Paradise Sky

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “He killed a man. You know how that’s going to work out, don’t you, son?”

  “I do. If it goes bad, I’ll go bad with it.”

  “It does sometimes, and as I said, if you shoot a man in the line of duty—”

  “It’s all right.”

  “That’s the size of it.”

  “The other, I figure he’ll come in dead and stinking.”

  The judge leaned back in his chair and pulled at his beard a little.

  “Know them on sight, do you?”

  “What I said. Now, I’m not saying I won’t do whatever I’m called to do before I get to them, but I’m saying I’d like the chance to deliver their warrant, such as it is. Someone else comes across them, they can have them, but I don’t want anyone else sent for them.”

  “I don’t see any problem in that. That way they aren’t being kept from being caught. It’s just you are the prime hunter. But I may not send you after them right away. I’ve had my eye on that gang for a time, and right now the leads have gone dry as a South Texas ditch. Put your hand on this.”

  He pushed the big book forward on his desk, and I put my hand on it. He said some words and had me repeat them, ended our talk with, “Show up here tomorrow morning, say, seven sharp.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  “Wait a minute.” Judge Parker dug in his coat pocket, came up with a silver dollar. “Have you a good meal. Advance on your salary, though. I’ll mark it down. Pay sometimes comes a little slow, but I can give you another dollar or two you need it.”

  “I’ll be all right,” I said. “And since this comes out of my pay, I’ll take it.”

  I was nearly to the door when the judge said, “By the way, I expect my men to be forthright and God-fearing and honest. I’m taking your word you are just that.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “And if you have to shoot a man in the back or sneak up on him and shoot him anywhere, that’s all right if it’s in line with the arrest and, of course, if your target is resisting. Remember, the byword is justice.”

  We were back to that again.

  “Of course,” I said, and left out of there.

  I didn’t look up Ruthie or her family but heard through the grapevine that Luther had started his own church, called Luther’s Church, and somehow it got around it was Lutheran, but it wasn’t. You can see how such confusion could set in.

  Far as the job went I delivered a few light warrants, and the worst I had encountered was when I arrested a drunk man for theft and his ten-year-old son showed me he had acquired quite a vocabulary, none of it words to be used politely.

  Up to then it was simple work, and I was paid all right, and I got a little extra payment for them that I captured and brought in. One day I was in town and coming out of the store where I used to sweep up, and there was Ruthie, a big brown-paper-wrapped package under her arm. She was wearing a bright blue dress, and her hair was in pigtails. She had on a pair of black shoes that looked new. She looked more beautiful than when I had last seen her.

  I was coming up the steps, going in, planning to buy some goods, so I couldn’t hardly dodge her. I took off my hat. “Ruthie. It’s good to see you.”

  “Why, you liar. You been in town for a month at least, and you haven’t so much as come by and said hi or ‘Kiss my ass’ to any of us.”

  “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to or didn’t mean to.”

  “Want to or mean to doesn’t get it done. You’ve forgot us since you left…” And then her face collapsed. “Oh, dear, Nat. I forgot about Win. Forgive me. I keep being selfish, and you’ve already told me how you feel.”

  She nearly dropped her package as the memory came over her. I reached out and took it, said, “Let me walk you home.”

  “Okay. I…I’m so sorry, Nat. Is she all right?”

  “No. She has passed on.”

  “I’m so sorry. I mean, you might think I’m not after what I said, but I am sorry. Truly.”

  “You shouldn’t be apologizing to me. I should have come by.”

  “It’s the other direction, Nat. We aren’t living in the wagon anymore.”

  We turned and started in that direction.

  “I heard Luther got a church.”

  “He did, and it comes with a little house. It’s not much of a house, but it’s better than that wagon. We got a corral there, and we’ve bought some chickens for eggs, and I have started a spring garden. There’s bugs in it, but the corn and potatoes do all right…Dang it, Nat. I really am sorry about Win.”

  “You said that.”

