The Eye of the Hunter (18 page)

“Well ...”

Frances threw the brush down. “That woman! I didn't even berate her! We just—Henry, there's something very odd about this. Did she tell Father Vargas this fairy tale in the confessional? Because if it was a confession, then he shouldn't even have told you.”

Henry picked up the brush and fondled a plait of her hair. “I used to brush my mother's hair,” he said. “Do you like it brushed up from the neck, too?”

“No, we'll wait for my hanging for that. Tell me the rest of it.”

Brushing, Henry told her what he knew, that the tale had originally been privileged information, but that later Catalina had spooked and decided she'd better tell the sheriff about it. But she was afraid to report it to the sheriff, so she asked Vargas to tell him for her.

Henry suddenly realized that she was quietly weeping. He put his arms around her and held her closely, murmuring.

“I'm cursed, Henry!” she wept. “She was the only witness I had. And she's turned against me! What am I going to do?”

“Well, so far, Vargas is waiting for me to tell him what to do. I think you should go over and tell him your story—and then stay on that side of the line. Let me talk to a lawyer on this side, and, er, explain what we've found to Bannock. Because everything we've found says that the Hunter killed Rip, with one single, unbelievable shot.”

Frances turned, tears on her face, but laughing. “Oh, Henry! Couldn't you have come up with a better word than
unbelievable
? He's
got
to believe it!”

With all the determination and force of an intelligent woman, Frances declared that she would never return to Nogales. “I have shaken off the dust of that town forever!” she said.

They had reached the ranch yard in late afternoon. Henry was wearily unsaddling his Army mount, and Alejandro had carried Frances's saddle into the adobe-walled bam.

“By now, I am wanted for murder, on the word of a prostitute. My father is a subject for jokes, women snicker at me, and I expect I shall soon lose this ranch in bankruptcy court.”

Even in her worn-out state she was beautiful, perhaps more so than before, since the deep shadows in her eyes and the thinness of her cheeks emphasized her fragility.

Henry said: “Don't be too sure about losing the ranch. Manion told me old Hum Parrish took some legal step to protect it. It's there in the papers. I'll look them over again. “

“Hum Parrish is dead. A couple of thousand dollars of bad debts ago. The ranch is a corporation, true. But I don't know whether the trick will work.”

“You're tired, Panchita. Tomorrow—”

“I've been tired for months. You're tired, too. Leave this town, Henry. Get on the train and go back to Kansas City. I told you there's a curse on the Wingards. No good will come of trying to help me.”

Henry kissed her sunburned lips with his own dry, cracked lips. “Woman,” he said, “where you go I go. If it has to be Costa Rica.”

“No, Henry. I'm the bad luck lady. We have a little house in Hermosillo. I'll stay there and get a midwife's license.”

“And how are you going to get to Sonora without going to Nogales?”

“There's a siding a mile from here where the train can be flagged. I'll catch it there tomorrow and just keep going. So that's settled!” she exclaimed. “Come inside now, and rest a while before you go on. And let your poor horse have a bait and a roll, too.”

Henry ate and then slept for two hours. By the time he was stirring, the Mexican boy had saddled and groomed his horse, after washing its back and tending its hooves, and the big red dun was ready to travel. Henry stole to the door of Frances's bedroom and considered tapping on it—but Josefina appeared and shushed him.

“She sleeps, Señor Logahn.
Esta muy cansada! Vaya con Dios!
”

Before he went with God, however, Henry collected all the old ranch papers, and the silver pesos, and stuffed his saddlebags with them.

He rode into Nogales as a church bell was bonging out the hour of nine, ringing through the darkness as softly as though the bell were lined with velvet. In the warm and fragrant air, charcoal smoke and food smells created in him a mood of nostalgia for a place he had never lived. He could hear tired children fussing behind the lamplit windows of the little adobe houses. He stopped to have a cup of coffee with Alice Gary, whose hair was done up in curlers. They sat in the kitchen and talked softly in order not to disturb Miss Leisure and Arthur Cleveland. And as far as that went, he scarcely had the power to speak loudly, anyway. Allie, winding her alarm clock, saw it and said, “You look worn-out, Henry.”

“I'm fine. Tell you whose health I am worried about, though. Milo Stockard's.”

