Chapter 11
She fed the stove up and put on more coffee and stood at the window while it came to heat.
The yard had dried out overnight, the rain already drawn back down into the ground the way it always went in this country, here and gone and nothing left of it within a day but the clay pots still hanging heavy with the water they’d caught.
“David still down?”
“Sleeping like a man who hasn’t dared to in a while,” Abe said. “I’d leave him at it.”
“You’re up early enough for the both of you.”
“As a rule.” He lifted the cup and drank and set it down. “I want to go up to Nash this morning. On my own.”
She turned from the window. “What for.”
“To watch the man’s face when somebody he’s never seen comes up his walk asking after his town.
A man who’s been running a crooked thing in a small place for two years has a way he handles people who come asking.
A set of motions he goes through. I want to see his motions before he knows there’s a me in this town to have motions about. ”
“He’ll know there’s a you the moment you knock on his door.”
“He’ll know there’s a stranger. That’s a long way short of knowing who the stranger is, or what he came for, or how much he’s already seen.
” He set the cup down and squared it. “You and David go back down on the river. Stay well off it, up on the high ground, the way you were when I came on you. I want to know how that crossing sits the morning after a run. Who comes down to it in the daylight, who walks away, whether Flores shows his own face or sends men to do his looking.”
“We were down there yesterday.”
“Yesterday you fell into the middle of it with your eyes shut. Today you’d be up above it with your eyes open and time to use them, which is a different thing entirely.
” He paused. “You know this ground and I don’t, not yet.
I need to know whether that crossing runs on some kind of schedule with a long gap behind it, or whether last night was the leading edge of something that doesn’t mean to stop. ”
She thought it over, and could find no fault in the reasoning. “David doesn’t love being that close to those men. I saw it in him at the river.”
“David does the thing that wants doing whether he loves it or not.” Abe looked into his cup. “He has, every time so far. He’ll go, and he’ll keep you out of trouble doing it, or get you out of it if it finds you.”
“Stay off the water,” she said. “If a single thing moves down there that you don’t like the look of, you leave it and come back. You don’t wait to learn what it was.”
He looked up at her, and the corner of his mouth did the thing it did. “I was about to put the same instruction to you.”
She went to wake David.
***
They parted at the fork in the road south of the house, Abe striking north for town and the two of them cutting southeast toward the river.
The morning had warmed off its early cool and the sky stood a clean pale blue with not one thing written across it, and the ground had firmed up under the night’s wet so that the walking was good.
David went the first quarter mile with his hands in his pockets and nothing to say, which she’d come to know as his way.
She’d come to it faster than she’d have thought.
He was turning a thing over somewhere back of his eyes, and he’d set it out when he had it turned the way he wanted it and not a step before.
“This Nash,” he said at last. “He knows you.”
“He knows me. This town’s not big enough for him not to.”
“And he knows you’ve been at your father’s business. Two years at it.”
“He knows.”
David watched the road come up under them. “Then he’s been at yours, the same two years. A man doesn’t sit still while somebody digs at the ground he’s buried something under. He watches the digging.”
She hadn’t ever put it to herself in just those words, though she’d lived down inside the shape of the thing for two years without naming it. Hearing it said flat by another mouth was a different matter than carrying it unspoken.
“Likely,” she said.
“So he knows you came back off that last Austin trip with nothing in your hands. And he knows your mother’s—” He caught himself.
“Going under,” she said. “You can say the word. I say it to myself often enough.”
“He knows your road’s near run out, is what I’m getting at.” David looked over at her. “A man like that, he’s been patient with you because patience cost him not one thing. You weren’t getting anywhere. Why take the risk of silencing a woman who’s silencing her own self by failing?”
“And now.”
“And now there’s a stranger walked into his town turning over his rocks, and you’re the one who walked him in.” He looked back to the road. “Patience that cost him nothing yesterday costs him something today. There’s a new edge on it whether he lets you see the edge or not.”
She carried that down the rest of the way to the river, and it sat in her cold.
