Valdez Is Coming: A Novel

  He didn’t have to stay here. He didn’t have to be a town constable. He didn’t have to work for the stage company. He didn’t have to listen to Mr. Beaudry and Mr. Malson and smile when they said those things. He didn’t have a wife or any kids. He didn’t have land that he owned. He could go anywhere he wanted.

  Diego Luz was coming over. Diego Luz had a wife and a daughter almost grown and some little kids and he had to stay, sure.

  Diego Luz squatted next to him, his arms on his knees and his big hands that he used for breaking horses hanging in front of him.

  “Stay near if they want you for something,” Bob Valdez said. He was watching Beaudry tilt the bottle up. Diego Luz said nothing.

  “One of them bends over,” Bob Valdez said then, “you kiss it, uh?”

  Diego Luz looked at him, patient about it. Not angry or stirred. “Why don’t you go home?”

  “He says get me a bottle, you run.”

  “I get it. I don’t run.”

  “Smile and hold your hat, uh?”

  “And don’t talk so much.”

  “Not unless they talk to you first.”

  “You better go home,” Diego said.

  Bob Valdez said, “That’s why you hit the horses.”

  “Listen,” Diego Luz said. “They pay me to break horses. They pay you to talk to drunks and keep them from killing somebody. They don’t pay you for what you think or how you feel. So if you take their money keep your mouth shut. All right?”

  Bob Valdez smiled. “I’m kidding you.”

  Diego Luz got up and walked away, down toward the hollow. The hell with him, he was thinking. Maybe he was kidding, but the hell with him. He was also thinking that maybe he could get a drink from that bottle. Maybe there would be a half inch left nobody wanted and Mr. Malson would tell him to kill it.

  But it was already finished. R. L. Davis was playing with the bottle, holding it by the neck and flipping it up and catching it as it came down. Beaudry was saying, “What about after dark?” And looking at Mr. Tanner, who was thinking about something else and didn’t notice.

  R. L. Davis stopped flipping the bottle. He said, “Put some men on the rise right above the hut; he comes out, bust him.”

  “Well, they should get the men over there,” Mr. Beaudry said, looking at the sky. “It won’t be long till dark.”

  “Where’s he going?” Mr. Malson said.

  The others looked up, stopped in whatever they were doing or thinking by the suddenness of Mr. Malson’s voice.

  “Hey, Valdez!” R. L. Davis yelled out. “Where you think you’re going?”

  Bob Valdez had circled them and was already below them on the slope, leaving the pines now and entering the scrub brush. He didn’t stop or look back.

  “Valdez!”

  Mr. Tanner raised one hand to silence R. L. Davis, all the time watching Bob Valdez getting smaller, going straight through the scrub, not just walking or passing the time but going right out to the pasture.

  “Look at him,” Mr. Malson said. There was some admiration in his voice.

  “He’s dumber than he looks,” R. L. Davis said, then jumped a little as Mr. Tanner touched his arm.

  “Come on,” Mr. Tanner said. “With the rifle.” And he started down the slope, hurrying and not seeming to care if he might stumble on the loose gravel.

  Bob Valdez was now halfway across the pasture, the shotgun pointed down at his side, his eyes not leaving the door of the line shack. The door was probably already open enough for a rifle barrel to poke through. He guessed the Army deserter was covering him, letting him get as close as he wanted; the closer he came the easier to hit him.

  Now he could see all the bullet marks in the door and the clean inner wood where the door was splintered. Two people in that little bake-oven of a place. He saw the door move.

  He saw the rag doll on the ground. It was a strange thing, the woman having a doll. Valdez hardly glanced at it but was aware of the button eyes looking up and the discomforted twist of the red wool mouth. Then, just past the doll, when he was wondering if he would go right up to the door and knock on it and wouldn’t that be a crazy thing, like visiting somebody, the door opened and the Negro was in the doorway filling it, standing there in pants and boots but without a shirt in that hot place, and holding a long-barreled dragoon that was already cocked.

  They stood twelve feet apart looking at each other, close enough so that no one could fire from the slope.

  “I can kill you first,” the Negro said, “if you raise it.”

  With his free hand, the left one, Bob Valdez motioned back over his shoulder. “There’s a man there said you killed somebody a year ago.”

  “What man?”

  “Said his name is Tanner.”

