by Bill Brooks
“True enough. Maybe if the weather breaks before I get back you should go on up ahead of me and stake a claim or two for us just in case.”
“Maybe I oughter.”
“You hear anything from Agnes lately?”
Charley sort of held his breath in case Agnes had written Bill and confessed their secret. But Bill simply shook his head.
“I expect to hear from her any day now. I write her twice a week.”
“You think any more on what I said back at camp?”
“I don’t need no pard other than you, Charley.”
“I was just thinking it might be good to have someone watch your back while I’m gone.”
Bill stopped paring his fingernails and looked at Charley in that sad way he had of looking when he was disappointed in something.
“I know what you’re thinking. That my eyes is gone on me and I can’t take care of myself. But I’ll tell you this, old son, if it gets to that point, I’d just as soon somebody shoot out my lights.”
“Ah, Bill, I wasn’t thinking that at all. We all can stand to have us a good pard. Why you said yourself there are fellers who’d like to put you as a notch on their guns. Like whoever that was last night tried to potshoot you…”
“I believe in fate, don’t you? If it is meant to happen, it will, and if not, me and Agnes will live a long and happy life together. You can’t stop what is already written on the wind, Charley.”
The barber’s chink came in and poured in another pail of hot water over Charley’s soapy head, and he felt about three days better.
“You want to take a bath?” Charley said, getting out of the tub.
“No, I took one on Friday,” Bill said.
Charley and Bill were eating their breakfast in the American Café when Teddy Blue walked in. Charley waved him over.
“You ate yet, old son?”
Teddy could see Charley wanted him to join them. Bill seemed completely neutral, busy as he was eating the hash off his plate.
“I wouldn’t want to intrude,” Teddy said, and started to find himself another table. But Bill looked up from under his sandy brows and said, “Come on and have a seat.”
Teddy ordered flapjacks and coffee, his mind still on the kid and Kathleen Bonney, but a little on the shooting last night as well.
“Charley tells me you killed a feller last night,” Bill said.
“I don’t think I killed him, I’m not even sure I hit him.”
“Charley said he was stalking me for assassination…”
“I can’t say for sure. He was lurking in the shadows, had his gun pulled. I called to him and he snapped one off at me and I snapped one off back.”
“You know who the feller was?”
Teddy and Charley exchanged glances.
“I couldn’t say for sure, it was dark.”
Bill must have bit a piece of bone in his hash, for he grimaced then picked something small and white from his teeth and looked at it before wiping it off his finger.
“I once ate dog in a Pawnee camp that tasted a lot like this hash,” he said, as though the whole subject of assassination hadn’t even come up.
Teddy ate his flapjacks and Charley his scrambled eggs and the three of them glanced out of the plate-glass window at the traffic trying to navigate the muddy street. Finally Bill finished, dabbed at his mouth with a linen napkin and said, “Charley’s leaving for a time to go visit his wife in Denver.”
Teddy exchanged looks with Charley, who offered a rather sheepish portrait of himself.
“Said he thought it’d be a good idear if me and you were pards if the weather broke while he was gone. What would you say to something like that?”
Teddy measured his response.
“I’d say that would be all right with me if it would you. I’m sure I’d not make you as good a pard as old Charley here, but I can be trusted.”
“Are you in the habit of bathing every morning?”
“I like to stay clean about my person, but I can’t vow to taking a bath every morning out here on these prairies. It isn’t always practicable.”
Bill smiled. “That’s my philosophy exactly. But old Charley here would rather drown in his bath than to skip it.”
Charley feigned indignation, and Bill said he was going back to camp for a siesta, that he was still feeling a bit “floozy” and that he wanted to write Agnes a letter. He stood, settled his hat down on his head, and shifted his revolvers around so they rode just so inside his red sash, then wandered out into the half-sunlit, half-gray morning.
“Bill ain’t the early kind,” Charley said.
“When are you leaving for Denver?”
“This afternoon on the flier. Do you think you’ll be all right watching Billy by yourself?”
“I’ll wander over to his camp later after he’s had time to take his siesta. It’ll give me time to get a few errands done.”
“Say, you ever find that kid you were looking for?”
“Yeah.”
“Looks like Jeff Carr found him too,” Charley said, staring out the plate-glass window.
Teddy saw Jeff Carr and two of his deputies marching the kid down the sidewalk, his hands and ankles cuffed.
Teddy made his way to Jeff Carr’s office just as they were putting the kid in a cell to the rear of the place. Jeff Carr was racking his double barrel.
“I’m here to pay his fine,” Teddy said as Carr turned to look at him.
“You his daddy?”
“No. I’m a friend of his mother’s.”
Carr got a look on his face that Teddy didn’t much care for.
“He ain’t been arraigned yet so no bail’s been set. And if I have my say, there won’t be any bail either.”
“What’s the charge?”
“Attempted murder.”
“I’d like to speak to him.”
“That ain’t even a consideration.”
“I’m his lawyer. She hired me to represent him.”
Carr looked skeptical. “Thought you said you were a friend of his mother’s?”
