Showdown at Possum Trot

by David Watts

  Jake leaned back. He turned his head quickly in the direction of the street outside. His eyes were suddenly luminous. He bit so hard on is toothpick that it split right down the center. With his tongue he flipped one half to the other side of his mouth and commenced chewing again. “What else can you tell me?” he said.

  “Nothin’ much. But you might check with George Pickins over at the General Store. He lives on the second floor over there and his window looks out on the alleyway that separates him from the Angel Dust.”

  “Thanks, Ruth Ann,” he said and tapped the counter twice with his hand. He stepped out onto the street.

  The General Store was crowded with people for that time of day, which means there were three folks there buying basics to stock their shelves. George was weighing flower for Nell Crenshaw who needed it to bake the pies she sold to Jackson Charles over at the Rusty Bucket.

  Jake waited ‘til all the people were served then asked George what he knew.

  “Nothing, I’m afraid.”

  “How come?”

  “Well, generally there’s lots of noise comes out of the Angel Dust at night. It disturbs my sleep. I got earplugs so I can sleep without interruption. You see, I was as surprised as you probably were to learn that something went on the other night. Sorry I can’t help more.”

  Jake went out and stood in the alleyway. He imagined someone coming out of the side door to the Angel Dust, passing through to the livery. . . ah! The Livery. How is it he would make the wagon ready? He probably didn’t have to. If he knew what he was doing ahead of time, which is likely, he would have prepared the horse and wagon beforehand so as to spend as little time possible getting out of town.

  He looked around at the dusty street below him. He walked toward the main street. Nothing to notice there. Toward the end of the alleyway there were fragments of wagon tracks covered over here and there by bootprints, horse shoe prints and powder dusted by the wind.

  He returned to the area of the side door and looked at the ground. He found two deep elliptical impressions in the sod in the place that a rear wheel and opposite front wheel might have stood waiting. The rest were swept away. He nodded. This is where the wagon waited while who ever it was went about his mischief bringing down Crissy.

  He wondered if anyone actually saw Crissy being loaded into the wagon and what state she would be in. He looked around, up and down the alleyway, at the Hampton stables at the end of the block—no one would have been there in the middle of the night—all the way to the beginning of the alleyway out in the center of town.

  He remembered something.

  He walked down the alley beyond the back end of the General store. There was a little house set back a slight distance from the road. No front yard. Just dust and stone.

  He went up to the door.

  A woman answered dressed in worn, rag-like clothes. Her hair was unkempt and her hands were reddened from scrubbing floors and windows. She had a quizzical look on her face.

  Jake asked to see Sally.

  *****

  An hour later Jake stood at the junction between town and the country road leading south and looked down its long and windy spine. He could imagine a wagon and its cargo leaving in the middle of the night. He watched to see two men following in early daylight. He had it all together.

  He nodded his head.

  SEVEN

  Crissy dozed and woke, dozed and woke. The uncomfortable position of her body with her hands tied behind her, feet tied, made sleep a shallow experience. On top of that she was leaning against a wall, butt pressed against a hardwood floor.

  She’d had some food, gruel really, a few hours ago—is it night or daytime now?—spoon fed, signal to open up just a tap, tap, tap on her lip by the spoon tip.

  She wondered what her captor looked like, wondered why she had to be blindfolded still, now that she had apparently reached a destination far away from home. It troubled her she couldn’t see him. Bad enough to be kidnapped. Not having an image for her captor, an added worry.

  She was surprised he hadn’t messed with her, hadn’t tried to take her. Only the tap, tap, tap of the spoon on the lips when the food was ready. Not a word otherwise.

  No communication. None invited. Gave her time the scheme a little.

  Why indeed would she want to talk to someone who ripped her out of bed in the middle of the night and carried her away, tied up like a lump of roast beef.

  What was in the mind of her captor? He must be following orders from Horse, that’s for sure. Since he’d not hurt her Horse must have told him he wanted her intact. Horse would. He wouldn’t want her looks to suffer. No damaged goods. Might lower her money potential.

  But why the silence?

  Silence made her hearing sharper. She could tell when the guy was present and when he went away, some kind of ritual he performed every few hours staying mostly away.

  She could hear the birds. She spent time trying to identify them by their calls. She made a list in her mind: mockingbird, goldfinch, meadowlark, canary. And that whispering sound in the background. What was that? She couldn’t place it.

  She remembered her mother telling her that if she was struggling to figure out something she should stop thinking about it and the answer would come to her.

  She shifted her attention from the sounds around her and thought of the girls back at the Angel Dust. How they must miss her. How terrorized they must be to think that they could be the next one whisked away. Why her, anyway?

  She had scanned her recent behavior several times to see if there might be some action that would offend Horse, set him off in a rage of jealousy, or revenge. All she could remember was her trying to do everything Horse wanted, trying to anticipate his moods, stay out of his way. Even when he hit her so hard recently, she was trying to help save his precious Venus from damage.

  She shifted her weight to relieve the pressure on one side of her bottom and remembered waking up in Galen’s little emergency room.