  The Negro shook his head, once each way.

  “Said your name is Johnson.”

  “You know my name.”

  “I’m telling you what he said.”

  “Where’d I kill this man?”

  “Huachuca.”

  The Negro hesitated. “That was some time ago I was in the Tenth. More than a year.”

  “You a deserter?”

  “I served it out.”

  “Then you got something that says so.”

  “In the wagon, there’s a bag there my things are in.”

  “Will you talk to this man Tanner?”

  “If I can hold from busting him.”

  “Listen, why did you run this morning?”

  “They come chasing. I don’t know what they want.” He lowered the gun a little, his brown-stained tired-looking eyes staring intently at Bob Valdez. “What would you do? They come on the run. Next thing I know they firing at us.”

  “Will you go with me and talk to him?”

  The Negro hesitated again. Then shook his head. “I don’t know him.”

  “Then he won’t know you.”

  “He didn’t know me this morning.”

  “All right,” Bob Valdez said. “I’ll bet your paper says you were discharged. Then we’ll show it to this man, uh?”

  The Negro thought it over before he nodded, very slowly, as if still thinking. “All right. Bring him here, I’ll say a few words to him.”

  Bob Valdez smiled a little. “You can point that gun some other way.”

  “Well…” the Negro said, “if everybody’s friends.” He lowered the revolver to his side.

  The wagon was in the willow trees by the creek. Off to the right. But Bob Valdez did not turn right away in that direction. He backed away, watching Orlando Rincón for no reason that he knew of. Maybe because the man was holding a gun and that was reason enough.

  He had backed off six or seven feet when Orlando Rincón shoved the revolver down into his belt. Bob Valdez turned and started for the trees.

  It was at this moment that he looked across the pasture. He saw Mr. Tanner and R. L. Davis at the edge of the scrub trees but wasn’t sure it was them. Something tried to tell him it was them, but he did not accept it until he was off to the right, out of the line of fire, and by then the time to yell at them or run toward them was past. R. L. Davis had the Winchester up and was firing.

  They say R. L. Davis was drunk or he would have pinned him square. As it was, the bullet shaved Rincón and plowed past him into the hut.

  Bob Valdez saw Rincón half turn and he saw Rincón’s accusing eyes as Rincón pulled the long-barreled dragoon from his belt.

  “They weren’t supposed to,” Bob Valdez said, holding one hand out as if to stop Rincón. “Listen, they weren’t supposed to do that!”

  The revolver was free, and Rincón was cocking it. “Don’t!” Bob Valdez said. “Don’t do it!” Looking right into the Negro’s eyes and seeing it was no use, that Rincón was going to shoot him, and suddenly hurrying, he jerked the shotgun up and pulled both triggers so that the explosions came out in one blast and Orlando Rincón was spun and thrown back inside.

  They came out across the pasture to have a look, some goin
g inside where they found the woman and brought her out, everybody noticing she would have a child in about a month. Those by the doorway made room as Mr. Tanner and R. L. Davis approached.

  Diego Luz came over by Bob Valdez, who had not moved. Valdez stood watching them and he saw Mr. Tanner look down at Rincón and after a moment shake his head.

  “It looked like him,” Mr. Tanner said. “It sure looked like him.”

  He saw R. L. Davis squint at Mr. Tanner. “It ain’t the one you said?”

  Mr. Tanner shook his head again. “I’ve seen him before though. I know I’ve seen him somewheres.”

  Bob Valdez saw R. L. Davis shrug. “You ask me, they all look alike.” He was yawning then, fooling with his hat, and then his eyes swiveled over to Bob Valdez standing with the empty shotgun.

  “Constable,” R. L. Davis said. “You went and killed the wrong coon.”

  Bob Valdez started for him, raising the shotgun to swing it like a club, but Diego Luz caught him from behind and locked a big arm around his neck, under his chin, until he was still and Mr. Tanner and the others had moved off.

  2

  A man can be in two different places and he will be two different men. Maybe if you think of more places he will be more men, but two is enough for now. This is Bob Valdez washing his hands in the creek and resting in the willows after digging the hole and lowering Orlando Rincón into it and covering him with dirt and stones, resting and watching the Lipan Apache woman who sat in silence by the grave of the man whose child she would have in a month.

