Friends (19 page)

Clete sat by the fire, across from the boy, who was awake, but looked dazed. The man was still out. When first I felt for his heartbeat at his wrist, I thought he'd died. But a heartbeat was still there, real faint and slow.

Clete had his knees drawed up and his arms around his legs, hugging them in. I told him where the shot'd gone through the wagon cover, well above where the woman and child was. Then I said about the dried blood, about how the little one would of had to been dead for hours for all that blood to dry. I was telling the truth, too, not just trying to make him feel better, and I think him hearing that in my voice is what calmed him.

He looked at me a second, looked back into the fire, and then nodded slow. "Then DuShane shot this man and knocked the boy alongside his head. God knows what he did to that woman, but it's clear what he did to the child." His eyes bore into the flames.

I started talking to the boy then, telling him who we was and what we was doing there. I asked him a bunch of questions-his name and where he was from and the like-but he wouldn't answer me. Except, when I asked if the man lying beside us was his pa, he nodded his head. Other than that, he just stared into the fire like my pardner was doing. After a while Clete stood up and walked out to where my horse and the roan was. He led them back in and started getting the gear spread out. After hobbling the horses, he took the lantern and gathered a big pile of chips. All the while I kept talking to the boy, but he still hadn't spoke.

Clete went down to the river and come back with a potful of that chalky water. Once he got a good look at it, though, he tossed it away and went up to the wagon and got some from their side barrel. Before long he had peeled a pile of potatoes and set them to boil with bacon frying in the skillet and a pot of coffee going, too. Smelled damn good, I can tell you.

"What about the woman?" Clete ask when we started to eat.

"I don't know," I said. "She'll be all right 'til morning, I suspect. Maybe something'll occur to us by then. I don't know." I dished the boy some of what we had, but he didn't touch it. He laid on his belly beside his pa and stared into the flames.

"It's good food, son, and you're welcome to it," I told him. "I'll bet you're hungry, ain't you? When was the last time you ate?" I guessed that was the wrong thing to ask him, for he begun to whimper again.

About that time we heard a yowl out beyond the edge of the firelight, and Clete stood up and drew his pistol. It was supposed to sound like a coyote, I guess, but any fool could tell it was a man tryin' to sound like a coyote-and doin' the worst job of it.

"Shit," Clete said, bolstering his Remington and then sitting back down.

"I'm coming in, now," a voice called to us. "Don't you go shootin' at me again, Sheriff."

Well, of course it was Banty Foote. He marched in on them short little bowed legs and stood beside the fire with his arms crossed. "Pretty chilly night," he said in that real quick way of his. "Fire feels good. Who's this boy?"

I waited for Clete to tell him, but he looked like he was pretending Banty wasn't there, so I told him myself what'd happened.

"I'll be dogged!" he said when I finished, and sat right down in the dirt. "Are we goin' after him now, the man what done this?"

"You're not going anywhere!" Clete yelled, causing the boy to fidget and sniffle again. "Not with us, you're not."

Clete looked at me and I tilted my head toward the boy. My pardner lowered his voice after that. "Why don't you git the hell out of here?" he ask Foote.

Banty dug in the dirt with his finger and looked downhearted. "Just wanted to help is all," he said. I thought for a while we was going to have two fellows crying on us. Clete went back to his food, and I offered Banty the plateful I had put out for the boy, for it was plain he wasn't interested in it.

Banty Foote spooned potatoes into his face and kept his eyes on Clete. That little man smacked his mouth louder while eatin' than Stalking Bear ever did, and that's saying something.

I told them the rest of what Crawford told me. What the Captain guessed of where DuShane was from and all. "He told Marsh's scout that you'd killed his brother and that he set out to get you back for it."

Clete thought on that for a minute. "The girl mentioned something like that too. But didn't she say he'd told her it was his
son
I had shot?"

"Yes, I think she did," I told him.

"I wonder which it is?"

"Beats me, but I guess I'd trust Crawford's recollection more than Mandy's. Her lingo is more French than American, and them damn French get the sex of everthing so turned around, I don't wonder they get confused between brothers and sons, too."

