Valdez Is Coming

6

Most of the day the woman, Gay Erin, rode behind Valdez as they climbed out of the flatland and across sloping meadows that stretched toward pine timber, in the open sunlight all morning and into the afternoon, until they reached the deep shade of the forest. She noticed that Valdez seldom looked back now. When they had stopped to rest and he stood waiting as the horses grazed, he would look north sometimes, the way they had come, but he stood relaxed and could be looking at nothing more than the view.

Earlier this morning, once it was light, he had looked back. He stopped and looked back for some time as they were crossing flat, open country. When they reached the trees he made her dismount and tied their horses to a dead trunk that had fallen. She watched him walk out of the trees, out across the flats until he was a small figure in the distance. She watched him squat or kneel by a low brush clump and then she didn’t see him again, not for more than an hour, not until the three riders appeared and she heard the gunfire. He came back carrying his shotgun; they mounted again and continued on. She asked him, “Did you kill them?” And he answered, “One. Maybe another.” She asked, “Why didn’t you tie me? I could have run away.” He said to her, “Where would you go?”

They spoke little after that. They stopped to rest in a high meadow and she asked him where they were going. “Up there,” he answered, nodding toward the rock slopes above them.

Another time she said to him, “Maybe you don’t have a natural call to do certain things, but I do.” He smiled a little and told her to go ahead, he wouldn’t look. She stayed on the off side of her horse and didn’t know if he looked or not.

At first she wondered about him, and there were questions she wanted to ask; but she followed him in silence, watching the slope of his shoulders, the easy way he sat his saddle. In time the pain began to creep down her back and into her thighs; she held on to the saddle horn, following the movement of the horse and not thinking or wondering about him after a while, wanting this to be over but knowing he wasn’t going to stop until he was ready.

When they reached the edge of the pine timber he dismounted. Gay Erin went to the ground and stretched out on her back in the shade. She could feel her lips cracked and hard and dirt in the corners of her eyes. She wanted water, to drink and to bathe in, but more than water she wanted to stretch the stiffness from her body and sleep.

She heard Valdez say, “We’re going to move. Not far, over a little bit.” Looking up at the pine branches she closed her eyes and thought, He’ll have to drag me or carry me. She could hear him moving in the pine needles and could hear the horses. She waited for him to come over and tell her to get up or kick her or pull her to her feet, but after a while there was no sound, and in the silence she fell asleep.

When she opened her eyes she wasn’t sure where she was and wondered if he had moved her. The trees above were a different color now, darker, and she could barely see the sky through the branches. She stretched, feeling the stiffness, and rolled to her side. Valdez was sitting on the ground a few feet away smoking a cigarette, watching her. She pushed herself to a sitting position. “I thought we were moving.”

“It’s waiting for you,” Valdez said.

He led her on foot along the dark-shadowed edge of the timber. Off from them, in the open, dusk was settling over the hills. They walked for several minutes, until she smelled wood burning and saw the horses picketed close below them in the meadow. The camp was just inside the timber, in a cutbank that came down through the pines like a narrow road, widening where it reached the meadow and dropping into the valley below.

At times she looked at him across the low fire, at this man who had taken her up a mountain and let her sleep for a few hours and then served her pan bread and ham and peppers and strong coffee. When they had finished he took a bottle of whiskey from a canvas bag. She watched him now. She could see Jim Erin with his bottle every evening, saying he was going to have a couple to relax and pouring a glass and then another glass, smoking a cigar and taking another drink, his voice becoming louder as he talked. Sometimes she would go out, visit one of the officers’ wives, and if she could stay long enough he would be asleep when she got home. But sometimes he wouldn’t allow her to go out and she would have to listen to him as he pretended he was a man, hearing his complaints and his obscenities and his words of abuse; the goddam Army and the goddam fort and the goddam heat and the goddam woman sitting there with her goddam nose up in the air. The first time he hit her she doubled her fist and hit him back, solidly in the mouth, and he beat her until she was unconscious. For months he didn’t take a drink and was kind to her. But he started again, gradually, and by the time he had worked up to his bottle an evening he was slapping her and several times hit her with his fist. She never fought back after the first time. She was married to him, a man old enough to be her father, who perhaps might grow up one day. Sometimes she thought she loved him; most of the time she wasn’t sure, and there were moments when she hated him. But he didn’t change; he beat her for the last time and no man would ever beat her again.

It surprised her when Valdez offered the bottle. “For the cold,” he said. “Or to make you sleep.” She hesitated, then took a sip and handed it back to him. Valdez raised the bottle. When he lowered it he popped in the cork and got up to put the bottle away.

“I’ve never seen a man take one drink,” she said.

Valdez sat down again by the fire. “Maybe it has to last.”

“I was married to a man who drank.” He made no comment and she said, “He was killed.”

Valdez nodded. “I see.”

“What do you see?”

“I mean you were married and now you’re not. What’s your name?”

“Gay Erin.”

He was looking at her but said nothing for a moment. “That’s your marriage name?”

“Mrs. James C. Erin.”

“Of Fort Huachuca,” Valdez said. “Your husband was killed six months ago.”

“You knew him?”

He shook his head.

She waited. “Then you heard about it.”

Valdez said, “You were in Lanoria Saturday when the man was killed?”

“Frank said an Army deserter was shot.”

“No, he wasn’t a deserter. Frank Ta

Gay Erin said, “And the Indian woman, the widow-”

“Was the wife of the man we killed by mistake.”

She nodded slowly. “I see.” She said then, “Frank didn’t tell me that.”

Valdez watched her. “But you’re going to marry him.”

“What difference does it make to you?”

“I like to know how much he wants you – if you’re worth coming after.”

“He’ll come,” she said.

“I think so too. I think he wants you pretty bad.” Valdez placed a stick on the fire and pushed the ends of the sticks that had not burned into the center of the flame. “You know what else I think. I think maybe he wanted you pretty bad when you were still married.”

The flame rose to the fresh wood. He could see her face in the light, her eyes holding on his.

“He knew my husband,” she said. “Sometimes he’d come to visit. Anyone who was at the hearing knows that.”

“And after it you go to live with him.”

She was staring at him in the flickering light. “Why don’t you say it right out?”

“It’s just something I started to wonder.”

“You think Frank killed my husband.”

“He could do it.”

“He could,” the woman said, “but he didn’t.”

“You’re sure of that, uh?”

“I know he didn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I killed him.”