Allie hooted. “Don't worry about that old devil! Hasn't spent a sick day since he was a baby.”

“He must have a doctor, though.”

“Why?”

“Because some sawbones must have taken care of him when he blinded his eye.”

“Oh, that. I think he went to Marcus Spanier. And of course the old idiot raised the dickens with Marcus when he couldn't save his eye.”

Henry turned the alarm clock and read it. It was eight-thirty. “S'pose he'd still be up?”

“Stockard?”

“No, the doctor.”

“Probably. When he's all through with his patients, he plays the French horn. They say that when he's driving out in the country on a call, you can hear him tooting for miles! The coyotes sing along with him! Really!”

“I believe it,” Henry said. “My own father played the piccolo. He joined the Army to be a bandmaster.... Well, thanks for the coffee, Allie! Where is Dr. Spanier's office?”

“On Alamos.” Allie told him how to find the house.

Henry rode until he found the peak-roofed house on the high side of Alamos Street. A stone retaining wall kept it from sliding down the hill. Behind the house he heard a windmill creaking. There were fruit trees in the front yard and a rose garden. A stained-glass fanlight glowed above the door. Though he heard no French horn tooting, he tied the horse to a cement hitching post and hiked up the steps to twist the handle of a brass doorbell.

A middle-aged woman appeared. When she heard Henry's name, she smiled. “Oh, you're the man who—”

“Probably.” Henry smiled. He laid his hand about where his liver should be. “I've had malaria, ma'am, and lately I've noticed—”

“Come right in, Henry! The doctor's somewhere. He'll be so glad to meet you! He met your father at the fort once!”

Waiting in the hall, Henry sat on an elegant bottle-green love seat that lovers who could have mated on a rock might have found comfortable. In a a moment a door opened and a dark-haired, middle-aged man looked out.

“Henry Logan!” he said. “What a pleasure! Captain Logan's son, I believe?”

Henry rose and offered his hand.
“A su servicio!
That about right?”

Dr. Spanier laughed.
“Mucho gusto!
And come right in.”

In his surgery there was a long, low bench, glass-and-wood cases, bright steel tools laid out on white cloth, and racks of medicine bottles. Spanier placed a chair for him, and Henry sank onto it with a sigh.

“You should get more rest, Henry,” the doctor warned. “Of course, championing young women can be tiring, I know. And you've had a tropical fever, I hear.”

Henry was moving closer to having to finagle some information out of the doctor, and he hadn't yet worked out how to make his ten of diamonds look like an ace of spades. So he rubbed his liver again and said, “Yes, sir. You see, the Army doctors—”

Spanier raised his hands. “Don't tell me, Henry! I'll make my own diagnosis. Now, I can guess the state of your liver, but before I pass sentence I'm going to allow you one drink of your father's own brand of Irish whiskey.”

He put a thermometer under Henry's tongue and then left the room. He returned with glasses, ice, and a bottle of Busbmill's and read the thermometer.

“Fine,” he said. He poured the whiskey and raised his glass. “To your father I”

After the toast, the doctor began recalling the legend of Captain Black Jack Logan—his rich Irish tenor voice, his yarns, his Black Irish handsomeness. Yet he recalled, too, a strain of sadness in him, a loneliness and dissatisfaction.

“Of course, he should have been a full colonel,” he said. “But somehow he was always passed over. And do you know the strangest thing of all?”

Henry shook his head. He knew something a lot stranger about his father than the doctor was likely to, but he let him tell his story.

“There was simply no way he could be induced to play the piccolo! But I heard him play, once—he played just for me, because I was an amateur musician, too. Henry, the sound was like poured silver—no, it was like the purest notes sung by most talented mockingbird in creation, trilling to attract a mate!”

Henry's eyes filled, and he drank quickly.
Don't do this to me, Doctor!
Fatigue and worry had just about done him in. He wiped his lips, lowered the glass, and said, “I know why he wouldn't play. The goddamn Army tricked him. He joined to be a bandleader and musician, not to murder Indians. I think it was a protest. He wouldn't playa note, not even for the general's parties.”

Dr. Spanier sighed. “I know, and it's really too bad. I may not be much of a horn player, but I'd miss it if I couldn't play it.... Well, Henry, about your physical problem. Let that be your last drink for a while. And take it easy, for heaven's sake—get more rest.”

