Valdez Is Coming: A Novel Read online

  “You expect to fight him?”

  “If he wants a little. We’ll see.”

  “We. There’s one of you.”

  “The ham smells good. Potatoes, fresh vegetables.” He smiled at Polly, then moved his gaze back to Inez. “You got any beef tallow?”

  “I’ll look,” Inez said. “Or maybe you can use ham fat.”

  “I cut lean slices specially,” Polly said. She was frowning, trying to understand why a man would want beef tallow when he had a plate of baked ham in front of him.

  “He doesn’t want it to eat,” Inez said, watching Valdez. “He puts the tallow in the shotgun shell; it holds the charge together so it doesn’t fly all over the place. How far would you say, Roberto?”

  Bob Valdez shrugged. “Maybe a hundred and fifty feet.”

  “Boom, like a cannon,” Inez said. “His own army. Listen, we’ll give you food to take, whatever you want.”

  “I’m grateful.”

  “When are you going?”

  “When Diego brings the horse.”

  “You’re not taking him, are you?”

  “No. One is as good as two.”

  “But not as good as two dozen.”

  “Maybe a little whiskey with the coffee, if you got some.”

  “And some to take for your nerve,” Inez said. “When do you plan to be back?”

  “Two days, three. I don’t know.”

  “So if you’re not back in three days—” Inez said.

  Valdez smiled. “Pray for me.”

  A little while later they watched him leave to begin his war: the Valdez from another time, the Valdez in leather chivarra pants and the long-barreled Walker Colt on his right thigh, carrying his shotgun and a Sharps carbine and field glasses and a big canteen and a warbag for the ham and biscuits, the Valdez no one had seen in ten years.

  He reached the birch forest before dawn, dismounting and leading his buckskin gelding through the gray shapes of the trees to the far side, to the edge of the meadow that reached to the slope where Tanner’s lookouts were stationed. The night was clear and there was no sign of life on the hill. But they would be there, he was sure; how many, he would have to wait and see.

  In the first light he moved along the edge of the thicket to the place where R. L. Davis had crowded his horse against him and pushed him over. Valdez did not leave the cover of the trees; he could see the cruciformed poles lying in the open; he could see, at the ends of the crosspole and in the middle, the leather thongs that had been cut by someone in the darkness, a shape close to him, an arm raising his head to give him water, hands helping him to his feet. He must have been out of his head not to remember; he must have been worse off than he imagined. Three days ago he had been lying here in the sun. Already it seemed as if it had happened in another time, years before. He moved back to a place where he would have a good view of the slopes across the meadow, and here he dropped his gear and settled down to wait, propping his field glasses on his warbag and canteen and lying behind them to hold his gaze on the slope.

  About six o’clock, not quite an hour after first light, three riders appeared against the sky at the top of the slope. They came down into the deep shadows, and shortly after, a single rider passed over the crest going the other way. One at night, Valdez marked down in his mind, and three during the day. Though maybe not all day.

  But it did turn out to be all day. Valdez remained in the thicket watching the slope, seeing very little movement; no one came down the trail or crossed the meadow toward the slope; the lookouts remained in dense brush most of the time, and if he did not know where to look for them through the glasses, he probably wouldn’t have noticed them. At about five o’clock in the evening a rider came over the crest of the ridge, and soon after the three lookouts climbed the switchbacks and disappeared.

  There you are, Valdez said to himself. How do you like it now? It doesn’t get any better.

  He had not eaten all day and had taken only a few sips of water. Now he ate some of the ham and biscuits and a handful of red peppers; he took a sip of the whiskey Inez had given him and a good drink from the canteen. Valdez was ready.

  Crossing the meadow, he let his hand fall to the Walker Colt and eased the barrel in its holster. The stock of the Sharps carbine rested against the inside of his left knee, in the saddle boot; the sawed-off Remington hung on the right side, looped to the saddle horn by a short length of suspender strap. By now the lookout would have seen him and studied him and would be ready. Three of them yesterday came down to meet R. L. Davis, but one up there now would stay put and plan to take him by surprise. Valdez let the buckskin walk, but nudged his heels into its flanks as they reached the rocks and brush and started up the trail.

