The Old Wolves

by Peter Brandvold

  “Not me.” Greta pushed off the steps and started into the street. “I’m gonna settle for a sponge bath, and then I’m gonna take a long, deep nap. Wake me if we have any visitors—will you, fellas?”

  “Sleep well, girl,” Spurr said, “and here. Might need that.”

  He extended one of the bottles to Greta, which she took and hefted in her hand, narrowing an appreciative eye at the old lawman. “Thanks.”

  Spurr winked. “Don’t mention it.”

  When she’d drifted off, Spurr and Drago finished pulling on their boots and walked around the side of the mercantile, the mercantiler staring after them curiously. The two oldsters found a path that climbed the slope to the tent that housed three large, deep, corrugated tin washtubs.

  The man who ran the bathhouse, which, judging by several copper pots and a small maze of clotheslines strung between fir trees, doubled as a laundry, was a lanky, freckled Irishman whom Spurr and Drago found asleep in a Windsor chair parked in the cool sunshine before the tent.

  A yellow-covered “dime” novel lay open on his lap; a cold cigar drooped from between his turkey lips. A scruffy-looking little poodle slept in a tight wooly ball beneath his chair until, hearing the strangers approach, he came out to bark and nip at the pilgrims’ ankles.

  The bathhouse manager woke, ambled over to scoop the feisty critter up in his arms, and said, “What’s your pleasure, buckos? You both look like a couple of ore drays ran over you and then backed over ya to squeeze the rest of your oozin’s out!” He laughed and extended a suntanned, freckled hand. “Jeff Mulligan at your service! I usually gotta couple girls around the place to spice things up, but Margie and Hannah done hightailed it out of the mountains in fear of the winter’s first snow. So I reckon all I can offer is a bath—but the best, hottest, healthiest bath in the whole Front Range, and that ain’t blarney!”

  “That’s the water down there, eh?” Spurr looked over to where salty-smelling steam slithered up out of the near rocks, past a sleepy-looking burro that stood hang-headed in the shade of a gnarled cedar. Four empty wooden buckets hung from the wooden pack frame strapped to the beast’s back.

  “Elixir of the Gods of the Mountains, my friend!” Mulligan laughed and led the bucket-laden burro down toward the steam, calling behind him, “Go ahead and make yourselves comfortable in the tent, gentlemen. Me an’ my sweet Rosy will be back in two jangles of a whore’s bell!”

  The Irishman continued down the path toward the springs, the little poodle trotting along beside the burro, stopping occasionally to sniff and to lift one of his hind legs on a shrub or a rock.

  Spurr set the bottles down on a bench and then sat on the bench himself and began stripping off his clothes, starting with the mackinaw. Boomer did the same. When they were down to their stiff, sweat-crusted balbriggans, socks, neckerchiefs, and hats, Spurr gave the outlaw a cigar.

  “There you go—don’t tell me I never done nothin’ for you, Boomer. Whiskey and a cigar from the man who’s been hopin’ you was dead for nigh on the past fifteen years.”

  Spurr scratched a match to life on the seat of his canvas trousers lumped beside him on the bench, and extended it so Boomer could light his cigar. Puffing smoke, the old outlaw chuckled and leaned back against a post.

  While Spurr lit his own cigar, Boomer said, “You saved my life, Spurr. I mean, of course, you almost got me killed initially, by not letting me go, but you just saved my life up there on that ridge.”

  “Nope.” Spurr blew smoke in the cool air around his head and tossed the match in the dirt. “I saved Greta’s life. Just so happens I saved yours in the bargain, but them’s were the cards I was dealt. St. Pete’ll find it in his heart to forgive me that one transgression.”

  “Shit, you know what, Spurr?”

  Spurr popped the cork on the bottle. “What?”

  Drago was watching Mulligan fill his wooden buckets at the springs. The old Irishman and the burro looked like ghosts inside the billowing, sunlit steam. The little poodle was a ways off, digging for a gopher.

  “I think you an’ me ain’t all that different. That’s why we was friends once. I think you might have gone my way under similar circumstances.”

  “What circumstances is that?”

  “The right offer.”

