Streets Of Laredo

But it was only temporary, her luck. The next Mox Mox might find her, or the next plague, or a storm or a fire or a war.

Maria had been a kind woman, but her fate had been far from kind--her fate had been hard and her end terrible. It was a warning; but a warning for a condition which had no cure, or of a threat that there was no guarding against.

Lorena put on Pea Eye's coat and stepped out into the cold night. The two men sat a little distance from the house. They had made a small campfire and were staring into it, passing a bottle back and forth. Lorena walked out to the fire.

Both men saw Lorena coming and felt uneasy.

She had been courteous to both of them and had made Billy Williams an ally forever because of her kindness to Maria. Maria would have died even harder had she not known that Lorena would take care of her children.

Billy and Olin had roamed the border country for most of their lives, and both of them remembered Lorena from other days when she had been a beautiful young whore in Lonesome Dove. Both had visited her. Olin Roy remembered the Frenchman, Xavier Wanz, who had loved Lorena so feverishly that he burned his own saloon and himself with it, in his grief when Lorena went north with the Hat Creek outfit. Neither had supposed they would encounter the woman so much later in life, married to the gangly Pea Eye. She was heavier and her fresh beauty had been worn away by life, but she was the same woman: she was respectable and competent by any standard.

She had amputated Woodrow Call's leg and brought him to safety across more than a hundred miles of desert. Few men would have been equal to that task. Now she was walking toward their campfire, in her husband's big coat. In the heat of action and the sadness of the last days, neither man had thought much about their earlier brief co

"Could you spare me a little of your liquor, gentlemen?" Lorena asked. "I'm feeling chill." "Here, ma'am--we've got a fresh bottle," Billy said, handing it to her. "This one ain't been slobbered on." Lorena took the full bottle and drank.

The whiskey burned her throat, but she sat down by the campfire, tucked the coat around her, and drank anyway. Pea Eye's coat was a heavy gray capote, with a hood for rough weather.

Lorena pulled the hood over her head and drank. The men had fallen silent, which a

"I don't mean to impose," Lorena said to them. "You don't have to choke off your conversation just because I'm here." "We wasn't saying much anyway," Billy Williams told her. "We was just chatting about Mary." "Tell me about her," Lorena said. "I didn't have time to get to know her very well." "She was married four times," Billy Williams said. "Three of her husbands got killed, and the other one run off. I never cared much for any of them myself, but it was Mary who took them as husbands, not me.

"Then Joey went bad," he added.

"Was she ever happy?" Lorena asked.

"Mary? Yes, we used to dance a lot," Billy Williams remembered.

"I guess you both cared for her," Lorena said. "Seems like you did, or you wouldn't be here.

Didn't either of you want to marry her?" "Oh, I did," Billy Williams said.

"She wouldn't have me, but we got along anyway." Olin Roy remained silent. His disappointments in regard to Maria were too deep to voice.

"Were any of her husbands good to her?" Lorena wondered.

The two men were silent. They had known little of what went on in Maria's marriages. When she was with Roberto Sanchez, her face had often been bruised; apparently he was rough, though Maria had never mentioned it to either of them. Carlos Garza had been a vaquero, off in the cow camps with other vaqueros. Juan Castro had been cheap; besides her midwifing, Maria had done cleaning for white people across the river when she was married to him. Benito had merely been lazy; he seemed to have no malice in him.

But was Maria ever happy? Both could remember her smile, and the sound of her laughter, and the look on her face when she was pleased as well as when she was displeased. But was Maria ever happy? It was a hard question.

"She had her children," Billy replied. "She was good to her children." Lorena asked no more questions. She felt she had been foolish to inquire. The two men were probably decent, as men went. Both had clearly been devoted to Maria, else why would they be here, reluctant to leave her grave? But how the woman had felt when she closed the doors of her house at night and was alone with one of her husbands and her children, was not something that men could be expected to know. What Maria had felt in the years of her womanhood was lost. Who would know what feelings she had struggled with as she lost four husbands and raised her children? How could men, decent or not, know what made a woman happy or unhappy? She herself had known little happiness until she had persuaded Pea Eye to accept her. Why she felt she might be happy with Pea instead ofwith any of the other men who had sought her hand in the years after Gus McCrae's death was elusive, too. Lorena had thought she'd known what drew her to Pea Eye once, but now, sitting by the campfire in Mexico, she found she couldn't recover her own reckonings in the matter.

She had been right, though, for she had known great happiness with Pea Eye and their children. Probably there was no explaining any of it; probably it had been mostly luck.

The night grew colder, and the stars shone even more sharply in the deep, inky sky. Lorena drank most of the bottle of whiskey. She knew that she would feel like her head was cracking in the morning, but she didn't care. The restlessness she felt had to be conquered; the deep fear inside her had to be dulled. She needed the fire of the whiskey and the numbness that finally came.

Even with the whiskey in her, Lorena could not stop thinking of Maria. She wished she'd had more time with her, time not so filled with violence and pain. There had been no time for the talk of women when there had been so many injured to attend to. Then Maria had become one of the injured herself. She'd had to save her strength for her final request.

Maria's eyes, at the end, haunted Lorena. She wanted to forget Maria's eyes, but she also wanted to know what Maria knew and what she had felt. She wished the two of them could have had even one talk about their lives. She wished it very much, but that wish could not be granted.