Valdez Is Coming (6 page)

“He seems familiar,” Valdez said.

Inez looked at him. “I hope so. It’s Rutherford Hayes.”

“Well, that was twelve, fourteen years ago,” Valdez said. He looked up as Polly laughed. She was leaning over Inez and the top of her robe hung partly open.

There were photographs of local businessmen, territorial officials and national figures, including two presidents, Rutherford Hayes and Chester A. Arthur, Profirio Díaz and Carmelita at Niagara Falls, and the Prince of Wales on his visit to Washington.

“Have they been to your place?” Valdez asked.

“No, but if they come I want to recognize them.” Inez turned a page. “Earl Beaudry, on his appointment as land agent.” Inez moved to the next page, her finger tracing down the column of newspaper clippings.

“Here it is,” she said. “The first mention of him. August 13, 1881 — Frank Tanner and a Carlisle Baylor were convicted of cattle theft and sent to Yuma Penitentiary.”

Valdez seemed as pleased as he was surprised. “He’s been to prison.”

“For a few years, I think,” Inez said. “It doesn’t say how long. He was stealing cattle and driving them across the border. There’s more about him.” Her hand moved down the column and went to the next page. “Here, October, 1886, Frank J. Tanner, cattle broker, arraigned on a charge of murder in Contention, Arizona.”

“Cattle broker now,” Valdez said.

“The case was dismissed.”

“It’s getting better.”

Inez turned the page. “Ah, here’s the picture. You see him there?” Inez turned the book halfway toward Valdez and he leaned in, recognizing Tanner standing with a group of Army officers in front of an adobe building.

Inez read the caption. “It says he has a contract with the government to supply remounts to the Tenth United States Cavalry at Fort Huachuca.” She turned a few more pages. “I think that’s all.”

“Nothing about him now, uh?”

“There’s something else sticks in my mind about Huachuca,” Inez said, “but I don’t see it. Unless — sure, it would be in the other book.” She sat back in her chair looking up over her shoulder. “Polly?”

Valdez watched the girl straighten and draw the robe together.

“Should I take this one?” the girl asked.

Inez was turning pages again. “No, I want to show Bob something.”

“What have you got now?” he asked her.

Coming to a page, she pressed it flat and turned the book to him. “You remember?”

Valdez smiled a little. “That one.”

It was a photograph of Bob Valdez taken at Fort Apache, Arizona, September 7, 1884: Bob Valdez standing among small trees and cactus plants the photographer had placed in his studio shed as a background: Bob Valdez with a Sharps .50 cradled in one arm and a long-barreled Walker Colt on his leg. He was wearing a hat, with a bandana beneath it that covered half of his forehead, a belt of cartridges for the Sharps, and knee-length Apache moccasins. The caption beneath the picture described Roberto Valdez as chief of scouts with Major General George Crook, Department of Arizona, during his expedition into Sonora against hostile Apaches.

“That’s the way I still picture you,” Inez said. “When someone says Bob Valdez, this is the one I see. Not the one that wears a suit and a collar.”

Valdez was concentrating on the book, looking now at a photograph of a young Apache scout in buckskins and holding a rifle, standing against the same background used in the photo of himself. He remembered the photographer, a man named Fly. And the day the pictures were taken at Fort Apache. He remembered the scout washing himself and brushing his hair and putting on the buckskin shirt he had bought and had never worn before.

“Peaches,” Valdez said. “General Crook’s guide. His real name was Tso-ay, but the soldiers and the general called him Peaches. His skin.” Valdez continued to study the photograph. He said, “They’d put a suit and a collar on him too, if they ever took his picture again.”

Inez looked up as Polly came in with the other scrapbook. She took it from her and held it over the table.

“I don’t know where he is now,” Valdez was saying. “Maybe Fort Sill, Oklahoma, with the rest of them. Planting corn.” He shook his head. “Man, I would like to see that sometime. Those people growing things in a garden.”

Inez opened the book and laid it over the page Valdez was studying. He sat back as she turned a few pages and raised his gaze to Polly, who was looking over Inez’s shoulder again, letting her robe come open. She was built very well and had very white skin.

“Here it is,” Inez said. “Sutler murdered at Fort Huachuca. James C. Erin was found shot to death a few miles from the fort today—”

Valdez stopped her. “When was this?”

