The Last Hard Men (2 page)

He sent the three old-timers down the Gila, eastward. The river was dry, only a few sinkholes, but they went, because Provo had the gun and Provo was a tough breed to tangle with; and because Cesar Menendez just stood there with his riot gun, watching them all with his fast little eyes.

Provo counted heads again. “Nine of us. That’ll do.”

“Do what?” young Mike Shelby asked. “What you got in mind, anyway?” Shelby was the only one of them with balls enough to ask that kind of question against Provo’s gun, but Shelby was the only one who knew how to take the sting off a challenge with an amiable smile. He had a wide friendly face and a head full of chestnut hair, and the innocence of his nineteen years.

Provo looked them over, walking around, going from face to face. “This time tomorrow,” he said finally, “those others will all be back in Yuma if they’re not dead. Same thing can happen to us if we don’t work together. Everybody understand me?”

Lee Roy Tucker said, “Maybe some of us might rather not take awders from you, Zach.”

Provo shifted the riot gun to his left hand. His right hand gripped Lee Roy’s arm. Lee Roy burst out in a gray sweat. The steel fingers bit into his arm, the strong thumb casually working flesh against cartilage against bone. Provo said, “When I say jump, Lee Roy, you say How high?”

He let go of Lee Roy’s arm and stepped back. Lee Roy looked unhappy, as if his shorts were bunching up. “I don’t think I want to mess with you, Zach.”

“You bet your ass you don’t.”

Anticipating trouble from Will Gant, Provo wheeled that way. Gant was tugging at a thick black hair in his nostril. The blunt head was anchored on a thick neck that bulged with folds of fat; the eyes were crafty. Provo didn’t bother to watch the eyes, with which Gant would be likely to feint; he watched Gant’s feet instead. “How about it, Will?”

“Depends what you got in mind.”

It was easy enough to read in Gant’s sullen face: he’d sooner herd sheep than follow orders from a half-breed Navajo. But Provo had the gun. Provo said, “I’m going to get us out.”

“All right. You won’t have no trouble with me.” Gant relaxed; his feet shifted and splayed.

Provo turned away, satisfied. “Everybody pay attention now. We’re going to walk straight over to the Colorado and sink ourselves down in the arrowweed over there until dark. Sweat it out. On the far side of the river, so the dogs won’t get to us. Come dark, we wade downriver into Yuma.”

“
Into Yuma
?” Lee Roy Tucker yelled.

“Shut up and stay still. We wade into Yuma and we wait under the ferryboat dock until sometime after midnight. There’s an eastbound S.P. freight comes in across the bridge about two in the morning. Pulls out for Tucson around three. There’s always half a dozen zinc-lined meat-hanging icebox cars. We climb into one of them. They’ll search all the cars on the train but we hide back in the corners behind the carcasses, underneath. They won’t take much time to search—they can’t hold an ice car open for long, everything’d melt. Middle of the night, they’ll be tired out by then anyway. They won’t find us as long as everybody keeps quiet. We’re going to freeze our asses but we’ll make it. Soon as the train pulls out of Yuma we pitch the ice out and get ourselves thawed out. We jump off when she slows down at some town up the line and we lay belly-flat in the scrub until she’s gone by. Then we shanks-mare into town and saw off these irons after dark, and get horses under us.”

Mike Shelby said, “You’ve got it all worked out.”

“I’ve had twenty-eight years for it.” He looked them over with icy contempt. “Everybody hear me the first time?”

Lee Roy’s jaw was set. “You got short brains, Zach. They bound to get aholt of us.”

“Like hell they are. Don’t be a farmer.”

Lee Roy was rubbing his arm where Provo had squeezed it. Provo said, “You can do this with your teeth or without them. Which way you want, Lee Roy?”

Lee Roy licked his upper lip. “I don’t know. Maybe I’d just as soon go it alone, you don’t mind.”

“I mind,” Provo said, flat. “Nobody busts loose now, Lee Roy. Not after you’ve heard the plan. We go in together and we stick together—like flies on flypaper.”

“Why? One less man, make it that much easier for you, Zach.”

“I can’t have you wandering into a posse and yapping to the law what we’re doing. Understand? Now you go ahead and walk away from here if you’re still a mind to, Lee Roy. But it’ll take you all the rest of your life to walk two steps. Hear?”

Lee Roy scuffed his feet and scowled and didn’t argue.

With a tongue dipped in vitriol, Provo snapped at them all: “I was born a few minutes ahead of the rest of you fools—just remember that. Come on, Menendez.” He turned on his heel and walked west, toward the river. The loose ends of the chains whacked him around the ankles but he didn’t slow down.

