One-Eyed Death Read online

“You do what you have to, Banker. It won’t make a cent’s worth of difference. Those boys are dead. That man is dead. You know what the law says. Law says I’d be in my rights defending myself. Think it’d look good with a blind preacher and his kin up there on the stand in a court? Just get the Hell out, “fore I change my mind.”

  Webley reared his horse, tugging savagely on the bridle. Riding back to join the others. The shootist saw that there wasn’t even any conversation. They’d seen death come out of a clear morning and pluck one of them away into instant death.

  There was a wind among the hills and life was very sweet. None of them wished to die.

  And the wagon rolled on westwards towards its promised land.

  Chapter Six

  “This used to be a Hell of a fine country. You know that, Crow? A Hell of a fine country.”

  They’d camped for the night and Ben Ford was lying in his usual place, close by the small fire, useless legs shrouded in a grey blanket.

  It had taken four days of hard traveling to get deep into the hills, with Crow alternately riding a mile ahead of the wagon, then switching and taking up watch on the rear. His experience told him that the folks from Rosa Cruz had likely taken enough and wouldn’t come out after them again. But there could always be one hot-head, seeking vengeance, coming on and on.

  However, the trail was clear. Ahead and behind. In the four days they’d been pushing on they’d only seen three signs of life. One morning, early, Crow had spotted a large Cavalry patrol, heading across their line of progress, stretched out and moving fast towards the north.

  One evening he’d heard the noise of ponies. Around a dozen he guessed. Sounding unshod, which meant Indians. But they weren’t bothered and he figured it for an ordinary hunting party.

  And during the late afternoon of the fourth day he’d seen tendrils of smoke, curling up from a valley a few miles ahead. Not the faint grey of signal fires, but a column, black and coiling. It was the sort of smoke that the shootist had seen before, from burning buildings. But that might not be so and he didn’t mention it to any of the party. Ben was sleeping fitfully in the back of the wagon at the time so there was no danger of his seeing the smoke.

  Crow decided that they’d move on more slowly the next day to give him more time to scout on ahead.

  “Yes, sir. Fine country. Isn’t that so, Crow?”

  The shootist nodded. The ramrod was slowly drinking himself towards sleep, the way he’d done the last three nights. For some reason the arrival of Crow seemed to have depressed him, maybe seeing in the shootist’s youth and strength a mockery of the helpless cripple that he’d become.

  “I remember those times well. Fought in the War, Crow. Saw them drivin’ old Dixie down. Lost my brother Virgil at Spotsylvania. They surely took the best, Crow. All the best. Bells ringin’. Fires. I’m forty-seven years old. Guess you ain’t thirty yet. Life ahead. Me, it’s over.”

  Most of the Spangels had retired for the night. The Reverend sleeping under the wagon, stretched out stiff and straight, arms at his sides like a soldier at attention. Daniel slept alongside his father, but he tossed and turned, moaning fitfully. Once crying out in a dream of a chair falling down a mountain.

  Mother Lily was sitting on a rock on the far side of the clearing where they were camped for the night. She was playing cat’s cradle with a length of twine, tangling and untangling it around her nimble fingers. Crooning to herself. Ignoring the two men by the fire.

  Daughter Mary hadn’t gone to the wagon to sleep. During the last couple of evenings she had begun to make it clear that she liked Crow. Becoming more and more forward each time they passed or spoke. Now she sat opposite him, quite silent, her eyes invisible behind the spectacles, the glass of the lenses reflecting the small fire that Daniel had built. But the way she sat revealed her feelings.

  Her legs were apart, drawn up under her, so that her chin rested on her knees. She wore calf-high button boots, scuffed at the heels. Her dress was dark green, stained around the hem with trail dirt. But the way she sat drew the skirt up on her legs so that Crow, lying alongside Ben Ford, couldn’t help seeing way up past her knees, the flames casting a crimson glow to the firm expanse of her thighs and the whiteness of her cotton drawers beyond.

  And she’d taken to touching herself.

