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Elmore Leonard: Valdez Is Coming

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Elmore Leonard Valdez Is Coming

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The Negro shook his head, once each way.

“Said your name is Johnson.”

“You know my name.”

“I’m telling you what he said.”

“Where’d I kill this man?”

“Huachuca.”

The Negro hesitated. “That was some time ago I was in the Tenth. More than a year.”

“You a deserter?”

“I served it out.”

“Then you got something that says so.”

“In the wagon, there’s a bag there my things are in.”

“Will you talk to this man Tanner?”

“If I can hold from busting him.”

“Listen, why did you run this morning?”

“They come chasing. I don’t know what they want.” He lowered the gun a little, his brown-stained tired-looking eyes staring intently at Bob Valdez. “What would you do? They come on the run. Next thing I know they firing at us.”

“Will you go with me and talk to him?”

The Negro hesitated again. Then shook his head. “I don’t know him.”

“Then he won’t know you.”

“He didn’t know me this morning.”

“All right,” Bob Valdez said. “I’ll bet your paper says you were discharged. Then we’ll show it to this man, uh?”

The Negro thought it over before he nodded, very slowly, as if still thinking. “All right. Bring him here, I’ll say a few words to him.”

Bob Valdez smiled a little. “You can point that gun some other way.”

“Well…” the Negro said, “if everybody’s friends.” He lowered the revolver to his side.

The wagon was in the willow trees by the creek. Off to the right. But Bob Valdez did not turn right away in that direction. He backed away, watching Orlando Rincon for no reason that he knew of. Maybe because the man was holding a gun and that was reason enough.

He had backed off six or seven feet when Orlando Rincon shoved the revolver down into his belt. Bob Valdez turned and started for the trees.

It was at this moment that he looked across the pasture. He saw Mr. Tanner and R. L. Davis at the edge of the scrub trees but wasn’t sure it was them. Something tried to tell him it was them, but he did not accept it until he was off to the right, out of the line of fire, and by then the time to yell at them or run toward them was past. R. L. Davis had the Winchester up and was firing.

They say R. L. Davis was drunk or he would have pinned him square. As it was, the bullet shaved Rincon and plowed past him into the hut.

Bob Valdez saw Rincon half turn and he saw Rincon’s accusing eyes as Rincon pulled the long-barreled dragoon from his belt.

“They weren’t supposed to,” Bob Valdez said, holding one hand out as if to stop Rincon. “Listen, they weren’t supposed to do that!”

The revolver was free, and Rincon was cocking it. “Don’t!” Bob Valdez said. “Don’t do it!” Looking right into the Negro’s eyes and seeing it was no use, that Rincon was going to shoot him, and suddenly hurrying, he jerked the shotgun up and pulled both triggers so that the explosions came out in one blast and Orlando Rincon was spun and thrown back inside.

They came out across the pasture to have a look, some going inside where they found the woman and brought her out, everybody noticing she would have a child in about a month. Those by the doorway made room as Mr. Tanner and R. L. Davis approached.

Diego Luz came over by Bob Valdez, who had not moved. Valdez stood watching them and he saw Mr. Tanner look down at Rincon and after a moment shake his head.

“It looked like him,” Mr. Tanner said. “It sure looked like him.”

He saw R. L. Davis squint at Mr. Tanner. “It ain’t the one you said?”

Mr. Tanner shook his head again. “I’ve seen him before though. I know I’ve seen him somewheres.”

Bob Valdez saw R. L. Davis shrug. “You ask me, they all look alike.” He was yawning then, fooling with his hat, and then his eyes swiveled over to Bob Valdez standing with the empty shotgun.

“Constable,” R. L. Davis said. “You went and killed the wrong coon.”

Bob Valdez started for him, raising the shotgun to swing it like a club, but Diego Luz caught him from behind and locked a big arm around his neck, under his chin, until he was still and Mr. Tanner and the others had moved off.

2

A man can be in two different places and he will be two different men. Maybe if you think of more places he will be more men, but two is enough for now. This is Bob Valdez washing his hands in the creek and resting in the willows after digging the hole and lowering Orlando Rincon into it and covering him with dirt and stones, resting and watching the Lipan Apache woman who sat in silence by the grave of the man whose child she would have in a month.

This is one Bob Valdez. The forty-year-old town constable and stage-line shotgun rider. A good, hardworking man. And hard looking, with a dark hard face that was creased and leathery; but don’t go by looks, they said, Bob Valdez was kindly and respectful. One of the good ones. The whores in Inez’s place on Commercial Street would call to him from their windows; even the white-skinned girls who had come from St. Louis, they liked him too. Bob Valdez would wave at them and sometimes he would go in and after being with the girl would have a cup of coffee with Inez. They had known each other when they were children in Tucson. That was all right, going to Inez’s place. Mr. Beaudry and Mr. Malson and the others could try to think of a time when Bob Valdez might have drunk too much or swaggered or had a certain smart-aleck look on his face, but they would never recall such a time. Yes, this Bob Valdez was all right.

Another Bob Valdez inside the Bob Valdez in the willows that evening had worked for the Army at one time and had been a contract guide when General Crook chased Geronimo down into the Madres. He was a tracker out of Whipple Barracks first, then out of Fort Thomas, then in charge of the Apache police at Whiteriver. He would sit at night eating with them and talking with them as he learned the Chiricahua dialect. He would keep up with them all day and shoot his Springfield carbine one hell of a lot better than any of them could shoot. He had taken scalps but never showed them to anyone and had thrown them away by the time Geronimo was in Oklahoma and he had gone to work for the stage company, Hatch and Hodges, to live as a civilized man. Shortly after that he was named town constable in Lanoria at twenty-five dollars a month, getting the job because he got along with people, including the Mexicans in town who drank too much on Saturday night, and this was the Bob Valdez that Mr. Beaudry and Mr. Malson and the others knew. They had never met the first Bob Valdez.

And they had forgotten about the second Bob Valdez; they had gone, everyone cleared out of the Maricopa pasture. He was alone with the Lipan Apache woman as evening settled and the grove in the willow trees became dark.

He had not spoken to the woman. He had touched her shoulder before digging the grave – when she had tried to take the shovel from him to do it herself – he had touched her, easing her to the ground, and she had sat unmoving while he formed the hole and dug deep into the soil. He would look at her and smile, but her expression gave him nothing in return. She wasn’t an attractive woman. She was a round shape in a dirty gray dress with yellow strands of beads. He did not know how old she was. She was something sitting there watching him but not watching him. She would build a fire and sit here all night and in the morning she would probably be gone.

He had never seen the woman before. He had seen Orlando Rincon in Lanoria. He had recognized him, but had never spoken to him before today. Rincon had a one-loop spread a half day’s ride south of Lanoria that he and the woman tended alone. That much was all Bob Valdez knew about them. They had come into town for something and now the man was dead and the woman was alone with her unborn child. Like that, her life, whatever it had been before, good or bad, was gone.

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