Streets of Laredo: A Novel (11 page)

"If there was another building or two here we could call it Crow Town," he said, speaking to his horse. John Wesley Hardin traveled alone. What conversation he made, he made with his horse. He repeated the remark in El Paso, and the name stuck.

Later, with the law after him, John Wesley fled to Crow Town. Two rough brothers from Chicago were sharing Blue Skin's hut. It was kill neither or kill both; fatigued, John Wesley chose to kill neither. He contented himself with a tent the old Basque had left. The soil around Crow Town boiled with fleas, from the thousands of rotting hides, but John Wesley wasn't bothered by fleas. His only problem with Crow Town, the community he had named, was the unavailability of victims. He didn't have to kill every day, or even every month or every year, but he did like to have people handy, in case the killing mood came on.

He left, but returned to Crow Town whenever he needed a respite after some killing spree.

Every year he found more people there--adobes that were smaller and more crude than the one Blue Skin had built, low frame houses and ragged tents.

Finally, there were twelve houses and a little saloon.

An Irishman named Patrick O'Brien owned the saloon. Whiskey deliveries were few and far between. When wagons did arrive Patrick O'Brien stacked the whiskey around his house, to the height of his roof. He had unpredictable customers, and was nervous about running out of liquor.

It was risky, stacking whiskey outside in such country. Patrick slept with four guns in his bed, and often had to run outside and empty two or three of them into the darkness, to protect his whiskey.

In Crow Town, where the sound of cawing could be heard night and day, the tamer types of citizens rarely appeared. Most of those who rode in were bad ones; not a few of them were worse than bad.

Many a traveler had been casually shot down in the street, his death watched only by the crows. The crows rested in the skinny mesquite. Sometimes they walked among the buildings, as if they were people.

The air, even on nice spring days, had a kind of rotten smell, the legacy of thousands of rotting hides.

Behind the town was a low, sandy hill with one skinny mesquite tree on it. Bodies of the dead were casually buried there; most of them would be dug up again, within a day or two, by enterprising varmints.

The most enterprising of the varmints was a giant feral hog, which showed up one Sunday and consumed substantial portions of three bodies. The locals, annoyed by the impudence of the swine, assembled a hasty firing squad and fired a fusillade at it; but, to their amazement, the hog defied them. It didn't die, or even retreat. It kept on eating. In the night it disappeared and was not seen for a month. Then one day, it reappeared and ate an unfortunate mule skinner who had been gored by his own ox. The ox, normally a placid creature, suddenly went insane and killed the mule skinner, though he had coaxed it across the prairies for eight years.

In time, the great pig grew bolder. Sometimes it would walk through town, attended by a contingent of crows, who would flank it or walk ahead of it, cawing. When the pig stretched out to sleep in the hot sun, several crows would attend it, cleaning nits and ticks out of its hide. The poor people who worked in the sandhills feared the pig. They called it the devil pig.

The pig disappeared for long stretches, only to reappear just when people had begun to hope that it had gone forever. The most superstitious of the poor people believed the pig walked down to hell to receive instructions from the devil, entering through a long tunnel that was said to open in the riverbank, just south of Boquillas. Sightings of the pig came from all points of the compass: from as far east as Abilene, as far north as Tascosa, and as far south as Piedras Negras. An old woman who lived near Boquillas claimed to have seen it go into the tunnel that led to hell.

Only the handful of people who stayed in Crow Town ever got used to the crows. Gamblers or outlaws who passed through found their cawing so distracting, they almost went mad. One famous gambler, known throughout the West as Tennessee Bob, became so maddened by the cawing that he pulled his revolver in the midst of a card game and blew his own brains out--and he'd been holding a winning hand, too. Tennessee Bob had played cards successfully from Dodge to Deadwood to Yuma, and he was playing cards successfully in Crow Town. What he couldn't deal with was the cacophony of the crows.

Tennessee Bob's real name was Sam Howard.