  Not so that it would be noticeable to anyone else. Just reaching under her skirts every now and again as though she was plagued by an itch. But each time she did it she stared towards the shootist. Once taking her right hand from far up between her thighs, and bringing her index finger to her lips. Sucking it in a blatantly provocative manner that brought a sudden tightening to the front of his breeches.

  Drunk though he was, Ben Ford hadn’t missed the silent byplay and he sniggered, reaching out and patting the shootist on the arm. Beckoning him to listen while he whispered.

  That little lady, friend,” he said. That little lady can be fucked. You know that?”

  Crow straightened up. “Yeah. I know that.”

  “Time was I’d have …” He took another swig at the whiskey bottle. “I was sayin’ “bout the old times.”

  “Go on.” Crow didn’t mind. He’d always been a good listener. Better than he was a talker. Content to lie back in the darkness and listen to the elderly cowboy talking through his life.

  “I recall before the War, when I was a boy. Filled up to overflowing with fire and gall. I traveled round a good while, Crow.”

  “Where?” asked the shootist, seeing that Ford wanted some kind of response.

  “Montana. Pacific coast. Done some loggin’. Rode beefs across Texas. Worked the railroads. Hunted buffalo. Why, I stood once on a bluff overlooking the high plains country and seen a herd go on by that lasted for hours. Must have been thousands on thousands on thousands of them. Brought them down with a fifty Sharps. One day we used one hundred and seventeen bullets, me an’ my partner. Killed us one hundred and fourteen animals. Food for the Chinks layin’ ties.”

  “I done some hunting like that. Maybe “hunting’ isn’t the right word.”

  Ford nodded his agreement. Shifting and trying to get himself comfortable. That’s right. Simple butchery. That’s all it was. But they were good old days, Crow. By God, but I’d give all the money in Spangel’s chest to be eighteen again. To be able to walk out among green trees and sit with a girl by cool waters.”

  Crow leaned back and breathed in the scents of the desert night. Somewhere, way overhead, he could hear the high-pitched sound of bats circling. There’d been a cave he’d once seen, somewhere round Carlsbad in New Mexico, where a vast hole in the ground was home for millions of bats. Dusk’d see them pouring out like smoke, and then back again at dawn. He thought about that for some time while Ben Ford sipped at his whiskey.

  “Had me a girl once. Near the Rockies. Up Leadville way. I was ramrod for a small ranch. Run by her. Widow lady, in her middle thirties. Name was Anny. Anny Denver. Ladiest lady … I was but twenty and she taught me all I ever needed to know ’bout lovin’.”

  Mary Spangel shifted, opening and closing her legs, very casually. Reaching up and taking off her glasses, looking straight at Crow.

  “We used to go skinny-dippin’ in the nights of summer,” said Ben Ford, locked tight into his memories.

  “Her body white and round and smooth. She’d swim to me. I was never strong at keeping up in water. And she’d put her legs about me and hold me close and we’d kiss.”

  “Why didn’t you marry her, Ben?”

  The ramrod sniffed. “Thought of it, Crow. Surely did. Most nights when we laid together in her bed. Bein’ with her was all I wanted. Just havin’ her there. Like havin’ bread when you’re hungered.”

  His voice dropped quieter and he was silent for some minutes. Crow lay still, wondering if he’d fallen into sleep.

  “We’d set a date for a wedding. July first, it was to be. Eighteen fifty-two.”

  “What happened, Mr Ford?” asked Mary Spangel, leaning forward, h
er fingers still gripping the frame of her glasses.

  “She died,” he said, very quietly. His voice wondering, as though he still couldn’t believe that his love was really gone from him.

  “How?”

  “We was swimmin’ in the hole by a small creek. She’ been sayin’ her head pained her. A throbbin’ at the temples and she’d laid down after noon for a siesta. Then she was better after a meal. Spritely. Like herself had … She dived deep and came up close to me. She often did that. You know, Crow. Touchin’ me like a woman does with her man. And I held her in my arms. Kissed her, tastin’ the water on her lips.” Out beyond the fire they all heard a coyote howling at the sailing moon.

  The shootist looked into the fire, not wanting to see the naked sadness on the face of a man he’d come to like and respect in the last five days.

