Carmody 6 Page 2

  I hadn’t seen Sam for six years and this one, Graciela, was new to me. The kid hissed like a snake when she poured raw mescal into the wound. When he got through hissing he grinned to show how tough he was.

  “Drink up,” Sam told me, not that there was any need.

  “Not me—I don’t drink,” the kid said when Sam shook the bottle and held up a glass.

  Sam winked at me. “No need to preach, son.”

  “Don’t call me son. And I’m not a kid. My name is Tex McCarty and I don’t drink because a man that drinks can’t shoot straight.”

  Sam filled his glass slopping full before he spoke. “You hear that, Carmody. You’re rotted clear through with poisonous likkers.”

  “Among other things,” I said.

  “Is not a bad wound,” the fat Mexican said, tying the ends of the bandage. “A crease. Stiff for two, three days, then like new. The other arm wrenched kind of bad.”

  She started to fix a sling. “You got to rest this arm a couple of week.”

  The kid looked at Sam. “Using my left hand don’t bother me. Right, left, makes no difference to me. Fast as a snake is what I am.”

  “Do tell?” Sam’s mouth was pulled down at the corners, trying hard to keep the grin from spreading.

  Graciela said, “A nice boy don’t talk like that.”

  After the other fat ladies finished steaming up the kitchen, they brought in the biggest onion smothered beefsteaks you ever saw. It took a while to stack the table with platters of home fried spuds, mashed turnips running with butter, three kinds of beans, canned peaches, hot apple pie, gallons of coffee.

  I grinned at Sam. “Why so stingy with the food?”

  “Dig in, boys,” Sam roared. “I call this a light lunch.”

  Talking to Sam with food on the table was a sorry waste of time, so I didn’t try. Anyway, after most of a week in the saddle and not leaving out the gun battle at the end of it, I was ready to leave talking for later.

  Sam ate twice what we did and still managed to finish first. “By the resurrected Christ, that was good,” he declared. He undid the top buttons of his pants and the fat serving ladies giggled. With my belly wrinkles set smooth by hot food and good bourbon, I didn’t give a curse if Sam took off his pants. But the kid darted a quick look at Sam’s hairy belly and got purse lipped about it. The kid didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t eat more than a chicken—and I wondered what else he liked besides guns.

  All that eating didn’t make Sam a bit sleepy; food fired him up like cordwood under a boiler. Old Blatchford wasn’t the jolly fat man some people thought he was, but I’ve met worse. Building a big New Mexico spread, especially when he first came West from Tennessee, took more than a ready laugh and a fondness for dark fat women. You could form a platoon of ghosts with the men who had died under his gun; still he wasn’t any harder than he had to be. Going on fifteen years was how long I’d known him—we traded a few favors—and sure as hell he set a good table.

  Pants open or closed, Sam was as generous as a Mexican with money. A snap of his fingers fetched good black cheroots. “Don’t suppose you smoke, Tex,” he said to the kid.

  “That’s right,” Tex said, and one look told you that Tex was a handle of his own making.

  Clouding his head in smoke, Sam sat back, testing his weight against the back of the chair. As long as I’d known him Sam never fully trusted anything that could break under him. “What do you do, Tex?” Sam added, “Wouldn’t think of asking were these normal times. But they ain’t.”

  The answer came out hard and flat in that city voice. “I’m a gunfighter.”

  Sam turned his smile toward the cheroot when he saw the look in the kid’s whitish-blue eyes. “That a fact, Tex. With that name you’d be a Texas man, I guess.”

  “Maybe so, maybe not, Mister … ”

  “Call me Sam. Everybody does.”

  “Can’t do that. You’re a real old man, Mr. Blatchford.”

  If another kid had said that to Sam I might have grinned, but there was nothing funny about this kid. For years Sam’s age was a sore spot, but he swore he’d die with a full belly, a fat woman under him, a bottle in one hand, a cigar in the other. In the old days he would have knocked the kid across the room. Now all he said was, “You could use some manners, Tex.”

  The kid got up so fast the chair fell over. “I can’t pay for the meal cause I got no money. So long, Mr. Blatchford. You too, Carmody.”

