Showdown at Possum Trot

by David Watts

  Galen looked away, examined a busted thumbnail. “What do you intend to do?” he said.

  “Intend what?”

  “Intend for yourself once this town settles down a bit.”

  “Lawdy, lawdy. Look how quick you change the subject.” Jake tilted his head side to side, turned his eyes on his horse prancing in the corral. “This town ain’t going to settle down anytime soon so that’s a moot point.”

  “That’s one way to dodge the question.”

  “Oh, I got lots of those. Come in handy when talking to curious people.”

  Galen looked out over the fields stretching toward the west where the sun was about to start its acceleration to the other side of the horizon.

  “I gave up shooting people for a living hoping to find a more peaceful life. This life around here ain’t peaceful and it doesn’t allow me to put away Claudette. . .” he patted his holster. “. . .at least not for a while more. But I have to say, this is a lot nicer life.” He took off his hat, scratched his head and tossed it on the porch floor. “What will your nicer life be, Jake?”

  Jake tilted his head way over to one side and bounced it there a few beats. “Well, I did buy another man’s dream.”

  Galen laughed. “What the hell?”

  “It’s a little story.”

  “I got ears.”

  Jake flipped his cigarette out on the walk and replaced it with a toothpick.

  “I been thinking for a long time about finding a little place up in the mountains, some place that don’t have no cattle or pigs, just a lot of pine trees and a nice view of a lake or a stream. I went up to Colorado three years ago but I didn’t know nuthin’ about finding property or even where to look.”

  He took the toothpick out, tore away a fragment and put it back in.

  “So I just went to a place I liked and it turned out I stopped in the San Juan Mountains around Durango, you know, down around mount Snuffles, Vestal Peak, Twilight Peak—I love those mountains—and I started looking around. Having no clue and nothing better to do, I went up to a house way up on the mountain and asked the man if he had the choice of any place around here to buy, what would it be. He pointed down the road and said, the old Carlisle place. I asked why and he just shrugged and said, it’s the best. Well, that was good enough for me. I knocked on the door and asked. The man said they’d never sell.”

  He stopped.

  “Sounds like a dead end,” said Galen, “but I know you wouldn’t be telling me this if there weren’t something queer about it.” He looked at him and smiled wryly. “Go on,” he said, “let’s get to the end of this.”

  “I told the man if he ever changed his mind to let me know and I give him my name and mailing address. He said he never would. Six months later I get a letter saying that the misses’ rheumatism was getting worse and she didn’t think she could stand one more winter so if I was still interested. . .”

  “You bought another man’s dream.”

  “That I did.”

  Both men had been looking out at the view. Galen turned full face to Jake. “And yet, here you sit.”

  “You noticed that.”

  “Couldn’t help. Why you still here?”

  Jake leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. His eyes were on the floorboards of the porch. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, maybe you know there’s a little woman about three miles from here who don’t want to leave her house and don’t want me to live with her neither.”

  “And you can’t take off by yerself?”

  “Well now Galen, that’s the rub, you see. There is this little complication called a woman. I seem to’ve got myself hooked into that tricky little whatever it is and can’t seem to get my feet pointed any other direction.”

  “That tricky little thing might be called love.”

  “There’s a name for it.”

  “Hate to see a man have a dream he can’t get to.”

  “That’s the circumstance.” He flipped his toothpick away. He waited for the sun to drop another notch. “Maybe I’ll get there someday,” he said. “We’ll see.”

  He leaned back and rocked a few times. “Meanwhile,” he slapped the arm of his chair, “lets go inside and see what that little miracle you brought home has cooked up for dinner.”

  They got up and walked indoors. Jake put his arm around Galen’s shoulder. “I might actually fatten up a tad,” he said, “if that little chickadee stays around here much longer.”

  *****

  George was on Tull’s porch.

  “Further developments?” said the parson.

  “The worst.”

  “Do tell.”

  “The man came to see me this afternoon. . .”

  “Madson Crow.”

  “. . . and I asked him those questions, the one about where the money was coming from. He refused to answer. Said it was none of my business. He demanded to know my decision and I told him the answer was the same.”

  “So far, so good.”

  “Don’t know about that. He said, did I realize what I might be doing to myself, to my family.”

  George stopped and took a deep breath. The parson waited.

  “That scared me,” George said. “I mean, if it’s about me, that’s one thing, but my family. . .”

  “So he left the store and later when I got home my wife come running out. She said a man came by, stopped in the middle of the road, got off his horse and pointed his long rifle at the house. She said she was in the front yard and for a terrifying moment he pointed it straight at her. Directly he turned it away and fixed it on our prize bull, shot him, and left him dead in the field.”

  He stopped and looked at the parson. “You said everything was going to turn out right. But that dead bull means that the next one to die is my kid or my wife. This is getting fucking dangerous!”

