By then I was already getting around with a cane, and in another week or so I didn’t need it anymore. I took my meals at a little Mex café down the street. I went for a stroll every morning in a nearby park, limping less every day. I’d sit on a bench in the sun and read the local papers. Every afternoon I’d check in at the post office. One day Esteban’s letter was waiting for me.
He wrote in a scrawl and mostly in Spanish as bad as his English, but with a few English phrasings mixed in, pretty much the way he usually talked. He said the police had questioned him and some of the other vaqueros about me but the boys all said they had no idea where I might have gone, which was of course the truth. There was a warrant out on me for murder, he said, and there was a reward of five hundred dollars for information leading to my capture. He said he could be a rich man if only he knew exactly where I was living. Maybe he was joking and maybe not. And he said that, in case I didn’t know it, the señora had sold the ranch.
She had done so only a few days after the funerals of Don Cullen and Don Reuben. And then a week after the sale, she departed on the train from Marfa with only two bags of belongings. She told everyone she was going to live with a cousin in Albuquerque and gave her new address to a few people. But it was common knowledge that when her bookstore friend Mrs. Morgan had tried to contact her shortly after she moved, the Albuquerque post office said there was no such address in town. Where she had truly gone, Esteban wrote, no one could say.
As for Chente, he had been convicted of assault and sentenced to six months in the county jail. It was doubtful he would receive an early release for good behavior, as he was always fighting with the other inmates. The new owner of the YB—now called the Blue Range Ranch—was a kind man named Colfax who had become rich in the oil business but had always wanted to raise horses. Mr. Colfax had kept on all of the hands and retained Esteban as the foreman. Esteban said he was glad the Blue Range would be strictly a horse ranch, and he concluded with the hope that I was safe and in good health and advised me to go with God.
That was that.
And why I lied to Daniela about how I’d come to leave the YB.
After I got Esteban’s letter I gave some thought to hitchhiking out into ranch country and trying to get on as a hand somewhere, but the more I thought about it the less the idea appealed to me. Then one morning I woke up knowing I never wanted to work on a ranch again.
Over the next two months I worked at several different jobs in San Antonio and hated them all. I carried a hod for a construction gang, worked with a road-tarring crew, laid sewer pipe on a municipal project, drove a water truck for the city. I didn’t stick with any of them for more than a few weeks. I was busting my back for peanuts and choking on the boredom. I was drunk almost every night and getting into bar fights.
One night in an alley behind a saloon I beat the shit out of a tough-talking merchant sailor who had a couple of inches and about thirty pounds on me. He’d been bullying everybody in the bar and they were glad to see me cool him, and my drinks were on the house the rest of the night. Among the spectators was a guy who had a friend who owned a cathouse at the south end of town and was in need of a good bouncer. The last good one who’d worked there had got stabbed in his sleep by a jealous girlfriend, and the two he’d hired since had both got their asses whipped by rough customers. Was I interested in the job? Sure, why not? The next day he took me out to the place, the Bluebonnet Dance Hall, and introduced me to the owner, a Mr. Stanley, and told him about the way I’d handled the sailor. And I got the job.
The place called itself a dance hall and on the ground floor that’s what it was. The “dance hostesses” did their whoring on the second floor. I’d check in around five o’clock and usually not leave till three or four in the morning, depending on how much business the joint was turning. I’d sit in a chair at the foot of the stairs to the second floor and keep an eye on things in the dance parlor and I was within easy call of the floorwoman upstairs if any of the girls had trouble with a customer.
The only troublesome guys we had in there during my first weeks on the job were drunks who either couldn’t get it up or couldn’t get off for some other reason and thought their three dollars bought them all the time they’d need to get their satisfaction. But the house limit was fifteen minutes unless you ponied up another three bucks. If a customer got unreasonable about it the floorwoman would call down for me and I’d go up and persuade the guy to get his clothes on and take his leave. I hardly ever had to get rougher with any of them than an armlock. Only now and then did I have to punch somebody in the gut to put an end to the argument. I carried the Colt under my jacket but Stanley had told me I’d better never pull it unless some customer pulled a piece first. The job required long hours, but it paid well and had the added benefit of a free fuck at the end of the night.
I’d been there about a month when a guy hit one of the girls and the floorwoman called down for me. The guy was bigger than me but looked scared and said he was really sorry and he’d give the girl some money to make up for it and so on. I figured what the hell, the girl wasn’t really hurt, why rough him up? I told him to give her twenty bucks and don’t come back. Right, right, he said—and the moment I took my eyes off him he caught me with a hell of a sucker punch. He landed another good one before I got my footing and turned the thing around. Like everybody else in the place Stanley heard the commotion and came rushing upstairs and into the room, but by then it was all over. The guy was groaning on the floor, his nose broken and blown up, a front tooth somewhere under the bed. I had a shiner and was tempted to give him a kick in the balls for good measure but didn’t do it. But when Stanley saw him he said, “Oh shit.” Turned out the guy was some kind of assistant to the mayor, a regular customer who’d been coming to the Bluebonnet once a week for the past several months. He’d been a problem a few times before but not in a long while, and this was the first time he’d ever taken a swing at anybody. Stanley and a couple of the girls helped him up and tidied him somewhat but then the guy started threatening to make plenty of legal trouble for the club. The matter was finally settled when Stanley gave him a wad of money and fired me.
For a week afterward I was in a fury. It was partly because of losing a job with good pay and free women, partly because of losing it the way I did. Still, that wasn’t the whole reason for my anger, or even the main part of it. But even if somebody had put a gun to my head I couldn’t have explained exactly what it was, and it made me even angrier that I couldn’t.
I started taking long walks every night and I always carried both guns. Then one chilly January night I was walking down a sidewalk bordering a large park thick with trees and shrubbery when I took notice of a fancy Spanish restaurant called Domingo’s across the street. The place was doing a brisk business and as I stood there it occurred to me how easy it would be to rob it.
The idea got my blood rushing. The cashier’s counter was by the front door and out of view of the dining room. Just stick the gun in the cashier’s face and make him hand over the money. If anybody came in the door or out of the dining room while I was at it I’d point the piece at them and tell them to stand fast…then grab the dough and hustle across the street into the park…then pick any one of a dozen paths out to some other street and mix in with the Saturday-night crowds.