  “You mean the right offer to join a band of cold-blooded killers and train robbers?” Spurr shook his head and took a deep pull from the whiskey bottle. “No, I don’t think so, Boomer. It takes a special kind of weak man to do that. Me, I’d prefer to make an honest livin’ as opposed to a dishonest one.”

  Boomer looked at him, scratching at a mole at a corner of his mouth, and arching the brow over his good eye. “How can you be so sure what you’d do if the right offer came along?”

  “I know,” Spurr said, handing Boomer the bottle. “I just know, Boomer. Don’t try to take that away from me, ’cause you can’t. I just know. It ain’t that I didn’t have my own offers and opportunities. Where I traveled, lawdoggin’, a man could do what he wanted. I chose to do what my badge and my own good conscience bid me to do.”

  He shook his head and watched Mulligan leading the burro and the splashing, steaming buckets back toward the tent. “I’m no saint. But I was a good lawman, by god. And I got that to take to the grave with me.”

  Drago took a deep pull from the bottle, glaring at Spurr. He pulled the bottle down, swallowed, blinked his good eye, and said in a sharp, caustic tone, “Well, good for you!” He rose and began skinning angrily out of his underwear. “Come on, Paddy. I’m freezin’ my ass off out here!”

  THIRTY-ONE

  When Mulligan had filled his and Drago’s tubs in the tent, which sat about six feet apart, Spurr skinned out of his balbriggans and asked the Irishman to haul a load of water down to the Albuquerque Hotel.

  “Fill a tub for a pretty young blonde named Greta.” Spurr winked and tossed the man two silver dollars.

  “A pretty girl named Greta. You got it, bucko!”

  The Irishman, the poodle and the burro ambled back toward the springs, Mulligan whistling happily for the unexpected business. Spurr stepped into the soothingly hot water, sucking a sharp breath.

  He continued sucking that breath as he slowly lowered himself into the murky-gray, salty liquid that sent steam snakes slithering into the chill air of the tent. The tent was open so that the bathers could sit and soak and stare out over the roofs of the little trail town. Spurr sat down and drew his knees up, leaning back and curling his toes at the bottom of the tub.

  They stung luxuriously as the hot, salty water cleaned out the scrapes and blisters.

  Spurr glanced up to see that he was still wearing his hat. He chuckled as he tossed the hat onto the bench sitting to his right and on which the rest of his clothes were piled, and sat back once more, puffing the cigar in his teeth. Drago splashed around in his own tub for a time, and then the old outlaw grabbed his cigar off the bench to his left and looked at the coal.

  Reluctantly, still miffed after the previous turn of their conversation, he asked for a light. Spurr chuckled and gave the man his cigar, and when Boomer had his own cigar going once more, he sat back in the tub and blew the smoke out over the sun-washed town.

  “I expect we’ll be forkin’ trails here,” the old outlaw said, cutting his cautious eye over to Spurr as though to see how the old lawman took the statement.

  “I ’spect.”

  “What’s that?” Drago said, skeptical. “I couldn’t hear ya. My ears is still ringin’ from all the gunfire.”

  Spurr rolled the stogie from one corner of his mouth to the other, watching a small wagon pulled by a lean mule and driven by a bearded gent in buckskins roll along the main street of Green Valley. The wagon was just visible over the rooftops.

  Several shopkeepers and saloon customers had drifted out of their stores and watering holes to chin on the boardwalks linin
g the street. They gestured and seemed generally excited. Something told Spurr that the news about the dead bear had blown through Green Valley, causing a mild uproar. He thought he could hear piano music emanating from one of the saloons.

  Spurr turned to Drago, who sat back in his tub, scowling at the old lawman. “I said you can do whatever the hell you damn well please, Drago.” Spurr picked up the bottle sitting on the ground between them, took a drink, and set the bottle back down.

  “That’s it, then? You ain’t gonna try to bring me in?”

  “I wouldn’t need to try, Boomer. If I wanted to bring you in, I would. But the plain truth of it is, you’re no longer worth my time. As far as I and the U.S. government is concerned, you died back in the canyon where Greta was savaged, and I done turned in my badge. I got bigger fish to fry.”

