decent thing in me had been fouled in that massacre. A myth had been shattered. I could no longer tell myself that my killing had been done in self-defense. I was sick with myself, but how could I tell anybody that?
“It wasn't anything,” I said.
“You better now?”
“Sure. Have some beer.”
She grinned uncertainly, then swigged from the mouth of the pitcher. I was beginning to be glad that she had shown up. I needed something or somebody to take my mind off of things. It was just the shock of seeing so much cold-blooded killing, I tried to tell myself. Pretty soon I would get over it, but now it was just as well that I had somebody to help me get my mind on something else.
“Don't you ever take no for an answer?” I said. “Do you always hang on until you get what you want?”
She shrugged as if she didn't understand me.
“What do you want me for, anyway? I'm not such a prize—not even in this God-forgotten place where almost anybody would be a prize.”
She shrugged again and grinned. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she took my wrist and began inspecting the bandage on my left wrist.
“I am sorry,” she said.
“It's all right now.”
But it still hurt, and it gave me a vicious, animal-like satisfaction to see that her mouth was still swollen and bruised where I had hit her.
It was dark now. Night had come suddenly down on Ocotillo, and we could hear the noises in the saloon below, and in the dusty street there was the rattle of high-wheeled cars as the Mexican farmers came in from the fields, and the lonesome, forlorn chanting of the native herdsmen. I rolled a cigarette and gave it to the girl, then I rolled one for myself and fired them with a sulphur match.
“Where you learn smoke like this?” she said suddenly.
“A friend of mine. He used to roll them this way, in cornshucks. He's dead now,” I added, for some reason.
“You love this friend very much,” she said.
“What makes you say that?”
“You are sad when you say he is dead.” Then, “He was good man?”
I listened to the night and remembered Pappy Garret. “He was good at one thing,” I said. “He could draw faster and shoot straighter than any man who ever lived. He picked me up when I was just a kid running from the State Police and taught me what he knew. I used to wonder why he bothered with me—but I know now that he was a lonely man.”
I knew that she wasn't really interested in hearing about it, but she kept quiet and I went on. “He wasn't really a bad man,” I said, “but once you start a thing like that, there's no end to it. A gunman kills a friend of yours, then you kill the gunman. Then the gunman has a friend and you have to kill him, or be killed, and it goes on and on that way until you think there isn't a man in the world that doesn't have a reason to shoot you.”
Marta stroked my bandaged arm with her cool fingers. “You no bad,” she said.
“I'm rotten to the bone, or I would never have done what I did today, no matter how much money there was in it.”
She looked up, but I couldn't see what she was thinking. “I think you be rich man pretty soon.”
“I'm as rich as I'm going to be, as soon as I get my cut of the silver. I'm through with Basset. I'm going to throw my guns in the deepest river I can find.”
It was dark and I couldn't tell much about her face, but I knew that she was smiling. I started hating her all over again. She didn't believe that I would ever throw my guns away, that I would ever quit Basset. What she believed was what I had said before—that I was rotten to the bone—and it didn't matter a damn to her one way or the other. I was going to be a rich man. I felt her arms crawling around my neck like soft warm snakes and she dug her fingers into my hair and pulled my face down to hers.
I brought my arms up and broke her hold and she hit the floor with her rump. I stood up and for a long moment neither of us said anything. Then I tightened my pistol belt and started for the door.
“Where you go?”
“I don't know.” .
I went down the stairs and heard the noise and laughing in the saloon. The girl was beside me as I pushed through the batwings and went to the bar, and I didn't try to get rid of her or hold her. I didn't care what she did.
The bartender came up and I said, “Tequila. You might as well bring the bottle.”
He brought the bottle and two glasses and I took them over to a table where Bama was sitting by himself. The girl was still with me.
Bama blinked his bleary eyes as we sat down. “I knew you were crazy,” he drawled, “but I never figured you'd be this crazy. Don't you know that Black Joseph will shoot you on sight if he catches you with his girl?”
“To hell with Black Joseph.”
He blinked again. Then he shrugged, smiling that lopsided smile of his. “To hell with him,” he said. “Well, I guess another killing, more or less, won't make much difference on this day of days.” He chuckled dryly. “The funny thing about this place is that everybody thinks that everybody else is crazy—and probably they're right. But there's one good thing about these raids of Basset's. A man can afford tequila for a while instead of that poisonous slop the greasers drink. Here's to bigger foothills.”
