Powder Keg

by Ed Gorman

  “She’ll keep asking me about her mother and brother. She won’t want to leave.”

  I started rolling another cigarette. Then: “You looked inside?”

  She nodded.

  “You saw the broom?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t have guts enough to pull the cover back and look at the mother, though.”

  I knew it was time to get busy. “I’ll start stacking the firewood in front of the door now.”

  “You sure work hard.”

  “Keeps my mind busy so I don’t have to remember what I saw in the cabin.”

  “I wonder if Clarice’ll be able to forget?”

  “She mention her brother?”

  “Just once. I saw him when I looked in through the door. He was trying to protect his mother.”

  “You go to the lean-to. I’ll stack the firewood.”

  I went over and started on the wood. Physical labor felt good. It would make me sleep instead of just being fatigued. A good hard three hours of blackness would give me back my strength.

  Work up a sweat and give in to just becoming a mule. There is something about that kind of labor that we all need from time to time. I worked out of the agency office for four months and finally tendered my resignation. A desk is not for me. They put me back on fieldwork.

  When I finished blocking up the doorway to the cabin, I grabbed my saddle blanket from my horse and went to the lean-to. The wind wasn’t so bad just then.

  Clarice was on Jen’s lap again, saying: “But won’t my mommy get cold?”

  “We’ll put plenty of blankets on her, honey.”

  “Will she wake up to say goodbye?”

  “We should just let her sleep, honey. We won’t be gone that long and then we’ll come back here and take both of you back to town.”

  I couldn’t figure out any way to say it any better. Maybe the kid knew the truth even without us telling her. Maybe she knew the truth but didn’t want us to say it. Maybe it was the only way she could deal with it—putting it off till she was stronger.

  The wind stayed down most of the night. We ended up huddled together because the temperature dropped several degrees. We were awakened twice by Clarice’s screams. Nightmares. They would curse her the rest of her life.

  At dawn we discussed coffee. We both wanted it but building a fire would waste time. We ate jerky and bread and drank water from the canteens.

  When we were getting the horses ready to move, Clarice got away from us and worked her way back toward the cabin. She hadn’t seen the firewood I’d stacked in front of the door. In the light I saw what a poor defense it was. Any number of animals could rip it down and get inside.

  But that wasn’t what bothered Clarice. She stood in front of the cabin and started sobbing.

  I got to her first and lifted her up. “What’s wrong, honey?”

  “That wood. How’s my mommy ever going to get out of there?”

  Then Jen was there. She took her and carried her away. I couldn’t hear what they were saying but as the sun began to paint the snow hills a rich gold, Clarice stopped crying.

  Getting upslope took a lot longer than getting downslope had. We didn’t reach the mountain trail for a good hour. The horses were still tired and, much as we didn’t want to admit it to each other, so were Jen and I.

  Clarice rode Jen’s horse. We walked. And after a while, so quietly that you could barely hear it in the growing wind, Clarice cried. Jen would call words to her but that was about all they seemed to be. Words. They didn’t slow the little girl’s crying at all.

  And for the first time, magnanimous son of a bitch that I am, I felt resentment toward the little girl. She was slowing us down. And what if she kept up crying like this? And how could we confront Connelly and Pepper with a kid in tow? And what if she started bawling when we snuck up on them?

  That little brat was all kinds of trouble.

  And then finally I realized what a bastard I was being.

  I needed sleep. I hadn’t had a good bowel movement in three days. Tom Daly’s wife was going to blame me for Tom’s death.

  The kid wasn’t the trouble; my life was the trouble.

  She’d had to watch her brother be murdered and her mother raped and murdered in just about the worst way you could think of. And she was only seven years old.

  And here I was feeling sorry for myself because I hadn’t had a good stool for seventy-two hours.

  What a magnanimous bastard I am.

  Chapter 20

  That afternoon, the wind was the worst of it, strong enough to blow you back several steps so that a good share of your walking was covering what you’d already been over.