  “She sort of shuddered. Said she was cold. Muttered somethin’ ’bout a black cloud coming down on her. Then she shook once more and her head snapped back like a hanged man. Right back, so the cords in her throat stood out stark in the light of the moon. And she was gone. Dead. Like that. In my arms, Crow. Oh, Jesus Christ, Crow. She just died.”

  He began to sob, his body shaking. The bottle chinked gently among the pebbles as he laid it down. Mary shuffled to him and held him, letting him rest his head on her breasts, while she stroked the back of his grizzled head. Calming him like you would a spooked foal. Crow watched, embarrassed by the show of emotion. One thing that his time with the Indians had taught him was that a man does not weep in that way. But he recognized that Ben Ford’s crippling injury had robbed him of more than the use of his legs. It had taken away his manhood.

  Mary sat with Ben Ford, cradling him until he finally slipped into sleep. Then she moved away from him, putting on her glasses again. Neither she nor Crow had said anything since the ramrod’s outburst. The fire was sinking, the moon moving lower. The shootist figured it had to be close to midnight.

  “Time you went to your bed, Miss Mary. Your Ma went an hour back.”

  “Will you come with me, Crow? We can lie together over yonder, behind those boulders.”

  The invitation didn’t surprise him. But the open manner of it did. It was as though the girl was tired of playing a game. Wanting to get to the result. To bring her desire for him out into the open.

  “I’m sure honored, Mary,” he replied, quietly.

  “But you don’t care for me? I thought that was it. I tried to show you. But because my sight is poor, you think me ugly.”

  “I’m not in the line of giving compliments, Mary. I can see you’re a mighty pretty lady.” He paused. “And some of the things you’ve been try in’ to catch my eye have been real rousing. That’s the truth.”

  “Then you will?”

  “Maybe. Maybe, and that’s all. Not here and now with Ben asleep. Your Ma in the wagon there and the other two close by. If the time gets right and the place goes along as well, then I don’t see why not.”

  The girl stood up, followed by Crow. She came to the shootist and laid her hands on his shoulders, drawing him down towards her. Raising her face so that he could kiss her on the lips. He did so, seeing that she had closed her eyes behind the magnifying spectacles.

  He suddenly felt fingers spidering across the leg of his pants, touching him. Gripping so that he almost gasped out loud. Unable then to control his own reaction to her.

  “Know what, Crow?” she whispered.

  “What, Mary?” he said, knowing the answer. Not ready to argue it.

  “Well, it seems to me that this might be the place and now the time. Isn’t it?”

  Crow was never one to waste time on words.

  Chapter Seven

  She was good.

  Very good.

  Her body was warm and willing. For the teenage daughter of a preacher, even setting aside her near blindness, Mary Spangel had learned tricks that could have earned her good money down Juarez, or out on the coast. She moved fast and hard, so that she seemed to be all over him. Her lips were sucking at the hollow of his neck while her fingers caressed him with a directness that was almost brutal. Then she was on top of him, setting her heels to his body as though he was a troublesome gelding.

  Crow wasn’t about to let a girl use him like that and he arched his back under her, rolling so that she finished flat on her back in the dirt. But they were still linked and he drove down into her, feeling her hips come up to meet him. Her mouth sagged open and the eyes, without her glasses, stared blankly up over his shoulders. Her nails raked at him through his black shirt and she locked her heels into the small of his back, tugging him even deeper between her thighs.

  “Oh, help me, Jesus,” she sighed. “Jesus Christ, let him fuck me good. Oh, God, but that is so good! Yes, Crow. Do me good. Ream out every damned line and furrow of me and sow your seed deep.”

  Crow had once had a whore in Des Moines who had whispered a psalm as he used her. The daughter of a minister who panted out foul language was something else again.

  Of the two he was sure which he preferred.

  The rest of the camp stayed silent, almost as though everyone was waiting and listening. Crow was conscious of the others, sleeping in the wagon and close by the dying fire, but he was too far traveled along the silken road of lust to give a damn.

  And when it was over he felt drained. Sore as well. As if he’d ridden a saddle-galled mustang for an hour.

