Orvis cast a sour look at Cooley, then checked behind him. “Where’s O’Malley?”
“Lord! Ain’t human what she done to that man! And lookit!” Cooley held his nose.
Julian grabbed it. “Get on with it!”
Cooley blubbered. “Ow!”
Jude awoke, snuffling, and Julian picked him up. “Shhhhh! Be my little man. No one dare harm a pinkie…” Scowling at the two, he kissed Jude’s fingers and jerked his head.
****
In Julian’s office, Julian gazed hungrily at the velvet case and hypodermic. He tapped his fingers. “I’m waiting.”
Orvis jabbed Cooley. “Quit caterwaulin’. I’ll tell!” To Julian. “Yes, sir. Cooley’s right there. It were nine, ten shooters. At least.”
Cooley nodded.
“The best, and been around. Looked like someone dropped ’im down a mine shaft,” Orvis elaborated.
Cooley said, “Six jumped me. I shot—I shot three of ’em. She run off. The rest—”
“Hold on! She? She!You keep sayin’ she.”
“What I’m—we—been sayin’, Mister Delacorte,” Orvis said, “is she looked like that dead woman. That Sary woman from the mine what got shot up and hung? I mean, she’s dead, ain’t she? Come again, s’posed she mighta been one a your new gals.” He glanced over at the skull with the black hair still attached, nudging Cooley.
Julian wheezed, “Swinford. And she’s hired unknowns? Well, let her come,” he barked. Then strangeness passed over his raddled face. Orvis looked at Cooley as Julian’s eyes brightened with a faraway look. Sary. Sary had come back, and he’d not heard a scrap from Ratchet.
The men shuffled. “Just thought to tell, case you wanted…” Orvis faded off. Julian stared at unseen demons and knotted his hands, changing once again. “At her old camp. She’d like me to ride up there. Oh, yes!” He nodded vigorous to Cooley and Orvis. “Just walk right in.” He fingered the skull. “Eater of the dead. Revenge is her executioner,” Julian gritted. “We’ll be ready. She won’t take my boy.”
Orvis ventured uneasily, “How—how you want to end this then, Mister Delacorte?”
Julian strode out. “Sieved and leaking.”
Orvis and Cooley hastened after. “Mister Delacorte. Might not be that many. Just seemed like a passel of ’em, what with…with all the guns, and all.” Orvis nudged Cooley. “Didn’t it, Cooley?”
“Don’t matter,” Julian shouted. “You done good. Good men!” He clapped their backs, bellowing, “Handi!” And Pearl came running. Julian bawled, “Where’s Handi!”
Pearl flinched. “Poorly, Julian.”
He thrust Jude at her, muttering, “Useless cow!” and rummaged a revolver from a drawer. “He don’t go two toes from you!” Tossing the weapon at her, he pointed a long arthritic finger. “Anything happens to that sweet boy, use it on yourself. Cooley! You!” He thrust Cooley to the window and strode to the hall with borrowed vigor. “Orvis!”
Orvis ran after him.
Cooley hooked a chair, smirking at Pearl.
****
Ratchet’s suit was shrunk, scratchy, and odiferous from his dip in the San Francisco Bay, and it was still slightly damp, adding to his irritability as he prodded what was left of O’Malley and swatted flies. Touching knife to nose, he scowled.
“I’ll keep the wound green, Delacorte.” Ratchet lashed his horse up the trail.
****
In the saloon, Julian thumped the piano. “Play!” he bellowed.
The piano player pounded out a jolly syncopated tune. Julian slapped a poker table. “Sing! Want ta hear cacophony!” He pointed and jabbed at cynical gamblers, hardscrabble ranchers, weathered panners, trappers, and the down and out, alike. “You and you! Out! Come round and back in—keep doing that. Show some life. Fucking icehouse morgue in here! Where’s the poxied girls?”
More soiled doves, hooking and buttoning, rushed down, followed by sickly Handi.
Chapter 40
The sputtering Mercedes coasted, juiceless and silent, onto a bluff overlooking Big Bear as the last of Sary’s fuel jolted out.
