Devil Up by T. R. Pearson

Author:T. R. Pearson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Barking Mad Press
Published: 2021-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

The Woman and the Goat

1

We made like we were still headed west and aiming for California, but we didn’t move out with any dispatch and spent time veering south and north. At first, we didn’t talk in any direct way about what we were up to, but a group like ours could only dawdle without comment for a while. It was like we weren’t prepared to fully break from the pull of Pueblo because we knew that’s where the marshal and the payout money was.

Once you’ve taken good money for delivering men you didn’t feel a thing about, doing it another time can start to grab you like a calling. That’s what was going on, but didn’t any of us say until after two weeks had passed by, and we’d all but circled Pueblo, had gone on sallies north and south but had spent most of our time on the overland trail where we’d met with a slew of people. We talked to more folks after Burke and Crowder than I’d seen since leaving home.

But we still didn’t own up to what we were doing in any direct and honest way until that Pawnee boy put all sorts of questions to Orla and Arturo. He wasn’t, for an Indian, anything like gifted with directions. He could go thirty feet into the deep woods and about get lost coming back. I think that’s especially why he missed the regular company of his dog since the dog always knew where they were.

But even that Pawnee boy could tell we were on some kind of wander and were looping back to places we’d traveled through before. He wanted to know what we were up to and said it was his people’s custom to move straight from place to place to place to place. At the end of the line they’d sometimes turn around and do it backwards, but he declared we seemed to be up to something far more aimless than that.

He said it all to Orla and Arturo who put it in English for us, and I was primed with a comment of my own because I’d been mulling too.

“We’re on the scour, aren’t we?” I aimed that at Orla. “I’ll be thinking tomorrow we’ll go on west, but we keep on hanging back.”

“Gift horse and that,” was Orla’s response.

It wasn’t like we had gotten together and had anything like a chat. Instead, we were only mindful there were wanted men around and a town within striking distance where we could cash them in.

“Take a vote maybe,” was my suggestion.

So at camp there one evening we gathered for what could have passed for a prayer meeting, and Orla even let Arturo open the thing with a Mexican poem. It was, naturally, about both the rigors of fate and a tragic, heartbroken woman. Those were the twin staples of Mexican poetry as best I could tell. Also, it all went on for longer than I’d like a poem to go, and it didn’t

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