She gave me a worried look. “Is your leg hurting again?”
“No, I’m fine. Don’t know why I mentioned it.”
I dropped her off at the house and made sure to kiss her before she went in the house with the kids. I waited until I had driven out of sight before I took another sip from my flask and reached under the seat and pulled out my pistol that I had wrapped up in my coat. Whiskey always made me mean or sad. By the time I hit the edge of town the flask was empty and I was feeling mean.
Chapter Fifty-four
I chose a corner under a barber pole straight across the street from the county jail. I had been standing there over an hour and knew good and well that Moon saw me if he was in there. But I could play the waiting game as long as he could.
Like I figured, his nerve finally broke, or he got up enough of a mad to overcome the yellow streak that ran through him. He came out the door, hitching his pants up and studying the street like it was a normal day.
I wasn’t as smart as Hamish, but I was a whole lot smarter than Moon Lowe. It was time I jerked his chain a little.
A deputy came out the door behind Moon, but stayed on the porch, acting like he didn’t know I was around. I didn’t know him, but from Carmelita’s description, I was guessing that he was Deputy Long, and the very same fellow that had roughed her up with Moon.
“Not many wear a sidearm in town anymore,” Moon said.
“Some law against it?”
“No, but there ought to be.”
“I hear you make your own laws.”
“You’re looking for trouble.”
“I’m looking at a badge with a tub of guts pinned on it.”
“Give me that pistol. We’re going over to the jailhouse.”
“Take it from me, Moon. Take it from me.”
“You arrogant bastard,” Moon said. “Think you can come into my county, my town, and threaten me? Nobody’s going to care if I lock up an ex-con like you.”
“Don’t look over your shoulder at your deputy. He can’t help you. I could shoot you full of holes before he gets his finger out of his nose.”
“You’re drunk.”
“Go ahead, pull that pistol on your hip. I see you wanting to. Make it easy for me.”
“I didn’t shoot your old man.”
“Liar.”
“I don’t have to take that off of a drunk cripple like you.”
“You’re taking it. You always were a coward. Beat any old men or women lately? No? Probably some old cowboy kicked your ass up between your shoulder blades.”
“Deputy Long, come over here and lend a hand.” Moon said it louder than he needed to, probably hoping anyone on the street would hear him. He was trying to set up an alibi and make it look like the good sheriff was doing his duty. “This man is resisting arrest.”
“Shame, or I would have got you when I got Prince. Prince was a no-good, but at least he had some sand.”
“Don’t you mention my brother.”
For a brief instant, I thought he was going to pull on me. But that wasn’t the way Moon did things. He was like some of those coyote dogs I had seen on that hunt with Papa. You had some dogs that would go right for the coyote’s throat, risking being bitten to go for the kill. And while the coyote was busy with that dog, the other kind dove in from behind and got in a bite. Ass-biters were what coyote hunters called them.
“How’d that make you feel? You got Prince to help you beat up Joseph and then you ran off and let Prince take your medicine?”
Moon was shaking. Even an ass-biter like him had a limit to how far you could push him. Deputy Long was halfway across the street, and I had taken things about as far as I could go.
“Prince was . . .”
I cut him off. “How about you come see me sometime? Let’s settle this without an audience.”
“You don’t . . .”
“See you later, Sheriff.”
“Did I just hear you threaten an officer of the law?” Moon called after me. “You don’t know the trouble I can bring down on you!”
I was counting on that.
Chapter Fifty-five
I thought Moon had finally worked his courage up and decided to make an issue of my tough talk when I looked in the bar mirror and saw one of his deputies look at me and start across the room. I would have seen him when he came in the door, instead of when he was almost on top of me, but I had belted back a few since I met Moon on the street.
It wasn’t Deputy Long, who I had seen with Moon at the jailhouse. This new deputy took a place at the bar beside me, obviously not wanting a drink, for he was facing me and paying the bartender no mind.
“He wants to see you.”
