The Last Hard Men (14 page)

He was nineteen years old—twenty next month—but he’d covered a lot of ground in his time. He’d been eleven when his mother had left Lordsburg. The fat old Mexican woman who ran the Occidental Café had taken him in, given him bed and board in exchange for the chores Shelby did around the place. About all he could remember about her was standing in the kitchen watching her slap big old corn tortillas from one fat arm to the other. He hadn’t stayed long; after his mother pulled out he didn’t like Lordsburg much at all. One night he’d stolen a horse and saddle and headed for Silver City. The truant officer picked him up less than five miles out of Lordsburg. They sent him to the county work farm for a year and he met some older and tougher kids there. Shelby was a quick learner. He had a talent for picking the toughest and brightest people around and studying how they did things. He’d hooked up with a fifteen-year-old named Dick Larson and they’d become good friends. When they got out of the work farm they’d hitched over into Texas and terrorized the El Paso area for a winter, living like nomadic savages by stealing chickens and selling stolen horses over in Mexico. When Dick Larson judged it was time, they’d moved on. They’d hung around Brownsville for a while and then drifted back west, on over to Nogales after a couple of years.

Shelby’d been fifteen when he had his first woman, a whore on the Mexican side of Nogales. He and Dick Larson had taken turns with the whore and then robbed her of all her cash and headed back into Arizona.

Dick Larson had an old dime novel, dog-eared and yellowed, about the great train robber Zach Provo, and after reading the whole thing Dick Larson had decided it was easy, the next thing they’d do was rob a train. But the express guard had opened up on them and killed Dick Larson and Shelby had barely got away with his skin.

He’d been lonely after that, almost as much as when his mother had walked out on him. It proved to Shelby that you couldn’t depend on anybody for long. He’d lone-wolfed it, strictly, ever since.

He’d done all right until last year when that stupid storekeeper knocked the gun out of his hand and turned him in for armed robbery. Two or three other storekeepers turned up and identified him for several previous crimes, including one he hadn’t done, but they convicted him of that one too. He’d gone to Yuma and about the only worthwhile, thing about that was meeting Zach Provo.

Shelby had remembered the name from the old dime novel, and meeting Provo in the flesh had been something like meeting royalty. Too much water had gone under the bridge for Shelby to try to team up with Provo the way he had with Dick Larson; anyhow Provo wasn’t the type who encouraged hangers-on. But Shelby knew he could learn a lot by watching Provo and studying how Provo worked, He was only, nineteen and with luck he had a lot of years ahead of him, but if he was going to survive he had to learn everything there was to learn. Provo was about as good a man to study as any, even if he had been caught and spent twenty-eight years in Yuma. Everybody had bad luck now and then. It didn’t mean Provo was anybody’s fool.

Dawn came slow. There was a lot of wind-lifted dust in the air and a heavy brownish sky hung over the eastern horizon for half an hour before the sun started to red up. George Weed said, “What this place needs is a lot more saloons.” His tongue and gums, smiling, were startlingly pink in the black face.

The country was all chopped-up redrock and clay. Shelby didn’t know the area at all but then neither did many other people except the Navajos. The sky seemed a thousand miles wide and the desert just as big. It was high here, several thousand feet of elevation, but the sun came up molten, and by noon Shelby knew it would be far above a hundred degrees on the plain. He felt sullen and cranky and more whacked-out exhausted than he’d ever been in his life.

Provo was up front, leading them. Behind Provo were Taco Riva and Will Gant and Quesada, who was leading the girl’s horse. Behind the girl rode Portugee Shiraz. Shelby was next, and Weed was behind him, and a little ways back rode Cesar Menendez. There was no particular reason for everybody to ride single-file now, there was plenty of room to spread out, but they’d got in the habit on the narrow switchback trails in the Mogollon country behind them.

They came up out of a depression in the ground and Shelby saw a great looming monster of a rock four or five miles out ahead. Red-walled, flat-topped, it soared a good thousand feet above the plain. Its shadow ran out a long way along the desert. At the foot of it, hard to see in the shadows, was enough greenery to suggest the presence of water. Provo called back along the line: “Castle Butte. Little Navajo town down there. We’re going in. Everybody act real friendly.”

