So Brave, Young, and Handsome (22 page)

In this teetering manner we followed the tracker up into the hills. Pompey had told us the man’s name, Ericsson, and his specialty, which was not chasing dangerous fugitives but recovering animals lost during storms or stampedes. It seems Ericsson was well liked: a quiet single fellow nearing fifty who maintained a fastidious home in the hope he would one day attract a comely wife or even a plain wife. He sewed leather hats and sheepskin gloves, which provided his living but took a toll on his eyesight and spine. Saturday nights he crouched over a Ward’s crystal radio, and he had a cool cellar in which he maintained a cache of orange soda.

We dry-camped in a rocky wash. The moon had set early and Siringo could not make out the trail by stars alone. Under his guidance I hobbled the horses with lengths of hemp. The horses didn’t seem tired and whickered to each other for company. We’d traveled at such a deliberate speed on those rented animals I couldn’t imagine we were catching anyone.

“Tracking’s always slow,” said Siringo. “You’re generally moving more slowly than the person you’re after. However that person stops now and then, while you keep moving as long as it’s light, sometimes longer.”

“We aren’t moving now.”

“Are you griping about that?”

“No.”

“You think I’m tough, and I am. But I’m old too. Moreover, here is this bullet hole—it’s still making me a little sick,” Siringo replied. “The moon will be up two hours before the sun. When it rises we’ll start again.”

Under that weary prospect I got out some of Mrs. Pompey’s bread for a cold supper—it was unleavened and hard as a salt lick. Siringo gnawed the piece I handed him but soon gave up and surrendered the damp remainder to his horse, who bit it and dropped it and walked away but kept returning until it was gone. Siringo lay down in his blanket, twisting about as though the rigid earth surprised him; I could hear him breathing with his porous lungs. Clearly, a punishing day for the old sinner. Embarrassed by his
suffering he said, “When you’re eleven you don’t ever think it’ll change.”

That’s when he’d gone off cowboying, of course—I recalled his recitation from the opening chapter of his memoir.

“You must’ve been homesick, though,” I said.

“I scarce remember.”

“You remember.”

He made a noise in his throat. “I suppose I was homesick. Gladys helped me out of it.”

“Gladys who?”

“A girl, Becket. What did you think?”

“Eleven is young to have a girlfriend.”

“She wasn’t a girl as you’d think of. A paid companion is what she was. She told me that straight out but I didn’t know what it meant. She was a girl to me.”

Siringo left it there and I listened to his settling lungs and tried to fall asleep. But instead of sleeping I imagined him eleven, with curiosity and expectation written in his round face, along with neglect and ignorance. He suddenly continued. “I suppose I was in love with her, young as I was. She had blonde hair. She’d hold my hand while we walked. We used to walk beside the train tracks outside Bay City and she’d tease me about hanging around with a paid companion.”

His speech tonight was different. This was no poised recitation. “We liked to play cards. Five-card and monte and gin. Men’s games. She had a pretty cockleshell necklace and unstrung it and we used the cockles for money. She was not a good player.”

“Why, you remember her well.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered what she asked me. My answer would’ve been yes.”

“That’s a dangerous position.”

“I was a boy. She didn’t ask much.”

“Tell me about your wife,” I said.

“I don’t scarcely remember.”

“You said she couldn’t see you,” I reminded him.

“At first she saw me fine. It was only later.”

“What happened?”

He said, “That’s the mystery, ain’t it, Becket.” A snort. “She was incompatible with my profession.”

“You were gone too much,” I said.

“It was more than gone. Lot of men are gone and their wives happy enough. It was what I did gone. As I’ve said my talent lies in pursuit. Therefore it fell to me to befriend the worst of us. Robbers, anarchists. Stranglers. Wouldn’t you know it I got along with them well. I have drunk the most putrescent rotgut with companions fresh from the bombed-out homes of policemen. I have raised toasts in their honor and more or less meant it, but it was always work to me and when the time came to call them down I never slacked or stayed my hand. I was a good detective.”

I said, “Most men never have the chance to be both things at once, the hero and the devil.”

“That is ignorant. Most men are hero and devil. All men. That is what ruins it with wives.”

“She wanted just the hero?”

