Blood and Punchlines

The relay station had been built in 1856 by a man named Pfeffer who believed the Butterfield line would come through the Peloncillo gap and make him necessary. The line went north instead. Pfeffer died of the flux in 1861 and the station passed through several owners, each one a smaller man than the last, until it belonged to nobody and sat in the gap like a tooth in an empty jaw — adobe walls two feet thick, a plank roof gone silver from weather, one window facing east and one facing south, neither of them large enough to climb through. The door was oak and hung on hand-forged strap hinges and it still worked. It was the kind of door you could close against whatever was coming and feel, briefly, that the closing meant something.

Dill Pettigrew sat against the south wall with the Krag across his knees and a hand-rolled cigarette going and the leather dispatch bag between his boots. The bag contained eleven thousand four hundred dollars in scrip and coin from the Consolidated Copper payroll, which as of this morning was three days late arriving in Lordsburg and the subject of, Dill assumed, considerable professional interest.

Toby Ruark stood at the east window. He had been standing there for twenty minutes without speaking, which for Toby was a medical event.

“You see anything?” Dill said.

“Dirt.”

“You been looking at dirt for twenty minutes.”

“It’s a lot of dirt.”

“See, that’s the problem with this territory. You can see a man coming from ten miles out, which sounds like an advantage until you realize he can see you from ten miles out, which means you’re both just watching each other get closer and nobody’s surprised. It’s like chess but everybody’s a bishop.”

Toby didn’t turn from the window. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“Chess doesn’t make sense. That’s why I never got good at it.”

“You never got good at it because you talk during the game and your opponent wants to kill you by the third move.”

“That’s a strategy.”

“It’s not.”

“Boyd Everly in Silver City. Remember him? I talked him through four hands of stud until he was so irritated he bet his horse. I rode that horse for two years.”

“You talked him into betting a horse worth forty dollars. We’re sitting on eleven thousand.”

“Principle’s the same.”

“Principle is not the same.”

Dill smoked and watched his partner’s back. Toby had always been the quiet one, or the quieter one — nobody who rode with Dill Pettigrew was truly quiet, because Dill’s conversation worked like a river: it carved its own channel and everything near it got pulled in. But Toby’s silences had a different quality lately. Not the thinking silences of a man working through a problem but the listening silences of a man who’d heard something he couldn’t place.

“What do you see?” Dill asked again.

“Horse tracks.”

Dill set the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and stood, stiff from sitting on packed earth, and crossed to the window. The late afternoon light came through the opening in a tight column — the wall was thick enough that the window was more like a tunnel, and standing back from it you could see only a narrow rectangle of the world outside, a strip of creosote flat going bronze in the descending sun.

He could see the tracks. Two riders, shod horses, coming in from the southeast on a line so straight it looked surveyed. The tracks ended about three hundred yards out where the hardpan turned to rock shelf and stopped recording.

“Those are old,” Dill said.

“They’re from this morning.”

“How do you know?”

“Wind hasn’t touched them.”

Dill looked at the tracks again. Toby was right. The edges were crisp, the horseshoe crescents still holding shadow. No wind, no erosion, no scatter. But the riders weren’t visible. They’d come to within three hundred yards and then — what? Dismounted. Walked to the rock shelf where they couldn’t be tracked. And then either gone or not gone, with no way to tell which.

“Could be anybody,” Dill said.

“Could be.”

“Cowboys. Prospectors. Couple of Mormons looking for a place to be miserable in private.”

“Could be.”

“You don’t think it’s anybody innocent.”

“I don’t think about innocent. I think about tracks that stop where tracking gets hard.”

Dill went back to the south wall and sat down with the Krag and the dispatch bag and the remainder of his cigarette, which had burned down to a nub that tasted of paper and spit. The old man was watching him from the corner. The old man had been there when they arrived — sitting in the same corner with a horse blanket over his legs and a clay jug of water and a look on his face like he’d been expecting someone but not necessarily them.

His name was Placido. He said he’d been the station keeper for Pfeffer and then for the men after Pfeffer and then for nobody, and that he’d stayed because the station was his and leaving would be agreeing that it wasn’t. He was seventy or eighty or some age past counting, Mexican or Yaqui or both, with hands like mesquite roots and eyes that had stopped being surprised by anything before Dill was born.