  There was no response. The parson’s eyes were wide and the pupils had expanded to the size of marbles. He was breathing slow and steady and his hands clutched the arms of his chair so hard George thought they might shatter. His vision, out of control, had spun off somewhere in the next universe. George thought he saw a hint of a smile at the corners of the parson’s mouth cracking his stony face.

  Eventually the parson shook his head and cleared his throat. He returned to himself and reassured George with a perfunctory set of platitudes and shooed him on his way.

  George was inconsolable. He discussed the situation with his wife that night and they resolved to sell the store.

  *****

  Evening, and Horse was presiding over an informal meeting upstairs in his office. Business as usual went on below. Downstairs, there was the customary assortment of farmhands, cedar choppers, cowboys and ranchers. Horse was upstairs saying things like, “You realize, that this town suffers from lack of leadership. It needs a iron hand and a strong command.” He would link the town’s weaknesses to the strengths he could provide: “It’s ours for the taking but we have to not be afraid use whatever force necessary.” He would demand reports on the activities of the day and berate the men for not accomplishing more. He sent them off to put even more pressure on the citizens of the town.

  Outside the bar the street was empty and all the storeowners were in their cottages. There was a waxing gibbous moon casting angular light into the town that created the effect of a pen and ink etching that shifted ever so slightly as the moon glided through the sky. The aroma was that of horse manure and alfalfa hay.

  A cat crossed the street. A little wind tossed something that flashed like it could have been a piece of tumbleweed or a scrap of somebody’s shirt. The one pair of eyes looking didn’t care.

  An hour went by. Men started walking, stumbling, falling out the door of the Angel Dust, their heavy boots clacking against the wooden porch. Some leaned against the posts, some had difficulty mounting their horses. Some checked their pockets to see what was left.

  Many men passed through that door and quite a few continued on through on their way ho
me that night. But those men are unimportant. Only one man is important and it took a long time for him to emerge. The person watching had to be careful to identify that man correctly, given the shortage of time one has to make a decision, the paucity of light and the rare quality of illumination that was fickle, angular, and consisting of the tonalities made of kerosene lanterns and cigar smoke.

  Yet there was one thing that would make the identification secure. That thing, a particularity so specific that no mistake could be made. No fatal error. No apologies to make afterward.

  When Madson Crow came out the door after midnight he stopped to light a cigarette, flushing his face with light. He inhaled, leaned his head back and blew smoke to the careless sky. That was a big mistake for it made his neck just right for the noose to drop over. Which it did. Quickly. Which it did, and at the same time, a gun was pressed in his rib and a voice commanded him on the price of his life then and there, upon that very spot, to keep his dirty mouth shut.

  He was marched around back where his gun was stripped, his jacket ripped away, his hands and feet bound, his neck rope tethered to the throat of a wagon and the long, moonlit ride had begun.

  A ghost-like wagon exited the town driven by a specter in dark clothing. It drifted out onto the expanding flatness of the prairie, kicking up a cloud that in the moonlight looked like smoke billowing from a hidden fire. Clouds rose up on the horizon and encompassed the moon, smothering then releasing its light to limn the edges of darker clouds rising steadily over the edge of the world.

  It was a sky that was opening its mouth to bellow.

  It took a while to reach the rim of the canyon, a while to hear the waters running a couple hundred feet below, a coyote howling in the lonely distance. The captive had only the moonlight to inform him the location of earth and sky and to trace the edgeless silhouette of his shapeless company. All he could tell of the man holding him was blackness.

  The specter hauled Madson Crow by his rope to the edge of the cliff, shoving him along with the muzzle of a long barreled pistol. He turned him with his back to the abyss and stepped three paces away. He slackened the rope.

  “You may wonder where you are,” the specter said. “You may wonder how you were chosen to be here. You may wonder what will happen to you. But you will not know anything until it happens.”

  “If you run you will be shot dead and tossed into the canyon. If you charge me I need only yank the rope around your neck and you will snap in two like a dry filament of pasta. You have earned the right to be humiliated in this manner.”

  To Madson Crow it was as if the specter had arisen out of the mist of midnight, self-made and angry with a cosmic fire in its belly. In reality, there was no form to it, only a voice arising out of nothingness, as if driven by forces from another world. Therefore, he knew that speaking or negotiating would be useless, a waste of time when time was only crumbles in a pan.

  He spent his moment instead trying to know where the rage it possessed came from and as he listened the voice split into many voices, each he almost recognized, almost assigned to people he had known, they who came and went from his life leaving scars or swatches of sweet sugar, always some unfathomable insertion of disorder. The voices resonated in him, drawing an uprising of the covered-over sorrows and crimes that marked his trail upon this earth.

  “I accuse you of cruelty beyond the imagination,” said the specter. “I accuse you of the criminal use of power causing people to lose their well-earned properties. I accuse you of threatening them with death, of loss of members of their families, loss of everything they have worked hard to achieve in this difficult life.”

  “You would take from them that which you have the power to do but not the right. This is the deepest trespass, the un-erasable wound of mankind.”

  There was silence and the slow motion of clouds grasping deliberately at the moon.

