The Desperado (4 page)

Maybe it was because of his size. He was a year or two older than
most of us, and big for his age anyway. But then Criss Bagley had been
bigger than any of us, and that hadn't kept him out of fights. I
thought about that and finally had to admit that there was something
about Ray Novak—but I didn't know what—that made you think twice
before starting anything with him. He always had that quiet, sober
look, even as a kid, and he didn't go in much for horseplay, as most of
us did. He came to Old Man Bigloe's academy for a curious reason, it
seemed to the rest of us. To learn.

And, too, Ray's pa was the town marshal, and that made him something
a little different. His pa had taught him everything there was to know
about guns and shooting, and he was the only boy around John's City who
could throw a tin can in the air and put two .44 bullets through it
before it hit the ground. I only saw him do it once, but he did it so
easily and perfectly that I knew it was no accident.

I don't think I ever liked Ray Novak much after that, although I had
never thought about it until now. I remember practicing with Pa's old
.44, the one I was wearing now, until my thumb was raw from pulling the
hammer back, but one bullet in the can was the best I could do. I think
that hit me harder than anything. I didn't mind it much when Ray would
make one of his occasional rides over to the Bannerman ranch—trying to
act as if he was just out looking for strays, and just happened to be
on that part of the range. I knew that Laurin Bannerman was the real
reason for his drifting off the home range. But I also knew that he was
too bashful to do anything about it, except gawk. And, anyway, Laurin
was mine.

Which was fine, but it didn't tell me the reason for that scared look
on Ray Novak's face back there at the arroyo, while the cavalry was
pounding by.

The sky in the east began to pale and we pulled our horses up to let
them blow. Ray dropped down from his saddle and stretched, and I did
the same. The morning was cool, and sharp with the early-spring smell
of green things. I began to think of bacon, and coffee, and
fresh-cooked cornbread.

“I figure we've got about another hour of riding time,” Ray said.
“We'll have to start looking for a place to bed down before long.”

I said, “We'll ride until we find a place.”

But Ray shook his head in that sober, solemn way of his. “I don't
want to run into any more cavalry or police. Not in the daylight. We're
in enough trouble as it is.”

I asked a question then, one I had been remembering about: “Are you
afraid of trouble?”

He looked at me and answered in one word: “Yes.”

Then, after thinking a moment, he went on, “I don't like this
running. If we run into the state police and they recognize us there'll
be a fight, and almost always when there's a fight, somebody doesn't
walk away from it. That's the kind of trouble I'm afraid of. We're on
the wrong side of the law.”

“What law?” I said. “The Davis police? The Yankee soldiers, and the
carpetbaggers, and scalawags, and bureau agents? If that's the law, I'm
just as glad to be on the other side.”

But he kept shaking his head. “There has to be law.”

He was a nut on the subject. The law was all he knew, I guess. He had
lived it, talked it, breathed it, ever since he was old enough to know
what a sheriff's star was. And he couldn't remember the time when his
pa hadn't worn a star. Which was all right, as far as I was concerned
—I'd never heard anything against Marshal Martin Novak. But all this
talk of Reconstruction Law, as the turncoats called it, was beginning
to disgust me.

I said, “Look, if you're so goddamned set on law and order, what are
you running for? After you hit that cavalryman why didn't you go right
on down to the jail and give yourself up? You seem to be forgetting one
thing: Right now I'd be back on the ranch in my own bed if it hadn't
been for you. If you hadn't come running like a wall-eyed coot and got
me mixed up in it. Why did you run in the first place, that's what I
want to know, if you're so damned set on the law being enforced?”

The more I talked the madder I got, and I said things that I wouldn't
have said if I hadn't been so hot. It was as much my fault as his. If I
hadn't clubbed that carpetbagger the Yankees wouldn't have been so
worked up. Ray would have got off with a few days in jail and that
would have been the end of it. But now it meant six months on the work
gang, if they caught him. And me too. And I didn't intend to spend six
months on the work gang, no matter whose fault it was.

