Isham himself, man, of the Circle-Eye. She comes home to find her husband a rich man. He don't live in that hut no more. No, he owns a hundred miles of graze and a house it took them two years to build, the glass and bricks brought in by the Southern Pacific. Sure, the railroad comes and he's a rich cattleman in only a few years."
"He makes her live there alone?"
"She's his wife, he provides for her. But that's all. Once a month his segundo named Bonnet rides out there with supplies and has someone shoe her horse and look at the animals." "But to live in the desert," Ruben Vega said, still frowning, thoughtful, "with a rusty pump . . ."
"Look at her," Diego Luz said. "What choice does she have?"
IT WAS HOT DOWN in this scrub pasture, a place to wither and die.
Ruben Vega loosened the new willow-root straw that did not yet conform to his head, though he had shaped the brim to curve down on one side and rise slightly on the other so that the brim slanted across the vision of his left eye. He held on his lap a nearly flat cardboard box that bore the name L. S. Weiss Mercantile Store.
The woman gazed up at him, shading her eyes with one hand. Finally she said, "You look different."
"The beard began to itch," Ruben Vega said, making no mention of the patches of gray he had studied in the hotel-room mirror. "So I shaved it off." He rubbed a hand over his jaw and smoothed down the tips of his mustache that was still full and seemed to cover his mouth. When he stepped down from the bay and approached the woman standing by the stick-fence corral, she looked off into the distance and back again.
She said, "You shouldn't be here."
Ruben Vega said, "Your husband doesn't want nobody to look at you. Is that it?" He held the store box, waiting for her to answer. "He has a big house with trees and the San Pedro River in his yard. Why doesn't he hide you there?"
She looked off again and said, "If they find you here, they'll shoot you."
"They," Ruben Vega said. "The ones who watch you bathe? Work for your husband and keep more than a close eye on you, and you'd like to hit them with something, wipe the grins from their faces."
"You better leave," the woman said.
The blue lines on her face were like claw marks, though not as wide as fingers: indelible lines of dye etched into her flesh with a cactus needle, the color worn and faded but still vivid against her skin, the blue matching her eyes.
He stepped close to her, raised his hand to her face, and touched the markings gently with the tips of his fingers, feeling nothing. He raised his eyes to hers. She was staring at him. He said, "You're in there, aren't you? Behind these little bars. They don't seem like much. Not enough to hold you."
She said nothing, but seemed to be waiting.
He said to her, "You should brush your hair. Brush it every day. . . ."
"Why?" the woman said.
"To feel good. You need to wear a dress. A little parasol to match."
"I'm asking you to leave," the woman said. But didn't move from his hand, with its yellowed, stained nails, that was like a fist made of old leather.
"I'll tell you something if I can," Ruben Vega said. "I know women all my life, all kinds of women in the way they look and dress, the way they adorn themselves according to custom. Women are always a wonder to me. When I'm not with a woman I think of them as all the same because I'm thinking of one thing. You understand?"
"Put a sack over their head," the woman said.
"Well, I'm not thinking of what she looks like then, when I'm out in the mountains or somewhere," Ruben Vega said. "That part of her doesn't matter. But when I'm with the woman, ah, then I realize how they are all different. You say, of course. This isn't a revelation to you.
But maybe it is when you think about it some more."
The woman's eyes changed, turned cold. "You want to go to bed with me? Is that what you're saying, why you bring a gift?"
He looked at her with disappointment, an expression of weariness.
But then he dropped the store box and took her to him gently, placing his hands on her shoulders, feeling her small bones in his grasp as he brought her in against him and his arms went around her.
He said, "You're gonna die here. Dry up and blow away."
She said, "Please . . ." Her voice hushed against him.
"They wanted only to mark your chin," Ruben Vega said, "in the custom of those people. But you wanted your own marks, didn't you? Y our marks, not like anyone else. . . . Well, you got them." After a moment he said to her, very quietly, "Tell me what you want."
The hushed voice close to him said, "I don't know."
