Streets of Laredo: A Novel (70 page)

"Go away, you goddamn buzzards!" he growled, at the few who dared to come within hearing distance.

The people feared to challenge him, but they were frustrated. The body of the famous young killer lay almost in sight, and they wanted to see it. They wanted to tell their children that they had seen the corpse of Joey Garza. They hated the old fountain man; he was crazy. What right did he have to turn them away when they had come long distances to look at a famous corpse. He didn't own the body!

"They ought to lock up the old bastard!" one disgruntled spectator complained. He expressed the general view.

But no one came to lock up Billy. Olin Roy arrived out of deep Mexico in time to help Billy dig the two graves. Olin was silent and sad, for he, too, had loved Maria. The old sisters came and dressed Maria's body, but they would not touch Joey. Lorena finished the cleaning that Maria, in her weakness, had begun.

Pea Eye watched with Famous Shoes, who had arrived in the night while Billy Williams sat drinking. The wounds in Joey's back were terrible, and Olin and Billy both believed they would have killed Joey, in time.

"Why, he was just a young boy," Pea Eye remarked. It always surprised him how ordinary famous outlaws turned out to be, once you saw them dead. People talked about them so much that you came to expect them to be giants, but they weren't. They were just men of ordinary size, if not smaller.

"Why, Clarie's bigger than he was," Pea Eye said. All that chasing and all that pain and death, and the boy who caused it hadn't been as big as his own fifteen-year-old.

"He had pretty hands, didn't he?" Lorena said. She felt sad and low. All Billy Williams's yelling and shooting made her nervous. She could not forget Maria's anguished eyes. What a terrible grief, to have a child go bad and never be able to correct it or even know why it happened. She wondered how she would live if one of her sons came to hate her as Joey had seemed to hate Maria.

It was not a direction Lorena wanted to allow her mind to go. She didn't want such darkness in her thoughts, for she had the living to tend to. She busied herself caring for Pea Eye, Captain Call, and the two children. She thought of Maria and her bad son as little as possible. There was no knowing why such things happened. Lorena had good sons, and she knew now how very lucky she was. To have an evil child come from her own womb would be too hard to bear; Lorena didn't want to think about it.

When Pea Eye's mind cleared and he had a good look at the Captain, he was shocked.

Call was almost helpless. He let the little blind girl feed him, but otherwise, he simply lay on his pallet, barely moving. Of course, he could barely move without assistance. He only had one leg and one arm, and could not button or unbutton himself.

"You have to help him make water," Lorena told Pea Eye. "He hates for me to do it, but if somebody don't help him, he'll wet his pallet. Watch him and help him. We don't have any bedding to spare." "Why, Captain, if there was many more people as bunged up as you and me, they'd have to build a crutch factory in the Panhandle, I guess," Pea Eye said. He was trying to make conversation with the silent man. He thought of the part about the crutch factory as a little joke, but Lorena glared at him when he said it, and Captain Call did not reply. He just stared upward.

Later, Pea Eye felt bad about having made the remark. He didn't know why he had even made it, it just popped out. Though his hip pained him a good deal, Pea Eye could not help but feel good. His wife had found him, and they were together again. He wouldn't have to lose her, and he would see his children soon. Lorena was going to wire Clara to send them home when the time came for them all to go north.

The sullen doctor from Presidio had been persuaded to come and set Pea Eye's hip, but only because Lorena had gone to Presidio herself and refused to take no for an answer. She had waited sternly in the doctor's office until he saddled a horse and came back with her. He said Pea would be walking without a crutch in two months, just in time for planting. His shoulder was already almost healed, and the two toes Joey shot off he could do without. Mox Mox and Joey Garza were dead, but he himself had survived. He had also learned his lesson, and learned it well. He would never leave his family again.

"Why'd you have to say that about the crutch factory?" Lorena whispered to him that night. The remark had startled her. Pea Eye had never made a joke in his life--why that one at that time?

