The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard - Elmore Leonard [242]
“A hotel lobby,” the desk clerk said, “is not a public place anyone can make theirself at home in. What is it you want here?”
At least he was uncovered, standing there now hat in hand. But then he said, “I’m waiting on Bren Early.”
“Bren is it,” the desk clerk said. “Captain Early’s an acquaintance of yours?”
“We go way back a ways.”
“You worked for him?”
“Some.”
At this point the manager said, “We’re all waiting for Captain Early. Why don’t you go out front and watch for him?” Ending the conversation.
The desk clerk—his name was Monty—followed the colored man to the front entrance and stepped out on the porch to watch him, bedroll over his shoulder, walking south on La Salle the two short blocks to Fourth Street. Monty returned to the desk, where he said to the manager, “He walked right in the Gold Dollar.”
The manager didn’t look up from his mail.
TWO RIDERS FROM the Circle-Eye, a spread on the San Pedro that delivered beef to the mine company, were at a table with their glasses of beer: a rider named Macon and a rider named Wayman, young men who wore sweat-stained hats down on their eyes as they stared at the Negro. Right there, the bartender speaking to him as he poured a whiskey, still speaking as the colored man drank it and the bartender poured him another one. Macon asked Wayman if he had ever seen a nigger wearing a suit of clothes and a necktie. Wayman said he couldn’t recall. When they finished drinking their beer and walked up to the bar, the colored man gone now, Macon asked the bartender who in the hell that smoke thought he was coming in here. “You would think,” Macon said, “he’d go to one of the places where the miners drink.”
The bartender appeared to smile, for some reason finding humor in Macon’s remark. He said, “Boys, that was Bo Catlett. I imagine Bo drinks just about wherever he feels like drinking.”
“Why?” Macon asked it, surprised. “He suppose to be somebody?”
“Bo lives up at White Tanks,” the bartender told him, “at the Indin agency. Went to war and now he’s home.”
Macon squinted beneath the hat brim funneled low on his eyes. He said, “Nobody told me they was niggers in the war.” Sounding as though it was the bartender’s fault he hadn’t been informed. When the bartender didn’t add anything to help him out, Macon said, “Wayman’s brother Wyatt was in the war, with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Only, Wyatt didn’t come home like the nigger.”
Wayman, about eighteen years old, was nodding his head now.
Because nothing about this made sense to Macon, it was becoming an irritation. Again he said to Wayman, “You ever see a smoke wearing a suit of clothes like that?” He said, “Jesus Christ.”
BO CATLETT WALKED up La Salle Street favoring his left leg some, though the limp, caused by a Mauser bullet or by the regiment surgeon who cut it out of his hip, was barely noticeable. He stared at the sight of the mine works against the sky, ugly, but something monumental about it: straight ahead up the grade, the main shaft scaffolding and company buildings, the crushing mill lower down, ore tailings that humped this way in ridges on down the slope to run out at the edge of town. A sorry place, dark and forlorn; men walked up the grade from boardinghouses on Mill Street to spend half their life underneath the ground, buried before they were dead. Three whiskeys in him, Catlett returned to the hotel on the corner of Second Street, looked up at the sign that said HURRAH FOR CAPTAIN EARLY!, and had to grin. THE HERO OF SAN JUAN HILL my ass.
Catlett mounted the steps to the porch, where he dropped his bedroll and took one of the rocking chairs all in a row, the porch empty, close on noon but nobody sitting out here, no drummers calling on La Salle Mining of New Jersey, the company still digging and scraping but running low on payload copper, operating only the day shift now. The rocking chairs, all dark green, needed painting. Man, but made of cane and comfortable with that nice squeak back