Fire on the Mountain
Page 15
Grandfather smiled and drew on the cigar. “I hope his name is Vogelin. Or Starr.”
“Why don’t you give in, old horse? Give in gracefully, like a gentleman, and let the generals make fools of themselves here for a while. Let them have their turn.”
“Let them. I’m willing. But I ain’t going to give in like a gentleman. If I have to give in I’m going to give in like an Apache. That’s part of the pattern, Lee. That’s the tradition around here.”
Lee stared hard at Grandfather before breaking into a smile. “You stone-headed old idiot. You are crazy. You must be crazy. Hand me that jug.”
“Billy, will you get us some more ice?” Grandfather asked.
“Yes sir.” I got up from the floor. The wall yawed toward me. I placed a hand on it to hold it up. “Ice,” I said.
“Now,” Lee said, after a deep sigh, “let’s begin all over again. Let’s see if we can’t study this thing from some other angle. …”
“Keep trying,” I heard the old man say, as I staggered into the darkness of the kitchen, feeling my way toward the lamp on the table. But the first thing I felt on the table was not the lamp but the rifle and beside it the box of ammunition. I sagged against the table, leaning on it with both hands, and waited for my head to stop swimming.
Through the fog which enclosed me I heard, out in the night, the great horned owl crying for hunger. And in the brush and sand along the wash all the little animals, the rabbits and bannertail mice and ground squirrels, would be listening, frozen in terror.
9
I slept badly that night. Halfway through the night the nausea in my belly became unendurable. I crawled feebly from my bunk, wobbled to the doorway and vomited about a quart of rum, Coke, and half-digested supper onto the ground.
I felt so weak and foul and hopeless that I sank to my hands and knees, fingering my throat and trying to heave up my horrible stomach. Finally, emptied and exhausted, I crept back to bed and fell into uneasy sleep, with dreams of trouble and fear, barking guns and barbed wire, a ripped-open horse and a barren well, clashing through my mind.
The glare of day had returned and my bunkhouse room was full of a stifling heat when I woke up. My head throbbed like a drum, my mouth tasted of filth. I lay on my back for a long time staring at the cobwebs on the ceiling and the circling flies. When the heat became at last too much to take, I sat up and pulled on my jeans, shirt and boots, put on my hat and stumbled outside into the dazzle of daylight. Bearing toward the ranch-house, I tramped dizzily over the stones and weeds, aware of a dark thirst. The sun was high in the east, near eight o’clock, flaming dully through layer upon layer of dust and heat. Lee’s car was gone.
Approaching the house I saw Grandfather coming out of the cowpen with the milk pail in hand. He’d let me sleep through my morning chore and faintly ashamed, I mumbled my good morning without looking him in the face.
We entered the house and the kitchen, where the old man put the milk in the refrigerator. I found a cold breakfast of slab bacon and scrambled eggs waiting for me. I didn’t want to eat but it seemed necessary: we might be in for a busy day. I forced the greasy stuff into my mouth, chewed without pleasure and swallowed it down, somehow. Coffee seemed to help. I poured a second cupful.
“Billy, you’re going home tonight.”
“What?” His words came to me through a haze of dizziness and fatigue. “Going home?”
“Tonight.” Grandfather held an open letter in his hand. “This is from your mother. Lee brought it last night. She says if I don’t send you home within a week she’s flying out here to get you. She’s mad at me. Lee’ll take you down to El Paso again this evening. And this time we’re putting you on an airplane. Let’s see you try and stop an airplane.”
I could do that, too, I thought, if I wanted to. Aloud I said, “But you said I could stay another week, Grandfather.”
“That was the day before yesterday. Anyhow, we got these orders from your mother.”
I’d been expecting such an ultimatum to arrive. Besides, I was too sick and tired to protest anymore. With dull nerves and a heavy heart I finished my breakfast and washed the dishes.