“Tell Moon to go to hell. If he wants me shot resisting arrest he can come do it himself.”
“Ain’t Moon that wants to see you. Mr. Lowe is waiting in his office to talk with you.”
“Clayton? I would have thought he choked on a sour pickle and died years ago.”
“He doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
Did Clayton think I would actually go in his office and step right into whatever he and that sheriff son of his had set up for me? They must have thought I was stupid or crazy.
I drained my glass and took up my cane and hobbled after the deputy. The bottle I had been nursing on was ninety-five-proof stupid and crazy and the rest of it was bitter branch water.
“I didn’t know a county deputy’s duty was to run and fetch for Clayton Lowe,” I said, unable to resist jabbing the deputy a little.
The deputy kept walking. “Are you sure you’re sober enough to walk?”
“Whiskey doesn’t have that effect on me. This bum leg’s what has me hobbling.”
“What does whiskey do to you?”
“First I get charming. Then I turn bulletproof. And then I turn invisible.”
“Which one are you now?” the deputy asked. “No, let me guess. You’re bulletproof?”
“No, charming. Can’t you tell?”
“You talk too much,” the deputy said.
We reached Clayton’s office before I could antagonize him more. The old store had been replaced by a brick affair. The upper story contained Clayton’s land and shipping business and a set of side stairs led up to it from an alley at one end of the building. The deputy stepped aside for me, but I shook my head and pointed up the stairs, directing him to go first.
“I’ll take my bullets in the front, thank you.”
He didn’t like that any more than he did me, but he went up the stairs ahead of me, knocking on the door at the top before entering. When I stepped in the doorway behind the deputy, Clayton Lowe was sitting behind a desk on the far side of the room. Either that man didn’t like me, or he had been sucking on those sour pickles again.
“Sit down, Gunn, and take a load off that leg.”
“I believe I’ll stay standing. This ought not take long.”
“You always were a trying one. I don’t see what it would hurt to have a drink with me and talk like civilized men.” He tried to smile, but I noticed his hand shaking on the tabletop. I also noticed that one side of his mouth didn’t seem to work right, that whole side of his face kind of sagging. A little white froth of drool worked like a spiderweb at that corner of his mouth. The way he was keeping the other arm below the table, I thought he might have a gun on me, but that arm was on the same side of his body as that sagging face. I got the impression that his arm didn’t work too good.
“Nice office you have here. Land business must be good,” I said.
“I won’t let you kill Moon,” Clayton said. “You’ve taken one of my boys, and I won’t see it happen again.”
“Moon shot Papa.”
He gave an odd shrug of his shoulders. “What if I were to send Moon out of the country, and he never came back?”
“I’d hunt him until I found him.”
“Why do you hate us so?”
“Your family has always been the one making trouble.
You picked fight after fight with us, even when you couldn’t win. We warned you time and again.”
“Do you think I hate you Dollarhydes?”
“I never cared enough to think on it.”
“I didn’t hate your father. I tried every way in the world to get along with him,” Clayton said. “But you couldn’t tell him anything.”
“Papa was twice the man you are.”
“Do you know what I did hate? I hated that your papa thought he was better than me. Men like that can’t share. It isn’t in them. He thought he was so big that other folks didn’t matter. Didn’t realize that it takes a lot of folks working together to make a place matter, and not one man.”
“You mean he wouldn’t let you make the rules,” I said. “You had the whole wide world open to you, but you couldn’t stand it because our ranch was the one place where you weren’t ever going to matter. Outside this pissant town, you never could measure up to Papa, and you knew it. That’s what bothered you most, wasn’t it?”
Clayton’s hand on the table was shaking worse. From the look of him, I guessed a stroke had got him sometime back. I remembered him as the tall, immaculately dressed man he had once been, but the bald, scarecrow thing in front of me was only a shell of that old memory.
“Clayton, I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt. That other hand of yours might be under the table because it doesn’t work so well anymore, but then again, you might be thinking on pulling a pistol you’ve got stashed in that desk and counting on this deputy here to finish me if you don’t get me.”