Inez looked at the date on the clipping. “March. Six months ago.”

“That’s the one Orlando Rincón was supposed to have killed.”

“It says he was found by some soldiers and” — her finger moved down the column — “here’s the part. ‘Held for questioning was Frank J. Tanner of Mimbreño, said to be the last person to have seen Erin alive. Mr. Tanner stated he had spent the previous evening with Mr. and Mrs. Erin at the fort, but had left for a business appointment in Nogales and had not seen Erin on the day he was reported to have been killed.’ ”

“He was sure it was Rincón,” Valdez said. “And that his name was Johnson.”

Inez nodded, looking at the book. “They mention a Johnson, listed as a deserter and also a suspect. A trooper with the Tenth Cavalry.”

“Maybe they know this Johnson did it now,” Valdez said.

Inez looked over the pages facing her. “I don’t see anything more about it.”

Valdez raised his eyes from the open robe to the nice-looking face of the dark-haired girl. “It’s too bad he doesn’t come here,” he said.

Inez closed the book. “He never has and I would guess he knows where it is.”

“If he did,” Valdez said, his gaze still on Polly. “I could wait for him.”

Diego Luz had a dream in which he saw himself sitting on a corral fence watching his men working green horses in the enclosure. In the dream, which he would look at during the day as well as at night, Diego Luz was manager of the Maricopa Cattle Company. He lived with his family in the whitewashed adobe off beyond the corral, where the cedars stood against the sky: a house with trees and a stone well in the yard and a porch to sit on in the evening. Sometimes he would picture himself on the porch with his family about him, his three sons and two daughters, his wife and his wife’s mother and whatever relatives might be visiting them. But his favorite dream was to see himself on the corral fence with his eldest son, who was almost a man, sitting next to him.

The hands were very nervous when he watched them with the horses because they knew he was the greatest mustanger and horsebreaker who ever lived. They knew he could subdue the meanest animals and they were afraid to make mistakes in his presence. He had told them how to do it, what they must do and not do, and he liked to watch them at work.

In the dream Diego and his son would watch R. L. Davis hanging on to the crow-hopping bronc until finally they saw him thrown and land hard on his shoulder. His son would shake his head and say, “Should I do it, Papa?” But he would say no, it was good for the man. He made R. L. Davis ride only the rough string, the outlaws and spoiled horses, when they were on roundup or a drive, and made R. L. Davis call him Señor Luz.

R. L. Davis mounted the bronc and was thrown again and this time he went after the horse with a loaded quirt and began beating the animal over the head. At this point in the dream Diego Luz walked over to R. L. Davis and said to him, “Hey,” and when R. L. Davis looked around Diego Luz hit him in the face with one of his big fists. R. L. Davis went down and the eldest son poured a bucket of water on him and when the man shook his head and opened his eyes, he said, “What did I do?” Diego Luz said, “You hit the horse.” R. L. Davis frowned, holding his jaw. “But you hit them when you broke horses,” he said. And Diego Luz smiled and said, “Maybe, but now I hit whoever I want to.”

R. L. Davis was a good one to hit. Once in a while though, he would leave R. L. Davis alone and hit Mr. Malson, not hitting him too hard, but letting him know he was hit. And sometimes he would fire Mr. Malson, call him over and say, “It’s too bad, but you’re too goddam weak and stupid to do this work anymore so we got to get rid of you. And don’t come back.”

Diego Luz would think of these things as he worked his land and broke the mustangs he and his eldest son drove down out of the high country. His place was southeast of Lanoria, well off the road to St. David and only a few miles from the village of Mimbreño, though there was no wagon road in that direction, only a few trails if a man knew where to find them.

His place was adobe with straw blinds that rolled down to cover the doorway and windows and an open lean-to built against the house for cooking. There were a few chickens and two goats in the yard with the three youngest children and a brown mongrel dog that slept in the shade of the house most of the day. There was a vegetable garden for growing beans and peppers, and the peppers that were drying hung from the roof of the ramada that shaded the front of the house, which faced north, on high ground. Down the slope from the house was the well, and beyond it, on flat, cleared ground, the mesquite-pole corral where Diego Luz broke and trained the mustangs he flushed out of the hills. He worked here most of the time. Several times a year he drove a horse string down to the Maricopa spread near Lanoria, and he would go down there at roundup time and when they drove the cattle to Willcox.