As for the old man, he walked once more all through the house, inspecting the fortifications, preparing food and water supplies, checking the guns, counting the ammunition. He seemed to me more resolute, less agitated, than ever before. He came back to the kitchen and stood and watched me, polishing his glasses.
“You’d make a good partner, Billy. I’m sorry you have to go.”
I said nothing. I felt too resigned and at the same time too bitter to make an argument.
As we stood there in the gloom of the kitchen we heard the rumble of engines, not one but several and approaching rapidly. We went to the front door and looked out. Over the rim of the bluff behind the ranch rose billows of dust,
“Here they come at last,” Grandfather said, though as yet we could see nothing but the dust cloud. The first thing he did was put his glasses on. The second thing he did was pick up the shotgun.
“Maybe it’s Lee,” I said, but the old man shook his head.
The lead government car approached around the turn, came down the winding road and toward the house past the outbuildings and under the trees. The first car was followed by two others, gray government sedans loaded with armed men.
The first car stopped out in the yard, half in the shade. While the driver stayed at the wheel the man beside him got out. It was Burr, the U.S. Marshal. He wore a suit, like DeSalius, like a businessman, and was not armed. But we could see the glint of rifles in the other two cars and the sheen of leather straps and badges. Two men in the first car, counting the marshal, and three in each of the others.
The marshal walked toward us. He was not smiling at all this time.
“Billy,” Grandfather whispered to me, “you sneak out to the pickup and get the revolver.”
“Yes sir.”
I sidled off to the end of the porch while Grandfather, holding his shotgun, waited for the marshal to speak. There was no way for me to get to the pickup truck unobserved; the men in the cars were watching me. So I simply walked as casually as I could toward the truck, hoping no one would pay me any attention. As I went I heard the opening parley between the old man and the marshal.
“Good morning, Mr. Vogelin.”
“Stop right there. Stop. Don’t come any closer.”
“I said good morning, Mr. Vogelin.”
“I heard you, Marshal. Now you stop right where you are and don’t come one step closer.”
“Okay, I’m stopped.”
“Stay there.”
I looked back. The marshal stood some thirty feet away from the porch steps, full in the harsh glare of the sun and facing the double-barreled shotgun aimed at him from the shadow on the porch.
“Now Mr. Vogelin, I guess you know why I’m here.”
“It won’t do you any good, Marshal.”
“I’m here to help you move, Mr. Vogelin. I’m here to carry out the orders of the Court. Are you ready to leave?”
“I’m not leaving.”
“All right, Mr. Vogelin. But I thought I’d give you one last chance to leave peacefully. I’ll use force if I have to.”
“You’ll have to. I’m ready. I’m ready, Marshal. Tell your men to start shooting.”
“We don’t want anything like that. For godsake listen to reason.”
“I’ve got all the reason I need, Marshal.”
I reached the truck, opened the door and half entered, leaning toward the dashboard compartment. But when I opened it I found the revolver gone. I knew I hadn’t taken it. Maybe Grandfather—
“Watcha doing, sonny?” One of the marshal’s deputies stood behind me, hand on the butt of his pistol. His belt was studded with brass shells.
I decided to make a dash for the house. But before I could get clear of the truck the man grabbed me, twisted my arm behind my back and forced me away from the truck toward the three cars.
“You’re hurting my arm,” I howled.
“I’m sorry.” The man eased up a bit on the pressure. As he did so I made another attempt to break free. He tightened his grip again. “Say, don’t try that, kid. Take it easy or I’ll have to put the cuffs on you.”
He pushed me into the back seat of the second car and got in beside me, breathing hard and stinking of sweat. His harness creaked. He looked like a draft horse. The two men in front, also armed and in uniform, ignored us. They were watching and listening to the scene by the verandah, where my grandfather and the marshal were still talking. We had no trouble at all in hearing everything that was said.
“No,” the old man was saying, “if you want to get me out of here you’ll have to dig me out.”