She left the vehicle back at the tree line and went to crouch at the edge. Dropping, Sary scanned the main street lined with saloons, mercantiles, ironmongers, and a new bank. The buildings dwindled into houses, a blacksmith, and lastly, the stable at the far end, with the water tower facing her at the near end.
Gay piano music tinkled up, hanging in the air like fairy music. The bouncy ragtime and the lit-up cluster of so-called civilization seemed cozy and welcoming, but Sary knew all too well the mockery of that scene. She promised herself, “I won’t let my boy turn into a keeper for a polluted old man in a rotting town—a cheat, drunk, card shark, consorting with whores, or worse. Never to know anything but Big Bear!” Where are you, Jude? How are you? Are you alive?
She panned with her binoculars.
Men, casually holding rifles or resting twitchy hands on gun belts, melting from doorways or in and out of porches, around buildings, most especially Delacorte’s, snapped into focus. She spotted Orvis among them. Even from her high vantage point he appeared antsy, as if something brewed. Sary eyed him as he shrank into the host of milling men and disappeared. Whatever the storm, he wanted no part of it. Maybe one less to worry over.
“A church social down there, Tommy.” She resented the way they joked and slapped, their guffaws raking the night. Not many were privy to the jokes, but it made for a change, she surmised.
“There are so many…”
Her resolve weakened like cloth too many times darned and fretted over. Then, arrested by a motion, Sary swung the glasses.
A sign flapped loose—Handi’s. She’d never let a thing like that go. Sary briefly considered what, or even if, that meant anything.
Panned to the left. One of Delacorte’s or Handi’s soiled doves was silhouetted in a window above the saloon—probably a bedroom. Sary swung the binoculars over the uneven roof and back again, her mouth open. Removing the eyepieces, Sary squinted at a huge unfinished Victorian house crouching like a monstrous cat over a mouse. It was a buffoon of a house, even unfinished as it was, a crazy quilt of half-floors, with staircases climbing, it seemed, for no destination in particular but wide-open sky. A half-finished turret lent the structure a lopsided look, like a hat perched on the side of a clown head, and odd ells, portcullises, and bays bulging like tumors seemed afterthoughts, as if someone sketched plans daily to a cobbled blueprint. She dipped the eyepieces to a dark maw of cellar dimly guessed at below. A chill crept up her back. Never mind that! Sary laid the binoculars aside, chewing her lip. Tommy once again intruded.
“Sary. There’s always a curtain between me and the audience. This is real. Isn’t it?”
“Act like you’re not afraid, Tommy. Act like you’ve never acted before,” she answered. Suddenly she sucked in a breath and drew back—a shadowy man crawled around the water tower, staring stonily right at her, or so it seemed.
She edged to the Mercedes, feeling eyes on her back, unloaded rifles, and crept to the bluff in relays, careful not to let them clink. The man was gone. No, still there, on the other side of a rickety catwalk, looking the other way. Sinking in scrub, Sary turned to figures moving across lit windows below as she loaded rifles, placing them at intervals along the bluff edge and sweating her next move.
****
In Jules’s old bedroom, Cooley winked at Pearl, suggestively waggling his gun.
Pearl cuddled Jude, ignoring the man at first.
Julian watched the street. Damnable party out there! He burst out, gasping, onto the porch with the patched posts, swatting doves, shoving men to four corners, bawling, “Keep watch! Line up! Don’t piss around like gawping halfwits!”
“But Delacorte, what the Sam Hill we lookin’ for?” a panner groused. He was obviously bemoaning his one night in town, when he couldn’t get even a sniff of a poxied gal, leave alone a hard drink.
“Her! Hell’s bells! You blind, deaf and dumb? Her!
” Julian registered the shrugs and side glances, concern evaporating the moment he turned, wild-eyed, to other anxieties. Most joined in the mugging chorus, but an unknown predator grown huge in small imaginations still worried a few. Julian seeming to suppose the danger so self-evident checked them. Besides, all this was a change from mountain gossip racing like a forest fire, from one end of town to the other, so fast that fifteen minutes after you et morning oatmeal the whole town knowed if you put sorghum or honey on it.
However, Cooley and a few young bucks looked for more. A half-Indian trapper with a road map of authority in his face, brown and weathered from the hills, staked his rifle and wouldn’t let Julian pass.
