The Messenger

by Bill Brooks

  “Well, sir, here you is.”

  “Thanks kindly for everything.”

  “I wish you luck with your business.”

  “I’ll need it.”

  Before we shook hands, Lincoln reached behind the wagon seat and shook free a denim jacket with brass buttons.

  “Thought you might want this old coat of mine. I sorta outgrowed it.”

  I felt embarrassed to take a man’s coat, but I took it anyway in the spirit in which it was offered. There was a quiet strength in Lincoln Johnson’s hand. Strength that had been there all that man’s life, I suspected. A man’s strength that was formed from hard labor and hard times he’d refused to let defeat him. It was a hand that had probably wrestled the devil and won, and rubbed away a child’s tear.

  “Tell your missus thanks again for that fine meal,” I said.

  The big man nodded, then turned his wagon around in the middle of the wide street, and started back in the direction we’d just come from.

  I stepped inside the gun shop.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The man behind the gun counter had an evil scar that looked like someone had sliced his cheek ear to lip and someone else had done a bad job of sewing it up. He wore smoke-colored spectacles and was inlaying a wood stock of maple with a fine little metal tool.

  He looked up when the bell above the door rang and stopped his work. He wore a greasy leather apron and the place smelled of gun oil and metal filings. There was a rack of various types of long guns along one wall—rifles and shotguns and sporting guns and even an old Civil War musket with a stock held together by a strand of wire.

  “What can I do for you?” he said. His neck was grizzled with unshaven bristles that flashed like small silver needles.

  “I want to buy a gun.”

  “That’s why most come in here,” he said. “What kind of gun? Handgun or long gun?”

  “Shotgun,” I said.

  He rose up.

  “Got several, anything in particular?”

  I walked over to the rack. There, plain as anything, was my gun—the one Burt had given me that bad day I’d decided to try my hand at honest work.

  “This one,” I said. “How much?”

  “Fifteen dollars and I’ll throw in a box of shells.”

  “Fifteen, hell,” I said, and turned to look at him. He’d stiffened considerable.

  “That’s my gun,” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “Well, ain’t you the prize,” he said. “I don’t see how that could be your gun when it’s in my rack.”

  “Who gave you this?” I said.

  “Nobody gave me nothing. I bought that gun.”

  “Who’d you buy it from?”

  “What the hell business is that of yours?”

  I crossed the room in three strides and, without saying a word, punched him just below that scar. I felt bone give way under the ruined flesh and he went down hard and I grabbed the half-carved maple wood stock and said: “If you want, I can beat you to death with this. Or, you can just answer my damned question.”

  His eye was already closing from the busted cheek bone and I would like to say I felt bad that I hit him but seeing my stolen gun standing in his rack, knowing that whoever shot me had taken it, and then sold it—well, I wasn’t sorry for anything.

  He looked up, holding one rough hand to his face.

  “A woman sold it to me.”

  “What’d she look like?”

  He described Belle Moon right down to her cold blue eyes.

  I dug $2 out of the envelope and tossed it on the counter and said—“Get me a box of shells for my gun.”—and turned and yanked it free of the rack and came back over and waited for him to get me a box of shells, then broke the breech and put one shell in each chamber and snapped it closed again.

  He looked forlorn.

  “See that,” I said, pointing to what looked like some rust spots on the top of the twin barrels. “That’s my god-damned blood.”

  I walked out with the box of shells in my pocket except for the pair that were in the shotgun.

  I asked after the local law and was told how to find him.

  His name was John Dove and he kept court at a place called the Hair of the Dog—a nasty little booze parlor down at the end of the main drag.

  I found John Dove sitting with three others, playing some sort of cards—whist maybe—and I said: “I understand you’re the law.”

  He looked up at me with a pair of porcine eyes like you might see on a blue shoat looking for its slops.

  “What if I am?” he said.

  “My name’s Royce Blood,” I said. “And I was shot in that hotel up the street. About three or four weeks ago.”

  The other playing cards with John Dove watched me like I was a rabbit and they were hunting pups—not quite sure what to do with me, if anything.

  “Well, seems I heard about that,” he said. “I was gone that week, fishing.”

  “So I was told.”

  “I like to fish,” he said.

  “When there’s trouble afoot or otherwise,” I said.

  His piggish gaze fell to the shotgun in my grip.

  He ordered a round of drinks for himself and his friends, and, when they came, he held his for a moment to his lips, looking at me over the top of his glass, then tossed it back. He was fat like a shoat hog, too, and had rust-colored gunfighter moustaches and I don’t doubt that somewhere in his history he’d killed more than one man.

  “What you want, mister?” he said, wiping his mouth with two fingers.

  “I want to know where Gypsy Davy and Belle Moon are,” I said.

  “Gypsy Davy?” he hooted. “Belle Moon?”

  The others seemed to be swallowing their grins.

  I stepped back away from the table.

  “I came here looking for them,” I said. “But I also came looking for the woman who was with me that night. Tell me what happened to her.”

  He looked serious then, like a big fat rattler coiling in order to strike.

  “There was a woman killed, yes,” he said. “Just like I heard you was, so who the hell knows who is dead and who isn’t?”

