City of Widows Read online

  Socorro City showed all the signs of a town on the grow. Buckboards and buggies outnumbered saddle horses on the street. Frame buildings were clattering up among the adobe and lumber was stacked everywhere, some of it under armed guard because by the time it was cut and milled in the mountains to the west and transported by wagon to the building sites it was worth nearly as much as a shipment of silver. Four men in shirtsleeves and paint-drizzled overalls were at work in front of a sign shop, where a dozen fresh placards were already curing against the side of the building. Most of them seemed to advertise real estate brokers. There were a stove works, a billiard hall, and four saloons on a main street as wide as a pasture. Prospectors came there for supplies and trail herders stopped there to cut the dust on their way across the border to borrow cattle from the old Spanish grandees.

  The pride of the Orient, and likely the inspiration for its name, seemed to be a paneled bar as long as an express car, lacquered black with cherry blossoms painted on the front. Antelope heads decorated the back wall and a six-foot painting of a belly dancer in a frame crusted over with gilt cupids dominated one end of a room built along the lines of a shotgun to accommodate a narrow lot. At that afternoon hour all the tables were occupied. When I asked for Frank Baronet a bartender with a strawberry mark on his forehead and a bulldog pistol standing in a water tumbler at his right elbow pointed out the faro table.

  “You playing?” he asked.

  “Not today.”

  “You’d best wait then till he finishes off that fellow. When it comes to kibitzers Frank is no Christian. There’s an empty chair at that corner table if you’re drinking. Billy the Kid sat there when he shot Feeny MacAdo last December. Straight through the heart at fifty-four feet.”

  “This Kid must have been hell on a stick. It can’t be twenty feet from there to the door.”

  “Nineteen and a half. Feeny was eating his breakfast in the Chicago House across the street when Fate struck him down.”

  I left the corner table to the Kid’s ghost and went over to watch the game.

  A sallow-faced man in a bowler and fresh collar that made his skin look even more unhealthy was bucking the tiger. He had a large stack of chips and eyes that never left the board except to follow the dealer’s movements when he slid a counter in the cue box. The dealer was as lean as a lodgepole and sat as stiffly, with an embroidered pillow doubled behind his back for support. He was sheathed in a black vest and green-striped shirtsleeves with garters to match the stripes and parted his black hair in the center. He had modest handlebars, a predatory nose, and an odd habit of batting his eyelids rapidly, like a sporting lady. It seemed a clumsy signaling device, but as there was no one standing behind the player I assumed it was some kind of tic. They say Jesse James suffered from a similar affliction.

  A counter moved. The player studied the board, sucked on his cigar. He put it down and slid a stack of reds onto the five of spades. The dealer drew two cards out of the box and laid them face up on the table. The first was the deuce of hearts. The second was the five of spades.

  The dealer exhaled softly. “Sid, you are part Irish today. I never saw such a run.”

  “How many turns left?” Sid asked.

  “Nine.”

  “Wrong again, Frank. It’s ten.”

  “Well, why the hell did you ask if you knew the answer?”

  “I got a side bet with Lyle Ring on just how big a liar you are.” He moved his chips to another card. “Draw again.”

  “Sheriff Baronet?” I said.

  The dealer winced and reached back to adjust his pillow. Three points of a nickel-plated star poked out of a pocket in his vest. “Later, mister. I have just ten more chances to bust this gentleman out. After that you just might be bringing your business to Sheriff Sidney L. Boone.”

  I recognized the name. “The real estate broker. I think your sign’s done.”

  The player picked up his cigar and drew on it. His attention remained on the board.

  “I’m Page Murdock,” I told Baronet. “I guess you know me better around here as Satan’s Sixgun.”

  “Give me a minute, Sid.” The player shrugged and sat back smoking and glowering at the board. Baronet blinked, regarding me. “You’re a lot south of your pasture, Marshal. We’ve had our sorrows with that cow crowd, getting drunk and shooting up innocent greasers they take for Don Segundo’s vaqueros, but we are on top of it. It never was a federal matter.”

  “That’s all behind me,” I said. “I’m fixed to go into private enterprise in San Sábado. Junior Harper has sold me half of the Apache Princess. I’m here to see if that’s all right with Socorro County.”