He said, "Think about it and remember something. There is no one else in the world like you."
HE REINED THE BAY to move out and saw the dust trail rising out of the old pasture, three riders coming, and heard the woman say, "I told you.
Now it's too late."
A man on a claybank and two young riders eating his dust, finally separating to come in abreast, reined to a walk as they reached the pump and the irrigation ditch. The woman, walking from the corral to the house, said to them, "What do you want? I don't need anything, Mr. Bonnet."
So this would be the Circle-Eye foreman on the claybank. The man ignored her, his gaze holding on Ruben Vega with a solemn expression, showing he was going to be dead serious. A chew formed a lump in his jaw. He wore army suspenders and sleeve garters, his shirt buttoned up at the neck. As old as you are, Ruben Vega thought, a man who likes a tight feel of security and is serious about his business.
Bonnet said to him finally, "You made a mistake."
"I don't know the rules," Ruben Vega said.
"She told you to leave her be. That's the only rule there is. But you bought yourself a dandy new hat and come back here."
"That's some hat," one of the young riders said. This one held a single-shot Springfield across his pommel. The foreman, Bonnet, turned in his saddle and said something to the other rider, who unhitched his rope and began shaking out a loop, hanging it nearly to the ground.
It's a show, Ruben Vega thought. He said to Bonnet, "I was leaving."
Bonnet said, "Yes, indeed, you are. On the off end of a rope. We're gonna drag you so you'll know the ground and never cross this land again."
The rider with the Springfield said, "Gimme your hat, mister, so's you don't get it dirty."
At this point Ruben Vega nudged his bay and began moving in on the foreman, who straightened, looking over at the roper, and said, "Well, tie on to him."
But Ruben Vega was close to the foreman now, the bay taller than the claybank, and would move the claybank if the man on his back told him to. Ruben Vega watched the foreman's eyes moving and knew the roper was coming around behind him. Now the foreman turned his head to spit and let go a stream that spattered the hard-pack close to the bay's forelegs.
"Stand still," Bonnet said, "and we'll get her done easy. Or you can run and get snubbed out of your chair. Either way."
Ruben Vega was thinking that he could drink with this ramrod and they'd tell each other stories until they were drunk. The man had thought it would be easy: chase off a Mexican gunnysacker who'd come sniffing the boss's wife. A kid who was good with a rope and another one who could shoot cans off the fence with an old Springfield should be enough.
Ruben Vega said to Bonnet, "Do you know who I am?"
"Tell us," Bonnet said, "so we'll know what the cat drug in and we drug out."
And Ruben Vega said, because he had no choice, "I hear the rope in the air, the one with the rifle is dead. Then you. Then the roper."
His words drew silence because there was nothing more to be said.
In the moments that Ruben Vega and the one named Bonnet stared at each other, the woman came out to them holding a revolver, an old Navy Colt, which she raised and laid the barrel against the muzzle of the foreman's claybank.
She said, "Leave now, Mr. Bonnet, or you'll walk nine miles to shade."
There was no argument, little discussion
, a few grumbling words.
The Tonto woman was still Mrs. Isham. Bonnet rode away with his young hands and a new silence came over the yard.
Ruben Vega said, "He believes you'd shoot his horse." The woman said, "He believes I'd cut steaks, and eat it too. It's how I'm seen after twelve years of that other life."
Ruben Vega began to smile. The woman looked at him and in a few moments she began to smile with him. She shook her head then, but continued to smile. He said to her, "You could have a good time if you want to."
She said, "How, scaring people?" He said, "If you feel like it." He said, "Get the present I brought you and open it."
HE CAME BACK for her the next day in a Concord buggy, wearing his new willow-root straw and a cutaway coat over his revolvers, the coat he'd rented at a funeral parlor. Mrs. Isham wore the pale blue-andwhite lace-trimmed dress he'd bought at Weiss's store, sat primly on the bustle, and held the parasol against the afternoon sun all the way to Benson, ten miles, and up the main street to the Charles Crooker Hotel where the drummers and cattlemen and railroad men sitting in their front-porch rockers stared and stared.
