Dead Man's Walk

by Larry McMurtry

MATILDA JANE ROBERTS WAS naked as the air. Known throughout south Texas as the Great Western, she came walking up from the muddy Rio Grande holding a big snapping turtle by the tail. Matilda was almost as large as the skinny little Mexican mustang Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call were trying to saddle-break. Call had the mare by the ears, waiting for Gus to pitch the saddle on her narrow back, but the pitch was slow in coming. When Call glanced toward the river and saw the Great Western in all her plump nakedness, he knew why: young Gus McCrae was by nature distractable; the sight of a naked, two-hundred-pound whore carrying a full-grown snapping turtle had captured his complete attention, and that of the rest of the Ranger troop as well. “Look at that, Woodrow,” Gus said. “Matty’s carrying that old turtle as if it was a basket of peaches.” “I can’t look,” Call said. “I’ll lose my grip and get kicked—and I’ve done been kicked.”

Long Bill Coleman, lounging against his saddle only a few yards from where the two young Rangers were struggling with the little mustang, watched Matilda approach, with a certain trepidation. Although it was only an hour past breakfast, he was already drunk. It seemed to Long Bill, in his tipsy state, that the Great Western was walking directly toward him with her angry catch. It might be that she meant to use the turtle as some kind of weapon—or so Long Bill surmised. Matilda Roberts despised debt, and carried grudges freely and at length. Bill knew himself to be considerably in arrears, the result of a persistent lust coupled with a vexing string of losses at cards. At the moment, he didn’t have a red cent and knew that he was unlikely to have one for days, or even weeks to come. If Matilda, who was whimsical, chose to call his debt, his only recourse might be to run; but Long Bill was in no shape to run, and in any case, there was no place to run to that offered the least prospect of refuge. The Rangers were camped on the Rio Grande, west of the alkaline Pecos. They were almost three hundred miles from the nearest civilized habitation, and the country between them and a town was not inviting.

Major Chevallie had only spent three weeks at West Point—he left because he found the classes boring and the discipline vexing. He nonetheless awarded himself the rank of major after a violent scrape in Baltimore convinced him that civilian life hemmed a man in with such a passel of legalities that it was no longer worth pursuing. Randall Chevallie hid on a ship, and the ship took him to Galveston; upon disembarking at that moist, sandy port, he declared himself a major and had been a major ever since.

She had strolled down to the river naked because she felt like having a wash in the cold water. It wasn’t deep enough to swim in, but she gave herself a good splashing. The old snapper just happened to be lazing on a rock nearby, so she grabbed it. Half the Rangers were scared of Matilda anyway, some so scared they would scarcely look at her, naked or clothed. The Major wasn’t scared of her, nor was Bigfoot or young Gus; the rest of the men, in her view, were incompetents, the kind of men who were likely to run up debts and get killed before they could pay them. She sailed the snapper in their direction to let them know she expected honest behavior. Going naked didn’t hurt, either. She was big, and liked it; she could punch most men out, if she had to, and sometimes she had to; her dream was to get to California and own a fine bordello, which was why she fell in with the first Ranger troop going west. It was a scraggly little troop, composed mostly of drunks and shiftless ramblers, but she took it and was making the best of it. The alternative was to wait in Texas, get old, and never own a bordello in California.

Long Bill Coleman felt a little queasy, partly because of the mescal and partly from the thought of having to stick a thorn in his neck in order to avoid Comanche torture. “Me, I’ll shoot myself in the head if I’ve got time,” Long Bill said. “Well, but that can go wrong,” Bigfoot informed him. Once set in an instructional direction, he didn’t like to turn until he had given a thorough lecture. Bigfoot considered himself to be practical to a fault—if a man had to kill himself in a hurry, it was best to know exactly how to proceed. “Don’t go sticking no gun in your mouth, unless it’s a shotgun,” he advised, noting that Long Bill looked a little green. Probably the alkaline water didn’t agree with him. “Why not, it’s hard to miss your head if you’ve got a gun in your mouth,” Ezekiel Moody commented. “No, it ain’t,” Bigfoot said. “The bullet could glance off a bone and come out your ear. You’d still be healthy enough that they could torture you for a week. Shove the barrel of the gun up against an eyeball and pull—that’s sure. Your brains will get blown out the back of your head—then if some squaw comes along and chews off your balls and your pecker, you won’t know the difference.” “My, this is a cheery conversation,” Major Chevallie said. “I wish Matilda would come back and remove this turtle.”

