by Jory Sherman
Lew stood up, leaned over the desk. His eyes widened.
“Those are hundred-dollar bills, Don.”
Swanson smiled.
Lew sat back down.
“I told them boys I knew where they got the money and they all turned right sheepish. You wanta know what they told me?”
“I can’t even guess,” Lew said.
“Said Virgil and Luke gave them bills to them to put your lamp out, Lew. Said they was to get another hunnert each after they done the deed.”
“They were going to kill me?” Lew said.
Swanson smiled again.
“Naw, they said they just took the money because it was free. They told me they was a-goin’ to ride on over to your place and tell you to git.”
“You didn’t believe them, I take it,” Lew said.
“Thought I’d let you decide that, Lew. They’re friends of your’n. Let’s go on back and see what those boys have to say.”
“All right,” Lew said. The skin on the back of his neck prickled.
“You can’t wear that hogleg back there, though. Better give it to me for safekeeping.”
Lew looked into the sheriff’s eyes, as if searching for any smoke of deception. Swanson’s eyes were steady on his. Lew pulled the Colt from its holster and handed it across the desk.
“You trust me?” Swanson said.
“Up to a point,” Lew admitted.
A brief smile flickered across the sheriff’s face.
“The way it’s lookin’, you might not have too many folks you can trust, Lew.”
Lew said nothing. He followed the sheriff as Swanson unlocked the door to the back part of the small building. They walked down a hallway, through another room. Swanson unlocked still another door made of heavy oak.
“Comin’ in, boys,” Swanson said as he pulled the door open.
The room had built-in bunks, a table, no chairs, a single bench along one wall. The three young men were sitting on it, looking like a trio of owls, their eyes wide and bright, teary from the sudden light. There was one high window with bars on it. Feeble sunlight trickled through it, tiny motes dancing in the small shafts.
“Hey, Lew,” Danny said. “Looks like we stepped into some shit.”
“I just want to know one thing,” Lew said. “Were you going to shoot me?”
“Naw, Lew. We was just goin’ to tell you what old Virgil and Luke Canby wanted us to do so’s you could light a shuck.”
“Then, what were you going to tell Pope and Canby?”
“We was going to tell them you run off,” Bobby said. “Honest.”
“That right, Kevin?” Lew said.
“That’s plumb right, Lew. You know we wouldn’t do nothin’ to you no ways. We just took the money they gave us.”
“I don’t believe you. Sheriff says you had rifles with you.”
“We had to make it look good,” Bobby said. “Case somebody said something to Pope and Canby. They’re plumb riled that you killed their boys.”
“Those boys would be alive today if that damned Alpena sheriff had arrested them. Billy Jim Colfax has got the balls of a field mouse.”
“They’d be in prison,” Slater said.
“Was Sheriff Colfax in on this?” Lew asked.
The three boys shrugged.
“Now, Lew,” Swanson said, “you don’t want to widen your loop too much.”
“I think Colfax knows what Canby and Pope are up to,” Lew said. “Three peas in a pod.”
“Well,” Gleason said, “Virgil did say we’d have no trouble with the law if we done you in.”
“You can make it plainer than that, Bobby.”
Gleason stood up. The sunlight splashed the top of his head, gilding the hairs with a pale buttery light.
“All right. Virgil said Billy Jim would look the other way.”
“What about me?” Swanson asked. “Did he say that I would turn my back on a killing?”
“No, sir,” Gleason said.
“He said to let him know if you gave us any trouble and he’d take care of it,” Smith said.
“And what did you think he meant by that, Kevin?” Swanson said.
Smith shrugged. “I didn’t think about it. I told you, Sheriff, we wasn’t going to kill Lew.”
“Did you think I’d run, Kevin?” Lew asked. There was iron in his voice and he fixed Smith with a piercing stare.
