Streets of Laredo: A Novel (20 page)

Lorena let him be for three weeks. She had days when she didn't concentrate so well, either.

Sometimes, she forgot things too, or did them badly, or just felt lazy. She didn't fret that much about human inconsistence, for she was human, and inconsistent herself.

But after a time, Pea's distractedness began to irritate her. They all had their work; she wanted him to do his, as she did hers. Hard work was the basis of their life. In the past, when Pea had gone off with Call, she and Clarie had worked harder than ever, so they would still have a life and a farm when Pea got back. They did well, too.

They couldn't do all the field work, but otherwise, they kept things going so well that sometimes, it took a week or two to adjust to having Pea back.

None of the stock died, the barn didn't burn down, and the essential things got done.

Picking up the slack when Pea Eye was gone was one thing; having to pick it up when he was there was vexing. Even more vexing was the cause of his distraction: he wished he had gone with Captain Call.

Lorena stepped outside, in the cutting wind, and repeated herself.

"Now you wish you'd gone, don't you?" she said again.

"I wish the Captain hadn't gone," Pea Eye said. "I wish he'd quit." "Quit and do what?" Lorena asked. "He doesn't know how to do anything but kill." "That ain't fair, Lorie," Pea Eye said. If there was one thing he hated to do, it was argue with Lorena, his wife, about Captain Call, his old commander. Yet that was exactly what he was doing, and in a cold wind, too.

"It is true," Lorena said. "Maybe in the days of the Indian troubles there was a need for a man like him." "You know there was. Look what Blue Duck did, and he was just one man," Pea Eye said.

"I don't need to remember what Blue Duck did," Lorena said. "I taught myself to forget it. Clara taught me about forgetting things like that." "Why, he never bothered Clara," Pea Eye said. He, too, tried not to think about the terrible time when Blue Duck, one of the worst outlaws ever to terrorize the plains, had kidnapped Lorena. Gus McCrae had rescued her and she had survived; she had recovered, and become his wife. What had happened with Blue Duck was the kind of thing that happened to people all over the frontier, in those days. He himself had fought over twenty engagements with Indians, and the first one had frightened him the most. It was known to locals as the Battle of the Stone Houses. The Indians fired the grass and stole the Rangers' horses, putting them afoot in territory where it was easily possible to starve. They hadn't starved, but Pea Eye had been a little deaf in his left ear ever since, the result of a terrified Ranger firing his rifle into the smoke, when the smoke was so thick he was unaware that Pea Eye was kneeling only a yard away.

Those had been hard times. Without the Captain's and Gus's leadership, Pea Eye doubted that he would have been alive to try dirt farming on the plains.

Clara Allen, though, lived in Nebraska. So far as he knew, she had never been taken by anyone as bad as Blue Duck.

"Clara has things to forget, too," Lorena insisted. "There's other kinds of bad things besides what happened to me. All three of her boys died. We got three boys. How would we be if all three of them died?" "Oh, Lord, don't even mention it," Pea Eye said. "Let's get back in the house." He felt chastened. Of course, losing children was worse than being half deafened in a fight; the thought of his children dying was not something he even wanted to let his mind approach. Lorie, as usual, was right. Life was hard for women, too, even though they didn't often have to go into battle.

"Clara has more to forget than I do," Lorena said, saddened by her own statement and by the memory of Clara's kindness--and Clara's sadness, which, now that Clara was older and had seen her girls marry, only seemed to sit on her the more heavily, judging from the letters she wrote Lorena. At least Clara loved horses, and had her herd to work with.

"If I was to lose three children, I'd give up," she told her husband. "If I even lost one child, I might give up. But Clara lost all her boys, and she didn't give up. And everything she did for me she did after her grief." "I wasn't saying anything bad about Clara," Pea Eye said. "I guess if it hadn't been for her, we might not have come together, and I wouldn't have none of this. I'm obliged to Clara, and I always will be. I didn't have nothing but the clothes on my back, and she helped me. I ain't the kind of man who forgets the folks that helped him.