  “Write every chance you get,” I said. Having the kid around was taking the kick out of the whisky. Something was all coiled up inside that twitchy runt, as if they had crossed a sneaky mongrel dog with a hungry wolf. Not giving a damn, I wondered how far he’d get with no money and two damaged wings.

  Sam was thinking the same thing, or maybe he was mooning about the son he’d lost some years back. Everybody knew Sam Junior was a lying, cheating, no-good son of a bitch. The posse that finally hung him for horse stealing over in Arizona did the whole country a favor. Sam never talked about Junior until he was at the sour end of an all night drunk.

  “Aw sit down and shut up,” he roared. His eyes flicked to where the kid’s left hand was resting, close to the butt of the short nickeled Colt. It was a peculiar stand-off, the nervous runt and the fat old man with his belly hanging out.

  “Sit down,” Sam said. “Do what I tell you, son.”

  “Okay, Mr. Blatchford.” This time the kid didn’t object to being called son.

  Sam took a breath and started to tell me about the trouble with Noah Saxbee. “Damn it to hell, me and Noah were partners for thirty years, now look at us.”

  Without looking up from his half eaten steak, the kid said abruptly, “New York City, not Texas.”

  Sam gaped at the kid. “You say something?”

  “I mean I was born in New York City.” The kid paused to set his story straight, or maybe to embroider some fancy lies. “Matt McCarty is my real name. Some fellers I rode with in Texas called me Tex. The name kind of stuck, I guess. I suppose you know William Bonney was born in New York?”

  Sam was an old man and the name didn’t jump at him. “Do tell?” he said politely.

  “Billy the Kid,” I told him.

  The kid was all nerved up about something; the lines of his stamped-on grin grew deeper. “William Bonney’s real name was William McCarty.”

  “You ever hear that, Carmody?” Sam asked me.

  I said yeah.

  Then the kid let the rat out of the cage. “Billy was my older brother. My God damned mother already had me and Billy when she married Bonney. My old man was dead. Billy took Bonney’s name, not legal though. Bonney died after Billy got in trouble and ran away. Then my God damned mother came down with fever and died.” The kid made a strangled sound that might have been the best he could do in the way of laughter.

  “What then?” It was Sam’s house, so I couldn’t stop him from asking.

  “You really want to know I’ll tell you. Got sent back to New York. Lived with an uncle till he got killed in a saloon fight. The third time I escaped from the orphan home they didn’t come after me. Picking pockets when I was nine, pimping at ten, rolling drunks at eleven. Then five years in Sing Sing for something I didn’t do. All the time I was in jail I kept hearing stories about Billy out West. Except by the time I got out he was long since dead. Murdered by a pack of yellow dogs.”

  Sam knew what everybody else knew, that Pat Garrett killed Billy without any outside help. There was no pack of dogs, yellow or otherwise, but all Sam said was, “No use dwelling on it.”

  “A good thing Pat Garrett’s dead,” the kid said. “Or I’d kill him all over again. I guess they thought the McCartys were finished when they killed Billy. Like hell! I’m going to be a bigger name than Billy ever was.”

  I guess the kid’s bragging reminded Sam of his dead son. On the table the first bottle still had some whisky in it; that meant it was still too early for Sam to drag out his trunk of half-baked ideas about good boy
s gone wrong. So there was a rasp in his voice when he told the kid to get back to the original question.

  “Those men Carmody killed worked for Saxbee,” Sam said. “Did they jump you, something like that? I thought Noah still had his boys on a short rein.”

  “They wanted to know where I was going.” Recalling the incident caused the kid to show his broken yellow teeth. “They said I was on Saxbee’s range. I told them to go climb their mothers, then rode on past. I guess they were too surprised to do anything right away. When they finally started shooting they killed my pony instead of me.”

  Looking at the kid I found myself wishing Saxbee’s riders had been better shots. But Sam liked the kid’s nerve. “Two men in cover with rifles and you bad-mouth their mothers. Yes, sir, I guess I’d be surprised myself.”

  Squinting for some reason—maybe thought came hard to him—the kid said, “I should have had it out with them right off. Faced them, killed them.”