“And an attorney…He has a right to legal representation. You want, we can go find a judge.”
“The judge won’t arrive for three days.”
Teddy held his gaze.
Jeff Carr still looked doubtful but could see the man across from him might be more trouble than he was worth. Carr wasn’t a man who liked complications cluttering his sense of duty.
“You’ve got five minutes with the prisoner.”
The kid sat on the cot looking unafraid and unconcerned.
“Thought I told you to stay put,” Teddy said.
The kid looked at him, said, “You think this shithole can hold me?”
“I think Jeff Carr is hoping you’ll do something stupid so he can blow your brains out and save the time of a trial.”
“Jeff Carr will be the one ends up with a hole shot in him, like that fool cousin of his did…”
“I’ll need you to lay it out for me in complete detail what happened that night if I’m to represent you at trial.”
The kid’s eyes narrowed.
“Unless, of course, you’d rather have the judge pick you a lawyer. Maybe someone who is a friend of the sheriff’s.”
The kid stood from the cot, walked over to the bars and put his hands around them, felt how cold and hard they were as he looked through them into the face of Teddy Blue.
“You doing this for me so you can get to her?” he said.
“Don’t be a bigger fool than you already are.”
“She tell you about my pa?”
“We haven’t exactly been sitting around in the parlor having tea and conversation.”
“He left out one day and didn’t come back. Dead maybe. Most likely, though, he ran off. She still pines for him, and I do believe if he showed his ugly face I’d shoot it off. But make no mistake, I ain’t looking for another daddy and she ain’t looking for another husband.”
“We’re not he
re to discuss what happened to your pa or about what your mother wants or anything other than how I’m going to try and keep you from going to the nearest state prison. You know anything about what it’s like in prison?”
Something flicked through the kid’s eyes, traveled down to his mouth, ticked in his jaw.
“Tell me what happened that night between you and Carr’s cousin?”
“Sure I’ll tell you. But it ain’t going to matter. They done caught the rabbit. But this old rabbit ain’t done running yet.”
“I’m listening,” Teddy said.
After leaving the jail with the kid’s story in his head, Teddy headed toward the boardinghouse, where he found Kathleen elbows deep into a vat of hot wash water, beads of sweat dotting her face.
“William’s in jail,” he said.
The news seemed to stagger her. He pulled a chair out and set her in it.
“I am going to represent him at trial.”
She seemed not to understand. He explained it.
“If you don’t mind,” she said afterward, “there’s a bottle of cognac in the cupboard…”
He poured her a small glass. She drank it, coughed. He poured more.
“William told me about his father…”
“Inconsequential,” she said. “It’s been years. I obtained a divorce. William still holds out hope he’ll return someday. He won’t, and William won’t admit he wants his father back. The damn bullheaded Irish…” she said.
“It can’t have been easy for you.”
“No, but who ever made any of us a promise that life would be easy?”
“I still think you need to be making plans to leave as soon as possible,” he said.
Those warm sea-green eyes searched his own quizzically.
“There always has to be a backup plan in case the first one doesn’t work out.”
“You’re not thinking…”
“Anything’s possible, Kathleen.”
He left her and went to the camp of Wild Bill, whose feet he saw protruding through the end of his and Charley’s tent. Charley was trimming his moustaches with a pair of ladies’ scissors in one hand while looking into a small mirror held in the other.
“Have to look presentable for the missus,” he said.
“What time you leaving out?”
“Noon flier.”
“You want to leave me a way I can send you a wire in case I need to?”
Charley wrote it out on a piece of paper from Bill’s notebook. “I surely hope you don’t need to,” he said, handing him the address.
“I might.”
“I hope not.”
“Me too.”
Wind sang through the trees and the sky grew more gray and it sure enough looked as though the weather might not ever break good enough for men to go to the country north, where the gold and riches lay.
It felt somehow like the end of the line, this place.
Bill slept like a child. Or a dead man, maybe.
Chapter 16
Temptation comes in its many forms, and Bill wasn’t sure if Alice was really there or he was dreaming she was.
The sun had crossed the sky from one end to the other, and shadows were starting to encroach upon the land—the shadows of the pines lay twenty feet long along the ground, the same with wagons and horses and every man and every woman standing.
Before he saw Alice’s face, Bill was in the arms of a nightmare. Phil Coe had his revolver pressed to Bill’s ear and he could feel the cold steel and hear the click of the hammer being thumbed back and Coe saying, “You thought you kilt me in Abilene but you never did and now I’ve come to shoot out your lights!” Then Phil killed him, and he saw himself lying in a casket with all his old pards marching past and several women he’d known and fought over, including Sara Schull that time he shot it out with McCanles. Even that bone-faced Calamity Jane was in line, drunk as usual, spouting off to anyone who would listen how sad she was her “lover” had been kilt by Phil Goddamn Coe and what she was going to do about it—“seek revenge and blow his melon to shreds.” Somebody had put his trusty rifle in the coffin with him—as if it were going to do him any good in the place where he was going.
