When the Women Come Out to Dance Page 11

"Then what'd you call me for?"

  "I'm not sure what to do."

  "Let the FBI work it."

  "I'm supposed to be helping them."

  "Yeah, but what good are you? You want to believe the guy's clean. Honey, the only way to find out if he is, you hav e to assume he isn't. You know what I'm saying? Why does a person rob banks? For money, yeah. But you have to be a moron, too, considering the odds against you, the security, cameras taking your picture. . . . So another reason could be the risk involved, it turns him on. The same reason he's playin g around with you. . . ."

  "He isn't playing around."

  "I'm glad I didn't say 'sucking up to get information, see what you know.' "

  "He's never mentioned banks." Karen paused. "Well, he might've once."

  "You could bring it up, see how he reacts. He gets sweaty, call for backup. Look, whether he's playing around or love s you with all his heart, he's still risking twenty years. He doesn't know if you're onto him or not and that heightens th e risk. It's like he thinks he's Cary Grant stealing jewels fro m the broad's home where he's having dinner, in his tux. Bu t your guy's still a moron if he robs banks. You know all that.

  Your frame of mind, you just don't want to accept it."

  "You think I should draw him out. See if I can set him up."

  "Actually," her dad said, "I think you should find another boyfriend."

  Karen remembered Christopher Walken in The Dogs of War placing his gun on a table in the front hall-GCo t he doorbell ringing--and laying a newspaper over the gu n before he opened the door. She remembered it because at on e time she was in love with Christopher Walken, not even caring that he wore his pants so high.

  Carl reminded her some of Christopher Walken, the way he smiled with his eyes. He came a little after seven. Kare n had on khaki shorts and a T-shirt, tennis shoes without socks.

  "I thought we were going out."

  They kissed and she touched his face, moving her hand lightly over his skin, smelling his aftershave, feeling the spo t where his right earlobe was pierced.

  "I'm making drinks," Karen said. "Let's have one and then I'll get ready." She started for the kitchen.

  "Can I help?"

  "You've been working all day. Sit down, relax."

  It took her a couple of minutes. Karen returned to the living room with a drink in each hand, her leather bag hanging from her shoulder. "This one's yours." Carl took it and sh e dipped her shoulder to let the bag slip off and drop to the coffee table. Carl grinned.

  "What've you got in there, a gun?"

  "Two pounds of heavy metal. How was your day?"

  They sat on the sofa and he told how it took almost four hours to land an eight-foot marlin, the leader wound aroun d its bill. Carl said he worked his tail off hauling the fish aboar d and the guy decided he didn't want it.

  Karen said, "After you got back from Kendall?"

  It gave him pause. "Why do you think I was in Kendall?"

  Carl had to wait while she sipped her drink.

  "Didn't you stop by Florida Southern and withdraw twenty-eight hundred?"

  That got him staring at her, but with no expression to speak of. Karen thinking, Tell me you were somewhere els e and can prove it.

  But he didn't; he kept staring.

  "No dye packs, no bait money. Are you still seeing Kathy Lopez?"

  Carl hunched over to put his drink on the coffee table and sat like that, leaning on his thighs, not looking at her now a s Karen studied his profile, his elegant nose. She looked at hi s glass, his prints all over it, and felt sorry for him.

  "Carl, you blew it."

  He turned his head to look at her past his shoulder. He said, "I'm leaving," pushed up from the sofa and said, "If thi s is what you think of me . . ."

  Karen said, "Carl, cut the shit," and put her drink down.

  Now, if he picked up her bag, that would cancel out any remaining doubts. She watched him pick up her bag. He got the Beretta out and let the bag drop.

  "Carl, sit down. Will you, please?"

  "I'm leaving. I'm walking out and you'll never see me again. But first . . ." He made her get a knife from the kitche n and cut the phone line in there and in the bedroom.

  He was pretty dumb. In the living room again he said, "You know something? We could've made it."

  Jesus. And he had seemed like such a cool guy. Karen watched him go to the front door and open it before turnin g to her again.

  "How about letting me have five minutes? For old times' s ake."

  It was becoming embarrassing, sad. She said, "Carl, don't you understand? You're under arrest."

  He said, "I don't want to hurt you, Karen, so don't try to stop me." He went out the door.

  Karen walked over to the chest where she dropped her car keys and mail coming in the house: a bombe chest by th e front door, the door still open. She laid aside the folded cop y of the Herald she'd placed there, over her SIG Sauer, picked u p the pistol, and went out to the front stoop, into the yello w glow of the porch light. She saw Carl at his car now, its whit e shape pale against the dark street, only about forty feet away.

  "Carl, don't make it hard, okay?"

  He had the car door open and half turned to look back. "I s aid I don't want to hurt you."

  Karen said, "Yeah, well . . ." and raised the pistol to rack the slide and cupped her left hand under the grip. She said , "You move to get in the car, I'll shoot."

  Carl turned his head again with a sad, wistful expression.

  "No you won't, sweetheart."

