Adam Steele 34, page 10
But when he woke at sun up the next morning, he could not even recall moving from the bathtub to the bed. So guessed that he had not needed any kind of soporific thought pattern to relax his exhausted body and wearied mind into sleep.
He was first awake in the boarding house and roused Rosa Canales by entering her bedroom and prodding her rear with the muzzle of the Colt Hartford. She returned to red-eyed awareness in a bad humor, but aside from the heaviness of lack of sleep and the sour scowl that both contributed to detracting from her good looks, she had obviously derived much from the night’s peaceful rest with some fresh food in her belly. And the tub of hot water, of which she had made use before she went to bed, had also helped to get her back into good shape.
When he told her that Flora Waldorf and Melvin Ivers were both still sleeping off the effects of the bottle of rye whisky and that if she wanted breakfast – or at least coffee – before they left Fort Curry she would have to fix it, she snarled some rasping Spanish at him and dragged the bedclothes up over her tousle haired head. But while he was across at the livery stable, preparing the burro and Miguel Lozano’s stallion for a day’s desert riding, he smelled woodsmoke in the bright, clear air of early morning – from closer at hand than the stack on the cookhouse at the fort. The smoke wisping from that chimney, and the two different uniformed men standing sentry duty on the walkway above the post gateway had been the only other signs of life visible in the community when he crossed the street from the boarding house to the stable. And later, when he led the two saddled animals back the way he had come, Flora Waldorf’s kitchen chimney was the only one on the street that was smoking.
Steele was aware that he was being watched by the two cavalrymen guarding the entrance to the post – and also by somebody inside the boarding house. And after he had been sitting on the step of the house for perhaps two minutes, loosely holding the reins of the two animals, Rosa appeared in the hallway behind him. With a cup of strong smelling coffee in each hand.
‘You prefer no breakfast, do you not?’ she asked as she gave a cup to him.
‘Right.’
‘And are eager for us to be on our way, I think?’
‘Yes.’
‘I am slowly becoming familiar with rising early and going without the breakfast.’
There was a brand of contrition in her attitude. And a very female freshness about her appearance even though she wore the same clothes she had changed into after he freed her from the Apache braves. So she looked like she had bathed again, had certainly fixed her hair and done all she could to clean her shirt and pants, before she went to the kitchen to light the fire and start the coffee. And while she was doing this, she had also worked at improving her humor – so that she only made a face and did not snarl a matching retort when Steele answered:
‘Yeah, Rosa. I reckon the richer you are, the harder real life hits you.’
He got up from his seat on the step and she emerged from the house, abruptly looking less attractive as the light of this morning’s sun fell harshly across the scars left by the glaring heat of those of yesterday and before. And her mood worsened again after she had cast a bleak-eyed gaze along the empty street in both directions and then stared with a grimace at the two saddled animals.
‘I will ride the burro and you the horse, I suppose?’
‘I killed his owner, Rosa. There’s a sort of code about such things that allows me to have his horse and other stuff without—’
‘Esteban killed my burro at the river,’ she cut in. ‘Thus, this animal was his and it now belongs to you. Since you killed Esteban.’
Steele finished his coffee and took from a slender roll of bills a five spot which he folded and creased so that it remained rigid when it was slotted through the Handle of the cup. He put the cup down on the step of the open doorway and swung smoothly up into the saddle of the big stallion.
‘It is too much,’ the woman complained. ‘For what little we had here. Just two of us.’
‘The burro had shelter, feed and water as well, Rosa,’ he reminded her. ‘The burro that maybe wouldn’t have been fit to ride if there was no—’
‘Esta bien,’ she interrupted wearily as she set down her cup beside the one with the money through the handle. Then, as she got astride the burro. ‘It’s okay. You are right again, Adam. But it is still too much.’
The Virginian was first to set his mount moving and the woman urged the burro to come close alongside the stallion.
‘Funeral expenses to come out of it, too,’ Steele added against the clop of slow moving hooves.