  Sam said, “A good thing Carmody came along when he did.”

  “Nobody asked him to butt in.” The kid didn’t look at me. “I guess I was headed for Colorado when the trouble started. Still am—you want me to leave now?”

  “Do what you want,” Sam said. “There’s an empty room, the end of the hall. Used to be my son’s room. You can bunk in there.”

  Already I was feeling poorly about having brought the kid to Sam’s house. Sam had just about all the trouble he could handle just then, and having Tex McCarty around wasn’t going to make life any easier for the old man.

  When prayer doesn’t help I reach for the bottle. First I filled Sam’s glass. The kid went out.

  “Again,” Sam said, knocking back a full one. “You think the kid’s telling the truth? You knew Billy at some point, ain’t that so?”

  I said not so. “Saw him one night in a saloon in Tularosa. Closest I ever got to knowing him. That night he didn’t have O’Folliard and Bowdry to back his play, so he just paid for a bottle and left. Yeah, I guess this runt looks like him. Same build, coloring; same crack-brained grin.”

  Sam banged the empty glass on the table. He hiccupped and looked doleful. “Poor little bastard,” he said.

  I said my short piece: “Get rid of him. Run him off. No charge for the advice. That kid smells of nothing but trouble.”

  “Whoa there, Carmody. I’ll be the one who decides about the kid.”

  I said fine and dandy.

  Drinking is one thing I do well, yet I don’t know where Sam put all that whisky. The second bottle was just about gone, and with two jerks of his wrist Sam put it out of its misery. “Course this Tex McCarty don’t look anything like Sam Junior and yet ... You remember Sam Junior? By Christ, there was a handsome high spirited boy … ”

  Sam Junior’s high spirits usually ran to beating up whores and shooting the kneecaps off Mexicans. There wasn’t enough whisky in the Territory to make me listen to Sam Junior’s good points. “How bad is the trouble with Noah?” I asked. If mentioning Sam’s old friend and new enemy didn’t jerk him back to the here-and-now it was my intention to snag a bottle and go to bed.

  It worked. “Keeps getting worse no matter what I do.” Sam had the look of a man much wronged by the world. “After thirty years we took to squabbling, so we broke up the partnership—never was nothing but a handshake—and split everything down the middle. Then came the last bad dry spell when I dammed the creek. Well, sir, the creek starts on my land, so I got a right to dam it any time I want. Anyway I let some water through. Sure I know the drought’s over, but it ain’t my place to back down … ”

  All this jabber wasn’t aimed at me; what Sam was trying to do was convince himself that he was a nice feller and Noah Saxbee was a miserable son of a bitch.

  “A fanatic is what he is,” Sam went on. “Let that sour faced Yankee come to me and admit he’s wrong and I’ll be the first ... Maybe it’s too late for talk. The shooting and the sniping already’s started.”

  Both old men were fanatics; most old men, if they have been hard and strong all their lives, turn fanatic when dying time is near. You think that old geezer in the hotel rocker is joking about wanting to start a new war with Mexico? Like hell he is. Sam and his old partner couldn’t manage that either, but they were well on their way to starting a range war that could spread across the Territory.

  “Maybe if you talked to Noah,” I said. “Just the two of you.” I wasn’t beating a big drum for the idea of a peace meeting. It was just something I said. Like the matter of the kid, Sam could do what he damn well pleased.

  Sam had no use for my suggestion. “What’s the matter with you, Carmody? Keep talking like that you’ll find yourself out of business.”

  Not a chance, I told Sam. There would always be a place for me as long as some men hired other men to do their killing.

  Sam drank to that. “That’s more like it, boy. A man don’t know he’s alive lessen he’s fighting something. Now me, I’m fighting to survive, the best kind of scrap there is. Yankees, Indians, comancheros, fever, flood, love pox, drought—I fought and whipped every one. Noah Saxbee thinks he’s going to wreck me, why, sir, that’s pure bullshit!”

  Laying a fat hand against his chest, Sam said mournfully, “Sad thing is I’m a man of peace. In here, in my heart I’m a man of peace.”

  I got the sentiment—and it was a damned lie.