They took the high ground above the east bend, the same rise she’d used a hundred times before he ever came, two hundred yards back off the crossing with a clean line down to the water through a gap in the brush.
The river still ran up and red from the rain, swollen and fast over the gravel where it had run thin and clear a week ago, and the clay shelf where the raft had grounded sat empty and washed in the early light, no sign left on it of what it had carried.
They settled into the brush to wait.
“You don’t spook easy,” David said after a while, low.
“Two years of this.” She kept her eyes on the far bank. “Sitting in brush. Watching a place where nothing happens until all at once it does. Waiting on a thing to move that mostly doesn’t.”
“On your own, the whole of it.”
“Mostly on my own. There was a stretch I paid a man in town to ride out with me, until I worked out he was carrying everything I did and said straight back to somebody.” She shifted the rifle across her knees and found a better seat for it. “After that, on my own.”
He looked at the water and the empty clay shelf below. “Hard way to spend two years of a life.”
“It was the life there was to spend.” She watched a fish roll in the slack water near the far bank and go down.
“My mother kept waiting on me to give it up and come back to her. My aunt writes me letters out of Florida, every few weeks, telling me to come east and stand by the ocean and let it work the grief out of me. She says the ocean’s good for it. ”
She paused. “My father would have come around to the same in the end, if it had been him left behind instead of me. Quit, he’d have said. Use your head. You’ve done what could be done. Go and have yourself a life.”
“But you didn’t.”
“He’s the same man taught me the difference between stubborn and persistent is whether your eyes are open while you do it.” She looked at the far bank. “Mine were open. I always knew what I was at, and why, and what the odds against it were. That felt to me more like persistence than stubbornness.”
She paused, and something dry came into it. “Most days it did. Some days it felt like the other thing wearing the first thing’s coat.”
The corner of David’s mouth moved, the way Abe’s did, and she wondered if one of them had caught it off the other or whether it was a thing certain men simply arrived at.
An hour ran out under the climbing sun. The birds dropped off into their midday quiet and nothing stirred on either bank, and she was watching a hawk ride a slow column of warm air up off the far trees, turning and turning without a wingbeat, when David’s hand closed on her forearm.
Three men came down through the brush on the Mexican side, on foot, working their way to the water.
They moved like men who knew the ground under them, never a wasted step, and they hunkered down at the bank and looked across the river without any hurry in them at all.
One said a thing and the other two spread out along the waterline, one upstream and one down.
“Same men,” she breathed.
“From yesterday.”
“I think so.” She watched them and her own breath went shallow without her telling it to.
No raft this time. No bundles, nothing carried, nothing in their hands but the rifles slung at their backs.
They were studying the near bank, the clay and the cut and the brush above it, reading the ground the way you read ground you mean to put to use.
“They’re not crossing. They’re laying something out. Measuring it.”
“For the next run.”
“For something.” She fixed on the man in the middle, who stood a little forward of the other two.
He carried the same unhurried ease she’d seen on Flores down at the river, the ease of a man who took it as the natural order that the moment he spoke other men would move.
Not Flores himself. Younger, lighter built.
But cut off the same bolt of cloth. “David. The one stood in the middle of the three.”
“I’ve got him.”
“He spoke and the both of them moved. He’s running this end of it.”
“You want to get close enough to hear what he’s saying.”
“They’re across a river two hundred yards off, and the water’s loud.”
“I know it,” he said. “I’m noting it, is all. Not putting it forward.”
That very nearly got a smile out of her, there in the brush with three armed men measuring the ground across the water.
They held the rise another half hour and nothing changed in it. The three men looked their fill at the near bank, conferred among themselves with their heads close, and went back up into the brush on their own side the way they’d come down through it.
Marielle gave it ten slow minutes after the last of them was gone, the way her father had taught her, and then she touched David’s arm and started them back.
They were working east through the mesquite, low and careful, when she heard the horses.
From the north, along the near bank, and more than a single pair of them. She put her hand flat on David’s back and they went down together into the brush.
