When the Women Come out to Dance (2002) (16 page)

Karen remembered Christopher Walken i
n
The Dogs of War placing his gun on a table in the front hall-GCo t he doorbell ringing--and laying a newspaper over the gu n before he opened the door. She remembered it because at on e time she was in love with Christopher Walken, not even caring that he wore his pants so high.

Carl reminded her some of Christopher Walken, the wa
y he smiled with his eyes. He came a little after seven. Kare n had on khaki shorts and a T-shirt, tennis shoes without socks.

"I thought we were going out."

They kissed and she touched his face, moving her han
d lightly over his skin, smelling his aftershave, feeling the spo t where his right earlobe was pierced.

"I'm making drinks," Karen said. "Let's have one and the
n I'll get ready." She started for the kitchen.

"Can I help?"

"You've been working all day. Sit down, relax."

It took her a couple of minutes. Karen returned to the living room with a drink in each hand, her leather bag hanging from her shoulder. "This one's yours." Carl took it and sh e dipped her shoulder to let the bag slip off and drop to the coffee table. Carl grinned.

"What've you got in there, a gun?"

"Two pounds of heavy metal. How was your day?"

They sat on the sofa and he told how it took almost fou
r hours to land an eight-foot marlin, the leader wound aroun d its bill. Carl said he worked his tail off hauling the fish aboar d and the guy decided he didn't want it.

Karen said, "After you got back from Kendall?"

It gave him pause. "Why do you think I was in Kendall?"

Carl had to wait while she sipped her drink.

"Didn't you stop by Florida Southern and withdra
w twenty-eight hundred?"

That got him staring at her, but with no expression t
o speak of. Karen thinking, Tell me you were somewhere els e and can prove it.

But he didn't; he kept staring.

"No dye packs, no bait money. Are you still seeing Kath
y Lopez?"

Carl hunched over to put his drink on the coffee table an
d sat like that, leaning on his thighs, not looking at her now a s Karen studied his profile, his elegant nose. She looked at hi s glass, his prints all over it, and felt sorry for him.

"Carl, you blew it."

He turned his head to look at her past his shoulder. H
e said, "I'm leaving," pushed up from the sofa and said, "If thi s is what you think of me . . ."

Karen said, "Carl, cut the shit," and put her drink down.

Now, if he picked up her bag, that would cancel out any remaining doubts. She watched him pick up her bag. He got the Beretta out and let the bag drop.

"Carl, sit down. Will you, please?"

"I'm leaving. I'm walking out and you'll never see m
e again. But first . . ." He made her get a knife from the kitche n and cut the phone line in there and in the bedroom.

He was pretty dumb. In the living room again he said
, "You know something? We could've made it."

Jesus. And he had seemed like such a cool guy. Kare
n watched him go to the front door and open it before turnin g to her again.

"How about letting me have five minutes? For old times'
s ake."

It was becoming embarrassing, sad. She said, "Carl, don'
t you understand? You're under arrest."

He said, "I don't want to hurt you, Karen, so don't try t
o stop me." He went out the door.

Karen walked over to the chest where she dropped her ca
r keys and mail coming in the house: a bombe chest by th e front door, the door still open. She laid aside the folded cop y of the Herald she'd placed there, over her SIG Sauer, picked u p the pistol, and went out to the front stoop, into the yello w glow of the porch light. She saw Carl at his car now, its whit e shape pale against the dark street, only about forty feet away.

"Carl, don't make it hard, okay?"

He had the car door open and half turned to look back. "I
s aid I don't want to hurt you."

Karen said, "Yeah, well . . ." and raised the pistol to rac
k the slide and cupped her left hand under the grip. She said , "You move to get in the car, I'll shoot."

Carl turned his head again with a sad, wistful expression.

"No you won't, sweetheart."

Don't say ciao, Karen thought. Please.

Carl said, "Ciao," turned to get in the car, and she sho
t him. Fired a single round at his left thigh and hit him wher e she'd aimed, in the fleshy part just below his butt. Car l howled and slumped inside against the seat and the steerin g wheel, his leg extended straight out, his hand gripping it, his eyes raised with a bewildered frown as Karen approached. Th e poor dumb guy looking at twenty years, and maybe a limp.

Karen felt she should say something. After all, for a fe
w days there they were as intimate as two people can get. Sh e thought about it for several moments, Carl staring up at he r with rheumy eyes. Finally Karen said, "Carl, I want you t o know I had a pretty good time, considering."

It was the best she could do.

*

*

HURRAH FOR CAPT. EARLY.

The second banner said HERO OF SAN JUAN
HILL. Both were tied to the upstairs balcon y of the Congress Hotel and looked down on L
a Salle Street in Sweetmary, a town named for a copper mine. The banners read across the building as a single statement. The day that Captain Earl y was expected home from the war in Cuba, ove r now these two months, was October 10, 1898.

The manager of the hotel and one of his des
k clerks were the first to observe the colored ma n who entered the lobby and dropped his bedroll o n the red velvet settee where it seemed he was abou t to sit down. Bold as brass. A tall, well-built colored man wearing a suit of clothes that looked new and appeared to fit him as though it migh t possibly be his own and not one handed down t o him. He wore the suit, a stiff collar, and a necktie.

With the manager nearby but not yet aware of th
e intruder, the young desk clerk spoke up, raised hi s voice to tell the person, "You can't sit dow n there."

The colored man turned his attention to the desk, taking a moment before he said, "Why is that?"

His quiet tone caused the desk clerk to hesitate and loo
k over at the manager, who stood holding the day's mail, letter s that had arrived on the El Paso & Southwestern morning ru n along with several guests now registered at the hotel and, apparently, this colored person. It was hard to tell his age, other than to say he was no longer a young man. He did seem clea n and his bedroll was done up in bleached canvas.