  Now it comes, Valdez thought. When he’s ready. Any time. He let himself slouch in the saddle, his shoulders moving with the gait of the horse, a rider climbing a trail, a man relaxed and off guard, in no hurry. Surprise me, he said in his mind to the lookout. I’m nothing to be afraid of. Come out in the open and stop me. I could be one of your friends.

  He was a little more than halfway up the slope when the rider appeared, fifty yards and three switchback levels above him. Valdez pretended not to see him and came on, rounding a switchback and reaching an almost level stretch of the trail before the man called out in Spanish, “Enough!”

  The Mexican. Valdez recognized the voice and, as he looked up now, the shape of the man on his horse—brown man and brown horse against the evening shadows of the brush slope. The Mexican came down the trail toward him, stopping and coming on again, the sound of his horse’s hooves clear in the stillness, reaching the level above Valdez, then tight-reining, his horse moving loose shale as he came down to the stretch of trail where Bob Valdez waited. The Mexican stopped about fifty feet away, facing him on the narrow ledge of the path.

  “I thought it was you, but I said no, that man carries a cross on his back.”

  “I got tired of it,” Valdez said.

  “Somebody found you, uh?”

  “Somebody.”

  “You had luck with you that time.”

  “If people help you,” Valdez said, “you don’t need luck.”

  “That’s it, uh? I didn’t know that.”

  “Sure, like you and me,” Valdez said. “We can be friends if we want. We talk awhile. I give you a drink of whiskey. What do you think about something like that?”

  “I think I see a lot of guns,” the Mexican said. “You come up here to talk and you bring all those guns?” He was at ease, smiling now.

  “This little thing?” Valdez raised the cutoff Remington in his right hand, his fingers around the neck of the stock, the stubby barrels pointing straight up. “You think this could hurt somebody? It’s for rabbits.”

  “For rabbits,” the Mexican said, nodding. “Sure, there are plenty of rabbits around here. That’s what you come for, uh, to hunt rabbits?”

  “If I see any maybe. No, I come to ask you to do something for me.”

  “Because we’re good friends,” the Mexican said.

  “That’s right. As a friend I want you to go see Mr. Tanner and tell him Valdez is coming.”

  The Mexican was silent for a moment, his head nodding slightly as he studied Valdez and thought about him. “You come to see me,” the Mexican said then. “How do you know I’m here?”

  “You or somebody else,” Valdez said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You mean me and somebody else. Somebody over in the rocks behind you.”

  “I’ll tell you something,” Valdez said. “I’ve been here all day. I saw three of you come and one of you leave. I saw one of you come and three of you leave. There’s no somebody else in the rocks—there’s just you in front of me. That’s all.”

  The Mexican watched him, unmoving. “You’re certain of that? You’d bet your life on it?”

  “It’s on the table,” Valdez said.

  The Mexican grinned. “What is this kind of talk with two friends? You wa
nt me to go tell him something? All right, I tell him. Put the rabbit gun down.” He lifted his reins and began sidestepping his horse to turn around on the narrow trail. Looking at Valdez again, he said, “You wait here, all right? I go tell him what you say and then I come back and tell you what he say. How is that?”

  Valdez nodded. “I’ll be here.” He lowered the shotgun, resting it across his lap.

  “Sure, stay right there. It don’t take me any time.”

  The Mexican turned in his saddle and started away, his back to Valdez until he reached the end of the ledge and kicked his horse up over the shale at the switchback, and now, on the level above Valdez and seventy or eighty feet away, came back toward him.