When Bob Valdez appeared, circling the corral — two days following the incident at the pasture — Diego Luz and his eldest son were at the well, pulling up buckets of water and filling the wooden trough that ran to the corral. They stood watching Bob Valdez walking his horse toward them and waited, after greeting him, as he stepped down from the saddle and took the dipper of water Diego’s son offered him.

There was no hurry. If a man rode all the way here he must have something to say, and it was good to wonder about it first and not ask him questions. Though Diego Luz had already decided Bob Valdez had not come to see them but was passing through on his way to Mimbreño. And who lived in Mimbreño? Frank Tanner. There it was. Simple.

They left the boy and climbed the slope to the house, Bob Valdez seeing the children in the yard, Diego’s wife and her mother watching them from the lean-to where they were both holding corn dough, shaping tortillas. The small children ran up to them and the eldest daughter appeared now in the doorway of the house. Hey, a good looking girl now, almost a woman. Anita. She would be maybe sixteen years old. Valdez had not been up here in almost a year.

When they were in the shade and had lighted cigarettes, Diego Luz said, “There’s something different about you. What is it?”

Valdez shrugged. “I’m the same. What are you talking about?”

“Your face is the same.” Diego Luz squinted, studying him. Slowly then his face relaxed. “I know what it is. You don’t have your collar on.”

Valdez’s hand went to his neck where he had tied a bandana.

“Or your suit. What is this, you’re not dressed up?”

“It’s too hot,” Valdez said.

“It’s always hot,” Diego Luz said. His gaze dropped to Valdez’s waist. “No gun though.”

Valdez frowned. “What’s the matter with you? I don’t have a coat on, that’s all.”

“And you’re going to see Mr. Tanner.”

“Just to say a few things to him.”

“My son rode to Lanoria yesterday. He heard about the few things you said the other night.”

Valdez shook his head. “People don’t have anything to talk about.”

“Listen, the woman doesn’t need any money. She doesn’t know what it is.”

“But we know,” Valdez said. “I just want to ask you something about Tanner.”

Diego Luz drew on his cigarette and squinted out into the sunlight, down the slope to the horse corral. “I know what others know. That’s all.”

“He lives in Mimbreño?”

“For about two years maybe.”

“How do the people like him?”

“There are no people. Most of them left at the time of the Apache. The rest of them left when Frank Tanner come. He’s there with his men,” Diego Luz said, “and some of their women.”

“How many men?”

“At least thirty. Sometimes more.”

“Do they ever come here?”

“Sometimes they pass by.”

“What do they do, anything?”

“They have a drink of water and go on.”

“They never make any trouble?”

“No, they don’t bother me. Never.”

“Maybe because you work for Maricopa.”

Diego Luz shrugged. “What do I have they would want?”

“Horses,” Valdez said.

“Once they asked to buy a string. I told them to see Mr. Malson.”

“Did Tanner himself come?”

“No, his segundo and some others.”

“Do you know any of them?”

“No, I don’t think any of them are from around here.”

“Do you think that’s strange?”

“No, these are guns he hires, not hands. I think they hear of Tanner and what he pays and they come from all over to get a job with him.”

“He pays good, uh?”

“You see them sometimes in St. David,” Diego Luz said. “They spend the money. But you see different ones each time, so maybe he lose some in Mexico or they get a stomach full of it and quit.”

“What, driving cattle?”

“Cattle and guns. He gets the guns somewhere and sneaks them over the border to people who are against Díaz and want to start a revolution. So over there the
rurales
and federal soldiers look for him and try to stop him. Everybody knows that.”

“I’ve been learning the stageline business,” Valdez said.

“Keep doing it,” Diego Luz said, “and live to be an old man.”

“Sometimes I feel old now.” He watched the chickens pecking the hard ground and heard Diego Luz’s children calling out something and laughing as they played somewhere on the other side of the house. What do you need besides this? he was thinking. To have a place, a family. Very quiet except for the children sometimes, and no trouble. No Apaches. No bandits raiding from across the border. Trees and water and a good house. The house could be fixed up better. A little work, that’s all. He said, “I’ll trade you. I become the horsebreaker, you work for the stage company.”