  “All Noah understands is the rope and the gun,” the man of peace stated. “The point is, it don’t matter what started the trouble. The trouble’s here now, so we got to be as strong as Noah. No, sir—stronger! That’s why you got to whip my boys into fighting shape. God damn, you wouldn’t have to do that ten, fifteen years ago. Back then, every man on a ranch—cookie to top hand—ready to fight on the count of three.”

  I was tired of listening to Sam. “Times change,” I said.

  “Not for me. I’m too old to change … ”

  One of the fat women was peeping out of the kitchen, making clicking sounds with her tongue. Sam, taking the bottle but not the glass, lurched out of his chair.

  “Duty calls,” he said.

  “You were always strong for duty,” I told my bloat-bellied employer.

  “That’s what they tell me, the ladies.” Sam was almighty pleased with himself. He went upstairs with his arm around Graciela, youngest and best looking of his Mexicans. That left two fat ladies who weren’t spoken for that night. I thought about it for a while before settling for the rest of the whisky.

  Chapter Three

  For the next three days the kid did his best to keep out of my way. That was jake with me. I had my work cut out trying to whip the hands into shape for the big fight Sam saw just over the horizon. Sam was paying top gun wages, yet for his sake I hoped the war with Saxbee would fizzle out. If the fight did come I’d hit Saxbee like Sherman hit Georgia, but if the two old buzzards decided to call it off, I could always find other work for my gun.

  I taught Sam’s boys every dirty trick I knew. How to set up an ambush so five men can knock down twenty. How to bring down the side of a mountain with one stick of dynamite. All the useful things I had learned in nearly twenty years on the prod.

  The kid kept working on his left arm, rubbing it with some kind of oil, baking it in the sun. But most of the time he kept out of my way. I’d be putting the boys through their paces, yelling at them to shave seconds from their time. The kid would drift in close like a short shadow, watch for a few minutes, then go off by himself.

  The second morning, my head buzzing with whisky but nothing a cold souse wouldn’t cure, I woke up listening to gunshots. Right away I knew it wasn’t Saxbee and his men. It stopped and started again—the crack-crack of a small caliber pistol. Out in the hall while I was going downstairs Sam showed up in a red nightshirt, sleep gummed in his eyes, a rifle in his hand.

  Sam went back to bed and I went outside and dipped my head in a rain barrel. At that hour—the sun hardly peeping—the water was bone rattling cold. Across the way, in the bunkhou
se, feet slapped the floor and a lamp flared up.

  Out past the corrals I saw him, and the shooting started again before I got close. A log was lined with empty cans, and while I watched he pushed the shiny .38 back in the holster, hung his left hand out, working the fingers. His hand streaked for the gun when he heard me.

  My gun beat him to it. I had no mind to be shot by a crazy kid with twitches in his head, so I kept the Colt in my hand while I explained a few rules.

  Dink Westfall, the top hand, came out of the bunkhouse buttoning his pants. I told him it was all right. “So you say, Carmody,” the ramrod answered, a small pinch of lye in his rear because Sam didn’t ask him for any of our cozy get-togethers in the dining room of the main house. Given a choice I would have grubbed with the hands, if only not to look at the kid while I ate, but Westfall didn’t know that.

  “Try me again tomorrow morning,” the kid said before I could go on with explaining the rules. I had a gun on him, but he wanted to argue. He wasn’t about to take any orders from me. And so on.

  Nobody was looking and maybe now was the time to settle the kid’s problems in one easy step. Nothing much had happened yet, but the best time to kill a problem is when it’s just learning to toddle.

  “You’ll take any order I give you, Tex.” Saying his name I put a sneer into it. “You will if it means the safety of this ranch. Say no, sonny, and I’ll put out your lamp. Right now, I mean.”

  Life hadn’t been good to the kid, and there was always a hint of whining behind his tough talk. “A real hard case, holding a gun on a wounded man.”

  “Safest way to kill a man,” I said. “One more time, here’s how it goes. No more gunplay unless everybody knows about it. You’re scaring the fat ladies, Tex. Making the fence riders nervous, hearing shots, thinking Saxbee’s men have sneaked past in the dark ...”