  “I know, but I said some bad things to you when you were here last time. I know it hurt.”

  “Hurt because it was true,” I said.

  “About you and me?”

  “I assume you have outgrown your fancy by now?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. But after Win dying I don’t think you could have an interest in me other than a ricochet. I don’t want anything like that.”

  “I understand.”

  We walked along without speaking for a while. It was a pretty good walk.

  I said, “You still speak to ducks and such?”

  “When they want to talk. Frankly, I haven’t seen a duck in a long time.”

  “I suppose it’s a limited enterprise, the plans of a duck.”

  “I get a sense of things from them and other birds as well. They told me you’d come back.”

  “They did, did they? Was you ever dropped on your head as a child?”

  “That’s no way to get on my good side.”

  “Think that’s what I’m trying to do?”

  “Not when you talk like that,” she said. “There’s the church. We got twenty colored families come all the time, couple of Creek Indian families, and even a white couple. No one likes the white couple in town, so they come to us.”

  “That’s generous of them,” I said. “Slumming like that with the colored folks.”

  “The Lord doesn’t care about color,” she said. “Not even white skin.”

  “He might be the only one.”

  We walked a little more, and then Ruthie stopped.

  “That’s the house.”

  It wasn’t far from where the church was and looked to be about twice the size of the room I had lived in before in Fort Smith. There was a little fenced garden and some poor-looking crops inside the fence. I saw a chicken coop and some chickens running about in the yard, which was grown over with weeds.

  “You might want to come in and say hello to Pa and Samson.”

  “Not today. I really wanted to see you all, but I didn’t know if I was ready. Thing is, Ruthie, I loved Win, and in some ways I always will. But you were right. I was in love with Win as I had known her, not as she had become. That alone made me ashamed of myself.”

  “That’s human nature,” Ruthie said. “You didn’t change her.”

  “Knowing me led to what happened to her,” I said.

  “You can’t go through life worrying about that kind of thing,” she said. “You couldn’t get out of bed in the morning if you did. God wants us to move on. He wants us to thrive.”

  “What about the ricochet?”

  “Give it some space, Nat. Come see us in a week or so. Come and have dinner. We’ll see how things develop. I have others courting me, you know.”

  All of a sudden she was in a good humor and sure of herself again. Sometimes Ruthie was hard to figure.

  “I don’t doubt that,” I said. “And I’ll tell you something. That soil you got there, reason your garden has bugs and the crops aren’t growing is the soil is too rocky and acidic. Some ashes from your stove would help with that. Mix it with some cow manure and keep that chicken mess out of it, as it’s too hot unless it’s cured. I can tell you ain’t composting it none.”

  “You know about gardens?”

  “I do. I had a good teacher. I’ll tell you about the nightshade family next time.”

  “Nightshade family?”

/>   “It’s a bit of a story, but I’ll share it later.”

  I gave her the package. She came close to me as she took it.

  “I have to go in now,” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “You will come by soon?”

  “Couple of weeks. I think what you said about not having a ricochet is right. We wouldn’t want that.”

  “No, we wouldn’t.”

  I could smell her skin. It smelled like lilac soap. Her breath was like mint leaves.

  I turned around and walked away, and I must tell you I wanted badly to turn back and look at her, maybe go back and plead with her to let me take her in my arms. But frankly, I was worried about that ricochet.

  I was put with Bass Reeves for a while so as to get some deputy marshal training. That big colored man was so full of wind that every time he talked he near knocked my hat off. But he could do most everything he bragged about doing. I was with him once when a white marshal who was in pursuit of a fellow sent word back to Fort Smith that he had him pinned down near a place called Gibson Station and assistance would be appreciated.

  Bass was dressed up for a church social that day, and besides his usual black hat, had on an orange-and-black-checked suit and a striped bow tie. I was sitting with him out front of the courthouse, him about to leave for that social, when this fellow the white marshal had sent came riding up. He was the one told Bass they had a man pinned down in the brush but he was putting up a good fight and was bound to shoot one of them if they went in. Worse, the fellow seemed to have plenty of ammunition.