None of the young men answered. Kevin looked down at his feet and started raking one shoe across the pine flooring as if there was a stain there that wouldn’t come out. Gleason sucked in a breath, and Slater looked away to a corner of the room.
Lew turned to Swanson.
“I’ve heard enough, Don. Let’s go.”
Swanson gave the boys a scathing glance.
“Sorry, boys,” he said.
“You going to press charges, Lew?” Slater asked, a pleading whine in his voice.
Lew didn’t answer. He walked out of the room. The sheriff locked the door. The young men ran to it and started pounding on it.
“Come on, Lew. We’re your friends,” Bobby yelled. “We want to go home.”
The trio was still yelling when Swanson and Lew entered the office. Swanson locked the door, went behind his desk.
“I’ll have my pistol back now, Don,” Lew said.
Swanson hesitated. “I don’t know if I should give it to you. You’re mad enough to use it on someone. I can tell.”
“I’m going to see Seneca, that’s all.”
“Don’t do anything foolish, Lew. You can’t take the law into your own hands.”
He handed the Colt back to Lew. Lew slid it back in its holster.
“What law is that, Don?”
“Let’s not go through all that again. I do the best I can here.”
“What about Colfax?”
“He’s duly sworn.”
“Shit.”
“Now, don’t go off half-cocked on Billy Jim. He ain’t in this, far as I can see. I could make out a charge against Pope and Canby, but I doubt if the judge would do anything. It would be those boys’ word against theirs and they’d deny they paid to have you murdered. And if the judge finds that no law has been broken, exactly, Colfax can’t arrest Virgil or Luke, and neither can I.”
“Nobody wants to buck Pope and Canby, Don. That’s what you’re saying.”
“Well, I don’t think even a jury would believe those boys. What do you think I ought to do with them?”
“What did you have in mind, Don?”
“Maybe disorderly conduct. Ten days in the Alpena jail.”
Lew snorted.
“About all I can do, without stirring up a lot of trouble up there.”
“In Alpena, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“Suit yourself. I think my friends need time to think about what they’ve done. Or what they might have done.”
“Yeah. I agree.”
Lew stood up.
“You know what bothers me about all this, Don?”
“I reckon you feel betrayed by your friends.”
Lew started for the door.
“I’m thinking that I might have had to kill three of my best friends, Don. That’s what’s itching right under my skin.”
Sheriff Don Swanson shivered in his chair as if gripped by a sudden chill.
He had no doubt that Lew meant every word he said.
3
AS LEW CLIMBED INTO THE SADDLE, SHERIFF SWANSON STEPPED out on the porch. He held up the three one-hundred-dollar bills, flapped them up and down.
“Zane,” Swanson said. “You watch your back, hear?”
Lew nodded, touched a finger to the brim of his hat, and turned Ruben toward the Possum Trot road.
Shadows stretched eastward in long stripes from the trees. His own shadow rippled on the road like oil floating on water. Grasshoppers made brittle sounds with their wings as they broke cover and took flight ahead of him.
Lew felt sorry for the three boys in
jail. They had been his brother David’s best friends before David had drowned, and he felt a special kinship with them, as if they were living links to David. Whether or not they had meant to kill him for money, he did not know. He knew that a hundred-dollar bill was a lot of money to folks born poor. That’s what galled him more than anything, that Virgil and Luke had tempted the boys. They had waved money at them, knowing that the money could corrupt almost anyone, especially young fellows who didn’t have better sense.
He turned his horse onto the rough-hewn road that led to the Jones house, the scent of cedar strong in his nostrils, the june bugs hopping off the road into the grasshopper country of tall weeds and old blackberry vines. His shadow crept up the slope toward the house as the sun hung just over the western horizon, frozen there for one last blaze of fiery glory.
