He reached for the bottle again. “I think I'll just sit here for a while, if you don't mind. Anyway, I got my cut last night.”
So I left him sitting there, getting an early start on the road to nowhere.
The bartender was leaning on a broom, contemplating a dark brown splotch on the saloon floor, when I came in. I said, “I want to see Basset,” and his head snapped up as if he had never seen me before.
“Sure. Sure,” he said. “Wait a minute, I'll see if Basset's up yet.”
He went back to the rear of the saloon, where I guessed Basset had a sleeping room next to his office—he struck me as being the kind of man that wouldn't like to get too far away from his business. After a minute the bartender came back.
“It's all right. He's in the office.” He was still sitting, fat and sweaty, behind his desk when I went in, looking exactly the same as the last time I had seen him. “Well,” he wheezed, “I guess you came by your reputation honest. You can handle guns, I'll say that for you. You've got a bad temper, though. You'll have to learn to hold onto that if you're going to work for me.”
“I'm not going to work for you,” I said. He sat back, blinking folds of fat over those buckshot eyes. “Now, look here,” he panted. “What's the matter?”
“I don't like wholesale murder and I don't like robbing people,” I said. “I just want to get out, like I told you. Now if you'll just figure out my cut of the silver...”
He lurched his hulk over in the chair and sat there blinking those eyes at me, breathing through his mouth. “Well,” he said. “If that's the way you feel about it. Sure, you can have your cut. No hard feelings.”
He pulled out the big bottom drawer of his desk and opened a strongbox with a key. He took out a heavy- looking, clanking canvas bag and shoved it across the desk toward me.
“Here it is,” he said. “You sure you don't want to change your mind?”
“I'm sure,” I said. I didn't bother to count the silver. I just picked it up and walked out, hoping that I had seen the fat man for the last time.
I went back up to my room and Bama was still there, drunk, as I had expected. I heard him talking to somebody as I came up the hall, and when I got to the door I saw that it was Marta.
“What's she doing here?”
Bama shrugged, “Maybe she's in love with you,” he said, waving his arms. “Maybe she can't bear to have you out of her sight.”
“She'd better start getting used to it, because I'm going to put Ocotillo behind me.”
I threw the sack of silver on the bed and she stood there looking at me. She seemed to come and go like night shadows, and every time I saw her she seemed to be a different person. I tried to remember how she had looked the first time I had seen her, there in the dusty street with fiesta going on all around us. I couldn't remember.
“I think the girl's got the wrong idea about you,” Bama said. “She thinks you killed the Indian because of her. It wasn't that at all, was it, Tall Cameron?”
“No,” I said, “it wasn't.”
“See?” Bama said, waving his arms again, as if he had just proved something.
The girl didn't say anything. She just stood there looking at me, and I had a feeling that overnight she had grown from a wild animal into a woman. And not a bad-looking woman, at that.
But I still wasn't interested. “You really ought to do something about her,” Bama said. “Tell her to go home. It's not decent the way she walks in and out of this place any time she gets the notion.” Bama lay back on the bed, holding the empty whisky bottle before him, staring into it as if it were a crystal ball and he were about ready to give us the beginning and end to everything. But, instead, he dropped the bottle and dozed off.
I began digging in my saddlebags, getting my stuff together. “Why don't you do like he says?” I said. “Go home or somewhere. Why don't you stay down in the Mexican part of town with your own people?”
“You need Marta,” she said.
“I don't need anybody.” But she didn't believe me.
And I didn't believe myself, for that matter. An old, half-forgotten memory began to shape in my mind, and I remembered what Bama had said the day before. “Why don't you tell me about the girl you left in Texas? The girl you grew up with and loved and planned to marry—”
For a moment bright anger washed over me, a hurting, twisting anger that made me want to kill Bama as he lay there in his drunken stupor. But then I remembered Bama's own lost love and the anger vanished. We weren't so different, at that, Bama and me. We both lived in the past, because men like us have no future.
The mood hung on and I couldn't shake it off, and I felt completely lost. A bundle of loose ends dangled in a black nothingness. There was no turning back, and I wondered if maybe Bama had found the answer in whisky.
It even occurred to me that maybe Marta was the answer for me, that maybe she was right and I needed her. But that wouldn't work either, and I knew it. The best thing to do was to get out of Ocotillo.
I threw some more stuff into the saddlebag, then I went over to the bed and rolled Bama over to give me room to count the silver. I hadn't bothered to guess how much my cut would be, but I had seen the pile of money we had got off the smugglers and I knew that a fair cut would be enough to take care of me for quite a while.
Bama grunted and lurched up in bed as I untied the sack and dumped the contents on the blanket.
For a minute I just looked at it. There were some adobe dollars there, all right, but there was a lot of other things too. I scattered the stuff around and picked up a handful of round brass disks with holes in the middle. On one side they had the names E. E. Basset stamped on them, and on the other side there were the words “Good for One Dollar in Trade.”
