Showdown at Possum Trot

by David Watts

  “Galen,” Jake said.

  “What?”

  “We got company.”

  Up on the hill moving along the road leading into the farm were seven men on horseback, riding hard. As they approached the farm two men split off and followed the trail that the women had taken.

  “They must have seen the dust and sent two of them to investigate.”

  “I’m going after them,” Galen said.

  Jake grabbed hold of his arm. “Too late,” he said. “Look.”

  The remaining five horsemen had come around and were blocking the road out of the farm.

  “Go now and you’ll be dead meat in three seconds,” Jake said. “No way you can beat five. You gonna have to let that situation take care of itself.”

  Two men in front of the farmhouse facing south.

  Five men on horseback lined up outside the rock fence facing north.

  “We’ve come for the farm,” J. J. said.

  “Not today,” said Jake.

  “It’s your funeral,” said the man and the five riders split and started to make a circle around the house.

  Galen and Jake ducked into the house as a shower of bullets tore up planks on the front porch and broke windows along the front. They dived into the front door and took shelter behind a potbelly stove. It was quiet for a moment.

  “Can’t stay here,” Galen said, “they’ll torch the house.”

  Outside the riders had circled waiting for a signal. J. J. raised his hand then dropped it suddenly. A rain of bullets shattered walls and posts of the house, spreading fragments of glass and wood flying.

  “I’ll take that window over there,” Jake said, pointing to the right side of the house, “you take that one on the other side. If anybody rides by. . .”

  The gunfire stopped. Jake and Galen watched their windows. “Don’t forget the back of the house,” said Galen and he turned in time to see a shower of bullets coming from the back. He rolled behind a sofa, rose in time to land two shots into the chest of the man rushing toward them.

  Jake fired and knocked a man off his horse as he circled to the side.

  “Three left. Where are they?” said Jake.

  “One behind the rock fence out front, one somewhere near the smokehouse. Don’t know where the other one is.”

  “Can we make it to the barn?” said Jake.

  “We’ll need a distraction.”

  Jake started laughing.

  “What are you laughing about?”

  “Brilliant!” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Jake started into the kitchen and behind it to the pantry. Galen followed. “I was helping Lily dig a storm cellar up the hill a ways.”

  “So?”

  “So take a look at this.” Jake opened the pantry and lifted the lid of a wooden box on the floor. “I told her not to keep this stuff in the house but she’s got a rock for a brain.” Inside the box were three sticks of dynamite. “We’re going to have a little party.”

  “Got a light?” said Galen.

  “Never more ready.”

  “You take the smoke house. I’ll take this side wherever that guy is. Be ready to run the second these babies go off.”

  They lit the fuses, jumped quickly into the arch of the back door and tossed the dynamite in the direction of the men hiding. Two huge explosions followed, one very close to the smoke house, one not so close to the ruin on the hill. They opened the door again and charged out in the direction of the barn. As they did so, Jake turned and lobbed the last stick at the man up the hill. It bounced off the edge of one of the half-destroyed walls and fell into in the ruins. The man got off one shot that dropped Jake to the ground. Then the explosion came.

  The explosion came quickly and leveled the ruins. The man hiding there got launched in the air like he was shot from a cannon and landed in a crump near the top of the hill.

  Galen stepped into the opening of the barn door and started firing on the man by the smokehouse. “Get your ass over here,” he yelled to Jake, “or I’ll come and drag you here.” The remaining shooter had recovered from the blast and was beginning to rise to his position but he had to contend with Galen which gave Jake a little time to inch closer to the barn.

  “Jake,” yelled Galen.

  “I’m okay.”

  “Hurry up,” he shouted.

  Jake half crawled, half slithered toward the barn. Galen ran out of ammunition.

  “Toss me your gun,” he said.

  Jake threw it like tossing horseshoes and Galen immediately resumed firing. Jake made it into the barn. They situated themselves in an empty horse stall and reloaded.

  Things got quiet for a moment.

  Galen tied off Jake’s wound in his leg. “Nothing broken,” he said. “Missed all the important stuff.”

  “Bad shot,” Jake said.

  Guns reloaded, extra shells stuffed into pockets.

  “Where do you reckon Horse Diggins is while all this chaos he created is going on?” said Galen.

  “He’s not around here.”

  “That’s cause he’s a chicken-shit.”

  “Yeah. And if he knew the status of his troops right now he’d be half way to Mexico.”

  “Two left,” Galen said, “one in the smokehouse and the other somewhere out front.”

  “He’s moved by now, I reckon.”

  “Right.”

  Jake leaned back against the stall wall. “Now that things have improved a bit you should check on the girls,” he said.

  “What about you?”

  “Oh, I’m having a lot of fun here. I’ll be all right.”

  A new rain of bullets came from another angle. “Now we know where the other guy is,” said Galen. He crawled to the edge of the stall, looked out the front door, “right there at the corner of the house behind that barrel.”

  “All the better,” said Jake.

  “Why?”

  “Because now you can get out of here.”

  “How do you propose I do that?”

  Jake just smiled and nodded. “Oldest trick in the book,” he said.

