and blond, then so much the worse for him or her.

Jimmy Cumsa wondered if fire was so hot that even dead people could feel it burning them. He had seen corpses twitch, while Mox Mox was burning them. It seemed to Jimmy that might mean even the dead had some feelings, enough feelings that they could respond to the heat of a fire.

Mox Mox had probably killed the old Comanche woman because she was short. She was about the same height as Mox Mox himself. Burning flesh smelled sweet--that was a fact soon learned, if you rode with Mox Mox. It didn't matter why he had killed the old woman; she was definitely dead. The flimsy branches of her little hovel didn't make much of a funeral flame. She wasn't going to be burned very completely, Jimmy knew that.

Mox Mox didn't seem to be paying much attention to this fire, or to the old woman's burning. Most likely, that was because she was dead, and couldn't scream and plead. When people screamed and pleaded, Mox Mox got icy cool. He was like the sleet at such times. Never once had he spared a person he wanted to burn, not since Jimmy had ridden with him. It didn't matter how loudly they pleaded, or how much money they offered him.

Peon got off his horse and began to piss into the flames. Peon was another runt, a little taller than Mox Mox, but not much. He had grown up in a swamp in Mississippi, and he slunk along, looking furtive and dirty, like some old swamp dog.

The two Mexicans were anxious to get the burning over with, so they could go to the cantina and drink. Oteros kept looking at the horizon, as if he expected to see a posse coming for him, with their hang ropes out.

Oteros was not afraid of Mox Mox, either.

He was with him because he admired his business sense.

He had met Mox Mox in jail, in San Luis Obispo. Mox Mox was about to be hung, for killing a boy. Oteros had very long arms and managed to reach out of his cell with one of his long arms and catch the jailer as the man was walking past with a plate of beans for an old bank robber who was being kept in the jail. Oteros held firmly to the jailer's collar until he could get his pistol and beat his head in. Mox Mox got the jailer's keys, and the two of them left.

Oteros had been with Mox Mox ever since.

"I don't like these crows," Oteros said.

"Why did we come here? There are too many laws in Texas." "He means lawmen," Peon said. He understood Oteros and liked him, although Oteros was the most violent of the seven men and as likely to kill friend as foe when his temper was up, as it often was.

"He thinks there are too many lawmen in Texas," he repeated, in case Mox Mox missed his point.

"There may be too many lawmen in Texas, but there's still too many Apaches in New Mexico," Mox Mox said. "I'd rather fight any lawman in the world than some old Apache with one eye and a weak bow. I'd kill the lawman, but the one-eyed Apache would probably kill me." "You, but not me," Oteros said. "I have killed many Indians and I will kill more if I see any." "Go kill Goodnight, if you want to kill a tough old wolf," Mox Mox said.

"The sonofabitch chased me a thousand miles, and he'd do it again if he knew I was alive." "Well, he'll find out, if we come over here and start cooking people," Jimmy Cumsa said.

"We won't be cooking too many until Goodnight is dead," Mox Mox said. "I do want to kill that Mexican boy who robbed those trains with the payrolls on them. We've robbed three trains and ain't took a payroll yet.

That boy's beating us to the money. If we could take a payroll, we could hire enough men to clean out a state." "A state?" Jimmy asked. "You want to kill all the people in a whole state? I never knew you had that kind of ambition, Mox." "Which one would you take, if you was to take a state?" Peon asked.

Mox Mox had given no detailed thought to the conquest of a state. He'd merely been reflecting on the army he could raise if he had a million dollars to spend. It was rumored in Juarez that the Garza boy had taken a million dollars in payroll money off the trains he had robbed.

"I might take Wyoming," Mox Mox said.

"I could take it and be governor of it. Then, I'd hang all the dirty sonsabitches I didn't like." "There wouldn't be a soul left in the state, if you hung all the people you didn't like," Jimmy Cumsa said. "I don't notice that you like too many people, Mox." "I don't, for a fact, and you're getting to be a prime candidate for hanging yourself," Mox Mox said. Sometimes Quick Jimmy let a little too much contempt leak into his voice, when he spoke to his boss. Jimmy didn't like very many people himself, but he paired up with Pedro Jones when they hit a town and decided to seek women.

Pedro Jones had a Yankee father and a mother who came from far down in the Indian country below the City of Mexico, by the ocean. Pedro carried a seashell with him, in his saddlebags. At night, by the fire, he would often sit holding the shell to his ear. He liked to listen to the sea, for he had grown up by it. Listening to its faint echo in the shell reminded him of a time when life had not been so harsh.

