Longarm cut the package string. “Ruben, this package is so beat-up it looks as if it’s probably been stomped on by a bunch of your Apache.”
“If it was from my Apache relatives, it’d be wrapped in a white man’s scalp!”
Longarm chuckled and began to open the package. The outer brown paper peeled away to reveal a neatly folded newspaper.
“Yep,” Longarm drawled. “It’s from Arizona. Wickenburg Weekly Press. Exactly a month old to the day.”
“Someone sent you a newspaper all the way from Arizona?”
Longarm spread the paper across his lap. He was surprised to find that there was nothing inside of it, but one of the articles was circled by a wavery pencil mark. Ruben forgot about the shoes and came around behind Longarm to stare at the paper.
“I been in Wickenburg. Hotter’n Flagstaff but not as bad as Tucson. There’s a few Apache and Mojave people there, but none of ‘em belong to my family.”
“Well, I sure don’t know anyone from Wickenburg.”
“Maybe you should read that paper,” Ruben suggested. “Maybe someone you know died there … or got rich!”
“Maybe,” Longarm said. “I suppose that Wickenburg is a mining town.”
“Rough as they come.”
Longarm refolded the paper and smoked in silence. Ruben’s hands and shine rag always made his tired feet feel better and that alone was enough of a reason to pay the man even when his boots weren’t scuffed or muddy.
“I lived in Arizona for twenty-six years,” Ruben said. “My family worked in a silver mine near Tucson, then raised some sheep and we caught wild horses to sell to the same damn army that put us on reservations.”
“Some of you deserved it,” Longarm said. “Although I’m sure that didn’t include your family.”
“Yeah, it did,” Ruben admitted. “My family was bad. Real bad. Most of my uncles and my father were all either shot or hanged. I’d have been too, if I hadn’t cleared out fast.”
“But I thought you once told me you and a couple of brothers went all the way to Washington, D.C.”
“We did. Went there to talk to the Great White Father. We were gonna tell him that the Apache deserved fair and honest treatment. We had been given a treaty, but it was broken by the white soldiers.”
“And what did the President say?”
Ruben removed the cheroot and spat on the ground. “He wouldn’t see us and so we got drunk. Raised hell and killed a couple of people fighting in a saloon. I got away, my brothers didn’t. One of ‘em, Charlie Big Thumbs, is still alive.”
“And in prison after all these years?”
Ruben shook his head. “Charlie, he don’t know nothin’ no more. Some guard hit him once too often in the head. I brought him to Denver to see a specialist. They put him in the big hospital. He eats good. Always laughing. I tried to take him out and he started howlin’ like a coyote. Wouldn’t leave!”
Longarm had never heard Ruben open up so completely. Up until this very minute, the man had always been a supreme enigma. “And that’s why you’ve stayed here in Denver?”
“That and the fact that I got a wife now and four kids. She’s Ute, not Apache, but she can cook good and warms my bed. She won’t go to Arizona and neither will my kids. If I go alone, maybe I get hanged. Arizona men are rough sons a bitches and don’t care if their boots look good or not, so maybe I starve. Right?”
“That’s right,” Longarm said, still marveling that Ruben had opened up so completely.
Ruben’s shine rag began to pop like a farm boy’s rabbit rifle. “You ain’t going to ask me why I’d hang in Arizona, are you?”
“No.”
“Good! I killed a few men, but they deserved it. There’s some real bastards livin’ in Arizona; I put a few of the worst in their graves but never took a scalp.”
“Ruben, I’ve always wondered—how old are you?”
“Fifty … seven just last Tuesday.”
Longarm tried to hide his surprise. He’d thought that Ruben was at least seventy. The man’s weathered face and bent body were the best evidence that he had lived a very hard and dangerous life.
“Someday,” Ruben was saying, “I’m gonna be shinin’ your boots or someone else’s, and the President will come by and see what a good job I do and want me to shine his shoes. And, when I do, I won’t charge him nothin’. That’s right!”
Ruben’s voice had taken on an angry tremor and now his rag really began to pop. “That’s right, Marshal Long, I won’t take a penny, but I will roast his ass over the broken treaties and them gawdamn reservations where all Indian people are treated worse’n stray dogs.”
“Maybe he’ll even make some changes,” Longarm said, wanting to give Ruben hope.
“No, he won’t. But I’ll feel better for having given him a piece of my mind. And I’ll tell my wife and kids and they’ll tell all their friends and I’ll be a big man … for a while.”
“You sure will be,” Longarm said, lapsing into a reverie.
“What does the Arizona paper say?”
“I don’t know. Haven’t read it yet.”
“Can I have it after you’re done? Maybe I’ll read about someone I knew.”
“Sure,” Longarm said, deciding that he might as well read the article so he could just give the paper to Ruben.
It would be one less thing that he’d have to try to remember tomorrow.
The circled article began by saying that an old prospector named Jim Cox had been found shot out in the desert but that he was recovering from his wounds.
“Jimmy is a good friend of mine,” Longarm explained. “He saved my life a few years ago. Never forget him.”
Ruben glanced up from Longarm’s now glistening boots. “How’d he do that?”
“I was tracking a murdering outlaw down near Tucson. Nothing in his past warned me that he carried a big buffalo rifle and knew how to use it. From a half mile away, he ambushed and winged me in the leg; the same bullet passed through the belly of my horse. So there I was, about sixty miles from water with a leakin’ leg and a dying horse.”
“But a man as experienced as you would have been carrying plenty of water.”
“Yeah, but that same damned slug went through my canteen. And I was pinned under the horse when it fell, and the outlaw decided it would be interesting to see if he could put another bullet through my horse into me. Follow?”
“I believe so.” Ruben frowned. “So there you were, no water, dead horse lyin’ on a leakin’ leg, and this outlaw son of a bitch using you for target practice.”
“That’s about the way it was,” Longarm said. “I was in a terrible fix.”
“But then I suppose this Jim Cox showed up and killed the outlaw?”
“No,” Longarm said, “but he ran him off and then he got me outta my scrape. I’d have died without Jimmy’s help.”
“What ever happened to the outlaw?”
“Apache caught and tortured him to death about a week later over by Casa Grande. They tied him to a big cactus and burned him alive after they’d cut off a bunch of his body parts. He was a murdering son of a bitch, but even he didn’t deserve that bad a death.”
“My people do know how to torture. But then, some whites are pretty good at it too.”
“Agreed.” Longarm turned his attention back to the newspaper. “Maybe I better read on and find out the rest of Jim’s story.”
Longarm read the remainder of the article out loud and it went on to say that Jim Cox, delirious with fever, had told a story of a lost Spanish treasure that he had been hunting for more than twenty years. No one had taken the story seriously. They’d considered it no more than the ranting of a fevered mind, until Cox had finally recovered, then paid all his bills with a handful of Spanish coins.