Chapter 31
Wanting to give Jasper the rest he himself could not afford, Catfish rented a horse from Russell McCormick at the Break O’ Day Livery Barn and rode out to the east end of town, where Brazos rented a cabin from Hettie Rose. The Widow Rose, as she was known in town, rented the small log shack flanking her own to Brazos.
Both hovels were sun-splashed now as Catfish rode up out of a dry wash separating the two shacks from town. Clothes hung from a line strung between two scrub oaks to the right of the first shack, near a dying fire over which a large copper pot hung from an iron tripod. The clothes shone brightly—vivid reds, greens, blues, and yellows—in the sunlight, nudged a little by a breeze that was growing hotter by the minute.
Already, Mrs. Rose had done laundry. Now she was likely inside the shack with her quiet boy, Peter, darning clothes for the townsfolk who patronized her. Peter was likely practicing his letters and numbers. Or reading. Catfish had heard the boy liked to read. Mrs. Rose herself had taught him, Catfish had heard, as, being Black, the boy wasn’t allowed to go to the white school in Wolfwater.
That was a crying shame, to Catfish’s way of thinking. For both the boy and his mother, who felt compelled to teach him to somehow survive in the white man’s world while she worked herself to the bone, providing for them both.
Lonely dang life out here, Catfish thought as he pulled his rented horse around the widow’s cabin and over to the one Brazos rented behind it. Brazos’s shutters and door were closed. No sound or movement around the boxlike log place, save the hot, dry breeze rattling mesquite and willow leaves and the chirping of desert wrens in a cedar thicket off the cabin’s right front corner.
Depressing place out here, Catfish thought as he halted the mount before the lone hitchrack fronting the small, shabby front stoop fronting the cabin. He didn’t know how Brazos could take it out here. Probably because all he did was sleep here. In the weeks since he and Catfish had donned their badges again, they’d both mostly been working. Little time even for sleep. That fact was darn real as Catfish crawled heavily down from the saddle now, fatigue weighing heavy on his shoulders. In fact, his left foot slipped out of the stirrup and dropped to the ground, giving Catfish a start. He grunted and fell wearily against his saddle, blinking and shaking his head.
Come on, you old goat, he silently told himself. You got a job to do. No time to sleep till Brazos is back on his . . .
He let the thought trail off incomplete. He’d heard what sounded like a woman’s muffled laugh beneath the scratching breeze, piping birds, and the squawk of the clay water pot, or olla, hanging from a nail in an awning support post on the cabin’s front stoop. Nah. He shook his head, blinked his eyes several times, rapidly. Couldn’t be.
Lack of sleep was making him hear things, just like it was making him conjure assassins where there were only roofers with nails bristling from between their lips . . .
Then it came again—a woman’s muffled laugh. The thud of someone slapping a table echoed, which was next followed by the brief, bemused chortle of a young boy.
The voice of a man sounded from inside the cabin—resonant, but too low and quiet for Catfish to make out what the man was saying. What Brazos was saying. That was Brazos’s voice, sure enough. Buoyant with subtle humor.
Catfish turned to the cabin, scowling.
What in tarnation?
He moved slowly to the two porch steps, climbed them slowly, one hand on his pistol grips. He looked around carefully, wondering if he was being led into a trap, maybe one that had already been set for his partner. After the first one that had been set for Brazos the previous night, that was. Maybe the killers had come to finish him off and then Catfish, to boot!
He winced as, crossing the porch, his right boot made a worn, age-silvered floorboard squawk faintly. Tightening his right hand around his gun handle, he moved up to the door and bent his head to listen. Sure enough, that was Brazos’s voice inside the place, all right.
Now he could vaguely make out what the man was saying, “. . . had the stuffin’ kicked out of one end before, but never both ends at once!”
Again, the woman laughed—a muffled sound as though she was holding her hand over her mouth.
The boy laughed loudly, delightedly.
Then Brazos laughed, too. Catfish hadn’t heard his partner laugh in a long time. Surely, neither he nor Catfish had had anything to laugh about lately, not like they had in times past, but that was Brazos’s voice, sure enough. Ripping loose with abandon, vaulting above the woman’s and the boy’s laughter.
