The Eye of the Hunter (12 page)

“Yes,” she said coolly, “I do understand that. But I don't want to marry anyone, ever again. And of course it would be illegal, until my husband is declared dead.”

Budge pulled his hat down to the bridge of his nose and tilted his head back to stare at her, his pallid face slick with sweat. He began to wriggle his shoulders.

“You Wingards think you're so fine,” he said with a smirk. “Your la-di-da papa with a chin beard like a goat. You and your fancy college ways.” He made his hands dangle from the wrists and wriggled his torso in what was evidently meant to mimic a college person.

“I don't think I'm better than you,” she said earnestly. “You're a good man. But you see—”

“Then how would you like to pay this good man for some of the feed your husband bought from me?” Budge yelled, pushing his face close to hers.

“I would like to, very much. As soon as—”

“And the horse he bought from me. He only paid half what he promised. Do you want to pay me the other half, college lady?”

Frances remembered the beautiful, utterly worthless chestnut Richard had shot in disgust. It was cut proud and tried to mount every mare on the road.

“But what?” Budge yelled.

“But nothing!”

“
But he told you I'd sold him a wind sucker, didn't he?
”

“No! That's not so.”

“So now you're a horse trader! Now you're a horse doctor! Know all there is to know, don't you?”

Frances turned to march haughtily from the barn, but Budge's hand caught her shoulder and he hurled her back against the wall of hay bales lining the aisle. Suddenly she began to weep—hopelessly, in exhaustion and fright. Why had Henry not known what would happen? Why had he let her do it?

“Help!” she cried. In her ears it sounded like a child's whimper.

Budge reached above her head and yanked something from the wall of hay. Some dried straw fell into her hair. He shook the thing in her face, his lips bared and his eyes wide. It was a hay hook with a single gleaming tine like a steel fang. Frances screamed.

Budge twisted the hook and caught the top button of her shirtwaist. He yanked it off. The polished point traced down her flesh to the hollow of her breast, and he snapped off another button. Then another fell, and he pulled her bodice open and looked at her lace chemise. With the hay hook he tore the lace and touched her breast with the steel.

Frances ran, stumbling, holding her skirts high.

She heard him a stride behind her as she reached the buggy. She collapsed against the leather seat, her head dropping forward.

She heard Budge sob with the effort of swinging the hook, heard it thud home but felt no pain. There was a second groan of effort, a sound of tearing fabric, but still there was no sensation. She turned her head a little and saw the steel flash as it ripped into a sack of grain inches from her shoulder. Again and again it tore through the burlap, as the grain spilled into the bed of the buggy.

Then Budge made a hoarse shout, and ran. She heard him stamping through the barn. In the silent morning, she heard her horse snorting and stamping and realized the buggy was being pulled out from under her.

Without looking back, she climbed into the buggy and let the big gray horse run.

The red dun was eager to travel, and Henry loped it for a minute or two, which carried him around a clump of mesquite at a turn. Then he jogged on at an easy traveling pace. He passed the last little adobe jacal and cornfield. He would have enjoyed riding all the way, but at a giant oak beside the road he dismounted and sat in the shade with his back against the trunk, wishing for one of the Frontera Hotel's cold steam beers.

He felt a touch feverish and remembered he had forgotten his quinine again.

He was carrying his old ‘95 gun on the saddle, and he went and got it out of its case and fooled with it, rubbing away some dust with his bandanna. A woodpecker was making a racket in the tree. He lay on his back to spot it, aimed, and made a popping sound. The bird flew.

“Don't know much about camouflage, do you?” Henry called after it. “Head like a New Hampshire apple.”

He was asleep when the crisp iron sound of buggy wheels came through the warm air. And for sure the horse was running!

Henry drove, slumped forward on a leather cushion beside the woman, wondering what, if anything, she was going to tell him about Budge. Three mysterious sacks of grain sprawled in the bed behind the seat, ripped open and with dull white grain spilling out. Frances had not yet explained, and she was in a dreadful state of nerves.

Her dress seemed to be torn, also, and every now and then she would reach up and pull the bodice together. And she would shiver, then take two or three deep sighs.