“Bad man or good she would’ve had me either way. She couldn’t endure both, however. She said to pick one and to be that thing only so that she might trust me until the day of Jesus. It disturbed her that I could work up a friendship to a man, eat at his table, pattacake with his babies, bury myself under the surface of his life for six months or a year and then call him to account. She feared its effect.”

I said, “It sounds like costly work.”

“All work is costly. I quit a few times and came home and lived like she wanted. We bred horses and some redbone hounds I couldn’t sell on account I was well-spoken and had all my teeth. We speculated here and there on riverfront and ranch land. Miserable work. There’s your costly job! I wrote some newspaper editorials that paid by the word, and I did enjoy that. Opinions come easily to me. And yet I had this history, Becket. I am not a regular man. What is history if you don’t own to it? She knew this at the altar. There was not a doubt in her mind she was marrying a man whose name would carry beyond his own time.”

“Do you still believe that?” I inquired.

Siringo didn’t reply. He rolled onto his back; he breathed noisily; maybe he examined the heavens. If you are tempted to interpret his silence as self-doubt, I say don’t do it! Charles Siringo had no doubts of his own; for the sakes of Glendon and Hood Roberts, don’t lend him the benefit of yours.

I woke before Siringo to a moon just up and nearly full. There he lay like bones in blankets and beyond him the hobbled horses asleep on their sprung hips. I’d have slept longer but was stiff from cold and hoisted up with a groan. At this Siringo woke coughing, coughed himself to an elbow and spat the wicked day to life.

The tracker Ericsson had himself left a comprehensible track. By sunup even I had begun to discern where his horse had trotted, where it walked, and where his small dog transited the horse’s path—staying behind always, like the well-behaved animal it proved to be. Time to time Ericsson dismounted to stoop back and forth and crouch on his toes, reading faint prints upon the dust. At first I could see very little sign except in my imagination but mile by mile it became more distinct until I found myself able to pick it out on the earth and animate it in my mind. As the day warmed, we warmed to the man we followed. “See how he tends his dog,” Siringo remarked, as we wound through a patch of spiny low cacti.

“How do you mean? I don’t see the dog’s prints at all here.”

“Right, he’s carrying the little chap,” Siringo said.

“How far ahead?”

Siringo didn’t answer but less than an hour he reined up in a place where the earth sank and softened and blue-green moss appeared on the stones.

“Do you smell that?” he said.

“No.”

We moved ahead at a quicker pace. The smell he had mentioned came to me first as a mere sense of reassurance. Only eventually did I
recognize it as pipe tobacco. Name a more heartening aroma! Thus Ericsson became in my mind a painstaking man who smoked a pipe, as Glendon did, and was generous to his animals. I felt somehow as though we were in Ericsson’s steady hands and so am all the sorrier to report that upon crossing the little stream known as the Antelope we emerged onto a rocky shelf to discover Ericsson lying tipped over beside his embers and his apprehensive spaniel pacing to and fro before him.

Siringo eased down off his horse and said a few words to the spaniel. The tracker lay on his side with his legs tucked up as if sleeping cold. He had not thrashed about. There was an oval cavity like a winey thumbprint next to his left eye. Ericsson had set about breakfast with a tidy camp table, which was a flat board fastened to an iron pike stuck in the earth—a clever arrangement with biscuits still on the table and a little jam pot and a white stoneware cup of pekoe tea.

“Well, now he’s serious,” said Charles Siringo. “Yes, he is.” With that he pulled the clasp knife from his pocket and stooped about the campsite poking it here and there, muttering “Now he means it,” poking the blade in the cold ashes and through a sheaf of booklets and papers I had not previously noticed lying on the ground. Among them was a small bound atlas and Siringo turned a few of its pages with the knife.

You would think I’d remember this more clearly. Ericsson’s face, for example, or the look of his hands—you come on a man shot dead at his breakfast and oughtn’t the scene write in blood ink on your memory? Yet what I chiefly recall are how my belt-buckle chafed when I slid off the horse, or how the spaniel wouldn’t come to my hand until I offered him a biscuit from Ericsson’s table. The biscuit crumbled in my fingers so I fed it to the dog piece by piece after which he went and lay down putting his chin in the crook of Ericsson’s dead old arm.

“His horse has departed in the company of two other animals,” Siringo said. He stood at some distance, reading the ground. “Two horses. Or a horse and a mule.”