“We’ll do that, Mr. Vogelin, if we have to. If you want it that way that’s what we’ll do. But I ask you, for the last time, don’t give us any trouble. Somebody might get bad hurt. Maybe you. Maybe one of us. Maybe me. Somebody might even get killed, Mr. Vogelin. I ask you to think about that. Is it worth it?”
Grandfather answered from the shadows of the porch. In the deep shade we could see little of him, only the dull shine of the shotgun and the twinkle of his glasses.
“You take yourself and your pistol whackers off my property and nobody’ll get hurt.”
“Can’t do that, Mr. Vogelin. These here orders—”
“I don’t care what your orders are. I’ll kill the first man who sets a foot on this porch or touches a hand to my house.”
“Now wait a minute, Mr. Vogelin. Let’s talk about this some more.”
“There’s nothing to talk about. Nothing at all. Either you and your men go away or we shoot it out, that’s all. I’m an old man now, I’d as soon die today as any other. It’s a nice day. Watch out there, don’t try to creep any closer!”
The marshal made a futile gesture with his hands, staring at the specter on the porch. He pushed back his hat and scratched his head. He looked around at me and the seven deputies sitting in the cars. He looked over at the barn and up at the windmill, which was still. He looked up, briefly, at the sun. Ten o’clock. He pulled a watch from his suit and looked at it.
“Well, Mr. Vogelin. …” A short plump official with a baggy seat to his trousers, the marshal looked harmless as a mailman. “Well, Mr. Vogelin, I don’t know what else I can say. My orders are to get you out of here.”
Grandfather made no reply. He waited.
The men in the car with me stared intently toward the house. I reached cautiously for the door handle at my side, found it, pushed down. The latch clicked open. I pushed the door open and rolled out while the deputy reached after me with clawing fingers.
“Grandfather!” I screamed. “Wait for me!”
The deputy caught me by my belt and yanked me back into the car. I fought with him, kicking and punching, until he again grabbed my wrist and bent my arm behind my back.
He held a pair of handcuffs before my eyes. “See these, boy? You see these things? If you don’t sit still like a good boy I’m going to put these on you and you won’t like that one little bit, no sir.”
I relaxed and tried hard not to cry. What hurt me most was not the twisted arm but the realization, the gradual realization that Grandfather had tricked me into leaving the house, that he had sent me after the revolver knowing it was not in the truck and also knowing that I would be captured. I felt betrayed. My nose was running and my eyes threatening to leak. I sniffed.
“Don’t cry, sonny,” the deputy said, relaxing his grip on my wrist. “You’re all right.”
“You shut up!” I bawled. “Get your dirty paw off me.”
“You’re a wild one, ain’t you?”
“Here comes Burr,” one of the deputies in the front seat said. “Looks like we’ll have some fun.”
I sat still and looked with the others. The marshal was walking slowly toward us, head bowed and hands in his pockets. The door of the ranch-house slammed shut behind him.
He stopped close to the cars. “Everybody out. Bring your grenades. Stick them on your rifles. Spread out. Take cover. Take the boy out of the firing line.”
He stood quietly, not watching, as the men scrambled out of the cars and followed his orders. The man who had captured me pulled me out of the car and led me toward the bunkhouse. Holding my arm in his and gripping my wrist with his huge hand, we stood against the shaded wall and watched the others.
The marshal’s men, crouching behind the trees and the outbuildings, were attaching the tear gas grenades to their rifles. I looked toward the house. The verandah was empty now, the door bolted, the last window closed and shuttered; the place looked solid as a fort. I knew that Grandfather was watching through the little gunport he had drilled through the wall halfway between the kitchen window and the front door—watching everything across the sights of his gun.
The marshal, standing in an exposed position near his automobile, studied the situation. With all the doors of the house barred and all the windows shuttered, locked from the inside, his primary problem was how to get the tear gas inside the building.
I watched him speaking to his assistant, saw the assistant speak to one of the deputies, saw the deputy, with several tear gas grenades in his hands, start off in a wide circle around the house toward the bluff in the rear.