  Don't say ciao, Karen thought. Please.

  Carl said, "Ciao," turned to get in the car, and she shot him. Fired a single round at his left thigh and hit him wher e she'd aimed, in the fleshy part just below his butt. Car l howled and slumped inside against the seat and the steerin g wheel, his leg extended straight out, his hand gripping it, his eyes raised with a bewildered frown as Karen approached. Th e poor dumb guy looking at twenty years, and maybe a limp.

  Karen felt she should say something. After all, for a few days there they were as intimate as two people can get. Sh e thought about it for several moments, Carl staring up at he r with rheumy eyes. Finally Karen said, "Carl, I want you t o know I had a pretty good time, considering."

  It was the best she could do.

  *

  *

  HURRAH FOR CAPT. EARLY.

  The second banner said HERO OF SAN JUAN HILL. Both were tied to the upstairs balcon y of the Congress Hotel and looked down on La Salle Street in Sweetmary, a town named for a copper mine. The banners read across the building as a single statement. The day that Captain Earl y was expected home from the war in Cuba, ove r 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 ma n who entered the lobby and dropped his bedroll o n the red velvet settee where it seemed he was abou t 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 migh t possibly be his own and not one handed down t o 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 hi s voice to tell the person, "You can't sit dow n 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, letter s that had arrived on the El Paso & Southwestern morning ru n 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 clea n 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 wan t 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 t o the desk, where he said to the manager, "He walked right i n 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, wer e at a table with their glasses of beer: a rider named Macon an d a rider named Wayman, young men who wore sweat-staine d hats down on their eyes as they stared at the Negro. Righ t there, the bartender speaking to him as he poured a whiskey , still speaking as the colored man drank it and the bartende r poured him another one. Macon asked Wayman if he had eve r seen a nigger wearing a suit of clothes and a necktie. Wayma n said he couldn't recall. When they finished drinking thei r 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."

  Macon squinted beneath the hat brim funneled low on his eyes. He said, "Nobody told me they was niggers in the war."

  Sounding as though it was the bartender's fault he hadn't been informed. When the bartender didn't add anything to hel p him out, Macon said, "Wayman's brother Wyatt was in th e war, with Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders. Only, Wyat t didn't come home like the nigger."

  Wayman, about eighteen years old, was nodding his head now.

  Because nothing about this made sense to Macon, it was becoming an irritation. Again he said to Wayman, "You eve r see a smoke wearing a suit of clothes like that?" He said , "Je-sus Christ."

  Bo Catlett walked up La Salle Street favoring his left leg some, though the limp, caused by a Mauser bulle t or by the regimental surgeon who cut it out of his hip, wa s barely noticeable. He stared at the sight of the mine work s against the sky, ugly, but something monumental about it: s traight ahead up the grade, the main shaft scaffolding an d company buildings, the crushing mill lower down, ore tailings that humped this way in ridges on down the slope to run out at the edge of town. A sorry place, dark and forlorn; me n walked up the grade from boardinghouses on Mill Street t o spend half their life underneath the ground, buried befor e they were dead. Three whiskeys in him, Catlett returned t o the hotel on the corner of Second Street, looked up at the sig n and said and had to grin, my ass.

  Catlett mounted the steps to the porch, where he dropped his bedroll and took one of the rocking chairs all in a row, th e porch empty, close on noon but nobody sitting out here, n o drummers calling on La Salle Mining of New Jersey, the company still digging and scraping but running low on payload copper, operating only the day shift now. The rocking chairs , all dark green, needed painting. Man, but made of cane an d comfortable with that nice squeak back and forth, back an d forth. . . . Bo Catlett watched two riders coming this way u p the street, couple of cowboys. . . . Catlett wondering ho w many times he had sat down in a real chair since April 25t h when war was declared and he left Arizona to go looking fo r his old regiment, trailed them to Fort Assiniboine in the Department of the Dakotas, then clear across the country to Camp Chickamauga in Georgia and on down to Tampa wher e he caught up with them and Lieutenant John Pershing looke d at his twenty-four years of service and put him up fo r squadron sergeant major. It didn't seem like any twenty-fou r years. . . .

  Going back to when he joined the First Kansas Colored Volunteers in '63, age fifteen. Wounded at Honey Springs th e same year. Guarded Rebel prisoners at Rock Island, took par t in the occupation of Galveston. Then after the war got sen t out here to join the all-Negro Tenth Cavalry on frontier station, Arizona Territory, and deal with hostile Apaches. In '87 w ent to Mexico with Lieutenant Brendan Early out of For t Huachuca--Bren and a contract guide named Dana Moon , now the agent at the White Tanks reservation--brought bac k a one-eyed Mimbreno named Loco, brought back a whit e woman the renegade Apache had run off with--and Dan a Moon later married--and they all got their pictures in som e newspapers. Mustered out that same year, '87. . . . Drove a wagon for Capt. Early Hunting Expeditions Incorporated before going to work for Dana at White Tanks. He'd be sitting on Dana's porch this evening with a glass of mescal and Dan a would say, "Well, now you've seen the elephant I don't imagine you'll want to stay around here." He'd tell Dana he saw W t he elephant a long time ago and wasn't too impressed. Just then another voice, not Dana's, said out loud to him: "So you was in the war, huh?"