  This had to do with a stolen pig. The thief in the brush had wounded some men and shot at this other marshal so much the marshal had developed a tic to one of his eyelids. When we rode up we tied our horses to a tree and scooted low along an embankment till we come up on the marshal, whose name was Ledbetter. He was there with three other white men and Choctaw Tom, who had helped track him. Choctaw Tom was a really lean man with wild twisted hair and a hat that nestled on top of it. It always looked as if it might blow off at the slightest wind, but it never did. I think he had it pinned there somehow. It had a few feathers in it, one of them broken and dangling.

  All the men, including Choctaw, was shoved up tight behind that bank, out of bullet range.

  The white marshal, Ledbetter, his eyelid hopping like a frog, said, “I’m glad to see you, Bass.”

  “I bet,” Bass said.

  One of the men said, “He shot off part of my finger. I don’t think that’s what he was aiming for, but he shot it off. Will it grow back?”

  “Of course not,” Bass said. “You’ve lost that. Let me look…Ah, hell, that’s just the tip. You don’t need it for nothing. You can dig a booger with the other hand.”

  Bass was like that. He talked the same to anyone, white or black or red.

  “He has got me buffaloed,” the marshal said. “I need you to shoot him, Bass. You can do that. I’ve seen you do it. I’ve seen you make some fine shots. None of us here have even come close.”

  “Choctaw didn’t come close to hitting him?” Bass asked.

  “He didn’t try,” said Marshal Ledbetter.

  “I’m not shooting a man that stole a pig,” Choctaw said. “I stole a pig once.”

  “How long ago?” Bass said.

  “I was a kid,” Choctaw said.

  “Well, then,” Bass said. “I guess we can let that go.” Bass nodded at me. “This boy here is more than a fair shot, or so I hear. He will back me up.”

  “Good enough,” Ledbetter said.

  “Ha! You mean you’d rather see a nigger get dropped than a white man,” Bass said.

  “Now, Bass,” Ledbetter said.

  “Shut up and give me a rifle,” Bass said.

  Ledbetter was carrying one, and he gave it to Bass. I had my Winchester.

  Choctaw Tom was rolling a cigarette. “I’m no marshal,” he said, spitting tobacco off his tongue, “just hired help, but I’d keep my head down.”

  Bass said, “You can give him a round of fire, Nat, and when he comes out I’ll pop him.”

  “All this over a pig?” I said.

  “It was a nice pig,” Marshal Ledbetter said.

  “Was?” I asked.

  Marshal Ledbetter nodded. “He stole it from Mr. Evans. Evans wants it back, and this fellow, Chooky Bullwater, part Creek, I think, don’t want to give it back on account of he thought Evans owed him for something or another, some old debt Evans doesn’t seem to know anything about. Chooky yelled out to us it was something to do with his father. I don’t know. I think that incident with his father had to do with a pig, too, but it could just be an excuse. We told him to turn over the pig, which he’d trussed and throwed on the ground after we shot his horse out from under him. We said if he gave up the pig, we’d see it went lighter with him than if he tried to keep it. He shot the pig. He said that would show he was serious.”

  “It showed the pig he was serious,” I said.

  Bass and me snuck along under the edge of the embankment, keeping our heads down. It sloped up, and we sloped up with it. We come to a spot where there was a couple of large trees and you could see between them, and unless the fellow with the dead pig was a crack shot, it would be hard to pick off a man, as there wasn’t but a hand’s width apart between those trees. Bass stuck his face through the gap in the trees, yelled out, “I’m Bass Reeves, deputy US marshal. I’m calling you to come out and to bring that dead pig with you. I reckon it’s still fresh enough for cooking.”

  “You can come get me,” Chooky called back. “I will be glad for some company. As for the pig, you can kiss my ass, and you can kiss its dead ass.”