‘The man who buries the corpse will have his clothing and perhaps some money he finds in the clothing. His gun and—’
‘I didn’t want any of that, so I didn’t contribute any of it, Rosa.’
‘Again it is the punto de honra, uh?’ she said with a sneer of scorn. ‘But you tell me this, Señor Sincero Steele – how you know the first person who finds the money does not keep it all himself. And maybe this person is not even one of those who is owed a part of it?’
‘I know I’ve paid what I owe, Rosa,’ he answered as they rode under the weathered town marker and on to the open trail. ‘If the people it’s due to can’t protect what’s theirs—’
‘You’re crazy, gringo. Full of crazy ideas. Crazy, also, to leave money when the keeper of the cantina says everything is on the house – gratuito.’
‘Rosa?’
‘Sí?’
‘We have a long way to go still.’
‘I know this.’
‘So if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather you didn’t keep talking all the while – just for the sake of talking.’
She looked angrily at him to demand: ‘You think I am one of those women who is the parlanchin? The … how you say … sí, the chatterbox? Who must hear the sound of her own voice all the time or she is not happy?’
‘You haven’t been that so far, Rosa.’
‘Then what are you telling me, gringo?’
‘That I’d be a whole lot happier if you kept quiet, Rosa. Either that, or get said what you really want to get off your chest.’
She shifted her gaze away from him to peer along the trail stretched out ahead of them, her mood changing from anger to sullenness. Said after several seconds: ‘I do not understand what you say.’
‘You’re doing it again,’ he answered and there was a degree of hardness in his tone.
‘Que?’
The Virginian pursed his lips and blew out a stream of air with a soft sound that was not quite a whistle. Then: ‘I reckon you do, young lady. But since we have so far to ride and it’s going to take us a long time to get you home, I guess I can spare you a little of that time to spell it out for you.
‘You, Rosa, it seems to me, are one scared señorita. Who is just itching to tell somebody what’s troubling her. But I’m the only person available and you’re not sure how I’ll take what it is you need to say. So you’re scared to tell me what has you so scared. And you’re scared you may start blurting it all out and to hell with the consequences. So you try to keep your mouth busy with words that don’t mean a damn thing to either of us while your mind works flat out at deciding whether to risk those consequences of me knowing what’s bothering you.’
‘I—’
‘I’m not through, lady,’ he said flatly as he looked at – and through – her as a feature in his field of vision while he was scanning the desert to the limit of the heat haze in the southeast. ‘And the longer you listen to me, the less time you have to fill by your own efforts to keep the problem bottled up inside you. Not much longer, though. I just have to tell you that I’m certain you gave me an honest translation of what Garrido said last night.’
‘Ciertamente, Adam!’ she blurted and by the tone of her voice demanded that he look at her and see in her face that she was speaking the truth. ‘Juraria que fue asi—’
‘Like I just told you, I’m certain of it, Rosa,’ he said across her vehement Spanish. ‘And, that being so, I know I’m in line to collect five thousand dollars when I deliver you to your father. So, unless what you’re scared to tell me affects my chances of earning that money, Rosa, you have nothing to worry about by telling me.’
For a much longer time than before, the woman remained silent. And Steele had occasion to glance specifically at her with mild curiosity just once – when she shifted from her dejected attitude astride the burro. But this was just to turn and work free a blanket from the bedroll behind her saddle: and donned it, mantilla fashion again, to protect her head and shoulders from the glaring heat of the sun. And the Virginian returned to his effortless but systematic scanning of their surroundings – from which the last trace of the town of Fort Curry had now gone. And no sign of a lone rider, be it Gregario Garrido or another, was to be seen: unless in the confusion of tracks that marked the frequently used trail they were riding.
Then, perhaps fifteen minutes after she had withdrawn into her private world of dark reflections upon what Adam Steele had told her, Rosa Canales broke her silence.