“Placido,” Dill said. “You ever have paying customers? Back when this was a going concern?”

“Cuatro veces,” Placido said. Four times.

“Four times. In how many years?”

“Treinta y dos.”

“Four customers in thirty-two years. That’s a business model.”

“Dill,” Toby said from the window.

“I’m talking to Placido. Placido, what did you charge for the overnight?”

“Two dollars. Feed and water for the horse.”

“Two dollars. That’s eight dollars total revenue over thirty-two years. You know what that averages out to? Twenty-five cents a year. You’re the most patient businessman I’ve ever met, and I once knew a man in Tombstone who opened a hat shop for miners.”

“Dill.”

“Miners don’t wear hats, Toby. They wear helmets. The man was ahead of his time in all the wrong directions.”

“There’s dust.”

Dill stopped talking. Dust in this country meant movement, and movement at this hour meant purpose. He stood again and crossed to the east window and looked over Toby’s shoulder. A smear of ochre haze hung over the flats about two miles out, low and directional, moving toward them at the speed of a walking horse. One horse. Maybe two. Hard to tell at distance with the light going copper and the dust itself diffusing as it rose.

“One rider,” Toby said.

“You can’t tell that from dust.”

“One rider. He’s been sitting out there since we got here. He moved when the sun started going down.”

“How do you know he’s been sitting out there?”

“Because I’ve been watching the dirt for twenty minutes.”

Dill looked at Toby’s face in profile. The scar on his jaw, gotten from a bottle in Deming that had nothing to do with outlawry and everything to do with a woman’s husband, caught the light and went white. Toby’s eyes were fixed on the dust with the attention of a man watching a fuse burn.

“We should go,” Dill said. “Out the south side. The horses are around back. We ride west into the Peloncillos and we’re in Arizona by midnight.”

“He’ll follow.”

“He’ll follow if we stay too.”

“If we stay, the walls are two feet thick and there’s one door. If we run, we’re on open flat in failing light and he can see us for ten miles.”

“If we run, we’re moving. I’d rather be moving.”

“You’d rather be moving because you can talk while you’re moving. You can tell me about the hat shop man and the horse you won off Boyd Everly and the time you — whatever the next story is. You run out of stories sitting in a room.”

“I don’t run out of stories.”

“You might.”

Dill looked at the dispatch bag. Eleven thousand four hundred dollars. He’d split plenty of takes before — this was the eighth job they’d pulled together, or the ninth, the kind of life where armed robbery became routine enough to lose count of. The money was always the same money. You took it and you moved and you spent it and you moved again.

But this money had brought the dust cloud. He’d known that since they’d taken it from the express wagon outside Steins Pass, because Consolidated Copper did not lose payrolls. They sent someone. Not a posse, not a marshal. They sent someone specific.

“You know who he is,” Dill said.

Toby didn’t answer.

“You knew before we took the job.”

“I knew it was a possibility.”

“A possibility. Like rain. Like a possibility of rain. You’re telling me you took a Consolidated job knowing they’d send Howell Lant after us and you filed that under possibility.”

“I filed it under money.”

“Eleven thousand doesn’t spend if you’re dead, Toby.”

“Nothing spends if you’re dead. Doesn’t change the arithmetic of being alive.”

Dill wanted to laugh but couldn’t locate the impulse. Howell Lant. He’d never met the man. Nobody he knew had met the man and remained in a condition to describe the meeting. What he knew was reputation, which in this territory was the same as prophecy — Lant worked for the mining companies as a recovery agent, which meant he got back what was taken and the method was his business. He didn’t chase. He followed. The distinction being that a chase implied urgency and Lant had none.

There was a story about Lant and a bookkeeper in Clifton who’d embezzled three hundred dollars from the Arizona Copper Company. The bookkeeper ran to Hermosillo and took a room in a boarding house and grew a mustache and changed his name to William Freed, which was either a declaration of intent or a bad joke. Lant found him four months later. Not through investigation or informants or any of the usual machinery of pursuit but through the simple arithmetic of a man who understood that three hundred dollars in Hermosillo would last exactly four months at the rate a frightened bookkeeper spends, and that a frightened bookkeeper with an empty wallet will do the one thing he knows how to do. Lant waited outside the only bank in Hermosillo that did business in American currency. The bookkeeper walked in on a Tuesday morning. He did not walk out.

