But that night, he saw her and knew she was walking toward him.
She blocked the red ball of the setting sun as she drew near. They were together inside a crimson lake. He could barely breathe and the water of this moment turned her walk into a slow swim toward him, her hair undulating out from her shoulders, her dress floating around her calves. He remembered forever that dress was the blue of morning sky. She wore no makeup on her skin, the color of milked coffee. The scent of purple lilacs came with her. Gene felt like Sandy spinning free of the chain that hung him high above the
earth as he fell into her midnight eyes.
He knew he said “Hello Billie” and she said “Hello Gene.”
Maybe they tried to say more but they couldn’t, not until she said: “I need your help. I need you to meet with some men. They sent me to get you. They want you to do something. It might save me, but it won’t be anything but trouble for you, no matter what they promise. But I had to come. I had to ask. I had to do that much. I’m sorry.”
All of a sudden it was night. Lights came on throughout the town. The glow from the street lamp on the corner yellowed her skin.
“Is it a long walk?” said Gene.
“I’ve got their car.”
The license plate on the Ford bore the county ID numbers from Butte, 200 miles to the south, the only place rougher than Shelby in the whole state. Butte was a smokestack city of 60,000 people, tough Bohunk miners digging up the richest hill on earth for Irish robber barons who ran the place with Pinkertons, dynamite and satchels of cash they spent to fight off Wobbly labor organizers and Ku Klux Klein Catholic haters and reform meddlers from back East. On a good day, Shelby only had 1,200 people crowded into its prairie valley, busted-out honyockers who’d believed the Iowa newspapers’ lies about homesteading, ranchers like Jensen and cowboys who cut barbed wire fences whenever they rode up to one, Basque sheepherders who couldn’t converse with two-legged creatures, Blackfeet and Gros Ventre and even Cheyenne stepped off their scrub reservations hunting for hope or honor or a last resort hell of a good time, railroad men, shopkeepers and saloon tenders and border runners and streetwalkers and roughnecks like Gene had become who were trying to cash in on the Great North Country Oil Strike of 1921 that had filled every hotel hallway with dime-a-night cots.
Gene liked the no-nonsense way Billie drove, shifting when she had to, not afraid to let the engine whine and work it up a steep grade rather than panic-shift to high, stall and maybe die. She drove them east, out of town past the railroad roundhouse and the mooing slaughterhouse pens, up and over the rim of the valley. Lamps of the town winked away in the Ford’s mirror. Somebody’d shotgunned a million white stars in the night overhead. The sky shimmered with green and pink sheets of northern lights, and the yellow cones of the car headlights showed only a narrow ribbon of oiled highway.
“This road goes all the way to Chicago,” said Gene.
“We can’t,” said Billie. “I can’t.”
She drove into the night.
“Why me?” he asked.
“Because of who you are. What you can do. California.”
“Because I’d come if you asked.”
“I don’t know what to say about that.”
“We never did.”
“No.” She steered the car toward a farmhouse. “We didn’t. Neither of us.”
She stopped the car in the dark yard beside a Cadillac Gene thought he recognized.
“I’ll take you back right now, if you want,” she said.
“Will you stay with me?”
He saw her head shake.
“Then let’s go,” said Gene as he got out of the car. “They’re waiting.”
Her brother opened the farmhouse door. He wore a frayed white shirt unbuttoned at the collar, loose pants and a pencil pusher’s black shoes that were as dull as his droopy eyes. His right hand that pumped Gene’s was strong enough to deal cards at the Palace Hotel but not much more, a weak grasp that whispered he was a man who couldn’t cover his bets.
“Zhene Mallette!” he slurred. “What d’you say, what d’you know, good ta see you!”
“How you doing, Harry?” said Gene, though he knew enough to know that answer and sent all the question’s sincerity to the man’s sister. Gene’s fingers brushed Harry back into the living room where the two men who mattered waited, and though he silently prayed otherwise, he sensed Billie step into the farmhouse behind him and shut the door.
The Cadillac in the yard belonged to the pudgy Shelby banker standing by the table supporting a bottle of pre-Prohibition whiskey and glasses. The brass nameplate on his desk in the bank read peter taylor—vice president. He had a knotty head of not much hair and reminded Gene of a grinning toad who never said no to another fly.
“Good evening, Mr. Mallette,” said Taylor. “Thank you for coming.”
“Wasn’t for you,” said Gene.
“We know,” said the other man, the one Gene had never seen. Least, he’d never seen that particular black-haired city-suited man who hadn’t bothered to get up off the couch—or to either fill his hand with the .45 on his lap or hide the gun. Gene’d seen those eyes and that set of face once in the trenches, another time in a Tijuana cantina, a third time ringside at a smoker in Fresno, and the last and worst time in a set of chains headed through the work camp to the scaffold at San Quentin. Wasn’t that the man was tough, though Gene knew he could take a beating and then some, it was that he’d crawl up off any floor you knocked him down on to tear your heart in two and suck in the sound of ripping flesh.
“Please,” said the banker, “have a chair. Call me Peter.”
“Never figured on calling you at all.”