‘Adam?’
‘Yeah, Rosa?’ he answered, sounding disinterested as he did a double take at the far distance directly ahead of them.
But she was not conscious of anything so subtle as the tone of his voice as she continued to stare down at her own hands holding the reins of the burro – oblivious, also, to the stir of activity that maintained a hold on part of Steele’s attention as she said:
‘I am some rotten bitch, Adam. The worst person I know. Who deserves nothing good. Because I am so bad – so malo. So evil.’ She looked at him now, and was irritated to find him gazing ahead. Demanded: ‘You are listening to me?’
‘You hate yourself, Rosa,’ he answered. ‘I heard you say that without needing to look at you. The same as I didn’t have to get out of the bathtub last night to hear a rifle shot a long way from town.’
Now she felt drawn to gaze in the same direction as Steele. And caught her breath at the sight of the disturbance some miles along the trail – a constantly moving patch of black on the pale colors of the desert, blurred by distance and the shimmering heat haze but unmistakably suggesting violence.
‘What is it?’
‘I reckon a bunch of buzzards. Doing what they have to do to survive, Rosa. But we’ll know for sure in an hour or so. Guess you have more to tell me than that you hate yourself?’
Having been sidetracked from her purpose after taking so much time and effort to get started, the woman needed to compose herself again before she felt able to continue. And her unsettled state of mind was not improved by the compulsion she experienced to constantly glance at the squabbling, gorging scavengers.
‘There are some who know of my situation who will tell you it is the fault of my father, Adam. And I am sometimes one of these. This depending upon how much of a rotten bitch I am at the time: how much of the hate I now feel for myself I direct toward him. You know what I am saying, Adam?’
‘Nobody’s unique, Rosa. We just all think we are sometimes – the worst of times, usually.’
‘I start from the beginning, yes? He was a wonderful man then, my father. My mother, she used to say he loved me better than he loved her. And better than De Raza Hacienda. That was the broma … the joke that was not quite the joke, Adam. My mother, as I remember her and as many who knew her better than me have told me, she understood my father’s love for me and his wish to spend much time with me. But she had the much resentimiento … resentment, that he was a lot of the time doing the work of the hacienda. To become very rich and very powerful. For his own sake, I know, but also for me and for my mother to have the goce … the enjoyment.
‘But my mother, she was impatient for the time when she and my father together would share the fruto de su trabajo … the success. And she leaves him. To go away with a gringo. A frances … a Frenchman from the Americano city of New Orleans. I was just … cinco … five years of age when this happens, so you understand why others I have spoken with knew my mother better than I?’
‘Sure, Rosa,’ Steele acknowledged, engaged in his usual three hundred and sixty degree surveillance again – paying no more attention to the gorging buzzards than he did to the pensively frowning, quietly talking woman riding the burro alongside him.
‘After this has happened – my mother has gone to New Orleans with the frances – my father spends more time than ever with me. And, as I tell you before, I think, he sees that I have everything I desire. He spoils me is how you say it in your language. And when I am so young, it is not to be expected that I will try not to be indulged in this way, no?’
‘You weren’t unique at that age either, Rosa,’ he allowed as he drank from one of his canteens. And, when she gave him a long, just vaguely sullen look, he added: ‘I refilled both your canteens, too.’
‘I do not think I could keep even water in my stomach until I am finished with this.’
‘Just don’t get dehydrated and pass out on me, Rosa.’
‘Sí,’ she countered after a few moments of scowling thought. ‘The premio posted by my father … the reward, it is not for me dead or alive.’
‘You were saying you didn’t kick against being spoiled when you were a child, Rosa.’
‘Sí. For then I am asked to do nothing in return. Not even to be good, for I am always forgiven. Just to show much love for my father.’ She paused, frowned deeper and hurried on: ‘Never the abnormal love, you must understand. My father loves me only as the hija … his daughter.’
