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They placed a mesquite pole across his shoulders that extended almost a foot on either side beyond his outstretched hands and tied it with leather thongs to his wrists and neck. They placed another pole down the length of his back, from above his head to his heels, and lashed this one to the crosspole and also around his neck and body. When this was done the segundo told him all right, stand up.
Valdez could not press his hands to the ground. He raised his head, turning it, and pushed his forehead against the hardpack, arching against the pole down his spine, straining the muscles of his neck, and gradually, kicking and scraping the ground, worked his knees up under him.
“The other one didn’t get up so quick,” the segundo said.
Valdez was on his knees raising his body, and he was kicked hard from behind and slammed onto his face again.
“This one don’t get up either,” the Mexican said.
Valdez heard Ta
“That way,” the segundo said, nodding across the square. “The way you came.”
“My horse,” Valdez said.
“Don’t worry about the horse,” the segundo said. “We take care of.”
There was nothing more to say. Valdez turned and started off, hunched over, raising his eyes and able to see perhaps twenty feet in front of him, but not able to hold his gaze in this strained position.
The segundo called after him. “Hey, don’t fall on your back. You’ll be like a turtle.” He laughed, and some of the others laughed with him.
Frank Ta
“You fixed him,” R. L. Davis said.
Ta
“Listen,” R. L. Davis began to say.
Ta
R. L. Davis squinted up at him. “I didn’t mean it that way. I come here to work for you.”
Ta
“You need a gun, I’m your man.”
“I didn’t see you hit anything the other day.”
“Jesus Christ, I wasn’t aiming at her. You said yourself just make her jump some.”
“Are you telling me what I said?”
“I thought that’s what it was.”
“Don’t think,” Ta
“Hell, you can always use another man, can’t you?”
“Maybe a man,” Ta
“Try me out. Put me on for a month.”
“We’ll put some poles on your back,” Ta
“I was just asking,” R. L. Davis lifted his reins and flicked them against the neck of his sorrel, bringing the animal around and guiding it through the group of riders, trying to take his time.
Ta
The woman, Gay Erin, who had been married to the sutler at Fort Huachuca and had been living with Frank Ta
She said, “Frank?” and waited again.
Now he looked around and came over to her, taking his time. “I didn’t know you were there,” he said.
She kept her eyes on him, waiting for him to come close. “I don’t understand you,” she said.
“I don’t need that boy. Why should I hire him?”
“The other one. He asks you a simple thing, to help someone.”
“We won’t talk about it out here,” Ta
Upstairs, in the office that had been made into a sitting room, Gay Erin looked out the window. She could see R. L. Davis at the end of the street; the hunched figure of Bob Valdez was no longer in sight.
“You better keep up here from now on,” Ta
She turned from the window. “And how long is that?”
“I guess as long as I want.” Ta
“Or sit here,” the girl said.
He looked up at her. “What else?”
“If you say sit I’m supposed to sit.” Her expression and the sound of her voice were mild, but her eyes held his and hung on. “No one can be that sure,” she said. “Not even you.”
“Well, you’re not going to leave,” Ta
“Whatever I have,” the girl said, “as your woman.”
“Aren’t I nice enough to you?”
“Sometimes.”
“Take what you get.”
“Sometimes you act like a human being.”
“When I’m in my drawers,” Ta
“You had them on outside.”
“You bet I did, lady.”
“He was trying to help a woman who’d lost her husband; that’s all he was doing.”
“And I’m helping one already,” Ta
“Frank, send someone to cut him loose.”
Ta
You’ve looked at the ground all your life, Valdez thought at one point. But never this close for so long.
The pain reached from the back of his neck down into his shoulders. He would try to arch his back, and the pole, with a knot in it, would press against his head and push his hat forward. The hat was low and stuck to his forehead and sweat stung his eyes. He told himself, The hell with it; don’t think about it. Go home. You’ve walked home before.
God, but he had never walked home like this. The ground across the grazing land was humped and spotted with brush, but he had little trouble with his footing. No, God, he could see where he was going all right. He could hear Ta
A mile across the grazing land and then up into the foothills, following a gully and angling out of it, climbing the side of a brush slope, not finding the trail and taking a longer way to the top, trying to look up to see where he was going with the pole pressed against his head. He couldn’t go straight up. He couldn’t lose his footing and fall backward on the crossed poles. He remembered what the segundo had said about the turtle, and at that time he had pictured himself lying on his back in the sun of midday and through the afternoon. No, he would take longer and he wouldn’t fall. It was the pain in his legs that bothered him now; it turned his thighs into cords and pulled so, as he neared the top, that his legs began to tremble.