"If you pay. It cost a bottle of dark rum for an hour or so. A bottle of bourbon whiskey you can stay as long as you want. The lieutenant drinks it and goes to sleep." Fuentes shoved his hands into the pockets of his suit coat, came out with a half-pint bottle of quinine in each hand and placed them on the desk. From a vest pocket he drew two double eagles, worth twenty dollars each, and reached across the desk to put them in Tyler's hand.
"For whatever you need."
"We appreciate it, all of us, but who is it from?" "What do you mean, who? Is from me." "Can you afford it?" "Don't insult me."
"Sorry." Tyler thought of Virgil and said, "I imagine the policeman told you about the marine."
Fuentes said, "The rumor that he's here? I heard that." "He is here. We're in the same cell."
Fuentes said, "Listen, we took the horses to Matanzas. All of them, yours too, on the train. I didn't want to leave your horse in Regla."
"And you don't want to talk about the marine," Tyler said.
"I have no reason to."
"Or the policeman, Rudi Calvo?"
"I know him, that's all. So, I took the horses to Matanzas. Boudreaux went, but now he's in Havana again. Also Amelia Brown, she's here. She wants to visit you." "She wants to come here?" "That's what she say." "What for?"
"If she comes you can ask her."
Tyler pushed the image of the girl out of his mind and said, "Have you seen Charlie?"
"A little while ago. He looks worse than you." "What's wrong with him?"
"He has the shits, what else? Listen, I have to get him some medicine and come back. What I want to tell you, they haven't found the ship yet, the Vamoose, and they won't find it. Don't ask me where it is, all right? Or ask me anything about it. I say this because they going to come and ask you where it is, and if you don't know you can't tell them. That's all I'm going to say to you," Fuentes said.
As he rose from the desk Tyler said, "When she say she's coming?"
"Who, Amelia?"
"Who else we talking about?"
He told Virgil, the two of them sitting by the outside grating, wild studs loved gentle mares; they'd get hold of some that'd wandered away from the home graze and run off with these nice girls, whether the mares wanted to go or not.
Virgil said, "Man, the studs, huh?"
Tyler told him the way to go after a big herd, put about a hundred and fifty gentle horses out there and drive the wild bunch into them. "See, then the gentle horses that were already with the wild ones, they'd stop, and some of the colts and yearlings'd get separated and stay with the gentle bunch.
So then the hands shake out their ropes…"
"That's how, huh?" Virgil ate it up.
Tyler told him you had to be a big cow outfit to do it like that, be able to put twenty riders out there for the drive. He told Virgil the way you worked it by yourself, or with Red and a couple of Mimbres along, you had to walk down the wild herd, slip up on them gradually, the wild ones likely never having seen a mounted man before, the bunch of them wondering what in the hell kind of horse is that?
Virgil said, "Man," shaking his head. He told Tyler he'd bought a horse for five dollars when he was fifteenmworked at the F.B. Severs Cash Store in Okmulgee, stocking shelves and sweeping floors to earn the money-and his stepfather, the son of a bitch, a Church of the Most Holy Word missionary who didn't know shit about anything except Scripture, took the horse away from him and sold it and kept the money.
Tyler told him if he ever worked for a big cow outfit he'd have ten of his own horses on a trail drive. Ride two or three a day and turn them back into the remuda for three days' rest. You had a special horse you rode at night. Green broncos were saved for winter.
"The first thing I learned about horses," Virgil said, "living where we did, was Indins like horse meat."
"Apaches," Tyler said, "prefer mule. Did you ever see Geronimo?"
"One time in '94 I was home on leave, I went over to Fort Sill to get a look at him, but he was off traveling with Pawnee Bill's Wild West Circus."
"I saw him and Nachez at Bowie in '86," Tyler said, "the day they shipped 'em off to Florida. The army gave 'em little hats to put on looked foolish, like flower pots, and they still scared the shit out of anybody was present. I think it was General Nelson Miles said the only man he ever knew with eyes as dark and piercing as Geronimo's was William Tecumseh Sherman. They had the kind of eyes could look right through you."
When Tavalera came to visit he sat in Lieutenant Molina's chair and swiveled back and forth while Tyler stood facing him across the desk.
"You don't look so good."
"It's the food," Tyler said.
"You don't like it? You can leave anytime-once you tell me where the ship is."
"I don't know."
"You tell me it was going to Matanzas."
"That's right."
"But it didn't come there."
"Maybe it's still on its way."
"It doesn't take thirty days, Havana to Matanzas."
"I can't help you, Lionel," Tyler said, pronouncing the name "Lynel" the way he did in the hotel bar. Tavalera stared at him and Tyler said, "I mean Leo-nel. I bet the ship went back home, partner. Can you check?"
"We did. Is not in Key West or Tampa or Galveston, Texas. Is still here somewhere. I believe from the beginning it has contraband aboard. Now I'm more sure than before. You refuse to tell me and your friend refuse when I talk to him. What am I going to do with you?… You think you helping these people to have freedom. I'll tell you something. If they do succeed, have their own government, you think it will be different for poor people than it is now? They talk about the ones in power as moved by greed, always wanting more. You think the Cubans, they get in power they won't be moved by greed? Anyone can learn how if they don't know. All right, what about the Negroes? Pretty soon half the people here are going to be black. You want some of them in power? These people were slaves only a few years ago. Listen, your own people in business here, they don't want Cubans or Negroes making laws, telling them what to do. Of course not. So what is it to you? Why don't you give up this game you play? Tell me where the boat is and you can go home. What do you say?"
"lledl) was Warm Springs Apache, he couldn't stand to be locked up like that, then taken out to work shackled, the way he was at Yuma the whole first year, to bust rocks. He couldn't eat the food either. The first day his leg irons are off after a year, we're working a section of road up on a high bank where you look down and there's the Colorado River, say a mile from the road to the other side. Red dropped his pick, not even checking the guards first, dropped his pick and ran. They chased him… Red was in the river, halfway to California, when they shot him."
"How was the chow at Yuma?"
"Terrible. Sometimes you couldn't tell what you were eating."
"That ain't all that's wrong with this shit; it's got bugs in it."
"Least they're cooked."
Virgil picked a maggot out of his meat. "This one ain't. Bread and water's the best, less the bread's moldy. Otherwise you can't mess up bread and water."
A few days later, Tyler's thirty-fourth day in the Morro, guards kept him in the cell while they brought everybody else out single file and marched them down the corridor, Virgil the last one out, looking back.
Tyler waited.
Now Tavalera appeared and entered the cell followed by two Guardia Civil privates armed with Mauser carbines. Tavalera said, "Come here," motioning Tyler down to the grating at the other end of the cell. When they got there and both were looking out at the empty yard in sunlight, Tavalera said, "Listo," in a loud voice.
Within a minute or so two Guardias came out of a doorway to the yard with Charlie Burke between them. They brought him all the way across the yard to the wall opposite the cell grating and faced him this way, head uncovered, hands fastened behind his back, a chew showing in his jaw.