by Bill Brooks
“Glen Weaver, my hired hand.”
“Where is he now?”
He shrugged.
“He quit on me yesterday.”
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know. I just come to check on things and he was gone. It’s hard to keep anybody working mucking out stalls, that’s why I’m doing it myself . . . till I can hire a new man.”
“How can I find Glen Weaver?” I said.
“I guess at home,” he said.
“Where is his home?”
He drew me a map on how to get to Glen Weaver’s place.
“Honest, mister, I didn’t know nothing about that horse being stolen. I’m an honest man.”
“Honest, huh? Maybe you ought to tell that to Dew Hardy. He’s been looking for an honest man.”
“Who’s Dew Hardy?”
I drove the wagon out to Glen Weaver’s place as described by the rough map. It sat back off the road a few hundred yards—just an old log cabin with some crude out buildings, something of a corral, and what looked like an old pigsty but without any pigs in it—just the mud wallow.
A pack of dogs came baying and barking out from the house and spooked the horses so they nearly ran off with me. I fired one of the barrels into the air and that spooked them again, but it also spooked the dogs and they ran back toward the house.
A woman and three kids stood there in front of the house by the time I tied off and got out of the wagon. They looked unwashed and worn grim. It was hard to say how old the woman might have been but those kids couldn’t have been more than ten or twelve, the oldest of them. All tow-headed boys.
“I’m looking for Glen Weaver,” I said. “Is this his place?”
“Who are you?” she said.
“It doesn’t matter who I am. Where is he at?”
“He ain’t here.”
“You mind if I go in and take a look?”
“Yes,” she said.
I went past her and stepped into the low-ceiling cabin. There were pallets on the floor, an old wood stove, a dry sink, and not much else. It smelled of cooking grease. Out back there was a handmade table and a couple of chairs standing in what could loosely be described as a yard. There was a pump, and off a way stood a privy. It was bare-bones living.
“Where’d he go?” I said when I stepped back out front again.
She looked pitiful over the question. Her boys stood wide-eyed with grim faces, bowl haircuts, and jug ears.
“Some man came and took him,” she said.
“Took him? Took him where?”
She pointed off toward the chaparral.
“Yonder,” she said.
Her lips quivered, remembering.
“He come, and another, and they called him from the house, saying they would burn it unless he come out. They asked him where the money was and he said he didn’t know nothing about any money, and they said they’d shoot me and our youngsters unless he told them. So he said it was in the privy.” She pointed. “Then they told him to go get it, and he come back with some saddlebags, and he gave it to them. Then the man swung a rope over Glen and they dragged him off through the brush.”
“Was the other one a woman?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It was dark. They was both dressed like men, but I don’t know.”
The direction she pointed looked rugged, too much so for a wagon.
“You have a saddle around here anywhere?” I said.
She nodded.
“Tad, go get papa’s saddle from ’round back.”
The tallest of the boys ran off as I unhitched a horse from the wagon. He came back lugging an old Army saddle.
“Ask your ma if she has a canteen I can take, and put some water in it.”
He went and returned with a clay jug with a stopper and a piece of rope around its neck I could hook onto the saddle. I’ve ridden harder things, but I couldn’t remember when. I started off in the direction the woman had pointed and rode for maybe a mile or two up and down over the caliche-covered hills and across little arroyos following the drag marks, bits of clothing, blood, until I found Glen Weaver.
He was lying there, twisted, and I thought he was dead until I came near and saw the slight rise and fall of his chest. His flesh was all torn and bloody, and flies swarmed over the wounds of his face, arms, and legs. Even his feet were a mess.
I unhooked the water jug and knelt by him and swiped the flies off before I shaded his face with my hat.
“Mister Weaver,” I said. “Can you hear me?”
He groaned. I spilled some water over his face and mouth.
His one eye opened; the other was swollen shut or missing, I couldn’t tell which.
“Shoot me,” he said.
“I can’t do that,” I said.
“Please, God, please.”
I judged his one leg to be broken pretty badly and maybe one of his arms as well.
“I’m killed anyway,” he uttered.
“I told your wife I’d find you,” I said.
He rolled his gaze away from me, then back again, the eye staring at me like something evil or haunting.
“I ain’t no good this way,” he said. “You got any mercy, you’ll shoot me.”
I stood away then, picking up the shotgun I’d laid next to him. He was right that he wouldn’t last the trip back even if I had a way to get him back other than slung over the horse. We’d go back in the dark with me walking, and I’d have done it if that’s all it was. But he was finished. It was just a matter of whether I wanted to leave him here to die slowly or sooner.
His eye kept staring at me. I couldn’t just walk away and leave him like that and I couldn’t just squat and watch him die slowly, either.
“You sure?” I said.
He nodded, and closed the eye. I pulled the trigger.
* * * * *
I rode back to the house.
“You find Glen?” the woman said.
“I did, yes, ma’am.”
I didn’t have to tell her the outcome since Glen wasn’t with me.
