The Long High Noon (10 page)

The railroad man's chair groaned this way and that; thinking with his ass. Finally he swiveled to face his desk, dipped a pen in a squat bottle, scribbled something on rag paper with the name of the railroad printed across the top in bold letters with doodads on them, sprinkled sand from a pot on what he'd written, and blew away the loose grains. “Give this to Ralph Potter, the foreman. Go to Elgin and follow the tracks west. You'll need travel expenses.”

A black iron safe with gilt lettering squatted in a corner. Grunting and blowing, the railroad man crab-walked his chair over to it on squealing casters, leaned forward, and worked the dial. He took a tin box from inside, opened it, counted out banknotes from a stack, put back the box, shut the safe, and gave the dial a spin. “One hundred dollars. That should cover the fare to Elgin—I'd give you a pass, but that stretch belongs to a competitor—provisions, and whatever other incidentals you'll need.”

Randy took the sheaf of notes, stuck it in his worn cowhide poke, and put it in his hip pocket. The railroad man asked him if he wasn't going to count the notes.

“I reckon it's all there. You train men don't steal by the dollar. Anyway, I can always find my way back here.”

It was March, although by the standards of most places it was July, especially the farther he went south across that parched territory, where through passengers got out at every poke-hole station to unstick their shirts from their backs and drink water from a pump. At every stop lay the same yellow dog in the shade of the station overhang, sprawled on its side as dead, the same plug-hatted Indian wrapped in a blanket sat with his back to the station wall, the same litter of scrawny boys wearing ropes for suspenders flocked around the alighting passengers looking to run an errand for a penny. Sixty miles of that, from Phoenix to Elgin, with nary a stick of wood in sight except what was required for support and couldn't be fashioned from the native mud like everything else. All the stations were made of it, frequently whitewashed although not always, with the red mud bleeding pink through the white.

Elgin was more of the same. The names of the businesses were generic:
MERCANTILE, SALOON, LIVERY STABLE, BANK,
as if the sheer dirt-pounding pressure of arid heat shriveled the imagination like the string of chili peppers hanging from every porch post, and painted directly on the dried mud. There was one mercantile, one livery, one bank, four saloons, with it seemed every horse in the vicinity tied up in front of the latter, heads hanging in the heat.

A fat blue fly landed on Randy's cheek while he was collecting his bedroll from the brass overhead rack, waited resignedly for him to swat it. When he didn't bother, it rubbed its front legs together, tested one wing, then the other, and lifted off, floating on the heavy air.

“You get used to it,” said the old man in a split-bottom chair tipped back against the station wall, another fixture at every stop. “It's dry heat, not like Kansas or Missouri.”

The newcomer finished mopping the back of his neck with a bandanna. “It's dry in a Dutch oven, but the biscuits burn just the same.”

He entered the livery, where the cool dimness fell across him like mist. The attendant, a wiry sixty in filthy overalls, sat on an overturned bucket scooping sardines from a can into his mouth with his fingers.

“Buggy's hired,” he said, eyeing Randy's game leg. “Expect it back at sundown.”

“I need a saddle horse.”

“You can have Patty. She's old but she's gentle.”

“I said a horse, not a rocking chair. And a decent saddle, not one of them dishrags.” A row of brittle-looking saddles drooped from a wooden rail, cinch straps stiff as straw. He'd sold his good one in Lincoln for the fare to Arizona Territory; he'd had his fill of cold and thought he might try his luck prospecting for silver in Tombstone or Bisbee. But the money ran out in Phoenix, just in time for him to see the notice in the
Herald.

The livery man frowned, tossed the empty sardine can into a pile of manure, wiped his hands on his overalls, and got up to trot out a short-coupled sorrel mare with thick haunches. Randy looked at its teeth, felt its fetlocks, and inspected it for fistulas. “How much?”

“For the day or the week?”

“For the horse. I don't figure to be coming back here.”

They traded, agreeing finally on thirty for the horse and ten for a McClellan saddle that looked as if it might last to Calabesas. Randy lashed his bedroll wrapped around the Ballard rifle behind the cantle and swung into leather, awkwardly on account of his leg but fast enough to satisfy the livery man he wouldn't fall off in town and bring shame to the enterprise.

