Elmore Leonard - Valdez Is Coming

“I’ve never seen a man take one drink,” she said.

Valdez sat down again by the fire. “Maybe it has to last.”

“I was married to a man who drank.” He made no comment and she said, “He was killed.”

Valdez nodded. “I see.”

“What do you see?”

“I mean you were married and now you’re not. What’s your name?”

“Gay Erin.”

He was looking at her but said nothing for a moment. “That’s your marriage name?”

“Mrs. James C. Erin.”

“Of Fort Huachuca,” Valdez said. “Your husband was killed six months ago.”

“You knew him?”

He shook his head.

She waited. “Then you heard about it.”

Valdez said, “You were in Lanoria Saturday when the man was killed?”

“Frank said an Army deserter was shot.”

“No, he wasn’t a deserter. Frank Tanner said it was the man that killed your husband, but when he looked at him dead he said no, it was somebody else.”

Gay Erin said, “And the Indian woman, the widow-”

“Was the wife of the man we killed by mistake.”

She nodded slowly. “I see.” She said then, “Frank didn’t tell me that.”

Valdez watched her. “But you’re going to marry him.”

“What difference does it make to you?”

“I like to know how much he wants you – if you’re worth coming after.”

“He’ll come,” she said.

“I think so too. I think he wants you pretty bad.” Valdez placed a stick on the fire and pushed the ends of the sticks that had not burned into the center of the flame. “You know what else I think. I think maybe he wanted you pretty bad when you were still married.”

The flame rose to the fresh wood. He could see her face in the light, her eyes holding on his.

“He knew my husband,” she said. “Sometimes he’d come to visit. Anyone who was at the hearing knows that.”

“And after it you go to live with him.”

She was staring at him in the flickering light. “Why don’t you say it right out?”

“It’s just something I started to wonder.”

“You think Frank killed my husband.”

“He could do it.”

“He could,” the woman said, “but he didn’t.”

“You’re sure of that, uh?”

“I know he didn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I killed him.”

She had come from Prescott with her nightgowns and linens to marry James C. Erin, and five years and six months later she fired three bullets into him from a service revolver and left him dead.

Tell this man about it, she thought. The time in the draw at night, a single moment in her life she would see more clearly than anything she had ever experienced. She had told no one about it and now she was telling this man sitting across the low-burning fire, not telling him everything, but not sure what to tell and what to leave out.

She began telling him about Jim Erin and found she had to tell him about her father and the years of living on Army posts and her mother dying of fever when she was a little girl. She remembered Jim Erin when she was younger, in her early teens, and her father was stationed at Whipple Barracks. She remembered Jim Erin and her father drinking together and remembered them stumbling and knocking the dishes from the table. A few years later she remembered her father – after he retired and they were living in Prescott – mentioning Jim Erin and saying he was coming to see them. And when he came she remembered Jim Erin again, the man with the nice smile and the black hair who had a way of holding her arm as he talked to her, his fingers moving, feeling her skin. She remembered her father drinking and cursing the Army and a system that would pass over a man and leave him a lieutenant after sixteen years on frontier station. Now a sutler was something else; he had a government contract to sell stores to the soldiers and could do well. Like his friend Jim Erin. The girl who gets him is getting something, her father had told her, leading up to it, and within a year had arranged the marriage. A year and a half later her father was dead of a stroke.

A lot of men drink, but their wives don’t kill them. Of course. It wasn’t his drinking. Yes, it was his drinking, but it was more than that. If he wasn’t the kind of man he was and he didn’t beat her it wouldn’t have happened. This was in her mind, though she didn’t try to explain it to Valdez. He put wood on the fire, keeping the flame low, while she told him about the night she killed her husband.

It was after Frank Tanner had left. He had come to see Jim Erin on business, with a proposition to supply the sutler’s store with leather and straw goods he could bring up from Mexico.

She stared into the fire, remembering that night. “They were drinking when I left to visit for a while,” she said. “When I got back Frank was gone and Jim was out of whiskey. He couldn’t borrow any. No one would lend it to him, and that night he didn’t have enough money to buy any. So he said he was going out to get corn beer…”

“He liked tulapai, uh?”

“He liked anything you could drink. He said someone not far away would sell him a bucket of it. I told him he was too drunk to go out alone, and he said then I was coming with him if I was so concerned. Jim got his gun and we took the buggy, not past the main gate, because he didn’t want anybody questioning him. There was no stockade and it was easy to slip out if you didn’t want to be seen.

“I don’t know where we went except it was a few miles from the fort and off the main road. When we finally stopped Jim got out and left me there. He said ‘here,’ handing me his gun, ‘so you won’t be scared.’ He didn’t mean it as kindness; he was saying ‘here, woman, I’m going off alone, but I don’t need any gun.’ Do you see what I mean?”

She looked at Valdez. He nodded and asked her then, “Was he drunk at this time?”

“Fairly. He’d had the bottle with Frank. He stumbled some, weaving, as he walked away from the buggy. There wasn’t a house around or a sign of light. He walked off toward a draw you could see because of the brush in it.

“It must have been a half hour before I saw him coming back, hearing him first, because it was so dark that night, then seeing him. He was carrying a gourd in front of him with both hands and when he got to the buggy he raised it and said, ‘Here, take it.’ He put his foot up on the step plate to rest the gourd on his knee, but as he did it his foot slipped and he dropped the gourd on the rocks. He looked down at the broken pieces and the corn beer soaking into the ground, then up at me and said it was my fault, I should have taken it. He started screaming at me, saying he was going to beat me up good. I said, ‘Jim, don’t do it. Please,’ I remember that. He started to step up into the buggy, reaching for me, and I jumped out the other side. I ran toward the draw, but he got ahead of me, turning me. I said to him, ‘Jim, I’ve got your gun. If you touch me I’ll use it.’ I remember saying that too. He kept coming, working around me as I faced him, until I was against the side of the draw and couldn’t turn. I said to Jim, please. He came at me and I pulled the trigger. Jim fell to his knees, though I wasn’t sure I had hit him. He picked up something, I guess a rock, and came at me again, and this time I shot him twice and knew I had killed him.”

Valdez rolled a cigarette and leaned into the fire to light it, and raising his eyes he saw the woman staring into the light. She sat unmoving; she was in another time, remembering, her hands folded in her lap. She seemed younger at this moment and smaller, this woman who had killed her husband.

Valdez said, “You didn’t tell anyone?”

She shook her head slowly.