  “You ain’t still plannin’ on goin’ after Keneally, are ya?”

  Spurr flicked ashes from his cigar; they sizzled in the water, which was cooling rapidly. “I do indeed.”

  “Well, you’re even dumber than you look, then. Dumb men don’t learn from their mistakes. Or did you forget what we just been through—climbin’ over a ridge to wriggle away from them boys and almost got ate up by ole Satan!”

  “I’m gonna rent a horse, if there’s one to be rented here in Green Valley. If not, I’ll borrow one. Then I’ll be goin’ after Keneally.” Spurr glanced at Boomer. “You do what you have to do to keep Greta from comin’ after me. Take her out of the mountains, get her put up safe somewhere. After you do that, I don’t care what you do or where you go.”

  “You can’t possibly think that you alone can bring that gang to heel, Spurr!”

  “No, but I can cut off the beast’s head. By that I mean drill Keneally right between his eyes.” Spurr glared at Boomer and tapped his index finger against the bridge of his nose. “And then I’ll drill as many more o’ them sons o’ bitches as I can before we all go dancin’ off to hell together.”

  Boomer slowly shook his head. “You got a silly sense of things. And that’s against the law, you know? That sounds like vigilantism to me, Marshal Spurr!”

  Sitting back in his tub, Spurr puffed on his stogie and said, “Well, I’m due. And so is Greta.” He heaved and hoisted and cursed himself to a standing position, the lukewarm water rolling off his pale, sinewy frame. “In the meantime, I’m gonna go fetch me a steak and get some sleep. I’m gonna need it.”

  “Well, hell—I’ll comin’ with ya, since we’re all made up an’ all!” Boomer rose from his own soapy water, grinning. “I’ll even buy . . . if’n you’re not too good to accept a gift from a notorious outlaw, that is . . .”

  Spurr narrowed a serious eye at Boomer. “You just get Greta out of these mountains to safety, you hear?”

  Boomer had just stepped out of his tub and was drying himself with a towel provided by the Irishman. He held Spurr’s gaze for several beats, and then he grinned again. “Say, I think you’re gone for that girl.” A pensive cast stole over his eye. A longing sadness shaped his lips inside his grizzled black beard.

  He said, “Oh, to be young again, eh, partner?”

  * * *

  Spurr and Drago ate steaks with all the trimmings in the Albuquerque’s dining room. Spurr ordered the persnickety and disapproving Mrs. Bertram to deliver a steak to Greta’s room, as well, and the woman did so with a caustic chuff.

  The middle-aged, full-hipped woman who ran the place with her husband, who rattled around in the kitchen, was candidly disapproving of her two raggedy, unshaven, old customers. In spite of their baths, they no doubt had the smell of the owlhoot trail about them, Spurr surmised.

  Mrs. Bertram disapproved of the whiskey and tobacco they partook of liberally in her white-clothed dining parlor appointed with polished silver, an ancient grandfather clock, brocade drapes, and potted flowers hanging from the ceiling. Doubtless, she also suspected something amiss about the circumstances of the pretty girl she was housing upstairs and who’d not only had a bath delivered to her, but now a meal, as well.

  After their meal, Spurr and Drago rented rooms from Mrs. Bertram, who kept her lips pursed as each man signed his name in the guestbook. When she’d dropped their coins in a box under the varnished oak desk, Spurr said, “What about the keys?”

  “No keys on any of the doors,” the old woman said with a haughty air, in a thick Southern accent, spreading her pudgy hands and smiling superciliously. “I find that men are more apt to behave themselves if the doors remain unlocked at all times.”

  Drago gave a caustic chuff. “Well, ain’t you just—”

  “Come on, Boomer,” Spurr said, turning the man by an arm and nudging him toward the stairs. “Time for your beauty rest.”

  When Spurr and Drago parted ways on the second floor, Spurr went into the room the old woman had assigned him, room eight, and stripped as quickly as he could all the way down to his birthday suit. He left his clothes and his guns piled on the floor at the foot of the double bed. He’d no sooner crawled under the soft sheets and quilts and rested his head back on the deep feather pillow than his eyelids drooped down over his eyes and he was out like a blown lamp.

