Valdez Is Coming: A Novel Read online

  The segundo answered, “We find out.”

  This is all, he thought, watching the three men move out, slouched in their saddles, heads bobbing, sweat staining a column down their spines. No more. He watched them another moment before calling out, “Hey, Tomás!” The riders looked around and the young Mexican he had hired a few months before reined in to wait for him.

  In Spanish the segundo said, “You have a ride the other way. Bring Señor Tanner.”

  The young Mexican picked up his reins, getting ready. “How will I know where to bring him?”

  “You’ll hear us,” the segundo said.

  9

  The twin peaks reached above them, beyond the slope that was swept with owl clover and cholla brush, beyond the scrub oak and dark mass of timber, stone pinnacles against the sky, close enough to touch in the clean, clear air.

  “Up there,” Valdez said. “We go through the trees and come out in a canyon. At the end of the canyon is a little trail that goes up through the rocks and passes between the two peaks and down the other side. You stand in there and look straight up and the peaks look like they’re moving in the wind.”

  The Erin woman’s eyes were half closed in the glare; she shielded her eyes with her hand.

  “Once we go through there, we see if we can make a slide to block the trail,” Valdez said. “Then we don’t hurry anymore. We take our time because it takes them a few days to find a way around.”

  Her gaze lowered and she looked at him now. “A few days. Is that all we’ll have?”

  “It’s up to us,” Valdez said. “Or it’s up to him. We can go to Mexico. We can go to China if there’s a way to go there. Or we can go to Lanoria.”

  “Where do you want to go?” she asked him.

  “To Lanoria.”

  “He’ll come for us.”

  “If he wants to,” Valdez said. “I run today, but not forever. Today is enough.”

  “Whatever you want to do,” the Erin woman said, “I want to do.”

  Valdez looked at her and wanted to reach over to touch her hair and feel the skin of her sun-darkened cheek and move the tips of his fingers gently over her cracked lips. But he kept his hand in his lap, around the slender neck of the Remington.

  He said, “If you want to go back now, you can. I let you go, you’re free. Go wherever you want. Tell him you got away from me.”

  Next to him, sitting in their saddles, their legs almost touching, she said again, “Whatever you want to do.”

  “We’ll go,” he said, reaching back and flicking the rope that trailed from his saddle to R. L. Davis’s sorrel horse.

  They left the trail and started up across the slope on an angle, moving through the owl clover and around the cholla bushes that were like dwarf trees, Valdez leading, aware of the woman behind him, wanting to turn to look at her, but only glancing at her as his gaze swept the hillside and back the way they had come.

  Roberto Valdez kept watch up the slope and Bob Valdez, inside him, pictured the woman coming out of an adobe into the front yard: a place like Diego Luz’s, alone in the high country, but larger than Diego’s, with glass in the windows and a plank front porch beneath the ramada. The woman in a white dress open at the throat and her hair hanging below her shoulders, her hair shining in the sunlight. He would be coming up from the horse pasture and see her and she would raise her arm to wave. God, he would like to ride up to her, twisting out of the saddle, and take hold of her with her arm still raised, his hands moving under her arms and around her and hold her as tightly as a man can hold a woman without injuring her. But he would stop at the pump and have a drink of water and wash himself and then go to the yard, walking his horse, because he would have the rest of his life to do this.

  As Bob Valdez pictured this, finally reaching the yard and the woman, Roberto Valdez saw the riders far below them starting across the slope in single file. Six of them and three horses in a string.

  Valdez took the field glasses from his saddlebag. He picked out Frank Tanner and R. L. Davis. He saw them looking up this way and saw one of the men pointing, saying something.

  Come on, Valdez thought, as they spread apart now and spurred their horses up through the brush. When you get here we’ll be gone. But still watching them, counting them again, he thought, If Tanner is here, where is his segundo?

  Emilio Avilar watched from above, from the shadowed edge of the timber.