The road was a maze of horse tracks, none of which looked familiar to him. Despite his preoccupation with seeing Seneca again, bidding her farewell, his mind was drawn to the hoof marks. He began to decipher them from long habit, as a man who composes music might begin to hum notes scrawled on a page of scales, or a retired mathematician might follow a formula found in an old textbook. Reading signs came natural to Lew, for he had lived outdoors, in the woods, for most of his young life and followed in the footsteps of his guiding father, who had taught him all he knew about tracking animal or man.
Two sets of horse tracks ascending the road, three coming back down. And fresh, all of the hoof marks were fresh, less than an hour old, he surmised. Visitors? Ed Jones, as most of the people who lived on Possum Trot, had few visitors, and then only when he was making sorghum. And in this time of summer, Ed was not manufacturing syrup, but tending to his cane.
The sun dropped below the horizon and Lew turned back to look at its last flare, the loaves of clouds floating like salmon just above the treetops, then turning ashen and cold as the light failed and the sky began to darken. Something his father had told him more than once came to mind: “Never miss a sunrise or a sunset, son.” It was an axiom that Lew had followed once he understood what his father had meant.
“Each morning that you go out of the house just before dawn,” Del Zane had said, “you are witness to creation itself. The birth of a new day. Each day like no other. And to see a blazing sunset is to see the Father of us all painting his masterpieces, evening after evening unto eternity.”
His father’s words stayed with him and became part of the fabric of his life. They seemed even more important, more sacred, even, since his father’s death. Yes, he thought, sacred was the word. His father, Delbert Zane, had been his guide for nineteen years, teaching him, warning him, leading him on a deep spiritual path without being ecclesiastic or domineering. With soft words, words that Lew continued to hear as if they were just spoken into his ear, just breathed into his consciousness a moment ago.
The house was dark, and Lew was surprised. Stars were beginning to stipple the sky like flung diamonds and the trees had gathered up their shadows and created dark sculptures around their trunks.
Seneca should have lighted a lamp by then, Lew thought. The windows in the front room should have been shimmering with a pale golden light, and most certainly, there should have been a lamp lighted in the kitchen, and maybe one in the dining room.
Ruben’s ears pricked to hard cones and twisted back and forth as Lew topped the rise to the house, the hitch rail barely visible, a shiny post that held the light enough for him to see it.it.
“What’s the matter, boy?” Lew said, his voice soft and without tremor. “Something wrong?”
Lew swung out of the saddle. The creak of leather was loud in the deep silence of the evening. He wrapped the reins around the hitch rail and stood there, looking at the porch, the dark house, the froed shingled roof. Everything so quiet, he thought. Everything so unnaturally quiet. Not even a cricket scraping its legs, nor the leathery lash of the whippoorwill’s tongue announcing that the night was upon them and owls were floating like wraiths through the cedars, the oaks, and the hickory trees.
So quiet his nerves crackled like bacon skittering in a skillet of hot grease.
“Ed,” Lew called, his right hand dropping to the butt of his Colt.
There was no answer.
“Seneca?”
The thick trees bordering the back lot of the house seemed to swallow his words. The silence became even more deafening as his voice died away into nothingness.
Lew looked around as if to determine if any of the nearby shadows were moving. Stillness and motionless. He felt as if he were in a cave, isolated from all life. A dark cave, where only he and Ruben stood, as if on an island of pure silence, a small piece of land devoid of all beings.
Be careful, a small voice inside him warned.
Those tracks might mean something. Something ominous. Something that could fill a cautious man with dread.
Lew walked to the front steps, stopping after each footfall, to listen. He put a foot on the first step, waited. Then he inched forward, putting his weight on that foot, pulled the other one forward, for balance. He went to the next step, and the next, until he stood on the porch. The oak planks had hardened over the years and the boards on the porch did not creak.
“Seneca?” Lew called again.
He turned toward the front door and took a step.
The hackles on the back of his neck prickled when he saw that the door was slightly ajar.
“Ed, you home? Seneca? Anybody?”