  TWENTY

  Beyond the hill the wagon carrying Crissy, Lily and Sanchez made its deliberate way toward San Antonio. Sanchez was holding the reins, the girls sitting with their backs to the side guards doing their best to tolerate the bumpy ride.

  The wagon had been built by a blacksmith in a neighboring town. The running gear was topped by a bolster that carried the wagon bed, made of pine. The bed had walls twenty inches high that the girls were leaning against. After about half a mile, Crissy figured out that her duffle would do as a shock-absorbing seat and she put it underneath her. Lily followed suit.

  Lily turned her head to see if she could get a glimpse of her farm, now more than a mile behind her and saw two men on horseback riding full speed her direction. She looked to see if it might be Galen and Jake but quickly realized it wasn’t.

  “Sanchez,” she said, “hurry. We’re being followed.”

  He broke the horses into a full gallop but the weight of the wagon made it evident that they would be overtaken. A warning shot over their heads confirmed that the men were not intending a friendly hello.

  Sanchez looked behind. “Take over,” he said to Lily. “But stay lying down in the bed.”

  The girls moved their duffels around and Lily took over the reins, only occasionally able to see where they were going from her lying position in the wagon bed, catching glimpses over the wagon front.

  Sanchez grabbed the 30-30 and positioned himself kneeling at the back of the wagon. A shot from the men in pursuit splintered the backboard just below him. He began firing.

  The two men split wide apart to make his difficulty greater and he found himself alternating his shots, firing at first one and then the other. Meanwhile the wagon was running essentially free, careening dangerously side to side.

  Crissy briefly considered jumping out but there was nowhere to hide even if she did survive the fall. She
looked around, hoping someone would be around to help them. No one was.

  The chase continued. The distances narrowed.

  Sanchez scored a hit on one of the men who fell off his horse and disappeared in the dust.

  The other man quickened his pace, leveled his gun and shot Sanchez in the chest. Sanchez fell to the ground.

  Now there was only a runaway wagon, two girls helplessly carried recklessly along, precarious and out of control.

  The pursuer came alongside, leveled his gun and shot the horse closest to him.

  The horse collapsed, twisting the wagon and its contents to one side. It tilted on two wheels, then rolled sideways and came to rest on its side, wheels spinning.

  Dust darkened the air.

  Crissy found herself under the wagon’s running gear, leaning against the underside, one wheel still turning. She looked for Lily. She was nowhere to be seen. Crissy struggled to elevate herself high enough to peer over the wagon and she found Lily on the other side, lying on the ground, not moving.

  Pushing through the dust cloud like a mirage forming itself was the horseman. He stopped in front of Crissy and dismounted.

  “Spunky little bitch aren’t you?” he said.

  Crissy said nothing. She suddenly realized that her ankle was badly sprained or broken. She had nowhere to go and no way to get there.

  The man stood three paces from her, feet apart, hands on hips. He looked at her for a long time. His face was a geography of sweat and mud.

  He pulled his gun.

  “Real shame to have to do you in,” he said.

  *****

  “Ready?” said Jake.

  “Hell yes.”

  Jake moved to the back of the group of horses he’d assembled in the middle of the barn. He looked to see that Galen was positioned. “Here we go,” he said.

  He yelled “Haw!” at the top of his lungs and slapped the rump of the trailing horse. The group of horses moved as one, bolting out of the barn, running across the open space between barn and house, out to the wide areas in front of the property. One horse had a saddle but no rider. No rider, at least, apparent to the two men crouched behind a barrel and behind the smokehouse, not visible because Galen was suspended alongside the horse, one hand on the saddle horn, one foot in the stirrup, body stretched out horizontal using the horse as a shield. Once he reached the open spaces he pulled up into the saddle and rode off in the direction of the wagon and its passengers.

  Jake smiled. Not a shot had been fired.

  He limped back to his spot in the stall, careful to watch all the places someone might come into the barn, and waited.

  He counted rounds. One in the chamber, two in the cylinder. He snapped the carriage back and waited.

  Some dust dropped on his shoulder.

  He looked up. Nothing. His eyes darted here and there at the undersurface of the loft above him. More dust, this time he saw it drifting through a crack in the floor of the loft. A little creaking sound. Boards bending here and there under the weight.

  He slid his body directly under the spot where the last bend in the planks had occurred and imagined the position of the man above him. He traced his motions with his gun.

  Suddenly two boards, side by side, bowed slightly downward. That meant his feet were side by side, standing in one place. Gotcha, he thought, and fired a shot up between the two boards. The man cried out. He fired once more and the man fell with a thud on the floor above, dust falling from several cracks between boards.

  One round left. Had to save it.

  But the man was moving, crawling.

  An open trap door lay off to the right. Jake moved himself directly under so as to see activity above him more clearly. Distracted by new shots coming in from the front of the barn landing closer to him, he looked away briefly. By the time he looked back there was the body of a man falling directly toward him.

  He covered his face.

  The body landed on top of him.

  “Aww, shit,” he said. “Did you have to do that?”

  The man was totally dead so there could be no answer. Jake took a moment to catch his breath.