"A hotel lobby," the desk clerk said, "is not a public plac
e anyone can make theirself at home in. What is it you wan t here?"

At least he was uncovered, standing there now hat in hand.

But then he said, "I'm waiting on Bren Early."

"Bren is it," the desk clerk said. "Captain Early's an acquaintance of yours?"

"We go way back a ways."

"You worked for him?"

"Some."

At this point the manager said, "We're all waiting for Captain Early. Why don't you go out front and watch for him?"

Ending the conversation.

The desk clerk--his name was Monty--followed the colored man to the front entrance and stepped out on the porch to watch him, bedroll over his shoulder, walking south on L
a Salle the two short blocks to Fourth Street. Monty returned t o the desk, where he said to the manager, "He walked right i n the Gold Dollar."

The manager didn't look up from his mail.

Two riders from the Circle-Eye, a spread o
n the San Pedro that delivered beef to the mine company, wer e at a table with their glasses of beer: a rider named Macon an d a rider named Wayman, young men who wore sweat-staine d hats down on their eyes as they stared at the Negro. Righ t there, the bartender speaking to him as he poured a whiskey , still speaking as the colored man drank it and the bartende r poured him another one. Macon asked Wayman if he had eve r seen a nigger wearing a suit of clothes and a necktie. Wayma n said he couldn't recall. When they finished drinking thei r beer and walked up to the bar, the colored man gone now, Macon asked the bartender who in the hell that smoke thought he was coming in here. "You would think," Macon said, "he'
d go to one of the places where the miners drink."

The bartender appeared to smile, for some reason findin
g humor in Macon's remark. He said, "Boys, that was Bo Catlett.

I imagine Bo drinks just about wherever he feels like drinking."

"Why?" Macon asked it, surprised. "He suppose to b
e somebody?"

"Bo lives up at White Tanks," the bartender told him, "a
t the Indin agency. Went to war and now he's home."

Macon squinted beneath the hat brim funneled low on hi
s eyes. He said, "Nobody told me they was niggers in the war."

Sounding as though it was the bartender's fault he hadn't bee
n informed. When the bartender didn't add anything to hel p him out, Macon said, "Wayman's brother Wyatt was in th e war, with Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders. Only, Wyat t didn't come home like the nigger."

Wayman, about eighteen years old, was nodding his head now.

Because nothing about this made sense to Macon, it wa
s becoming an irritation. Again he said to Wayman, "You eve r see a smoke wearing a suit of clothes like that?" He said , "Je-sus Christ."

Bo Catlett walked up La Salle Street favorin
g his left leg some, though the limp, caused by a Mauser bulle t or by the regimental surgeon who cut it out of his hip, wa s barely noticeable. He stared at the sight of the mine work s against the sky, ugly, but something monumental about it: s traight ahead up the grade, the main shaft scaffolding an d company buildings, the crushing mill lower down, ore tailings that humped this way in ridges on down the slope to run out at the edge of town. A sorry place, dark and forlorn; me n walked up the grade from boardinghouses on Mill Street t o spend half their life underneath the ground, buried befor e they were dead. Three whiskeys in him, Catlett returned t o the hotel on the corner of Second Street, looked up at the sig n and said and had to grin, my ass.

Catlett mounted the steps to the porch, where he droppe
d his bedroll and took one of the rocking chairs all in a row, th e porch empty, close on noon but nobody sitting out here, n o drummers calling on La Salle Mining of New Jersey, the company still digging and scraping but running low on payload copper, operating only the day shift now. The rocking chairs , all dark green, needed painting. Man, but made of cane an d comfortable with that nice squeak back and forth, back an d forth. . . . Bo Catlett watched two riders coming this way u p the street, couple of cowboys. . . . Catlett wondering ho w many times he had sat down in a real chair since April 25t h when war was declared and he left Arizona to go looking fo r his old regiment, trailed them to Fort Assiniboine in the Department of the Dakotas, then clear across the country to Camp Chickamauga in Georgia and on down to Tampa wher e he caught up with them and Lieutenant John Pershing looke d at his twenty-four years of service and put him up fo r squadron sergeant major. It didn't seem like any twenty-fou r years. . . .

Going back to when he joined the First Kansas Colore
d Volunteers in '63, age fifteen. Wounded at Honey Springs th e same year. Guarded Rebel prisoners at Rock Island, took par t in the occupation of Galveston. Then after the war got sen t out here to join the all-Negro Tenth Cavalry on frontier station, Arizona Territory, and deal with hostile Apaches. In '87
w ent to Mexico with Lieutenant Brendan Early out of For t Huachuca--Bren and a contract guide named Dana Moon , now the agent at the White Tanks reservation--brought bac k a one-eyed Mimbreno named Loco, brought back a whit e woman the renegade Apache had run off with--and Dan a Moon later married--and they all got their pictures in som e newspapers. Mustered out that same year, '87. . . . Drove a wagon for Capt. Early Hunting Expeditions Incorporated before going to work for Dana at White Tanks. He'd be sitting on Dana's porch this evening with a glass of mescal and Dan a would say, "Well, now you've seen the elephant I don't imagine you'll want to stay around here." He'd tell Dana he saw W
t he elephant a long time ago and wasn't too impressed. Just then another voice, not Dana's, said out loud to him: "So you was in the war, huh?"

It was one of the cowboys. He sat his mount, a little claybank quarter horse, close to the porch rail, sat leaning on the pommel to show he was at ease, his hat low on his eyes, staring directly at Catlett in his rocking chair. The other one sat his mount, a bay, more out in the street, maybe holding back.

This boy was not at ease but fidgety. Catlett remembere
d them in the Gold Dollar.

Now the one close said, "What was it you did over there i
n Cuba?"