"He'll never forgive you for saying it, and I don't blame him," she went on. "You're just hurt, Pea. In two months you'll be as good as new. But the Captain is crippled for life.

He's crippled, for life!

"You better just shut up about crutch factories!" she whispered later, with unusual vehemence.

Pea Eye came to feel that his chance remark was the worst thing he had ever said in his life. His main hope was that the Captain would just forget it. But the Captain said so little to anyone that it was hard to know what he was remembering or forgetting. The Captain just lay there. He only fought when Pea Eye tried to help him relieve himself, struggling with his one weak hand. His struggles unnerved Pea Eye so much that he did a poor job the first time, and he made a mess. This incompetence annoyed Lorena to the point that she ignored the Captain's objections and helped him herself after that.

"You'll have to learn to do things for him, Pea," Lorena said. "He's helpless. He'll have to live with us for a while, I guess. I told Maria I'd take her children, and we've got them to think about, too. We're both going to have all we can do. You better make up your mind to start helping Captain Call. You have to help him now whether he likes it or not. You know the man. You worked for him most of your life. He don't like it when I help him. I don't know whether he just don't like me, or whether it's because I'm a woman, or because I was what I was, once ... I don't know. But we're going to have all we can do, both of us, and the Captain ought to be your responsibility." "Why, that little blind girl takes care of him pretty well herself," Pea said. Indeed, Teresa's attentiveness and the Captain's acceptance of it surprised him. He had never known the Captain to cotton to a child. He had never even come to visit their children, and he and Lorena had five.

Teresa brought the Captain his food and sat by him and fed him. She brought a rag and washed his face when he finished. If he wanted to turn on his side, he let Teresa help him.

Often, she whispered to him and the Captain responded, though in a voice so low that Pea Eye could not pick up the words. The little girl was quick as a lizard. She could be across the room and out the door in a flash, and Pea Eye never saw her bump into anything.

Maria and Joey were buried in the two graves Billy and Olin had dug. Many people came; not for Maria, but so they could say they had seen Joey Garza buried. Billy and Lorena went across the river and got the coffins, plain pine boxes.

They tried to find Mullins, the photographer, and return his donkey, but Mullins was drunk somewhere and could not be located. The collapse of his prospects proved too much for him. Billy Williams was a little abashed; it had all been the vaqueros' fault, not the photographer's. But they could not spend all day looking for a drunken photographer, so they took the donkey back to Mexico.

The old sisters and a few local women came to the burial, but very few men showed up. Gordo, the butcher, walked by sullenly and went home.

He was still angry with Maria for being dead and thus unavailable for marriage.

"There ought to be singing," Lorena said. She knew Pea Eye couldn't sing, and Billy and Olin were unknown quantities when it came to hymn singing. She remembered the songs in Laredo, during the burial of the deputy's young wife. She had learned from Pea that the deputy was dead now, too; it made her want to go live in a country where not so much blood was spilled. She remembered how the whore with the curly hair had poured her heart into the song for the young woman, as if she had known how the deputy's wife must have felt, to want to take her own life. Though not confident of her own voice, Lorena resolved to sing alone if necessary. She began "There's a Home Beyond the River"--after all, the river was right there in sight--and to her surprise, Olin Roy joined her. He had a fine baritone voice. He sang so well that a few of the gawkers from Presidio were moved to join in.

That night, dark feelings burdened Lorena.

She could not get Maria's horrible end to leave her mind. She tried to sleep, but could not. She lay beside Pea Eye on the pallet and began to shake. The feeling came over her that had made her want to die when Blue Duck took her and when Mox Mox prepared to burn her. Evil men or evil circumstances would come and prove stronger than all the good in her life. She had her husband back and would soon have her children with her, but in her fear, she could not help feeling that the reprieve was only temporary. Clara Allen herself had watched all three of her sons die.