*   *   *

Ralph Potter, the foreman, was a lean man in a leather waistcoat and whipcords, with stovepipe boots and a flat-brimmed, round-crowned hat like a town Indian's. He wore a self-cocker in a stiff cavalry holster on his hip. His pale blue eyes looked like steel shavings caught in cracks and he was burned deep cherry from sweatband to collar and from wrists to fingertips and likely was creamy white everywhere else, like an honest man. Randy figured he was honest enough, but disliked him on sight. He was inhospitable, but that was neither here nor there. There was something lacking in the man—not as obvious as a missing limb or a blind eye, but easy to spot just the same.

Decency, that's what was missing. Randy had seen it before, often enough to know better than to argue himself out of the suspicion.

“Goddamn it, I told 'em the Apaches are down in Chihuahua, holed up in caves avoiding General Crook. I'd sooner they sent a good working jack.”

“Well, I'm here.”

They had tents set up, the nearest shade being where they had come from and where they were headed, which was about the same distance. The graders were hauling their drags, the gandies dropping the rails into place with businesslike clanks and swinging their sledges, the Irish singing something from the old country, the Chinese working silently, no jabbering like their fellow expatriates who worked in town. A Negro boy in a flop hat and overalls carried around a bucket of water from which the Irish took a dipper and drank or sloshed it over their heads or both. The Chinese never sloshed, and some of them skipped their turns at a drink, seeming almost annoyed at the interruption to their labors. There was a covered chuck wagon and a dray loaded with barrels of water. Randy wondered what sort of man was in charge of the chuck.

Damn, now he was even
thinking
like a cookie.

Potter watched him watching the crew.

“The chinks are hard workers, and dependable as clap in Kansas City. They don't get drunk, don't fight among themselves, never go on strike, and stay away from whores.”

“What about the Irish?”

“Ignorant as mules and twice as stubborn. Oh, they give you a week's work in a day, when they ain't hungover or beating each other's brains out or got a bee up their ass over some little thing. If I could breed 'em with the chinks, cross the micks' muscle with the yeller boys' sense of responsibility, I'd have this spur finished. The Irish are talking strike, just when I need 'em to work through Sundays before the monsoons shut us down for a month.” The foreman shot a stream of tobacco, just missing the toe of Randy's boot; testing the distance, thought the other; between his indecency and Randy's patience. “Seeing's how you're here, you can draw your pay at the end of the week, then go wherever you like, so long as it ain't here.”

“I was promised six weeks.”

“Not by me, you wasn't. I can't stand to see a man drawing pay sitting in the shade. It gives the Irish ideas.”

“What shade? That rake handle over there wouldn't keep the sweat off a sand flea. I didn't come all the way from Nebraska for no twenty dollars. I spent all the up-front money on trains and that fat town mare holding up a Yankee saddle.”

“You got them, and you got to see some country. I was you I'd leave it at that.” Potter laid a hand to rest on the handle of the self-cocking pistol.

Randy considered it; but he was saving that fight for someone else. “I'll draw that twenty now.”

“At the end of the week, I said.”

He pushed his hat back on his head, exposing pale skin from where it had rested to his thinning widow's peak. “Then I reckon I'll stretch out under the chuck wagon. Have somebody wake me it's supper, will you? Me, I'd pick one of the Chinese, but I don't like to tell a ramrod his business.”

The foreman's left cheek caved in, getting the works between his teeth. Randy saw a couple of the Irish looking their way, getting ready to lean on the handles of their shovels. Finally he dropped his hand from his weapon and jerked his head toward the biggest of the tents.

The respective cool of the interior dried the sweat on the back of Randy's neck. There was a campaign table and chair, a leather-reinforced canvas bag like postmen carried tied in a Gordian knot by its handles to the center pole with a lock securing its flap, a cot, and a ledger the size of a plat book spread open on the table. It was where the foreman doled out the pay. He sat in the folding chair, hoisted a bottle from under the table, and slid it across the table. “No glasses. No fandango dancers neither. Just Old Pepper; and if the micks smell it out they'll beat each other to death trying to get it.”