“What's wrong, Frances?” he asked finally.

“You should have stayed with me!” she charged.

He looked into her face. “Hey, that's what I thought, too. But you expressly told me—”

“I know. I'm sorry. He wanted to dance.”

“
Dance?
” Henry laughed. “What for?”

“Celebrating our betrothal. I was so frightened! I thought he was going to kill me with a hay hook. But he finally attacked the grain sacks instead....”

Henry tugged on the leathers. “I'm going back,” he said. “Evidently he didn't get the point I was making last night at the
Globe
. Keep driving—I'll take the horse.”

“Don't leave me! We're going home, Henry. He'd attack you and you'd have to kill him to stop him.”

It was true.

Whereas if he let Gorman get drunk tonight and pick a fight with someone else, the other man would kill him. Or the stablemen would kill him and be hung later.

Humming, he let the horse out again, kicking one leg over the side rail, trying to feel cocksure. (Captain Logan's boy strutting around with his little rifle, mimicking his daddy at Fort Bowie.)

Frances shuddered again.

“Hasn't been your best year, has it?” Henry said. But why, at this moment, did he have to remember what the priest had told him?

“No, it has not.”

He thought she might be weeping, but she kept her head turned away.

Halfway home they ate sandwiches she had brought, and drank warm soda. Then it was back to the grating of iron on gravel, of sunshine reflecting off the road, and scenery that didn't change much.

He was keenly aware of the fragrance of country flowers in her hair and clothing, probably a sachet collected and dried by her; of her little feminine movements. Sometimes she would clear her throat, sigh, or move a bit; turn her head to look at something in the brush or on a hillside. She had tied a blue bandanna over her hair to protect it against the dust. Her hair was almost black, like dark, oiled latigo leather.

But another woman said this pretty little thing had murdered her husband.

Since combat, Henry was acutely interested in the nature of the cover around him. Small trees, olive-gray, grew in the wash, which consisted mostly of sandbars. Many of the mesquites, though, were as large as oaks, dark green and thorny. A man down there had better climb a tree or dig like hell if he heard a shot, or he was a dead soldier.

To the west loomed rimrocked mountains, blued by distance; from the mountains, foothills came sloping back toward the river, peculiarly shaped formations like the skeletons of fish laid out with their tails toward the river, endless small ridges angling out north and south like fish bones. A detail trying to work toward the mountains would have all these small ridges to take, crest after bloody crest. They were tawny with dry grass and only modestly timbered with oaks.

Frances pointed. “We turn at that juniper,” she said. “We're almost home. That's a hackberry tree, beyond the juniper—with the mistletoe in the branches? It looks like oak, but oak resists the stuff. The tall grass is love grass—it's pretty good grazing and Mr. Parrish has a lot of it.”

“Mr. Hum Parrish? I thought he was dead.”

A quick glance. “My husband.”

“And is this Mr. Parrish's gun?” asked Henry, pulling the ornate carbine from the saddle scabbard beside the seat. It was the Hotchkiss-Winchester, with a tubular magazine in the stock, all the metal richly engraved with scrolls and inlaid with gold. Carved into the stock was a slogan that he read aloud: “
Let 'er RIP!
That's good.” He pushed the gun back.

But Frances shrugged in disdain. “Ornamentation precedes extinction,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“As Charles Darwin and my papa used to say. Certain animals—the dinosaurs, you know—became so furbished and furbelowed with protective horns and plates that they got stuck in tight places and starved. Or sank in the pond in which they'd been admiring themselves. At least the males.”

Henry chuckled. “Do you think your husband is extinct, Mrs. Parrish?”

Frances pointed quickly toward a bush. “That's an Arizona cardinal! Isn't he lovely?”

Henry admired the startlingly red bird eating berries from the shrub. “Yes, but he's so ornamental, he might become extinct, mightn't he?”

“Mr. Logan, I don't know whether my husband is dead or not. That is the truth. I could not swear either way. Tomorrow I'll show you what I mean.”

