by M. K. Wren
“Oh, he’s fine. He don’t ever come to these parties, y’know. Most of the fellers ’round here never have time for dancin’. Least, not once they’re married.”
“Like George?” Then, when she only shrugged, “Look, I want a straight answer, that’s all. I’ve heard the rumors, and I want to know if there’s anything behind them.”
She glanced around uneasily, but Conan was making sure they didn’t stay in one spot long enough for anyone to overhear more than a fragment of their conversation.
“You mean about Linc and Laura. Well, Mr. Flagg, I don’t rightly know, but there’s been a lot of talk, and Linc—well, he didn’t exac’ly act like a brother to her.”
“How did Laura act toward him?”
“That’s hard to say. I mean, I never could tell what she was thinkin’; not really. You sound like you’re still…lookin’ for answers.”
He nodded, catching a glimpse of Ted moving toward the edge of the dance floor, alone, watching them intently.
“Yes. Did you think I’d give up so soon?”
“Well, no. You said you was stiff-necked.” She gave him a sidelong smile. “Least, a warnin’ shot don’t faze you. You—uh, havin’ any luck?”
“It’s a little early in the game yet.”
“I guess so. I didn’t tell my folks about you. I mean, about why you’re here. Jest said you was out to the rezzavoy to see where—where your friend passed on.”
“I appreciate that, Bridgie. Very much.”
“Well, I figgered Pa’s got enough to worry about right now. Oh, you might be inter-ested—Pa had a call this afternoon from Hor’ce Foley. I guess he changed his mind about that loan; said Pa could come in and sign the papers Monday.”
Conan raised an eyebrow in skeptical amazement.
“Well, it’s a relief to hear some good news occasionally. Did Foley say why he changed his mind?”
“No.” She eyed him suspiciously, for the moment too intent to realize they were moving closer to Ted with every turn. “I figgered mebbe you might know somethin’ about it.”
“Me? I have a hard time getting the time of day around here.” A few more turns; he held her attention with a direct look and an offhand compliment. “Except from you, and that’s worth getting shot at. You’re the image of a girl I knew—but that’s a long story.”
She laughed. “I’ll bet it is, and prob’ly a good one.”
“Well…” He shrugged, then, with a show of surprise, came to a stop. “Oh—hello, Ted.”
He doubted he could have moved her from that spot if he’d wished to, but at first she and Ted only looked at each other, both seemingly suffering a sudden vocal paralysis.
Conan said lightly, “There’s Jesse Broadbent. I want to talk to her before she leaves. Ted, you’ll have to take over the dancing honors.” Jesse was standing near the door but showing no inclination to leave, a fact that didn’t register with Ted or Bridgie. Ted finally got out a few stumbling words.
“Bridgie, you…I mean, would you…”
She laughed and took his hand.
“Come on, Ted, before the music runs out.”
Conan watched them dance dreamily into the crowd as he walked over to Jesse, who met him with a knowing half smile.
“You goin’ into the matchmakin’ business?”
“I’m a romantic at heart—or so I’ve been told.”
“I believe it. Say, you hear the big news?”
“Probably not. I’m not wired into the local grapevine.”
“Well, seems ol’ Foley decided to give Alvin that loan after all. You know anything about that?”
“How would I? I just heard about it from Bridgie.”
“Uh-huh. Well, I was jest thinkin’ since you had that little talk with Foley this mornin’…Oh, Lordy, here comes trouble right through the front door.”
Conan turned. Trouble was entering in the person of Linc McFall, his step unsteady, bleary belligerence in his set jaw and stiff posture. Gil Potts was with him, sober enough to show his uneasiness as Linc surveyed the room, then fixed on Bridgie and Ted, a cold smile twisting his mouth. He began pushing his way through the dancers, and Conan was close enough to hear him say, “Hey, jes’ looka that, Gil. Looka the shtar…star-croshed lovers…
Conan took Jesse’s arm. “Let’s finish this dance.”
“Why, sure. Best offer I had all night.” The attempt at humor lacked conviction, and she showed a strong tendency to take the lead, but they were headed in the same direction. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Joe Tate moving in unobtrusively.