The Navajo Reservation was bigger than most Eastern states. Here and there, at a crossroads or a good water source, a little community could be found, centered around an Agency trading post and a Navajo Agency police station.

It took them three quarters of an hour to reach Castle Butte. The citizens were up and around: several fat women in elaborate dresses, full of suspicion, watched them ride in. If anybody recognized Zach Provo there was no sign of it. A heavyset Indian in a khaki shirt and a cowboy hat low over his eyes came out onto the porch of the trading post and Provo spoke to him in a tongue Shelby had never heard before. The Indian tipped his head back to see out from under his hat and grinned briefly with very bad teeth and rattled off something to which Provo responded with a grunt and a nod. Provo turned and spoke over his shoulder:

“Get on up to the spring there, under the trees. Get cleaned up and eat and try to get some rest. I’ll be along in awhile. Got some business to transact here. Shelby, you look after missy, she’s your responsibility, hear?”

Shelby knew what that meant. He hadn’t missed the way Gant and Portugee and Quesada had been watching Susan Burgade. It was a mystery to Shelby why Provo cared one way or the other about the girl’s virtue, since Provo wasn’t much of a moralist under the best of circumstances and the girl’s father was the one man in the world Provo hated more than all the others combined. But presumably there was a reason for it. Shelby didn’t want the assignment but he could see why Provo picked him for it. Probably figured he was too young to have eyes for an older woman—she had to be anyhow ten, twelve years older than Shelby—and besides, Provo trusted him more than most of the others. Shelby didn’t know whether to feel flattered or hurt by that, but at the moment he was too tired to care. He didn’t want to sit up nursemaiding Miss Burgade, he resented the assignment, and so he was curt and rude to her when he untied her leg from the stirrup-leather and let her climb down stiffly; he stuck close to her while she went over to the spring and splashed water all over her head and face. She was still wearing the homespun dress she’d had on when they’d first seen her—there hadn’t been time for anybody to change clothes. This was the first stand-down they’d had since Friday noon, and it was now what, Monday morning? He’d lost track.

Some of them had the knack of sleeping in the saddle. Provo, for one; Provo hadn’t looked at all tired when he’d disappeared into the Agency police shack a hundred yards back down the slope from the spring. Riva, of course—Riva had been born on a horse; Riva was fussing over the horses now as if they were expensive Thoroughbreds on a racing paddock and he was their trainer, instead of him being an ex-mountain bandit and them being ordinary old quarterhorse plugs from some working outfit outside Winslow. Riva went around loosening all the cinches and dumping the saddles and blankets, making sure all the horses were within browsing distance of graze tufts, and rubbing them down one at a time with a currybrush he’d stolen somewhere back along the trail.

Not everybody was that solicitous or energetic. George Weed was flat on his back; he started snoring within two minutes after they got dismounted. Portugee Shiraz took the time to find a comfortable bed of leaves under a shade tree fifty yards from the rest of them; Protugee was asleep too. Shelby wished to hell he could do the same, but he wasn’t of a mind to disobey Provo’s instructions—not yet, at any rate. He wasn’t going to follow Provo blindly into the jaws of death but he was willing to suspend resistance until he saw imminent danger. Until then, Shelby judged, he was better off with Provo than without him.

Cesar Menendez sat crosslegged, off a bit from the rest of them, his rifle across his lap, watching with a sleepy-eyed smile, his eyes squinted up so that Shelby couldn’t really tell if he was awake or asleep until he saw Menendez stretch like a cat and roll up a cigarette from the makings he’d pinched off that beat-up old wrangler he’d shot in the leg. Menendez dragged on the cigarette and jetted smoke.

Shelby washed some of the grit off his face and told the girl to sit down under a tree and sleep if she could. She made no answer, but she did what he told her to do. She didn’t seem to be asleep. Maybe after all she’d been able to sleep on horseback. God knew she’d had nothing better to do. Shelby slid down with his back against a tree and let his legs sprawl out in front of him and concentrated on keeping his dry raw eyes open, mainly because Will Gant was squatting nearby with his face turned toward the girl. Gant was a tense, huge shape in the leaf shadows. He picked up a twig and burrowed it into his ear, examined it and threw it away. He kept staring at the girl; once his eyes glanced toward Shelby and Shelby saw an abrupt touch of sullenness in his face. Then the thick sun-chapped lips pulled back slowly in a smile and Gant sat back with his hands intertwined across the sag of his paunch.