Four riders. Nash up front on a tall gray, sitting it the way a man sits a horse he’s proud of, and the sheriff at his stirrup on a common bay, and two deputies strung out behind.
They came along the bank at an easy walk, in no hurry, Nash looking the river over with calm proprietary attention. He said a thing to the sheriff at his knee. The sheriff answered it. Nash nodded, slow, the nod of a man having his own thinking confirmed back to him.
They were close enough now, and the wind right, to take the words off the air.
“The Hendersons can’t stay on it,” Nash said. “It’s the right size of place, and it’s far enough out that nobody rides past it and nobody comes asking. Flores needs ground that’ll hold that many men and that much freight without the county noticing it’s got either.”
“When,” the sheriff said.
“Inside the week.” Nash looked across at the far bank. “And you tell Flores the crossing stays dark till it’s done. Not one more run comes over until we’ve cleared the old folks off that land and it’s ours to use.”
The sheriff nodded. He had about him the worn-smooth agreeableness of a man who’d stopped some years back asking himself whether a thing was right and held himself now to the narrower question of whether it could be managed without fuss.
“Quiet,” Nash said. “I want it done quiet. The Hendersons are known people. Forty years on that land. People will ask after them when they’re gone.”
“And when they ask.”
“They sold up and moved on to family,” Nash said, easy as anything.
“Old folks do it every season of the world. There’s nothing in it for anybody to wonder at.
” He brought the gray’s head around to the north, and the others fell in behind him, and they rode back up the bank the way they’d come and were gone around the bend.
Marielle looked at David, and found him already looking at her.
Tom Henderson was seventy years old. His wife Mae had taught the Sunday school in that town thirty years and more, had taught half the grown men in it their letters, Marielle among them.
They had no children living and no people close enough by to come looking when the asking-after turned up nothing.
“We’ve got to go,” she said. “Now. Today.”
She had shifted her weight to rise, careful and quiet the way she’d been taught it, when the brush off to their left gave up a sound that wasn’t theirs.
A branch, close, far too close, and a low voice under it, and a second voice answering from off to the right. Men on foot, working in on the two of them from both sides at the once, near enough now that she could hear the dry grass dragging at their legs.
She held one half breath and ran the sum cold, the way her father had drilled into her: pinned where they were, they’d be taken in under a minute, with no ground at their backs and no start on anybody, and what those men did to a woman they caught in this brush was a thing she needed no one to spell out for her. The figure came out one way only.
She ran.
David came up off the ground and ran with her, matching her stride for stride through the brush, and there was no thought now of going quiet because quiet had stopped being any use to them the instant that branch went.
She heard the men behind, heard a voice throw something after them in Spanish, sharp and furious, and she put her head down and drove for the high ground and the road beyond it.
Her boots slid in the wet clay at the crest of the rise, and for one bad half second the ground wouldn’t hold her. Then David’s hand closed hard on her upper arm and hauled her up and over the top without either of them breaking stride, and they came down onto the flat above the river and ran on.
A shot cracked behind them, high and wide, fired more in temper than in any hope of hitting, and another, and then no more.
The voices fell off behind. The boots fell off. They ran another quarter mile with the breath tearing in and out of them before Marielle let it slow, and they put the ridge and a thick stand of brush between themselves and the bank.
She pulled up with her hands braced on her knees and dragged the hot air down and made herself listen past the hammer of her own blood.
Nothing back there. No boots. No voices. No horses come over the rise after them.
David stood beside her, bent the same way, blowing hard, the sweat cutting tracks through the dust on his face. He straightened first and looked back the way they’d come and then at her.
“They didn’t run us far,” he got out.
“No.” She pushed herself upright and worked to slow her breathing. “They didn’t dare run us far. Out in the open, in daylight, where somebody on the road might see armed men chasing a woman? They want to be seen down at that crossing about as bad as we wanted to be caught at it. Maybe worse.”
She looked back at the ridge, and then north, toward town and the long low smudge of it under the noon sun.
“We need Abe,” she said.