Two of Maria's children had afflictions, and the one who had been whole and beautiful was evil. He had murdered many men and, in the end, had even murdered the woman who had carried him in her womb. Lorena couldn't control her fear, for it came from places too deep and too real, from what she had known and what she had seen. She and her family were safe, but only for a time. Her children were still young, and disease could take them. Her boys were still small; one of them could be a Joey. She didn't expect it, but Maria probably hadn't expected it either, when Joey had been the age of Georgie or Ben.

The fear made Lorena restless. She got up, then lay down again. The room was too small to walk in. She could hear Pea Eye's breathing, and the Captain's and Rafael's; the large boy snored in his sleep.

Billy Williams and Olin Roy were outside, drinking and smoking. In her restlessness, Lorena went out. She had never drunk much whiskey, but she wanted something that would dull her feeling--the feeling that there was no safety and that nothing could prevent things happening to her or her loved ones, things that were even worse than what had already happened. She knew she was lucky, for she was healthy, she wasn't dead, none of her children were sick, and her husband's wounds would heal.

But it was only temporary, her luck. The next Mox Mox might find her, or the next plague, or a storm or a fire or a war.

Maria had been a kind woman, but her fate had been far from kind--her fate had been hard and her end terrible. It was a warning; but a warning for a condition which had no cure, or of a threat that there was no guarding against.

Lorena put on Pea Eye's coat and stepped out into the cold night. The two men sat a little distance from the house. They had made a small campfire and were staring into it, passing a bottle back and forth. Lorena walked out to the fire.

Both men saw Lorena coming and felt uneasy.

She had been courteous to both of them and had made Billy Williams an ally forever because of her kindness to Maria. Maria would have died even harder had she not known that Lorena would take care of her children.

Billy and Olin had roamed the border country for most of their lives, and both of them remembered Lorena from other days when she had been a beautiful young whore in Lonesome Dove. Both had visited her. Olin Roy remembered the Frenchman, Xavier Wanz, who had loved Lorena so feverishly that he burned his own saloon and himself with it, in his grief when Lorena went north with the Hat Creek outfit. Neither had supposed they would encounter the woman so much later in life, married to the gangly Pea Eye. She was heavier and her fresh beauty had been worn away by life, but she was the same woman: she was respectable and competent by any standard.

She had amputated Woodrow Call's leg and brought him to safety across more than a hundred miles of desert. Few men would have been equal to that task. Now she was walking toward their campfire, in her husband's big coat. In the heat of action and the sadness of the last days, neither man had thought much about their earlier brief connection with Lorena. But now they wondered, separately, if she would remember that they had been among her many customers, long ago.

"Could you spare me a little of your liquor, gentlemen?" Lorena asked. "I'm feeling chill." "Here, ma'am--we've got a fresh bottle," Billy said, handing it to her. "This one ain't been slobbered on." Lorena took the full bottle and drank.

The whiskey burned her throat, but she sat down by the campfire, tucked the coat around her, and drank anyway. Pea Eye's coat was a heavy gray capote, with a hood for rough weather.

Lorena pulled the hood over her head and drank. The men had fallen silent, which annoyed her a little. It irritated her that men were so uneasy in her company most of the time. She had been courteous to these men--why had they immediately stopped talking when she arrived? Even Pea Eye was sometimes ill at ease in her company, for no reason she could understand. She was doing exactly the same thing as the men: sitting by a campfire drinking whiskey. Why wouldn't they talk?

"I don't mean to impose," Lorena said to them. "You don't have to choke off your conversation just because I'm here." "We wasn't saying much anyway," Billy Williams told her. "We was just chatting about Mary." "Tell me about her," Lorena said. "I didn't have time to get to know her very well." "She was married four times," Billy Williams said. "Three of her husbands got killed, and the other one run off. I never cared much for any of them myself, but it was Mary who took them as husbands, not me.

"Then Joey went bad," he added.