by Robert Knott
“Law work, legal business is boring, you know that, Allie.”
“And you know that I’m very respectful of your legal business, Virgil.”
“And I appreciate it, Allie.”
“But. You know, Virgil. I know Bernice McCormick.”
“I know you do.”
“You know that she’s a member of our social.”
“I know.”
“And you know that she has pitched in, financially, with Appaloosa Days.”
“Yes, and that is good.”
“Which, I might add, the event is right around the corner.”
“I know.”
“She’s new to the social. And I would like to at the very least let her know that we care for her, that we are here for her. I can’t be so crass to hope this . . . this tragedy won’t be a damper on the event.”
Virgil was doing his best to keep Allie from carrying on, but he was running out of options.
“I understand,” he said.
“So I don’t know why you don’t want me to pay her a visit yet.”
Virgil leaned back in his chair.
“Don’t think that is a good idea.”
“But why?”
“Just ’cause.”
“’Cause there is an investigation going on right now?” she said.
Virgil looked to me.
“I knew it,” she said.
“Well, we don’t know all the facts about what has happened is all, Allie.”
“You haven’t even told me how he died.”
Virgil swiveled in his chair and crossed his arms.
“Help me out here, Everett,” Virgil said.
“He was murdered,” I said.
“Oh my God,” Allie said. “Sweet Jesus. I knew it. He was too young to drop dead in the street of a heart attack or some such.”
“My goodness,” Martha Kathryn said.
I nodded.
“Appaloosa is not without its own brand of drama,” Martha Kathryn said.
“Murdered?” Allie said. “By who?”
“We don’t know all the details regarding his death,” I said.
“But he was murdered?” Allie said.
“And until we do know the details,” Virgil said, “we have to treat everyone as a suspect.”
I nodded.
“Including Bernice?” Allie said.
“Nobody is excluded,” Virgil said.
“Well, my word,” Allie said with a scoff. “Surely beautiful Bernice is not a suspect?”
“We don’t know who did this, Allie,” Virgil said.
“Beautiful or not,” I said.
“We need to be quiet about this until we know more,” Virgil said. “That is all.”
“Well, it has to be the bad men, the gunmen, the men we saw in the Boston House, of course. Don’t you think?” Allie said. “And this all started with the two McCormick miners who were missing. And now this.”
“In a situation like this, Allie,” I said, “we have to be careful not to jump to conclusions.”
Virgil nodded.
“Not until we know what is what,” he said.
Allie was wide-eyed.
“We will get to the bottom of it,” I said. “Rest assured.”
“The gold,” Allie said.
Martha Kathryn cut her eyes to me.
“This,” she said. “The questioning earlier?”
I nodded.
She shook her head.
“Just need to keep this quiet, Allie,” Virgil said. “Last thing we need is to have the ladies’ social talking about this all over town. Just move forward with your Appaloosa Days and let us do our job.”
“Gold makes people do things they otherwise might not do,” Martha Kathryn said.
“Does,” Virgil said.
46
The whole trip home the kid was sick to his stomach. Along the journey he had to ask the teamster to stop a few times so he could puke. It’d been only in the last few hours that he was beginning to feel better. But as they neared the house, the kid was alarmed by the sound of gunshots.
“Son of a bitch,” he said.
“It’s okay,” the teamster said.
But the kid whipped around and grabbed his Winchester from behind the seat of the buckboard.
“It’s nothing,” the teamster said.
“What?” the kid said as more shots rang out.
“It’s her.”
“What? What do you mean, ‘it’s her’?” the kid said as he chambered a round in his rifle.
“It’s my wife,” he said.
“What?”
“Gunfire. Shooting guns is normal around our place.”
“Shooting what?”
“She’s likely sighting in a long rifle.”
The kid sat back, resting his Winchester in his lap.
“She collects and trades all kinds of firearms,” the teamster said. “And shoots them. Constantly. Part of her universe.”
When they rounded the corner and the homestead was in sight, the teamster pointed to a hill behind the house.
“There she is.”
More rifle reports echoed. And puffs of gun smoke kicked up from where a figure was positioned. As they got closer, it was clear to the kid that it was the teamster’s wife shooting the rifle. Her dark skin was glowing with sweat and it was shiny in the late-afternoon sun.
“Guns are a big part of her life.”
The kid just watched but said nothing as they neared the house and she continued to fire.
“Like most things she touches,” the teamster said. “She’s good with them.”
The kid thought about that. Thinking about her touching things and being good with what she touched.
“Mostly rifles,” the teamster said.
The kid just stared up at her.
“She has a dead eye,” the teamster said. “She’s fond of shooting. She picked up an old Sharps rifle at an auction the other day. Looks like she’s sighting it in on horse apples. But she prefers moving targets.”
“I’ll be damned,” the kid said.