  This is one Bob Valdez. The forty-year-old town constable and stage-line shotgun rider. A good, hardworking man. And hard looking, with a dark hard face that was creased and leathery; but don’t go by looks, they said, Bob Valdez was kindly and respectful. One of the good ones. The whores in Inez’s place on Commercial Street would call to him from their windows; even the white-skinned girls who had come from St. Louis, they liked him too. Bob Valdez would wave at them and sometimes he would go in and after being with the girl would have a cup of coffee with Inez. They had known each other when they were children in Tucson. That was all right, going to Inez’s place. Mr. Beaudry and Mr. Malson and the others could try to think of a time when Bob Valdez might have drunk too much or swaggered or had a certain smart-aleck look on his face, but they would never recall such a time. Yes, this Bob Valdez was all right.

  Another Bob Valdez inside the Bob Valdez in the willows that evening had worked for the Army at one time and had been a contract guide when General Crook chased Geronimo down into the Madres. He was a tracker out of Whipple Barracks first, then out of Fort Thomas, then in charge of the Apache police at Whiteriver. He would sit at night eating with them and talking with them as he learned the Chiricahua dialect. He would keep up with them all day and shoot his Springfield carbine one hell of a lot better than any of them could shoot. He had taken scalps but never showed them to anyone and had thrown them away by the time Geronimo was in Oklahoma and he had gone to work for the stage company, Hatch and Hodges, to live as a civilized man. Shortly after that he was named town constable in Lanoria at twenty-five dollars a month, getting the job because he got along with people, including the Mexicans in town who drank too much on Saturday night, and this was the Bob Valdez that Mr. Beaudry and Mr. Malson and the others knew. They had never met the first Bob Valdez.

  And they had forgotten about the second Bob Valdez; they had gone, everyone cleared out of the Maricopa pasture. He was alone with the Lipan Apache woman as evening settled and the grove in the willow trees became dark.

  He had not spoken to the woman. He had touched her shoulder before digging the grave—when she had tried to take the shovel from him to do it herself—he had touched her, easing her to the ground, and she had sat unmoving while he formed the hole and dug deep into the soil. He would look at her and smile, but her expression gave him nothing in return. She wasn’t an attractive woman. She was a round shape in a dirty gray dress with yellow strands of beads. He did not know how old she was. She was something sitting there watching him but not watching him. She would build a fire and sit here all night and in the morning she would probably be gone.

  He had never seen the woman before. He had seen Orlando Rincón in Lanoria. He had recognized him, but had never spoken to him before today. Rincón had a one-loop spread a half day’s ride south of Lanoria that he and the woman tended alone. That much was all Bob Valdez knew about them. They had come into town for something and now the man was dead and the woman was alone with her unborn child. Like that, her life, whatever it had been before, good or bad, was gone.

  He watched the woman rise from the grave to water the wagon horses in the creek. She returned and made a fire, lighting it with a match. Valdez went over to her then, fashioning a cigarette and leaning in to light it in the fire, taking his time because he wasn’t sure of the words he wanted to use.

  In Spanish he said, “Where will you go?” and repeated it in the Chiricahua dialect when she continued to stare at him, and now she pointed off beyond the creek.

  “This should not have happened,” he said. “Your husband had done nothing. It was a mistake.” He leaned closer to see her clearly in the firelight. “I did it to him, but I didn’t want to. He didn’t understand and he was going to kill me.”

  Christ, if you can’t say anything, Valdez thought, quit talking.

  He said, “It isn’t your fault this has happened. I mean, you are made to suffer and yet you did nothing to cause it. You understand?”

  The woman nodded slightly, looking into the fire now. “All right, we can’t give him back to you, but we should give you something. You take something from a person, then you have to pay for it. We have to pay. We have to pay you for taking your husband. You see that?”

  The woman did not move or speak.

  “I don’t know how much you pay a woman for killing her husband, but we’ll think of something, all right? There were many men there; I don’t know them all. But the ones I know I go to and ask them to give me something for you. A hundred dollars. No, five hundred dollars we get and give it to you so you can do what you want with it. Have your baby and go home, wherever your home is, or stay here. Buy some, I don’t know, something to grow, and a cow and maybe some goats, uh? You know goats?”

  Christ, let her buy what she wants. Get it done.

  “Look,” Valdez said then. “We get in the wagon and go back to town. I see the men and talk to them—you stay in town also. I find a place for you, all right?”