“Life adds up like we don’t expect. Please, sit down. There, beside the woman.”
“Where should I sit?” said her brother, but his words went into the night as didn’t matter.
Gene eased himself into the folding chair closest to the couch and acted like his legs weren’t coiled springs. Banker Taylor settled into an easy chair and filled glasses with whiskey. Harry
Larson strutted to the folding chair close to Gene, grandly lowered himself but misjudged his balance and almost crashed to the floor. By the time he got himself stable, his sister stood behind him, a hand on his shoulder. The man on the couch didn’t move.
“Nice night for a drive.” Gene sent his words to the banker, kept the man on the couch in his gaze. “But that whiskey is illegal. Seems like a man in your position would be more careful.”
“Laws like Prohibition are for people who fear man’s nature." Taylor held a whiskey toward Gene. When Gene didn’t take it, Taylor sat the glass on a milk crate near Gene’s legs. “Wise of you not to drink, given the opportunity in front of you. As for what’s legal, a man like you who’s served time in a prison work camp can’t be sanctimonious.”
“Your friend on the couch there would know more about prison than me.”
“Never been,” said the man on the couch. “Witnesses never make it to the trials.”
Banker Taylor extended a glass of whiskey to the blackhaired man. “Gene, you’ll find that Norman here—pardon my manners, this is Norman Doyle—Mr. Doyle is a lucky man.”
Doyle took the whiskey glass with his left hand; the butt of the .45 faced his right.
“You don’t need a glass, do you, Harry? You took care of yourself as soon as your sis left for town. Your vice is still legal, though the politicians are going to fix that, too. And you, Wilemena —or should I call you Widow Harris? You know, Gene, she’s been without a man for a long time. A broke-in mare without a saddle for the itch. 1 don’t think we’ll give her a glass. She’s a woman, plus whiskey and Injuns don’t mix, even if they are breeds.”
“Get to it,” snapped Gene.
“How you doing in the market?”
“What?”
“The stock market,” said the banker. “Everybody plays the market these days. Going up, up, up. Going to make everybody a
/> millionaire. How you doing in the stock market?”
“You know I’m not that kind of guy.”
“You mean you can’t be. ’Cause you don’t have the money. So how you going to get rich? This is America. Everybody wants to get rich. Can’t get a good car or the woman you want if you don’t have silver dollars to jingle. Are you going to get what you want, what you need, by roughnecking other people’s oil out of this Godforsaken ground?”
“I get by.”
“And that’s all you’re getting. By. Passed by. Till one day the wind just up and blows you away like you were never here. Forgotten. But tonight, you’re a lucky man. If you got the guts to be who you are and do what you can do better than any man in this state.”
“Tell me.”
The banker said: “You’re a boxer.”
Harry Larson blurted out: “Everybody knows, Gene! We all heard. You’re the best!”
Billie squeezed her brother’s shoulder and he shut up.
“I gave that up,” said Gene. “I’m not ever going back in the ring.”
Doyle said: “Yet.”
“California rules don’t matter up here,” said the banker. “What that judge said—”
“It isn’t about that.”
“Maybe you don’t have the guts for it anymore,” said Doyle. “It’s not guts,” said Gene. “It’s the stomach.”
“Killing a man should be no big deal for a war boy like you,” said the man with the gun.
“I didn’t kill him. We fought. I hit him. He went down. He didn’t get up. He died.”
“Oh.” Doyle smiled. “So you didn’t do it. What happened? Did some angel come down to the canvas and snatch his soul?”
“I don’t know. Angels don’t tell me their secrets. The only reason the night court judge called it reckless misadventure was to keep the locals from lynching me. Banning me from boxing in the state and sticking me in the work camp for ninety days got me out of town. When I got out, nobody cared anymore. Except me. I went home. So what’s my boxing to you?”
“It’s what it is to our whole damn town,” said the banker. “We got us a heavyweight championship of the world going to be fought here. Jack Dempsey against Tommy Gibbons.”
“That’s just a joke going around,” said Gene.
“Yes, it started that way. A joke. A telegram from a civic leader that was a publicity stunt to get Shelby a little free fame. As if anything is free.”
“Who cares about fame.”
“Be a modern man, Gene. Modesty is over. Useless. So is reality. Image is everything. What’s true for a man is true for a town. This is a dirt road nowhere, but so what? If it can become famous, a celebrity, then riches and the happy-ever-after good life will surely follow.”
“That’s a load of crap.”
“Maybe, but it’s the way things work nowadays. The joke telegram was going to get us a few newspaper stories back East, a publicity stunt. But Dempsey’s manager Jack Kearns called the bluff, agreed to his boy fighting for the championship in Shelby. Nobody out here wants to be a back-down kind of guy. So now this ‘joke’ thing has grown a life of its own, a bigger one every day. Dempsey’s been guaranteed a hundred thousand dollars. Now accountants are estimating a total cash gate of a million to a million point four.”
“What does that have to do with me?” Gene nodded his head to take in Billie. “With us?”
“We’re going to heist the fight.”
“What?"