‘Okay,’ the Virginian said when he glanced at her after she paused and found that she was staring fixedly at him – to stress the truth of what she had said and demanding that he confirm he accepted this.
‘Loved me then and loves me now, Adam. Except that he demands more in return. Has made such demands since, as I think I told you earlier, about the time I became dieciseis.. . sixteen years old. And I begin to see that there should be other men interesting to me in addition to my father. And men other than he take the interest in me. Which is all perfectly natural, of course. And my father, he is understanding of this – for as long as there is no seriedad … no seriousness between the young men and me. For as long as—’ She began to chew on her lower lip as she spoke and there was something akin to shame in her dark eyes. ‘—I treated them the way I acted toward my father, I suppose. I allowed them to spoil me in their ways and gave them nothing in return. Nothing but angustia … the heartbreak, anyway.’
She looked up from her hands, and a shudder shook her body. But it was not caused by vivid memories of how she had dashed youthful passions. Instead, they had ridden far enough up the trail now so that they could see the ugly birds clearly enough to pick out the splashes of crimson on their black plumage. This as the half dozen buzzards who had been at the feast moved sluggishly over the dark stained ground, scratching at and sometimes using their bills to investigate perhaps overlooked tidbits in the dust. All of them satiated, but in this hostile environment where the next meal might be days away, reluctant to move off before they were certain there was nothing more to be scavenged here. Their lumbering forms were between the skeletal remains of their meal and the approaching riders.
Rosa Canales took to staring fixedly down at her hands which toyed with the slack reins, as she continued with her story.
‘Twice I had the taste of my own medicine and recovered, Adam. When I thought I had fallen in love with young men and then thought I would die after they left me. But to have a father like Don Benito was a great comfort. It certainly seemed so at the time. How was I to know that he was buying comfort for himself, too? Salving his conciencia … conscience with the dinero que se paga por remordimientos … the money for the conscience, you know?’
She was suddenly very embittered.
‘Conscience money, Rosa,’ Steele said. ‘How did Don Benito get rid of the young fellers?’
‘With the dinero … the money. That they accepted the soborno … the bribe means that neither was the kind of man I thought he was. Filipe was paid dos mil and Augustin accepted tres mil. Dollars American. Canallal scum!’
She shrieked the final few words, the sound of them resonant with hatred across the burning floor of the desert. And the buzzards were startled into sudden flight., awkward until the moment of take off, then becoming gradually more graceful as rising thermals of air reduced the amount of effort the birds had to apply to beating their wings. Until they were beautiful in soaring movement as they diminished in perspective against the blue glare of the sky. While below the birds the two riders closed the final few yards on the skeleton of a man, not quite picked clean: for there was dried blood and some hardened fragments of flesh and organs still clinging to bones here and there, the former crimson color faded to dull brown by the harsh sun of half a morning.
Much of the man’s clothing had been torn to shreds by the bills of the ravenous birds and it seemed that a good deal had been swallowed in the haste to gorge the fresh meat. But the metallic decoration had not been consumed. Nor the black hat, the gunbelt, the bullets in the loops and the Tranter with its elaborate etchings on the barrel. Nor the knife.
The revolver was still in the holster and the knife was in its sheath. But then neither would have been of any use to Gregorio Garrido against his attacker. Who had fired a rifle shot – Steele had heard and recognized the report for what it was – over a long range: at short range the bullet that had made just the one hole through the hat and the skull of the Mexican would have made others on the way out the other side.
‘It is Garrido, is it not?’ the woman asked, unable to look back at the skeleton after an initial glance, but even toned and apparently in no haste to leave the scene – if Steele wanted to stay.
‘Right, Rosa,’ he confirmed and heeled his horse forward, having scanned the surrounding area without dismounting. He had seen that the Mexican’s stallion had bolted in the wake of losing his rider so violently – wheeled half to the left to race due south. Steele had failed to see any sign that the rifleman who had killed Garrido had ridden on to the trail to check on his victim.