For a long minute Ray Novak said nothing. In the first pale light of
dawn, I could see his face getting hot and red, and I knew the smart
thing
to
do would be to let him alone. But I was wound up and my
mouth was running ahead of my thinking.

“Well,” I said, “what are you going to do about it?”

He just stood there, getting hotter, and doing nothing. I guess Ray
Novak wasn't used to being talked to like that. He was a lot like his
pa—the quiet, serious kind, commanding respect but not making a show
of it. He didn't know what to do now, with an eighteen-year-old
standing up and the same as calling him yellow. For a minute I thought
he might go for his gun, and at that point I didn't care one way or
another.

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and I could almost see
him taking hold of himself. He said softly, “I guess we both need some
sleep. We'd better be riding on.”

“Just a minute,” I said. “I want to know what you're going to do.
You'd better know now that if we run into any law I'm not giving myself
up for a spell on the work gang. If you don't feel the same way about
it, we'd better split up here and now.”

He gave it careful thought before answering. “Tall,” he said finally,
“I told you once I was sorry for dragging you into this. That's all I
can do. If I had been smart, I would have given myself up in John's
City. But I wasn't smart. Now it looks like we'll have to hide out for
a little while. I'll hide out but I don't intend to fight the law, if
it comes to that. If you don't want to ride with me, we'll split up,
and no hard feelings.”

He was a hard guy to hate for a long stretch of time. He was so dead
serious about everything. “Oh, hell,” I said. “Let's go.”

So we rode on, neither of us saying anything. For a while I amused
myself by thinking of the cavalry, and how foolish they must look
pounding up and down the arroyo and wondering what had happened to us.
I enjoyed that. It was the same as a military victory, for the war was
not over in Texas. It would never be over as long as Sheridan sent men
like Throckmorton and his bluebelly generals to rule Texas with
soldiers. Or men like Pease, who threw out all the judges and sheriffs
and mayors who might have been able to keep some semblance of law and
order and put in his own scalawags who didn't give a damn for anything
except to bleed the ranchers and farmers and cotton growers, and fatten
their own bank accounts back in New York or Ohio or Pennsylvania or
wherever they came from. And even worse, men like E. J. Davis.

E. J. Davis, the “reconstruction governor.” Colonel Davis, commanding
officer of the First Texas Cavalry, U.S. Volunteers. But I'd heard him
called other things, standing under the wooden awning of Garner's
Store, listening to old men talk. Old men with angry faces and outraged
eyes, some of them with Minie balls of the war still lodged in their
lank, hungry bodies. “That bastard, Davis,” was the way they usually
put it. “Commanding officer of the First Texas Traitors, Cowards, and
Sons-of-bitches.” Around the time war broke out, Davis rounded up all
the scum in Texas—or that's the way I always heard it, anyway—called
them the First Texas Cavalry, and offered its services to the North.
And, as reward for this thoughtfulness and foresight, Sheridan, in his
fine office in New Orleans, from behind a blue cloud of
fifty-cent-cigar smoke, had decided that E. J. Davis was just the man
for the governor's office in Texas.

Oh, there was an election. General Philip Sheridan was a man to do
things right. When the people of Texas began to get restless and
complained that their livestock was all dying and the children weren't
getting enough to eat because the Northern army was taking everything,
the General began to give it some thought. By God, if the people of
Texas didn't like the army, then he would give them a governor. There
would be an election and they could choose anybody they wanted.

The only trouble was, if you wanted to vote, you had to take the
“Ironclad Oath,” and that weeded everybody out except the newly freed
slaves, and some white trash, and maybe the veterans of the First Texas
Cavalry, U.S. Volunteers. Davis won in a walk. “The people's choice!”
the scalawag newspapers said.

While the war was going on, I wasn't old enough to understand
everything about it. But I understood the bitterness as the ranchers'
big herds dwindled down to a few mangy-looking old mossyhorns, and I
remembered trying to eat meat without salt because ships couldn't get
through the Northern blockade. And, somehow, I knew it was all the
Yankees' fault.