They walked past the manager and into the dining room before Ruben Vega removed his hat and pointed to the table he liked, one against the wall between two windows. The waitress in her starched uniform was wide-eyed taking them over and getting them seated. It was early and the dining room was not half filled.
"The place for a quiet dinner," Ruben Vega said. "You see how quiet it is?"
"Everybody's looking at me," Sarah Isham said to the menu in front of her.
Ruben Vega said, "I thought they were looking at me. All right, soon they'll be used to it."
She glanced up and said, "People are leaving."
He said, "That's what you do when you finish eating, you leave."
She looked at him, staring, and said, "Who are you?"
"I told you."
"Only your name."
"You want me to tell you the truth, why I came here?"
"Please."
"To steal some of your husband's cattle."
She began to smile and he smiled. She began to laugh and he laughed, looking openly at the people looking at them, but not bothered by them. Of course they'd look. How could they help it? A Mexican rider and a woman with blue stripes on her face sitting at a table in the hotel dining room, laughing. He said, "Do you like fish? I know your Indian brothers didn't serve you none. It's against their religion.
Some things are for religion, as you know, and some things are against it. We spend all our lives learning customs. Then they change them. I'll tell you something else if you promise not to be angry or point your pistol at me. Something else I could do the rest of my life. I could look at you and touch you and love you."
Her hand moved across the linen tablecloth to his with the cracked, yellowed nails and took hold of it, clutched it.
She said, "You're going to leave."
He said, "When it's time."
She said, "I know you. I don't know anyone else."
He said, "You're the loveliest woman I've ever met. And the strongest. Are you ready? I think the man coming now is your husband."
It seemed strange to Ruben Vega that the man stood looking at him and not at his wife. The man seemed not too old for her, as he had expected, but too self-important. A man with a very serious demeanor, as though his business had failed or someone in his family had passed away. The man's wife was still clutching the hand with the gnarled fingers. Maybe that was it. Ruben Vega was going to lift her hand from his, but then thought, Why? He said as pleasantly as he was able, "Yes, can I help you?"
Mr. Isham said, "You have one minute to mount up and ride out of town."
"Why don't you sit down," Ruben Vega said, "have a glass of wine with us?" He paused and said, "I'll introduce you to your wife."
Sarah Isham laughed; not loud but with a warmth to it and Ruben Vega had to look at her and smile. It seemed all right to release her hand now. As he did he said, "Do you know this gentleman?"
"I'm not sure I've had the pleasure," Sarah Isham said. "Why does he stand there?"
"I don't know," Ruben Vega said. "He seems worried about something."
"I've warned you," Mr. Isham said. "You can walk out or be dragged out."
Ruben Vega said, "He has something about wanting to drag people.
Why is that?" And again heard Sarah's laugh, a giggle now that she covered with her hand. Then she looked up at her husband, her face with its blue tribal lines raised to the soft light of the dining room. She said, "John, look at me. . . . Won't you please sit with us?"
Now it was as if the man had to make a moral decision, first consult his conscience, then consider the manner in which he would pull the chair out--the center of attention. When finally he was seated, upright on the chair and somewhat away from the table, Ruben Vega thought, All that to sit down. He felt sorry for the man now, because the man was not the kind who could say what he felt.
Sarah said, "John, can you look at me?"
He said, "Of course I can."
"Then do it. I'm right here."
"We'll talk later," her husband said.
She said, "When? Is there a visitor's day?"
"You'll be coming to the house, soon."
"You mean to see it?"
"To live there."
She looked at Ruben Vega with just the trace of a smile, a sad one.
Then said to her husband, "I don't know if I want to. I don't know you.
So I don't know if I want to be married to you. Can you understand that?"
Ruben Vega was nodding as she spoke. He could understand it. He heard the man say, "But we are married. I have an obligation to you and I respect it. Don't I provide for you?"
