I
Boiling like a coffee pot before we were five miles out of Filmer, the automobile stage carried me south into the shimmering heat, blinding sunlight, and bitter white dust of the Arizona desert.
I was the only passenger. The driver felt as little like talking as I. All morning we rode through cactus-spiked, sage-studded oven-country, without conversation, except when the driver cursed the necessity of stopping to feed his clattering machine more water. The car crept through soft sifting sand; wound between steep-walled red mesas; dipped into dry arroyas where clumps of dusty mesquite were like white lace in the glare; and skirted sharp-edged barrancos.
All these things were hot. All of them tried to get rid of their heat by throwing it on the car. My fat melted in the heat. The heat dried my perspiration before I could feel its moisture. The dazzling light scorched my eyeballs; puckered my lids; cooked my mouth. Alkali stung my nose; was gritty between my teeth.
It was a nice ride! I understood why the natives were a hard lot. A morning like this would put any man in a mood to kill his brother, and would fry his brother into not caring whether he was killed.
The sun climbed up in the brazen sky. The higher it got, the larger and hotter it got. I wondered how much hotter it would have to get to explode the cartridges in the gun under my arm. Not that it mattered—if it got any hotter, we would all blow up anyway. Car, desert, chauffeur and I would all bang out of existence in one explosive flash. I didn’t care if we did!
That was my frame of mind as we pushed up a long slope, topped a sharp ridge, and slid down into Corkscrew.
Corkscrew wouldn’t have been impressive at any time. It especially wasn’t this white-hot Sunday afternoon. One sandy street following the crooked edge of the Tirabuzon Canyon, from which, by translation, the town took its name. A town, it was called, but village would have been flattery: fifteen or eighteen shabby buildings slumped along the irregular street, with tumbledown shacks leaning against them, squatting close to them, and trying to sneak away from them.
That was Corkscrew. One look at it, and I believed all I had heard about it!
In the street, four dusty automobiles cooked. Between two buildings I could see a corral where half a dozen horses bunched their dejection under a shed. No person was in sight. Even the stage driver, carrying a limp and apparently empty mail sack, had vanished into a building labelled “Adderly’s Emporium.”
Gathering up my two grey-powdered bags, I climbed out and crossed the road to where a weather-washed sign, on which Canyon House was barely visible, hung over the door of a two-story, iron-roofed, adobe house.
I crossed the wide, unpainted and unpeopled porch, and pushed a door open with my foot, going into a dining-room, where a dozen men and a woman sat eating at oilcloth-covered tables. In one corner of the room, was a cashier’s desk; and, on the wall behind it, a key-rack. Between rack and desk, a pudgy man whose few remaining hairs were the exact shade of his sallow skin, sat on a stool, and pretended he didn’t see me.
“A room and a lot of water,” I said, dropping my bags, and reaching for the glass that sat on top of a cooler in the corner.
“You can have your room,” the sallow man growled, “but water won’t do you no good. You won’t no sooner drink and wash, than you’ll be thirsty and dirty all over again. Where in hell is that register?”
He couldn’t find it, so he pushed an old envelope across the desk at me.
“Register on the back of that. Be with us a spell?”
“Most likely.”
A chair upset behind me.
I turned around as a lanky man with enormous red ears reared himself upright with the help of his hands on the table—one of them flat in the plate of ham and eggs he had been eating.
“Ladiesh an’ gentsh,” he solemnly declaimed, “th’ time hash came for yuh t’ give up y’r evil waysh an’ git out y’r knittin’. Th’ law hash came to Orilla County!”
The drunk bowed to me, upset his ham and eggs, and sat down again. The other diners applauded with thump of knives and forks on tables and dishes.
I looked them over while they looked me over. A miscellaneous assortment: weather-beaten horsemen, clumsily muscled laborers, men with the pasty complexions of night workers. The one woman in the room didn’t belong to Arizona. She was a thin girl of maybe twenty-five, with too-bright dark eyes, dark, short hair, and a sharp prettiness that was the mark of a larger settlement than this. You’ve seen her, or her sisters, in the larger cities, in the places that get going after the theatres let out.
The man with her was range country—a slim lad in the early twenties, not very tall, with pale blue eyes that were startling in so dark-tanned a face. His features were a bit too perfect in their clean-cut regularity.
“So you’re the new deputy sheriff?” the sallow man questioned the back of my head.
Somebody had kept my secret right out in the open! There was no use trying to cover up.
“Yes.” I hid my annoyance under a grin that took in him and the diners. “But I’ll trade my star right now for that room and water we were talking about.”
He took me through the dining-room and upstairs to a board-walled room in the rear second floor, said, “This is it,” and left me.
I did what I could with the water in a pitcher on the washstand to free myself from the white grime I had accumulated. Then I dug a grey shirt and a suit of whipcords out of my bags, and holstered my gun under my left shoulder, where it wouldn’t be a secret.
In each side pocket of my coat I stowed a new .32 automatic—small, snub-nosed affairs that weren’t much better than toys. Their smallness let me carry them where they’d be close to my hands without advertising the fact that the gun under my shoulder wasn’t all my arsenal.
The dining-room was empty when I went downstairs again. The sallow pessimist who ran the place stuck his head out of a door.
“Any chance of getting something to eat?” I asked.
“Hardly any,” jerking his head toward a sign that said:
Meals 6 to 8 a.m., 12 to 2 and 5 to 7 p.m.
“You can grub up at the Jew’s—if you ain’t particular,” he added sourly.
I went out, across the porch that was too hot for idlers, and into the street that was empty for the same reason. Huddled against the wall of a large one-story adobe building, which had Border Palace painted all across its front, I found the Jew’s.
It was a small shack—three wooden walls stuck against the adobe wall of the Border Palace—jammed with a lunch counter, eight stools, a stove, a handful of cooking implements, half the flies in the world, an iron cot behind a half-drawn burlap curtain, and the proprietor. The interior had once been painted white. It was a smoky grease-color now, except where homemade signs said:
Meals At All Hours. No Credit.
and gave the prices of various foods. These signs were a fly-specked yellow-grey.
The proprietor wasn’t a Jew—an Armenian or something of the sort, I thought. He was a small man, old, scrawny, dark-skinned, wrinkled and cheerful.
“You the new sheriff?” he asked, and when he grinned I saw he had no teeth.
“Deputy,” I admitted, “and hungry. I’ll eat anything you’ve got that won’t bite back, and that won’t take long to get ready.”
“Sure!” He turned to his stove and began banging pans around. “We need sheriffs,” he said over his shoulder. “Sure, we need them!”
“Somebody been picking on you?”
He showed his empty gums in another grin.
“Nobody pick on me—I tell you that!” He flourished a stringy hand at a sugar barrel under the shelves behind his counter. “I fix them decidedly!”
A shotgun butt stuck out of the barrel. I pulled it out: a double-barrel shotgun with the barrels sawed off short: a mean weapon close up.
I slid it back into its resting place as the old man began thumping dishes down in front of me.