Widowmaker Jones (3 page)

The night was too hot to light the stove, and Kizzy butchered the hen and baked it in a Dutch oven at a fire she built beside the wagon. She had already finished her portion of the chicken and carried water to the horses from the river to their picket line by the time Fonzo and his helpers were through packing up the show. He joined her at the fire, and she noticed the weary way he walked.

He nodded at the money box she had set on the camp table beside their fire. “How much?”

“After the cost of the hay and what you paid the men to help take down the tent?”

“How much?”

She pointed at the half-picked carcass of the hen grown cold on the plate she left out for him. “You get half a chicken.”

He shrugged. “Oh well, but please tell me we have a little wine left.”

She lifted a pottery jug and held it close to her ear while she shook it. “There's a swallow left. Maybe we can find someone down the road that might have a little fruit to sell so that you can make us some more.”

He picked at the cold chicken, brooding and lost in his own thoughts. She noticed the way his eyebrows tilted in together above his nose, like their father's had when he was deep in thought. After a while he stood and paced around the fire.

When he spoke again he switched to the Roma tongue without thinking. Although they had both been born on American soil and were as comfortable with English as any language, it was an old habit when they were alone with each other. When their parents were alive they all had spoken the language of their people among family settings. And it had other advantages when strangers were around, as it was often of benefit to them to converse where the
gadje
couldn't understand what was being said. In addition to the Gypsy language, both of them spoke a smattering of French, a thing rarely used, but their mother had insisted on it, as it was the land of her birth. To add to the confusion of their multilingual skills, there was the bit of Spanish picked up during their time below the border. Without either of them realizing it, they often mixed words of many languages in the same breath, or hopped from one to another at whim.

“Homemade wine not fit for human consumption, and a bit of cold chicken. What's happened to us?” He lifted both arms wide and then let them drop with a slap against his hips.

“You know what happened.”

“I think we ought to go back to the States. There's no money down here.”

“And who in the States wants us, and what money were we making north of the border?” she asked, cocking one eyebrow.

“What about the invite to Monterrey?”

She picked up the money box and rattled the few coins in it as she had shaken the almost empty bottle of wine. “I don't think there's enough here to get us there.”

He walked to the edge of the firelight where his white horses stood watching him from their picket line. He picked up a brush and began to rub it over the back of one of them—a gelding slightly larger and heavier than the rest of them.

“Hercules looks like he's lost a little weight,” she said.

“They've all lost weight, and I fed them the last of the corn this morning.”

“We'll get by like we always do.”

He whirled and threw the brush across the camp. “It isn't fair.”

“Nothing is fair.”

“How many people will be at that bullring in Monterrey?”

“I'm told that it can seat a thousand people, and the crowds are always large,” she said. “I can get you the letter from the promoter if you want to read it again.”

“How much up front did he offer us?”

“Only a cut of the gate after each show. Ten percent. We perform two acts a day in between bullfights. No guarantees of any kind.”

“Getting there is a week's trip, at least.”

“President Díaz is supposed to be at the fights, and the U.S. ambassador to Mexico and other dignitaries, also. I imagine it will be a big crowd,” she said. “Maybe the kind of crowd that could put us back on the map.”

He paced more, and she suppressed a smile the sight of him brought on. He had both arms folded behind his back and was bent at the waist, his face turned down to the ground and his brow furrowed in thought. A pacing general on the night before a battle wouldn't have looked more serious.

In an instant, his demeanor changed and he stopped in his tracks and turned to her with an impish, boyish smile lighting him like a candle. “We'll give them a real show. I'll break out the new acts I've been practicing and some special stuff for the bigger arena. And we can think up some new things for you. Maybe you'll rethink some of my suggestions.”

She couldn't help but sigh. For almost a year since their parents had passed on, Fonzo had been trying to get her to add what he called some “William Tell” parts to her portion of the show—shoot an apple off his head or a coin out of his hand, much like some of the other traveling sharpshooter acts did. He had persisted so in his arguments that she had finally agreed to practice such. Their second day of practice with her shooting a silver dollar out of his outstretched hand, she took the tip off his right index finger. The sight of him bleeding and the scarred nub of that finger, minus its last joint, was more than she could take. She knew she was an exceptional shot, but it felt foolishly dangerous to risk his health. He was the last of any kind of kin or family she had on the earth, unless she counted some distant cousins, equally as nomadic as she and Fonzo, and long since out of contact.

The shadows of two dogs crept into the edge of the firelight. Both of them were big and hairy with broad heads, outsized feet, and jaws like bears. The smaller of the two was brown and the larger one was white. They lay down at her feet on either side of her, and one of them, the white dog, carried a dead rabbit clamped in its jaws.

“Look at that,” Fonzo said. “Even the dogs eat better than we do.”

She reached down and stroked both the dogs' heads. “Did you ever think of giving up this life?”

“And do what?”

“I don't know. Maybe live like normal people and stay in one place.”

He laughed. “We're Roma.”

“There are Gypsies that don't live on the road. You've met them like I have.”