Sarah said, "Oh, my God--" and looked at Ruben Vega. "Did you hear that? He provides for me." She smiled again, not able to hide it, while her husband began to frown, confused.
"He's a generous man," Ruben Vega said, pushing up from the table. He saw her smile fade, though something warm remained in her eyes. "I'm sorry. I have to leave. I'm going on a trip tonight, south, and first I have to pick up a few things." He moved around the table to take one of her hands in his, not caring what the husband thought. He said, "You'll do all right, whatever you decide. Just keep in mind there's no one else in the world like you."
She said, "I can always charge admission. Do you think ten cents a look is too high?"
"At least that," Ruben Vega said. "But you'll think of something better."
He left her there in the dining room of the Charles Crooker Hotel in Benson, Arizona--maybe to see her again sometime, maybe not--and went out with a good conscience to take some of her husband's cattle.
Chapter 30 "Hurrah for Captain Early!.
New Trails, New York, Doubleday, 1994.
( Western Writers of America Anthology).
THE SECOND BANNER said hero of san juan hill. Both were tied to the upstairs balcony of the Congress Hotel and looked down on La Salle Street in Sweetmary, a town named for a coppermine. The banners read across the building as a single statement. This day that Captain Early was expected home from the war in Cuba, over now these two months, was October 10, 1898.
The manager of the hotel and one of his desk clerks were the first to observe the colored man who entered the lobby and dropped his bedroll on the red velvet settee where it seemed he was about to sit down. Bold as brass. A tall, well-built colored man wearing a suit of clothes that looked new and appeared to fit him as though it might possibly be his own and not one handed down to him. He wore the suit, a stiff collar, and a necktie. With the manager nearby but not yet aware of the intruder, the young desk clerk spoke up, raised his voice to tell the person, "You can't sit down there."
The colored man turned his attention to the desk, taking a moment before he said, "Why is that?"
His quiet tone caused the desk clerk to hesitate and look over at the manager, who stood holding the day's mail, letters
that had arrived on the El Paso & Southwestern morning run along with several guests now registered at the hotel and, apparently, this colored person. It was hard to tell his age, other than to say he was no longer a young man. He did seem clean and his bedroll was done up in bleached canvas.
"A hotel lobby," the desk clerk said, "is not a public place anyone can make theirself at home in. What is it you want here?" At least he was uncovered, standing there now hat in hand. But then he said, "I'm waiting on Bren Early."
"Bren is it," the desk clerk said. "Captain Early's an acquaintance of yours?"
"We go way back a ways."
"You worked for him?"
"Some."
At this point the manager said, "We're all waiting for Captain Early. Why don't you go out front and watch for him?" Ending the conversation.
The desk clerk--his name was Monty--followed the colored man to the front entrance and stepped out on the porch to watch him, bedroll over his shoulder, walking south on La Salle the two short blocks to Fourth Street. Monty returned to the desk, where he said to the manager, "He walked right in the Gold Dollar."
The manager didn't look up from his mail.
TWO RIDERS FROM the Circle-Eye, a spread on the San Pedro that delivered beef to the mine company, were at a table with their glasses of beer: a rider named Macon and a rider named Wayman, young men who wore sweat-stained hats down on their eyes as they stared at the Negro. Right there, the bartender speaking to him as he poured a whiskey, still speaking as the colored man drank it and the bartender poured him another one. Macon asked Wayman if he had ever seen a nigger wearing a suit of clothes and a necktie. Wayman said he couldn't recall.
When they finished drinking their beer and walked up to the bar, the colored man gone now, Macon asked the bartender who in the hell that smoke thought he was coming in here. "You would think," Macon said, "he'd go to one of the places where the miners drink."
The bartender appeared to smile, for some reason finding humor in Macon's remark. He said, "Boys, that was Bo Catlett. I imagine Bo drinks just about wherever he feels like drinking."
"Why?" Macon asked it, surprised. "He suppose to be somebody?"
"Bo lives up at White Tanks," the bartender told him, "at the Indin agency. Went to war and now he's home."