Elmore Leonard - Valdez Is Coming

“Where?” Tanner said.

“He was hiding.”

“I said where.”

“In the line shack. At the Maricopa pasture.”

To the segundo Tanner said, “They look in the shack?”

“I’ll find out,” the segundo said.

“If he wasn’t there,” Tanner said to Diego Luz, “you’re a dead man.”

“He brought him his clothes,” R. L. Davis said, “and he must’ve brought him his guns too.”

“We’ve stayed long enough,” Tanner said. “Tend to the horsebreaker.”

R. L. Davis was standing in the yard. He wanted to say more, but it was passing him by. “Mr. Tanner, I could talk to him some-”

But Tanner wasn’t paying any attention to him.

Two men and then a third one brought Diego Luz out in the yard. They bent his arms behind him, forcing him to his knees and this way got him facedown on the hardpack, spreading his arms, a man sitting on him and a man clamping each of his arms flat to the ground with a boot.

The segundo went to one knee at Diego Luz’s head. He worked the tobacco from one side of his mouth to the other with his tongue and spit a brown stream close to Diego Luz. He said, “I believe you; you don’t know where he is. But maybe you’re lying. Or maybe you lie some other time to us. You understand?”

The American with the bony face and the high boots went down to his knees close to Diego Luz’s left hand that was palm-flat on the ground. The man drew his Colt revolver and flipped it, catching it by the barrel, and brought the butt down hard on Diego Luz’s hand. The hand clenched to protect itself as Diego Luz screamed and the gun butt came down on the tight white knuckles and Diego Luz screamed again. This way they broke both of the horsebreaker’s hands while his family watched from the shade of the ramada.

“I mean it,” the segundo said, as Diego Luz lay there after the men holding him had moved away. “You come work for me sometime.”

They herded the family into the yard to get them out of the way while they destroyed the house and burned everything that would burn, beginning inside, pouring kerosene on the beds and the furniture, while outside two mounted men were fixing their ropes to the support posts of the ramada. The flames took the straw blinds covering the windows; the men inside poured out with smoke, and as they cleared the doorway, the mounted men spurred away to bring the mesquite-pole awning down over the front of the house. They burned the ramada and the outbuildings and the corn crib. They pulled his corral apart, scattering the horses, and came back across the yard, gathering and riding out southeast, leaving their dust hanging in the air and the sound of them fading in the early morning sunlight.

They were a good mile from the place, moving single file down the bank of an arroyo, the riders milling in the dry stream bed as they moved one at a time up the other side.

R. L. Davis looked back, squinting at the gray smoke rising in the near distance – not a lot of smoke now; the house would be burned out and most of the smoke was probably coming from the corn crib. He turned in his saddle. Tanner was already up the cutbank, but he saw the segundo still in the dry stream bed, waiting for the file of riders to move up. R. L. Davis walked his horse over to him.

“You see that smoke?”

The segundo looked at R. L. Davis, not at the sky.

“I reckon you can see that smoke a good piece,” R. L. Davis said. “We’re about a mile. I reckon you could still see it eight, ten miles.”

The segundo said, “If he’s no farther than that and if he’s looking this way.”

R. L. Davis grinned. “You see what I mean, huh? I was sure you would, though I wasn’t putting much stock in Tanner getting it.”

“Be careful,” the segundo said. “He’ll eat you up.”

“I don’t mean that insulting. I mean he might want to think about it a while, seeing things I don’t see-”

“Hey,” the segundo said. He took time to squirt a stream of tobacco to the dry-caked earth. “Why do you think he’d come if he sees the smoke?”

“Because they’re friends. He brought him clothes and his guns.”

“Would you go? If you saw your friend’s place burning?”

“Sure I would.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” the segundo said. “But he might. If he sees it he might.”

“It’s worth staying to find out,” R. L. Davis said.

The segundo nodded. “Worth leaving you and maybe a few more.” He started off, reining his horse toward the far bank, then came around to look at Davis again. “Hey,” the segundo said, maybe smiling in the shadow of his Sonora hat. “What are you going to do if he comes?”

“You don’t have to tie me,” the Erin woman said. “I’ll wait for you; I won’t run.”

Valdez said nothing. Maybe he had to tie her and maybe he didn’t, but a mile from Diego Luz’s place now and the smoke gone from the sky an hour, he tied her and left her in the arroyo, marking the place in his mind: willows on the bank and yellow brittlebrush in the dry bed. He left her in deep shade, not speaking or looking at her face.

Though he looked at her over and over as he made his way to Diego Luz’s place, picturing her in the darkness of the high meadow, the woman lying with him under the blanket, holding her and feeling her against him and for a long time, after she was asleep, staring up at the cold night sky, at the clouds that moved past the moon.

In the morning the sky was clear, until he saw the smoke in the distance, seven miles northwest, and knew what it was as he saw it. Valdez packed their gear without a word and they moved out, across the meadow and down through the foothills toward the column of smoke. At one point she said to him, “What if they’re waiting for you?” And he answered, “We’ll see.”

They could be waiting or not waiting. Or he could have not seen the smoke. Or he could have continued with the woman southeast and been near the twin peaks by this evening. Or he never could have asked Diego Luz to help him. Or he never could have started this. Or he never could have been born. But he was here and he was pointing northwest instead of southeast because he had no choice. At first he had thought only about Diego Luz and his family. But when there was no sign of Tanner, no dust rising through the field glasses, he began to think of the woman more. When she was still with him when they reached the arroyo, he knew he wanted to keep her and tied her up to make sure of it.

Following the dry stream bed north, Valdez saw the tracks where Tanner’s men had crossed; he noticed the prints of several horses leading south. He continued on a short distance before climbing out of the arroyo to move west. This way he circled Diego Luz’s place and approached from a thicket beyond the horse pasture, studying the house and yard for some time before he moved into the open.

It might have been a dozen years ago after an Apache raid, the look of the place, the burned-out house and the dog lying in the yard; but there were people here, alive, and a team hitched to a wagon, and that was the difference. They waited for him by the wagon, Diego Luz and his family.

Valdez dismounted. “What did they do to you?”

“What you see,” Diego Luz said. He raised his hands in front of him, his hands open, the swollen, discolored fingers apart.

“Did they harm your family?”

“A little. If they did any more I wouldn’t be here.”

“I’m sorry,” Valdez said.

“We’re friends. They would have come with or without Mr. R. L. Davis.”

“He was with them?”

“He saw me in Lanoria with your clothes. Jesus, my hands hurt.”

“Let me look at them.”

“No looking today. Get out of here.”