Pedro had become a criminal by accident, at a time when he lived in Vera Cruz.

He was very tight with his money and had begun to strangle the whores he went to see, in order to save what they cost. It seemed to him a reasonable practice. There were many, many whores in Vera Cruz, and he had only strangled a few and beat in the heads of one or two more. He had only killed the last few because of drink, but the authorities had not accepted his excuses. A whore who was in love with him helped him break out of jail and he went west, across Mexico and then north into Arizona Territory, where Mox Mox found him. Pedro had killed an old woman who wanted to charge him too much for his supper. Old as she was, the authorities still took offense, so that Pedro was forced to flee along the Gila.

Manuel had been in jail with Pedro, and fled with him when he escaped. Manuel was a simple horse thief who was too lazy to run as far as it was necessary to run when he stole horses from the gringos. He stayed with Mox Mox and his gang because he didn't like traveling alone. He thought Mox Mox's habit of burning people was repugnant, and he always rode off a mile or two and tried to take a nap, while the people screamed out their pain. But he stayed with the gang because it eliminated the problem of being lazy and getting caught. He could make fires and he could cook; those were his main jobs with Mox Mox. He was rarely asked to take much part in the killing, and had been very reluctant to ride his horse over the hut of the old Comanche woman, although he had not known the woman personally. It seemed to him dangerous to race seven horses at the same time, and make them smash a hut, even a small one. Running horses often fell anyway. His own brother had his skull broken because a running horse had fallen in a rocky place with him on its back.

"They say Joey Garza can shoot you from a mile," Jimmy Cumsa said. "They say he don't miss." "I don't miss, either," Mox Mox said.

"You miss because you don't aim--you just shoot. If I hadn't adopted you, I imagine you'd have been plugged by now. Let's go find somebody who knows where this wild boy's at. I want to kill him before he takes any more payrolls away from us.

Then, we'll go get Goodnight." At the saloon, Oteros and Manuel stayed outside. Pedro Jones went in, but came right back out. He disliked low rooms.

Peon went in, hoping Mox Mox would buy him whiskey, but Mox Mox didn't mention buying whiskey for anyone. Hergardt and Jimmy Cumsa also went inside. Hergardt's head came within an inch of the ceiling, when he straightened up.

A white man with a splotchy face, a cripple, and an Irishman were in the saloon.

Mox Mox recognized John Wesley Hardin at once, from photographs he had seen in newspapers. Seeing him in person was a surprise. Mox Mox hadn't supposed he could walk into a saloon in the sandhills and come upon a famous man.

"Ain't you Hardin?" he asked, feeling that he was addressing a peer.

"Mind your own business, you cross-eyed runt," Hardin said. He had stepped outside and surveyed the gang briefly. Red Foot had limped in and informed him that they were trampling old Naiche to death.

"Well, there goes the last woman," he observed, to Patrick O'Brien. "This place has got the curse of doom upon it. If I was you and had a business in a place like this, I'd move it." "Wes, I just got a load of whiskey in last week," Patrick pointed out. "It's the wrong time to move." Mox Mox was so startled by John Wesley Hardin's insulting reply that he didn't do a thing. He took the other table, and told the Irishman to bring him whiskey. There were only two chairs at his dirty little table, and Jimmy Cumsa took the second chair. Jimmy was amused by the killer's reply to Mox Mox. Such talk was music to his ears. He had described Mox Mox exactly: a cross-eyed runt.

Hergardt was left standing. He didn't seem to mind or to notice, but John Wesley Hardin noticed.

"You're too big to be inside--go outside and wait," he said, to Hergardt. "Or else sit down. You're blocking the light. I can scarcely see my cards." "There ain't no chair for me," Hergardt informed him.

"Then sit on the floor, you damn German," Wesley Hardin said. "If you don't get out of my light, you'll soon be enjoying a few holes in your liver." He pulled his revolver out of his belt, and laid it on the table.

Despite the insult that had been offered him, Mox Mox found that he admired Hardin's temerity. Hardin was the most famous killer in the Southwest, after all. Finding a man who would say exactly what he pleased was a novelty, and of course, Hardin's reputation was far greater than his own. Hardin had the habit of killing, and he had gone to prison for it and survived, untamed.