  “You no longer keep the peace?”

  “Only my own.”

  He counted his chips. His other hand dangled off the back of his chair near the pillow. “I’m concerned about this yellowback business. It might draw fire. Some pissant pistolero reads his nickel’s worth and decides to find out for himself if you sizzle on the griddle. He shoots you or you shoot him. Either way somebody has to dig a hole. The newspapers forget all about Tombstone and here I am sitting on six hundred thousand square miles of sand and scorpion shit and no prospects. It’s happened in milder places than this.”

  “Maybe they’ll decide to publish this instead.” I handed him Governor Wallace’s letter.

  He read it quickly and handed it back. “That carpetbagger. Things were just becoming settled in Lincoln County when he brought in the federals and stirred them back up. It killed my brother, Ross.”

  “I heard he was wounded in some kind of raid.”

  “He ran wild, I don’t deny it. Ross hadn’t my temperament or he would not have lashed out. He died last month of the blood fever in a cave in Chihuahua.”

  “I saw him three weeks ago in Juarez,” Sid Boone said. “He looked fit to me.”

  “You’re mistaken.” Baronet batted his eyes at me. “I went through there on my way to bury Ross. We were twins. People confused us often.”

  “Ross is two inches shorter and twenty pounds heavier. I guess I can tell you apart.”

  “Someone else, then.”

  I put away the letter. “What about the partnership?”

  “The Princess has a quiet reputation,” Baronet said. “Anyway the ordinance against any new saloons expired last week. I look forward to trying my luck at your table.”

  I thanked him, hesitated. “How large is the caliber in that pillow?”

  He had good teeth behind the moustaches, blue-white against the New Mexico tan. From behind the embroidered pillow he drew a Remington Rolling Block pistol with a fifty-caliber bore. I could have reached inside with my fingers and plucked out the ball.

  “I didn’t know buffalo came this far down,” I said.

  “Single-shot.” He turned it sideways, admiring its lazy-J lines. “I’ve found that in indoor shooting, one slug this size is sufficient. What’s that you carry?”

  I pulled aside my coattail to show the chicken-bone butt of the five-shot in the dropover holster. “Deane-Adams. English gun. It fires Colt’s forty-five, but only if I load the cartridges myself.”

  “Frank.” Sid Boone put out his cigar.

  The sheriff laid down the Remington and dealt two cards. I thanked him again and left.

  The Socorro Hotel was one of the older adobe structures on a side street. My room was cool in the daytime desert heat but included a scooped-out fireplace for the chilly evenings. A Navajo saddle blanket did for a rug on the planks. There was a crucifix on the wall above the iron bedstead and a cornshuck mattress that felt like spun clouds when I stretched out on it in my clothes, and to hell with the rustling and scratching when I turned over. A Mexican as old as cornmeal and frijoles, shriveled down no bigger than my thumb in peasant cotton and rope sandals that slapped his feet like shutters, came in at sundown with an armload of sticks and started a fire. When he left I got one boot off and dropped into the warmest blackest hole I had been in since childhood.

 
I woke up just after dawn, feeling sore all over and more rested than I had at any time since quitting Helena. I thought about treating myself to a barber shave, then remembered that Hernando Padilla was in jail thinking about his own neck, and shaved myself. I put on corduroys, a fresh shirt, and a mackinaw against the morning cold and reported for breakfast to the Chicago House, where Feeny MacAdo had had the black fortune to sit in the line of Billy the Kid’s magic fire.

  I had a short wait. The room, plastered and wainscoted, with framed lithographs of Greek ruins leaning out from the walls, was just big enough for six tables and was clearly the most popular place to eat in town. At length I was seated by the owner, a bald, loose-jowled German in his fifties whose waistline was his best advertising. He brought out my steak and eggs in good order and filled my cup from an old campaigner of a two-gallon pot.

  “Big doings at the Orient last night, you bet,” he said. “You heard shooting?”

  “Last night I’d have slept through Shiloh.” The coffee was thick and black and strong enough to float a fifty-cent piece. It scorched a furrow all the way down to my stomach. “Who got shot?”