“I don’t believe the million-dollar-gate hype,” said the banker. “But figure it’s half that, and figure our plan will get us half of that half. A quarter of a million dollars split up among we five won’t make us famous, but these days, that much cash will still buy us some sweet years.”
“You’re nuts!”
“No, I’m the inside man. If these locals knew the strings I’ve been pulling the last few years, they’d lynch me. I’ve been a public naysayer on this fight, but a whisper here, a question phrased just so, and suddenly people get an idea they think is their own. That’s how I put this in place, that’s how we’ll take it.
“To make it work,” said the toad, “we all need to be insiders. I inspired the idea that to perfect our glorious Dempsey-Gibbons fight, we need a preliminary bout: the heavyweight championship of Shelby. That’ll put us all on the inside. That’s how we’ll rip it off.”
“You want me to be your man in that prelim fight. Your boxer.”
“Don’t care if you win,” said the pudgy banker in the lantern-lit farmhouse. “Don’t care if you lose. All we care about is that you fight, that you make it go the distance, and that you climb out of the ring alive with enough left in you to do the job.”
“Getting out of the ring alive seems like a good idea,” said Gene.
“We’re good idea men,” said the banker. “The question is whether you got the guts and the smarts to be one, too. You can say no, walk out of here right now. If you’re dumb enough to tell anybody what’s what, we’ll call you crazy and a liar. They’ll believe us, not you.”
“This hard world is Hell on liars.” The black-haired man reclined on the couch, made a show of keeping his eyes on Gene and the .45 automatic on his lap.
“How is it on crazies?” said Gene.
“Depends.” Norman Doyle didn’t smile.
“What if they have to carry me out of the ring?”
Doyle said: “Don’t bother to wake up.”
The hophead beside Gene looked at nobody.
“So what’s it going to be?” said the banker. “Yes or no?”
“Never happen.” Gene shook his head: “Forget about whether the heist would work, the crime thing isn’t what I do.”
“Then you can say goodnight and leave,” said the toad. “Your Billie girl will drive you back to that charming boardinghouse. Say goodbye to her, then, too. She’ll be leaving town.
“You see,” continued the toad, “there’ve been expenses. Bringing Doyle up from Butte. Guaranteeing debts Harry incurred ’round the state. He was the one who knew of your fondness for his sister. She’s a hell of a woman. A fine worker. But schoolmarming and waitressing won’t settle Harry’s debts. Bankruptcy foreclosure from the people Harry owes is permanent. So if our scheme ‘never happens,’ then Doyle will drive her to Butte so she can work buying her brother’s lifeblood a few dollars at a time in an establishment whose proprietor I happen to—”
Gene was on his feet, the folding chair spinning behind him before he knew it, but not before Doyle’d filled his hand with the .45.
“You did this whole thing!” he told the banker.
“Let’s say I brought elements together for a successful business venture,” said Taylor. “Now you choose. What do you want that business to be?”
The black hole of the .45 watched Gene’s heart. The banker watched his eyes. Harry Larson slumped with his face in his hands.
His sister stood behind him. Gene saw her soft cheek he’d never touched now scarred by a wet line.
Must have been deep into the twenty-first century before he said: “Who do I have to fight?”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Doyle.
“No,” said Gene, “I guess it doesn’t. How long do I have to get ready?”
“Seven weeks and change. You fight on the Fourth of July.”
“That’s not enough time.”
“Make it be,” said Taylor. “Inspired local sponsors ‘found’ Doyle to manage you. The mayor’s sending an offer. Accept it. Also, cultivate your mustache: in your pictures, that’s what we want people to see and remember, for your sake. Tomorrow, Billie will fetch you out to the old Woon ranch. The four of you will live there while you train.”
“One of you might be able to run away for a while,” said Doyle. “I’d catch you, but you’d have a while. But the three of you...easy pickings.”
“I have enough running to do for the fight,” said Gene.
“Good,” said Taylor. He raised his whiskey glass: “And
good luck...champ.”
She drove him back to town. They didn’t talk. The envelope with the offer from the mayor was in his mailbox. Gene scrawled OK, signed his name and gave the club-footed desk clerk two bits to deliver it. Gene settled his tab through the morning and stretched out on his last honest bed. Trains clattered through town on the tracks fifty yards from where he lay, but he let them go without him to clean forests and seaside towns.
Billie picked him up after breakfast. The highway snaked through erosion-farmed prairie spreading sixty miles west to the jagged blue sawtooth range of the Rocky Mountains. That highway beneath heaven’s blue bowl sky led to Mexico. She turned left off that oiled route, put the Rockies at their backs as they followed a graveled snake trail. The farmland became hilly with the breaks for the river named Marias after some woman in Meriwether Lewis’ life. Gene thought Lewis was damn lucky to be able to do that for her.
The peeling Woon house and barn stood against the horizon at the end of the road.
“There’s two bedrooms upstairs, one down, and a room in the barn,” said Doyle as he came off the front porch to where Gene and Billie parked. “I got the downstairs where I can hear the screen doors creak. You’re upstairs, palooka, the woman, too. Hophead is in the barn.”
Otto Penzler (ed) - Murder 06 - Murder on the Ropes raw Page 14