Major Chevallie advanced the two dollars, and the next morning at dawn, he, Call, Gus, Shadrach, Bob Bascom, Long Bill Coleman, Ezekiel Moody, Josh Corn, one-eyed Johnny Carthage, Blackie Slidell, Rip Green, and Black Sam, leading his kitchen mule, trotted out of San Antonio. Call had never been so happy in his life—overnight he had become a Texas Ranger, the grandest thing anyone could possibly be.

Texas was the sort of place where people could simply name themselves something and then start being whatever they happened to name. Then they could start acquiring the skills of their new profession—or not acquiring them, as the case might be.

The land before him, which looked so empty, wasn’t. A people were there who knew the emptiness better than he did; they knew it even better than Bigfoot or Shadrach. They knew it and they claimed it. They were the people of the emptiness.

“WHERE IS SANTA FE?” Call asked, when he first heard that an expedition was being got up to capture it. Gus McCrae had just heard the news, and had come running as fast as he could to inform Call so the two of them could be among the first to join. “They say Caleb Cobb’s leading the troop,” Gus said. Call was as vague about the name as he had been about the place. Several times, it seemed to him, he had heard people mention a place called Santa Fe, but so far as he could recall, he had not until that moment heard the name Caleb Cobb. Gus, who had been painting a saloon when the news reached him, was highly excited, but short on particulars. “Why, everybody’s heard of Caleb Cobb,” he said, though in fact the name was new to him as well. “No, everybody ain’t, because I ain’t,” Call informed him. “Is he a soldier, or what? I ain’t joining up if I have to work for a soldier again.” “I think Caleb Cobb was the man who captured old Santa Anna,” Gus said. “I guess sometimes he soldiers and sometimes he don’t. I’ve heard that he fought Indians with Sam Houston himself.” The last assertion was a pure lie, but it was a lie with a serious purpose, and the purpose was to overcome Woodrow Call’s stubborn skepticism and get him in the mood to join the expedition that would soon set out to capture Santa Fe.

Call had four mules yet to shoe and was not eager for a long palaver. There had been no rangering since the little troop had returned to San Antonio, though he and Gus were still drawing their pay. Idleness didn’t suit him; from time to time he still lent old Jesus a hand with the horseshoeing. Gus McCrae rarely did anything except solicit whores; in all likelihood it was a pimp named Redmond Dale, owner of San Antonio’s newest saloon, who had talked Gus into doing the painting—no doubt he had offered free services as an inducement. What time Gus didn’t spend in the whorehouses he usually spent in jail. With no work to do he had developed a tendency to drink liquor, and drinking liquor made him argumentative. The day seldom passed without Gus getting into a fight, the usual result being that he would whip three or four sober citizens and be hauled off to jail. Even when he didn’t actually fight, he yelled or shot off his pistol or generally disturbed the peace.

“I say leave the mules—I want to get started for Austin,” Gus said. “Redmond Dale can find someone else to paint his saloon. Of course we might have time for a visit to the whorehouse, if you ever get tired of working.” “I can’t afford the whorehouse—I’m saving up for a better gun,” Call said. “If we’re going out there into the Indian country, I need to have a better gun.” He had visited the whorehouse, though, with Gus, several times—he didn’t scorn it as a pastime. Matilda Roberts was employed there while waiting for passage to the west. She had taken a liking to young Call. Gus too had his likable side, but he was overpersistent, and also a blabber. There were times when Matilda could put up with persistence easier than she could with blab. Young Call, though, seldom said two words. He just handed over the coins. Matilda saw something sad in the boy’s eyes—it touched her. She saw after a few visits that her great bulk frightened him, and put him with a young Mexican girl named Rosa, who soon came to like him. Call often thought of Rosa—she taught him many Spanish words: how to count, words for food. She was a slim girl who seldom smiled, though once in awhile she smiled at him. Call thought of her most afternoons when he was working in the hot lots behind the blacksmith’s shop. He also thought of her at night when he was sleeping on his blanket, near the stable. He would have liked to see Rosa oftener—Gus had not been wrong to recommend whores, but Gus was reckless with...

