Powder Keg

by Ed Gorman

  I gained on her steadily. She looked back once and saw me.

  The only warm part of me was the trickle of blood on my forehead. I really did need to get that stitched up.

  I had almost caught up to her. “I just want to talk to you, Mrs. Nordberg! Let’s just stop and talk!”

  I made my voice as cordial as I could.

  But she didn’t turn around again. She increased her speed by doubling the number of mincing little steps she took. She wanted to hurry but she wanted to be safe, too.

  I was almost able to reach out and grab her shoulder when it happened. The accident had the air of unreality about it—the mind’s first impulse to reject it as impossible—but that didn’t stop it from being real indeed.

  In other circumstances, a stage comedy for instance, what happened might even have been humorous.

  You have this woman hurrying along a path adjacent to the river five feet below. Clutching her baby as if her—their—lives depended on it. That noblest of all creatures—the mother protecting her child.

  And then it happened.

  She stumbled or started sliding. Whichever it was, she lost her grip on the infant she was carrying. And the baby, still swaddled in baby blankets, popped from her arms. It took to the air. And I think she and I both became paralyzed at the same instant, watching the arc of the child as it flew upward into the air. It seemed to hover there for a very long time—the way certain terrible moments in nightmares seem to linger—and it then began a descent to the icy river, where moments later it crashed.

  She found her voice. Her scream was so piercing, so helpless, so horrified that I doubted I would ever be able to get it out of my mind.

  Then I found my legs. Instinct took over then. I stepped to the edge of the trail.

  Mrs. Nordberg was still screaming, crying out for her child. No sound sadder than that.

  In that instant, I calculated that the ice would be strong enough to hold me when I slammed onto its surface. If it wasn’t, there was a good chance I’d smash through it and drown in the icy waters below. There wasn’t the faintest hope that Mrs. Nordberg would be able to save me. Or even lend a hand in that effort. She wanted her daughter. That was her only concern. And I couldn’t blame her.

  I jumped.

  As I landed, my full weight touching the ice for the first time, I heard a muted cracking sound. Would it hold me? I could see the infant sitting maybe ten yards from me. When it landed, it had skidded up river. Making things even more difficult.

  Mrs. Nordberg teetered on the edge of the snow above the river. She was steeling herself for a jump to the ice.

  I shouted, “Let me get her, Mrs. Nordberg!”

  But I doubted she could hear me. Her only reality was the baby on the ice below her. Her baby.

  I started moving toward it. The deep cracking sound came again. My face was sheathed with sweat that made me tremble. The icy water would take care of the sweat. Unless I was very lucky, it would take care of me, too.

  I started carefully, slowly across the ten yards separating me from the infant.

  At that moment, Mrs. Nordberg decided to jump. The effect was startling. She seemed to hang in the air, irrespective of time and gravity, just as her infant had after popping from her mom’s arms.

  This time the cracking sound was much more pronounced. She was a thin body but heavy enough to make a difference on that section of ice. She landed on her hands and knees. A thin line, thin as a thread, appeared in the ice between me and the baby. The woman was in no condition—she was still on her hands and knees—to grab her baby in case the crack got wider and a hole opened up in the ice.

  I moved as fast as I could toward the kid. Saving her was the only thought in my mind. Nothing else mattered.

  I covered five feet of ice, six, seven. And then the infant was within my reach. I bent down and picked up the blankets that hid the infant.

  The big thing was to make sure that the infant had survived the fall. Sometimes they survived catastrophes; sometimes minor injuries killed them.

  I guess in my frenzy, wanting to get the blankets off her so that I could see her face and make sure she was all right—I guess in that second I didn’t notice how little the blankets weighed.

  But then I began undoing the blankets that kept her warm and hid her from public view.

  There was no baby inside.

  I was holding only a bundle of small bunched blankets that had been safety-pinned together to resemble the shape of a baby.

