21

THE CORPSE OF Mordecai Moon lay on a table inside the main drinking hall of Moon’s House of a Thousand Delights.

Two Apache girls and one Mexican were just now finishing dressing him after they’d given his little, gnarled, pasty body a sponge bath scented with rose water. They’d cleaned the bruised dimple that Ruth Rose’s bullet had made in his forehead. They’d pomaded his three or four fringes of colorless hair, so that they lay pasted against the top of his bullet-shaped, lantern-jawed head. And they’d cleaned and wrapped his bullet-torn hand with a cotton bandage.

Griselda stood over Moon now as the Mexican girl finished wrestling the little body into his age-coppered clawhammer coat, which, like the rest of Moon’s attire, was no different than his customary garb, only they’d laundered his shirt and pants and given the coat and his bowler hat a thorough brushing. The Mexican girl lay Moon back against the Indian blanket spread out across the table beneath him and started to button his coat.

Griselda leaned down and slapped the girl’s hands away. “He never wore it buttoned, stupid greaser!”

The Mexican girl jerked her hands away with a gasp and regarded Griselda like she would a coiled and rattling diamondback.

There were a dozen or so of Moon’s men in the room, as well as transient freighters, gamblers, down-at-heel drifters, shopkeepers, and Mexican residents of Moon’s Well. They’d come to pay their respects and some were having drinks in Mr. Moon’s memory, but now they all regarded her incredulously, frowning. A Mexican in customary peasant pajamas and rope-soled sandals, holding his frayed sombrero down low before him respectfully, shook his head and sucked air through his teeth.

Many of the residents of Moon’s Well had seen the value in Moon’s being here, despite the water tax. For it was Moon and his small army of gunslingers and desperadoes who held the bronco Indians and other desperadoes from both sides of the border at bay. After Moon had come and built his big hotel and gambling parlor, the Mexican residents no longer had to flee to the mountains at the first sign of trouble, which they’d always had to do in previous years.

Looking around the room, Griselda realized her mistake. She wasn’t looking properly grief-stricken.

“Oh, Lord,” she said, bringing a hand to her temple. “I’m sorry, Esmeralda. It’s just that . . . oh, God, Mordecai!”

Griselda threw herself atop the little, suited body, smashing flat his hat resting beside him.

She feigned a half-dozen or so convulsions and then straightened, wiped her invisible tears from her cheeks with the backs of her hands, sniffed, and lifted the dwarf’s little hat still wearing the bullet hole in its crown. She reshaped the crown, set the hat on Moon’s chest, and nodded at the two Mexicans waiting nearby with a five-foot-long box they’d hammered together for a coffin.

The Mexicans—Indian dark, withered, nearly toothless men, one with a corn-husk cigarette smoldering in one corner of his mouth—set the coffin on the table beside the dwarf. They lifted the little suited body with the feathered hat on its chest into the coffin.

“Here’s to Mr. Moon,” said a beefy, Irish bartender, standing behind the bar and lifting a shot glass in salute. His voice was thick as he added, “He was the only man who offered me a job when I bailed out of Yuma pen. God bless you, squire!”

The others muttered and nodded, raised their own glasses, and sipped their beers or tequilas or whiskies, and then the Mexicans lifted the coffin lid from off a separate table.

“I’m going to miss you, my love,” Griselda said, glancing at the Rio Bravo Kid, who stood beside his new deputy, Lee Mortimer, near the open double doors. He and Mortimer both stood with their hats in their hands, chins dipped to their chests. Mortimer’s jaw was set tight in silent anger. Meeting Griselda’s glance, the Kid quirked a faint, conspiratorial smile, dimpling his cheeks, and winked.

That bit of foolishness annoyed Griselda. What if the others had seen? She’d admonish the big, stupid firebrand later, maybe even withhold her body for a night or two in punishment. After their celebratory tumble of the preceding night, he’d miss it for sure!

The Mexicans held up the coffin lid, waiting for Griselda’s order. She stared into the coffin at Moon’s slack face, his eyes tightly closed, what appeared a faint grin on his thin lips mantled by his scraggly mustache, with a fringe of goat beard sagging off his dimpled chin.

She sighed, nodded. The Mexicans placed the lid on the coffin and then each grabbed a rope handle on either end. They began carrying the coffin toward the open doors.

Griselda said, “We’ll have a brief service at Mr. Moon’s grave, gentlemen and ladies. Just a few words, maybe a prayer. Any more than that would only embarrass him. As you know, Mr. Moon was not a God-fearing man.”

A couple of the Mexican peasants and Mexican freighters shook their heads regretfully at that. One crossed himself and moved his lips as though in prayer for Moon’s lost soul.

Griselda suppressed an urge to roll her eyes.

She donned her hat and walked to the front of the saloon, avoiding eye contact with either the Kid or Deputy Mortimer, and headed out into the bright sunlight. The other mourners followed her out of the saloon, and they all formed a procession, Griselda following the two peasants carrying the dwarf’s coffin, the Kid and Mortimer behind her, the others behind them.

Several more people who’d been holding a vigil of sorts out in the street followed, as well, so that there were a good thirty, forty people striding mournfully behind the sprawling saloon and past the corrals and barns and up a rocky hill sparsely stippled with mesquites and sotol cactus.