At the center of the dance floor a circle of tension was growing, all movement, all conversation stopped within its expanding circumference. Linc was laughing sardonically, shrugging off Potts’s efforts to draw him away.
“Hey, ain’ this cute!” He draped an arm around Ted’s shoulders and leaned close to Bridgie. “A roshe by any other name’d bed as swee’. Ain’ that so, Teddy-boy?”
“Linc, you—jest keep your mouth clean, will you?” His face was red with embarrassment, which Linc seemed to find irresistibly funny.”Dirt’s inna ear of the beholder, li’l brother. Hey, come on, Bri’gie, baby—how ’bout a dance?”
She glared at him as she might a rattlesnake through the sights of a shotgun just before she pulled the trigger.
“Linc, you stay away from me. I’m dancin’ with Ted.”
“Oh, Ted!” Linc laughed in his face, and Ted turned away with a grimace of disgust. “Oh, Ted, Teddio…where the hell art thou, Teddio?” Then with a sweeping gesture that nearly unbalanced him, “Deny thy father, refuse thy name, ’r be but swore my love, an’ Til no longer be a…a Drinkwa’er” And he sagged under helpless peals of laughter.
“What’s he talkin’ about?” Jesse asked Conan, but he didn’t try to explain. Ted irritably extricated himself from his brother’s arm.
“Damn it, Linc, you’re drunk. Jest get outa here. Gil, for God’s sake, take him on home.”
“Take yourself home!” Linc retorted, pent anger erupting suddenly out of befuddled laughter, taking Ted and everyone else by surprise. The gathering crowd seemed to compress like a startled sea anemone, but Linc was oblivious to anything beyond his own irrational indignation.
“You can jest, take yourself and your damn little—”
“Shut up!” Ted lunged, not entirely succeeding in cutting off the final epithet. Bridgie held him back, both hands locked on his arm, bewildered and even frightened, and if she did hear the word Linc used to describe her, Conan doubted she’d ever heard it before.
Ted said thickly, “Get him out of here, Gil!”
He was rigid with the effort of containing his rage, and there was no hope of apology in Linc’s pale, strained features. But it wasn’t Potts who stepped in to avert the threatened explosion; it was Joe Tate.
“Okay, boys, now you jest cool down. This ain’t the place to settle nothin’. Ever’body’s here to have a good time. Hey, Pete, get some music goin’!”
It was only then that Conan realized the music had stopped, and when the fiddler struck up a lively tune and his amateur orchestra nervously joined in, everyone in the hall seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.
Everyone but Linc.
Perhaps if he hadn’t been so drunk, or so much like his father in his refusal to recognize grief, instead channeling it into aimless rage, the matter would have ended there.
“So, if this ain’t the place to settle nothin’, mebbe you’d like to go to the right place, Teddy-boy.”
He seemed sobered by his anger, his speech clearer, muscular control restored, but Conan could see his eyes and knew this to be an illusion; he doubted Linc could even focus. But this escaped Ted, whose anger was fed not only by grief but soul-deep frustration accumulated over long months and centered on the girl who still clung to his arm, whom Linc had drunkenly described in gutter terms.
“We’ll settle it!” he said through clenched teeth, then pulled away from Bridgie and strode t
o the door. “Come on!”
“Ted? Oh, no—Ted, please…” But he didn’t hear her halting protest; the crowd closed in on her.
*
Conan and Jesse managed to stay in the front ranks as the erstwhile revelers thronged out of the hall, and the combatants and spectators joined under the cold blue light of a streetlamp.
No one seem shocked at the impending encounter, and Conan understood that; a brawl or two was expected at a Saturday-night dance, an outlet for high spirits volatilized by alcoholic spirits, regarded almost as an informal floor show.
But this was different. These were not only brothers, but McFalls, and the cause of their dissension was Alvin Drinkwater’s daughter. An explosive situation, and none of the onlookers was unaware of it. Yet none of them made an effort to stop the confrontation.
Honor demanded a fair fight. Two brothers could beat each other into bloody insensibility—and the local ethic did not preclude below-the-belt punches, gouging, any kind of wrestling lock, nor the expedient use of those lethally pointed boots—and no one would consider stopping it until honor had been satisfied.