She just stood there and nodded once.
“I carried rocks and put them over him. It was all I could do.”
“You want to stay to supper?” she asked.
“No, ma’am, I got to be getting back,” I said, unsaddling the horse and hitching it back up to the wagon.
“I appreciate you going to look for Glen,” she said.
I didn’t say anything. I could still see that eye watching me, afraid of what was, afraid of what was to be. I couldn’t blame him, either way. I wondered if in those final moments he thought about whether all the money in all the world was worth the price he’d have to pay to try and get rich. But then I imagined most men wondered the same thing at one time or another.
Chapter Twelve
It was a long dreary trip back to Two Cents. The dark descended upon the world and the taste in my mouth was bad, like blood.
I saw the lights of the town twinkling out in front of me in the dark and was glad to see them. I was hungry and tired and thirsty. I was weary of the chase, and, if it hadn’t been for my obligation to bring about justice for Burt, I’d probably have quit the trail then and there, gone in and gotten dead drunk, and kept on drifting until death itself found me, or I it.
I halted the wagon in front of the first saloon I came to and went in. The place was small and narrow, like most of them. Yellow light glowed off the tin ceiling and smoked swirled in the air. Talk was a rumble of voices, all mixed together with the clack of a wheel of fortune and the faro dealer’s call.
I took up residence at the bar’s end, as was my custom, so I could watch the front door to see who might come in—maybe a fancy-dressed man with a good-looking, highbrow lady. I ordered my usual, a bottle of whiskey, not the best, but not the worst, either. I couldn’t afford the best and you never want to drink the worst unless you have to because of the headaches it’ll give you. The worst stuff they call forty-rod, or snakehead
. It’s for wild kids who want to get drunk cheap their first time, and old-timers who want to get drunk their last time.
The barkeep was a skinny man with his dark wet hair combed straight forward and scissored off straight across his forehead. He reminded me of somebody I knew sometime but I couldn’t remember who or where or when. He had long thin fingers and wore a gold signet ring on the pinky of his right hand. He looked at me and said: “You look familiar.”
“You do, too.”
“Where you hail from?”
“Here, there,” I said.
“Didn’t mean to pry,” he said.
“No offense taken.”
“I used to teach school up in Red Lodge,” he said. “Montana Territory.”
“I know where it is,” I said.
He wiped a wet spot on the wood with the rag he took from over his left shoulder.
“My late wife was from up around there,” I said, tossing back my drink and pouring myself another.
“That so? What was her name?”
“Ophelia Carson,” I said.
“I was at your wedding,” he said. “I’m Ophelia’s cousin, Roy Tender. We didn’t hardly meet except that once.”
He extended his hand and I shook it.
“How’d she die?” he said. “I mean I heard rumor she had, but that was a while back and I’d already moved over this way. I lost track of her people.”
I told him she died of the consumption. It wasn’t anybody’s business what she died of. It didn’t matter.
He shook his head and his face grew grim.
“Awfully young to die of anything,” he said.
He reached under the bar and got a glass and started to reach for a bottle on the shelf behind him.
“I’d like to drink to her memory,” he said.
I poured him one from my bottle instead.
“Here’s to Ophelia,” he said, raising his glass. I didn’t feel much like talking about her, but I clinked glasses with him anyway. He licked his lips.
“That bottle’s on me,” he said, pointing at the one we’d been drinking from.
“I don’t need the charity,” I said.
“Not offering any. Let it be some small comfort to you if it may. I don’t know what else to do or say.”
“Thanks, Roy,” I said. He smiled and went back to work, to the men clamoring for more liquor, cursing about anything that troubled their minds, those hungry, sad, lonely, drunk men who found it necessary to drink every night in a den amongst each other. Maybe some of them had wives to go home to and that was part of the problem, or maybe they didn’t have anything but an empty room and empty bed awaiting them and that was also part of the problem. I just knew I didn’t have either. I tossed back another drink, corked the bottle, and walked out into the night air.
It was raining a nice soft gentle rain.
I’d been thinking about Sara ever since she offered herself to me. I knew it was wrong. I knew nothing about her and she knew nothing about me, except right then we were just two lonely souls looking for something even if we didn’t know what it was.
I looked across the street at the hotel, the red brick dark now from the wetness. My gaze went up to the second story where I saw her light was still on, and I succumbed to the temptation.
She answered the door almost before I finished knocking and wordlessly stepped aside to let me in. I didn’t say anything, but instead leaned the shotgun against the wall, then removed my hat and slapped the rain from it against my leg before turning to face her.
For a long time neither of us spoke—what was wanted, or what was not. She was dressed in a dark blue silk kimono.
“I’m glad you changed your mind,” she said.
I put the bottle on a chair by the bed, and then sat myself on the bed’s edge and pulled off my boots and socks. She watched me carefully.
“I probably could stand a bath,” I said.
“You talk too much about other things,” she said.
“I don’t know what else to talk about any more.”
