“I said we’d be married, we will.”
“When?”
“Well not right now, all right?” His hand stroked her arm beneath the flannel. “Come on, take this thing off.”
She lay without moving, her eyes open in the darkness, letting her hesitation stretch into silence, a long moment, before she sat up slowly and worked the nightgown out from beneath her. She pulled it over her head, turning to him.
3
Inez was fat and took her time coming over from the stove with the coffeepot. Filling the china cup in front of Bob Valdez and then her own, Inez said, “She left early. It must have been before daybreak.”
“You hear her?”
“No, maybe one of the girls did. I can ask.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I heard what you’re doing,” Inez said.
“Well, I’m not doing very good. I wanted to tell the woman maybe it would take me a little longer.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Listen, I’m tired,” Valdez said. “I’m not going to argue with you, all right?”
“Go upstairs.”
“I said I’m tired.”
“So are the girls. I mean take a room and go to sleep.”
“I have a run to St. David this afternoon and don’t come back till the morning.”
“Tell them you’re sick.”
“No, they don’t have anybody.”
“That Davis was in here last night. I threw him out.”
“You can do it,” Valdez said.
“He was in no condition. Only talk. I don’t need talk,” Inez said. She made a noise sipping her coffee and watched Valdez shape a cigarette. He handed it to her and made another one and lit them with a kitchen match.
“Now what do you do, forget the whole thing?”
“I don’t know.” He rubbed a gnarled brown hand over his hair, pulling it down on his forehead. “I think maybe talk to this Mr. Tanner again.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I didn’t explain it to him right. The part that it’s like a court where you get money for something done to you. Not like a court, but, you know.”
“You’re still crazy. He won’t listen to you. Nobody will.”
“But if he does, the others will, uh?” Valdez sipped his coffee.
“Put a gun in his back if you can get close to him,” Inez said. “That’s the only way.”
“No guns.”
“The little shotgun.”
Valdez nodded, thinking about it. “That would be good, wouldn’t it?”
“Boom!” Inez laughed out and the sound of her voice filled the kitchen.
Valdez smiled. “Has he ever been in here?”
“They say he’s got a woman. Maybe he beats her or does strange things to her.”
“He’s never been here, but you don’t like him,” Valdez said. “Why?”
“My book.”
“Ah, your book. I forgot about it.”
“You’re in it.”
“Sure, I remember now.”
Inez called out, “Polly!” and waited a moment and called again.
A dark-haired girl in a robe came through the door from the front room. She smiled at Bob Valdez, holding the robe together in front of her. “Early bird,” she said.
“No early bird. Get me the book,” Inez said.
“Which, the black one?”
“No, the one before,” Inez said. “The green one.”
Valdez shook his head. “Black ones and green ones. How many do you have?”
“They go back about twelve years. To your time.”
“Like I’m an old man now.”
“Sometime you act it.”
The girl came into the kitchen again with the scrapbook under her arm. “The green one,” she said, winking at Bob Valdez and handing it to Inez, who pushed her coffee cup out of the way to open the book on the table. Inez sat at the end of the kitchen table with Polly standing behind her now, looking over her shoulder. Sitting to the side, Valdez lowered and cocked his head to look at the newspaper clippings and photographs mounted in the book.
“He seems familiar,” Valdez said.
Inez looked at him. “I hope so. It’s Rutherford Hayes.”
“Well, that was twelve, fourteen years ago,” Valdez said. He looked up as Polly laughed. She was leaning over Inez and the top of her robe hung partly open.
There were photographs of local businessmen, territorial officials and national figures, including two presidents, Rutherford Hayes and Chester A. Arthur, Profirio Diaz and Carmelita at Niagara Falls, and the Prince of Wales on his visit to Washington.
“Have they been to your place?” Valdez asked.
“No, but if they come I want to recognize them.” Inez turned a page. “Earl Beaudry, on his appointment as land agent.” Inez moved to the next page, her finger tracing down the column of newspaper clippings.
“Here it is,” she said. “The first mention of him. August 13, 1881 – Frank Tanner and a Carlisle Baylor were convicted of cattle theft and sent to Yuma Penitentiary.”
Valdez seemed as pleased as he was surprised. “He’s been to prison.”
“For a few years, I think,” Inez said. “It doesn’t say how long. He was stealing cattle and driving them across the border. There’s more about him.” Her hand moved down the column and went to the next page. “Here, October, 1886, Frank J. Tanner, cattle broker, arraigned on a charge of murder in Contention, Arizona.”
“Cattle broker now,” Valdez said.
“The case was dismissed.”
“It’s getting better.”
Inez turned the page. “Ah, here’s the picture. You see him there?” Inez turned the book halfway toward Valdez and he leaned in, recognizing Tanner standing with a group of Army officers in front of an adobe building.
Inez read the caption. “It says he has a contract with the government to supply remounts to the Tenth United States Cavalry at Fort Huachuca.” She turned a few more pages. “I think that’s all.”
“Nothing about him now, uh?”
“There’s something else sticks in my mind about Huachuca,” Inez said, “but I don’t see it. Unless – sure, it would be in the other book.” She sat back in her chair looking up over her shoulder. “Polly?”
Valdez watched the girl straighten and draw the robe together.
“Should I take this one?” the girl asked.
Inez was turning pages again. “No, I want to show Bob something.”
“What have you got now?” he asked her.
Coming to a page, she pressed it flat and turned the book to him. “You remember?”
Valdez smiled a little. “That one.”
It was a photograph of Bob Valdez taken at Fort Apache, Arizona, September 7, 1884: Bob Valdez standing among small trees and cactus plants the photographer had placed in his studio shed as a background: Bob Valdez with a Sharps.50 cradled in one arm and a long-barreled Walker Colt on his leg. He was wearing a hat, with a bandana beneath it that covered half of his forehead, a belt of cartridges for the Sharps, and knee-length Apache moccasins. The caption beneath the picture described Roberto Valdez as chief of scouts with Major General George Crook, Department of Arizona, during his expedition into Sonora against hostile Apaches.
“That’s the way I still picture you,” Inez said. “When someone says Bob Valdez, this is the one I see. Not the one that wears a suit and a collar.”
Valdez was concentrating on the book, looking now at a photograph of a young Apache scout in buckskins and holding a rifle, standing against the same background used in the photo of himself. He remembered the photographer, a man named Fly. And the day the pictures were taken at Fort Apache. He remembered the scout washing himself and brushing his hair and putting on the buckskin shirt he had bought and had never worn before.
“Peaches,” Valdez said. “General Crook’s guide. His real name was Tso-ay, but the soldiers and the general called him Peaches. His skin.” Valdez continued to study the photograph. He said, “They’d put a suit and a collar on him too, if they ever took his picture again.”
Inez looked up as Polly came in with the other scrapbook. She took it from her and held it over the table.
“I don’t know where he is now,” Valdez was saying. “Maybe Fort Sill, Oklahoma, with the rest of them. Planting corn.” He shook his head. “Man, I would like to see that sometime. Those people growing things in a garden.”
Inez opened the book and laid it over the page Valdez was studying. He sat back as she turned a few pages and raised his gaze to Polly, who was looking over Inez’s shoulder again, letting her robe come open. She was built very well and had very white skin.