The contenders entered the lists amid a fanfare of shouts and whoops. Conan watched sickly as they went at each other, smelled the bitter dust raised by their scuffling feet, heard the grunts and stifled cries of angry pain, the smashing thuds of fists into flesh, and Joe Tate stood by, an unofficial referee, a rural sphinx, while the crowd recorded the progress of the tourney with partisan shouts, and Jesse, shaking her head, plaintively murmured, “Oh, mercy, oh, Lord have mercy…
Linc was getting the worst of it. The illusion of sobriety still maintained, but his reflexes were too blunted to match Ted’s. He stumbled into punches, his own missing twice for every time he landed even a glancing blow, and with every failure he left himself wide open to Ted’s fists. He sprawled in the dust, choking and blinded, again and again, and only once succeeded in grappling Ted down with him, but even then, Ted was back on his feet before Linc.
Ted pulled no punches, moving into every opening with cold efficiency, his hands more bloodied than his face, knuckles broken against his brother’s flesh and bone. And Linc masochistically kept coming back for more; the anger that impelled them both seemed to feed on his unreasoning obstinacy, and as long as he could keep his feet, this fair fight would not be called.
But Conan finally reached the limits of tolerance, seeing the blood, purpled by the light, mired with dust on those savage faces and battering rams of fists. Boys’ games played with men’s weapons; one too drunk to know he was defeated, the other too angry to recognize his advantage.
Gil Potts. He was also standing in the front row, wincing as Ted’s fist plunged into Linc’s belly, doubling him over like a puppet with the strings suddenly cut. Conan pushed toward him. Potts might be willing to get Linc under control if he would tackle Ted.
But Conan didn’t reach his objective. A crunching impact, a wretching grunt; Potts scrambled to catch Linc as he careened backward against him, and Joe Tate finally reached the same conclusion Conan had: this fair fight had gone far enough.
Tate raised his arms, palms down, and Ted paused, hands still fisted, but his attention divided, waiting for Tate.
“All right, you boys,” Tate said over their hoarse panting. “Now, that’s about enough for—Gawdamn!”
Linc still wasn’t ready to call it quits. Staggering, one eye swollen shut, a purplish stream running from his nose and into his mouth, he stumbled back into the arena.
But that wasn’t what wrenched that startled expletive from Tate. The light gleamed icily on a metallic surface, a knife blade, and the onlookers loosed a concerted cry of chagrin. The blade flashed out, slicing across Ted’s forearm.
Conan was stunned, but more by the knife than the wound; it was only a light cut. A switchblade. It was incomprehensible here, a ghetto weapon. A submachine gun would be no less appalling, and he wondered vaguely where Linc had gotten it, how it had come into his hand at this moment, or if he realized that he had conjured the specter of death here with that shining blade.
The desert night silence closed in, but it wasn’t just the knife that elicited the silence. It was Ted’s face.
He spun away when the blade struck his arm, and when he understood the wound and its cause, went dead white under the smears of dust and blood. The metamorphosis was instant and frightening. He had been angry and intent on violence to this point, but still recognizable; still Ted, steady, dependable Ted. But he was someone else now, a man intent on and capable of more than violence; a man capable of killing. Perhaps Linc saw it, too, but he still wouldn’t back down. For untold long, taut seconds the brothers circled warily, crouching like predators in an unnatural encounter, until Ted attacked, teeth bared in an atavistic grimace.
He wrested the knife from Linc almost effortlessly, lithely dodged his flailing fist, doubled him with a solar plexus blow, sent him writhing in the dust with a knee to the groin, and still wasn’t satisfied.
The knife flashed in a long downward arc.
As if it were planned, Conan and Tate moved in, Tate pulling Linc out of the way, the plunging thrust stopped with a hard slap as Conan caught Ted’s wrist with one hand, aimed a snapping chop at the elbow with the other, and the knife flew from his hand. A light kick to the back of the knees, and he dropped to the ground to crouch staring at the knife glinting in the dust, his labored panting sounding strangely like sobbing.
*
Tate surveyed the prone combatants, shaking his head, and at length said, “This looks to me like a draw. Okay, ever’body, we come here for a party. Let’s get on with it.”