  He looked about at his pals, and they smiled like they were all playing to an inside straight up against a pair of deuces.

  “This is getting to be just like Jerusalem with all these dead people risen up and walking around,” John Dove continued. I guess he thought he was being clever. He did not understand how close he was to being dead.

  “Where would they have taken her if she was dead?” I said.

  “The graveyard, I suspect. Ain’t that usually where you take dead people?”

  I looked at the others. They were close to walking in the light, too, as far as I was concerned. I had enough buckshot for all of them.

  I’d seen a sign for an undertaker on the way to the saloon. Every town had one—it was the one constant business a man who didn’t mind working in that line could count on.

  “You’ve been real friendly,” I said. “I also had a horse and wagon. Where might they have gone?”

  He shrugged.

  “I guess the way of all things,” he said, and sniggered.

  “I find Davy in this town I’m going to kill him,” I said. “Just so you know.”

  The snigger went away.

  “Nobody gets killed in my town ’less I do it,” he said.

  “You want to start now?” I said.

  I’d learned over a lifetime of watching other men who will fight and who will try and talk you to death. The ones that will fight get right to it most generally. The fat man eased whatever was in his flesh and bone and let it settle back into that bloated body of his.

  “I’ll decide when the killing starts,” he said.

  “Good, just let me know.”

  I backed out, not trusting the son-of-a-bitch not to back shoot me. I know some talk about a code of honor and some have it, but most don’t when it comes to being especially sc
ared of the other man.

  I hustled up to the undertaker’s and found him nearly passed out drunk on a horsehair sofa inside. He tried to right himself at my entrance but struggled to do so.

  “Do ya need a funeral?” he said in a slurred Irish accent. He was a little bitty fellow and his trousers were too short, showing off a pair of shiny shin bones. “For ya certainly don’t look dead to me!” He laughed at his own joke. Always a bad sign of character.

  I asked about Sara.

  He shook his head.

  “Last woman I buried was Maude Smith,” he said. “I buried all three of her husbands before her, too. Got the whole family. Always do, always will.”

  “If a woman was to die in this town, wouldn’t it be you who’d know about it?”

  “I would,” he said.

  “So no young woman died, most specifically shot in that hotel across the street?”

  He tried sitting up again, but fell back.

  “’Tis liquor that knows my name,” he said, and shook his head. “Sorry, friend, I have not handled or otherwise disposed of any female flesh younger than old Maude who was nearly a hundred and looked every day of it, too.” He wrinkled his nose at the thought, then added: “Nor have I touched any live female flesh that young in ages.” He grinned, and closed his eyes.

  I went out and across to the hotel, hoping to find the clerk that was on duty. But it wasn’t the same man. The other one had black hair and this one was nearly bald and a lot older. I told him why I’d come.

  “That would have been Purvis,” he said.

  “Where might I find him?”

  “I heard he went to Omaha to become a carpenter,” he said.

  “How much you know about folks around these parts?” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “Don’t know nothing.”

  I took the last of the money from the envelope and set it on the desk.

  “It’s yours if you can tell me where to find either Gypsy Davy or Belle Moon,” I said.

  He stared at it a long time.

  “I don’t nothing about a Gypsy Davy,” he said, his fingers sort of dancing toward the money. “But I know Belle’s got a ma or aunt or something living out west of here.”

  I had him tell me how to find her place, and then watched as he scooped the money up.

  “You tell anybody I said anything about this,” he said, “I’ll deny it.”

  “Judas got thirty pieces of silver,” I said. “You got nineteen dollars.”

  I walked down to the livery to see if I could find my horse and wagon. A Negro was pitching hay into the corral from a stack alongside the shed. A little dark-skinned girl sat on a wood bench, watching him.

  I told him the situation. He just looked long at me. Then he said: “I heard about you.”

  “What’d you hear?” I said.

  “Heard they killed you at the hotel. Some lady, too.”

  “You hear who it was killed me?” I said.

  He shook his head. He had a horseshoe of graying hair and the top of his head gleamed with sun and sweat. He glanced over at the child.

  “No,” he said. “I din’t hear no more than they was a killing.”

  “What about that horse and wagon?” I said.

  He looked toward the barn.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “Saddle me the horse and you can keep the wagon.”

  I saw that he was studying on it. Then he nodded.

  As he tightened the cinch on what used to be my horse, sort of, I said: “You hear of a Missus Moon who lives west of here?”

  “They’s a crazy old woman named that, yas.”

  I asked him to give me directions and he did. I forked the bay and gave the child a glance. Her eyes were large and white and dark in the centers. She was skinny and dressed raggedly but had the face of an angel.

  I rode west until I spotted the low-lying shack.

  There, sitting out front on an upturned wood keg, was Dew Hardy, looking like a man who’d gone to a razor fight without his razor.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Pinkerton was peeling an apple with a small paring knife. He stopped peeling when I rode up. His face was lashed with red stripes and his nose was a lot more crooked than I remembered it and his right eye looked a little off.

  “I see you made it,” he said.

  “I come looking for Belle’s ma or aunt or whatever the hell she is,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Surviving mostly,” he said, then peeled some more of the apple, letting the long string of red skin curl off the blade of his knife like a snake’s skin.