  The mountain was a soaring wall that blocked out a good deal of sky. The very top was often lost in snow swirls that were like exotic mists in an adventure story. Even the wolves we saw looked whipped and beaten by the weather, hidden just a few feet off the path, their eyes lurid and lonely. Two or three times I smelled and heard bear but never actually saw one.

  Clarice slept as she rode, bundled up mummy-like in blankets.

  Always, relentless, there was the wind, the sounds it made in the mountain rocks above alternately friendly and eerie. Whenever I was in the mountains I always thought of how many different centuries of men had lived in them. The cries of the wind sometimes sounded like the cries of ghosts all the way back to when men hunted with clubs and sharpened stones and feared animals we couldn’t even imagine now.

  The wind blinded us, too. Visibility was at most ten, twelve feet, occasionally much less. The path was straight so that kept us on track, anyway.

  Darkness came quickly.

  Jen was eager to push forward but I said no. Another storm was on its way. The cloud mass and color told that. She argued that we could probably reach her brother’s hiding place soon; two, three hours at most.

  I didn’t argue. I just tied down my horse and went looking for firewood. When I got back she’d set up a lean-to. Clarice sat bundled inside it, eating some of the bread and jerky Jen had given her. Jen didn’t speak to me. I didn’t blame her for worrying about her brother but I wasn’t ready to die in a night of near-blizzard conditions.

  The fire proved to be a bitch. Wind and snow assaulted not only us but set the forest areas to swaying so hard that you could hear timber crack. I did well enough to heat up coffee and beans but then the wind changed directions and put the fire out for good.

  That night Jen and Clarice stayed on one side of the lean-to and I stayed on the other. She had answered a grand total of three of my questions since we’d made camp. One-word answers. She was many things, this Jen I felt closer and closer to all the time, but forgiving was not one of them. My apology might have helped the situation. But I didn’t make a habit of apologizing when I felt I was in the right.

  The storm that had stopped around midnight whipped up again just before dawn. It was of enough strength to make traveling impossible. It was wind and snow equally. This fortunately was brief though it had turned into sleet.

  When the storm died we quickly set off.

  Jen was familiar with what we needed to do to find the cave. She signaled where we turned east along a narrow trail through heavy timber.

  She was speaking to me again. Not in the way she usually did. She was taking it slow, making me appreciate each modest advance. The previous night had been one-word answers. We were up to two-word answers by then with the prospects of three-word answers on the horizon.

  Clarice apparently had a nightmare about her mother. During an odd silence in the woods, she began screaming so hard she fell off the horse. The blankets she’d been wrapped in broke her fall. She wasn’t hurt but she’d been stunned out of the lingering nightmare.

  Amazing how maternal and tender Jen could be when she was still mostly ignoring me. She held the kid tight and rocked her back and forth and started saying those half-whispered words that sounded like cooing again.

  The sun appeared midafternoon, just as we came to an outcr
op of rock.

  And that was when we met up with Connelly and Pepper.

  They had left the outcropping so they could fire at us from the left, from up on a hill that gave them pine-heavy cover. Exposed like that, we were much easier targets.

  We dismounted quickly, Jen grabbing Clarice. We managed to scramble behind a thin copse of pine. They had to kill something to amuse themselves so they took our horses. At the sound of the gunfire the horses spooked and made the mistake of turning to the edge of the outcropping. My horse was shot twice in the face and pitched sideways off the trail. Jen’s horse fell, too, but balanced perilously on the edge of the outcropping. Its legs jerked as it died, propelling her horse over the edge.

  The trouble was the trees were sparse and from their perch on the hill, Connelly and Pepper could see us without much trouble.

  I couldn’t get any kind of clean shot off. I needed to get closer but in order to do that I’d have to move closer to the trail. This would invite a barrage of gunfire. Getting killed was part of my job. But neither Jen nor Clarice had signed on for that. I needed to get them to a place that was safer than that relatively open place.