  The woman’s gaze rose from the fire, her dark face glistening in the light, the shapeless, flat-faced Lipan Apache woman looking at him. A person, but Christ, barely a person.

  Why did Rincón choose this one? Valdez thought. He smiled then. “How does that sound? You stay in town, sleep in a bed. You don’t have to worry or think about it. We pay for everything.”

  A Maricopa rider came into De Spain’s, where Mr. Beaudry and Mr. Malson were playing poker with another gentleman and the house man, and told them it was the goddamnedest thing he’d seen in a while: Bob Valdez walking into the Republic Hotel with that blown-up Indian woman.

  R. L. Davis came over from the bar and said, “What about the Indian woman? Hell, I could have knocked her flat if I’d wanted. Nobody believes that then they never seen me shoot.”

  Mr. Malson told him to shut up and said to the Maricopa rider, “What’s this about Bob Valdez?”

  “He’s in the Republic registering that nigger’s squaw,” the rider said. “I saw them come up in the team and go inside, so I stuck my head in.”

  Mr. Beaudry was squinting in his cigar smoke. “What’d the clerk do?”

  “I guess he didn’t know what to do,” the rider said. “He went and got the manager, and him and Bob Valdez were talking over the counter, but I couldn’t hear them.”

  Mr. Malson, the manager of Maricopa, looked at Mr. Beaudry, the government land agent, and Mr. Beaudry said, “I never heard of anything like that before
.”

  Mr. Malson shook his head. “They won’t give her a room. Christ Almighty.”

  Mr. Beaudry shook his head too. “I don’t know,” he said. “Bob Valdez. You sure it was Bob?”

  “Yes sir,” the Maricopa rider said. He waited a minute while the men at the poker table thought about it, then went over to the bar and got himself a glass of whiskey.

  Next to him, R. L. Davis said, “Were you out there today?” The rider shook his head, but said he’d heard all about it. R. L. Davis told him how he had taken the Winchester and put four good ones right behind the woman when she came out for water and one smack in the door as she went back inside. “Hell,” R. L. Davis said, “I’d wanted to hit her I’d have hit her square.”

  The Maricopa rider said, “Goddam, I guess she’s a big enough something to shoot at for anybody.”

  “I was two hundred yards off!” R. L. Davis stiffened up and his face was tight. “I put them shots right where I aimed!”

  The Maricopa rider said, “All right, I believe you.” He was tired and didn’t feel like arguing with some stringy drunk who was liable to make something out of nothing.

  For a Saturday night there was only a fair crowd in De Spain’s, the riders and a few town merchants lined up and lounged at the bar and some others played poker and faro, with tobacco smoke hanging above them around the brass lamps. They were drinking and talking, but it didn’t seem loud enough for a Saturday. There had been more men in here earlier, right after supper, a number of them coming in for a quick glass or a jug to take with them, heading back to their spreads with their families, but now it was only a fair-sized crowd. The moment of excitement had been Mr. Tanner coming in. He had stood at the bar and lit a cigar and sipped two glasses of whiskey while Mr. Malson stood with him. Those who were out at the Maricopa pasture pointed out Mr. Tanner to those who hadn’t been there. The reactions to seeing him were mostly the same. So that was Frank Tanner. He didn’t look so big. They expected a man with his name and reputation to look different—a man who traded goods to Mexican rebels and had a price on his head across the border and two dozen guns riding for him. Imagine paying all those men. He must do pretty well. He was a little above average height and was straight as a post, thin, with a thin, sunken-in face and a heavy moustache and eyes in the shadow of his hatbrim. He made a person look at him when he walked in, but once the person had looked, Tanner wasn’t that different from anybody else. That was the reaction to Frank Tanner. That he was not so much after all. Still, while he was in De Spain’s, it seemed quieter, like everybody was holding back, though most of the men were trying to act natural and somebody would laugh every once in a while. Frank Tanner stayed fifteen minutes and left. He’d gone over to the Republic and shortly after, he and his wife were seen riding out of Lanoria in their buggy with a mounted Mexican trailing them, everyone coming to doors and windows to get a look at them. The men said boy, his wife was something—a nice young thing and not too frail either, and the women admitted yes, she was pretty, but she ought to knot or braid her hair instead of letting it hang down like that; it made her look awful bold.