Sliphammer

by Brian Garfield

  He did not roll away. They lay together, pulses drumming, lungs gasping. She felt the hungry cravings subside in logged satiety. She said, “Oh, God, let’s do it forever, it feels so damned good.”

  He could make her feel as though she was the only woman on earth. She wrapped her arms around him and squeezed; he was still inside her and she didn’t want him to go. She said, “Know something?”

  “Not much.”

  “Sometimes I hate your guts because I need you so bad. Nobody should have to need anybody as bad as I need you.”

  He ruffled her hair. “You’re a good girl,” he said, and rolled his weight off her. He lay back naked, his belly rising and falling gently. She felt as if she had been surgically wounded; she felt raw with the residues of high, sweet pleasure.

  After a while he sat up and looked down at her. She smiled almost shyly. Lying on her back, with her breasts diminished to the shape of inverted teacups, she knew she looked girlish and wistful. She felt somnolent pleasure, the soft glow of warmth, the temporary easing of lustful needs which soon would overcome her all over again.

  He did an unusual thing: he bent and very softly kissed her. And then he got off the bed and walked into the private bathroom that was part of the great carpeted suite.

  He was seldom so gentle with her; it made her feel strange and puzzled. She sat up, put her feet on the floor and walked to the mirror. She could feel the wet, draining stickiness between her thighs; she liked it there.

  She studied herself in the mirror. She always liked to look at herself. Once, when she was sixteen, her father had caught her admiring herself naked in front of a mirror. He had grinned: “Don’t let that spoil, Josie. Be a shame to let it go to waste.” Her father had been like that. She wondered how he had been able to stand her prude of a mother. There were rumors about the women he was supposed to be keeping on the side, particularly a red-haired wench down on Mission Street. It didn’t matter any more; he had died when she was nineteen and after that, all that mattered to her was to get away from her mother; she had joined the traveling troupe, and she had met Wyatt.

  Her face in the mirror had a bright, hard, shiny-eyed after-sex look. She thought, There really wasn’t much else than this; you went through the rest of the time just waiting for this.

  He came out of the bathroom naked. He wasn’t smiling; he wasn’t looking at her: his mind had moved on to other things. She was struck by the sudden fear that his gentle gesture a few moments ago had been the sort of thing a man might do if he felt guilty about something. Was he getting weary of her? She felt a moment’s horror. She had always tried to ignore the dark cranny of her mind which housed the suspicion that what, to her, was both serious and desperate, was to him only occasionally desperate and never serious.

  She knew it was altogether the wrong thing to say to him but she couldn’t help it. “Darling, when are we going to get married? Really married, I mean?”

  She felt cold, anxious, unnerved. When he looked at her it was only a brief distracted glance, but at least it was without irritation.

  “There’s no hurry, is there?” he said absently, and went to put on his clothes and guns.

  Seven

  In a dismal morning drizzle, Tree walked down to the telegraph office, his loose oilskin poncho flapping. Water dripped from the trough of his hat brim and his feet squished in his boots, the result of having to cross intersections that were a foot deep in mud after the steady two-day rain.

  His mood was as bleak as the sky, the passage of time had screwed his nerves up past the point of alert tautness, into a state of apathetic indifference. His expression had faded to blankness.

  The telegrapher gave him one brief look and said, “Nothing for you today.”

  “You sure?”

  The telegrapher, a wizened little man, gave him a waspish glance. “I told you, Deputy, when anything comes in for you I’ll send a runner. You don’t have to keep checking in here.”

  Tree turned the oilskin collar up around hii? face and ducked his head and stepped outside into the drizzle. He didn’t have to keep checking in with Western Union. But it gave him something to do. Besides, he didn’t trust the telegrapher: the man might deliver the message to Wyatt Earp before he delivered it to Tree.

  By this time he didn’t trust anybody at all. It was a miserable feeling. Two weeks in this town had been ample to prove to him that the whole community was locked up tight against him. No one had threatened him, but no one had opened up to him. He was an enemy, tolerated because of Wyatt Earp’s truce. Even the miners, who were Earp’s enemies or thought they were, gave him wide berth. They probably didn’t want to get mixed up in what could turn out to be trouble—they had enough of that of their own.