  They had the man almost in their sights, Valdez coming across the slope through the scrub oak, leading the horse and the woman behind him, coming at a walk and angling directly toward them, walking into their guns, and now Tanner the Almighty, the white barbarian, had ruined the ambush and was running him again.

  God, the man would have been dead in a moment, shot out of his saddle, but now with the woman behind him, kicking their mounts straight up the grade, Valdez had reached the top of the slope and was entering the timber. Not here, where the segundo had waited with his two Americans for almost an hour, but more than a hundred yards away: a last glimpse of Valdez and the woman disappearing into the trees.

  The segundo had scouted the timber and the canyon beyond, studying the canyon and the narrow defile at the end of it, and known at once Valdez was coming here. Where else? This man knew the ground and the water sinks and fought like an Apache. Sure Valdez was coming here: to escape through the defile or to stand in it and shoot them one at a time as they came for him.

  Don’t let him get in the canyon, the segundo had thought. Don’t take a chance with him. Wait for him at the canyon mouth and shoot him as he enters. But Valdez would be coming through the cover of the trees and maybe his nose or his ears would tell him something, warn him, and he would run off another way. You have to think of him as you would a mountain lion, the segundo thought. Trap him in the open, away from cover.

  So the segundo had gone back through the timber to the edge overlooking the slope and had told his two men very carefully what they would do: how they would watch for him, then study his angle of approach from the cover of the trees, and be waiting for him to walk into it, waiting until he was close to the trees but still in the open, and kill him before he saw them.

  But now Valdez was already in the timber. The segundo had told his men to be quiet and keep their horses quiet and listen.

  One of them said, “You know he’s going for the canyon.”

  “He reached it, that’s all,” the other one said. “Once he gets in the hole ain’t nobody going in after him.”

  “Not this child,” the first man said. “Tanner can go in himself he wants him so bad.”

  Christ Jesus, the segundo said to himself. “Will you be quiet!”

  They listened.

  “I don’t hear him,” one of them said. “I don’t hear a sound.”

  The segundo drew the two men closer to him, listening, and they listened with him. “Do you know why?” he said. “Because he’s not moving, he’s listening. He knows we’re in here with him.”

  “He didn’t see us.”

  “When are you going to know him?” the segundo said. “He doesn’t have to see you.”

  “He’s got to move sometime,” one of them said.

  The segundo nodded. “Before Tanner and the others come up. All right, we separate, spread out a little. But all of us move toward the canyon.” His voice dropped to a hushed tone. “Very quietly.”

  There were open patches where sunlight streaked through the pine branches a hundred feet above, and there were thickets of scrub oak and dense brush. There was an occasional sound close to them, a small scurrying sound in the brush, and there were the shrill faraway cries of unseen birds in the treetops. The birds would stop and in the shadowed forest, high in the Santa Ritas, a silence would settle.

  They moved deep into the trees from the open slope before Valdez brought them up to listen. And as he listened he thought, You should have kept going and taken the chance. You don’t have time to wait.

  He heard the sound through the
trees, a twig snapping, then silence. In a moment he heard it again and the sound of movement in dead leaves.

  He was right, some of them were already in the trees. But it did no good to be right this time. They should have kept going and not stopped. They weren’t going to sneak through and keep running, and now he wondered if the woman should go first or follow him. Follow him through the trees and in the open, if they reached the canyon, then first into the defile while he held them off. He couldn’t remember the distance to the canyon. Perhaps fifty yards, a little more. He was certain of the general direction, the way they would point and keep going.

  He said to the woman, “The last time we run. Are you ready?”

  She nodded once, up and down. Both of her hands were on her saddle horn, but she didn’t seem tense or to be holding on.

  “I go first,” Valdez said. He nodded in the direction. “That way. You come behind me. Don’t go another way around the trees, keep behind me. If you see them in front of us, stay close to me, as close as you can. At the end of the canyon you’ll see the opening. You go in first. Don’t get off, ride in—it’s wide enough—and I’ll come in after you.”