“What would we do to make a living?”

“I wouldn't call what we make now a living.”

“I like performing, and you do, too.”

“That's not what I mean. Don't you ever think what it would be like to have a real house? Maybe something solid for once. A place to winter, at the very least.”

“Sounds boring.”

“Maybe.”

“And what about the first time someone accuses us of some petty theft, or places blame on us whether we're guilty or not? Don't you know? We Romani are supposed to be a shifty lot. Witches, thieves, and fortune-tellers. I think I'll go find some children to kidnap.”

“Don't be so dramatic.” She took up her little squeeze-box accordion and began to play a wistful tune that her mother had taught her.

“Quit that. It's bad enough without you playing that stuff.”

“I like that tune. It makes me think of Mama.”

He sat down on a campstool and listened to her a play awhile. “Look at us. We're everything Gypsies are supposed to be. You playing that thing, and both of us without a penny to our names and wondering where we can go to snatch a little coin from someone's purse.”

“We'll get by.”

He jumped to his feet, the passion in his voice raising it half an octave. “We're going to Monterrey. I won't take no for an answer.”

She watched him storm off into the night, smiling to herself. Fonzo liked to announce everything, as if he made all the decisions. But in truth, she had intended to point the wagons that way in the morning anyway. Maybe Monterrey would turn out like they hoped, but that was the thing about being Roma and circus people. The next place down the road was always the same thing as hope.

I
t felt like he had been walking forever across a flat expanse that never changed and never ended. By the time the Comanche found him, Newt's fevered brain barely recognized what they were, and he wasn't in much of a condition to do anything about it when he literally stumbled right up to them. There were four of them, all warriors, and they were leading two spare horses with a dead antelope tied on the back of one.

One of their horses stamped at a fly, and Newt put a hand against its shoulder to steady himself. The whole world was spinning, but he willed his blurred vision to focus when he looked up at the wild Indians.

They stared back at him out of their dark eyes, their faces stoic and unreadable, and as fierce as anything ever born—nothing to greet him but fistfuls of sharp weapons and the kind of looks a hawk gives a field rat when looking down on him from above. One of them pointed a lance at him with a wicked length of ground-down cavalry saber for a head and a handle so long that the needle tip of the blade nearly brushed his chest. The Comanche with the lance said something in his native tongue and it made the others laugh. Their laugh didn't sound friendly at all. He knew only enough about Comanche to know that they would certainly kill him, and his dying would take a long time.

And Cortina was going to get away with his gold.

“I'll be damned,” he said right before he fell.

* * *

When he awoke it was the second time he came back from the dead. At least it felt that way.

He was lying inside a tepee on a pallet made of a few tattered wool army blankets. The bone-white buffalo hide sides of the conical lodge had been rolled up some two feet off the ground to keep it cool. Despite the breeze blowing through the shade of the lodge, he was covered in sour-smelling sweat. A groan escaped his lips when he tried to move, and it was as if every muscle and joint in his body protested. He was bare to the waist, and someone had covered the bullet hole in his chest with some kind of mud and moss poultice. By the time he had struggled to a sitting position, some of the poultice had cracked and fallen away, but the wound wasn't bleeding.

A pack of camp dogs trotted by while he sat there getting his bearings, and one of them hiked a leg on one of the peeled lodge poles and then growled at him before it trotted off. Shortly, there came the sound of moccasins scuffing the ground, and a young Comanche woman stuck her head between the flaps of the doorway. She took quick stock of him, her eyes growing large at the sight of him awake, and then quickly disappeared.

Sometime later, he heard more footsteps coming. This time, the warrior with the nasty scars down one side of his face who had held the lance to his chest entered the lodge, followed by another warrior. Both of them sat on the ground across from him and nodded in greeting.

They were well past middle age, although the scar-faced warrior seemed the younger of the two. One side of his head was decorated with a crow's wing tied into the top of one braid of his hair, and a bear claw necklace stood out against the brown of his throat and bare chest. Neither of the men wore any clothing except for breechcloths covering their nether parts and moccasins on their feet. They bore no weapons other than the knives on their belts.

The elder of the two said something that Newt couldn't understand. When he shook his head to let them know he didn't speak their language, the scarred one spoke.

“
¿Habla español?
” he asked.

Newt recognized that he was being asked if he could speak Spanish, but that was almost the limit of his bilingual skills. “No.”

The two warriors glanced at each other and then the scarred warrior began to make a series of hand symbols, at first so silly as to seem like children making shapes and playing shadow games, but Newt was surprised at how easy it was for him to understand the gist of the story being told. He had heard that many Indians used hand talk as a means to trade and communicate with other tribes, but he had never witnessed it.

In short, the men had been out hunting and found him staggering and half-dead on the trail. When the scarred warrior pointed at his counterpart and made a motion of slicing the edge of his hand across his hairline, Newt understood that it had been the wish of most of them to take his scalp and leave him where he fell. Apparently, the scarred warrior had talked them out of it for reasons that Newt couldn't understand. There was a whole flurry of hand symbols that weren't clear to him, but it was plain that they brought him to their camp and tended his wounds. Also, the older of the two before him seemed to be some kind of shaman or medicine man. He had a hide rattle on the end of a short shaft of wood and occasionally shook it and said something loudly, looking up at the ceiling as if he were talking to the spirits or the sky itself.