  Walking through town he passed occasional pedestrians darting from shelter to shelter, their faces as gray as the rain. He wandered unhurriedly toward the Inter Ocean because his orders were to keep an eye on the Earps. The fact was, the Earps weren’t going anywhere—they were safest right here, why should they leave? But this, too, gave him something to do.

  Under the flowing oilskin his wrists brushed the paired sliphammer revolvers. His eyes, silver-hued in good light, seemed dulled to the color of tarnished lead. His face had developed a pinched pair of creases that bracketed his mouth, ordinarily good-humored, with a pattern of mute anger and volatility held precariously in check. At this point he would even welcome a fight with Reese Cooley: but Cooley, for reasons of his own, had made a point of ignoring him for two weeks.

  He turned a corner a block from the Inter Ocean and stopped. A hundred feet away, under the shelter of the overhanging veranda roof, Wyatt Earp had posted himself in a porch rocking chair. Earp basked there with one boot up against the porch rail, lazy-eyed and droopy-mustached as a king lion keeping watch over his pride. If he saw Tree he made no sign of it, but it was inconceivable he was unaware of Tree’s appearance: Tree was virtually the only pedestrian in sight. Earp sat with a proprietary air, with the wise indolence of authority. He was smoking a cigar. Earp was a bit of an actor, Tree had learned; he liked to strike poses. He carried himself with the presumed superiority of a public figure who knew he was at all times on display. But his arrogance was earned. Tree had studied him with close care and thus far he had found in Earp no false note, no weakness, no sign that the pose was hollow bravado.

  He and Earp had spent the two weeks feeling each other out—warily, like strange dogs on unfamiliar territory. Tree had come to Gunnison prepared to be impressed; Earp, hard-nosed and yet judicious, had not disappointed him. He did not want to think his judgment or intentions could be colored by the tall shadow of the Wyatt Earp legend, but he had taken care to make sure that was not the case. He had poked and prodded and by now he was more than satisfied. As a result, more than ever he did not want to have to try to arrest Earp.

  While he stood watching, Josie Earp came out of the Inter Ocean, pouted at the rain, and said something to Wyatt, who nodded and gave her his sly, slow smile and whacked her rump affectionately before she turned to go back inside. At the door she paused and gave Tree a long direct glance. She excited his interest, and she knew it: she was a girl who exuded a subtle air of compressed amoral sexuality, calculated—by design or by nature—to excite a man. With a fleeting lidded smile she pulled her glance away from Tree and went inside, hips churning.

  Tree dropped off the boardwalk and quartered across the muddy street, climbed onto the porch and kicked excess mud off his boots, and walked down the rail to where Earp sat. Earp only looked up when he stopped six feet away.

  “Pull up a chair. I hate to have to look up at a man.”

  “You could stand up.”

  “Still digesting my breakfast,” Earp replied, and waved his -cigar toward a vacant rocking chair. “You keep regular hours for a man with nothing to do.”

  “Habit, I guess.” Tree pulled the rocker forward and sat, batting his hat against the side of the chair and hooking it over his knee. “Another day
of this and the whole town will float away.”

  “Heard anything from Denver?”

  Tree looked at him and grinned. “Now ask me a question you don’t already know the answer to.”

  “If it’s any comfort to you,” Earp said, “I haven’t had any word either.” Which meant he had no news about whether there had been any success in his long-distance effort to pull strings in the Governor’s office.

  “No particular comfort,” Tree said.

  “You’d just as soon have it over with.”

  “One way or the other—either way,” Tree agreed. “Waiting drags on a man’s nerves.” He gave Earp a sharp, sudden scrutiny in an effort to detect whether Earp felt the same pressure.

  There was no change in Earp’s expression—the impassive face of the professional gambler. He said, “Put that you get orders to arrest me. What do you do?”