  She nodded again. “All right.”

  He smiled at her. “Just a little ride, it’s over.”

  She nodded again and tried to smile and now he saw she was afraid.

  Valdez dismounted. He untied the sorrel, moving it aside, holding the bridle under the horse’s muzzle. As soon as Tanner’s men entered the trees he would send the sorrel galloping off and hope they would take off after its sound. He waited, telling Tanner’s men to hurry so he would hear them soon; and when it came, moments later, the sound of their horses rushing into the timber, he hissed into the sorrel’s ear, yanking the bridle and slapping the Remington hard across the horse’s rump as it jumped to a start and ran off through the trees.

  “Now,” Valdez said.

  They were moving, running through the shafts of sunlight and darkness with the beating, breathing sound of the horses and the tree branches cutting at their faces, running through the brush, through the wall of leaves and snapping branches and through a clearing into trees again, now hearing Tanner’s men calling out somewhere behind and somewhere off in the timber. Valdez could see the canyon ahead through the foliage, the open mouth of the meadow, the rock escarpment slanting to the sky.

  He saw the opening and he saw a rider slash out of the trees in front of him and come around, his horse rearing with the sudden motion. Valdez broke out of the trees straight for the rider, seeing him broadside now and kicking his mount. He bore down on the man, raising the Remington in front of him, and at point-blank range blew the man off the back of his horse.

  He was aware of horses behind him and felt the next man before he saw him or heard him coming up on the left. He switched the Remington to that hand, extending it at arm’s length, and when he looked, he fired as the rider fired and saw the man go out of his saddle. The man’s horse kept running, racing him, and now he felt the wind in the open and saw the sun balanced on the west rim of the escarpment and heard the Erin woman’s horse holding close behind him.

  A high whine sang through the narrows as a rifle opened up on him. He remembered the sound of gunfire in the canyon from a time before. He remembered the shadowed crevices high on the walls and the thick gama grass. But he remembered the meadow longer than this, a half mile long in his mind. Now it was not half that distance and he was almost to the end.

  Another rifle shot sang out as he reached the defile and came around.

  The woman would be there, behind him, and ride in and he would follow her.

  But the horse that came behind him was riderless.

  The horse veered off, seeing the canyon wall. As it moved out of the way, Valdez saw her: she was about thirty yards from him, her horse was down, and she was rising to her feet, holding her head with both hands and looking at the dead horse.

  He saw the segundo close beyond her, dismounting and coming up with a rifle in his hands. Valdez wanted to call out to her, “Run! Come on, do it!” But it was too late. The segundo came on, walking through the gama grass with the rifle in his right hand, his finger through the trigger guard. He stopped before reaching the Erin woman.

  Valdez loaded the Remington—not thinking about it, but loading it because it was empty and saying to the segundo with his gaze, You want to do something, come on, do it. He was tired, God, at the end of it, but this is what he was saying to the segundo. With the Remington loaded and cocked he walked out to the woman.

  She stood with one hand covering the side of her face, dirt and pieces of grass on her dress and in her hair, as she watched Valdez coming. She looked tired and still afraid, her eyes dull and without question or hope.

  “Almost, uh?” Valdez said.

  “Almost,” the Erin woman said.

  “Are you all right?” She nodded and he said then, “You don’t have to go back with him. Remember that.”

  A look of awareness came into her eyes, as if she had been suddenly awakened from sleep. “Don’t say that.”

  “It has to be said.”

  “I go with you. I don’t go with him.”

  “Frank Tanner doesn’t know that.” Valdez paused. He said then, “Frank,” smiling with the weariness etched in his face. “Francisco. Francis. I had a friend named Francis. I don’t know what happened to him.”

  He laughed out loud and saw the startled look come over her and saw the segundo looking at him.