  His hair hung wetly down over his face when he dipped his head to study the apple he peeled. His clothes were poor but clean. He wore an old pair of brogan shoes that looked like they chaffed his ankles; you could see because his pants were high-water.

  He looked up again and bit into the soft white pulp and looked pleased at its taste.

  Then the front door of the shack opened and a woman stepped out, carrying a long-barreled gun that was as tall as she was—an old ball-and-powder. She was bony as a yard chicken with a yard chicken’s beak for a nose and the same beady eyes a yard chicken has, and she said: “What you want, mister?”

  “Etta Winesop, Belle’s aunty,” Dew Hardy said, thumbing back over his shoulder. “You best be careful, she’s mighty protective.”

  “Put that gun away, ma’am, before you kill somebody,” I said.

  “That’s what I aim to do if you’ve come to take him!” she said.

  I looked at the Pinkerton. He looked sheepish as hell.

  “I didn’t come to take him,” I said. “I come to find out where Belle Moon is.”

  “I don’t know no such body,” she said. Her voice was pinched like a woman who is always fearful.

  “You keep waving that gun around, I’m going to have to take it off you,” I said.

  “Just you damn’ well try, mister.”

  “She’s a pickle,” Dew Hardy said, eating more of his apple.

  She had ringlets of ash gray hair and no beauty to her whatsoever. If you’d have wanted a spell cast on you, she might have been the one to see.

  “Go on, git!” she said to me.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not gitting anywhere until you tell me what I came here for.”

  She advanced and stood next to Dew Hardy.

  “Run him off,” she said to the Pinkerton.

  “With what, Etta, this here paring knife?”

  “Take my gun and shoot him.”

  “What would I do with him if I was to do that?”

  “Bury him out back.”

  “Now, Etta, I know this fellow and he’s not so bad.”

  “You going off with him?”

  “I wasn’t planning on it,” Dew Hardy said. He bit another chunk of the apple and chewed it thoughtfully, then added: “But then, I wasn’t planning on a lot of things.”

  “I saved your worthless hide,” she said.

  “That you most certainly did and for it I am eternally grateful.”

  “I want to know where Belle Moon is even if I have to do bad things to you,” I threatened.

  She punched Dew Hardy in the shoulder with the butt of her gun.

  “Defend me!” she cried.

  Dew Hardy hummed and kept eating his apple as though she wasn’t there.

  “You worthless bastard!” she said, and stalked into the house.

  “What’s between you two?” I said.

  “I owe her,” Dew Hardy said.

  “How the hell did you end up here?” I said.

  He bit off the last piece of apple, then tossed the core aside.

  “I was hot on their trail,” he said, gazing off to nowhere in particular—just the great beyond. “I thought I had run them to ground, too.”

  I looked toward the house to make sure the old crone wasn’t planning on assassinating me from a window.

  “Anyway, I tracked them down to where I found Belle.” H
e paused as though troubled by the memory and shook his head slowly. “You want to know how I found her?”

  “Go on with it,” I said, growing impatient.

  “Naked, is how. Sitting her horse without a stitch on . . . under the shade of a buckeye tree. I seen that and I fell for the oldest trick in the book.”

  “She led you into an ambush,” I said.

  Again he shook his head.

  “I never seen a woman that beautiful, naked or otherwise,” he said. “It dazzled my thinking. You know I’m like every other man . . . led by my pecker and it ain’t got no sense.”

  “Davy was waylaying for you and Belle led you to him.”

  “I was the rabbit and him the fox,” the Pinkerton said. “Trapped me easy as anything.”

  “Surprised he didn’t kill you,” I said.

  Dew Hardy looked up with a half-satisfied look.

  “He sure gave it all he had,” he said. “He trussed me to a fence post with barb wire, then used his fists on me, then he whipped me with his belt so the blood would draw flies and ants to me. Belle just sat there, enjoying the show. Coldest bitch I ever encountered in my life.”

  I heard the old woman howling inside the shack.

  “She’s just grieving,” Dew Hardy said.

  “Grieving for what?” I said.

  “She’s certain you’re going to take me away from her.”

  “Does she think she owns you?”

  “She does,” he said. “Told me that she saved my life and that I was forever hers. Who was I to argue? She came along just hours before I would have perished. All eaten up by flies and ants and mosquitoes. I could hear wolves howling in the dark. They smelled my blood and would have eaten the meat off my bones. I was tied up for three days and nights before she came along and found me. She took to me like a cat to sweet milk.” Dew Hardy looked pleased with himself in an odd sort of way.

  “All well and good,” I said, “but what I don’t understand is why you haven’t gotten her to tell you where Davy and Belle are and tracked them down . . . you wanted that damned stolen gold so bad.”

  He squinted. A twitch started under his off eye.

  “Tell you the truth,” he said, “I’m not sure I’d want to catch them after the way they did me. The second night out there, tied to that fence post, I talked to Jesus and the devil. They both came to visit me, and they was arguing over which one should take my soul and I was arguing I wasn’t yet ready to go nowheres.” A tear leaked from his eye.