Lew drew his pistol. It whispered out of the holster. The sound sent a shiver up his spine. He stepped forward and pushed the door all the way open. The metal hinges squeaked ever so soft, like the far-off peep of a baby chick. Inside, he saw only darkness, heard only more silence, a deeper silence now. The lonesome silence of an empty house.
“Ed? Anybody home in there?”
Lew stiffened. He thought he heard a sound. What was it? A groan? A moan? His imagination?
“Ed? It’s me, Lew Zane.”
He heard a scuffling. More groans. He had not imagined them. The hairs on the back of his neck subsided, replaced by a hard cold ball of iron in his stomach.
Lew hunched over and stepped through the door, his finger on the pistol hammer, ready to cock the single-action with a downward press.
He sidled left, away from the door, and struck a small table that he had forgotten was there. He stifled a curse and flattened himself against the wall.
“Ed? You in there?”
“Mmmf. Mmmmmf.”
Down the hall. The kitchen, maybe. His senses prickled as if he had walked across a rug in winter and touched something metal; as if electrified by a sudden spark set off by friction.
“Ed?”
Sounds of scuffling and then a heavy pounding. Lew stiffened and eased the hammer back on the Colt. The metallic click as the mechanism engaged the sear sounded throughout the house, so loud he was sure the world had heard it.
The heavy blows ceased and the house filled with silence once again.
He walked toward the hallway, only dimly visible in the shadowy confines of the front room. He stepped softly down the hall, past a closed door. He entered the small dining room, and then he was in the kitchen.
“Mmmmmf.”
Lew whirled at the sound and went into a fighting crouch, the pistol held level in front of him. He was a tiger, ready to pounce.
Nobody rushed him.
“Ed? You in here?”
“Uhhhnhhnhhh.” A long sound, this time, from a corner of the room. Over by the iron cookstove, he thought.
Then, the thud of something heavy on the hardwood flooring. Lew’s finger trembled near the trigger.
“Uhhhumffff.”
Lew eased the hammer back down to half-cock and strode toward the source of the sounds. He stepped into a blob of darkness, then felt the cold iron of the stove on his hip. He stretched a foot out and his boot struck something soft, softer than the floor, but harder than just a bundle of clothes.
“Ed?�
�� He said the name with a tone just above a whisper.
“Uhmf.”
Lew bent down and reached out with his left hand. He felt something. Something alive. He patted the object and knew what it was. A foot. A shoe. He moved his hands both ways, and felt a leg, felt something around one ankle, something corded and familiar. Rope.
“Is this you, Ed?”
“Uhhhmmmffff.” Savagely positive, this time, the voice loud, insistent. Desperate.
“Hold on. I’ll light a lamp.”
“Nnnnnmmmffff.”
“All right. Wait.”
Lew holstered his pistol and felt along the trousers, to the waist. Then, with both hands, he probed the figure on the floor until he felt bare skin. A chin, a cheek, cloth tight around the mouth. He followed the path of the cloth and his fingers detected a knot. He used both hands to untie the knot and pulled the cloth free.
“Lew, goddamnit, untie me, quick.”
“I can’t see a damned thing, Ed.”
“My hands. Untie my hands.”
He felt Ed’s body lurch as he lunged to one side. Lew let his hands find the rope around Ed’s wrists and he began to untie them. The rope came free and Ed sat up. He was close enough now to see him, not his face, but his human shape. Ed’s fingers worked frantically at the ropes around his legs and ankles.
“Sonofabitch,” Ed said as Lew heard the plunk of the rope falling to the floor. “Help me up, Lew. I’ll get us some light.”
Lew stood up and slid his hands beneath Ed’s arms, helped him to his feet. He stood there as Ed hobbled off somewhere. Scratching sounds, a soft clank of metal, a tink of glass. Then another scratch and Lew saw a blossom of orange flame, the dim flash of Ed’s face as he lit the lamp. He turned up the wick and Ed’s features and his body sprang into view, the kitchen burst out in sudden relief and the darkness fled.