  “Sid Boone, the real property man. They are saying he had a bad run at the sheriff’s table and went on the prod. He took out his pistol. Mr. Baronet put a round in him while he was still cocking. He is dead as Judas.”

  He spotted an empty cup and boated off before I could ask questions.

  My steak had had all the fight pounded out of it. Cutting it up, I reflected on how rapidly a man’s luck could change in a game of chance.

  3

  THE SUN WAS barely above the Oscuros when I stepped out of the Chicago House and already the heat was crawling off the dirt street. It lay across my shoulders like an oak beam when I took off the mackinaw.

  The larger of the town’s two liveries was an unpainted barn with a roof that extended four feet past the front, throwing a triangle of shade on a man sitting on a bench in overalls with one strap gone, brogans with black steel toes poking through the leather, and a slouch hat with no more shape than a bar rag. He was shirtless and the hair on his chest was pale against the boiled skin.

  “I need a saddle horse for a couple of hours,” I said. “What’s the best you’ve got?”

  He had to tip his head all the way back to see up from under his flop brim. He was a towheaded twenty, a surprise. He had slat shoulders and the general dilapidated posture of a man in his seventies.

  “Depends on what you want it for. I got a buckskin wouldn’t throw a child or a fly but you’d have to carry it back from the lip of town on your hip.”

  “It has to carry me out to the Whiteside ranch and back. No flies or children.”

  His head dropped. “Patch get you.”

  “I heard the Apaches were raiding Arizona this year.”

  “Patch don’t know when he’s across the line.” He spat. The spittle evaporated in the air.

  “I’m obliged for your time,” I said, turning. “There’s another stable.”

  “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar, mister. She’s too hot to argue.” He stood, stretched, and went inside. The sun moved, and then he came back out leading a gaunt bay by its bridle. Its hip sockets showed and its right eye was milky.

  “That’s as good as it gets?”

  “Good as you get anyway. You don’t have to stand in front of my uncle and tell him Patch et his sorrel for noon dinner.” He tipped his head. “What’s that for?”

  I had drawn the Deane-Adams. I plugged a cartridge into the empty chamber and spun the cylinder with a diamondback buzz. “I want to be sure I have enough shells to hit a swift-moving target like you once I finish putting this sack of umbrellas out of its misery.”

  “Hold on, mister. There’s law in this county.”

  “Curious thing about the law. It almost always gets off the second shot.” I holstered the revolver. “Ten minutes from now I’m going to step out the front door of the Socorro Hotel and throw a leg over an animal with some kind of pulse. If I should fall off the porch for lack of anything to break my drop, the law in this county is going to hold an inquest over your remains. That’s if it can find a difference.”

  “Two dollars for the day,” he said after a minute. “Saddle’s fifty cents extra.”

  “I’ll use my own.” I handed him two cartwheels and left.

  A sorrel with some years left on it was hitched at the rail when I came out carrying my gear. The boy was there and so was Frank Baronet. The sheriff had on a Prince Albert and a pinch hat squared over his brows. His thumbs were hooked inside the armholes of his vest and the gutta-percha handle of the large-bore Remington poked out of the notch above his belt buckle. He looked like an election poster.

  He blinked up at the sky. “There’s worse days for a ride.”

  “Not in Montana.” I set down the saddle and Winchester and smoothed my faded blanket over the horse’s back. “Is it always like this?”

  “Nine months out of the year. Then it heats up.”

  I slung the saddle into place, jerked the cinch before the animal could puff itself up. It whickered and tried to crawl out of its skin. “I heard you had a row.”

  “Yes sir, I did. I’m going to miss old Sid. It’s sad what the love of money will do to a Christian.”

  “The cards must have gone sour for him all at once. He was a piece ahead when I left.”

  “They will do that. I won back the table stakes plus an interest in his real business when he got frisky with that belly gun he carried. His widow can keep the store. I only let him wager it because he was determined to quit even. If I knew how determined I’d have shut down the game.”

  “I guess you had a crowd by then. When a man loses that much that fast it generally draws an audience.”