  He doubted he’d ever slept so deeply, dreamlessly. It was like being wrapped in warm feathers, a cool breeze spiced with peppermint cat-footing across his aching brain.

  When he woke and lifted his head in response to some unidentified sound—or was it his lawman’s sense of imminent danger?—it took him several seconds to remember where he was and how he’d gotten there. The windows flanking the bed were both dark.

  Noise of raucous revelry—men yelling, women laughing, pianos pattering, and fiddles fiddling—rose from the street outside. He could also tell from the sounds that people were dancing in the street. Smells emanating from that direction were of roasting bear. Spurr knew the smell.

  The villagers were having a fest to celebrate the demise of Satan!

  Spurr smacked his lips and ran a hand down his face. He’d just flopped back down against his pillow, intending to go on sleeping until morning, when there was a light tap on his door. He realized then that it had been a similar tap, not the din from the street, that had awakened him.

  It took him a moment to find his voice. He wished he’d hauled his guns up closer to the bed. Ready to throw the covers back and leap for both pistols resting amongst his clothes, he said, “Who’s there?”

  “You awake?” Greta asked softly on the other side of the door.

  Before Spurr could respond, the door latch clicked. The door came open, hinges squeaking quietly.

  Spurr saw her slender figure silhouetted against the lamplight in the hall. Her hair spilled across her shoulders, flashing golden in the light just before she closed the door. Spurr also saw that she was holding a blanket around her shoulders. But as the door closed, he saw in the light from the villagers’ cook fire pushing through the windows behind him, the blanket drop to the floor. It made a sibilant sound as it piled up at her feet.

  Naked, Greta walked around the side of the bed, and threw the covers back. He could smell the intoxicating smell of woman about her, scrubbed of the smoke and horse smells and all the other trail smells, as she slid in beside him and drew the covers up to her bare shoulders.

  She turned toward him, tenting the covers across her shoulders. Her hair hung down over her breasts, which sloped toward the sheets as she snuggled against him.

  “Hold on, girl,” Spurr said, finally finding his shock-pinched voice again. “One of us must be dreamin’, and if it’s you, I do believe you’re sleepwalkin’, honey!”

  Greta laughed. He felt her warm lips part as she nuzzled his shoulder. “I got lonely, Spurr.”

  “You did?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  She wrapped an arm across his belly as she let her head sink down against his pillow, her face only an inch from his. He could smell her warm breath on
his cheek. Her arm was warm and yielding across his waist. He knew that what felt like a tender flower petal pressed up against his ribs was one of her nipples. He tried to steel himself against the sensation of her, but he’d be damned if he didn’t feel an erection coming on—hard and fast.

  It was damned uncomfortable.

  “Greta, I’m old.”

  “Older than the damn hills,” she said with a humorous snort against his neck, squirming against him.

  “You get the idea, then.”

  “What idea’s that, Spurr?”

  “That I’m old enough to be your father. Possibly even old enough to be your grandfather . . . though that’s a liberal estimation.” He chuckled.

  “Oh, shut up about that, Spurr. I just got to missing you, that’s all. No one knows how to take care of a girl like you do. And I don’t think there’s any man half your age any better or tougher than you are, neither.”

  “Be that as it may . . .”

  She drew her arm tighter around him. She groaned as she snuggled harder against him, sliding one of her long, cool legs over his left one. “I didn’t come in here to make love. I was just lonesome and wanted to be near you and to snuggle up against you”—he felt her lips part in a sexy smile against his neck as she whispered into his ear—“but I can see it’s gonna happen.”

  She lowered her hand to his half erection. Her touch was light, gently probing, fondling.

  Spurr opened his mouth to draw a heavy breath.

  “Greta, did you forget what happened to you?”

  “No, I didn’t forget. And I don’t intend to let you stick this ax handle in me, neither.” She wagged his dong and smiled. She was whispering in his ear so that he thought he could feel her warm breath sweeping all through his head, straightening out and soothing the kinks and aches in his brain. “But I can do other things.”

  She gave a husky laugh as she rolled on top of him, straddling him, wrapped her arms around his neck and lowered her face very slowly to his. That one eye crossed as she very gently pecked his swollen nose.