  Chapter 39

  “Nordberg wasn’t home when I got there,” Doc Tomkins said, “but Wendy was. She was sitting in this rocking chair with the baby in her lap, rocking back and forth. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody who looked like that. Her eyes, I mean. They were totally—vacant. I don’t know any other way to describe them. This beautiful little house and you look in the window and there’s nothing inside. No people, no furniture, nothing.

  “I’d come out there because Sheriff Nordberg had stopped by and said that the baby was pretty sick. That was the first time I realized that that’s what he always called her. ‘The baby.’ Not ‘his’ baby or ‘her baby’ or even ‘their baby.’ He didn’t look worried or sad or anything that night. If anything, he looked angry. I thought maybe that was the way he reacted to a sick baby. That’s how some people react to any sort of medical problem. They get mad.

  “Well, Wendy was a favorite of mine. And so was her little girl. They were just such sweet, quiet little people. Never knew a baby who made as little fuss. So I went out there right away and I see her in this rocking chair and I see the baby in her lap and I see that she’s got the baby all covered up. I spoke to Wendy a couple of times. But her expression didn’t change. She just sat in the chair and rocked back and forth. And stared. I wondered what she was seeing. In her mind, I mean. Something had obviously happened that she couldn’t face up to.

  “So I leaned over and turned the cover back and there was the baby and I knew right away she was dead. I remembered how sharp my breath was in the house when I realized that she was sitting there rocking a dead baby.

  “But Wendy was so far gone, she didn’t even seem to know what I was doing when I took the baby from her. I carried her over to their table and turned up the lamp and examined her right there.

  “Didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened. The left side of the baby’s head was stove in. The wound was deep and raw, I could see bone there under the blood. Then I happened to notice some kind of smear on the wall behind where Wendy sat in the rocking chair.

  “I picked up the lamp and went over there and got a close look. You could see where somebody had smashed her head against the wall. There was blood and hair and flecks of bone in this smear I was looking at. And I didn’t have to think real hard about who’d done it. It sure hadn’t been Wendy. Not the way she loved that little girl.

  “I wrapped the baby up and went looking for some whiskey. Wendy didn’t want any of it at first but I made her take it. And it was funny, after about three belts—and she hadn’t said a single word the whole time—she just sat there staring straight ahead and started shuddering. Never saw a person thrash around that way. She was like some contraption that was going to fly apart in bits and pieces.

  “I right away dug in my bag and got her a sedative and I gave it to her. I sat right next to her on a footstool, holding her hand until the shuddering stopped when the sedative took hold of her.

  “And that was when she told me everything. How Nordberg would beat her from their wedding night on. That he always called her a whore, even though she’d really been a virgin at that time. Not even Mike Chaney had slept with her at that point, though she’d gone out with him for three years before Nordberg even came to town. She wanted a baby. That was all she thought about. Having a baby. She’d never been a real social girl so she figured she’d finally get a true friend who she could take care of. A baby.

  “But Nordberg wouldn’t touch her after the first s
ix months of their marriage. He’d go into these rages and accuse her of giving him some kind of disease. She knew he was sneaking off and seeing girls at the bawdyhouse. But his own wife he wouldn’t have anything to do with.

  “Then he started raping her. That’s what she called it. He’d come home drunk and throw her against the wall and rape her. And then he’d beat her afterward.

  “She told her folks this but they’re religious people and they told her that the Bible said a woman should answer only to her husband, not carry tales of him to others. A man needed his dignity and she was giving him a bad name. Besides, these things always worked out. That was the sign of a good marriage. Having things work out.

  “Then one night when he was gone, she went out for a walk as she did a lot on spring nights. And ran into Mike Chaney. That’s how he explained it, anyway. Completely coincidental. He just happened to be walking down the same grassy lane she was. She had the sense that he’d followed her but she didn’t really care.

  “That night she slept with him. She still had feelings for him. Not love, she told me. She’d grown up enough to see that he was a showboat as much as anything. That he wasn’t robbing Flannery’s banks to help people around here—he was doing it to humiliate Flannery and to make a name for himself.