I said, “I need to go home,” a useless statement to which Siringo didn’t rise. “I’m going home, Siringo. This is enough.”

“Poor Becket. Is this business troubling to you?”

“It would be troubling to anyone with a shred of soul left.”

Siringo took his time walking back. Looking in my face he said, “We knew little of Ericsson besides that he was a decent man. That is his tragedy. If he had been more careful we might be having coffee with him now. I am not hypocrite enough to pretend his death matters to me. On the other hand, it does add some dash to your Hood Roberts. It gives him more value. You understand that.”

I said, “You don’t know Hood Roberts. You are only adding him to your tale of yourself.”

This piqued Siringo. “So you know the reckless boy, and his work here bothers you. What do you imagine you know of him?” He reached for the reins of his gelding.

“What are you doing? Shouldn’t we bury this man?” But Siringo was already aboard, setting forth after the fugitives. I followed suit and whistled for the dog. When he refused to come I climbed back down and retrieved the little fellow and set him in my coat where he propped himself as if from long practice. That spaniel was a patient rider and didn’t whine for the next several hours as we followed the track in its southerly course. Now with three horses, or two and a mule, the trail was easy to follow, and I came up and rode next to Charles Siringo and asked where he guessed they would be.

“In some tilty farmhouse, I suppose,” he mused. “Do you know, they always find some idiot farmhouse to hole up in.”

“Hole up? But aren’t we close to Mexico?”

“Mexico. Oh—you mean if he gets across that border, he has gotten away.”

“Away from you, anyway.”

He regarded me with amusement for some moments. “Becket, do you actually know anything at all?”

I believe it was an honest question.

He said, “Do you know even one thing that is true?”

The trail led more or less straight to Columbus, which we entered at the supper hour. It did not look like the doomed village it was. We smelled meat and squash and, unmistakably, corn on the cob and saw the lively fires of the U.S. Army camp to the west. A light breeze was turning the town’s considerable number of windmills, and we met a creaking wagonload of boys returning from a foray down to the Rio Casas across the Mexican line. The boys wore the weary glee of successful disobedience and were laughing at everything they saw. My memory of Columbus is, of all things, musical—through its screen doors I heard no fewer than three pianos being played with varying degrees of success. Also one woman sat on a porch moving her hands across a harp taller than herself, the first harp I ever saw.

The grocery was closed but Siringo took out his revolver and beat the door with such resolve that the grocer himself, plump and compliant, looked out the window above the store and came down to sell us whatever it would take. While he tallied up our bread and bacon and coffee, Siringo asked whether a young white boy had come through with a Mexican girl.

“Are you the boy’s granddad?”

“I am no such thing. What did they buy from you?”

“Six fresh eggs and two slices of nice pink ham.”

“The boy loves breakfast,” Siringo noted to me.

“A good-looking lad, I thought so at the time,” said the grocer. “Would you like some of the ham? I have a little left.”

“No. Did the boy talk to you?”

“What kind of talk?”

“Any kind.”

“Not as I recall. Maybe you gentlemen would care for a tin of peaches; these are refreshing after a taxing day.”

Siringo said, “You seem not to grasp what’s transpiring here. I am in pursuit of a bona fide desperado whose trail is gory despite his cupid appearance. If the boy said a word to you beyond yessir, then out with it; otherwise shut up and let a man work.”

The grocer was taken aback. I felt bad for him—he’d only spoken in that yielding way lonely people do, and here was this tall rawhide standing over him and brooking no twaddle. Frowning at Siringo, he said, “There’s a place on a little tannin creek just to the south, belongs to Michael Raban who fought for Stonewall Jackson. Mike ain’t around much, but he leaves the place open. Travelers come through they often stay there.”

“We’ll take a look,” said Siringo.

And so it came down to a farmhouse. As it so often does! Remember Dan Champion, valiant of the Johnson County War, who crouched in that hovel until they lit it on fire then shot him forty times when he ran out? We rode down the dirt trail toward Mexico and sure enough came to a grove of trees in which we saw the shine of a tin roof and heard the creek rattling. It looked deserted from a distance and we doubted whether this was the Raban property; then we heard the strange bray of a mule and “Hold up,” said Siringo.