Джо Горес: Cases

Dunc dug out his windbreaker; the full moon gave plenty of light, but no heat. He had just sat back down when he saw a hairy black dinner plate coming across the road at him. He was frozen in place as a tarantula, nearly a foot across with all its hairy legs outstretched and moving, crossed his boot and was gone.

He let out a long silent breath, had a huge drink of water, took a leak in the nearest mesquite bush, lay down on his back with his duffel bag as a pillow to wait for the sound of a ride. The moon was setting, a million stars crowded the blue-black sky. Trying to pick out constellations, he slipped down and down and down and was gone. Just like that.

Dunc woke from dreamless sleep to a cold, hungry dawn, so hungry he actually thought he could smell bacon frying. But what brought him bolt upright was a horrendous screeching noise.

Nieng-haw! Nieng-haw! Nieng-haw!

He was looking into a pair of beautiful, mild brown eyes, with the most sweeping, romantic lashes he had ever seen. The donkey shoved a muzzle like velvet into his cupped hand. It was little and brown, with a darker mane and tail, was cinched and packed with a blanket roll. On one side was a pickax and a flat metal pan gleaming like polished silver, on the other a .30–30 carbine, the old 1897 Winchester with the octagonal barrel.

A grizzled old man appeared wearing a wide-brimmed hat, faded red shirt with long sleeves, and lace-up boots with canvas trousers Housed into them. Equally faded gold suspenders crisscrossed the shirt, a wide leather belt held up the pants. He patted the donkey’s flank with great affection.

“Señorita was afraid you was dead.”

“The donkey’s name is Señorita?”

The old prospector sang in a cracked voice:

He stuck out his hand. “Folks call me Harry.”

“Folks call me Dunc.”

Señorita exclaimed, “Nieng-haw! Nieng-haw!”

“I come by last night, you looked near enough t’dead as damn t’swearing, so I figgered you’d be hungry enough t’eat a dead turtle when Señorita decided to wake you up.”

Dead turtle. Hent and Larkie. A nightmare shudder went through him. But he said, “You figured right, Harry.”

The old man led him fifty yards back into the desert to a smokeless stone-banked mesquite fire with eight thick hand-cut strips of bacon sizzling slowly in a pan set to one side, coffee brewing in a big blue ceramic-ware pot.

Dunc asked casually, “Looking for gold?”

“Mebbe gold. Mebbe silver. I ain’t rightly sayin’.”

Harry got out silverware, halved the bacon onto two tin plates. They sat down. Señorita kept nuzzling Dunc’s right ear as half a dozen eggs popped and blackened in the hot bacon fat.

Dunc gestured at the Winchester cased against the donkey’s side. “You use that for hunting, Harry?”

“Just for meat.” The old prospector got a faraway look in his eye. “Used to trophy hunt. When I was livin’ in Cuba just after the turn of the century, I used that there very rifle to try and get me the biggest damn deer in the whole Sierra Maestra.”

He shook on pepper and salt, flipped the eggs out onto the tin plates. His eyes still had their faraway look.

“Teddy Roosevelt had led them Rough Riders up San Juan Hill five, six years before, and Cuba was wide open. There was big coastal towns like Santiago and Havana, and most of the island was sugarcane, pineapple, banana. But down south in Oriente Province it was wild country, son! Bucks as big as elks back in them mountains. I wanted me one of them big old geezers.”

Dunc ate bacon. Señorita gave his ear a velvety kiss.

“No roads in the high country, so I needed a packhorse. But all I could find was a man with a mule in a little village near Alto Cedro. Fat, dirty fellow with a sash around his middle who loved that mule — once I wanted to buy it! Wouldn’t sell. Rent. Three days at a dollar a day. Dollars, mind, not pesos!”

Dunc shook his head in wonder, busy poking one of his eggs in the eye. They were the best eggs he’d ever eaten.

“That mule had a hunting heart, son; I could have trained him to retrieve game. We pushed up into the mountains, eight thousand feet high and everything steaming from the heat. Then something huge crashed off through the brush...”

Dunc had finished his eggs and bacon.

“I unslung my carbine and that mule was like a thoroughbred at the gate. He knew — he knew! Son, that was a hunting mule! When I tied him to some brush at the edge of the clearing, his eyes pleaded with me to take him along.”

“So why didn’t you?”

Harry poured half a tin of peaches into each plate. They ate the fruit with their forks, slurping the juice.

“Mules can’t make no silent stalk, son. So I went creeping on alone up and down that hillside through that steaming brush. Must of been two hours later I broke out into a clearing. On the far side I could see a pair of unwinking eyes and a patch of sun-dappled hide. Them eyes was so high off the ground, son, I knew he had to be the biggest deer in Cuba! The snick of my hammer going back was thunderous. I shot right between them eyes. There was a fearful thrashing in the brush, and then... silence.”

Harry grunted his way to his feet, started scouring his plate and silverware with desert sand. Dunc, doing the same, finally burst out, “So did you get him? Did you get your deer?”

Harry had hauled out an old tin of Prince Albert and had started to roll a cigarette.

“Son,” he said solemnly, “I shot my mule.”

The first driver Dunc stuck out a thumb at gave him a ride. He was mid-thirties and six-one, built like a fullback. Wavy blondish hair and startling blue eyes somehow askew in a tawny wise-guy face. A chain-smoker, lighting one cigarette off the butt of the other as they went along. Suntan, bright long-sleeved sport shirt. He said his name was Jack Falkoner and that he was from Palo Alto, where Dunc knew Stanford University was. He drove the red MG with a loose, easy abandon. It had California plates and the top down even though the desert air was still dawn-cold.

“My big brother had a car just like this for a couple of years after the war,” said Dunc. “Even the same color. But then he traded it in for a Jaguar.”

“Must have had a lot of money and liked a lot of speed.”

“He liked the speed, all right, but he got behind in the payments and they came and took the Jag away from him and then he didn’t have anything at all.”

Falkoner feathered smoke through his nostrils, gave a bitter laugh as the slipstream whipped it away.

“I’ve got another TC being overhauled in Palo Alto right now. Just like this one, except it’s black.” He squiggled the steering wheel back and forth, zigzagging them down the empty highway. “Only two and a half turns, lock-to-lock.”

The low red car ate up the road. Falkoner shrugged.

“But I guess a man can’t have sports cars and a wife at the same time. She filed on me two weeks ago. I took off before—”

“She left you over a couple of sports cars?”

“No, she drove the MG real good. I was proud of her.”

He pushed smoke through a nose once broken and healed slightly crooked; that, and an inch-long patch of shiny scar tissue over his right eye, made him not only handsome without being pretty, but possibly tougher than his manner suggested.

“But we were only married a month and she was running around on me. Two different guys.” His voice was suddenly guttural. “I’ll deal with that when I get back.” He turned to study Dunc. “You ever been to Ciudad Juárez, in Old Mexico?”