“Well, I just get by, really.”
“I ain’t got the stick-with-it for learnin’.”
Cold was nipping at whatever was exposed outside as Josiah Gordon Scurlock strolled over from the adobe house a little farther on with a girl of no more than sixteen. Scurlock was co-owner of Bowdre’s ranch and the wrangler who handled the half a hundred horses needed on Tunstall’s ranch, the cowhands often running through at least two per shift. The girl turned out to be his wife, Antonia Herrera, the younger sister of Manuela.
Doc Scurlock was twenty-eight, as blond as the Kid and an inch taller. He’d studied medicine in New Orleans and in the twentieth century would become a schoolteacher, but earlier in Louisiana he’d argued over a faro game and ended up killing his accuser with his gun, so he quit his physiology studies and fled to Arizona, where he partnered with Bowdre in a failed enterprise of making cheese. Wandering into the village of Lincoln, the pair found work as cattle rustlers for L. G. Murphy before preferring the more legitimate employment of the Englishman.
The five went inside to get out of the stiff wind and cold, and the Herrera sisters served hot-peppered steak fajitas. Just for conversation the Kid asked Scurlock, “Are you a doctor still?”
“Of horses,” he admitted.
“Why’d you give up being a physician?”
Scurlock answered, “I guess I don’t much like hospitals. I associate them with sick people.”
He offered little else, but for the first time Doc smiled, revealing the quarter-size hole in his shattered front teeth that a gunshot took out in his struggle with the Louisiana gambler. The hole of the exit wound behind his throat had healed up like a button.
The Herrera girls were glancing shyly at Billy and giggling with each other as Bowdre and Scurlock talked about horse breeding. The Kid heard the sisters calling him Billito, and then Scurlock heard them saying the Kid was “muy guapo,” very handsome, and he said, “They seem to like the cut of your jib, Kid.”
It seemed more accusation than compliment.
The Kid hung his head a little.
Bowdre spoke so slowly it was like each word was his unique invention. “He’s a ladies’ man,” he said. “I could tell that from the first instance.”
“Innocence, flair, and helplessness conjoined,” Scurlock said.
To change the subject or give an excuse for the girls’ overfondness, the Kid said, “This being November twenty-third, it’s my eighteenth birthday.”
“Qué dijo?” Antonia asked. What’d he say?
Scurlock told his wife, “Que hoy tiene dieciocho años.” He has today eighteen years.
Manuela told Charlie, “Entonces necesitamos una fiesta.” Then we need a party.
And so Scurlock went off for his fiddle and Bowdre got his squeeze-box and changed into a fresh white shirt and red brocaded vest and the gold-striped trousers that he tucked into his boots. Scurlock and he weren’t dancers, so they played the music and filled their whiskey glasses between songs and drunkenly watched as Manuela and Antonia taught the Kid an old Spanish dance, clicking castanets and clapping their palms and flouncing their skirts in a kind of disdainful, fierce, taunting quarrel whose final goal was seduction.
Scurlock fell asleep around ten, so his wife took him home, but Bowdre just kept tilting his whiskey bottle into his mouth until his hand no longer worked and he fell into a stunned insensibility, finally closing his eyes and snoring.
His wife said she was too excited by the company to sleep, so she stayed up and told Billito about the region. She said the Anglos called them Mexicans, but the people called themselves Spanish, for many still considered themselves citizens of the Imperial Spanish Viceroyalty of the sixteenth century, and even spoke in the formal, older ways of the explorer Coronado or like the characters created by Miguel de Cervantes. Had Billito read Don Quixote de la Mancha?
He hadn’t yet but he’d get right to it.
She smiled and said in English, “But you can still call us Mexicans. All the Anglos do.” She flushed a little as she added, “You berry nice to talk with. All days it is only my sister.”
“Well, you got Charlie now,” the Kid said.
Manuela looked across at the whiskeyed, snoring jigger boss. “Oh, heem,” she said. “For heem I am only his servant. We no even married.” She seemed to be sorting out thoughts, and then she turned to the Kid. “I have for you a . . . regalo de cumpleaños?”
“Birthday present.”
“Jes.” She then unbuttoned the bodice of her dark woolen dress to expose the full breasts of a girl of eighteen.
Smiling, he said, “Precioso!” Beautiful!
She whispered, “You may touch, too.”
The Kid glanced at Charlie.