"Crawford's a good man," Banty offered. "Acts strange, but he don't miss much."

Clete shook his head and then we just sat quiet. The boy was still awake, though not stirring at all. Banty belched like a cow, stretched himself out on the ground beside the fire, and in a minute he was asleep. I guess he didn't have no bedroll along anyway.

"Then it was me he was after all along," Clete said of a sudden. "I didn't understand why he burned down Nell's house, but I do now. He must have known I stayed there sometimes, and when he saw Jesse go in that night, he thought it was me. Nell got killed because of me, then." He nodded his head slow and the fire glinted in his eye. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and hard as a spike.
"Que
cabrón de mierda.
Wait'll I catch that sonofabitch."

Banty rolled over after Clete said that, and the boy looked more awake than ever. We sat and I listened to the night sounds and smoked my pipe while the fire burned lower. After a while Clete checked the man's breathing and then lay down on his sogans without saying anything, and in a while he was snoring.

I touched the boy's arm and he looked up.

"Ain't you gettin' sleepy yet?" I asked him.

He shook his head.

"Well, I ain't much sleepy myself, but it would be a comfort to hear your voice just once tonight. Want to tell me your name now?"

He shook his head again.

I nodded and rubbed his hair, being careful not to get close to his sore spot. "I know how it is for a young fellow out away from home and a terrible thing like this happens to him, with his family and all. Same thing happened to me when I was about your age." I stopped and relit my pipe.

He looked up again and you could see he was waiting for me to goon.

"Yes, I was coming out from the East with my Ma and Pa and little sister. Just west of the Mississippi River, we was, when a dozen or so Indians jumped us. My Pa killed four or five and I shot one myself. But my little sister must of got scared from all the shooting and run away, for after them braves cleared out, we couldn't find her nowheres. Ma had thought she was under the wagon with my Pa and me, and Pa thought she was inside with Ma. Only, as it turned out, she wasn't neither place. The Indians had took her, for they will do that. We followed them redskins for weeks, long after we knowed we had no chance of catching them, but we kept on after them 'til we got to Texas, and there we stopped.

"That was a long time ago, son, for I ain't no young man anymore. Only thing I can remember about my sister is her name and the color of her hair. It was long and black and hung in ringy curls way down her back. Bright and shiny black in the sunlight, it was. It's hard to lose kin, I know. Often I try to remember what she looked like, my little sister, but all I can recollect is the way her hair looked, black as midnight and shiny as stars. Just that and her name."

The peepers down by the river was raising a ruckus.

"What was her name?" the boy asked.

"Why, it was Amanda, son, but we called her Mandy. Say, your tongue
ain't
broke, is it?"

"My name's Jimmy," he said, and then laid his head down.

I pulled his blanket over his shoulder and he was asleep well before the moon come up.

Clete shook me awake before dawn, just a little strip of gray showing toward the east.

"We got work to do before we can get after him, so we better get started," he said. "I made a pot of coffee. Get yourself awake and start digging a grave." He hunkered down beside the fire and poured us each a cup. "The man died during the night. Guess one hole will do for him and the baby. Those mules are gonna founder if I don't water and feed them soon."

I sat up and drank my coffee still in my bedroll. The boy stirred and opened his eyes before I spoke to him. "Come on, Jimmy. The sheriff needs your help with the team."

Best to keep him busy, I thought. Banty was up and poking at the fire when I went and washed my face in the river and then found the short-handled shovel.

Diggin' a grave's odd work. And making a final bed for somebody ain't as simple as it looks, either. First you need to find a good place. I went up the bank a piece, up on the last bench before the prairie started right. Still wasn't very light, but I could see well enough. I watched Clete unhitch the mules down below, and not long after, Jimmy come and took the lead team from Clete down to the river.

No trees there where I decided on, of course. That woulda been nice, and I
could
of buried him right where we'd slept, under the one big cottonwood that was close by the edge of the river. But it was mucky down there, and I figured he wouldn't like lying in mud 'til kingdom come any better than I'd like digging in it for the next hour. Maybe he'd rest better, too, a little distance off from where he was murdered.