Griselda had sent out two other Mexicans—an old man and a boy of about twelve—to dig the dwarf’s grave. The grave was dug, and now the pair lounged in the shade of a lone mesquite, the middle-aged Mexican taking a drink from the bladder flask looped around his neck, the boy sitting against the same tree and playing with a black and brown mongrel puppy between his spread legs. The boy and the puppy were playing tug-of-war with a knotted rag.

When the puppy saw the little wooden box and the crowd filing up the hill toward the hole in the ground, it growled and barked and then gave a yip and ran down the side of the hill to the north.

The man and the boy gained their feet as Griselda and the two peasants carrying the coffin approached. The peasants set the coffin down, and Griselda looked into the hole. It was only about three feet deep. A pile of ash-colored soil liberally sprinkled with gravel lay beside it.

Griselda frowned at the old man, who doffed his battered felt hat, and said nervously in halting English, “Bad rock. Very shallow. Too hard dig. Should bury Senor Moon there.” He turned to indicate a higher hill about two hundred yards farther west, the starkly forbidding Chisos range rising beyond. “Not so rocky,” the Mexican said.

Griselda shook her head. She hadn’t wanted to walk that far in the blinding sun and searing heat. It was so hot that she didn’t even sweat, but she felt as desiccated as a hunk of beef jerky.

“This was his favorite tree,” she lied. “This is where we’d often come to look over his holdings. This is where he wanted to be planted. He told me so.”

Mortimer gave a little snort but did not meet Griselda’s silent glare. The Kid stood beside Mortimer, keeping his own head down, his hat in his hand, but still looking as though he were about to jump up and down and whoop with joy at being named sheriff of Moon’s Well.

Griselda doffed her own hat and held it before her as she waited for the other mourners to circle around the grave. No one said anything. There was only the sound of the hot, parched wind rattling the mesquite leaves and kicking up dust here and there around this godforsaken stretch of ground west of Moon’s Well. She kept her head down but looked toward the Chisos range and then south across the painfully bright, white, lunar-like landscape toward the Rio Grande and Mexico.

What a god-awful place this was. All dust and rock and blazing sun and hot wind and Gila monsters, and hardly anything green at all. Even mesquite leaves weren’t really green, but more of a silver, as though there wasn’t enough water to nourish them properly.

What Griselda wouldn’t give to see a sprawling red oak again in the humid, green hills of Missouri. . . .

Soon, very soon, she’d have Moon’s money from the safe and from the sale of the slave whores, and she’d be off in search of an ocean somewhere, or at least some green hills.

“All right, let’s get on with it,” she said, too quickly, indiscreetly returning her mind to the task at hand. “I mean . . . go ahead and set him in the hole, por favor.”

The peasants dropped to their knees and, each taking an end of the coffin, slowly lowered it into the shallow hole. The hole wasn’t much deeper than the box itself. Coyotes would probably dig Moon up in no time, but what the hell? At least he was gone and out of her hair. If only she’d learned the combination to his safe first, and he’d sold the slave whores . . .

Oh, well. Things might be turning out in her favor despite all of that. A couple of sticks of dynamite would likely blow the safe open. She’d simply have some freighted in.

“Anyone know a prayer?” Griselda asked, when the man and the boy had lowered the box into the grave and gained their feet, dusting themselves off with their hats.

She looked around at the mourners of every shape and size surrounding her—a ragged, dusty lot, some armed, some not. There were more than a few Mexican women from town here to pay their own respects to Moon despite his expensive water contracts, despite his using them for mostly slave labor.

They all looked at her. Most of the Mexicans hadn’t understood her. None of the Anglos appeared to know any prayers, except Mortimer, who said with a faintly cunning grin: “Sure, I know a prayer.”

“Oh, Deputy Mortimer,” Griselda said. “How nice!”

Mortimer held his eyes on her with that faintly wry, decidedly insolent grin as he recited “The Lord’s Prayer.” When he was finished, he snugged his flat-brimmed, black hat on his head, turned and strode down the hill toward the town, his string tie blowing back over his shoulder in the wind.

“All right, cover him,” Griselda said to the Mexican man and his son. To the others she said, “Funeral’s over, folks. Mr. Moon is planted. Everyone back to work!”

The gravediggers had just picked up their shovels and started to toss dirt into the hole when there was a hollow thud. Griselda had just started to walk down the hill, but now she turned back to the hole, frowning.

She’d thought that the Mexican man or the boy must have tossed a stone onto the coffin, but the thud had sounded duller than the sound a rock would have made.

The Mexican man and the boy leaped back from the grave as though they’d just spied a rattler slithering out of the hole.

There was another thud.

And another.

A man’s hoarse, muffled voice shouted something incoherent. It seemed to come from the hole.

But that couldn’t be.

Griselda grew weak in the knees.

The lid flew up off of the coffin. The dwarf crawled up out of the hole, looking haggard, holding his bullet-torn hat in one hand, and standing up on the side of the hole. He canted his head, glowered up at Griselda, and said through gritted teeth, “Surprise, surprise—I ain’t dead!”