Valdez Is Coming (13 page)

“It’s waiting for you,” Valdez said.

He led her on foot along the dark-shadowed edge of the timber. Off from them, in the open, dusk was settling over the hills. They walked for several minutes, until she smelled wood burning and saw the horses picketed close below them in the meadow. The camp was just inside the timber, in a cutbank that came down through the pines like a narrow road, widening where it reached the meadow and dropping into the valley below.

At times she looked at him across the low fire, at this man who had taken her up a mountain and let her sleep for a few hours and then served her pan bread and ham and peppers and strong coffee. When they had finished he took a bottle of whiskey from a canvas bag. She watched him now. She could see Jim Erin with his bottle every evening, saying he was going to have a couple to relax and pouring a glass and then another glass, smoking a cigar and taking another drink, his voice becoming louder as he talked. Sometimes she would go out, visit one of the officers’ wives, and if she could stay long enough he would be asleep when she got home. But sometimes he wouldn’t allow her to go out and she would have to listen to him as he pretended he was a man, hearing his complaints and his obscenities and his words of abuse; the goddam Army and the goddam fort and the goddam heat and the goddam woman sitting there with her goddam nose up in the air. The first time he hit her she doubled her fist and hit him back, solidly in the mouth, and he beat her until she was unconscious. For months he didn’t take a drink and was kind to her. But he started again, gradually, and by the time he had worked up to his bottle an evening he was slapping her and several times hit her with his fist. She never fought back after the first time. She was married to him, a man old enough to be her father, who perhaps might grow up one day. Sometimes she thought she loved him; most of the time she wasn’t sure, and there were moments when she hated him. But he didn’t change; he beat her for the last time and no man would ever beat her again.

It surprised her when Valdez offered the bottle. “For the cold,” he said. “Or to make you sleep.” She hesitated, then took a sip and handed it back to him. Valdez raised the bottle. When he lowered it he popped in the cork and got up to put the bottle away.

“I’ve never seen a man take one drink,” she said.

Valdez sat down again by the fire. “Maybe it has to last.”

“I was married to a man who drank.” He made no comment and she said, “He was killed.”

Valdez nodded. “I see.”

“What do you see?”

“I mean you were married and now you’re not. What’s your name?”

“Gay Erin.”

He was looking at her but said nothing for a moment. “That’s your marriage name?”

“Mrs. James C. Erin.”

“Of Fort Huachuca,” Valdez said. “Your husband was killed six months ago.”

“You knew him?”

He shook his head.

She waited. “Then you heard about it.”

Valdez said, “You were in Lanoria Saturday when the man was killed?”

“Frank said an Army deserter was shot.”

“No, he wasn’t a deserter. Frank Tanner said it was the man that killed your husband, but when he looked at him dead he said no, it was somebody else.”

Gay Erin said, “And the Indian woman, the widow—”

“Was the wife of the man we killed by mistake.”

She nodded slowly. “I see.” She said then, “Frank didn’t tell me that.”

Valdez watched her. “But you’re going to marry him.”

“What difference does it make to you?”

“I like to know how much he wants you — if you’re worth coming after.”

“He’ll come,” she said.

“I think so too. I think he wants you pretty bad.” Valdez placed a stick on the fire and pushed the ends of the sticks that had not burned into the center of the flame. “You know what else I think. I think maybe he wanted you pretty bad when you were still married.”

The flame rose to the fresh wood. He could see her face in the light, her eyes holding on his.

“He knew my husband,” she said. “Sometimes he’d come to visit. Anyone who was at the hearing knows that.”

“And after it you go to live with him.”

She was staring at him in the flickering light. “Why don’t you say it right out?”

“It’s just something I started to wonder.”

“You think Frank killed my husband.”

“He could do it.”

“He could,” the woman said, “but he didn’t.”

“You’re sure of that, uh?”

“I know he didn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I killed him.”

She had come from Prescott with her nightgowns and linens to marry James C. Erin, and five years and six months later she fired three bullets into him from a service revolver and left him dead.

Tell this man about it, she thought. The time in the draw at night, a single moment in her life she would see more clearly than anything she had ever experienced. She had told no one about it and now she was telling this man sitting across the low-burning fire, not telling him everything, but not sure what to tell and what to leave out.