“Delacorte. How we know who to kill?”
Julian stared at him, wild. “Oh, you’ll know by her traitorous face.” He nodded vigorously.
The trapper spat. “All this about some female?”
Julian shoved him aside. “Don’t let nobody through!” He subsided choking. “You won’t know what shape she takes!”
A shade of superstitious memory passed over the trapper, and he gripped his gun and his knife scabbard tightly.
****
Julian fell into his office before they could see the weakness. He smoothed Jules’s skull against his chest, kissing the ivory-slick bony prominence, tucking it back into its satin-lined box.
Yanking drawers and cupboards, spilling weapons, he took up a relic—a long-barreled, bulky, army revolver from the French and Indian wars—and loaded bullets big as his thumb. His hands wouldn’t work. He dropped the gun. Bullets scattered. Shakily, Julian shot up and reloaded.
****
The unseen piano player still thumped tunes as Sary finished with the rifles along the bluff edge. She had methodically loaded each one. Once again, she heard Tommy.
“How do we play it, Sary? Comedy? Or ‘The Scottish Play’?”
“Oh, definitely comedy, Tommy,” she answered his wraith and hunkered down to wait—and plan. All dark except the saloon. Quieter, too. Still, Sary sensed townsfolk peering like ferrets from dens, eyes glowing with the moon in them, all with preternatural sight, seeking her out.
The assembly—gaunt-faced bar bums to weathered panners, ranchers, drunks, and corpse-white gamblers—seemed more focused, ringing the saloon in a ragged wall facing out or on watch atop the saloon, with silhouettes of bristling rifles. Pearl the dove leaned out the window, this time with Cooley.
“I grasp it, Tommy. I can’t get them all.”
One man atop the saloon turned. She dropped the rifle. It was the fourteen-year-old.
“Let me think!” She fiercely addressed tufts of weed.
“You should’na bonked me on the head. I should be there,” Tommy nagged. Sary flattened her belly to the ground.
“Don’t need anyone! And, I didn’t mean to hit you, Tommy!”
A cigarette glow rounded the tower. As the watcher sucked in, she saw a dissipated face, young but brutal.
Sary slugged from the canteen, cudgeling her brain, gulped a fistful of raisins and stuffed more into her shirt pocket, and watched the water tower—all clear. She crawled back to the Mercedes and returned clutching the green bottle.
“That’s not in the play!” Tommy spoke in her head, alarmed. “And just what mayhem do you plan with that mischief? You’re stalling, Sary!”
It was a delaying tactic. What was she to do with gelignite? Blow up the town? In that short span, more men milled with purpose. Their prey was her, and they were eager for the first showing. Men on roofs, doorways, lining the porch, stalking three abreast, some raking the bluff with their ferret eyes.
“Well, what you waiting for? Gabriel’s trumpet?” Tommy again. She panned a last time. Pearl. Only now she held something. Sary stopped breathing.
A small boy—Jude, by the child’s curls and round cheeks. He was no longer the infant kept in her memory-vault these strange months, and she gazed, mesmerized, as the toddler clapped chubby hands. His excited crow cut though the rinky-tink piano, the clip-clop of horses, and the stamping boots.
Pearl, breasts spilling from her chemise, giggled, pointing at a mob enlarged by ordinary folk, wives and shop owners, as fast as news reached their quiet kitchens. Gently Sary laid the bottle on the ground, desperately thinking.
“Tommy? Remember? Before the play? How Luigi did that magic act? It was all the art of misdirection or something. Illusion, you said.”
“Bravo!” Tommy’s irritating wraith applauded. “And when does this sparkling bit of legerdemain begin?”
Tightening the weighty gunbelt low about hips made thinner of late, Sary shouldered a rifle and shoved the Derringer into her boot. “Watch me.”
Tenderly she tucked the green bottle into her shirt and crouched at the edge of the bluff. Slipping over, she hung on tough weeds, crab-crawling down to the stable set a little apart from the last straggle of buildings, until she was above the smithy. Sliding the last few feet where the bluff sloped, the stable three yards to her left, she ducked into the shadowed lee of rough wood, redolent of hay, horses, and manure.