Hating came as natural as breathing, in those days, in Texas. I
remember overhearing a conversation in front of the hardware store in
John's City, where some men were laughing over the old joke of “You
know what I just heard? A feller back there claims 'damn Yankee' is two
words instead of one!” I laughed, but it wasn't until a couple of years
later that I found out what it was about. Even Professor Bigloe said
“damnyankee” and I figured he ought to know.

That was Texas, after the war. Broke and hungry, and if it tried to
lift itself to its knees it got a kick in the gut for its trouble. Pa
got off easier than most ranchers, because he had been too old to go to
war and was able to stay on the ranch and look after his herd. Most of
the ranchers weren't so lucky. After they got back, they found that
their cattle had scattered from hell to Georgia —what was left of them
after the Union soldiers took what they wanted. And the Confederate
soldiers too, for that matter. And the calves were unbranded and wild
and belonged legally to anybody who could catch them and burn them with
his own iron. Most of the cattlemen had to start all over again, and if
they got their beef back it was usually with a gun. The best guarantee
of ownership was a fast draw and a sure aim.

After Davis came the Davis police, or state police, and the governor
was burned in effigy so often that the smell of smoke would
automatically bring out a squad of soldiers with bayoneted rifles. The
police were supposed to take the place of the soldiers who were being
gradually drawn out of the South. But they weren't any better. They
were worse, if anything.

Thinking of the Davis police brought me back to Ray Novak. Old Martin
Novak was hit hardest of all by the police, because he had to sit back
and watch white trash and hired gunmen take over his marshal's job and
run it to suit themselves. There was no law in John's City, if you
wanted to side in with the turncoats. And if you didn't, there was a
law against everything. A rancher could be fined a hundred dollars for
elbowing his way to a saloon bar, and, if he didn't have the money to
pay, it would be taken out in beef cattle, with a dozen or so of the
police going along to see that the collection was made. And all Martin
Novak could do was watch. And wait. And hope that someday things would
change and he could bring another kind of law back to John's City.

And Ray... Maybe that was what he was afraid of —of hurting his pa's
chances of getting back into office. Maybe that was the reason he was
so anxious to avoid any kind of brush with the law.

I was tired thinking about it. Maybe he was just plain yellow and had
a streak up his back that you couldn't cover with both hands. I decided
that when we started riding the next night Ray could go his way and I'd
go mine. To hell with him.

It was just beginning to get light when we came to the creek, so we
didn't have to argue about whether or not we were going to ride in the
daylight. It was just a little stream, with the banks pretty well grown
up in brush and salt cedars, and here and there a big green cottonwood.
We rode along the bank for a while, looking for a place to stop. It
looked like a good place for snakes, but not much of a spot for
pitching camp. Finally we saw what we were looking for, a wide bend in
the creek where the bank sloped down to the water, and the ground was
brilliant green with new shoots of grass that was just beginning to
come up. I didn't notice the horse until it was too late. It was a big
black, with a white diamond in the middle of his forehead, grazing a
big circle in the new green grass from the end of a picket rope. As we
rounded the bend, the horse was the first thing we saw. But it didn't
hold our attention long. The next thing we saw was the muzzle of a
carbine.

I don't know how long I sat there looking at that gun before I
realized that somebody had to be holding the thing. I don't suppose it
was more than a small part of a second, but it seemed like a long time.
By the time I was through looking at it, I knew everything about it.

It was a Ball magazine carbine, with the magazine under the barrel
holding eight .50-caliber cartridges, loading from the rear. I had seen
one or two of them before in cavalry officers' saddle boots. But guns
like that didn't come easy, not even to cavalry officers. It was a
beautiful piece of killing equipment. You could almost imagine that a
man would be glad to get shot with a gun like that, if he cared
anything for firearms. It had a tricky ramrod that pulled out the
magazine spring to make loading fast and easy. Rim fire. It was a
Yankee gun, but they hadn't brought it out in time to use it in the
war, and I was glad of that. If they had, there would have been a lot
more graves and a lot more boys sleeping under faded red flags with
blue St. Andrew's crosses on them. I could almost tell, by looking at
that carbine, what kind of man would be holding it.