Then he looked up, unable to move so much as a whisker—for dead don’t feel nothing and can’t move nothing—and there stood Squirrel Tooth Alice with tears running down her pretty rouged cheeks.
“Oh Bill, oh Bill,” she sobbed, and he half felt sorry for her, for she was a good old gal as there ever was and he pretty much loved her at one time, but then he saw Olive and fell in love with her. But Olive wasn’t a true heart and took turns going back and forth between him and Phil Coe, and that’s what got it all started. Phil Coe’s drunken display and loud-mouthed threat was just the capper; they both knew it was going to end that night—each thinking it would be the other shut up for eternity.
He come up out of the dream gasping and clawing for his pistols, and had one cocked and aimed and the other about there when he realized it wasn’t a dream and Alice was real. Only thing was, her hair was pure white, not dark and pretty like it used to be.
“Lord God, don’t shoot me, Bill!”
That was the trouble with sleeping in the day, he always had those bad, bad dreams.
He put away his guns, crawled out of the tent and said, “You was in a dream I was having all about my funeral…”
“You always had them awful dreams, Bill. Sometimes I was afraid to sleep with you. Afraid you’d wake up out of one of them and blast me.”
“Oh, I never would.”
“Ain’t you glad to see me?”
He chewed on whether he should tell her about Agnes. Decided it could wait just a little.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“Come to find you, Bill. I got to warn you about something! I come all this way to prove my love for you.”
“Warn me of what?”
“A man is coming to kill you, Bill. He come and ask me where you was. I didn’t want to tell him nothing, but he made me tell him. Then he shot me in the head, and except for the providence of God and the fact he had shot me with a little bullet and my hair and all, I’d be dead this very minute.”
Bill sat on a stump and pulled on his boots one at a time. Alice was always an excitable sort, especially if she got into the whiskey too heavy, which Bill figured she was to be telling such a fantastic story. The sky was turning the color of a plum, and clouds were stretched across it like fingers. Bill always admired what the sky could do when there were clouds and a setting sun together.
When Alice saw Bill’s lack of concern, she said, “You believe me, don’t you, Bill?”
“You been drinking, Alice?”
“Some, but not so much I’d—”
Bill cut her off: “It don’t concern me fellers is out to kill me. Fellers has been out to kill me from the day I set foot in this country. And I reckon if there is one who will kill me, it will be a stroke of fate or pure madman’s luck. Now get on along there, Alice.”
“Bill, is there room enough in that tent for two?”
Bill looked back as if it was the first time he noticed his and Charley’s tent.
“It wouldn’t be right,” he said.
“Why wouldn’t it?”
“I’ve gone respectable, Alice.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Bill figured he’d made a vow to Agnes to stay loyal and true, and besides, hard as it was getting to piss anymore, he realized he had caught a case of the drip and wasn’t exactly sure when or from who. It took all the urge out of him for women. Just the thought of it made him cringe a little. Life’s pleasure doors were starting to close to him and he didn’t know how much more of it he could stand. Sometimes when he thought about death, he thought it would be a blessing.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” he said. “I have to go make water.”
Bill walked up behind the trees and stood there a time, leaning as he could against the trunk of on
e especially large pine, and tried not to think too hard on anything because the more he concentrated on the task at hand the harder it became to perform it.
You’ve sure enough started to come apart at the threads, old son, he told himself, the darkness creeping closer and closer to his boots. Your eyes and dick are all but gone to hell on you. They ain’t much left…
Pretty soon he came back to the tent, beads of sweat riveted to his forehead and a cool wind starting to chase after the shadows.
“I know something bad’s going on with you, Bill,” Alice said. “What is it?”
“I got married, Alice. But it ain’t a bad thing, I reckon.”
He could see it took her breath away, and he offered her a bucket to sit on and said, “No use getting all melancholy on me. It’s done and can’t be undone.”
“Who’d you marry, Bill?”
“Agnes Lake—the circus lady.”
Alice ran it through her mind, that name, tried to put a face with it. The only one she could see was one that was plain and older by several years than Bill.
“That doughty widow came to Abilene that time with lions and horses and trick shot artists?”
“Now I’ll take your description of her as just a case of simple jealousy, Alice. I know you aren’t in your right thinking so I’ll overlook it this once.”
Alice began to shed tears, but Bill knew them to be of the crocodile variety for he’d seen them shed before.
“You’ve not been in your right head since you shot Phil Coe that night,” she sobbed.
“Phil Coe didn’t have nothing to do with it.”
“Yes it did, Bill. Yes it did.”
Alice grew inconsolable, as she always did when drunk. Bill figured to let her air out, get sober again and get in her right mind. Instead of running her off like he knew he oughter, he told her she could put her valise and herself in the tent for that night but come the next day she’d have to find new quarters. He tried to pass it off that Charley would not care much to find a woman in his tent when he returned. Of course, Charley would probably be delighted to find a female in his tent, and especially one as bosomy as Alice. Bill wandered into town feeling lower than the run-down boot heels of a Texas cowboy. A good poker game was what would cure his mood. He headed for the Gold Room.