Now she looked out across the yard again to the stable and she thought of Bowen—remembering how she had compared her husband to him the day he was placed in the punishment cell; remembering now how she had catalogued him in her mind: a man who would do anything to escape.
She thought of him calmly, impersonally now, feeling that there had been something almost instinctive in choosing him from among all the convicts. As if—since Willis would do nothing—Bowen was the next logical choice to help her.
But how?
In some way that would benefit him. That, she realized already. A way that would help him escape. But, she thought now, talk to him first. He isn’t on Renda’s side. But neither is he necessarily on yours.
Before leaving the window to change into her riding suit, she saw her husband ride out of the gate. Less than ten minutes later, she walked across the yard and into the wide opening of the stable. She saw Pryde immediately, at the far end sweeping the aisle between the stalls—then Bowen. He was in the first stall on the right side, curry-combing Renda’s big chestnut mare. She walked toward him.
“Frank didn’t waste time putting you back to work, did he?”
Bowen looked up. “No, ma’am.” He watched her move toward him. She came almost into the stall, stopping to lean against the end of the partition that separated this stall from the next one. This was the first time she had even spoken to him and her relaxed, almost familiar manner surprised him.
“Will you saddle my horse?”
“All right.” He looked back, over the partition. “Which one?”
“The sorrel, on the other side.”
Bowen turned, taking a step as he did, then stopped abruptly. Lizann, less than an arm’s length from him, had not moved.
“I’m in no hurry,” she said. “Finish what you’re doing.”
“I’ve got all day to do this,” Bowen said.
Lizann was studying him openly. “How do you feel?”
“Not so good,” Bowen said. Her eyes made him conscious of his three weeks’ growth of beard, his ragged, sweat-stained appearance.
“I saw what Renda did to to you,” Lizann said quietly. “I was standing behind him.”
Bowen nodded. “I noticed.”
“It’s too bad your hands were tied.”
“Maybe it was good. I might have killed him.”
“Do you mean that?”
Her question surprised him. “I mean I was mad enough at the time.”
Lizann nodded slowly. “I could see why you would be. You’ve been here, what—three months?”
“That’s right.”
“And Yuma before that,” Lizann said. “With six years to serve of a seven-year sentence. I can’t say I blame you for trying to escape.”
“How do you know all that?” Bowen asked. He was reminded of Karla Demery. Now a second woman who seemed to know all about him.
“I looked up your record,” Lizann said.
“For a reason?”
“Perhaps.”
“What were you looking for?”
Lizann smiled. “You’ve a very suspicious nature. Perhaps I just felt sorry for you…thought you needed a friend.”
Bowen shook his head. “Not in a convict camp. With a husband.”
“My husband doesn’t know everything I do.”
“But Renda does. He has to know what everybody’s doing. Even you.”
“You sound very sure of yourself.”
“What’s going on here,” Bowen said, “is black and white and you know it as well as anyone else. Renda gets seventy cents a day for each convict—thirty of us—for food, clothes and shelter. But he doesn’t spend two bits a man on his best day. He buys cheap flour, full of worms. The coffee goes twice as far as it should. The Mimbres shoot most of his meat which costs him only for bullets. We sleep on straw mats you wouldn’t put a dog on. Since I’ve been here three men have died on those mats. Not one of them had a doctor, though Renda’s supposed to provide medical care. He makes money on the road contract and he’s keeping it going as long as he can, for every day he can stretch it he makes that much more money off the convicts. Anybody who’s been here longer than one day knows it. So it comes down to this—living here you’re either his friend or his prisoner and either way he knows what you’re doing.”
Lizann’s eyes remained on him. “You’ve thought it out very carefully.”
“I’ve had the time.”
“Which do you think my husband is, friend or prisoner?”
“Maybe both. But he drinks so he won’t have to admit to being either.”
“And I?” Lizann asked. “Which am I?”
“Until a while ago, I would’ve thought you and Renda got along fine.”
Lizann’s eyebrows raised inquiringly. “And now?”
“Now I’d say you want out.”
“You just thought of that,” Lizann said. “You’re guessing.”
Bowen moved his hand slowly over the smooth back of the chestnut. “I’ll guess something else.”
“I’m listening.”
“You’re looking for somebody angry enough to help you.”
For a moment there was no sound in the stable. They were aware then of the faint sound of Pryde sweeping at the far end, but that was all. Their eyes held, neither of them moving until Lizann asked, quietly, “Are you angry enough, Corey?”
“That all depends.”
“On me?”
Bowen nodded. “On what’s on your mind.”
“I’ll be perfectly honest with you,” Lizann said softly. She moved closer to him. “I don’t know how it can be done. All I know is I have to get away from here. My husband has refused to help me and Renda has me watched constantly. That’s why I have no choice but to—”
“Come to a convict.”
“I wasn’t going to say that. I have no choice but to devise my own means of getting away from here.”
“You’d leave your husband?”
“He’s already left me, you might say.”
“Why won’t he help you?”
“You said it yourself. He’s Renda’s prisoner.”