Randy made sure a nearby powder keg was empty and lowered himself onto it. “If you're looking to drink me under this table to avoid paying me, you better dig a hole.” He uncorked the bottle, tipped it up, and let it gurgle.

“No. Hell, no. Out there I got to behave like it's coming out of my own poke, but to me it's just rebel scrip. I was to do the company out of a dime, they'd hunt me to China and take it out through my kidneys. I reckon you and I can reach an agreement.”

“The Irish?” Randy wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and scooted the bottle back across the table.

“When the day's work's through and they ain't stripping the hide off each other's faces with their bare knuckles, they're talking strike. I can't take 'em all on, comes to that. But if an example can be made before they sort out their minds on the subject, I might could buy time, at least till the monsoons. By then we'll be so close to Calabesas I can finish with the chinks if I have to.” He took a pull and pushed the bottle Randy's way.

Randy left it there. “I hired on to shoot injuns on the warpath. I won't murder a white man just to make a point.”

“That's surprising talk, considering what I heard about you; but I'd never ask you to shoot an Irishman. They come in litters and we'd both be fighting 'em off the rest of our lives, which wouldn't be long.”

“What, then?” But he was beginning to suspect.

Potter got up, went to the tent flap, and drew it aside. The view descended a slope to where a group of Chinese in flop hats and overalls were carrying twenty feet of iron rail.

“Take your pick,” he said. “They're all of 'em alike.”

Randy said nothing. The foreman looked back at him. “It'd convince the Irish we mean business. A chink today, maybe a mick tomorrow. It ain't as if the yeller boys ain't got a hundred cousins pouring in from Frisco every day.”

Randy considered; then stood, scooped up the empty keg, and swung it at Potter's head. The staves collapsed like the sticks they were and one of the iron hoops lit on its side and rolled out the flap and down toward the latest patch of railroad, where it excited some interest, but only for a moment. Then the clank of the rails dropping into place and the clang of the sledges striking home the spikes resumed, echoing in Randy Locke's mind miles after it had faded from actual hearing.

In his poke he carried the six weeks' wages he'd hired on for, freed from the bank bag with the aid of his old worn bowie and his own two hands, worn as well but still of service. Apprised of the atrocity by a wire from Ralph Potter, recuperating from a broken jaw in a mission hospital in Elgin, the railroad man in Phoenix posted a reward for his capture; as was typical of that industry, the amount settled upon was ten times more than had been lost.

Randy stopped for rest in a town that was so Mexican he suspected government surveyors of erring in drawing the line south rather than north of it. Every day seemed to be a cause for fiesta: the birth or death of an important saint, the anniversary of some skirmish between patriots and some tyrannical despot or other, thirteen whelps born to an old unparticular bitch thought barren, and she with teats enough to serve the bunch. All the signs were in Spanish and some bored woodcarver had hacked a monkey-faced Christ out of a saguaro cactus at the village entrance. The cantina where he found a room was run by a short broad Mexican with his hair cut in bangs and little triangular moustaches at the corners of his mouth. He put aside the Spanish-language newspaper he was reading to open the registration book. When he spun it his way to read the signature, his eyes stood out from his head.

“
Señor
Randy Locke?” said he. “
Randolph
Locke?”

“Not Randolph. Not to my face. Not in twenty-five years.
Por que?
” A man couldn't remain in Arizona long without picking up some of the lingo.

The little man spread the newspaper on the cracked piñon surface of the registration desk, pointing a ragged nail at an item in
El Noticias Telegrafo
. The first English word Randy spotted quickened his pulse:
Farmer
.

“How's your English?”

The little man glanced out the open front door, which looked out on the Rio Grande, brown and sluggish under the burden of violent history; Mexico three hundred yards away.

“
Señor
, I am not certain which language I am speaking now.”

Randy stabbed a finger at the paper, cutting a cicatrix in the brittle newsprint with the nail. “Read it. In English.” He stood a cartwheel dollar on its edge and spun it with a flick of the same finger. It made a white blur, mesmeric to the little man behind the desk, who snatched it up in mid-spin and turned the newspaper back his way.