He pulled out the big bottom drawer of his desk and opened a strongbox with a key. He took out a heavy-looking, clanking canvas bag and shoved it across the desk toward me.
“Here it is,” he said. “You sure you don't want to change your mind?”
“I'm sure,” I said. I didn't bother to count the silver. I just picked it up and walked out, hoping that I had seen the fat man for the last time.
I went back up to my room and Bama was still there, drunk, as I had expected. I heard him talking to somebody as I came up the hall, and when I got to the door I saw that it was Marta.
“What's she doing here?”
Bama shrugged, “Maybe she's in love with you,” he said, waving his arms. “Maybe she can't bear to have you out of her sight.”
“She'd better start getting used to it, because I'm going to put Ocotillo behind me.”
I threw the sack of silver on the bed and she stood there looking at me. She seemed to come and go like night shadows, and every time I saw her she seemed to be a different person. I tried to remember how she had looked the first time I had seen her, there in the dusty street with fiesta going on all around us. I couldn't remember.
“I think the girl's got the wrong idea about you,” Bama said. “She thinks you killed the Indian because of her. It wasn't that at all, was it, Tall Cameron?”
“No,” I said, “it wasn't.”
“See?” Bama said, waving his arms again, as if he had just proved something.
The girl didn't say anything. She just stood there looking at me, and I had a feeling that overnight she had grown from a wild animal into a woman. And not a bad-looking woman, at that.
But I still wasn't interested. “You really ought to do something about her,” Bama said. “Tell her to go home. It's not decent the way she walks in and out of this place any time she gets the notion.” Bama lay back on the bed, holding the empty whisky bottle before him, staring into it as if it were a crystal ball and he were about ready to give us the beginning and end to everything. But, instead, he dropped the bottle and dozed off.
I began digging in my saddlebags, getting my stuff together. “Why don't you do like he says?” I said. “Go home or somewhere. Why don't you stay down in the Mexican part of town with your own people?”
“You need Marta,” she said.
“I don't need anybody.” But she didn't believe me.
And I didn't believe myself, for that matter. An old, half-forgotten memory began to shape in my mind, and I remembered what Bama had said the day before. “Why don't you tell me about the girl you left in Texas? The girl you grew up with and loved and planned to marry—”
For a moment bright anger washed over me, a hurting, twisting anger that made me want to kill Bama as he lay there in his drunken stupor. But then I remembered Bama's own lost love and the anger vanished. We weren't so different, at that, Bama and me. We both lived in the past, because men like us have no future.
The mood hung on and I couldn't shake it off, and I felt completely lost. A bundle of loose ends dangled in a black nothingness. There was no turning back, and I wondered if maybe Bama had found the answer in whisky.
It even occurred to me that maybe Marta was the answer for me, that maybe she was right and I needed her. But that wouldn't work either, and I knew it. The best thing to do was to get out of Ocotillo.
I threw some more stuff into the saddlebag, then I went over to the bed and rolled Bama over to give me room to count the silver. I hadn't bothered to guess how much my cut would be, but I had seen the pile of money we had got off the smugglers and I knew that a fair cut would be enough to take care of me for quite a while.
Bama grunted and lurched up in bed as I untied the sack and dumped the contents on the blanket.
For a minute I just looked at it. There were some adobe dollars there, all right, but there was a lot of other things too. I scattered the stuff around and picked up a handful of round brass disks with holes in the middle. On one side they had the names E. E. Basset stamped on them, and on the other side there were the words “Good for One Dollar in Trade.”
For a minute I thought there had been a mistake and Basset had given me the wrong sack. But then, from the look on Bama's face, I knew that it was no mistake. This was the way the fat man paid off: He collected the silver and gave his men a pile of worthless brass buttons. Quickly I scattered the stuff some more and sorted it out, and when I had finished I had thirty-five adobe dollars and sixty-five pieces of brass.
Finally I straightened up, and what was going on inside of me must have been written on my face.
Bama seemed suddenly sober. “Take it easy, kid.”
“Is this the way Basset pays all his men?”
“I thought you knew,” Bama said.
“Look at that!” I kicked the bed and brass and silver went flying all over the room. “Is that what he calls a fair cut? I saw the money they sacked up on that raid— fifteen thousand dollars, at least. Maybe twenty thousand. And he hands me thirty-five dollars and sixty-five pieces of brass. Even if it was all silver. It would still be a long way from a fair cut.”
By the time the money hit the floor, Marta was on her knees gathering it up in her skirt. Bama sighed deeply.
“That's the way it is when you work for men like Basset. That's why I was wondering how you meant to get out of Ocotillo. Anyway, that brass is as good as the silver, if you spend it in the saloon.”
“I don't intend to spend it in the saloon,” I said. Then I wheeled and headed for the door. Marta was standing there, the silver and brass in her skirt, holding it out.
I said, “Keep it. Spend it on saloon whisky, or take it home, or throw it to the chickens. I won't need it.”
Her eyes lit up and she smiled a smile like a kid who had just found a wagonful of candy.
Bama lurched across the room and grabbed my sleeve as I was about to walk out. “Don't go down there half-cocked,” he said. “Don't you think Basset has had this kind of trouble before? He knows what he's doing and he knows how to take care of himself.”
“I don't want any trouble,” I said, “but I'm going to get what's coming to me if I have to choke the stuff out of him.”
I shook Bama off and went down the stairs three at a time and burst into the saloon. The bartender was still leaning on his broom. He didn't seem exactly surprised to see me and he didn't try to stop me when I marched straight on back to Basset's office. I kicked the door open and said, “Goddamn you, Basset, I want what's coming to me...”
But I left the words hanging. Basset had been receiving company while I'd been upstairs jawing with Bama. Kreyler, the fat man's right-hand gun, was leaning against the wall near the door. I guessed that Bama knew what he was talking about; Basset had experience in handling situations like this.
Kreyler didn't have his guns out, but he had his thumbs hooked in his gun belt, and all he had to do was cup his hand around the pistol butt if there was some shooting to be done. Basset was still sitting where I had left him, smiling that wet smile of his. He sat back wheezing and coughing.
“Why, son, what seems to be the matter? Ha-ha. You look all worked up about something. Doesn't he, Kreyler?”