Riva came in and broke out the mess gear and served up some cold food for those who were awake and hungry. The girl ate as if her mind was a thousand miles away on other things. Will Gant dipped his face close to the tin plate and shoveled oversized mouthfuls of food into his face; washed them down with canteen water, only half chewed, his Adam’s apple bulging and bouncing in the thick throat.

Riva, who of them all seemed least disturbed by the nerves of flight, sat down loosely and said in a friendly way, “I feel hound-dog lazy,” and went to sleep smiling.

They had probably been there an hour, but Provo hadn’t appeared yet from the police shack. Shelby began to feel spooked. But then, he thought, if the Agency police had arrested Provo they’d be up here by now. He tried to relax.

Presently Portugee woke up and ambled over to squat down beside Will Gant. Portugee’s feet were like paddles. The two of them sat there and boasted about the fights they had been in and the carnage they had done, as if there was some important kind of
machismo
in having done and seen such things—or perhaps in being able to talk of it with suitably callous heartiness. Maybe they were trying to impress the girl, but if so, she gave no sign she was listening.

Once, Portugee’s glance came around and lay speculatively against Shelby, and something struggled fiercely behind Portugee’s eyes. Shelby sat like a stone, not liking this. He pinched his mouth tight and breathed deep through his nose. Will Gant looked at him and Portugee whispered something, and Gant laughed silently, his eyes wrinkling up until they were almost shut. Something was going on between those two. Shelby began to sweat.

Shelby got slowly to his feet and tried to look casual. He wandered over to the spring and had a drink, filled his canteen and wandered back. But he stopped much closer to the girl than he’d been before. He hunkered down on his heels not five feet from her and when she looked at him, her eyes widened: plainly the same thought had crossed her mind that had crossed his.

His maneuver had not gone unnoticed. Will Gant stood up and hitched at his trousers with the flats of his wrists. Then he tipped his hat back. The sweatband had indented a red weal across his forehead; he rubbed it with the side of his index finger while he looked unblinkingly at the girl and smiled that slow thick-lipped smile of his.

Damp with springwater, the homespun dress clung to the girl’s body, stuck to the undersides of her nubile breasts. She wore no stays, no evident underpinnings of any kind. Her woman-smell reached Shelby’s nostrils and he knew the fire had caught inside Gant and Portugee; it burned him as well. But Shelby couldn’t fathom the mind of anybody who would take it from a woman who didn’t want to give it. He felt suddenly and unaccountably protective toward her. It had nothing to do with Provo’s orders. Sweating, he wiped his palms dry on the buttocks of his Levi’s.

From where he squatted he could see past the lovely long column of her back and the dark long hair that she had plaited at the side of her head—past her surly and beautiful face to Gant and Portugee. Portugee removed his hat and slicked back his hair and looked at Will Gant, whereupon Gant got to his feet and shoved his hand down behind his belt buckle into his fly and said, “Mike, what do you say we climb into that saddle of hers? You can go first kid, I don’t mind watchin’.”

Shelby’s lids drooped bleakly. He saw the girl slide her glance off Gant as if he were some kind of zoo animal. With his free hand Gant tugged at the long black hair in his nose. Shelby said, “Cut it out. You heard Zach.”

“Zach ain’t here,” Portugee murmured, and got to his feet. “You ain’t fixin’ to spoil the fun, are you?”

“Aeah,” Shelby sighed, “I guess I am, Portugee.” He eased himself upright and planted his boots a couple of feet apart.

Portugee laughed softly. “Let’s bust him, Will.”

The girl was getting up too. Her breasts moved when she turned. She pinched her lower lip with her teeth and she gave Shelby a frightened frown.

Gant said, “Only aimin’ to do her a kandness, Mike. She gonna enjoy it, you know she will.”

Shelby drew out his gun and spoke from a semi-crouch: “Forget it. I like you all right, Will, but we don’t need you. I don’t want to have to shovel dirt in your fat face.