  It was one of the cowboys. He sat his mount, a little claybank quarter horse, close to the porch rail, sat leaning on the pommel to show he was at ease, his hat low on his eyes, staring directly at Catlett in his rocking chair. The other one sat his mount, a bay, more out in the street, maybe holding back.

  This boy was not at ease but fidgety. Catlett remembered them in the Gold Dollar.

  Now the one close said, "What was it you did over there in Cuba?"

  Meaning a colored man. What did a colored man do. Like most people the boy not knowing anything about Negro soldiers in the war. This one squinting at him had size and maybe got his way enough he believed he could say whateve r he pleased, or use a tone of voice that would irritate the perso n addressed. As he did just now.

  "What did I do over there?" Catlett said. "What everybody did, I was in the war."

  "You wrangle stock for the Rough Riders?"

  "Where'd you get that idea?"

  "I asked you a question. Is that what you did, tend their stock?"

  Once Catlett decided to remain civil and maybe this boy would go away, he said, "There wasn't no stock. The Roug h Riders, even the Rough Riders, were afoot. The only peopl e had horses were artillery, pulling caissons with thei r Hotchkiss guns and the coffee grinders, what they called th e Gatling guns. Lemme see," Catlett said, "they had som e mules, too, but I didn't tend anybody's stock."

  "His brother was a Rough Rider," Macon said, raising one hand to hook his thumb at Wayman. "Served with Colone l Teddy Roosevelt and got killed in an ambush--the only wa y greasers know how to fight. I like to hear what you peopl e were doing while his brother Wyatt was getting killed."

  You people. Look at him trying to start a fight.

  "You believe it was my fault he got killed?"

  "I asked you what you were doing."

  It wasn't even this kid's business. Catlett thinking, Well, see if you can educate him, and said, "Las Guasimas. You eve r hear of it?"

  The kid stared with his eyes half shut. Suspicious, or letting you know he's serious, Catlett thought. Keen-eyed and mean; you're not gonna put anything past him.

  "What's it, a place over there?"

  "That's right, Las Guasimas, the place where it happened.

  On the way to Santiago de Coo-ba. Sixteen men killed that day, mostly by rifle fire, and something like fifty wounded.

  Except it wasn't what you said, the dons pulling an ambush.

  It was more the Rough Riders walking along not looking where they was going."

  The cowboy, Macon, said, "Je-sus Christ, you saying the Rough Riders didn't know what they were do ing?" Like thi s was something impossible to believe. />
  "They mighta had an idea what they was doing," Catlett said, "only thing it wasn't what they shoulda been doing." He said, "You understand the difference?" And thought, What'r e you explaining it to him for? The boy giving him that mean look again, ready to defend the Rough Riders. All right, h e was so proud of Teddy's people, why hadn't he been over ther e with them?

  "Look," Catlett said, using a quiet tone now, "the way it was, the dons had sharpshooters in these trees, a thicket o f mangoes and palm trees growing wild you couldn't see into.

  You understand? Had men hidden in there were expert with the rifle, these Mausers they used with smokeless powder.

  Teddy's people come along a ridge was all covered with these trees and run into the dons, see, the dons letting some of th e Rough Riders pass and then closing in on 'em. So, yeah, it wa s an ambush in a way." Catlett paused. "We was down on th e road, once we caught up, moving in the same direction." He paused again, remembering something the cowboy said tha t bothered him. "There's nothing wrong with an ambush--lik e say you think it ain't fair? If you can set it up and keep you r people behind cover, do it. There was a captain with th e Rough Riders said he believed an officer should never tak e cover, should stand out there and be an example to his men.

  The captain said, 'There ain't a Spanish bullet made that can kill me.' Stepped out in the open and got shot in the head."

  A couple of cowboys looking like the two who were mounted had come out of the Chinaman's picking their teet h and now stood by to see what was going on. Some people wh o had come out of the hotel were standing along the steps.

  Catlett took all this in as he paused again, getting the words straight in his mind to tell how they left the road, som e companies of the Tenth and the First, all regular army, wen t up the slope laying down fire and run off the dons before th e Rough Riders got cut to pieces, the Rough Riders volunteer s and not experienced in all kind of situations--the reason the y didn't know shit about advancing through hostile country or , get right down to it, what they were doing in Cuba, thes e people that come looking for glory and got served sharpshooters with Mausers and mosquitoes carrying yellow fever. Tell these cowboys the true story. General Wheeler, "Fightin' Joe" f rom the Confederate side in the Civil War now thirty-thre e years later an old man with a white beard; sees the Spanis h pulling back at Las Guasimas and says, "Boys, we got th e Yankees on the run." Man like that directing a battle. . . .