  “She got pregnant. There was no doubt it was Mike’s child. When Nordberg accused her of sleeping with somebody else, she told him that he wasn’t remembering the night when he’d thrown her on the bed and taken her from behind. She told him he’d never been up that far inside of her before, that’s how she’d gotten pregnant. She said he believed her for a while.

  “But he couldn’t let go of the notion that Mike was the baby’s father. He got to the point where he didn’t want to even look at the child, let alone hold it or even touch it.

  “And then one night he came home drunk and wild and took the baby by her ankles and smashed her head against the wall. That was when I got involved in it all. And I’m not proud I didn’t speak up. I’m too old to move anywhere else. And I didn’t have any proof that Nordberg did it. It could have been Wendy herself, though I knew better.

  “Nordberg wasn’t anybody I could go up against. He has too many friends in this town. I rode out there the next morning to see how Wendy was. She came to the door holding those blankets all wrapped up and pretending her baby was inside. Her baby dying and all—she lost her mind. She sat in the rocking chair with all those blankets bundled together and talked about her baby as if she was still alive. I think Nordberg buried the real baby somewhere and the fact that Wendy was carrying those bundled-up blankets all over town was fine with him. People thought the real baby was still alive.

  “I imagine with what happened this morning—the way you described her on the ice—I imagine she’s even worse off mentally than she was before. You brought her over here but while we were in here talking, Ford, she left. The Lord alone knows where’s she gone now.”

  Chapter 40

  The ride out to Nordberg’s place was cold. The wind was up, doing its best to ruin the sunny day. I was still trying to sort it all out. It was beginning to come clear. Nordberg didn’t just want Mike Chaney dead, he wanted him discredited. The town thought Mike Chaney was a hero until he started killing people. Or until Nordberg made it look as if Chaney was killing people. But it was Nordberg who’d killed them all.

  His only problem was when he rode out and killed Chaney and Pepper and Connelly. He set it up to make it look as if Flannery had murdered them. And who wouldn’t believe it? Everybody knew how much Flannery hated Chaney. And he’d have to kill the agents with Chaney because they might be able to identify him.

  On the way out to Nordberg’s that morning, I’d stopped by Mrs. Ralston’s place. She finally admitted that her husband had told her it was Nordberg who’d taken his horse from the livery the afternoon Chaney and the others had died. And the maid at Flannery’s mansion confirmed to me that Nordberg was one of the men who’d been given the command words to calm the Dobermans. Flannery and Nordberg had done a lot of hunting together. Flannery had shown off his dogs many times to Nordberg and trusted Nordberg to know the secret words. With the dogs subdued, it had been easy for Nordberg to sneak into the mansion and set up Flannery’s fake suicide. And then by insisting to me that it had been faked, he threw suspicion off himself.

  Smoke from the tin chimney. A pair of jittery squirrels raising their heads as I approached the Nordberg place. Raising their heads and then scampering away. A hefty gray tomcat sat in the window, watching me with great interest.

  There was no good place to hide at the front of the house. All I could do was grab my carbine and circle wide to the rear of the place.

  Nordberg’s horse was there. The saddlebags bulged. The horse was ready to go.

  There was a single window in back and that was where he fired from. The shot got me in the left shoulder with such force that it spun me half around. It also saved my life by knocking me to the ground, in time to elude the other two shots that rang out afterward.

  Shock. Pain. Confusion. Pain. I knew that he’d be out the back door to finish me. I buried my face in the snow, keeping it there until my cheeks felt frozen hard. I had to stay clearheaded. The snow stunned me into full consciousness, enough so that I was able to crawl over to a pile of firewood and drag myself behind it.

  I wondered why he hadn’t come after me already. He would certainly be eager to kill me. I was a loose end he needed to tie up before he escaped town and went somewhere to start a new life for himself. As much as the Old West was quickly becoming the New West, there were still many places a man could hide and start a new life somewhere. There was always the chance that somebody would appear from your past and recognize you. But a man like Nordberg, running away and starting fresh was the only chance he had.