“He could get word out somehow,” Bowen said. “Mail a report from Fuegos.”
“He could…if he wasn’t accepting money from Frank.”
“Renda’s bribing him?”
Lizann nodded calmly. “If he reports Frank, Frank will report him. Staying here, Willis is desperately protecting what he chooses to call his career in government service.”
“I didn’t think Frank was making that much that he could afford to pay somebody off.”
“He doesn’t have a choice.”
“It seems to me,” Bowen said, “he could get away with just threatening your husband.”
“Perhaps he could, but it wouldn’t be as sure as the way he’s doing it.”
“How long has your husband been taking the money?”
“I suppose from almost the first day we came here. It wouldn’t have taken Willis long to realize what Renda was doing. Willis keeps the books…That’s something else, another way Renda has him. All the accounting is in Willis’s handwriting—the entries of the government subsistence funds, then the recording of fictitious expenditures to cover the funds going into Renda’s pocket. As far as the people in Prescott know, the convicts are getting the equivalent of seventy cents a day—in food, clothing, blankets…well, you know, you mentioned it a moment ago.”
“How much does your husband get out of it?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps just enough to cover the six bottles of Green River he buys every week.”
“Maybe Renda forced him into it somehow.”
“I have found,” Lizann said quietly, “that worrying about my husband serves no one’s purpose, not even his.”
Bowen studied her thoughtfully. “All right…now tell me where I fit in.”
“I’m not yet sure,” Lizann answered. Her face was raised to his and for a moment neither of them spoke. “But,” she
asked then, “you’d be willing to help me, wouldn’t you?”
“It still depends,” Bowen said mildly. “You tell me when you think of a way to leave…and then I’ll let you know.”
7
By five thirty A.M. the roving night guard had made his last swing through the compound, checked with the gate guard and had gone to wake up the cook. Fifteen minutes later, Renda and the day men were up and dressed. They unlocked one door of the barracks, brought the convicts out single file and counted them before marching them to the outside mesquite-pole-
awninged mess tables behind the barracks.
At six o’clock they were lined up in front of the barracks again. A few minutes later, three single-team wagons moved out of the compound—the first carrying equipment, the other two, the convicts. A guard rode alongside both of the convict wagons and Renda and Brazil brought up the rear. As the wagons rolled through the gate, twelve Mimbreño trackers rode out from their camp. Three of them held back to follow the wagons, but the rest went on, spreading out and running their horses now toward the looming sand-colored slope less than a mile in the distance. As the sun rose higher, five shadow lines formed by washes and rock slides would creep down the slope like a gigantic hand groping for the convict camp below.
In the third wagon, sitting next to Bowen, Pryde said, “There they go. You see them in the morning, then you see them maybe once all day.”
“Unless,” Bowen said, “you try to run. Then you see them again.” He watched Salvaje, a good fifty yards out, ride by the wagons, and he nodded, saying to Pryde, “How’d you like to have him on our side?”
Pryde turned to watch the Mimbres. “That would do it, wouldn’t it?”
That would do it all right, Bowen thought—his eyes raising to Renda and Brazil who had separated and dropped back a dozen yards or more to be clear of the dust rising from the wagons—once you got by those two. Maybe, he continued to think, there’s where Lizann comes in. To help you get by.
But how does a woman help you break out of a convict camp?
No—don’t underestimate her because she’s a woman. Not that one. And don’t think she’s doing it for you. You guessed it and she admitted it. She wants out. She wants to be free of Renda…and the wire fence and the Mimbres and the sun and…even if it means running away with a convict she doesn’t know from any other convict. Think about that. Think about it good and see what it tells you. A woman who’s willing to leave her husband behind…willing to help a convict if he’ll help her. Picture the way she was in the stable and the way she spoke, then add. Add it up without cluttering it with running-hiding-making-it-escaping-from-it pictures and see what you get. Put yourself in her shoes. Be sick of your husband and hating Renda and hating everything in sight. Then look at you. A weapon. Somebody Renda beat hell out of. Somebody angry enough. You said it yourself. You don’t have to reason it out. You said it yourself in the stable. Somebody angry enough. She’ll use you for a battering ram to bust the door down. That’s all. If you can get up and run out yourself, all right. If you can’t, she’s not going to stop to help you up. And if she fails, then it was a convict who forced her into it.
And so you know all that just by looking at her face, guessing what wasn’t said but what was almost said. Is that how you know all about her?
Yes. Some things you know.
Some things are very simple and you can take all this reasoning that really isn’t reasoning and throw it out because you knew with the first word she said and the way she said it that she was after something and if she wanted it bad enough she’d get it, one way or another. With you or with somebody else. And knowing it you’ll go along with her, because at least it’s a chance and one chance is better than six more years of this. Even if you don’t make it.
So what have you got?
He was still watching Renda and he thought: Ride over here close and look the other way and let that shotgun barrel stick out a little more.
Then get Brazil first.
Yes, that’s smart thinking. Ask Pryde if he thinks that’s cool, calm, smart thinking. Ask him if he feels anything about it.