  Bass called out to him. “You’ve decided, then?”

  “I have,” Chooky said.

  Bass said to me, “You fire into those bushes and keep him busy. If you hit him, all the better, but if he rises up to run, I’ll shoot him.”

  “Wing him, Bass,” I said.

  “I don’t think so. When he runs, I’m going to shoot him in the back of the neck. That cuts the spinal cord. He’ll be as done as the pig. I think I can talk the owner of the pig into giving us some of the meat if you want it.”

  “You keep it. And shoot him in the leg. Ain’t we supposed to always try and bring them in alive?”

  “Sure we are. And I’ll bring him in, though he might be turning stiff when I do. I can see Judge Parker gave you the talk, but he didn’t mean it. He don’t give a damn long as we get them.”

  I could see how things was, and did as I was told, Bass being the senior man. I flicked the baffle on the loop-cock Winchester so it would be rapid-fire, rose up quick, and started blasting shots into the brush where Chooky was hidden. I shot high, clipping the tops of the brush, trying to make sure I didn’t hit him, hoping he’d give it up and come out. Then, like Bass said, Chooky rose up and ran, dragging that pig with him.

  True to his word Bass stood up and from between that cut in the trees he fired, hit the man, and brought him down. When we went out for a look, sure enough he had hit him in the back of the neck, severing his spine. He was a real ugly customer, with a long nose and a round head with lots of black hair that had fallen loose when his hat was knocked off.

  “I had to do it,” Bass said.

  “Why?”

  “He’d have got away.”

  “He’s a pig thief,” I said. “Not a desperado.”

  “One is as good a black mark as the other in my book.”

  “You keep odd books, Bass.”

  Bass was bent down, looking the pig over.

  “Have it your way. Look there, he had to shoot the pig twice. He’s got one in the snout, and one between the eyes, which is the one did him, I think. Hell, you have to shoot a pig twice close-up, you need to practice your shooting.”

  I didn’t get down and make sure Bass was right about the pig. The others was coming up now, along with Marshal Ledbetter. “Good shooting, Bass.”

  “I know,” Bass said.r />
  Without saying anything, I left them there, walked past Choctaw Tom, who had not gone over to see the dead man. He said, “So Bass shot another one, huh?”

  “He did,” I said.

  I got on Satan and rode back to Fort Smith. I rode on out to where Luther’s Church was and tied Satan to the hitching rail. The door to the church was open. I went inside. It was small, six pews to a side. I went to the one up front and sat down. There was a lectern up there, and behind it on the wall was a carving of Jesus on the cross. I sat there and studied on it. I heard someone else come in, turned, and looked. It was Luther. He was wearing overalls and a dirty hat.

  “I thought that was Satan tied out front,” Luther said, walking toward me.

  “Coming from you,” I said, “that’s funny when you think about it.”

  “You get religion, Nat?”

  “I came here to see if I felt anything, but I didn’t. It is a little stuffy in here, though, and at first I thought that might be God, as I figure he’s got to be a big fellow. But no, it’s just stuffy.”

  “How come you’re really here, Nat?”

  By this time Luther had took the seat beside me on the pew.

  “I’m a deputy marshal,” I said.

  “I’ve heard.”

  “I just seen another marshal kill a man for stealing a pig. The man had been shooting at folks, but he took a run for it, and the other marshal shot him in the neck and killed him.”

  “You’re saying it wasn’t necessary?”

  “I’m saying I’m a marshal, too, and I got to wonder if being like that just comes with time. Wondering if you get so you can kill without it mattering.”

  Luther sat silent for a time. “You’ve killed. You’ve told me about it.”

  “I think they had it coming more than a fellow stole a pig. Fellow did shoot and kill the pig, and maybe that counts for something. It was an innocent pig, and it was meat wasted, though it’s possible Bass will eat it.”

  “You have to make your own decisions. You have to make sure you’re right with God. I can’t speak for the pig.”

  “What if you don’t believe in God?”