She came and held forth her arms and hands as though inviting a child and I stood and she lifted my shirt over my head and then undid my belt and I stepped out of my jeans. She pressed herself against me and her body was warm and soft and I sensed something in it wanting just as my own body wanted.
Her head tilted up and her eyes shone in the soft light like wet stones. Her mouth was soft and yielding against mine. Her tongue flicked against my lips like a darting minnow before I let it into the cave of my mouth. My mind went numb against everything but her, us, that moment, and I did not think of the past or of the future, only of the moment. And I did not think of her, either, of her past. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
The wind blew the rain now against the window glass and thunder shook through the room followed by a bright bolt of lightning that lit us up like a photographer’s flash. She had let the kimono drop away and stood naked, her flesh pale and bruised from the men who had abused her.
I wanted desperately to stand between her and any more pain, to become her protector forever more. It was not love in my heart for her, but something other than love that I could not explain even to myself—those things I was feeling as we toppled onto the bed.
She wrapped herself about me and we clung to each other against the storm’s rage and lost ourselves in it and in one another.
Later we laid side-by-side, she curled against me.
“You make love like you’re angry at me,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It is OK. I’m kind of used to it.”
“Please, don’t talk about anything in the past,” I said. “I’m not one of those men.”
“I know you ain’t, Royce.”
She stood from the bed and walked naked to the window and looked through its rain-streaked glass.
“Will you make us cigarettes?” she said over her shoulder.
“Yes.”
I leaned out of the bed and got the makings from my coat pocket and fashioned us each a shuck and lit them. My fingers shook a little but I had what was left in the bottle to solidify me against the tremors I knew would get worse.
She turned from the window and came to the bed and took the cigarette I lit for her. She put it to her lips and stared down at me, the glow from her smoke flaring each time she drew on it.
“Come, sit down,” I said.
I saw in her sad, hungry eyes the face of a woman who knew there was too little hope left for her and nowhere to turn any more. She seemed most vulnerable to me.
“I was hoping you’d change your mind,” she said, sitting down then. “I’m really glad you did.”
“I didn’t plan on it,” I said. “It just happened. I want you to know that.”
“Don’t matter whether you did or not. I’m just glad you came back.”
“I don’t want you to think . . .”
She shushed me by putting her fingers against my lips.
“Let’s just enjoy each other tonight and let the tomorrows take care of themselves, OK?”
I nodded. She was right. To hell with tomorrows.
She was surprisingly loving with me—gentle and genteel. I tried not to think of the brutality wrought against her by other men. I wondered why she even trusted me or any man.
“Did you find them?” she said after a time.
“No.”
“I wish you had . . . not on my account, but because of your friend. The ones who hurt me . . . well, at least they’re dead and good riddance.”
“I had to shoot a man,” I said, swinging around on my side of the bed, reaching for the bottle, then letting it be. “Earlier.”
She remained quiet.
“He was dying and begged me to do it.”
Her hand touched my shoulder, her mouth pressed against my back. Again I was surprised at the effect such tenderness had on me.
“This fellow had a wife and several children,” I said. “Now, she has no man
, those kids no daddy.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” she whispered, her breath warm against my skin, her breath smoky.
“I couldn’t save him.”
“You did him a kind act then.”
“I surely could stand a drink,” I said, and reached for the bottle and this time took hold of it.
“Wait,” she said.
She rose again from the bed and crossed the room to the carpet-sided bag that contained her possessions and took out a small tin whose metal winked in the next flash of lightening and brought it to the bed, climbed in next to me.
“Take some of these,” she said, pressing some small pills into my palm.
“What are they?”
“Cocaine pills. They’ll settle your nerves. Better than whiskey,” she said. “But better with the whiskey.”
I washed them down with a long pull from the bottle, and she did, too.
We finished our smokes and laid back on the bed again.
“What’s worse, do you suppose,” I said, “a boozer or a dope fiend?”
She laughed.
“It don’t matter, does it, Royce? We all have our crutches in life . . . booze, pills, sex. Whatever gets us through the night, I reckon.”
“I reckon so, too,” I said.
We made love again, only the second time I felt myself enveloped in a slow, peaceful haze that at some point felt as if we’d become one body, me and her, a single being that sought to exhaust itself upon itself and only then, when it finally did, did we fall unashamedly asleep.
I dreamed that night of Glen Weaver looking at me with one eye, saying: Please take my life, mister . . . it ain’t worth nothing this away.
Then the gun went off in my hand in a loud crash that woke me only to realize it was a clap of thunder and not a pistol shot. There was no one there but Sara, and I closed my eyes again and fell back into the same dream.
Chapter Thirteen
The next thing that awakened me wasn’t thunder but something like it.
The door crashed in and a shadow stood framed in it.
“You looking for me, you son-of-a-bitch!”
I reached for my shotgun, then remembered it was on the far wall. Bullets slammed into me like bare-knuckle fists knocking all the air out of me. I reached for Sara. But then my world went dark.