****
Nesting the pear-shaped bottle in weeds, Sary peeked through the back way, squinting in the lantern glow that turned littered straw and hay bales to dull gold not unlike her swath of ore.
An omen, if she trusted such things.
A water-pumper wagon squatted just inside double doors standing open to the main street.
Sary cringed at a dry whine of hinges as she entered. She paced past the same stalls as before, when she had stolen her own horse. The stable was alive now with whickering and the thud of many hooves. She halted mid step. Standing in the wide doorway was the boy who breathed through his mouth, who had worn a startled blue-eyed expression the last time she saw him. Lured to the action, the stable hand danced out, feet pattering away. He wouldn’t be back.
Sary raced stall to stall, shooing horses out, no doubt alerting the town. Soon it wouldn’t matter. She flung the lamp, firing the hay. After decades of arid air, the brittle-dry stable caught and bloomed with a shocking roar. Sary leaped back, suddenly aware through the crackle that it was Grace, among others outside, yelling, “Ya sleepin’ with your long johns undone? We’re on fire here!” Sary glimpsed her dashing from the dry-goods store, apron flapping, waving her arms as she bee-lined for the saloon.
Sary raced for the rear of the stable—and rammed right into Ratchet, who looked like the Devil come alive, his gaunt features animated by the flames. He resembled a ghost with an aura of flickering light surrounding him. Supernatural, straight from Hell. But he drowned. He drowned! Sary realized on one level that he must have been in one of the stalls. Without thought, Sary stifled a scream and flung the last of the kerosene. With the stench of burning tweed in her nose, Sary grabbed the green bottle of gelignite and ran for her life. Behind her, Ratchet slapped his pant legs and sprinted after her on his long legs, murder in the red glint of his eyes.
****
The saloon still rocked, revel-makers on the Titanic, soon to go down. Sary darted past shop owners dashing from homes and stores and making for the blazing stable, avoiding the panicked horses. They backed, shielding faces with bent elbows as tongues of fire licked from the door.
The foolhardy dragged the pumper, blazing now too, swatting the burning hose, yanking it, stumbling, grunting and cursing, flags of fire snapping behind it, to the water tower. With the ease at which they rolled it, rattling and bumping, Sary surmised the pumper’s reservoir was empty. She was stunned by the implication. Why would they store the pumper in the stable and not below the water tower, she wondered, as a sail of fire whipped and crackled over the blacksmith’s bark roof. The wind had risen.
“What have we done?” Sary breathed.
“We?” Tommy carped.
“Bigger than I thought, Tommy. They won’t be able to stop it.”
“Then you’d best make haste, Sary Swinford…”
The wind picked up, helped by a vortex of heat, blowin
g perversely west into the town.
Jude!
Firemen struggled back with the filled reservoir, manning the pumper. A thin arterial spout ineffectively sprayed, turning to steam and smoke and obscuring the street as Sary wove though people who milled, agog, changing focus in ragged waves but aiming generally for the stable, getting in the way of the wagon and tattered bucket brigade.
“But it was just a diversion!”
“You’re on, Sary. Do you know your lines? Your part?” Tommy demanded.
“No! I told you, it’s all ad lib! Now don’t bother me!”
“It’s all for nothing, if you don’t go on now! Your audience awaits.”
Sary wended, ducking and darting, through sparking coals. She attracted a little abstract startled recognition when she didn’t keep her head tucked or ran into a townsperson vaguely recalled, but they were soon diverted by the fire, as pleasure takers wandered from the saloon to ogle or help fill the clumsy brigade. It was a circus atmosphere. Sary skimmed through a thinning in the mob as more drifted to the stable end, while some ran back home or to their store. Someone thrust a dishpan sloshing with water at her. She passed it along, getting another puzzled look, and melted away. Sary looked ahead. The windy conflagration was well away from the saloon and Jude—so far. At the gap in the buildings, between the new bank and Doheney’s, it would die out.
****
Sary darted under the tower, craning to study the fat wooden underbelly, briefly considering the man on top and the volunteer filling buckets from a loose hose hanging outside. In the shadow of the bulge’s underside, she tucked the bottle by a strut—it just seemed right—and stepped aside. Shotgun to her shoulder, she blasted the underbelly with buckshot, over and under. There, that’s done. One more diversion.
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