  The gunfire kept Clarice’s crying at a constant keen, making even Jen sob every once in a while. They wanted to kill us but they wanted to have some fun doing it.

  I lifted Jen’s Colt from her holster.

  I said, “I’m going to start returning fire. You take the kid and start running for the timber as soon as I do.”

  Jen didn’t argue. She probably would have stayed and done her own shooting but it was the kid she was worried for.

  My rifle was in the scabbard on my animal. All I had was my .44. But it would be enough to force them to take cover while Jen and Clarice made it to the woods.

  “Now!” I shouted.

  I started firing like crazy, emptying Jen’s gun into the air in the general direction of their position. This got the response I’d hoped for. Just as I got into a crouching position, preparing to throw myself onto the trail and roll to the relatively safe haven of the forest where Jen and Clarice were about to hide—just then the air became furious with two men who had decided to give up playing and start firing in earnest. And they would start with me. And after I was dead, they’d have Jen to have some fun with. Maybe even the same kind of fun they’d had with Clarice’s mother. Clarice screamed as Jen picked her up, tucked her under her arm, and started moving as fast as she could on the slick surface of snow.

  But before I reached the trees where Jen and Clarice were hiding, I wanted to get my rifle. I would have to be damned quick—my horse was close by but right out in the open—but a repeater and ammunition were the only way we were going to survive.

  I kept pumping bullets at the outcropping, even though they’d now retreated behind a tree at the edge of the rock they were firing from.

  I stood up, keeping my head down to avoid them using it as a target. Ten years before I could have pulled that trick off without undue risk of getting a few fairly serious holes put in my skull.

  But I wasn’t that fast anymore and I’d be jumping from a very slippery surface, which could mean that my jump might not be clean. I’d be a good target for them but I wouldn’t even have a chance at getting the rifle. But I didn’t have any choice. I readied myself for my jump. Deep breath. Two deep breaths.

  I stuffed my .44 in its holster. And then I jumped.

  It took them a few seconds to see me. They didn’t wait to think through what I was doing. They didn’t need to. They saw me jump and then reach the dead animal and then rip the repeater from its scabbard.

  In those seconds they fired a war’s worth of rounds.

  The jump worked fine. But as soon as I had the repeater in my hand, my boot heels skidded on the icy surface of the trail and I went over backward.

  I didn’t want to lose the rifle. It could easily slide away. So I clutched it as hard as I could and just gave in to the fall. I wasn’t worried about going over the edge. But I sure didn’t want to crack my head open, either.

  I held my head up as I hit the ground. My shoulders took a lot of the impact. My hand still gripped the rifle.

  I started rolling toward the edge of the woods. Bullets ripped up snow bursts all around me, coming closer and closer.

  I was able to angle myself behind some bushes and lay there while they pumped shots endlessly near and around me.

  I still had maybe six feet to go before I reached the woods proper. A clear six feet. I’d once again be a clear target.

  I got up on my haunches. From there I could see Jen and Clarice behind a huge boulder just inside the line of woods.

  Their firing let up. Reloading no doubt. And probably trying to give me a false sense of security.

  Sure, I could make that six-foot run from that wide, open spot on the trail. They wouldn’t hurt me. They’d be too busy loading their rifles.

  But I was wrong. One of them had apparently reloaded because three bullets sizzled past me. I ducked but in doing so I fell to my knees on the ice.

  A rabbit on my right got my attention. It was trying to get enough traction to get moving again. The surface of the snow away from the outcropping was sufficiently slick to qualify as an ice-skating rink.

  No way could I survive a direct run to the woods. Not with one of them still able to fire at me. But the rabbit gave me an idea. All I needed was for the surface of the snow to cooperate. If it was sufficiently frozen it would be able to support me and I’d skid right into the woods.