"It's just that Captain Call is one of the folks who helped me," he said. "Now he came asking for my help, and I didn't go. I can't not feel that's wrong, even though I know I'd feel wronger if I went." "Not wronger--more wrong," Lorena corrected.

All of a sudden, without her wanting it or even expecting it, tears flooded her eyes, tears of anger and hurt. It would never be finished, the trouble over Call, not while the Captain was alive, it wouldn't.

"Go!" she said, vehemently. "Go! I want you to. I'll never really have you while he's alive, and neither will the children. Go! And if you get killed, good riddance!" Pea Eye looked at her, stunned.

"I don't want to go," he said. "I told you why and I told the Captain why. Since we been married, I ain't really wanted to go." "Haven't really wanted to go!" she corrected him, again. "Haven't!" Pea Eye just looked at her, bewildered.

He saw her tears and her anger, but didn't really understand that she was trying to correct his grammar.

"I didn't go," he pointed out. "I didn't go. I didn't want to, neither. It's just that I feel bad for the Captain. I can't help it." Lorena turned away. It was a subject she was sick of. She didn't speak another word to Pea, before leaving for school. But the sad look in his eyes, when she and the children left, made her feel sorry all day, and as soon as she got home she went down to the barn, where she found him trying to straighten a horseshoe. He was not that good with tools, Pea wasn't. Clarie could often fix things that left Pea Eye at a loss.

But seeing him holding the shoe in his hand--it seemed to Lorena that he was just making it more bent-- touched her. He was not mechanical, or even very competent physically. It was a wonder he had survived, in a place where physical competence was so important. Yet his very lack of skill in areas where most frontiersmen excelled, moved her. It always had. Pea Eye was a man she could do things for, and he would let her do things for him.

He accepted her instruction gratefully, whereas most men she had tried to instruct, in even small, unimportant matters, had usually bristled and become angry; in some cases, even violently angry. But Pea Eye had no violence in him, and he surrendered meekly and tried to pay attention when she or Clarie was trying to show him how to do some simple task.

"I didn't mean that about good riddance if you didn't come back," she said. "I'm sorry I said it. I was just mad." When Lorena apologized to him, which she did almost every time she got mad at him, and she got mad at him fairly often, Pea Eye felt even more unhappy. Lorena oughtn't to be having to apologize. In his eyes, Lorie was never wrong. If they disagreed, he was the one who was wrong. In the matter of the Captain, he had to feel doubly wrong: in relation to Lorena and his family, if he went; in relation to the Captain, if he didn't.

But this time, it seemed, he felt even worse.

The Captain had looked old, when they met by the train. In fact, the Captain was old. He oughtn't to be chasing bandits, at his age. Of course, ordinary bandits, of which there were a great many still running loose in the West, would give the Captain no trouble, even at his age.

It was just that the Garza boy didn't sound like an ordinary bandit. Pea Eye had run into Charles Goodnight while at the blacksmith's in Quitaque, and Goodnight had been startled to see him.

"Thought you went with Call to run down the Garza boy," he said, looking gruff.

"No, my family's got too big," Pea Eye said. Charles Goodnight was a stern fellow, even when he wasn't being gruff. Being even slightly in his disfavor was not comfortable.

"I've got a new little one, and my wife has to teach school," Pea said, though he felt explanation was hopeless. All the good reasons he could muster for not going with the Captain weren't likely to be good reasons to Mr. Goodnight.

He would doubtless view them as the Captain had-- excuses, made by a man who had no stomach for conflict, anymore.

"I don't care to know the details," Goodnight said, looking critically at the hoof of a horse that had just been shod.

"Well, the Captain went away, with the man from the railroad," Pea explained. "That's a young boy he's after. I doubt he'll give the Captain much trouble, the young ones never do." "You're scarce on your facts," Goodnight said, lifting the hoof so high that the horse almost fell over. Goodnight was a big man. Though old, he could still lift most of a horse, if it was necessary.