  A scream, a gunshot, a fainter scream.

  Wendy. He’d shot and probably killed Wendy. That shouldn’t have surprised me—it was his hatred of her that had driven him to kill all those people—but still, lying there in the snow, the smell of damp wood filling my nostrils on that fine bright blue-skyed winter day, the screams and the single shot seemed more violent than anything I’d yet encountered in that town. Crazy Wendy, carrying those blankets around and convinced her real child was inside them. Crazy Nordberg, so given to rage and hatred, but able to conceal it in a character he’d created for himself—the quiet, sensible, dutiful town sheriff, a man respected by just about everybody in the community. Not seeming to understand—or maybe not caring to understand—that one killing necessitated another and then another and then another.

  Until that moment.

  The scream and the gunshot and the second, weaker scream.

  The bleeding was getting bad by then. I sopped up as much of the blood as I could with my coat. But soon enough the whole side of the coat would be soaked.

  Not a sound from inside. A windswept silence. That deep solemn song of wind fanning the pines in back of Nordberg’s property. Then a sound I didn’t recognize at first. My own sound, a low deep moan. Me.

  The back door opening. Footsteps on the stoop. Nordberg.

  He didn’t say anything. He just put two bullets into the three-foot-high pile of firewood I was hiding behind. It was the only place I could possibly be. He knew he’d wounded me, that I probably wasn’t in any condition to make it back to the pines. Therefore I was behind the firewood.

  “You knew whose baby that was all along, didn’t you, Ford? I bet a lot of people did. And I bet they got a lot of good laughs out of it, too. Poor stupid Nordberg. Too dumb to know that Mike Chaney was fucking his wife all the time after Nordberg married her. Well, I took care of that slut. And now I’m gonna finish it up with you.”

  Footsteps on the stoop. Then crunching into the snow.

  There was a bad problem by then. I was starting to black out every thirty seconds or so. Not for long. But long enough so that I might not be able to defend myself. Even if he killed me, I wanted to put a
couple of bullets into him. Maybe I couldn’t take him with me but I sure wanted him to remember me.

  I eased myself up on my haunches. My breath came in raw gasps. As soon as he got near, I was going to jerk myself up and start firing. It was better than just letting him shoot me.

  He put two more bullets into the firewood. A small piece of wood flew into my left eye, momentarily blinding it. My left arm was useless because of the wound. And my right hand was needed to hold my gun. I had to live with the blinking left eye.

  He didn’t try to walk soft. He sounded like he was purposely walking heavy. Trying to unnerve me.

  Closer and closer and closer.

  I gripped my .44 hard. Got ready to lurch up as far as I could and fire two, three times. Uselessly, probably. But right then I didn’t give a damn. I just felt this animal anger.

  Closer and closer and—

  I stood up. Or tried to. I even got a couple of shots off. But the trouble was that even as I was standing up my legs were shaking so badly from the blood loss and shock of the wound—even as I was standing I was falling over backward.

  He came around the firewood and looked down at me on my back. In the fall, my gun had slipped from my hand and was lost in the snow.

  “Maybe you fucked her, too. I never thought of that till just right now, Ford. You probably fucked her, too, didn’t you?”

  He was gone. Way gone. He’d loved her and hated her. And finally he’d killed her. But he still wasn’t sated. He was pure hate crazy by then. Imagining that I’d slept with her. Pure hate crazy.

  He raised his .45.

  For me there was just pain and nuisance. My shoulder pounded with pain. And my left eye kept blinking and watering over.

  I’d always thought about how I would die. I’d seen brave men shit their pants and beg to live. But I couldn’t do that because all I was going to have out there on that nowhere patch of windswept land was a bit of dignity. And dignity wouldn’t matter to him or the unknown place I was headed for. But it mattered to me because it was the only comfort I had.