“
Bueno!
I came a long way to hear your opinion.” Henry smiled, but she would not look at him. He waited for her to continue with some startling revelation, but instead she lapsed into small talk.

“Are you married, Mr. Logan?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Do you go to church?”

“Miss Leisure asked me that, too. And the general said to be careful or his wife would ask me. I guess the answer to all you ladies is that I go to church when the fit is on me. Why do you ask?”

“I do have a reason. One last question: Do you believe everything you read in the papers?”

“Ma'am,” Henry said, “I'm a full-time bachelor, a part-time Presbyterian, and I don't believe all I read in the
Arizona Globe
. Where do we go from there?”

Frances crossed her arms and pressed her small, gloved fist against her chin. “Mr. Logan,” she said, “I've had to learn not to trust anyone. I've had no friends in two years. I'm trying to determine whether there is the slightest chance of our becoming—well, amigos—despite the bad start in the cemetery. You saw that the women in town snubbed me, and even the men were afraid to speak—they just grin and look down. I think that a man who isn't all tangled up in morals, and hasn't a wife telling him to beware of me, and knows that printing a lie doesn't make it true, might make—might be— I'm getting lost!”

She put her hand to her brow. “I mean that such a person might be able to understand the difficulties of my position! I've prayed till God's bored with me. Has He spoken a word to help me? Lifted a finger? Not so I've noticed.”

“Maybe you don't understand His language.”

She threw him a wild look, tears brimming. “
And you don't understand me, either!
”

“No, but I mean to try. Indeed I do.”

As her tears overflowed, he reached down to pat her hand. She caught his hand in both of hers, then clutched his arm, jammed her face against his shoulder, and began to sob.

“Sakes alive,” Henry chuckled. “Who would guess that such a beautiful lady would have anything but friends!”

She blubbered something unintelligible.

Henry drove, murmuring nonsense in a soothing voice. Frances would cry and sniffle, try to stop, and then cry some more. He recognized that her problem had been building for a long time, and she was having to let off pressure. If the Mexican woman had told Father Vargas the truth, then understanding Frances's anguish was not difficult. And even if the woman lied, some hard nuts still remained to be cracked.

Seeing a curious rock formation a hundred yards ahead, he slowed the horse. Frances looked at him and sniffled. “Is something wrong?”

“No, no. I was just seeing if your horse was limping. He's okay.”

The problem with the road was that it squeezed into a formation of towering rocks, ugly snags like discolored teeth pitted with brown cavities and topped with reddish cusps. A combat detail would never consider passing through that funnel, the perfect fore-and-aft ambush. A buggy, however, had no choice but to stay on the road, for a six-foot cut bank dropped into the wash on the right, and a thicket of bluish oak brush fenced the road on the left.

And besides, the war's over, Henry!
he thought. The Spaniards hadn't been there since the eighteenth century and the Indians were on the reservation.

He remembered something. Reaching into his pocket, he said cheerfully, “You know, I've heard that one place to find peace of mind is in church. And it just happens that this morning a padre across the line asked me to give you this....”

As the buggy horse trotted into the gap in the rocks, he placed the rosary on her palm. “He'd like you to visit him sometime.”

“Oh, Henry! Why didn't you tell me this before we left?”

“I was afraid you might do it—and come back feeling even worse. I wanted to get your story first, and we can talk it all over—try to clear it up in your mind.”

“Thank you very much. You're probably right.”

“You're welcome.
Great snakes!
”

He saw a puff of dust on a yellowish slant of rock almost at his right elbow, heard a bullet strike it and take off with an unnerving
whanggg
!

Terrified, the horse reared. Henry came to his feet and fought it down, yelling; he held it in and let it run on through the gap. Frances uttered a single earsplitting shriek that tore his nerves like barbed wire. Behind the buggy the red dun was snorting but standing steady. Swearing at the gray, Henry tried to bully it off the road into a thicket at the left, but it reared again. He heard another slug hit among the rocks. He yanked the whip from the socket and slashed at the horse's rump until it dropped back to its forefeet and began to pull. It crashed through the oak brush, snorting in terror; now they were safe behind the rocks.