Dill had heard that story from a freighter in Benson who’d heard it from a deputy in Nogales who claimed to have helped move the body. It might have been true. It didn’t matter. Nobody who told it ever suggested the bookkeeper could have done anything different.

“How long have you known?” Dill said.

“Since Steins Pass.”

“That’s three days.”

“Yes.”

“Three days of riding and camping and me talking about all the things I was going to do with my share, and you knew the whole time that the man coming after us doesn’t bring people back.”

“I didn’t want to ruin the conversation.”

Dill stared at him. Then he laughed — one short bark that sounded wrong in the adobe room, too loud, hitting the walls and coming back smaller. “You didn’t want to ruin the conversation. That’s — Toby, that’s the funniest thing you’ve ever said, and you said it about us dying.”

“I didn’t say we were dying.”

“Howell Lant is a mile and a half away and getting closer. What’s the other option?”

Toby turned from the window. His face was calm — not the performed calm of a man managing fear but the actual calm of a man who had already been afraid and come out the other side into something flatter and less interesting than fear. “The walls are two feet thick,” he said. “One door. Two windows too small to climb through. We’ve got water, ammunition, and the high ground isn’t relevant because there is no high ground — it’s flat for five miles in every direction. If he wants us, he comes through the door.”

“And if he waits?”

“Then we wait.”

“I’m not good at waiting.”

“I know.”

Placido said something in Spanish that Dill didn’t catch. Toby answered him — Toby’s Spanish was better, something he’d picked up working cattle in Chihuahua before the outlaw career, before Dill, before whatever chain of decisions had brought them to this room with this bag of money and this dust on the horizon.

“What’d he say?” Dill asked.

“He said the door has never been forced. Not by Apaches, not by federales, not by weather. He’s proud of the door.”

“That’s great. I’m glad the door is proud of itself.”

“He also said there’s a root cellar.”

Dill looked at the floor. Packed earth, smooth from decades of use, with a faded Navajo blanket in the center that he’d assumed was decorative. “Under the rug?”

“Under the blanket. Goes down eight feet. Pfeffer built it for stores.”

“Does it go anywhere?”

“It goes down eight feet.”

“I mean out. Does it connect to anything?”

Toby asked Placido. Placido shook his head.

“It’s a hole,” Toby said. “Eight feet deep. Walls are rock.”

“So our escape plan is a hole.”

“It’s not an escape plan. It’s a place to put the money.”

Dill looked at the dispatch bag and then at the window. The dust was closer — less than a mile now, and in the horizontal light he thought he could see the shape of the rider, though it might have been the creosote bushes playing tricks at distance. Everything out there was the same color. Everything out there was waiting.

“Here’s what I’m thinking,” Dill said. “We put the money in the cellar. We close the trapdoor. We put the blanket back. If it comes to talking—”

“It won’t come to talking.”

“If it comes to talking, we don’t have the money. We already spent it. We buried it. We gave it to a mission. We tell him whatever he needs to hear to leave us alone.”

“Lant doesn’t leave people alone.”

“Everybody leaves people alone if you give them a reason.”

“Dill.” Toby’s voice had changed. Not louder — lower. The voice of a man setting something down. “Lant tracked the Emery brothers from Bisbee to Nogales to a ranch outside Cananea. It took him three weeks. He found them and he killed them and he brought the money back and the company paid him his fee and he went home. He didn’t negotiate. He didn’t arrest them. He didn’t give them a chance to explain or lie or bargain. That’s who’s out there.”

Dill sat down. The Krag was cold across his knees. The cigarette was dead. The room was contracting as the light went, the walls closer and the ceiling lower, the way rooms get when you can’t leave them.

“I was going to buy a place,” Dill said. “Outside Prescott. Nothing fancy. Forty acres, some scrub cattle, a house with a porch where I could sit and watch the road and not have to worry about who was on it.”

“I know.”

“I told you about it. Every night for three days I told you about the porch and the cattle and the view of Thumb Butte.”

“You told me.”