Long Bill Coleman brought out his harmonica—he never trusted it to his saddlebags but kept it about his person, and played a tune called “Barbara Allen.” Call liked to listen to Long Bill play the harmonica. The old tune, clear and plaintive, made a sadness come in him. He didn’t know why the music made him sad—or even what the sadness was for. After all, as the young woman said, they were all still alive, and not much worse off than they had been before the cyclone struck. The loss of the horses was a nuisance, of course, but it wasn’t because of the horses that he felt sad. He felt sad for all of them: the Rangers, Matilda, the little family that had lost its roof. They were small, and the world was large and violent.

They were scared: they had ridden out of Austin into a world where the rules were not white rules, where torture and mutilation awaited the weak and the unwary, the slow, the young.

Gus’s preparations for the grand expedition to Santa Fe consisted in dragging himself, his guns, and a blanket into the heavy cart. Then he huddled in the cart, so drunk that he was not much bothered by the fact that Johnny Carthage was pitching every object he could get his hands on in on top of him. The cooking pots, the extra saddlery, blankets and guns, ropes and boxes of medicines, were all heaped in the cart, with little care taken as to placement. “Why do we have to leave in the middle of the night?” Gus asked, several times—but Johnny Carthage was muttering and coughing; he made no reply. He had an old lantern, and was searching all around the large area of the camp, well aware that he would be blamed if he left anything behind. But with only one eye and a gimpy leg, and with Gus too crippled and too drunk to help, gathering up the belongings of the whole troop on a dark, rainy night was chancy work.

At some point well before dawn, Quartermaster Brognoli made a tour of the area, to see that the fifteen or twenty different groups of free-ranging adventurers, many of them merchants or would-be merchants, were making adequate progress toward departure. Gus stuck his head out from under a dripping blanket long enough to talk to him a minute. “Why leave when it’s dark?” he asked. “Why not wait for sunup?” Brognoli had taken a liking to the tall boy from Tennessee. He was green but friendly, and he moved quick. Years of trying to get soldiers on the move had given Brognoli a distaste for slow people. “Colonel Cobb don’t care for light nor dark,” he informed Gus. “He don’t care for the time of day or the month or the year. When he decides to go, we go.” “But three in the morning’s an odd time to start an expedition,” Gus pointed out. “No, it’s regular enough,” Brognoli said. “If we start pushing out about three the stragglers will clear Austin by six or seven. Colonel Cobb left an hour ago. We’re going to stop at Bushy Creek for breakfast, so we better get moving. If we ain’t there when the Colonel expects us, there won’t be no breakfast.”

Most of the men squatted or sat, looking at the blackened plain. In the space of a morning they had been put in serious peril. The thought of water was on every man’s mind. Even with horses it had sometimes been hard to find water holes. On foot they might stumble for days, or until they dropped, looking for water.

They couldn’t just sit where they were, with no food and almost no water—some of the men had canteens, but many didn’t. Many had relied on leather pouches, which had burnt or burst in the fire. Finally, after three hours, Caleb stood up. “Well, we’re no worse off than old Coronado,” he said, and started walking west. The men followed slowly, afraid of scorching themselves. The plain was dotted with wands of smoke, drifting upward from smoldering plants. Call was not far behind Caleb—he saw Caleb reach down and pick up a charred jackrabbit that had been crisped coming out of its hole. Caleb pulled a patch of burned skin off the rabbit and ate a few bites of rabbit meat, as he walked. Looking back, he noticed that Call was startled. “We’re going to have to eat anything we can scratch up now, Corporal,” he said. “You better be looking for a rabbit yourself.” Not ten minutes later, Call saw another dead rabbit. He picked it up by its leg and carried it with him—he did not feel hungry enough to eat a scorched rabbit; not yet. Gus, still weak from his scare, saw him pick it up. “What’s the jackrabbit for?” he asked. “It’s to eat,” Call said. “The Colonel ate one. He says we have to eat anything we can find, now. It’s a long way to where we can get grub.” “I mean to find something better than a damn rabbit,” Gus said. “I might find a deer or an antelope, if I look hard.” “You better take what you can get!” Bigfoot advised. “I’m looking for a burnt polecat, myself. Polecat meat is...

