“I knowed Jim for years. I knowed both of his brothers, too, when the three of them bought out most of the cotton exchange in New Orleans.”
“Then if you know so damn much, what do you think about a Texian that marries into Santa Anna’s family?” the man said. His eyes were black and dilated with whiskey, and his body had the heavy, confident proportions of a man who knew he could command a room’s attention simply by changing the tone of his voice.
Hugh sipped out of his cup and squinted his shining walleye at the men staring at him from the tables. Son moved his hand over to the rifle barrel and looked backward at the oak door.
“From what I understand James Bowie and Sam Houston is about to tear Santa Anna’s nuts out,” Hugh said. “I also understand that James Bowie would use that knife of his to slip the head off a drunk man that made a remark about his marriage. That probably don’t apply here, but I’d sure hate to tell him about it when I get to Bexar. What’s your name, anyway, mister?”
The pot of chicken stew cooking in the logs boiled over and snapped in the flames. The men at the tables went to fixing their pipes or motioning quietly to the Mexican woman to fill their cups again.
“It’s all right that you don’t remember your name, mister,” Hugh said. “Sometimes a man gets his tongue caught in his cup and don’t know how to speak right. Damn, if that ain’t old Jack Tyler walking out with his britches unbuttoned.”
Jack Tyler came through the burlap curtain at the far end of the plank. He couldn’t have been over five feet tall, Son thought, and his hair hung on his wide shoulders like a girl’s. His shirt sleeves and long underwear were rolled, and his stubby arms were knotted with muscle. There was a line of dead skin where his hat fitted his head, and Son could smell the corn whiskey and tobacco juice on his breath like a rancid odor corked in a stone crock.
“Ain’t you got no shame, Jack? Why don’t you button it up before it catches cold?” Hugh said.
“It’s been a hell of a long time, Hugh,” he said. “From what I heared about you, I didn’t think you’d ever be over this way again.”
“I always figured to come back to Texas eventually. New Orleans is all right, but the likes of me can’t make no money there and I understand you all been having more fun shooting at Mexicans than hogs rolling in shit.”
“Dealing with them sonsofbitches ain’t exactly fun.”
“Don’t poor-mouth me, Jack. You’d make money selling sand to a thirsty man in a desert. Look, this here is Son Holland, a friend of mine from Tennessee, and this is White-Man’s-Woman. We stayed a bit with the Indians back toward the Sabine.”
Son put out his hand, and Tyler shook it as though he were momentarily picking up something strange and unfamiliar.
“You got something dead inside that shirt of yours?” he said.
“What do you mean?” Son said.
“You fellows must have been eating dog with them Indians,” Tyler said.
“Maybe it’s just where I’m standing,” Son said. “The air smells right rank to me, too.”
“The reason we stopped here, Jack, is to do some trading,” Hugh said.
“I know the reason you stopped here, and we better go in back to talk about it.”
“I ain’t talking about nothing right now except money and some of that chicken stew and a lot of wine,” Hugh said.
“We got time for that, but you all had better walk in back with me.”
Son finished his cup and set it on the plank.
“I think he’s got some news for us we don’t want to hear,” he said.
The three of them followed Tyler through the curtain into a back room with a dirt floor and a log ceiling. A plank table was nailed to the top of a sawed-off oak stump with an oil lamp on it and in the dim yellow light Son saw a fat Mexican woman lying on a bunk bed. Her stomach brought her dress over her knees, and there were rings of fat on her thighs.
“Vaya por la comida y vino,” Tyler said, then pushed the woman in the rear with his boot.
“Jack, your taste in a bunkie has sure changed. You used to be chasing the young ones around. Maybe we’re getting too damn old for anything except them big sows, and that’s what I wanted to talk with you about. What’s the toll on them lady-fairs out there?”
“You better get serious for a space,” Tyler said. “You and your friend from Tennessee ain’t over here to shoot at no Mexicans. Four days ago a bunch of Frenchies come through here, and they had papers on both of you. I don’t read no French and I couldn’t hardly understand the head sonofabitch, but it looked to me like you all killed a prison guard.”
“It’s hard getting out of them Louisiana jails sometimes, Jack,” Hugh said. “Then again, you can’t always believe what a Frenchie will tell you.”
The Mexican woman brought three plates of chicken stew with wooden spoons to the table, and a large green bottle of wine in a wicker cask.
“I ain’t telling you what to do,” Tyler said. “But that head fellow was a mean bastard, and I wouldn’t want him after me.”
“Where did they head?” Son said.
“West, down the trace, but that don’t mean nothing,” Tyler said. “Did you all really kill a prison guard back in Louisiana?”
“We killed that fellow’s brother,” Son said, and lifted a spoonful of the chicken stew into his mouth. The taste of cooked meat that wasn’t game or boiled dog made him weak inside.
“What the hell are you going to do now?” Tyler said.
“After you sharp us out of the horses we got outside, we’re going to Bexar and see ole Jim Bowie,” Hugh said. His mouth was filled with food, and wine dripped out of his whiskers.
“Do you know what’s going on over there?” Tyler said.
“What?” Son said.
“Ben Milam says he’s going to kick all the Mexicans out of there and make it the capital of a new republic.”
“Who’s Ben Milam?” Son said.
“You ought to know that, boy, if you’re fixing to join up with him,” Tyler said. “He’s from back in Kentucky, and he’s a crazier sonofabitch than Bowie or Houston, both.”
“Who you putting in with on this deal, anyway?” Hugh said.
“Anybody that can cut us loose from the Mexicans. But I don’t think any of them fellows we got right now is going to help us. They say Sam Houston is drunk half the time, and Jim Bowie has been too close to Santa Anna to suit me. Stephen Austin claims he’s general of the Texas army, but there ain’t no army, except the volunteers they try to hold together from one day to the next. I’d like one Mexican rifle ball to fly across the Sabine so Andy Jackson’s soldiers could come in and take over the whole damn country.”
“Andy Jackson wouldn’t do shit for none of us,” Hugh said. His jaw was becoming slack with drink, and there was a fine bead of light in his walleye. He lifted his cup again and drank it to the bottom. “You know that. You was at Chalmette, too. We killed them redcoats by the hundreds. We drilled them right in the middle of their silver breast buckles while they marched into us with the sun in their eyes and the bagpipes playing their death song behind them. Then we run them with pig-stickers from the mudworks all the way back to the Gulf. What did Andy Jackson give us for it, or the ball I caught in my leg? Not enough scrip to buy two quarts of rum in New Orleans.”
“It don’t matter. Anything is better than living under these arrogant greasers,” Tyler said.
“We want to trade that string we got out front,” Son said. “You want to take a look at them?”
“I reckon you got a bill of sale on all of them, ain’t you?” Tyler said.
“We got the same kind you probably got on some of them horses in your lot,” Son said.