  “If I didn’t mean to follow orders I wouldn’t be here at all.”

  Earp’s big head moved back and forth morosely. “Then you’re a gold-plated fool, amigo. Digging yourself a grave.”

  Tree shrugged. “You can’t lead my kind of life and expect to live forever. Yours either.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I expect to live to a ripe old age.” Earp gave him a guileless cocked-eyebrow glance; hard to tell whether he. meant it humorously. “If I’m religious about anything,” Earp said, “it’s that. I firmly believe I’ll have my threescore and ten, and then some.”

  “Who told you that? Tea leaves or a crystal ball?”

  Earp shifted his seat, leaned back and crossed his legs. He murmured, “Let’s use cards, Deputy—let’s lay them face up on the table. Now, I’ve been gentle with you because nobody had to tell me the courage it took for you to come in here at me, in a town where every gun’s against you. It takes guts to humble yourself to duty, obey an order you don’t like and maybe don’t even believe in. But you came here carrying the seeds of trouble—for me and my family. Every time the clock ticks it could mean you’re coming at us with a warrant and a gun. I don’t intend to hang, or see my brother hang, for doing what any decent man would have done to a mad dog like Stillwell. I don’t have to ask any questions, I know I’m right. You haven’t got that luxury. You’re not sure, down deep, whether arresting me is the right thing or the wrong thing. Which puts you in a bad position—you’ve got a private conscience hanging deadweight around your neck no matter what your notion of duty tells you you’ve got to do.”

  Earp turned to look him in the face. “It’ll slow you down, you know. It’ll take the edge off. You’ll hesitate when you can’t afford to.”

  “Maybe.” Not liking it here any more, Tree got up out of the chair, holding his hat.

  Earp said, “It’d be a shame if you got yourself hurt to no purpose.”

  Tree thought, God help me, I think you’re right He didn’t say a word; he walked away, putting on his hat before he stepped into the rain.

  When he turned into Main Street he saw the white thatched figure of Sheriff McKesson standing just inside the open door of the sheriff’s office, ever vigilant, watching the town. As Tree went by on the opposite side of the street, the sheriff’s grave face turned slowly, indicating his interest in Tree’s passage. Tree waved at him and went on down to the little hotel. The clerk wasn’t on the desk; nobody was in sight. He went back through the corridor to his room and, from habit, glanced to see if the tenpenny nail was in place.

  It wasn’t. The door stood ajar, open an inch.

  He stood making a puddle in the shape of a ring around his dripping poncho. Disgust welled up in him. He drew both guns out through the pocket holes in the poncho, lifted his boot and kicked the door open.

  Both of them jerked, startled. Caroline was by the window; Tree’s half brother Rafe lay on his back on the bed in sock feet.

  Rafe grinned. “If I was a bushwhacker waitin’ with a gun I wouldn’t have much of a chance, would I?”

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Come in and shut the door and we might tell you.”

  “Aagh,” Tree said in disgust, putting his guns away and lifting the poncho over his head. He tossed it across a chair, removed his hat, ran fingers through his matted hair and said, “Well?”

  Rafe got off the bed and went past him to shut the door. Then he turned. Caroline was watching Tree, looking pretty and blonde and milkmaid fresh in spite of the mud on her clothes and the tangled disorder of her hair.

  Rafe said, “You got a nice warm way of greetin’ us, ain’t you?”

  “What the hell is this all about?”

  Caroline said, “We were afraid you’d get hurt. We came to help.”

  “Sure you did.”

  Rafe came around him from the door and went back to the bed, where he sat down and tipped his head to one side. “That ain’t exactly the whole truth. We couldn’t get the fare together so we came in the buggy.”

  “All the way from Tucson?”

  “Left right after you did,” Rafe said, not without pride. “All the way across the goddamn desert and the goddamn mountains in that old buggy, campin’ out. Caroline’s a right good traveler, she’d of made a good Forty-niner.” Rafe grinned at his wife.

  “Both of you,” Tree said, shaking his head. “Why’d both of you come, for crying out loud?”