“She likes keeping her skills sharp. She says you never know when they might come in handy.”
“Handy for what?”
“Fuck if I know.”
The teamster pulled the buckboard to a stop near the barn. They sat and watched her.
“Never seen no woman wise on guns,” the kid said.
“There’s one right there,” the teamster said with a laugh as he jumped down from the buckboard.
“She has passions, they run deep in her.”
“Don’t I know,” the kid said.
“You don’t know the half of it,” the teamster said. “She has her clothes, and her foods, and her oils, and her potions. She concocts different types of potions.”
“What kind of potions?”
“She makes different kinds that do different things. Some are calming, some curing kinds. Most all of them are potions that alter your perspective.”
“Perspective?”
“Your outlook, your angle on things.”
“Oh, yeah,” the kid said. “I know about that kind of loco stuff.”
“You do?”
“I come on a Mexican witch doctor’s camp near Juárez where they did that sort of thing.”
“You did it?”
“Not myself,” the kid said. “But I seen folks crying and laughing there. Some running around like chickens with their heads cut off. All the time talking to things that don’t talk back. Heard about people trying to fly and end up dying. Run right off the side of a cliff.”
“She says it’s to keep you from getting too comfortable with yourself.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Hell if I know.”
“You do it?”
The teamster scoffed.
“No, never. She said I did not need it. Wasn’t right for it. Said I was already uncomfortable with myself enough.”
“Maybe she thought you might want to fly?”
The teamster nodded and chuckled.
“Maybe,” the teamster said. “May . . . be.”
The kid remained seated, watching her.
“She likes weapons way better than people, I can tell you that,” the teamster said. “She appreciates the fact weapons have a point.”
She stopped shooting when she saw them. She held her hand over her eyes, blocking the sun’s glare.
The kid waved but felt foolish for doing so. He glanced at the teamster to see if he had noticed.
But the teamster was busy with his mules. When the kid turned to her again, she was on the move, working her way down from where she had been perched. The kid watched her. The manner in which she was moving, quickly and surefooted, with her dark skin and her dark hair blowing in the wind, made him think of an Indian brave.
* * *
• • •
After the kid and the teamster got the rigging and the mules squared away, they walked toward the house.
The teamster’s wife stood over a washbasin on the front porch, washing the dress that she had been wearing. She looked naked. Her thin white underwear clung to her sweaty body. She finished scrubbing her dress as we walked up. The teamster moved up behind her and kissed her neck. She turned to him and kissed him back. Then she proceeded to hang the dress on a clothesline that was tethered from the porch to a post near the garden.
“You haven’t been doing much shooting of late,” he said.
“I was in need,” she said. “I felt it was time.”
“I was telling him about your shooting. About your guns.”
The kid nodded.
“Said you were a dead eye,” he said.
She turned from the clothesline with her full body facing him.
“Said you liked your guns better than people.”
She stared at the teamster.
“They do not lie,” she said.
She picked up the Sharps that was leaning against the porch post. Then moved closer toward the kid.
“This is a truth,” she said as she looked to the rifle in her hand. “Guns have no-nonsense.”
Then she turned, with the rifle barrel angled toward the teamster.
“There is nothing unclear about a gun,” she said.
The teamster smiled.
“They have no bullshit,” she said, “and no fat. No unimportant or unnecessary moving parts.”
The kid looked back and forth between the teamster and his wife as she continued to speak.
“And if used correctly,” she said, “they provide a desired end result, a final outcome that’s a function of their design.”
She raised the rifle up, pointed it at the teamster.
The kid took a nervous short step.
“Um . . .” he said.
But she continued and raised the rifle and pointed it to the teamster’s head.
“They have a particular point of their purpose,” she said.
The teamster smiled. Unafraid. Then cut his eyes to the kid.
“But there is a point when they are completely worthless,” the teamster said.
Then he looked to his wife again, who held the gun pointed at his head.
“Without ammunition,” the teamster said with a smile. “They are completely worthless. Isn’t that so?”
She stared at him, unsmiling, and pulled the trigger.
47
Virgil and I were on the porch of the sheriff’s office with Book, Skeeter, Lloyd, and two of the newer deputies. Summer bugs were more active than they’d been in the last few evenings. The warmth of the day was lingering later than it had been, keeping the moths and late june bugs active. They were swirling around the sconces on both sides of the door to the office. The lamps inside also had swirls of bugs and flies enjoying the light and the heat.
Virgil leaned on the post just in front of the office door, looking out into the street as he smoked a cigar.
As usual, we were listening to one of Lloyd’s stories. This one was about a run-in he had in the Indian Territory with the Cherokee outlaw Ned Christie.