Clayton’s eye threw hellfire at me, and his mouth sprayed spit. “You Dollarhydes!”
“Good night.” I backed out the door, keeping a closer eye on the deputy than I was on Clayton.
“I won’t let you kill my boy!” Clayton yelled after me as I headed down the stairs.
Chapter Fifty-six
Maybe it was because I was too drunk to go home, or maybe it was because my whiskey flask was empty and I had a partial bottle stashed in the dugout. For a time, Papa had used it to store junk, but it hadn’t been fit for even that in years. The roof had caved in, along with a good part of the front wall, and the weeds and grass almost hid it from a casual glance.
I took a seat on a crate I drug out of the dugout and nursed my whiskey, staring at the ruins of what had been our first home in Texas. Only, it never was.
Sometime later, I sloshed kerosene into the tumble of fallen rafters and threw the can in after it. A clump of dry grass was enough tinder to get a fire going and I pitched it in the ruins with the kerosene. There was enough refuse inside to get the flames going high, and the rafters and rotten decking were burning before I returned to my seat and took my whiskey bottle back up.
Somebody yelled at me from the big house. It was a woman’s voice, but it was Hamish who showed up first. Carmelita or Juanita must have gone to get him.
He killed the Oldsmobile’s engine and turned off its lights. The flames were almost hot enough to singe my face by the time he came to stand beside me. I could see Mama’s mahogany dresser burning in the center of the fire.
“Are you about to tell me that I’m drunk or crazy?”
Hamish shook his head in the firelight. “No, we should have burned it a long time ago. Remember how Mama cried when she saw what Papa wanted her to live in?”
“Go get some boards off of that rotten lumber pile over there and let’s burn her up.”
“You loved Mama, too.”
“Mama quit us.”
“Mama was strong as Papa. Maybe stronger,” he said. “The Kiowa took her. How can she have any blame in that?”
I laughed bitterly. “Mama shot Baby Beth and then shot herself. You didn’t go in the dugout, but I got close enough before Papa stopped me. Saw the hole in her head and that little pistol Papa gave her lying there off the end of her hand.”
“You lie.”
“You’ve got that pistol still, don’t you? Why do you think the Kiowa didn’t take it if they killed her? They never left a gun lying around after a raid.”
“They overlooked it. It was Kiowa, and they were out for revenge because we had fought them and killed a couple of them when we helped those Quakers.”
“Who knows what those Kiowa were up to, or even if it was Kiowa. Could have been Comanche or any kind of Indian, no matter what Jose thought. He didn’t know much about Indians, and never said he did. It was Papa grilling him hard that made him give an opinion that it was Kiowa. That, and the fact that me and Papa had killed two of them the day Papa traded for Joseph.” I could tell Hamish was listening to me, even though he didn’t want to. “Maybe those Indians were only riding by, curious like, and Old Ben wasn’t taking any chances and was going to get in a first shot. Maybe she saw them kill Old Ben and did it then. Something like that is the only thing that explains why they didn’t take her gun, nor Old Ben’s either. I carried his pistol for years myself.”
“They set fire to one of our wagons and stole some of the stock.”
“Could have had their mad up by then. How come you think Joseph was able to hide from them so easy, and Juanita, too? I think they weren’t dead set on raiding us, but something went bad. After that, they took what was handy and moved on quick. Indians don’t like suicides. Maybe Mama was what caused them to go without taking the time to carry off everything on the place.”
“You are crazy.”
“Doesn’t matter if they came raiding or not, there’s one thing I know.” Hamish was about to interrupt me, but I cut him off. “Instead of forting up and trying to make a go of it, Mama lost her nerve and wasn’t going to let them get her or Baby Beth. All those horror stories of what Indians did to white women and that ‘save the last bullet’ stuff was too much.”
“What’s wrong with you to make up such things?”
“If Papa was still here you could ask him.”