Scowling his incredulity, Catfish lifted his left hand and lightly tapped his knuckles against the door comprised of vertical pine boards between which windblown seeds, cactus thorns, and sand had gathered over the long years since Samuel Rose had built both cabins out here on the edge of nowhere—one for him and his bride to live in, one to rent out to a fellow prospector. Catfish tripped the door’s latch, and as the door shuddered open a few inches on its leather hinges, he cast his mystified gaze into the cabin.
As he did, Brazos, sitting at the small, square table just beyond the door, jerked his pistol up from his right hip, clicked the hammer back, and aimed it at the door. His molasses-dark eyes gazed threateningly down the barrel, until his black brows stitched and he lowered the gun slightly and said, “Cha’les? What in tarnation you doin’, skulkin’ around on my front porch?” He depressed his Colt’s hammer with a click. “Lookin’ to get yourself drilled a third eye—one you can’t see out of?”
The woman and the boy turned to Catfish then as well, dark eyes widening in shock and sudden fear, the humor of only a second ago erased from their faces. All three sat at the table, which was fairly buried beneath the platters, plates, cups, and bowls of a hearty meal. The leavings of which—as well as the succulent aroma of which—spoke of nicely browned baking-powder biscuits, rich dark sausage gravy, scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, and a glass pitcher of creamy milk. The boy sat on the side of the table nearest the door, hipped around in his chair to regard the intruder, round-eyed. The Widow Rose sat at the end of the table, to the boy’s right. Brazos sat across from the boy, studying Catfish incredulously as he slowly lowered his Colt, until it disappeared beneath the table.
Then there was nothing to impede Catfish’s view of his partner’s face, which was a swollen mask of cut, scraped, and otherwise badly abused tissues. Both eyes were nearly swollen shut so that the man’s eyes were black slits in the center of two puffy mounds. His lips resembled raw beef, both bristling with sutures. Brazos wore a red longhandle top, the open V-neck of which revealed a thick white bandage wrapped around his chest and belly.
“Yep,” Catfish said, “you had the stuffin’ kicked out of both ends, all right.” Suddenly, seeing all eyes on him, he felt as though he had intruded on a family having breakfast together. He glanced at the boy and the widow once more, then said to Brazos, “I was just checkin’ on ya, pard. Heard about the, uh, incident. I see you’re still kickin’, though. Taken care of real good.” He glanced at the Widow Rose, then stepped back and started to draw the door closed. “I’ll come back later.”
He’d almost latched the door, when Brazos said loudly, “Cha’les, get in here!”
“Yes, yes, yes,” the Widow Rose said, rising quickly from her chair, coffee-brown cheeks darkening as a flush rose into them. “Please, Marshal Tuttle. Come on in. Peter an’ I were just leav—”
“No, no, no,” Catfish said, shoving the door open again, keeping his hand on the knob. He wished he would have ridden off when he’d heard the woman’s and the boy’s laughter. He was intruding, indeed, and he felt sorry as heck about it. His curiosity had gotten the better of him. “You stay right there, ma’am. You too, Peter. I’ll just . . .”
But she was already to the counter running along the kitchen’s back wall, her arms full of plates and platters. “Peter and I have much work to do at our own place, Marshal,” she said with a flush-faced glance over her shoulder, setting her load of dirty dishes into the wreck pan. “I just . . . we just . . . I mean . . . I saw Brazos—I mean, Deputy McQueen . . . ride home late, slumped over on his horse. I saw he needed assistance, so I only . . . well, I only . . .”
“She fixed me up right fine,” Brazos said as Peter helped his mother clear the table. Brazos, too, seemed a little chagrined, embarrassed, as he dug into his tobacco pouch on the table for his makin’s sack. “Don’t know what I woulda done without her. Don’t think no ribs are broke through, but they’re bruised up good, an’ this here bandage makes the pain right tolerable.” He jerked his head back irritably. “Get in here, Cha’les. Stop standin’ there like a calf caught in a thicket. Get in here!” He glanced at the widow clearing more cups and plates from the table. “You don’t need to go, Het . . . er, I mean, uh, Mrs. Rose. You an’ Cha’les here ever been properly introduced?”
