Desperadoes

Miss Moore had been drawing in charcoal pencil on heavy rag paper a picture of fruits on a plate. Bob bent over it and so did the others. ‘Eugenia did that freehand,’ he said. Bryant said, ‘I think you’ve captured it, Miss Moore.’

Bob sat down on the floor next to his woman, tugged off his boots, and wadded his socks inside. Eugenia wore a white nightgown and her nipples showed dark underneath. Bob told McElhanie to blow out the coal-oil lantern, which he did, needless to say, and the only light in the room was orange and thrown across our faces by the fire. ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ I said.

Newcomb said, ‘You must have music in ya, Emmett, Syne I sure ain’t heard any come out yet.’

McElhanie snickered.

My brother draped his arm over the woman’s shoulder and put his hand upon her breast. She whispered to him, ‘That’s nice.’

The six of us drank beer and ate hot corn on the cob; then Bob licked his fingers and saw Bryant across the room. ‘How much money you got in your pockets?’

Bryant snuffed and tossed his corn cob out the raised window.

‘What kind of shape you in, Bitter Creek?’

‘I can’t even see the back of my neck.’

Bob turned to Eugenia. ‘Shall I tell them?’

‘If you want.’

He said, ‘Miss Moore and I have been turning over in our heads a major money-making scheme.’

Then he went on to explain that they’d decided to hold up a Mexican cantina located farther south between Silver City and Santa Rita in a town so small he forgot its name. The buildings there were only a half dozen or so and populated by mine laborers and immigrants and conquered people. But Eugenia had reconnoitered and counted more than three thousand dollars on the gambling tables on a typical Saturday night. ‘And here’s the bonus: the house cheats. A gang can grab the cash in five minutes and have almost everybody on their side; all we’d have to worry about is the few scrub Mexicans who want their two dollar winnings back. The only law around is Canty and Eugenia’s going to deal with him.’

There was silence as the others chewed the idea; then McElhanie proposed, ‘How about a “Hip hip hooray”?’

‘Siddown,’ said Blackface Charley Bryant.

The gang rode out of Silver City on Saturday afternoon. Miss Moore was not with us. We did not ride at all hard for it was still blazing hot in the desert and we wanted our animals rested. And we tied up in the town at dusk and sat on straw mats in a Chinese restaurant. We could hear the cantina music as we ate. McElhanie said, ‘The band has a rousing tempo, don’t it?’ Nobody commented. Bob ordered five identical meals for the gang and none of us much complained, being somewhat fearful of Chinese cooking. It turned out to be clear celery soup with amber grease floating in it. Then we had something with bean sprouts and white roots and crumbly sheepshead fish still gritty from the river.

We drank green tea until eight and then crossed the wide street of the mining town, our irons big under our slickers. We opened two wooden doors with leaded stained-glass windows. Inside, the cantina was long as an alley and blue with tobacco

smoke, with waxed board floors and a green tin fleur-de-lis ceiling and a loud Mexican orchestra playing on the stage at the very end. At the mahogany bar were miners in soot-black clothes and cowboys with great mustaches and big-roweled spurs and sunburns up to their eyes. They each had a boot up on the brass foot rail.

The left and rear of the house were mahogany gambling tables at which were seated every variety of gunslinger, most speaking the Spanish language, some rubbing a Mexican whore’s behind through her brownish muslin dress. The whores did not use underwear.

Bryant sat down with Mexicans, paid a quarter for a pull of mescal, and lucked out, the bottle worm falling down into his swallow. He grinned happily as he chewed it and made himself no friends.

McElhanie bought one of the two white prostitutes hot beer and talked into her ear for most of a half hour. His tongue would reach out to lick her neck and she’d cringe. Then he made some kind of arrangement and followed her through a green velvet curtain and into a low-ceilinged crib not much wider than a bed and basin. He merely unbuttoned himself for her. And he was back before Bob and Bitter Creek Newcomb could find open chairs for faro.

Faro was the game in those days; you hardly see it any-more. Thirteen spade cards were lacquered onto the tabletop and bets placed on any number of them. The banker would turn over on his left the top card of the deck, which was called soda. On his right he’d reveal the next card, and any match-up between it and the board lost the bet. The next card he’d place on soda, and bets on the spade card like it would win. Idiots could play the game, which no doubt led to its extinction.

At the cantina, the auction for banker went to a professional gambling man who called himself Fancy Jack. He had rings that glittered with glass on his thumbs and a red feather in a white hat. That was the only thing fancy about him. His fingernails were black-rimmed and his dark suit was white-stained with sweat. Bob and Newcomb sat down with him at last and he bothered them with questions as he dealt each pair of cards. ‘Did you vote in the last election?’ he asked. ‘Ever ate fresh water clams?’

I sat with strangers at a corner table and got cleaned out in no time by a Mexican with teeth the colors of maize. He laughed out loud and slapped the dealing box every time he raked my money into his shirt. Whenever others lost he at least made sure to waggle a bit so that the silver coins would jangle.

I posted myself as lookout and stood at the bar feeling queasy at every glance toward the hundreds of guns in the place. Bob bought me a shot glass of whiskey and we jawed about the Remington Rolling-block .50 caliber rifle, also known as the Remington Buffalo Gun.

‘Don’t you think that sweetheart packs a wallop,’ I said. ‘I hear a miner in Creede, Colorado, got shot in the head with one while unscrewing a can of sardines and some of his hair floated as far as the assayer’s office in Pueblo.’

And Bob said, ‘These games are crooked. Nobody’s going to risk anything for this place. I’ve got a premonition about it.’

He left me with the shot glass he’d bought for himself and every fifteen minutes or so I’d take the meagerest sip.

Meanwhile Miss Eugenia Moore was having dinner with City Marshal Ben Canty back in Silver City. He wadded a slice of bread and wiped up the gravy on his plate. He used a small comb on his mustache as he chewed, and she told him the boys were gone to look for work in that unclaimed area of Texas, Kansas, and Colorado referred to as No Man’s Land. She herself was heading north at the end of the week for Denver.

He stared at her. Finally he said, ‘I’m sorry to hear you and Bob are splitting up like that.’