  She sat upright. Dropped her head to one side. That must be it! Maybe Horse thinks there is some kind of connection between her and Galen. Maybe Horse is trying to get back at Galen, trying to draw him out. Oh my god!

  The thought hit her like stampeding cattle. It’s a trap! Horse wants Galen to come find her, wants her captor to ambush him. That must be why he keeps leaving to go outside. That must be why there is so much silence.

  She trembled at the shock of her new realization. A chill rocketed through her shoulders and spine. Her breathing quickened. What could she do?

  Silence again, filled only by worried thoughts. . . and that background noise she was always hearing. . . And while she was not trying so hard to figure it out, it hit her.

  Ah! Why didn’t she think of this before? It’s water.

  A brook, no something louder. A waterfall. Suddenly she knew where she was. Her family had come here when she was five or six years old. I remember the sound, she thought. I’ve heard it nowhere else. It’s Pedernalis Falls.

  *****

  The sun was pressing against the horizon. Light slipping away into the expanding darkness. Galen and Sabo hadn’t gotten as far as they’d wished. They spent considerable time taking a wrong turn when faced with a fork in the road and no wheel ruts to guide them.

  Sabo wanted to be thorough before eliminating the left fork as the proper path. Then it took another hour to find the ruts again on the right fork.

  They watered their horses in a nearby stream, let them graze in the rising dark then tied them up for the night.

  Morning come they would start tracking again.

  *****

  Crissy was awakened by someone moving near to her. She decided to try to engage the man in conversation. Maybe she could find out something about him, explore some weakness or fault. Maybe he could be convinced to remove her blindfold at least.

  “I hear you’re back,” she said.

  No response.

  “How long you going to keep me here?” She knew
he couldn’t answer but she just wanted to keep the connection going.

  No answer.

  “I guess you must work for Horse Diggins,” she said. “I know what that’s like, working for him myself.” She paused. “One thing I know about working for Horse is that you never come out ahead. And it usually means lots of pain for someone, somewhere.”

  She took a deep breath. She heard him rustle around with kitchenware and hoped she was getting her something to eat.

  “What a girl needs in this wild territory is someone to protect her. If you’re all alone out here among the Indians and the outlaws, you won’t last very long. That’s why I fell in with Horse. Cost me a lot to do that, my pride, my privacy, my respect. Now it looks like even Horse has turned on me.” She shifted her position as best she could and bowed her head. “Why do you suppose that is?”

  She didn’t expect an answer and didn’t get one. All she got was that tap, tap, tap on her lips that meant more gruel was coming at her. This man clearly had no sympathy. To him she was just a bundle of rags tied up in a corner.

  The gruel was done and set aside. Crissy felt the itch of porridge drying on her face and twitched her nose and cheek in an attempt to dislodge it. The next thing she felt was the spoon against her cheek, scraping bits of crust from her skin, a little bit at a time.

  She waited, not knowing what to expect, blind and tied up, completely at his mercy.

  The spoon came back to her cheek, though nothing was still there. It traced the curve of her face bones, the almond oval of her eyes under the blindfold, lifting and circling the promontory of her chin.

  It crossed her lips to the tip of her tongue and rubbed forward and back, forward and back, until she gagged.

  The spoon came out and crashed to the floor. She felt his hands around her neck, thumbs pressed upward against her jawbone. Her head tilted back under the pressure. He pressed her Adam’s apple and made her cough and wriggle free.

  She felt his hands sliding down her neck to her shoulders and inward to the top of her chest where he started unbuttoning her blouse.

  She knew what was coming. She’d known many men in their state of arousal. She could smell their lust boiling and seething under the surface like steam ready to explode the pot. There would be no chance to turn him away.

  She felt his hand under her clothing probing her naked breast.

  “Do you think Horse wants you messing with his property like that?” she said.

  The man spoke for the first time. His voice was surprisingly unsteady, nervous. “Horse doesn’t want you damaged,” he said. “No cuts. No bruises.”

  She could feel his hands on her breasts and the open air covering the entire front of her torso. He moved his hands to her waist. “Nothing’s going to show if I just fuck you,” he said.

  “Horse wants me back, alive and well,” she said. “He’ll want to know how I was treated. Maybe I could give him details.”

  “Do you think he would believe you?”

  His hands crawled her skin like two tarantulas, edging lower and lower. She had little time left and no way to defend herself.

  “You enjoy fucking women who have no defense against you.”

  “I enjoy fucking women any old way. And you look pretty ripe for a good fuck.”

  Now Crissy was on the precipice between what little sanctity she had left and utter chaos. It was desperation time. No sense to struggle. It was threaten somehow or just give in. What ammunition did she have left?

  “You know I was at the doctor’s office recently.”

  His hands pulled down her clothing.

  “He said I have Syphilis.”

  The man stopped a second and laughed. He laughed long and hard. It wasn’t long before he spoke again.

  “I’ll take my chances,” he said.

  *****

  Horse returned to town with five men in tow. Ruth Ann was buying sugar at the General Store and looked out the window to see the entourage. She took a deep breath and furrowed her brow.