  “No, it was late. It was just Sid and me and Mike Henry behind the bar. Mike was asleep on his hand at the time. He fell off it and chipped a tooth when I fired.”

  “You’re proficient with that buffalo pistol.”

  “I was elected to keep the peace. I don’t play at it.” He blinked. “I’ll have that hip gun.”

  When a man says that, right out of the blue with both hands occupied, you look around. Jubilo, the deputy sheriff with no last name, was standing at the end of the hotel porch with his Creedmoor rifle resting on top of the railing. The bottom half of his face was a desert beneath the shadow of his flat brim. At that range he didn’t need the folding sight.

  I looked back at Baronet. “I’m headed into Apache country.”

  “You should have thought of that before you threatened the life of young Ole here. I’ll have the whole rig. Just hang it over the hitch.”

  I unbuckled the cartridge belt and draped it next to the sorrel’s tie. The sheriff stepped forward and lifted it off. “Hang on to that.” He thrust it at the boy, who seized it eagerly, his head tilted back to watch me. His face was all anticipation.

  “You don’t wear the tin, you don’t abuse a free man.” Baronet jerked the Remington out of his belt and backhanded it in the same motion. A drop of red paint on the front sight caught my eye just before the sun exploded. I missed the fall. I was lying on the porch boards looking at the remains of my steak and eggs.

  “Aw.” Ole was disgusted. “He got something on my pants.”

  I rolled over quickly. The sole of a boot fastened on my throat.

  “Come around here waving a letter from the governor,” Baronet said. “I kill a man, I don’t eat for three days. You can thank Sid Boone for your life, him and the fact I don’t take to starvation. Otherwise you’d be bucking the devil’s tiger right along with him.”

  “Aw, kill him.”

  “Shut up, Ole.”

  I was having trouble squeezing wind down my pipe. The sheriff leaned in, shutting off the rest of the supply. I clutched at his boot, but the blow to my head had done something to my connections. I had no feeling in my fingers.

  “There’s one law in Socorro.” His upper body blocked the light.
“It isn’t a yellowback former federal named Murdock and it sure isn’t that carpetbagging Wallace in Santa Fe. Let me hear you say its name.”

  I couldn’t talk. He leaned harder. My vision broke up into black-and-white checks.

  “Say its name.”

  The white checks shrank to pinholes. I could feel the blood swelling the veins in my eyeballs.

  He leaned back then, relieving some of the pressure. I sucked in air and coughed.

  “Frank Baronet.”

  He removed his foot, straightened. His face was an oval blur inside the circle of his hatbrim with sharp blue sky behind it.

  “‘Satan’s Sixgun,’” he said. “My ass.”

  * * *

  I lay there for a space of time. I knew Baronet had left and probably Ole and the deputy, but I was aware that I was still an object of curiosity for a portion of the local tax base. My hands were starting to tingle when I pushed myself into a sitting position. My cartridge belt slid off my chest and the Deane-Adams clunked against the boards. I hadn’t even felt its weight when it was dumped on me.

  I picked it up along with myself, found my hat, Winchester and canteen, and went back inside to use the basin in my room. The barrel of the sheriff’s pistol hadn’t broken the skin but the entire right side of my head felt like rotten wood. I inspected the loads in the five-shot, gripped the handle hard until I could feel it as far as my elbow. I brushed the sawdust off my corduroys and went out.

  The countryside was ablaze with that dry heat that opens your pores and sucks out the moisture like lemon carbonate through a straw. For all that it was a green land, dotted over with juniper and scrub oak connecting in the distance to create the illusion of a grass ocean. The mountains too were flecked with green, cloud-capped, the air so clear around them I might have been looking at them through a glass. The sky came down to the ground.

  The ranch road led past a long low adobe house with a red tile roof and a corral next to it containing half a dozen horses. Behind the house I found a Mexican cook and his Negro helper scalding a hog in a cauldron the size of a bathtub. The cook said I’d find Señor Whiteside stringing fence in the northwest corner. I didn’t waste time leaving the pair to their work. I don’t mind the smell of singed bristles, but a dead hog looks too much like a naked man to my taste. On my way back to the road I paused to look over the horses in the corral.