  No time to debate. The move I made was similar to riding a sled. I needed to get some traction and then I needed to hit the ground in such a way that the icy surface would help me slide right across and into the woods. Hopefully I’d be moving fast enough—and giving them a big enough surprise—that their bullets wouldn’t be able to find me in time.

  I sent my rifle skidding across the ice to the edge of the woods. It would be too cumbersome to keep with me.

  Then I decided to jackpot. Either I’d soon be relatively safe or I’d be seriously wounded or maybe even dead.

  I slammed my body down as I had when I spent long winter afternoons sledding as a kid.

  Then I was off the trail and sliding along the surface of the snow. Jen was screaming for me to hurry up! Hurry up! She didn’t seem to understand that I was skidding as fast as I could.

  Another round of gunfire from Connelly and Pepper. Stench of gunfire; crack of bullets smashing into branches and ice-covered snow.

  Jen dragged me into the woods the way she would have dragged a drowning man across a beach.

  I got to my feet, brushed myself off.

  Clarice stood next to Jen. She looked alert in a way I hadn’t seen before.

  “Are they the men who killed my mommy?”

  She said it simply, almost without emotion.

  Jen glanced at me then leaned over close to Clarice and said, “Yes, honey. Those are the men.”

  “Will they be hanged?”

  “Yes, honey, they will.”

  She turned her small face to me.

  “Will you hang them?”

  “No, but I’ll arrest them and see that they get hanged.” I spoke in ragged, broken bursts. I had no breath left and my body was half-frozen from sweat.

  I leaned down and gave Clarice a kiss on the head.

  Maybe someday we’d know why she had suddenly realized—or allowed herself to realize—that her mother and brother were dead.

  Jen said, “I have a box of bullets for your carbine. I brought one from home. So we still have that, anyway.”

  “How far is it to your brother’s cave?”

  “No more than half an hour.”

  “I wonder why Connelly and Pepper were waiting for us instead of being at the cave.”

  “Mike has the advantage. In order to shoot him, they have to lean over the top of the cave to see where they’re shooting. He could pick them off.”

  “But if they put enough bullets down there—”
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  “Yeah. Enough bullets and the way bullets will ricochet off the walls—they’d hit him eventually. The cave isn’t that big. And even if he gets to the hidden cave they can wait him out.” Bitter smile. “They never did mean to bring him in alive, did they?”

  “I thought I had a deal with them. But then when Mike got accused of killing Tom Daly—”

  “I just keep thinking of what they did back at the cabin to Clarice’s mother and brother—” Then she stopped herself. Her eyes got a sheen on them and I thought she was going to cry. But she made an obvious effort not to and said, “Let’s get going.”

  She knew a path through the woods. No evidence of fresh footsteps. There was a good chance we’d be safe taking that route. Connelly and Pepper would be looking for us on the mountain trail.

  The afternoon had turned mild enough for us to catch glimpses of forest animals watching us move along. Fascinating creatures, human beings, me being one and all. But for the most part, I still preferred the company of so-called dumb animals.

  We tried to make as little noise as possible, but feet on icy snow aren’t exactly quiet. I led and every few minutes or so I’d stop to listen for any extra sounds the wind might be carrying. Connelly and Pepper wouldn’t be much better in this kind of terrain than I was.

  We all needed toilet stops at different times. I’d just finished mine, washing my hands in the snow and setting off to the path again, when a voice from above said, “Stop right there. I’ve got a carbine trained right on the back of your neck.”

  I assumed it was Connelly or Pepper. But when the voice spoke again I realized it was too young and clear—no tobacco, no whiskey in that voice—to be either one of them.

  “Get my sister back here.”

  I took my hat off and stared up, trying to find a face among the snow-heavy branches of the scrub pine. I got a glimpse of one but that was all.

  “You Mike?”

  “That’s right. I saw your badge so I don’t have to ask who you are.”

  “I’ve told your sister that I’d give you every chance to tell your story.” My neck was getting a crick from having to look straight up.