She began telling him about Jim Erin and found she had to tell him about her father and the years of living on Army posts and her mother dying of fever when she was a little girl. She remembered Jim Erin when she was younger, in her early teens, and her father was stationed at Whipple Barracks. She remembered Jim Erin and her father drinking together and remembered them stumbling and knocking the dishes from the table. A few years later she remembered her father — after he retired and they were living in Prescott — mentioning Jim Erin and saying he was coming to see them. And when he came she remembered Jim Erin again, the man with the nice smile and the black hair who had a way of holding her arm as he talked to her, his fingers moving, feeling her skin. She remembered her father drinking and cursing the Army and a system that would pass over a man and leave him a lieutenant after sixteen years on frontier station. Now a sutler was something else; he had a government contract to sell stores to the soldiers and could do well. Like his friend Jim Erin. The girl who gets him is getting something, her father had told her, leading up to it, and within a year had arranged the marriage. A year and a half later her father was dead of a stroke.

A lot of men drink, but their wives don’t kill them. Of course. It wasn’t his drinking. Yes, it was his drinking, but it was more than that. If he wasn’t the kind of man he was and he didn’t beat her it wouldn’t have happened. This was in her mind, though she didn’t try to explain it to Valdez. He put wood on the fire, keeping the flame low, while she told him about the night she killed her husband.

It was after Frank Tanner had left. He had come to see Jim Erin on business, with a proposition to supply the sutler’s store with leather and straw goods he could bring up from Mexico.

She stared into the fire, remembering that night. “They were drinking when I left to visit for a while,” she said. “When I got back Frank was gone and Jim was out of whiskey. He couldn’t borrow any. No one would lend it to him, and that night he didn’t have enough money to buy any. So he said he was going out to get corn beer…”

“He liked tulapai, uh?”

“He liked anything you could drink. He said someone not far away would sell him a bucket of it. I told him he was too drunk to go out alone, and he said then I was coming with him if I was so concerned. Jim got his gun and we took the buggy, not past the main gate, because he didn’t want anybody questioning him. There was no stockade and it was easy to slip out if you didn’t want to be seen.

“I don’t know where we went except it was a few miles from the fort and off the main road. When we finally stopped Jim got out and left me there. He said ‘here,’ handing me his gun, ‘so you won’t be scared.’ He didn’t mean it as kindness; he was saying ‘here, woman, I’m going off alone, but I don’t need any gun.’ Do you see what I mean?”

She looked at Valdez. He nodded and asked her then, “Was he drunk at this time?”

“Fairly. He’d had the bottle with Frank. He stumbled some, weaving, as he walked away from the buggy. There wasn’t a house around or a sign of light. He walked off toward a draw you could see because of the brush in it.

“It must have been a half hour before I saw him coming back, hearing him first, because it was so dark that night, then seeing him. He was carrying a gourd in front of him with both hands and when he got to the buggy he raised it and said, ‘Here, take it.’ He put his foot up on the step plate to rest the gourd on his knee, but as he did it his foot slipped and he dropped the gourd on the rocks. He looked down at the broken pieces and the corn beer soaking into the ground, then up at me and said it was my fault, I should have taken it. He started screaming at me, saying he was going to beat me up good. I said, ‘Jim, don’t do it. Please,’ I remember that. He started to step up into the buggy, reaching for me, and I jumped out the other side. I ran toward the draw, but he got ahead of me, turning me. I said to him, ‘Jim, I’ve got your gun. If you touch me I’ll use it.’ I remember saying that too. He kept coming, working around me as I faced him, until I was against the side of the draw and couldn’t turn. I said to Jim, please. He came at me and I pulled the trigger. Jim fell to his knees, though I wasn’t sure I had hit him. He picked up something, I guess a rock, and came at me again, and this time I shot him twice and knew I had killed him.”

Valdez rolled a cigarette and leaned into the fire to light it, and raising his eyes he saw the woman staring into the light. She sat unmoving; she was in another time, remembering, her hands folded in her lap. She seemed younger at this moment and smaller, this woman who had killed her husband.

Valdez said, “You didn’t tell anyone?”

She shook her head slowly.

“Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know. I was afraid. I went back to the post. The next day, after they found him, they asked me questions. I told them Jim had gone out late, but I didn’t know where. They told me he was dead and I didn’t say anything, because I couldn’t pretend to be sorry. When I didn’t tell them then, I couldn’t tell them later, at the hearing. They decided it must have been the man who deserted, a soldier named Johnson who everybody knew was buying corn beer from the Indians and selling it at the post.”

Valdez drew on his cigarette, letting the smoke out slowly. “You haven’t told Frank Tanner?”

“No. I almost did. But I thought better of it.”

“Then why did you tell me?”

Her eyes raised now in the firelight. “I don’t know,” she said softly. “Maybe it’s this place. Maybe it’s because I wanted to tell somebody so bad. I just don’t know.” She paused, and with the soft sound gone from her voice said, “Maybe I told you because you’re not going to live long enough to tell anyone else.”

“You want to stay alive,” Valdez said. “Everybody wants to stay alive.”

She was staring at him again. “Do you?”

“Everybody,” Valdez said.

“Well, remember that when you close your eyes,” she said. “I killed a man to be free of him, to stay alive.”

“I’ll remember that,” Valdez said. “I’ll remember something else, too, a man lying on his back tied to a cross and someone cutting him loose and giving him water.”

He watched closely but there was no change of expression on her face. He said, “The man believes a woman did this. He thought the woman had dark hair, because he had been thinking of a woman with dark hair. But maybe he thought it was dark hair because it was night. Maybe it was a woman with light hair. A woman who lived near this place and knew where he was and could find him.”

She was listening intently now, hunched forward, her long hair hanging close to her face. She said, “It could have been one of the Mexican women.”

“No, it wasn’t one of them, I know that. They live with those men and they would be afraid.”

She waited, thoughtful, but still did not move her eyes from his. She said, almost cautiously, “You believe I’m the woman?”

“There’s no one else.”

She said then, still thoughtful, watching him, “If you believe I saved you, why are you doing this to me?”

Valdez took a last draw on the cigarette and dropped it in the fire. “I’m not doing it to you. I’m doing it to Frank Tanner.”

“But if he doesn’t give you the money—”

“Let’s see what happens,” Valdez said. He got to his knees and spread his blanket so that his feet would be toward the fire.

Gay Erin didn’t move. She said, “Why do you think I cut you loose?”

“I don’t know. Because you felt sorry for me?”

“Maybe.” She watched him. “Or maybe because of Frank. To do something against him.”

“You’re going to marry him,” Valdez said.

“He says I’m going to marry him.”

“Well, if you don’t want to, why didn’t you leave?”

“Because I’ve no place to go. So I’ll marry him whether I want to or not.” She looked into the fire, moving her hair from the side of her face gently, with the tips of her fingers. “I have no family to go to. People I used to know are scattered all over the territory. I think even when I was married to Jim I felt alone. I stayed with him, I guess, for the same reason I’m going to marry Frank.”

Valdez knelt on his blanket, half turned to look at her. “You want to get married so bad, there are plenty of men.”

“Are there?” She got up and smoothed her skirt, standing close to the fire. “Where should I spread my blanket?”

“Where do you want to?”

Looking down at him she said, “Wherever you tell me.”

Look at him again as he looked at himself that night. His name was Roberto Eladio Valdez, born July 23, 1854, in an adobe village on the San Pedro, where the valley land climbed into the Galiuros. His father was a farmer until they moved to Tucson and his father went to work for a freight company and sent his children to the mission school. Roberto Eladio Valdez, born of Mexican parents in the United States Territory of Arizona, a boy who lived in the desert and knew of many people who had been killed by the Apaches, boy to man in the desert and in the mountains, finally working for the Army, leading the Apache trackers when the hostiles jumped San Carlos and went raiding, and finally through with that and deciding it was time to work the land or work for a company, as most men did, and do it now if it wasn’t already too late. Roberto Eladio Valdez worked for Hatch and Hodges, and they put him on the boot with the shotgun because he was good with it. He asked the municipal committee of Lanoria for a town job and they made him a part-time constable and put a shotgun in his hands because he was good with it and because he was quiet and because everybody liked him or at least abided him, because he was one of the good ones who kept himself clean and neat, even wearing the starched collar and the suit when everybody else was in shirtsleeves, and never drank too much or was abusive. Remember, there is the Bob Valdez who knew his place, and the one looking for a normal life and a home and a family.