  Mary rolled away from him, their flesh parting with the slight stickiness of lovemaking. She sighed and fumbled among the stones for her spectacles, putting them on and only then turning her head to look at him. Smiling shyly.

  “You must think me awful, Mr Crow,” she said, doing up the hooks and eyes along the front of her dress.

  “That a question or a statement, Mary?” he replied, buttoning his pants.

  “A question, I guess.”

  “Then the answer is that I don’t think you’re awful. Fact is, you were real good.”

  “Best you’ve had?”

  Crow lay back and stretched like a big cat, throwing out his arms above his head and pushing so hard that his muscles cracked. “Best is a big word.”

  “One of the best?”

  There was a note of entreaty in her voice. “Sure, Mary. I’d say one of the best.”

  “You don’t mind that I can’t see very well and have to wear these…?”

  “Doesn’t signify, lady. It’s the lady, not the clothes that matters.”

  “I’m glad. Very glad. I can see a little better now than I could once. But Daniel’s gettin’ worse and worse. He’s got what Pa’s got.”

  “How’s that again?”

  “Same eye ailment.”

  “Goin’ blind? Full blind?”

  “It’s like lookin’ down a railroad tunnel, is what he says about it.”

  “You mean a kind of tube of seeing?”

  She nodded, the movement making her long hair weave about her shoulders like dark smoke. “Yes. The one eye’s gone. The left.”

  “And?”

  “And the right’s sinkin’ fast. Says that times he can hardly make out anything and he has to keep moving his head to see properly.”

  “He’ll go blind?”

  She nodded again, turning to look at the shootist with concern. “Yes, Crow. Soon. Any day now, he’ll lose that bit of sight. That’s why we have to get the place that my father has chosen.”

  Crow was puzzled. “He’s chosen it already?”

  “No. No, not yet. But he knows that he’ll know it when he sees it.”

  “Could go on forever. And if he don’t see at all, then how will…?”

  She patted him on the arm, with the easy affection that comes close after sexual love. “There’ll be a sign, Crow. That’s what he’s waiting for.”

  “Some Indian tribes think like that.”

  “How?”

  The shootist lay back and looked up at the black veil of the sky, sparkled with diamond-point stars. “They look f
or things like, maybe, an owl at noon. Or the wind and clouds playin’ odd tricks. Then they decide whether it’s a good day for dying or not.”

  Mary Spangel sat up straight, adjusting her glasses over her ears. Pushing back the hair. “Pa’s not like some heathen shaman, Mr Crow.”

  He noticed the “Mister’ but didn’t say anything. Realizing that this was a touchy subject:

  “I think I’d best go and join Ma in the wagon, less’n she gets wakeful and upset.”

  “Do that, Miss Mary.”

  She noticed the “Miss” but didn’t say anything in reply.

  She stood up in a rustle of cotton, smoothing her dress over her thighs. “I ... I surely would like to say that you and...”

  He uncoiled himself, towering over her, feeling a sudden wave of pity for the girl. Tied in to a family of the blind and mad. Unsure of herself, yet giving herself generously to him. He touched her on the side of the face, feeling her cheek wet with tears, glistening in the sinking moonlight.

  “No need for words, Mary. Bein’ friends means that you never have to say anything.”

  “Good night, Crow.”

  “Good night, Mary.”

  He watched her disappear into the gloom, her boots crunching over the dry pebbles. Then he turned to lie down himself, near the glowing remains of the fire. Alongside the still figure of Ben Ford.

  Within a couple of minutes he was asleep.

  The soldiers came on them before sunrise.

  The first pale light of the false dawn was tinting the sky, edging away the black into light blue, shading into an opalescent pink. Crow started awake, immediately alert. Hand reaching for the butt of the Purdey, tucked under his saddle by his head.

  Ben Ford detected the movement and also came out of sleep, drawing his own pistol.

  “What is it, Crow?”

  “Horses.”

  “Comin’ this way? Yeah, yeah I hear them. How many d’you make it?”

  “Three. Shod.”

  “Mexes?”

  Crow sat up, thumbing back on the hammers of the scattergun. “Could be, Ben. Best to get ready. Don’t wake the others.”