“I'll try.”

“At least”—Dr. Spanier chuckled—“I hear there's no faulting your eye. Heard tell you shot the bejesus out of that pipsqueak Ambrose's golden ball! Couldn't you have made it his, er, balls?”

Henry laughed.

Then the doctor said something that led right into Henry's area of interest. He said, “Let's see what a good eye looks like. Sit tight.”

He donned an ophthalmologist's mirror, adjusted a lamp, peered into Henry's eye, and murmured, “Beautiful! No floaters, absolutely clear vitreous humor! Macula like a diamond.”

As he shifted the light to Henry's left eye, Henry said, “I hear General Stockard's got quite an eye, too....”

“Yes. Rotten disposition, but a good eye. Well—he did have. You know about his loading accident?”

“Yes. Scorched himself pretty well, did he?”

Spanier laid down his instruments. He seemed to debate something. “Well, the flesh near his eye,” he said.

“I don't understand.”

“The eye itself is sound.”

Henry felt a thrill so great that he had to seize the whiskey bottle and pour himself another inch of amber joy.

“But why the eye patch, then? Why did he quit shooting? Surely he's not faking blindness?”

Spanier raised a cautionary finger. “Now, now, Henry! I didn't say that. I meant that the damage is in his mind—that fear of blindness turned off the lights in that eye! But he might as well have ripped out the cornea. He doesn't need the eye patch any more than the bust of Beethoven on my wife's piano needs spectacles.”

“Then why does he wear it?”

Spanier winked at him. “Bid for sympathy. He'd kill you if you said it, but I think it's true. He's too tough to mourn his tragedy, but his ego was punctured. He's saying to men, 'If I don't challenge you anymore, you know why.' Now and then he comes in to ask what I've read in the journals. What can I tell him? The eye is undamaged! It wasn't even singed in the explosion.”

In his room, Henry pored over every scrap of paper Lawyer Manion had given him, every onionskin and memo he had read while he was sick the previous week. What finally struck him was that the ranch was officially the Spider Cattle Corporation. Spider, Inc., this; Spider, Inc., that; John Manion, for Spider Cattle Corp.

At one point Frances Wingard Parrish became vice president of the corporation, even.

And, of course, a quire of please-remits.

Most surprising, though, a written offer for the ranch, made by Milo Stockard, AUS, Ret., and Aaron Beckwith, Bank of Nogales. Apparently Ambrose wasn't even in it with the general—they were partners only in the newspaper.

Then, exhausted, he turned off the light and lay in the dark, mulling over what the doctor had told him. It was clear now that Stockard, as well as anyone else, could be the Hunter—that his eye was as perfect and as dangerous as ever! Tomorrow he would visit the
Globe
office and see whether that tarnished bottlenose shell from the sniper's roost would fit the general's target rifle.

Deep in the night a vision of his father appeared before him.

Clad in a white planter's suit and sporting a fine wide-brimmed Panama hat, Captain Logan was standing in the
zaguán
of a big Spanish-style house. There was lawn, huge-leaved plants, gorgeous purple-flowered vines crawling over the house, and little black-haired servants, also in white, standing by, awaiting his orders. He heard wind chimes and birds singing. It was lovely! Was he dead? he wondered. Then his dad raised a revolver—no, it was a silver piccolo!—pointed it at Henry, and made the popping sound with his lips that as a child Henry used to laugh over.

He blew a tune Henry loved, “Oh, Danny Boy,” lowered the piccolo, and said, “Never give up, Henry. Get the payroll through.”

“I'll get it through, Dad!” he promised. “Play it again!”

His father said, “It's really called ‘Londonderry Air,' a nice Irish song, but here we go”—and with the notes of that lovely, heartbreaking tune in his head, Henry slept like a dead man, dreaming of cascades of silver pesos.

On International Street, Henry saw Father Vargas pulling a wagon made of cast-off parts up the rutted street. The stores were open, though it was not yet nine o'clock, and the wagon was heaped with boxes and sacks of purchases. Bent forward, the priest strode along in his black cassock, holding a book close to his face. Henry stood among three others on a corner, waiting for the bank to open.