Elmore Leonard: Hombre

I was out in front of the Hatch & Hodges office at the time, directly across the street, and I got a clear look at the girl even with all the people around. She was seventeen or eighteen and certainly pretty. Though maybe pretty wasn’t the word, the way her hair was cut almost as short as a boy’s and her face dark from the sun. But she looked good anyway. Even after living with Apaches over a month and after all the things they must have done to her.

Somebody said the girl had been taken by Chiricahuas on a raid and held four or five weeks before a patrol out of Fort Thomas surprised their ranchería and found her. She had stayed at Thomas a while and now this officer was to put her on a stage for home. Some place around St. David.

Only by now there weren’t any more southbound stages, and there hadn’t been for over a week. There were notices all over, but that was like the Army to bring her all the way over to Sweetmary not knowing Hatch & Hodges had shut down its stage service. They told the lieutenant over at the hotel, but he wanted to hear it directly from the company. So he sent one of the escort soldiers for Henry Mendez who went right over.

I stayed out front hoping to get another look at the girl if she came out. That’s why I was still there when John Russell appeared, which was some fifteen minutes later.

Somebody might laugh, but just for something to do I was picturing the McLaren girl and I sitting alone in the hotel café. We were talking and I heard myself say, “It must have been a very terrible experience, being with those Apaches.” Her eyes stayed on her coffee, and she didn’t say anything to that.

So we talked about other things. I heard myself speaking calmly in a low tone, telling her how I would be looking into some other business now that this office was closing. Go some place else. With no family here there was nothing to keep me. Then I pictured us traveling together. (Do you see how one thing led to another?) But what would we travel in?

That’s when I thought of the mud wagon, the light spring coach Mr. Mendez and I had taken to Delgado’s that day. It was still here.

I said to the McLaren girl, “Since you’re anxious to leave and there’s no regular stage, I wonder if you would like to ride along with me?” (Which proves that using the mud wagon was my idea; whether Mr. Mendez agrees or not.)

Then I skipped the part where she says yes and goes and gets her things and all and pictured the two of us in the coach again. It was night and we were traveling south. Above the wind and the rattle sounds I’d hear her start to cry and put my arm around her and lift her chin and say something that would calm her. She’d sniffle and nestle closer, and even with the peculiar haircut I’d know she wasn’t any boy.

We might have rode along in that coach the whole night while I just stood there in front of the office. But both the McLaren girl and the coach disappeared the second I saw John Russell. The new John Russell.

He was sitting his roan horse on this side of the street but down a ways. He was watching the hotel, sitting there like he’d always been there. Smoking a cigarette, I remember that too. But the only thing I recognized about him right away was his hat, worn straight and the brim just curled a little.

Now he had on a suit. It was a pretty worn dark gray one, but it fit him all right. You could see that his hair had been cut. Without the hair covering the ears and that shell belt and all he wasn’t someone you would stare at. At least not till you saw him close.

That was not till a few minutes later. Until Mr. Mendez came out of the hotel and Russell nudged his roan up to in front of the office. As he dismounted he looked at me over the saddle and there was that tell-nothing expression, looking at me no different than the way he had looked at Lamarr Dean the moment before he broke a whisky glass against his mouth.

Mr. Mendez was standing there now. He said, “You’re going to do it?”

“I’m going there to sell the place,” Russell said.

Mr. Mendez seemed to stare at him for awhile, thinking or just looking, I don’t know which. Finally he said, “It’s up to you. You can be white or Mexican or Indian. But now it pays you to be a white man. To look like a white man for awhile. When you go to Contention, you say, How are you? I’m John Russell. I own the Russell place. Some people will remember you from before; some won’t. But they will all know you as John Russell who owns the Russell place. You look at it. If you don’t like it, sell it. If you like it, keep it, and see what happens and then decide.” Mr. Mendez almost seemed to smile. “Did you know life was that simple?”

“I’ve learned some things,” John Russell said. “That’s why I sell it.”

He left his roan horse in front and went with Mr. Mendez back across the street to the Alamosa Hotel. Mr. Mendez hadn’t bothered to introduce us. In fact he had not bothered to look at me at all. Which was all right.

A little later this Mexican boy who worked for us took Russell’s horse around to the stable. I was in the office then, having given up on seeing the McLaren girl again. The boy came in through the back carrying Russell’s blanket roll and carbine and put them down on the passenger bench. I remember thinking, What will he do without the Spencer if Lamarr Dean or Early are over there at the Alamosa?

I also remember thinking at the time that dressing like a white man and taking a white man’s name wasn’t ever going to hide the Apache in him. I don’t mean Apache blood. I just mean after the way he had lived, how was he even going to convince anybody he was a white man? He didn’t even prefer to speak English. It was things like that gave you the feeling he had no use for white men or our ways.

According to Mr. Mendez he was most likely three-parts white, as I have said, and the rest Mexican on his mother’s side. John Russell himself had no memory of his father and only some memory of living in a Mexican village. Probably in Sonora. At that time they say the Apaches were forever raiding the little pueblos and carrying off whatever they needed, clothes, weapons, some women, and sometimes boys young enough to be brought up Apache-style. Which is what must have happened to John Russell. Piecing things together, he must have lived with them about from the time he was six to about age twelve.

Here is where a James Russell, late of Contention, comes in. At that time he owned supply wagons contracted to the Army, and he was at Fort Thomas when this boy who was called Ish-kay-nay was brought in with some prisoners. The boy was assigned to a work detail under James Russell and that was how the two became friends. Just a month later, when James Russell sold his business and went to settle in Contention, he took the boy with him and gave him his American name, John Russell. Five years or so passed and the boy even went to school there. Then all of a sudden he left and went up to San Carlos and joined the reservation police as if to become Apache again. (Here they called him Tres Hombres, which I will try to tell you about later.)

Now we are almost up to the present. He was with the police about three years, mostly up at Turkey Creek and Whiteriver. Then he moved again. Off on his own now as a mustanger. (I guess to break horses you don’t have to be halter-broke yourself, because he was pretty good at it Mr. Mendez said.)

A month ago, then, when Mr. James Russell died, the word was passed to John Russell through Mr. Mendez that he had been left Russell’s place outside Contention. Mr. Mendez wanted to put him on a coach and send him down there in style, but Russell kept backing off. Finally, when he did show up willing, there were no more stagecoaches. As I have explained.

Hatch & Hodges was leaving Sweetmary partly because there wasn’t enough business from here south; partly because the railroad was taking too much business other places. But that day, all of a sudden, you’d never know we were hard up for business.