  “Because,” Caroline said quietly, “I wouldn’t let him go without me. He came with me or not at all.”

  Looking at both of them, Tree saw how it was. Once more he remembered what Caroline’s father had said to him not too long ago: J told her not to marry your brother because he just ain’t tough enough for her. She’ll put spurs to him one time when she ain’t even thanking about it, and she’ll rip him to shreds ‘thout ever knowing how it happened. It was clear to see how this marriage had settled down, who wore the pants. Tree thought, You poor son of a bitch, you should’ve known better.

  He said to Rafe, “I suppose you’ve still got your tongue hanging out over that four-thousand-dollar reward on the Earp brothers.”

  “I still need the money to buy that ranch. Where else am I, gonna get that kind of money?”

  “You’re both pretty damned young,” Tree said, looking straight at Caroline. “Couldn’t you settle for something less than your own ranch to start out with?”

  “Why should we?” Rafe demanded. “You take what you can get, Jeremy, it’s a me-first country.”

  Tree jerked a thumb toward the invisible hills. “A lot of bleached bones up in those mountains thought the same thing.”

  “I ain’t scared of Wyatt Earp.”

  No, Tree thought, you’re not, are you? It surprised him a little—particularly because even if Rafe didn’t think he was scared of Earp, he was certainly intimidated enough by his own wife. But that was a different sort of thing: petticoat power was too subtle for Rafe to handle. Rafe was brash, bold, full of bullheaded guts, and no less callow than an ignorant puppy.

  “Listen,” Tree said, “you two just get back in your goddamn buggy and drive back to Arizona. There’s nothing here for you.”

  Caroline scowled at him but did not speak. Rafe, his face red, said, “Damn it, when you gonna quit treating me like a kid?”

  “When you quit acting like one.”

  Caroline said, “That’s not fair.”

  He looked at her. “Shut up.”

  Rafe sat up straight. “Who you tellin’ to shut up?”

  Tree ignored him; he said flatly to Caroline, “You put him up to this—you filled his head with notions. If you don’t want him dead, you’d better change his mind.”

  Caroline gave him a savage mock-sweet smile. “Rafe’s a man—he makes his own decisions.”

  “In a pig’s eye. Now grab him by the ear and get him out of here—or I’ll do it myself.”

  “You just try,” Rafe growled, eyes flashing. “You just try that little thing, Jeremy.”

  Tree snorted, walked around the foot of the bed and picked up a newspaper from the l
ittle lamp table. He went over to the bed and lay down, crossing his muddy boots on the coverlet, and held the newspaper up in front of his face.

  Caroline said, “What do you think you’re doing?”.

  “Reading,” Tree said.

  “And just what are we supposed to do?”

  Tree lowered the newspaper and looked at her. “I couldn’t care less what you do,” he said, and lifted the paper.

  Caroline said, “We haven’t got the money for a hotel room.”

  “Should’ve thought of that before you came all this way, shouldn’t you?”

  “You bastard,” she said.

  Tree said, “There sure as hell isn’t room for all three of us on this bed, Caroline.”

  “Jerr, you’re a first class A number one son of a bitch.”

  “Uh-hunh,” he muttered, reading.

  Rafe got off the corner of the bed, assembled his dignity, and said, “Come on, honey, let’s you and me go get something to eat. To hell with his majesty.”

  “Enjoy yourselves,” Tree intoned, without looking away from his reading matter.

  Caroline said in a stifled, angry little voice, “You just wait till you need our help arresting Wyatt Earp. You’ll come begging on your knees, Jeremiah Tree.”

  “All right,” Tree drawled. “You two just stay out of trouble until I do.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” said Rafe, yanking the door open. He stopped. “You coming?”

  Caroline came away from the window. “You just wait,” she fumed.

  The two of them went out; the door slammed angrily. Tree put the paper down on his chest and frowned at the ceiling. The frown turned to a scowl.

  Wyatt Earp said to him, “I’ve got a skittish brother too, amigo, but I can handle him. You put hobbles on that kid or he’ll get hurt.”