The air went out of him and he sat against the bottom rail of the corral fence with his hands on his knees and his head hung. The flames were dying down.
I let Hamish think on it while I stared at my whiskey flask until I threw the empty thing in the coals. I never should have told him. I had kept it from him all those years, but whiskey is full of regrets.
“Sometimes I hate you,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t know how we can be brothers.”
“They say you can pick your friends but you can’t pick your family.”
“You and Papa. I used to try to be like you, all the time feeling bad because I couldn’t. Took me years to figure out I could be something else.”
“You got her smarts.”
He stood like he was going to his car, but held where he was. “You know when I knew I wasn’t like you and Papa? I knew it that morning in that Wichita village.”
“That was a bad morning.”
“As far as I know, he never said a word about what he did that morning for the rest of his life. It was like he could forget it happened, but who could do that?”
“Papa had his own ways. Walk a mile in his moccasins before you go to judging him.”
“He shot Emilio right in front of us. I loved Papa as much as you did, but I never could forget that.”
“We’ve all done things. You always want to pick which part of Papa you liked. He had his faults, but I took him on the whole, like I take you on the whole, the good and the bad.”
“I’m going to make something big so that all that wasn’t for nothing. I’m going to make it good.”
“Fix it all? Make it bigger than Papa did? You sound a lot like him, whether you’ll admit it or not.”
“I’m nothing like him. I loved him, but God strike me down if I ever become him.” Hamish went to his car and I listened to him drive away.
“Don’t toy with God, brother,” I said to myself. “He’s got a wicked sense of humor.”
Chapter Fifty-seven
Tiffany came by the house and told us that Hamish was about to bring in his oil well, and she wanted us t
o be there to see it. She was driving Hamish’s automobile, wearing a canvas driving duster over her dress, a pair of goggles, and had her hair tucked up inside a cap. The sight of a woman driving such a contraption struck me odd, especially in that getup, but Tiffany was an Eastern woman and what Hamish called a freethinker. Next thing you know she would be wearing pants.
I went to the barn and hitched a team to our buggy, while Carmelita got the kids ready and Juanita packed a basket with a lunch. I picked them all up in front of the house and we drove to Hamish’s well site.
I quickly saw that we weren’t the only sightseers to have heard the word, for there must have been fifty people already there, with their wagons scattered back a hundred yards or so from the rig and sitting in the wagon beds like bleachers or spreading blankets on the ground. The ladies spread our blanket, and by the time Juanita broke out our lunch more people were arriving. And they kept coming and coming.
Hamish’s driller and his crew were busy tending to things that I had no idea about, but what struck me most is that they were nervous. You could see it even from a distance. I saw the driller pull Hamish aside several times, and the discussion between them was intense. I assumed they were simply on edge as to whether or not they were going to bring a well in. The majority of the holes the crazy oil field wildcatters in the county were drilling turned out to be nothing but dusters or shallow and short-lived low producers, and Hamish was probably sweating bullets, considering the money he had spent trying to become the next Rockefeller.
“Rumor is, DB has found himself one hundred feet of black sand,” a man standing near our picnic blanket said.
“They might have something, then, but don’t count on it,” the man with him said. “If rumors and hope were barrels of oil, we’d all be rich by now.”
From the look of the two, I guessed they were roughnecks or oil field types themselves. In fact, many of the crews from rigs working in the area had shown up to see how things played out. Maybe it was professional courtesy, but I imagine they were trying to get the scout on where the next hot area would be. The big shots back East, the Texacos, Gulf Oils, and Standard Oils, all had their lease men traveling the country trying to buy mineral rights to whatever ground interested them. Coupled with those big-money lease agents, there were just as many shady, pie-in-the-sky wildcatters doing the same thing. I had asked Hamish why we didn’t lease the ranch, bank the money, and let some other fools worrying about drilling holes, but he was convinced that a fortune was buried below us and was dead set on keeping the lion’s share instead of leasing out our ground for a royalty percentage.
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