But that wouldn’t do them any good. In the first place Grandfather would see through the maneuver. In the second place they’d still have to get a man close in to the house to pry open a shutter or climb to the roof. That meant risking somebody’s life.
But then I realized that the old man, alone inside, could not possibly cover all the ground surrounding the house. He could not be in two places at the same time. All that the marshal had to do to insure success was send his men up to the house from opposite sides. Even then, however, Grandfather would be able to kill some of them. The marshal was understandably reluctant to risk anyone’s life in this operation and he kept us all waiting for a long time, perhaps twenty minutes or more, before he did anything at all other than send the one deputy to the high ground in the rear of the house.
At last he was ready. The marshal stepped out into the scalding sunlight and took a few slow paces toward the house.
“All right, Vogelin,” he said loudly, “we’re not waiting any more. You ready to come out?”
We all stared toward the house. There was no reply. The marshal turned to one of the deputies near the parked cars. “Give me the ax.”
The deputy found an ax in one of the cars and carried it out to the marshal, then returned to his place behind the trunk of a cottonwood.
Holding the ax in his hands, the marshal faced the house. “You see this here ax, Mr. Vogelin? Now I’m coming up there and I’m gonna chop down your front door.” He paused. “You hear me, Mr. Vogelin?”
We waited for the answer. There was no answer.
I thought of the old man crouching inside the darkened house, moving from peephole to peephole, front and rear, trying to see everything that was happening. His fort was also a trap. He needed help. He needed me. He needed Lee Mackie.
The marshal took a step toward the house, brandishing the ax. “Here I come Mr. Vogelin,” he shouted, loud and clear. “Can you see me? I’m coming to chop down your front door and help you out of there.” As he shouted, the marshal took two more deliberate steps toward the house.
Now the man in the rear of the house advanced a little, moving from rock to rock, keeping low and under cover. If he was able to reach the house he might climb to the roof and simply drop the tear gas bombs down the chimneys.
“Grandfather,” I yelled, “watch out for the man in”
The deputy’s fat hand clapped across my mouth. He screwed my arm behind my back. “You shut up, boy,” he said firmly.
“Here I come, Mr. Vogelin,” the marshal shouted, taking another ste
p toward the house. “Here I come, look at me.”
Something whistled through the air above the marshal’s head as we heard the crack of a rifle from the inside of the house.
With amazing alacrity the marshal jumped back and ran for the shelter of the nearest car. At the same time the man in the rear of the house ran forward, reaching the comparative safety of the walls, and began edging his way around a corner toward the nearest of the porch pillars. Climbing that he could attain the roof. But again he might expose himself. So hugging the wall, the deputy waited for the marshal to do something, to give him another chance.
Mr. Burr was slow to act. He was in no hurry to draw the old man’s fire again. But something had to be done. The sun was creeping higher, the day was becoming impossibly hot and cruel and exasperating.
We waited, we waited, while the marshal, squatting behind his automobile, consulted with his assistant and one of the deputies. Another five, ten, fifteen minutes passed in this way, with nothing of any apparent importance happening. I knew the time involved because I could read the watch on the hairy wrist of the deputy whose hand was hovering near my mouth.
Where, I wondered, where in God’s name was Lee? Now when we needed him more than ever before, he was not here.
At last the marshal prepared to act again. Remaining in the shelter of the car, I heard him call to his men:
“Smoke him out, boys.”
Almost simultaneously five rifles went off and five heavy grenades lobbed through the air and crashed against the front of the house, around the doors and windows of the porch. They exploded on contact, releasing billows of yellow gas that gathered under the porch roof, lazily oozing over the edges. Some of the tear gas no doubt seeped into the house through the cracks in the barricaded openings.
I’d almost forgotten the man in the rear. When I looked for him I found him already on the roof of the house crawling toward the nearest of the two chimneys, the one for the living room fireplace. I imagined the bombs bursting in the fireplace and in the kitchen stove, filling the house with their intolerable fumes.