Like most of the temporary residents of Crow Town, he had gone there because he had more or less used up the West. His career had taken him from Memphis to Abilene, from Abilene to Dodge City, from Dodge City to Silver City, from Silver City to Denver, from Denver to Deadwood, from Deadwood to Cheyenne, from Cheyenne to Tombstone, and from Tombstone to Crow Town.

Other renegades, whether Mexicans, Swedes, Indians, Irish, or American, took the same route in different order. What they shared was a sense that there weren't too many places left where life was so cheap that the law wouldn't bother trying to preserve it. Why send Rangers, or the army, to clean out a dirty little village in the sandhills, whose residents were so quarrelsome that they could be counted on to eliminate one another themselves, at the rate of one or two a month?

Renegades of all descriptions could reside in Crow Town and feel themselves safe from the law-- they just weren't safe from one another. The few women who came there enjoyed no illusions about their safety. They weren't safe from anyone, and they knew it.

Very few lawmen ventured into the sandhills.

"I doubt even Woodrow Call would go to Crow Town," Billy Williams said, some two months before Maria left. He was discussing the matter in Maria's kitchen with an experienced smuggler named Olin Roy, whose specialty was moving gold across the border, at the behest of corrupt Mexican generals who were afraid they would be robbed by generals yet more corrupt.

Olin Roy was a large man, weighing just over three hundred pounds. He had trouble finding mounts that could carry him swiftly over the distances he sometimes had to cover.

"I expect Call would go to Crow Town if he felt like it," Olin said. "Probably he don't feel like it, though." Maria overheard the conversation. She could not have avoided it, since Billy and Olin were in her kitchen. Olin Roy had once tried to marry her. She had refused him, but he still had hopes.

He and Billy were opposites in one respect: Billy was always drunk, Olin always sober.

Though large, Olin was delicate in his appetites. He could stomach only the mildest of peppers, preferring to diet on raw eggs stirred into a little sugary milk. In his travels, eggs were often unavailable to him. As a concession to the great fondness Maria knew he bore her, she tried to have eggs on hand when he came to visit. She could tell that Olin appreciated such small attentions.

When Billy and Olin were in Ojinaga at the same time, Maria was careful. She was no man's woman, but men were men and she had a lot of trouble with men who became confused about her affections.

Her first husband, Carlos Garza, was so jealous that he would fight any man who turned his eyes in Maria's direction. She was beautiful then; men often turned their eyes; there were many fights. She tried to soothe Carlos, to see that he rose content from their bed, but her love, though she gave it all, was not enough. Even if he had just left her bed, jealousy burned in Carlos's dark eyes. He loved, but he could not trust, and when she became pregnant with Joey he beat her and accused her of taking a lover. He would not accept that the child was his.

For Maria, his distrust brought pain and shock.

She was young, and she had given herself body and soul to Carlos. She could not understand how he could think she would accept another man. She wanted no other man, could not even imagine wanting one. Only Carlos Garza could move her. He was very handsome, and he could move her with a touch or a look. Many times she begged him not to be foolish, not to fight over things that wouldn't happen, over feelings she didn't have. But Carlos was like a deaf man. From him, Maria learned that few men trusted women. Carlos heard only his own fears. Maria's words meant nothing, for to Carlos, women were liars.

When Joey was one year old, Carlos noticed a soldier turn his eyes to Maria.

She was making tortillas, outside in the sun.

The soldier, a fat Federale, was sitting in a wagon, across the street. It was a hot day.

Probably the soldier was hungry, and only wanted a few of the tortillas Maria was making.

But Carlos didn't think the soldier only wanted tortillas. Maria had seen the man look, but her mind was on her task. Carlos was supposed to be carrying water. She thought he was at the river, until she heard the sound of his voice, raised in anger. The soldier had a crowbar, since the Federales had been repairing the telegraph. She saw the soldier strike Carlos once, but he struck so hard that Maria was a widow before she could even run across the street. Carlos had been right about the soldier, too. Three weeks later, he was back in Ojinaga. Maria spat on him in full view of several Federales. She expected to be killed, but in fact, the man was a coward and did nothing. For a year, Maria felt guilty. She felt she had not done enough to make Carlos happy.