  Heard someone nearby.

  “Looks like it’s just you and me,” someone said.

  It was J. J., standing ten feet away, gun drawn, smiling at the predicament Jake was in.

  “You’re in a tight spot.” He laughed. “How did you manage to do that?”

  “Just my good planning,” said Jake.

  “Well, I got to say, you make my job easy.”

  J. J. lifted his gun to aim at Jake’s head, where it stuck out from under the body of the dead man. “You know how it is, J. J. said, “one of us has to go.”

  He pulled back the hammer.

  A shot was fired.

  J. J. looked puzzled. Disturbed.

  He turned his head down to his belly where he was starting to bleed, then back at the corpse which had a new hole in it. Jake had shot J. J. through the body of the dead man.

  J. J. fell to the ground but was not done. Jake was out of ammo. He saw the dead man’s gun lying in some hay eight feet away and struggled to release himself and move toward it.

  J. J. raised his gun. “I can still take you with me,” he said and prepared to shoot.

  Jake realized he was unable to reach to gun in time and thus knew the hopelessness of his situation, even so, he still struggled to get at the weapon.

  Four shots rang through the air.

  Jake felt around on his body. He looked down trying to find where he was hit. Rubbed his fingers together expecting blood.

  He looked up to see J. J. motionless on the ground, his blood seeping out from everywhere in his body.

  Behind J. J. the silhouette of a tall man stood in the doorway of the barn, wide brimmed hat, dressed in black.

  “Behold the coming of the Lord,” said the man.

  Jake nodded. “Glad to see you, parson.”

  *****

  The next three minutes happened in hyper-slow motion.

  First the gunman was standing in front of her, gun raised, thumb on the hammer, ever-so-slowly pulling it back, then the click into cocked position sounding like a hollow tree struck by a stone, then it seemed to Crissy that twenty minutes had passed.

  The gun muzzle lifted a little as if in preparation, then dropped to point directly at her forehead. She was frozen. The bullet would be on its way.

  Strange to be waiting for a bullet, nowhere to be, nowhere to go, no time for regret, or sorrow, just the seconds waiting, moving slowly, grinding against the friction of time.

  How would it feel at impact? Could she see it in flight? Would there be anything afterward she would experience, would remember? Would there be space left for memory?

  But in the next instant the man moved sharply backwards, flying through the air slowly as if he suddenly jumped out of the way of a striking sidewinder. Only the man, in mid air, began to split in two as if opening like a hinge in his mid section. Simultaneous with this, and almost so incidental as to be disassociated completely from the action in front of her, were two very loud explosions, Ka-Blam, so close together that only a fraction of a second separated them. The man, still in mid-air, now broke into several pieces and dropped to the ground, steaming and smoking.

  Crissy shook herself. Her ears were ringing. She checked her body, ran her hands over her chest, her legs, her head. She looked again where the man had been standing. There was the man, or what was left of him, in pieces on the ground, smoke rising from the bloody corpus.

  She turned around. She saw nothing. She looked the other direction. Nothing.

  She pulled herself up over the edge of the wagon.

  There was Lily, lying flat on her back on the ground, the 10-gage shotgun standing erect from her side, wobbling and smoking.

  Lily raised her head to look at Crissy. “Did I get him?” she said.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Horse couldn’t be found. He must have sensed things were going badly and
packed up and left town. Jigsaw Higgins saw him leave. He reported to everyone that Mr. Diggins did not look at all like he intended to come back.

  That left the Angel Dust in a quandary. But not for long. Jake figured out a way of declaring Horse Diggins in default and deeding the property over to Martha and Rosalie who started renovations right away.

  Thereafter, the Rusty Bucket and the Angel Dust got along famously, each with their specific styles and offerings to their distinctive clientele, one more family friendly, the other more kick up your heels.

  Faith found a boyfriend over in Ft. Worth and managed to steal a visit now and then.

  Lily settled back into her home. The neighbors came around to repair windows and replace the shattered wood. Turns out, there was a bounty on two of the men who worked for Horse which provided a little cash for damage repairs and for the parson’s charity drive.

  Sanchez got a proper funeral with a very long prayer from the parson. His relatives came up from Laredo to attend and a couple of them stayed behind to help out on the farm.

  Ruth Ann set back to watching the street from her perch by her front window, George took down the for sale sign.

  Lily hung the 10 gage over her mantle.

  POSTSCRIPT

  he looked around

  at the old familiar terrain

  the longer he stayed

  the more Colorado

  was disappearing

  from his life

  would it still be there

  if he stayed

  one more autumn

  The moment had come in late August when the earth shifts. Jake could feel it under his feet. And the sunlight suddenly arrived from a different place, dropping angular shafts of smoky light through the branches. The air turned sweeter somehow, and though very still, it had the feeling of movement, as if foreshadowing the harsh winds of winter already pushing against the forests of Northern Canada, bringing just the faintest scent of northern ice.

  And his heart swelled and remembered what it wanted, sitting on his front porch thinking about Colorado. Maybe there’s a woman there who will know my name. Maybe she will come to meet me in the high mountains.