  “This cannot be allowed.”

  A rock dislodged under Madson’s foot and careened down the canyon wall.

  “How do you plead?” said the dark accuser.

  Madson Crow didn’t even reach back for one last plea, for one last assertion of the validity of his life. He knew nothing was there.

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  “Ah,” said the accuser. “You make it so easy.”

  A click sounded as the hammer was pulled back. “I commend you to the mercy of the spirits, Madson Crow, in the name of The Father. . .” one shot to the forehead—Madson staggered. “. . . the Son. . .” one shot to the belly—he folded. “. . . and the Holy” . . . a shot to the right lung . . . “Ghost,” a shot to the left lung.

  Madson’s breath turned to air.

  *****

  All that is left to tell about this evening is the sound of a body falling to the bottom of the canyon.

  THIRTEEN

  Horse was beside himself.

  He paced, and stomped, and threw a book crashing through a closed window. The book fell to the street and opened its words to the air. He cleared his desk with one wide sweep of his arm. The letter opener cut his forearm but he didn’t feel it.

  He called for his men.

  “Where is Madson Crow?”

  Nobody knew.

  He walked up to Rafe Jacobs. “How is it a man can disappear right under our noses and no one has a fucking idea how it happened?”

  It was a rhetorical question that seemed to demand an answer. Not one was given.

  Jacobs didn’t move from where he stood. Nor did J. J. Creek, or Alligator Smith. The tension in the room was thick as fumes from a piss pot set on fire.

  Horse went back to his desk. Slumped in his chair. It was the morning after the last person had seen Madson Crow and Horse was in disarray, bleeding rather briskly from his forearm. He finally slowed down enough to notice. He showed a little flicker of surprise, rolled up his sleeve, examined the laceration, struck three matches and cauterized the site.

  “Think I’ll pay the sheriff a visit,” he said, rolled down his sleeve and put on his hat.

  *****

  There was, in fact, an office for the sheriff, though he never used it. His opinion was that if anything went wrong someone would come and find him. If not, no sense sitting around waiting for it to happen. Besides, it suited his lifestyle to not be available, to avoid some piddling little complaint that would resolve itself if left alone by the meddling, well-wishing folks of this happy town, and that included the sheriff.

  It happened that he was in his office that morning because it was the first of the month and Bonnie Jane, his sometimes secretary, othertimes wife and comforter to her husband, Cletus Swarthmore, the disabled tinker who could only work part time at his tinkering, requiring a little sideline work for his wife in order to make ends meet, would be there sifting through papers and recent mails, if, indeed, there were any.

  Got his arm caught in a pulley cable, Cletus did. Mangled it up pretty bad.

  And there was a letter, this one from the U.S. Marshall over at Abilene. It was a wanted poster sporting the face of none other than Madson Crow. Wanted for robbery of the Wells Fargo Stage at Buxton Crossings during which two people were murdered.

  Horse Diggins came busting in the door.

  “Well, looky here,” said Jake, “I can’t believe my eyes. Horse ass left his cage and come all the way to the end of town to pay his respects to the Sheriff of Clarkston County.”

  “No such,” Horse said.

  “I just cannot imagine what has sucked you out of that rat hole you stay in, surrounded by all those—what shall we call them—men.”

  Horse leaned over Jake’s desk. Jake did not remove his boots from the spot just next to where he was leaning.

  “I have a complaint,” Horse said.

  “Aww, Bonnie,” Jake said, “See, nothing good happens when we come to work.”

  “Madson Crow is missing.”

  “How do you know?”

  Horse leaned back in disgust. “Look sheriff, he was here and then he
wasn’t. That’s it. He’s fucking missing. And I have already suffered the loss of my faithful friend. . .”

  Jake held up his hand. “You can stop right there,” he said. “You lost that poor bastard, Hitch Carbide I believe it was, because you sent him on the Devil’s errand. The Devil’s errand and he got bit.”

  Jake took down his boots and leaned on his desk from the other side. “Literally.” Jake laughed in spite of himself. “Now here’s my take on that. You were up to your usual troublemaking and it backfired on you. Likely as not, this disappearance if it is one, is another example of your misdeeds coming back to bite your ass.” He leaned back in his chair. “Either that, or this Madson Crow creep just left town because you smell too bad.”

  “So you’re not going to do anything?”

  “He’s not missing until he’s missing. You’re just pissed because you brought six men into town altogether and now you’re down to three. Something keeps happening to your little pricks.”

  “What?”

  “Give it time, Horse. Give it time, for Crissake. He may turn up, dead or alive.”

  “What do you mean, dead or alive?”

  Jake put hand on a piece of paper on his desk, looked Horse in the eye, then turned over paper and repositioned it delicately facing Horse.

  “See this? People will be looking for him. He’s going to have to turn up.” He walked over and thumbtacked the poster to the wall. “Seems you surround yourself with some mighty seedy characters, Horse Diggins. If I didn’t know better, why, I’d be thinking you mean trouble for this town.”