When he looked back the rest of them were following. Menendez, with the riot gun, was herding them.

It was stinking hot in the arrowweed rushes. The late afternoon sun beat down on the muddy surface of the river. They could still hear the dogs baying, going away upriver on the far bank, probably tracking the Alcorn bunch on the trail to Quartzsite. He had planned it like that.

Menendez said, “Sonoma bitch, it’s gonna work.”

“We’re not out yet.”

“Bot it’s gonna work.
Seguro que sí.
” The cruel fox-thin face smiled. “What’s that song you humming?”

“Owl Song.”

“Hey?”

“They sing it on the Reservation in hard times,” Provo said. “Owl’s a tough bird.”

“You ain’t a fullblood Navajo, are you?”

“Half,” Provo said.

“Me, I’m half Messican and half es-Spanish and half Yaqui and half Texano and half focking rattlesnake, I guess. Listen, Zach, what we gon do after we get horses?”

“I don’t know about the rest of you. I know what I’m going to do.”

“Ahjess?”

“I want Sam Burgade,” Provo said. He slapped a mosquito. “I want Sam Burgade’s cocksucking hide on a spit.”

“Hell, ain’t you got nawthing better’n that to aim for, Zach?”

Deep hate was a fervor that got stronger with time. Provo shook his head. “I want him, Menendez. I want to peel the tough old bastard down to a whimper.”

“Hell, he’s got to be a real old man by now.”

Provo didn’t say anything. After a while Menendez said, “Sam Burgade ain’t nawthing but a tired old man, Zach. You’ll suit yourself, I guess, but it ain’t es-smart, what you fixin’ to do. You want to get your hands on Burgade, you gonna have to show your efface right in the middle of Tucson. Tucson’s a big town. They got a lot of law there.”

Provo grunted.

Menendez said, “And it ain’t as if he was some old
mestizo
nobody cared nawthing about. Burgade, he’s an important es-sonomabitch. Maybe he don’t tote a badge no more but he’s got a lot of important frands. They hang you sure.”

“If he’s riding high that’s fine,” Provo said. “The ground will hit him a lot harder when he falls.”

“Shit, whatever he done must’ve been a focking long time ago, Zach.”

“Shut up,” Provo said.

They kept close to the bank, slipping and sucking in the mud, wading into Yuma under the wharves of the old riverboat shipyards. The crosshatched spindle tracery of the S.P. railroad bridge was a latticed silhouette against the night sky. Lamplight reflected off the dappled surface of the Colorado. The water was warm, a fast current that kept them moving downstream. Provo had the riot gun over his shoulder to keep it dry.

The ferryboat was over on the California side. They gathered under the landing slip on the Arizona side and waited. Provo’s flesh had already begun to pucker from waterlogging; he climbed up into the woodwork under the ferry dock to dry off. The others took perches in the framework around him, like pigeons resting,

A federal motorboat putted by, coming downstream fast on the current, its electric search light sweeping the river. It didn’t have a chance of picking them up where they hid. It went by and there was only the faint lapping of the river against pilings, the clatter of wagons and the occasional cough and sputter of a passing motorcar. Sometime around eleven, the westbound passenger flyer roared across the bridge toward San Diego. They had another three hours to wait.

Someone urinated into the river nearby—the trickle was plainly audible. The ferry came across on its guy ropes, gasoline engine chattering, carrying two horseless carriages and a horse-drawn victoria and a dozen pedestrian passengers. Provo took a strong grip on the piling and held on while the ferry rammed into the slip and made everything shake. It didn’t knock anybody off. The ferry got rid of its load and a new California-bound load came aboard. Provo couldn’t see it; he could hear it. Someone’s boots tramped the dock heavily and he heard a hard voice talking to the boatman: “Keep an eye on the river tonight, Charley—God knows maybe they’ll try to come down on rafts or something.”

“How many of them convicts you boys got back?”

“Picked up three on the Gila and a half dozen Mexes down south of town. The Chief just telephoned in from Quartzsite, they got five or six pinned down in a ranch house halfway up there, holdin’ out with the rancher’s guns. We’ll get ’em soon as they run out of cartridges. Last I heard the dogs picked up another bunch that went west across the river. Prob’ly round them up by sunup. Just a matter of time, Charley, just a matter of time. We’ll get ’em all, just as sure as they’s a hole in your ass.”

