“That all depends.”
“On me?”
Bowen nodded. “On what’s on your mind.”
“I’ll be perfectly honest with you,” Lizann said softly. She moved closer to him. “I don’t know how it can be done. All I know is I have to get away from here. My husband has refused to help me and Renda has me watched constantly. That’s why I have no choice but to-”
“Come to a convict.”
“I wasn’t going to say that. I have no choice but to devise my own means of getting away from here.”
“You’d leave your husband?”
“He’s already left me, you might say.”
“Why won’t he help you?”
“You said it yourself. He’s Renda’s prisoner.”
“He could get word out somehow,” Bowen said. “Mail a report from Fuegos.”
“He could…if he wasn’t accepting money from Frank.”
“Renda’s bribing him?”
Lizann nodded calmly. “If he reports Frank, Frank will report him. Staying here, Willis is desperately protecting what he chooses to call his career in government service.”
“I didn’t think Frank was making that much that he could afford to pay somebody off.”
“He doesn’t have a choice.”
“It seems to me,” Bowen said, “he could get away with just threatening your husband.”
“Perhaps he could, but it wouldn’t be as sure as the way he’s doing it.”
“How long has your husband been taking the money?”
“I suppose from almost the first day we came here. It wouldn’t have taken Willis long to realize what Renda was doing. Willis keeps the books…That’s something else, another way Renda has him. All the accounting is in Willis’s handwriting-the entries of the government subsistence funds, then the recording of fictitious expenditures to cover the funds going into Renda’s pocket. As far as the people in Prescott know, the convicts are getting the equivalent of seventy cents a day-in food, clothing, blankets…well, you know, you mentioned it a moment ago.”
“How much does your husband get out of it?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps just enough to cover the six bottles of Green River he buys every week.”
“Maybe Renda forced him into it somehow.”
“I have found,” Lizann said quietly, “that worrying about my husband serves no one’s purpose, not even his.”
Bowen studied her thoughtfully. “All right…now tell me where I fit in.”
“I’m not yet sure,” Lizann answered. Her face was raised to his and for a moment neither of them spoke. “But,” she asked then, “you’d be willing to help me, wouldn’t you?”
“It still depends,” Bowen said mildly. “You tell me when you think of a way to leave…and then I’ll let you know.”
By five thirty A.M. the roving night guard had made his last swing through the compound, checked with the gate guard and had gone to wake up the cook. Fifteen minutes later, Renda and the day men were up and dressed. They unlocked one door of the barracks, brought the convicts out single file and counted them before marching them to the outside mesquite-pole-
awninged mess tables behind the barracks.
At six o’clock they were lined up in front of the barracks again. A few minutes later, three single-team wagons moved out of the compound-the first carrying equipment, the other two, the convicts. A guard rode alongside both of the convict wagons and Renda and Brazil brought up the rear. As the wagons rolled through the gate, twelve Mimbreño trackers rode out from their camp. Three of them held back to follow the wagons, but the rest went on, spreading out and running their horses now toward the looming sand-colored slope less than a mile in the distance. As the sun rose higher, five shadow lines formed by washes and rock slides would creep down the slope like a gigantic hand groping for the convict camp below.
In the third wagon, sitting next to Bowen, Pryde said, “There they go. You see them in the morning, then you see them maybe once all day.”
“Unless,” Bowen said, “you try to run. Then you see them again.” He watched Salvaje, a good fifty yards out, ride by the wagons, and he nodded, saying to Pryde, “How’d you like to have him on our side?”
Pryde turned to watch the Mimbres. “That would do it, wouldn’t it?”
That would do it all right, Bowen thought-his eyes raising to Renda and Brazil who had separated and dropped back a dozen yards or more to be clear of the dust rising from the wagons-once you got by those two. Maybe, he continued to think, there’s where Lizann comes in. To help you get by.
But how does a woman help you break out of a convict camp?
No-don’t underestimate her because she’s a woman. Not that one. And don’t think she’s doing it for you. You guessed it and she admitted it. She wants out. She wants to be free of Renda…and the wire fence and the Mimbres and the sun and…even if it means running away with a convict she doesn’t know from any other convict. Think about that. Think about it good and see what it tells you. A woman who’s willing to leave her husband behind…willing to help a convict if he’ll help her. Picture the way she was in the stable and the way she spoke, then add. Add it up without cluttering it with running-hiding-making-it-escaping-from-it pictures and see what you get. Put yourself in her shoes. Be sick of your husband and hating Renda and hating everything in sight. Then look at you. A weapon. Somebody Renda beat hell out of. Somebody angry enough. You said it yourself. You don’t have to reason it out. You said it yourself in the stable. Somebody angry enough. She’ll use you for a battering ram to bust the door down. That’s all. If you can get up and run out yourself, all right. If you can’t, she’s not going to stop to help you up. And if she fails, then it was a convict who forced her into it.
And so you know all that just by looking at her face, guessing what wasn’t said but what was almost said. Is that how you know all about her?
Yes. Some things you know.
Some things are very simple and you can take all this reasoning that really isn’t reasoning and throw it out because you knew with the first word she said and the way she said it that she was after something and if she wanted it bad enough she’d get it, one way or another. With you or with somebody else. And knowing it you’ll go along with her, because at least it’s a chance and one chance is better than six more years of this. Even if you don’t make it.
So what have you got?
He was still watching Renda and he thought: Ride over here close and look the other way and let that shotgun barrel stick out a little more.
Then get Brazil first.
Yes, that’s smart thinking. Ask Pryde if he thinks that’s cool, calm, smart thinking. Ask him if he feels anything about it.
If you planned a break with one of the convicts, he wouldn’t think of you, would he? He’d think of himself. And you’d think of your self. That’s what it comes down to. She’s as much a prisoner as anyone else. So if she wants to get out, even needing somebody else, she’ll be thinking of herself. It’s not surprising now, is it? Suddenly it’s not surprising. Your mistake was thinking of her as a woman instead of as another convict.
So forget she’s a woman and just listen to whatever she has to say. Forget she’s supposed to think like a woman, however women are supposed to think. She’s another convict. Put a convict’s shirt on her and numbered pants if that makes it any easier.
He began to picture Lizann in a man’s shirt, not doing it intentionally, but because it was already in his mind; but suddenly the woman was no longer Lizann and he was picturing Karla Demery in a faded blue chambray shirt, the one she had been wearing that day three weeks ago.
As the trail began to climb, Bowen watched Brazil come up almost to their wagon before turning his horse from the trail. He rode even with them then, but off beyond the twisted, shaggy-barked cliff rose bushes that grew close along the wagon ruts. Renda remained behind, though he seemed to be closer to the wagon now. The three Mimbres who had trailed him were no longer there.