If she had done even a little more, perhaps Carlos would not have been so tormented by jealousy. If he had lived, surely in time he would have come to accept that she wanted no other man.

But Carlos died, leaving Joey fatherless and herself a widow. Since then, she had been cautious around males. She treated them carefully, as vaqueros treated bulls. Everyone knew that bulls were at their most dangerous when they fought, and at such times, the loser was more dangerous than the winner.

Maria didn't want Billy and Olin to fight. She valued their experience and their affection and didn't want to lose one of them in a silly fight.

"I don't think either of you know this Woodrow Call," Maria said.

"I know him, but I'll be perfectly happy to leave him alone," Olin said.

The two men fell silent. Mention of Call seemed to remind them of the uncertainty of life, along the border.

"I'll do better than that," Olin added.

"I'd ride about a hundred miles out of my way, to avoid the man." "Didn't you sell Call the horse that killed his boy?" Billy asked.

"No, no," Olin said, wishing the legend of the Hell Bitch would just die.

"Why, I thought, you sold her to Call," Billy said. "That's what everybody thinks." "I did once own that mare," Olin admitted. "At the time, I had no idea Call had a son for her to kill." It was growing dark; great shadows stretched into Chihuahua. The two men talked too much history, too much about things that were past. Bad things had happened to her, too, but she did not like to dwell on them. A certain restlessness took her, when she heard too much about the past. She still liked to laugh, to dance a little in the cantina.

Roberto Sanchez, her last husband, had not been a very good man, but despite that, she missed him. She would have liked to have a husband. She enjoyed being with a man at night, and not just a pistolero or a man of the cantina. She wanted a man who was not so prone to comings and goings, one who would spend months or even years with her; someone whose hands she liked, whose ways she liked. Perhaps this man, if she could find him, would also like her ways, and would welcome the laughter in her. Not all men liked happiness in a woman; they seemed to fear her laughter. Was it only men who were supposed to laugh?

Of her four husbands, only Benito, the third, had laughed with her. Carlos and Juan, her first two husbands, had been too jealous.

Juan was also too violent. Roberto Sanchez had been too restless; he didn't like to stay put. He could not even stay in bed all night, much less stay with her for months. He didn't live in the past, though. Men who lived in the past brought out her restlessness. Life was there, in the house, in the yard, in the town; in the bedroom, in her hands, in her womb. It was not in the past. The bad things that had happened to her had not killed her.

They had not even killed the laughter in her.

She became a little annoyed at Billy and Olin, because they so easily turned their eyes backward. Men were odd. One day they were hard, far too hard; the next day they were soft, far too soft. They were like porcupines: prickly on the outside, but with soft bellies.

Benito, her third husband, had not even been prickly on the outside. He never scolded her, and would never have thought of striking her. His only fault was laziness. Benito would lie in bed all day, looking at her with his big eyes. If she happened to stop in her chores, to pause near the bed, Benito would put out a hand.

"Is that all you can think about?" she asked one day, flattered if a little flustered. "I'm old --why do you want me?" Benito shrugged, and smiled his little-boy smile. He was younger than Joey, Benito--not in years, but in feeling. Joey had never been young. Benito would never have been old, even if he had lived. But Benito got a toothache, a bad one. After a month, the toothache was so bad, Benito could scarcely think. He ceased putting out his hand to Maria, when she stopped near the bed.

Maria wanted him to let her pull the tooth, or let the priest pull it, or the blacksmith, or anyone. But Benito kept shaking off this advice. He had beautiful white teeth and was vain about them. He wanted to keep them all.

"Why, so you will look beautiful in heaven?" Maria asked, vexed by his attitude.