  He heard his own laughter again in the canyon and at the far end saw Frank Tanner and men on both sides of him coming out into the meadow. He saw Tanner stop, looking this way.

  Gay Erin touched his arm, holding on to it. He said to her, “I don’t know why I thought it was funny. This Frank and my friend having the same name. They’re not much alike.” He smiled, still thinking of it, and watched the segundo approach, the segundo staring at him, trying to understand what would make him laugh.

  With his left hand Emilio Avilar raised his hat and wiped his forehead with the same hand and put his hat on again. He said to Valdez, “You have tobacco? For chewing?”

  “Cigarette,” Valdez said.

  The segundo nodded. “All right.”

  Valdez brought the sack and paper out of his pocket and moved toward the segundo, who stepped forward to meet him. The segundo rolled a cigarette and returned the sack to Valdez, who made one for himself, and the segundo lighted the cigarettes. Valdez stepped back, the cigarette in his mouth, the Remington in his right hand, pointed down.

  The segundo said, blowing out smoke and shaking the match, “Tell me something—who you are.”

  “What difference does it make?” Valdez answered. He looked beyond the segundo to Tanner coming up with his men spread behind him.

  “You hit one yesterday,” the segundo said. “I think five hundred yards.”

  “Six hundred,” Valdez said.

  “What was it you use?”

  “Sharps.”

  “I thought some goddam buffalo gun. You hunt buffalo?”

  “Apache,” Valdez said.

  “Man, I know it. When?”

  “When they were here.”

  “You leave any alive?”

  “Some. In Oklahoma now.”

  “Goddam, you do it,” the segundo said. “You know how many of mine you kill?”

  “Twelve,” Valdez said.

  “You count them.”

  “You better, uh?” Valdez said.

  The segundo drew deeply on the cigarette and exhaled slowly. He was looking at Valdez and thinking, How would you like about four of him? All the rest of them could go home. Four of him and no Tanner and they could drive cattle to Mexico and become rich. And then he was thinking, Who would you rather shoot, him or Tanner? It was too bad the two of them couldn’t trade places. Tanner liked to put people against the wall. This one knew how to do it. He didn’t need a wall. He could kill a man at six hundred yards, and the son of a bitch kept cou
nt.

  “It’s too bad it turns out like this,” the segundo said.

  “Well,” Valdez shrugged. “It will be settled now. It will be finished.”

  The segundo continued to study him. “Why don’t you give him his woman? Tell him you won’t do it again.”

  “It’s not his woman now.”

  The segundo smiled. “Like that.”

  “Sure, it’s up to him. He wants her back, he has to take her.”

  “You think he can’t do it?”

  Valdez shrugged again. “If he tries, he’s dead. Somebody will get me, there are enough of you. But he still will be dead.”

  “He don’t think that way,” the segundo said.

  Valdez held his gaze. “What do you think?”

  “I believe it.” The segundo saw Valdez’s gaze lift and he moved to the side, looking over his shoulder to see Frank Tanner coming toward them. The segundo backed away several more steps, but Tanner stopped before reaching him. He was holding a Colt revolver at his side. A man behind Tanner took his horse, and the rest of the men, five of them, spread out, moving to both sides, keeping their eyes on Valdez. R. L. Davis was next to Tanner, a few feet to his right.

  Tanner was looking at the Erin woman, who had not moved as he approached. He stared at her and his expression showed nothing, but he was making up his mind.

  He said finally, “Come over here next to me.”

  The woman made no move. “I’m all right where I am.”

  “You better start thinking straight,” Tanner said. “You better have something to tell me when we get home.”

  “I’m not going home with you.”

  Tanner took his time. “That’s how it is, huh?” His gaze shifted to Valdez. “She better than a Mexican bitch?”

  Valdez said nothing.

  “If that’s how it is, you better tell that whore next to you go get out of the way.”

  Quietly, Valdez said to her, “Move over a little. Just a little.”

  Tanner waited. “Have you got something you want to say to me?”