“Well, I don’t know if I’d go so far—”
“That’s all right, Sergeant,” Fisher said. “I had him pegged as a little deceiver from the get-go. Believe me, that backstabber wouldn’t have lasted five minutes down in Mexico. Someone, and I’m not saying who, mind you, would have put a hole in his head the first time he let his guard down to eat one of those goddamn tacos the old women were always trying to bribe us with.” He leaned back in his chair, stared at his boots for a moment. “But, that being said, I’m going to ask you one more time. Any idea where your buddy might be?”
“No, sir, but I don’t think he’s gone AWOL. I’ve seen a few deserters in my time, and he just don’t strike me as the type.”
“Why’s that?”
Malone looked over at a tapestry hanging on the captain’s wall, burros and adobe huts and a couple of cacti, evidently a memento from the Mexican campaign. He recalled the way the lieutenant had paid attention to him the other night in the Blind Owl when he went into one of his trances and couldn’t stop talking. As if he couldn’t get enough. He was the first man who didn’t seem repulsed by Malone’s descriptions of the carnage at the Front. Hell, from the way his face lit up, you’d have thought he was listening to someone talk about a beautiful woman instead of overripe, headless corpses and rats the size of beagle dogs. “From everything I’ve heard him say, he’s keen as hell to get to France.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Yesterday around dinnertime. Mentioned something about going to the officers’ club. That’s really all I know.”
Fisher bent down with a rag, wiped a speck of dust off the toe of one of his boots. “The general’s already on my ass about this. Though there’s been three other men skip out in the last two weeks, he’s the first officer, and that doesn’t look good. We even talked about draggin’ that goddamn Franks out of that hospital where he’s hiding and putting one through his other eye, just to serve as an example, but there’s too many legal complications in the States. That’s what I liked about Mexico. A man could buy himself out of any kind of trouble down there with a sack of flour and a blanket.”
“I see, sir.”
The captain stopped talking and chewed away like a cow with a cud for a minute or two, then swallowed. “I’m going to give you an assignment, Sergeant Malone.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want you to take a patrol into town every night until we get this cowardly bullshit stopped. You won’t answer to anybody but me. Pick out some men you think you can trust, say, ten or so. Be easy with the citizens, that is, if you can, but any soldiers you catch committing even the slightest infractions, I give you my permission to rough ’em up a little before you haul them to the brig. Understand?”
“I understand, sir.”
“One more thing,” Fisher said. “A little piece of advice I’ve learned along the way you might want to remember.”
“Yes, sir.”
“If you happen to kill anybody, make sure they got a gun on ’em before the asshole authorities show up. That’ll save you a lot of headaches in the long run.”
64
EULA WAS IN the kitchen baking an apple pie, and Ellsworth was sitting on the porch smoking his pipe, when Sykes, the constable from Pike County who had dragged him off to jail over the cattle scam, drove into the yard. The farmer raised up in his rocker. Whenever the law shows up at your door uninvited, it can’t be good; and his immediate thought was that Eddie was in trouble. “Shit,” he muttered to himself, hoping Eula hadn’t heard the car pull in. Ever since those boys had left the other day, she had been unusually quiet, and whenever she did say anything, she was either wondering again why Eddie hadn’t written them a letter yet, or recalling another one of the compliments Junior had paid her. Ellsworth hurried toward the car before the lawman could get out. He noticed that an old man with a long beard sat in the backseat, just like he himself had last fall.
To his surprise, Sykes told him that they’d caught the man who took his money last year. “Tried to pull the same thing on ol’ Stanley Starling over in Beaver,” he said, “but he was a little sharper than you were. Had him tied up and waiting on us when we got there. You don’t ever want to mess with Stanley. They say he could read and write before he was even born. Well, anyway, we got the bastard, but he done spent your money, I’m afraid. Calls himself Oren Malloy, but I’d bet a dollar that’s not his real name.” Then he sniffed the air. “Is that apple pie I smell?”
“Might be,” Ellsworth said.