“And you let me talk about it knowing this was coming.”

Toby came away from the window and sat down across from him, their boots almost touching, the dispatch bag between them. The window’s rectangle of light had gone from copper to purple and was narrowing toward black. The dust had settled. The rider had stopped.

“The porch was a good plan,” Toby said.

“It wasn’t a plan. It was a story I was telling myself.”

“Same thing.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“With you it is.”

Placido was pouring water from his jug into a tin cup, his hands steady. He offered the cup to Dill. Dill took it and drank and the water tasted of clay and iron and the jug it had been sitting in.

“I could still talk to him,” Dill said.

“You could.”

“I’m good at talking.”

“You’re the best I’ve ever seen.”

“Is that sarcasm?”

“It’s not sarcasm. You talked the Tombstone marshal into releasing our horses. You talked a Pinkerton man in Tucson into buying you dinner. You talked me into this job.”

“So I should—”

“You should know that what you’re good at and what’s going to work here are two different things.”

Dill picked up the dispatch bag. Felt the weight. Eleven thousand four hundred dollars. A house outside Prescott. A porch. Thumb Butte going purple at sunset.

He opened the trapdoor — Placido had to show him the iron ring hidden under the blanket’s fringe — and looked down into the cellar. It was cool and dark and smelled of old potatoes and packed earth. Eight feet deep. Rock walls. Nothing in it except shadows.

He dropped the bag in. It hit the bottom with a sound like gravel shifting. He closed the trapdoor and spread the blanket back over it, smoothing the edges with the care of a man making a bed he wouldn’t sleep in. The blanket was old enough that it had faded from whatever it once was into a general brownness that matched the floor, and when he stepped back and looked at it there was nothing to suggest that anything lay beneath it except more packed earth.

Placido watched all of this without comment. His expression hadn’t changed since they’d arrived — the look of a man in a room he considered his own, observing guests who had not been invited and would not be staying long.

“Placido,” Dill said. “If anyone asks, you never saw us put anything in that cellar.”

“Nadie pregunta,” Placido said. Nobody asks.

“Right. Because nobody comes here. Four customers in thirty-two years. But if customer number five shows up tonight and he’s carrying a rifle and asking about a dispatch bag, you don’t know anything about any bag.”

Placido looked at the blanket on the floor and then at Dill and then at the south window where the last band of light was thinning into nothing. “La bolsa no es mía,” he said. The bag isn’t mine.

“That’s the spirit.”

“Okay,” Dill said. “The money’s in the ground. We’re two men in a room with no money and no particular reason to be here.”

“He won’t believe that.”

“He doesn’t need to believe it. He just needs to come through the door.”

Toby checked his revolver. Dill checked the Krag. Placido sat in his corner with his blanket and his water jug.

Outside, the last light died. The desert went black — total, lunar, the stars coming up like someone had poked holes in the sky to let the cold through. The rider was out there. Dill couldn’t see him but he could feel him the way you feel weather changing, a pressure drop, something in the air that had no name but had weight.

“You still thinking about Prescott?” Toby said.

“I wasn’t, no.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You’ve heard it.”

“I know.”

Dill could barely see Toby’s face — just the shape of it, the scar catching whatever starlight came through the east window.

“Forty acres,” Dill said. “Maybe fifty. There’s a creek bed that runs wet in spring. The house is nothing — two rooms, a cookstove, walls that need work. But the porch. The porch faces west. And every evening you can sit there with a cup of something and watch Thumb Butte turn colors — it goes through about eight of them between six and dark. Orange, then red, then something that’s not quite purple, then—”

He kept talking. He described the cattle — just a few head, scrub longhorns, nothing worth rustling. He described the creek and the cottonwoods along it and the way cottonwood leaves sound in wind, like a woman shuffling cards. He described the view and the weather and the particular quality of afternoon light in Yavapai County, which he had never actually seen but could describe with the precision of a man who had built the whole place in his head over three days of riding toward the thing that would keep him from ever reaching it.

Toby listened. Placido listened, or slept. Outside, the rider sat his horse and the horse stood patient and the night spread over the Peloncillo gap and Dill kept talking because it was the one thing he could do and because Toby had asked and because the silence, if he let it in, would be the shape of the room they were actually in.