"What facts?" Pea Eye asked. "We don't hear that much news, out at the farm." "They estimate Joey Garza has killed over thirty men, and that's just the ones who've been found," Goodnight said. "There may be more who haven't been found and never will be found. He shoots a German rifle with a telescope sight. They say he can kill at five hundred yards, which is farther than most people can see. Half the line riders west of the Pecos may be dead, for all we know. Who's going to find a line rider, if he's shot fifty miles from the bunkhouse? Who would even miss one? Line riders don't come back half the time, anyway." Pea had seen rifles with telescope sights. They had been available for many years.

But they were too slow for most of the rangering action, and so he had never fired one. The notion that a man could be killed at five hundred yards, other than by a freak shot such as the famous one Billy Dixon had made during the Adobe Walls fight, was difficult to grasp. Most of the killing he had seen had taken place at distances under thirty yards, and in many cases, under twenty yards. Five hundred yards was about the distance from Lorie's schoolhouse to the Red River. He himself could see a bull, or a buffalo, at that distance, but that didn't mean he could hit it if he shot at it.

"Good Lord, I hadn't heard any of that," he told Goodnight.

"You ought to have gone with your Captain," Goodnight said bluntly. "This is a time when he might need an experienced man." "Well, I swear," Pea Eye said. He felt bad in his stomach, suddenly. Mr.

Goodnight was probably right. He should have gone.

"I guess the Captain will manage," he said, guiltily.

"In my opinion, Woodrow Call is a fool, to be pursuing young killers at his age," Goodnight said. "I'm his age, and I ain't pursuing young killers." Pea Eye was silent. His sense of guilt was swelling within him. He had become sick at his stomach, just from the weight of the old man's displeasure.

"Is he that dangerous, this boy?" Pea asked.

"The whole Comanche nation would take a year to kill thirty men, and that would be in a good year, too," Goodnight replied, looking at Pea Eye solemnly.

Then, as if suddenly weary of his thoughts, or perhaps even of thinking, Goodnight set the gelding's foot down, and mounted him.

"There's always a time when you don't win," he said. "With me, it's lawyers. I've never won against any lawyer, not even the dumb ones. But lawyers just rob you legally. They don't shoot German rifles with telescope sights." Pea Eye had met only two lawyers.

One of them lived in Quanah and had drawn up the deed when he and Lorena bought the farm.

"There's always a trip you don't come back from," Goodnight said. He turned his horse, as if to leave, and then turned back again, stood up in his stirrups, reached in his pocket and found several coins, which he handed to the blacksmith.

"Were you just going to let me ride off without paying you?" he asked the young blacksmith.

"Yes, sir," the blacksmith, Jim Peeples, replied. It would never have occurred to him to ask Charles Goodnight for money.

"Well, that would have been a damn nuisance," Goodnight said. "Then I'd have had to ride the whole way back to pay you. If you want to thrive in business, you better learn to speak up." "Yes, sir," Jim Peeples said, terrified. He had never supposed Charles Goodnight would speak to him at all, much less lecture him. It was a little like being lectured by God, or at least, by the prophet Moses.

Jim Peeples was a Baptist. He read the Bible every night, and much of Sunday, too. He didn't really think he had a clear picture of how God looked, but he did think he could imagine the prophet Moses fairly accurately. In Jim Peeples's opinion, Moses had looked a lot like Charles Goodnight.

Goodnight looked down at Pea Eye. The man had made a remarkable walk, nearly a hundred miles, naked, through the Cheyenne country to find Call and bring him to where his wounded partner, Augustus McCrae, lay dying. It was a great thing, in Goodnight's view, that walk. Not too many men, in his experience, had achieved a great thing, even one. Very few ever achieved more than one, he knew. He had led men himself, many men. Men as faithful as Pea Eye had been to Call had served with him until they fell, and the best of them had fallen. Goodnight was a married man himself, but had no children. He had always wondered what it meant, to have offspring. How would it affect his leadership, his ability to go and keep going, his attitude toward the dangers of the trail? It hadn't happened, but he didn't suppose it would have simplified matters if he had. In a time of danger, he had sometimes thought of his wife, but he always thought of his men. He did not worry too much about his wife. He had never supposed himself to be a very good husband; he had always been too busy. His wife was an able woman, and would probably be happier with someone more settled, if something happened to him. But he had never had to worry about children, and the man who stood before him did have to worry about children.