More people began to gather outside the lodge while the scarred one was still making hand talk. From the bare calves and the bottom edge of the buckskin dresses that Newt could see revealed beneath the rolled-up bottom of the lodge, he knew it was more Comanche women, and it was quickly apparent that they were dismantling the lodge.

The scarred Comanche pointed a finger at the wound in Newt's chest and asked something.

Newt thought a moment and then made a pistol shape with his right hand and mocked the hammer fall with his thumb and the muzzle forefinger rising with recoil as he did a childish imitation of a gun sound. “Bad man.
Mal hombre
.”

The two Comanche passed a look between them, and then the scarred warrior pitched Newt's knife on the ground in front of him. Newt picked up the knife and drew it from its sheath. Neither of the Comanche so much as flinched, and Newt couldn't tell if they were daring or expecting him to do something.

Newt pointed to the wound in his chest again and then stabbed the knife into the ground. “Enemy.”

The two Comanche glanced at each other again, grunted, and then stood. The shaman shook the hide rattle at Newt and said something that made the scarred warrior smile.

The squaws had the hide walls removed by the time Newt had managed to pull into his boots. Someone had cleaned and patched his tattered shirt, and he tucked it into his pants while he stood and stared at the other lodges being taking down. It was a small camp, from the looks of it, and maybe only six or seven dwellings. The pole A-frames of travois were being lashed to horses' backs, and luggage and home items were being loaded on them. A large herd of loose horses was already started east with some young boys driving them. Apparently, the whole camp was about to move elsewhere.

Newt's wound may have closed and the poultice taken the inflammation out, but he was still weak. His heart was racing and his legs shaky in the short trip it took him to get out of the tepee. He took up the water bag they had left him and sat down a few feet out of the way of the working squaws. The bag was made from the bladder of a buffalo, or some other organ, with a horn stopper and a length of rawhide for a carrying strap. His thirst was incredible, and he drank half the bag over the course of the next half hour. By that time, the lodge he had been in was torn down, loaded on a travois, and the whole camp was leaving. Nobody waved at him or came to talk to him, only looking at him in passing and saying things to one another about him that he couldn't understand.

Soon, he was alone, sitting on the ground with his water bag and a buckskin sack full of food that they had left him. The scarred warrior and the shaman were the last to go. The scarred one was leading a spare horse and he pitched its lead rope to Newt.

Newt studied the horse. It was a short-coupled, brown horse with a light brown nose and not a white mark on it. Despite the plain coloring, the animal was exceptional-looking. It was stockier and better muscled than most of the Indian ponies, with big, good bones and dark hooves. Unlike many of the jug-headed ponies Newt had seen in the camp, the brown had a broad forehead beneath short, foxlike ears, bulldog jaws, and large, intelligent eyes.

The scarred Comanche pointed at the horse and then at Newt. By the time Newt got to his feet and took up the brown's lead rope the two Comanche were already riding away.

Newt ran a hand down the brown's neck and noticed for the first time the brand on its left hip. It was a circle with a single dot in its center. As far as he knew, Indians didn't brand their horses to mark them for ownership like Americans or Mexicans did. Odds were, the gelding had probably been stolen during a raid, but Newt wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Actually, he did, and the brown's teeth were fine.

Newt couldn't figure why the Comanche hadn't killed him, much less doctored his wounds and left him with supplies and a horse. They had a reputation as a fierce lot and rarely gave any enemy quarter or mercy. You didn't have to know anything about Comanche to have heard all the horror stories about the cruel atrocities they committed on white folks they captured.

He would have liked to rest awhile—days, if truth were told—but he wasn't about to give the Comanche a chance to change their minds. The squaws had also left a couple of the army blankets he had lain on in the lodge. He rolled the bag of food up in them and cinched the bundle together with his belt and laid it across the brown's withers. The water bag he hung over his shoulders and across his chest, and he secured his sheath knife in his boot top. The sun was already working its way high above to the midday mark, and he wished he had his hat. He couldn't remember where he had lost it.

There was no saddle for the brown, and he was going to have to ride bareback. Normally, it would have been no feat at all for him to swing up on the horse's back without a saddle or stirrup. However, considering the shape he was in, mounting up presented a problem, even though the brown wasn't very tall.

The answer to his problem showed itself when he spotted the shallow, dry gully not far away and leading down to the river. He led the brown into the bottom of the wash, and the animal stood calmly while he climbed up on the high bank. Indian pony or not, the horse seemed smart and calm enough and obviously had some training. Newt eased onto the brown's back from above, took up the looped rein tied to some kind of halter or bosal around the horse's nose, smiled to himself at the accomplishment with so little pain to his wound, and then gently bumped the brown's belly with his heels.

The brown promptly threw him into a cluster of prickly pear.