He glanced up at Catfish, who took one more tentative step into the cabin, and then Brazos dribbled chopped tobacco onto the wheat paper troughed between his fingers.
“Uh,” Catfish said. “Well, no, I reckon not prop—”
He stopped as the widow swung toward him, a little breathless, and self-consciously tucked her curly hair into the messy bun atop her head. “I just came back over this morning because I knew Braz—I mean”—she stomped her foot down in frustration, causing the boy to jerk with a start—“Mr. McQueen needed a proper meal in his belly. You know, so he can heal!”
Catfish stopped halfway between the door and the table and raised his hands, palms out. “Oh, you don’t need to . . . you don’t need to . . .”
“Sit down, Cha’les,” Brazos said, slowly curling the paper into a cylinder. “The damage has been done,” he added with a dry chuckle.
The table having been cleared, the widow turned to Brazos, smoothing her apron down flat against her thighs, and said, “Peter and I will leave you men to your business. I will come back later and finish cleaning up this mess I made.”
“Oh, no nee—” Brazos said, but stopped when the breathless widow grabbed the boy by the arm and jerked him out the door, fumbling the door closed behind her.
“Mama,” Catfish heard the boy say outside, “what’s wrong with—”
“Shh,” came her quick retort. “Never you mind. Come along. We have work to do, for pity’s sake!”
Their quick footsteps dwindled to silence.
Catfish turned to Brazos. “Sorry, pard. I—”
“There ain’t nothin’ to be sorry about. The lady tended my injuries and was kind enough to make me breakfast. I insisted she didn’t—by God, that woman has enough work to do, Lord knows—but she insisted, and in my condition, I couldn’t do much to stop her.”
Brazos flicked his thumbnail across a lucifer match; the flame hissed and leaped to life. He touched it to the quirley protruding from his stitched, puffy lips, which made Catfish wince to look at it.
Catfish moved up to the table, placed his hands on the back of the chair that the boy had been sitting in. “There’s nothin’ to be embarrassed about.”
Brazos frowned as he blew a smoke plume toward the ceiling. “I’m not embarrassed about noth . . .” He let his voice trail off, frowning pensively at the chair the widow had been sitting in. He shrugged sheepishly, then said, “I don’t know.”
“You looked good together. All three of you.”
Catfish dragged a tin cup down from a shelf above the dry sink and wreck pan, then filled it from the gurgling coffeepot on the small black range’s warming rack.
“Did we?” Brazos said, frowning at him curiously, his ears turning a little darker as he blushed again.
“Why, sure you did.” Catfish sat slowly down in the boy’s chair, wincing at the popping and creaking in his old, battered knees and hips, not to mention his shoulders. He almost felt as bad as Brazos looked. “You like this lady . . . the Widow Rose?”
Brazos seemed to ponder the question as he stared self-consciously at the lit end of his cigarette. He pursed his lips, nodded slowly, then frowned and looked over at Catfish suddenly. “Enough on that. Cha’les, we got problems. Big problems.”
“Don’t I know!” Catfish exclaimed. He hadn’t even begun to tell his end of things!
“Finish your coffee,” Brazos said, sticking the quirley between his lips, then placing his hands on the table and rising with a painful grunt from his chair. “Take your time, gonna take me a few minutes to get my battered carcass dressed.”
“You just stay right where you are, old son!” Catfish objected.
“Uh-uh, uh-uh,” Brazos said. “You an’ me is headin’ over to the Yellow Rose. I got me a man to see about a hoss!”
He gave Catfish a sly wink. At least Catfish thought he winked. The flesh was so swollen around both eyes it was hard to tell. What was not hard to tell was that Brazos was not heading for the Yellow Rose to talk to any man about a horse . . .
No, he had a man to kill, or Catfish missed his guess.