“We chased him all over the goddamn place. Up across the Red and the Arkansas River, right up through the Choctaw country. Then followed him north right into Cherokee land. It was just about midmorning when we come upon him. Same time of year as this—August, it was. It was hotter than a witch’s teat. We was weeks following the sonofabitch. And now we closed in on him, we had Ned in the palm of our hand. And we chased him over a goddam lil’ ol’ rise on the horizon just in front of us. We had the sonofabitch! Had him. And then we come over that rise and we saw him. He was stopped and facing us. He rode right into the middle of thousands of Indians. It was like he wired ahead to have every Indian in the Indian Territory gathered up there to scare us off.”
The deputies were all staring at him, wide-eyed.
“No shit,” Lloyd said. “Spread out in front of us was a wall of Indians as far as the eye could see. There we were, facing what seemed like every Indian that was ever fucking born. There was twelve of us. And we was looking at a goddamn red sea.”
“What did you do?” Skeeter said.
“Well,” Lloyd said, “we by God knew right fast that we had no goddamn business being there.”
Lloyd paused as he took a sip of coffee. The deputies were hanging on his words.
“So what happened?” Book said.
“Well,” he said. “Needless to say. We were scared off. We smiled and slowly and very quietly turned and moved away. And when we got below the rise, out of their sight, we fucking run off as fast as we could goddamn gallop those tired horses.”
“You vamoosed?” Skeeter said.
“Vamoosed like a bunch of goddamn barefoot kids that just poked a fucking hornet’s nest with a stick,” Lloyd said. “Never even took a gander behind us for fear I might wet my saddle. We ran like hell.”
“And?” Book said.
“Well,” Lloyd said. “I don’t know, we likely gave them a good laugh, is about all that happened.”
“What’s funny about that?” Skeeter said.
“Texas Rangers, running,” Lloyd said. “If that ain’t funny, I don’t know what is.”
“Where did you run to?” Skeeter said.
“Texas,” Lloyd said with a scoff. “Where all big, bad Texans hide, where else?”
Virgil glanced to me and smiled.
“Hell. Just being alive is laughable,” Lloyd said. “I look back on so much that we did. Hell, I’m lucky to be sitting here on this porch and talking about it. Instead of being up there and looking down on it.”
“Up? Cielo? Looking down? Infierno?” Skeeter said with a wide grin. “From all we have heard you would be down in Infierno and be looking up to Cielo?”
“You ain’t too old for me to put you across my lap,” Lloyd said. “And give you a whippin’.”
“Like to see you try,” Skeeter said, then laughed and moved off the porch and out of Lloyd’s reach.
Virgil turned as he took a pull on his cigar. He blew out a roll of smoke, then focused on Lloyd and me sitting on the bench in front of the office window.
“I been thinking,” he said.
“About?” I said.
“About those gun hands,” Virgil said. “Locked up in there.”
I glanced over my shoulder toward the jail.
“You want ’em out?” I said.
Virgil nodded.
“All of them?” I said. “Baptiste hands and the McCormick hands?”
; “Yep,” Virgil said.
“You don’t want them to face the judge?” Lloyd said.
Virgil puffed on his cigar and shook his head.
“Nope,” Virgil said. “Don’t think there is much that they can be held for. Firearms will be a fine, and they have already spent enough days against the fine.”
“Nothing for them to be convicted for, really,” I said. “Maybe Noah Miller for facing you in the Boston House. But fact is, not likely, though, because he never touched his pistol. And neither did the McCormick hands I locked up.”
“But keeping them behind bars does keep the hostile bullshit between the miners at bay,” Lloyd said.
Virgil nodded.
“Does,” Virgil said. “And I’m not sure that is a good thing.”
“You thinking maybe the quicker all this comes to a head, the better,” Lloyd said.
“That’d be my thinking,” Virgil said.
“Can’t really force them to leave town, can you,” Lloyd said. “Seeing how they did time and are let go.”
“We can ask them polite-like,” I said.
“We can,” Virgil said. “But they will stay as long as there is pay.”
“That what you want to do?” Lloyd said.
Virgil blew out a roll of smoke and nodded to Lloyd.
“Now?” Lloyd said.
Virgil nodded.
“Now,” Virgil said. “Speed the plow.”
48
You thought she was gonna fucking kill me, didn’t you?” the teamster said with a laugh.
“Well, hell,” the kid said.
“You did,” the teamster said.
There had been no talk about the Sharps incident during the dinner. Again the kid ate foods like he’d never experienced. Spicy things. Hotter than the chilies in Mexican foods he was fond of. After the table was cleared the teamster and the kid settled into the outside chairs in front of the house and smoked cigarettes.
“Didn’t you?”
The kid glanced toward the house and he could see her. She was lifting a steaming pot that was sitting on the big iron stove.
“There was little time to think, really,” the kid said. “But it goddamn rabbited across my mind for a split second, you bet.”
“You mean until the hammer dropped and the Sharps clicked,” the teamster said, “instead of going boom.”