  Valdez’s right thumb eased back both hammers, his finger curled inside the guard and felt the tension of the first trigger. The Mexican was spurring his horse now, kicking it to a gallop up the low angle of the trail, holding the reins in his left hand. Valdez saw nothing but the Mexican coming and it was in his mind that the man would go past him and suddenly turn and fire from behind. But thirty feet away closing to twenty, he saw the Mexican’s right hand come up with the revolver and there it was, right now, the Mexican hunched low in the saddle, screaming Aiiiii for the horse or for himself, the revolver across the horse’s mane, the man offering only his left leg and side and shoulder, but it was enough. Valdez brought up the barrels of the Remington from his lap, and with the ten-bore explosion close in front of him, the Mexican came out of his saddle, flung back over the horse’s rump, his revolver discharging as he struck the ground, and the buckskin beneath Valdez throwing its head and trying to dance away from the man, and loose shale coming down the slope at them. The Mexican rolled to his back almost beneath the buckskin, his clothes filmed with fine dust, a dark, wet stain spreading from his side down over his thigh. His eyes were open and he had his left arm tight to his side.

  “How do you feel?” Valdez asked.

  The Mexican said nothing, staring up at him with a dazed expression.

  Valdez dismounted and went to his knees over the man, raising his arm gently to look at the wound. The shotgun charge had torn through his side at the waist, ripping away his belt and part of his shirt and leather chaps.

  “You should have this taken care of,” Valdez said. “You know somebody can sew you up?”

  The Mexican’s eyes were glazed, wet looking. “What do you put in that thing?”

  “I told you, something for rabbits. Listen, I’m going to get your horse and put you on it.”

  “I can’t ride anywhere.”

  “Sure you can.” Valdez lowered the Mexican’s arm and gave his shoulder a pat. The Mexican winced and Valdez smiled. “You ride to Mr. Tanner, all right? Tell him Valdez is coming. You hear what I said? Valdez is coming. But listen, friend, I think you better go there quick.”

  5

  “He’s dying,” the segundo said. “Maybe before tonight.”

  The Mexican was on his back at the edge of the loading platform where they had taken him off his horse and laid him on his back. His eyes looked up at the segundo and at Frank Tanner standing over him. He could hear the people in the street, but he did not have the strength or the desire to turn his head to look at them. He heard the segundo say he was dying and he knew he was dying, now, as the sun went down. He was thinking, I should have gone past him and turned and shot him. Or I should have shot him as he came up, before he saw me. Or I could have gone higher and used the rifle. He wished he could begin it again, do it over from the time Valdez started up the trail, but it was too late. He could see Valdez raising the gun, the blunt double barrels looking at him; he could see Mr. Tanner looking at him, the mouth beneath the moustache barely moving.

  “What else did he say?”

  The Mexican who was dying stared up at Mr. Tanner, and the segundo said, “Valdez is coming. That’s all.”

  “How do we know it’s the same one?”

  “It’s his name.”

  “There are a hundred Valdezes.”

  “Maybe, but it must be the same one,” the segundo said. “You said he killed the Negro with a shotgun.”

  “A farmer gun,” Tanner said.

  “I don’t know,” the segundo said. “The way he used it.”

  Tanner looked up from the Mexican, his gaze lifting beyond the square, beyond the adobes to the ridge of hills in the distance, to the cold red slash of sky above the shadowed slopes. This Valdez killed one of his men up there and said he was coming. For what? It couldn’t be to help any dead nigger’s Indian woman. He couldn’t come in and pull a gun to get money. He’d never get in or out. Then what was he doing? Who was he?

  The segundo followed Tanner’s gaze to the hills. “He’s gone. He wouldn’t be there waiting.”

  “Send somebody and make sure.”

  “He could be anywhere.”

  “Well, goddam it, you’ve got people who read signs?”

  “We’ve got some, sure.”

  “Then send them,” Tanner said. “I want people all over those hills, and if he’s there I want him brought in, straight up or facedown. I don’t care. I want some men sent to Lanoria to look every place he might be and talk to anybody knows him. I want a sign put up on the main street that says Bob Valdez is a dead man and anybody known to be helping him is also dead. You understand me?”