The boots tramped back to hard ground and the ferry chugged away. Menendez said in Provo’s ear, “I hope that es-sonomabitch is wrong, hey? They ain’t gon get us now, are they, Zach?”

“Not me they ain’t,” Provo murmured. “Not until I make Sam Burgade sweat some blood, they ain’t.”

It worked fine. A railroader opened the side door and flashed an electric torch around quickly and slammed the zinc door shut. Didn’t glimpse them. They all sat in the thick dark and trembled with cold until the train started up with banging couplings and slowly picked up steam. Provo waited until he couldn’t stand the cold any longer, and then he hummed the Owl Song to himself and waited another fifteen or twenty minutes, and when Menendez joined the chorus of groans in the dark Provo smiled, because no one could see his face, and said under his breath, “Not half bad for a fifty-two-year-old half-breed,” and got up and shoved the sliding door open and said, “You bastards start heaving that ice out of here before we all turn blue.”

The train started to slow down for Gila Bend about six in the morning. When it was half a mile out, Provo slid the right-hand door open and nodded to Menendez. Menendez jumped—landed running like a cat. Provo poked the rest of them out, fast, with his riot gun and went out last, after pulling the door as nearly shut as he could and still squeeze through. Maybe they wouldn’t find the warm icebox car until Tucson or maybe even El Paso.

He hit easy on both feet, legs bent against the fall, went over on his shoulder and rolled. He didn’t lose his grip on the riot gun. His shoulder was a little banged up and he’d bruised one heel, but that was all right. He bellied down in the brush and watched the long train clatter past. The caboose went by and he waited until it was into town beyond the outskirt laborers’ shacks; then he spoke softly and gathered them around him and said, “We make for the nearest shack up yonder. We get inside it and we wait for dark. Move.”

He let Menendez lead the way. He waited until they had all crawled past before he fell in at the back of the line. Broken chains rattled on their ankles. Provo hung back a little: better not to let any of them see he was favoring his right foot from, the jump. They kept to a line of approach that interposed the cluster of shacks between them and the town. Nobody was likely to see them, but Menendez moved bent double and the rest followed suit, dodging from greasewood bush to paloverde. Clump to clump.

Menendez stood up against the corner of the weather-blasted gray shack, eeled around the corner and disappeared. Provo tensed, squinting into the morning sun. But after a minute the back shutter flapped open and Menendez waved them in.

Provo came in last and pulled the warped door shut behind him. The nine men made a dense crowd in the little shack; it was barely big enough to accommodate two occupants. He could smell the sweat already, and the day hadn’t started to warm up yet. Under the tarpaper roof it would get up to a hundred and twenty in here by mid-afternoon.

Young Mike Shelby said, “Maybe we ought to split up some. Take a couple more cabins, three men in each one.”

“We stick together,” Provo said.

“Why?”

“I want you all where I can see you.”

Lee Roy Tucker said, ‘“for how long?”

“Until we get rid of these irons and get ourselves into clothes everybody won’t recognize.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Mike Shelby said, and sat down on one of the two cots. There was a rickety table with a lamp and washbasin. Shelves nailed on one wall—a few boxes and cans of food. George Weed, blackskinned and full of disgust, slid his back down the wall in the front corner until he was sitting with his shoulders wedged in. “I don’t suppose anybody’s got a deck of cawds.”

Provo studied them covertly, one at a time, measuring them. He took his time.

Menendez: little, fox-quick, cruel, practical. Mike Shelby: young, level-headed, good-humored, a friendly face and a shaggy head of chestnut hair and big tough hands. Lee Roy Tucker: slat-narrow, buck-toothed, a complainer, but Lee Roy had handled blasting caps, working in a quarry, and knew explosives. Portugee Shiraz: part Portuguese, part Negro, eighteen years into a thirty-year noncommutable sentence for having knifed his wife and two children, one of whom had died; Portugee had the snout of a mountain wolf and he loved knives, all kinds of knives; he had worked in a slaughterhouse. Will Gant: a very big brute with a belly on him, not quite as slow in the head as he seemed. George Weed: black, square-built, his hair like a wire-wool skullcap, lazy eyes; contained and quiet except for occasional bursts of anger. Taco Riva: ex-mountain bandit, ex-vaquero; Taco loved horses, in all possible ways. Joaquim Quesada: a big-nosed brute with thick shoulders and a deep chest, a gray monk’s fringe around his bald head, his face purple with tiny broken blood vessels—an alcoholic, an incorrigible petty criminal, and in spite of his bulk, an expert sneak-burglar.