At the moment, meat was not what was on his mind. Caleb Cobb’s treachery in denying him the promotion was what was on his mind. He had gone over the edge of the canyon and taken the risk. Suppose his belt had slipped off, like the dog’s collar? He would be dead, and all for a dog’s sake. It was poor commanding, in Gus’s view. He had been the only man who volunteered—he ought to have been promoted on that score alone. He had been proud to be a corporal, for awhile, but now it seemed a petty title, considering the hardship that was involved.

While he was thinking of the hardship, an awful thought occurred to him. They were now on the open plain, walking through waist-high grass. The canyon was already several miles behind them. But where the Comanches were, no one knew. The Indians could be drawing a circle around them, even as they walked. If they fired the grass again, there would be no canyon to hide them. They had no horses, and even horses had not been able to outrun the fire. “What if they set another fire, Woodrow?” Gus asked. “We’d be fried like that jackrabbit you’re carrying.” Call walked on. What Gus had just said was obviously true. If the Indians fired the grass again they would all be killed. That was such a plain fact that he didn’t see any need to talk about it. Gus would do better to be thinking about grub, or water holes, it seemed to him.

Caleb Cobb was unaffected by Matilda’s howling. He was eating a piece of horse meat—he glanced at Matilda from time to time. It amused him that the troop had become so uneasy, just because a woman was crying. Love, with all its mystery, had arrived in their midst, and they didn’t like it. A whore had fallen in love with an old man of the mountains. It wasn’t supposed to happen, but it had. The men were unnerved by it—such a thing was unnecessary, even unnatural. Even the Comanches, in a way, worried them less. Comanches did what they were expected to, which was kill whites. It might mean war to the death, but at least there was no uncertainty about what to expect. But here was a woman howling like a she-wolf—what sense did that make?

“Love’s a terrible price to pay for company, ain’t it, Matty?” Caleb said. “I won’t pay it, myself. I’d rather do without the company.”

Caleb Cobb gave the returning scouts a stony welcome. A rattlesnake had crawled across him during the night and disturbed his sleep. His temper was foul, and he didn’t bother to conceal the fact. “Nobody told you to go chasing antelope,” he said. “But since you went, where’s the meat? If I still had chains I’d put them on you.” The carcass of the little antelope was slung across one of the recaptured horses. Shadrach pulled it off, and pitched it at Caleb’s feet. He was angry, but Bigfoot Wallace was angrier. Few of the men had seen Bigfoot’s temper rise, but those who had knew to lean far back from it. His face had grown red and his eyes menacing, as he stood before Caleb Cobb. “You wouldn’t put no damn chains on me, I guess,” he said. “I won’t be chained—not by you and not by any man. “You ain’t no colonel!” he added. “You’re nothing but a land pirate. They run you off the seas, so now you’re out here trying to pirate Santa Fe. I’ve took my last orders from you, Mr. Cobb, and Shadrach feels the same.”

Caleb calmly stood up and drew his big knife. “Let’s fight,” he said. “We’ll see how hard you are to chain once I cut your goddamn throat.” In an instant, Bigfoot’s knife was out; he was ready to start slashing at Caleb Cobb, but before the fight started old Shadrach slipped between them. He grabbed two pistols from Gus, and pointed one at each combatant.

He didn’t understand why women had such a need to question. He himself preferred just to let life happen, and act when opportunity arose.

“Now, Woodrow, come on,” Gus said, taking his friend’s arm. “Let’s whore a little, and then lope up to Austin.” “Austin—why?” Call asked. “So I can see if that girl in the general store still wants to marry me,” Gus said.