After you have a spot picked out, you've got to keep the size of the person you're putting to rest in mind. Sure, you could dig a hole seven feet long and three feet wide, a grave that would fit anyone. But that's a lot of extra diggin' for nothing, the way I figure it.

The strangest part of digging a grave, I guess, is the way it makes you think about your own dyin'. It's funny how, most of the time, you can keep from considering it. But not when you're digging a hole to put a man in, you can't. At least I can't. Always makes me think on how little I done, so far, with this life I got. Always makes me sweat, too, no matter how chilly it is, and it was, that morning. Even after the sun come up bright and clear.

The diggin' was going real easy, but I was only down about two feet when I heard Banty screeching and hollering. "Come and git it now, you men, or I'll throw it to the pigs!"

When I saw Clete and the boy start toward the river to wash up, I dropped the shovel in the hole and went down, too.

"What's this?" Clete ask after we come up and wiped our hands on our pants and was sitting down to the plates Banty'd filled.

"Why, it's pancakes and bacon. Can't you tell pancakes when you see 'em?" the little man said, his face all scrunched up. "If you don't want 'em, give 'em here. I'll eat 'em …

"No, they look all right,,. Clete said, taking up his fork. "Smell all right, too. Just surprised me, that's all."

"Well, you had flour and you had sody and salt. That's all you need, sody and salt. And flour, a course. You need flour."

"What's this on top, molasses?" I ask.

"He'll, no. You ain't got no molasses in that pack. We'd have molasses right now if I'd a packed it, only I didn't. No, I scorched some sugar in the bacon fat. That's what my ma always done. She died some time ago. Snake bit her." He was smacking his food so loud, eatin' and talking together, you could hardly think of nothing else.

"I expect rn feel snake-bit after I finish these," Clete said. "But they taste all right, rn admit that …

"I'm a good cook. I don't mind cookin'," Banty said, and right away I saw what he was after. "'can handle a gun, too. Shot a man once, but he got away anyhow."

You could tell Clete was thinking something, for just a hint of a smile turned the edges of his mouth up. He didn't say nothing, though. The boy was quiet too, and he was eatin' his pancakes like what he had in mind was to fill up a big hollow space inside, quick a she could.

"I can handle a rifle too," Banty said. "And I can ride fast if I have a good horse." He looked at me and then Clete and then back at me. "Betcha I can ride faster than either of you two," the little man bragged.

"Got no time for a horse race this momin'," Clete said, finishing his bacon. "But you ride fast enough."

"Then why don'tcha let me go along with you men after this man you're chasin?" he ask.

I lit my pipe and drank my coffee, watching Clete close to see what he was up to.

He just shook his head.

"Why not?" Banty asked, looking almost tearful.

Clete shook his head again. "No, you ride all right, and I believe you about shooting straight. But I only take on men who know how to follow orders. To the letter and real quick, without any backtalk or argument. I don't think you could handle that."

"What!" Banty yelled, jumping up. "Why, I can take orders better and faster than any man alive. You ask the Perfesser if I can't! Just you gimme an order an I'll show ya right now."

Clete looked like he was considering the matter real careful. "I don't know," he said after a spell, and took a sip of his coffee.

"Try me out is all I'm askin'. Go ahead, gimme an order!"

"And if you don't do it, you 'II clear out and leave us alone, right?" Clete ask.

"Right!" Banty said, sticking his chin up in the air and folding his arms.

"Well, all right, Clete said, slow and deliberate. "I'll give you three, but if you don't do 'em, or can't-or make a fuss about it you get the hell out of here."

"Yessir, three at a time. Just the way I like 'em."

When Clete stood up he towered over Banty. "Try these on, then. First, wash these dishes and get our gear stowed away good. Then go get that dead child away from that woman in the wagon and wrap it up in a tarp along with that fellow over there. He's the baby's daddy and we're going to bury them together."

Jimmy looked over toward his pa real quick. He must have knowed before then that his daddy'd died, for Clete had covered up his face. Probly knew about his baby brother or sister, too. But maybe it just hadn't sunk in on him yet.