He had to repeat that order several times before the spectators began retreating to the hall with dissatisfied murmurings, leaving the field of honor to the bloodied adversaries, their seconds, the referee, and a few interested parties: Jesse Broadbent, Bridgie and Emily Drinkwater.
While Potts helped Linc up and provided a handkerchief to stanch his wounds, Conan stood aside for Bridgie to get her fallen champion to his feet, and if her words of comfort included calling him a damn fool, there was still tenderness in them, and Ted was himself again; no evidence of the terrible metamorphosis he had so recently undergone. The McFall temper. Conan wondered if this was what Laura meant when she said Ted had the McFall temper.
Joe Tate leaned down to pick up the knife.
“Linc, where the hell’d you get this thing?”
He looked at it through one dimmed eye; the other was closed in livid swelling,
“I…I don’ know.”
Tate didn’t believe him, but didn’t argue, pocketing the knife with a weary sigh.
“Damn it, this is an illegal weapon. I could take you in jest for carryin’ it around, but I ain’t gonna bother.”
“Why ain’t you gonna bother?” Bridgie demanded hotly.
Tate looked at her, mildly surprised.
“There’s been trouble enough already, Bridgie.”
“And he’s a McFall—is that it? Ol’ Aaron might get mad, and the whole county’d be shakin’ in their boots!”
Ted said tiredly, “Bridgie, jest shut up. Please.”
“Well, it’s true, ain’t it? Anybody else’d be headed for the county jail right now, but Linc’s a McFall, and Joe Tate don’t dare touch a hair of—”
“Bridgie, I’m a McFall, too.”
That stopped her. She stared at him, then without warning burst into tears and stumbled away. Her mother took her in a comforting embrace back to the hall.
Linc was sagging against the lightpost being wretchedly ill, his back to them, Potts supporting him.
“He gonna be all right?” Tate asked.
“Prob’ly.” Potts glanced over his shoulder. “I’ll look after him. And thanks for—well, goin’ easy on him.”
Tate only shrugged. “How ’bout you, Ted?”
“I’m okay,” he said curtly, then with a glance at Conan, “Let’s get outa here.”
The drive back
to the Black Stallion was tensely quiet, Ted responding to Conan’s questions with reluctant monosyllables or total silence. His attitude was both cold and belligerent, and Conan found his own temper flaring. Ted seemed to hold him responsible for this disastrous evening, and had not a word of thanks or even recognition of the fact that he had stopped him from killing his brother.
But Conan withheld comment on that, knowing his temper was only the backwash of tension. The state of his nerves also made him more vulnerable, and tonight more than anytime previously, he felt the acid bite of grief.
These were George McFall’s brothers, and he had loved them. Yet the grief born of their love for him had helped fuel the rage that nearly left one dead by the other’s hand.
And he considered that rage, particularly Ted’s. Linc at least had the excuse of drunkenness. Ted had been totally sober, and yet one brother was still alive only because someone else had intervened.
CHAPTER 17
Conan made a point of staying out of the way the next morning, the day of George’s funeral. He didn’t emerge from his room until nine o’clock, but not because he was indulging in a few extra hours of badly needed sleep. He awakened at dawn with the ringing of the cookhouse bell, and no amount of self-cajolery would keep his eyes shut after that.
He found evasion easier than he expected, thanks to the stream of visitors passing in and out of the main gate, where Mano was again posted with a shotgun to see that no reporters or photographers slipped past with the sympathizers.
The friends and neighbors who were allowed through the gate almost without exception brought offerings of food, but he knew he was seeing only a fraction of the neighborly offerings here; most would be taken to the Grange Hall in Drewsey, where the mourners would gather after the funeral for a pot-luck dinner. An old custom, and perhaps its roots were in the Irish wake; or perhaps in a land where affluence was an innovation, an offering of food was a particularly meaningful expression of comfort.
When he left his room, Conan slipped past the living room, where the sympathizers congregated with the family, made a haphazard breakfast in the cookhouse kitchen, then spent the rest of the morning wandering around the ranch, avoiding even the buckaroos, but keeping an eye on the house.