“I got a friend. She’s holding him.”
That’s all. She turned and led the way toward the nearby river.
In those days, before they choked her off, that river widened or narrowed as it pleased, one day going fast, the next slow. But no matter how it flowed and until it dried, it carried its own high load of mud and a body lost upstream or down would have been hid for good. I knew children shouldn’t play around it.
But they run loose out here like their parents. And you can’t tell what children see or what they find. They’re skinned up and bandaged from climbing around where people big enough to do wrong have done it, or tried to, since sometimes me and my boys can stop them before they’re through. Right in the middle of the desert where there is hardly sign of bird or animal you are liable to find some scrap or garment that once belonged personally to a woman. That’s evidence. A man is wise if he keeps to town. But even there he comes across it.
So I walked quiet as I could when I first smelled that brown water and caught sight of the shadows from shrub and cactus that grew more heavy in those days, when the crime rate was high around the river and the daylight offenders were the worst. I knew this little girl had found one of the spots where water, meant just to liven up men half dead or draw together cattle, drives men and women to undress and swim and maybe kill themselves. That water towed under many.
I’ve dragged it. That was part of my job, as well as bringing out liquor to a horse with heaves or holding a basin under a man’s wrists that was slashed in jail. He lived. I hate the sight of a dragging iron with all them rusty points that you lower from the end of a slippery rope. We never caught much with it anyway. I don’t like boats.
This time we didn’t need an iron. And I didn’t figure to have to use my gun, not with this child safe enough to come and get me, leaving her friend to wait. But I had it ready.
The shrubbery didn’t cover us at all. I think he saw us from the first. I didn’t care if he did; the thing to do was to crouch down as we was and watch before jumping up to scare him or chase him away. I took my time. There are other times when you have to step right in, when you are Sheriff or even Deputy, and catch hold of a bare shoulder or head of hair, keeping your face turned back so as it don’t get bruised, and drag them off. Maybe you get splashed with a glass of beer or your hand gets bit, but they have to be broke apart. Fast. I would rather help a woman have a baby than fight with them that don’t or that don’t care. But sometimes it’s better not to move.
We watched.
We sat there in the sun like we had fish poles and all day to wait for what would happen, like that little girl and me would have supper when we got back and it could keep, with no trouble at home, until we did.