  “Looks like Horse Diggins got himself a gang now,” she said.

  George shook his head. “We had enough trouble already in this town. The weather just got worse.”

  “Coming into town in broad daylight like that. He wants everybody to know what he’s got. Goddamned showoff!”

  George and Ruth Ann went out on the porch.

  “I’ve seen this before,” said a voice to their right.

  They turned to see Jigsaw Higgins sitting in his chair rolling a cigarette. “Every time an evil man goes out and gets a bunch more evil men it means—and mark my words—there’ll be a gunfight real soon.”

  They watched four arrogant men dismount and go into the Angel Dust Saloon.

  Down the street another man took an entirely different view of the happenings. Jebediah Tull sat on his front porch watching the men ride into town, watching them dismount, tie up and walk into the Angel Dust.

  He lifted his peacemaker from its snug cozy at his side and clicked the cylinder round and round. He stroked the barrel and nodded. “Couldn’t be better,” he said. “Couldn’t be better.”

  The dust in the street stirred in the wind.

  EIGHT

  Crissy curled her body like a Nautilus in its shell, as if to contain somehow the wound to her soul. It was night. She could tell that much by the sounds she heard.

  She wept and shuddered. She coughed. She moaned.

  The man outside was doing whatever he came to do. She didn’t care. She hoped he fell off a cliff.

  She hated him. She hated the woman who birthed him. She hated God for making men like him.

  She sang to herself songs her mother sang at her bedside when she woke up in the night trembling and sweating. Her mother never failed her. She would always leave her bed to answer her desperate call. She loved her mother. But her mother was not there to help her now. No one was.

  She sighed. She wept.

  She could just die.

  Maybe that was the thing to do. Just die. See how that made them all feel.

  She imagined the man having to tell Horse she was dead. She relished the moment that Horse got angry and slapped him around. Maybe he would shoot him in the foot. Make him suffer for what he did to her.

  A wave of spasm rippled through her body. She tightened her knees against her chest.

  Maybe the man wouldn’t return to Horse now that she was dead. Maybe Horse would track him down like the dirty rotten human filth he was and shoot him like a squealing pig.

  She whimpered a little until her whimpering ceased and she hovered in the silence between consciousness and a world beyond.

  The sounds of the night oozed into her. Crickets and nightingales and the sounds of trees shifting their roots.

  She thought of Galen. What a fine man he was. Too bad more men like him didn’t exist in the world.

  She felt sleep coming on. She released herself to the murmuring of the night. As she crossed over and back at the edge of sleep she heard the sounds swell and ebb, swell and ebb.

  In her stupor she didn’t recognize the new sound right away. It just seemed like another round of crickets chirping or branches shifting, but the more she heard it’s intermittent pulsing the more distinct it became. Her ears opened wider. Her heart raced in recognition long before her brain identified what it was. Then suddenly she knew!

  She became lifeless. Still. Hardly breathing. Frozen in the circumference of danger.

  She stayed that way for two eternities. Then a thought occurred to her. This would be a way for her to die, to wreak havoc on those who perpetrated this horrible injustice. All she had to do was move around and make a little noise.

  But something stopped her. Partly it was a strong will to live that turned out to be a lot more forceful than she thought. A wave of pleasure coursed through her at that recognition. Now this new insight allowed her a foothold, a platform upon which to view another reason to remain calm, because in doing so she might pass this death threat fro
m her along to her captor. All she had to do was to remain absolutely still. Could she do it?

  At the end of each of the eternities that passed through her she wondered if she had the energy to continue. The body ached its message to be relieved. The spot where her hip pressed against the floor was turning rotten under her, the tissue dying under the constant pressure. Yet she forced herself to continue. She must overcome the will of the body to care for itself. Did she have the strength?

  Death waited patiently three feet from her. Would he pass her by?

  The sounds of the night were fading. Was it her consciousness drifting or was it the deepening of night into its darkest period? She was losing track. She was fading.

  A new noise. A click. Was it the door opening? Was the man coming back in the house?

  Footsteps now and a rustling of clothing. The clump of a gunbelt hitting the table. Boots off.

  Then the sound came back, this time not in pulses but a constant stream of a hissing, agitated, furious noise. A sudden whiff of air against the side of her face and the air shattered by a voice crying the cry of a man struck with a mortal wound. A struggle of movement. Thrashing about. Grunts and anguished cries and growls. Then the a little pause. The sound of a match striking, then three shots.

  Complete silence.

  Even the sounds outside drew to a hush. No sound left to break the membrane of night.

  Crissy, fully spent, helpless in the dark, finally gave in to her exhaustion and descended to oblivion.

  *****

  Next morning Galen and Sabo came upon the house to find a semi-conscious girl tied up and blindfolded, a dead man with fang marks in his neck, and a seven foot rattler shot to three pieces on the floor.

  NINE

  Jake was coming out of the bank when the procession hit town. He’d just finished arguing with Sterling Jennings, the banker, about his balance. Nobody much wins an argument with Jake, but, on the other hand, bankers don’t lose many.