If you planned a break with one of the convicts, he wouldn’t think of you, would he? He’d think of himself. And you’d think of your self. That’s what it comes down to. She’s as much a prisoner as anyone else. So if she wants to get out, even needing somebody else, she’ll be thinking of herself. It’s not surprising now, is it? Suddenly it’s not surprising. Your mistake was thinking of her as a woman instead of as another convict.
So forget she’s a woman and just listen to whatever she has to say. Forget she’s supposed to think like a woman, however women are supposed to think. She’s another convict. Put a convict’s shirt on her and numbered pants if that makes it any easier.
He began to picture Lizann in a man’s shirt, not doing it intentionally, but because it was already in his mind; but suddenly the woman was no longer Lizann and he was picturing Karla Demery in a faded blue chambray shirt, the one she had been wearing that day three weeks ago.
As the trail began to climb, Bowen watched Brazil come up almost to their wagon before turning his horse from the trail. He rode even with them then, but off beyond the twisted, shaggy-barked cliff rose bushes that grew close along the wagon ruts. Renda remained behind, though he seemed to be closer to the wagon now. The three Mimbres who had trailed him were no longer there.
Then, watching Renda, Bowen thought of Karla Demery again—picturing her with Renda in the station yard. Then later, when he had been close to her—
Her short black hair making her look almost like a boy yet, strangely, more feminine because of it. A slim body. Small even features. Clean-scrubbed, clean-smelling and dark from the sun, though you knew some of the warm brown was Mexican blood and you could see it in the eyes—one quarter from her mother’s side. Not more than one quarter. In the eyes that were alive and didn’t move from your face as you spoke, though not the way Lizann Falvey’s had not moved.
Read Karla, Bowen thought. Not the giving you the clothes and the horse and the talking about the lawyer. Read what was behind her eyes the way you did Lizann’s. If you can do that, you’ll understand the horse and the clothes and the other thing. But it isn’t as easy, is it? You don’t just label her and say, There, that’s why she’s doing it.
Which one would you rather be with?
For what?
For anything!
You almost kissed her.
You almost kissed both of them.
No…Karla. You almost climbed right off the horse to kiss her. Not for what she had done but because you wanted to. The other was different. Lizann was trying to make you kiss her. But you didn’t.
Maybe you should’ve gotten off the horse.
The wagons followed a dry wash down through rock-strewn, pinyon-studded talus to the wide floor of a canyon and here intersected the new road that, following the canyon, came down from the north. The wagons moved down canyon a good three hundred yards before halting at the end of construction.
Bowen waited his turn, then jumped down from the wagon. Pryde followed him. They started for the equipment wagon as Brazil rode up.
“You two unhitch the team.”
Pryde looked up at him. “We’re going to pull stumps?”
Brazil grinned. “Till your back breaks.”
They watched Brazil ride on to the equipment wagon. “I knew we’d be pulling stumps,” Pryde said.
“One job’s as bad as another,” Bowen said. He looked back along the new road. “We didn’t miss very much. That needle rock back there. We were even with it three weeks ago.”
Pryde squinted along the canyon. “Maybe two and a half miles.”
“Renda’s making it last,” Bowen said.
Pryde nodded. “Four months to come about twelve miles and not doing much more than cutting a path.”
“With another four miles to go,” Bowen said. He turned to look down the canyon. “The hardest four. Up ove
r the rocks, then down to come out somewhere behind the stagecoach station. Renda can make that last a good two months.”
“He must know somebody,” Pryde said.
Bowen nodded. “He’d have to. He doesn’t know anything about road building.”
“The government must have lots of money,” Pryde said thoughtfully. “Six months to build sixteen miles of road through the mountains to save one day’s travel from Willcox to San Carlos.”
“To save a half day,” Bowen corrected. “You know Renda knows somebody.”
Brazil motioned to them and they brought the team up past the equipment wagon where two convicts stood waiting for them. One, a Mexican, with a twelve-foot length of chain over his shoulder; the other leaning on a long-handled shovel. Bowen nodded to them.
The convict with the shovel squinted as if he needed glasses and the lines of his face formed a nervous, half-smiling expression. He was a small man, perhaps forty. His straw hat was cocked over one eye and his shirt collar was buttoned, though it hung loosely, at least three sizes too large for him, and he gave the impression that even in convict clothes he was trying to keep up his appearance—the white collar, coat and tie appearance of a man who had been an assistant cashier at the Wickenburg bank until the day he stole five hundred and fifty dollars to cover a gambling debt. His name was Chick Miller; the man who had described the supply wagon trip to Bowen.
“Corey,” he said now, “I’m sorry you didn’t make it.” When Bowen said nothing, he added, “I hope you don’t hold it against me.”
“Why should I?”
“I mean since I was the one told you to try it.”
“I made up my own mind,” Bowen said.
Chick grinned. “Brazil came riding like hell through here to gather the trackers and we thought for certain you’d made it.”
“Chick, did you tell Earl I was going to try it?”
The question came unexpectedly and Chick Miller straightened, his hands sliding down the handle of the shovel. “Why would you think that?”