  “We start the drive tomorrow,” the segundo said.

  Tanner looked at him. “We start the drive when I tell you we start it.”

  The man lying on his back dying, with the wet stain of his blood on the platform now—thinking that this shouldn’t have happened to him because of the life in him an hour ago and because of the way he saw himself, aware of himself alive and never thinking of himself dying—looked up at the sky and didn’t have to close the light from his eyes. He saw the beard on the segundo’s face and the under-brim of his straw hat, and then he didn’t see the segundo. He saw Mr. Tanner’s face and then he didn’t see Mr. Tanner anymore. He saw the open sky above him and that was all there was to see. But the sky wasn’t something to look at. If he wasn’t on the hill tonight he would be in the adobe that was the cantina, with the oil smoke and the women coming in, lighting a cigar as he looked at them and feeling his belly beneath his gunbelts full of beef and tortillas, bringing a woman close to him and drinking mescal with his hand on the curve of her shoulder, touching her neck and feeling strands of her hair between his fingers. But he had done it the wrong way. He should have looked at the three guns on the man and known something. But he had thought of the man as he had remembered him from before, against the wall and with the cross on his back, and he had listened to the man talk even while he planned to kill the man, being careful not being careful enough, not giving the man enough. He should have thought more about the way the man stood at the wall and watched them shoot at him. He should have remembered the way the man got up with the cross on his back and was kicked down and got up again and walked away. Look—someone should have said to him, or he should have told himself—the man wears three guns and hangs a Remington from his saddle. What kind of man is that? And then he thought, You should know when you’re going to die. It should be something in your life you plan. It shouldn’t happen but it’s happening. He tried to raise his left arm but could not. He had no feeling in his left side, from his chest into his legs. His side was hanging open and draining his life as he looked at the sky. He said to himself, What is the sky to me? He said to himself, What are you doing here alone?

  “Ask him if he’s sure it’s the same one,” Tanner said.

  The segundo stepped close to the Mexican again. He knew he was dead as he looked at him, though the man’s eyes were open, staring at the sky.

  The Mexican had reached the village, his head hanging, letting the horse take him, but he seemed to be still alive as he entered the street between the adobes.

  You can die any time after you tell them, Valdez had thought, watching through the field glasses at the top of the trail. He
had nothing against the man except a kick in the back and the certainty the man had wanted to kill him. He knew the man would die, and it would be better if he did; but he didn’t wish the man dead. It would happen, that was all.

  Soon they would come out. They would come out in all directions or they would come strung out across the graze toward the trail into the hills. As the Mexican had reached the adobes, Valdez had climbed higher, off the trail now, leading the buckskin up into the rocks. From here he watched the three riders coming first, letting their horses out across the open land. They came up through the ravines and went down the switchbacks on the other side, not stopping. Three more came behind them, but not running their horses, taking their time. They climbed over the trail looking at the ground; coming to the place where Valdez had shot the Mexican they dismounted.

  There were others coming out from the village, fanning out, not knowing where they were going. They were nothing. The three looking for his sign were little better than nothing; they had less than an hour of light and no chance of catching up with him. He counted seventeen men who had come out of the village. There would be others with the herd and perhaps others somewhere else. There was no way of knowing how many still in the village. There was no way of knowing if Tanner had come out or was still in the village. He would have to go there to find out. And if Tanner was not in the village he would have to think of another way to do it and come back another time. There was no hurry. It wasn’t something that had to be done today or tomorrow or this week. It could be done any time. But you’d better do it tonight, Valdez said to himself, before you think about it too much. Do it or don’t do it.

  Do it, he thought. He took a sip of the whiskey and put the bottle back in the warbag that hung from his saddle.

  Do it before you get too old.

  He took the reins of the buckskin and began working down through the rocks toward the village. He would circle and approach from the trees on the far side, coming up behind the burned-out church.