skeletons

by Glendon Swarthout

  Tyler showed with an overnight case. The rain had stopped. The driver wouldn’t. Crosstown to my place he continued to harangue. Viva Mexico, Cuba si, Yanqui no, Puerto Rican independence. New York cabbies intimidate me. Tyler they do not. When she paid him off, and failed to tip, explaining she had hired him for transportation, not for insults, he chewed her out in Mexican, most of which even I could understand was obscene.

  She paused on the curb beside him. “Bean, hip de la chingada” she began. “No tengo duda que tu madre era puta y tu padre su padrote. Lo que es mas, te apuesto no eres ciudadano americano, que eres extranjero ilegal, un rnojado. Y si dices otra palahra o me vuelvo a subir en tu taxi, apuntare tu nombre y te denunciare a la immigracion, y te echardn de culo al otro lado de la frontera por ignorante y malagradecido.” She gave him her most elegant smile. “Buenos noches, senor.”

  If a brown face could go white, his did, and he took off in a funk of pollution. On the way up, in the elevator, I said, “I didn’t know you speak espanol.”

  “Born and raised in New Mexico?”

  “What did you say to him?”

  “Loosely translated, I said, ‘You bean bastard. I have no doubt your mother was a whore and your father pimped for her. Furthermore, I will bet you are not an American citizen, that you have no papers, that you are a goddamned illegal alien, a wetback. And if I hear any more out of you, or ever step in your cab again, I will take your name and turn you in to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and they will kick your ignorant, ungrateful ass back across the border immediately. Good evening, senor.’”

  Drinks.

  I put on some Herbie Mann records but we did not hear them.

  She did steaks, I made a salad.

  To celebrate her homecoming, I opened a good California Cabernet Sauvignon.

  We ate.

  She washed dishes, I dried.

  While she was washing I took off her slacks, her blouse, her brassiere. I named one of her nipples PROCTER and the other GAMBLE and christened them with detergent and worked up some suds and an erection and we got to giggling and she turned to me and we kissed. Suddenly we couldn’t wait any longer and staggered, arms round each other like drunks, into the bedroom. Where we set a record for speed and animal urgency.

  Then she wore one of my shirts and we huddled in the living room with coffee while she painted the nickels, dimes, and quarters in her change purse with streaks of blood-red nail enamel and spaced them out to dry.

  “Thanks for the sex,” I said.

  “Max was murdered,” she said.

  I almost dropped my cup.

  “I’m serious.”

  “Tyler, you said on the phone it was a hit-and-run accident—I distinctly remember because I said I was sorry I wasn’t the driver. What was he doing out there?”

  “I told you. I told him about the trials. And my grandfathers. He thought there might be a book in it—suspense, mystery. And of course money.”

  “Murdered?”

  “Murdered.”

  “I don’t care to hear any more.” I got up, shivering, and brought us a brandy, still shivering. “Tell me again. What you told Sanson.”

  This time I listened, really listened, as I should have while we were married. The scenario began in 1910, when her grandfather, Buell Wood, an attorney, got into a famous last gunfight in Harding and killed three men. He was charged with murder, prosecuted by her other grandfather, Charles Vaught, and acquitted. Then, in 1916, after the raid by Pancho Villa on Columbus, New Mexico, four Villistas had been taken prisoner by the Army, charged with the murder of civilians, and tried in Harding. Her grandfather Wood defended them, and her grandfather Vaught prosecuted. Everyone expected the Villistas to hang. The jury found them not guilty. They had not lived long, however. That very night they were set free to run what was called a “Texas horse race.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know. But they were never seen again. And neither was my grandfather.”

  “Which one?”

  “Buell Wood.”

  To demonstrate my boredom, I gargled brandy. “Tyler, this is New York, not New Mexico. And this is 1977, not 1916. Sell the story to Hollywood—it would make a great flick.”

  “But it’s true.”

  “So what? It’s no skin off mine.”

  “It’s important to me. It has been my whole life.”

  “And I can’t understand Sansom, the Bronx Bad Boy, flying out there and—”

  “Jimmie, listen.” She leaned forward, exposing her mammary armament. “Buell Wood beat Charles Vaught twice. In the biggest cases in Harding history. In other words, my father’s father, Charles Vaught, probably hated my mother’s father, Buell Wood, as much as any man ever hated another. That fascinated Max. He—”

  “What a minute. Then how did—I mean, how did you happen? If there was that much bad blood, how could your father marry your mother?”

  “They eloped.”

  I shook my head. “Romeo and Juliet on the range. And about as long ago.”

  “Not for Max it wasn’t.”

  “What did you tell him to do?”

  “Talk to my father. And my mother. And read the transcripts of both trials. And five days ago I said goodbye to him at Kennedy.”

  “And today you said hello.”

  “He was murdered.”

  “So you say.”

  “So I know. So no matter how long ago it was, it isn’t over.”

  I sulked. “I’m tired of talking about Sansom and your freak family tree.”

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “Us.”

  “But first, a pause for this message,” she said, and rose and took my hand and led me like a poodle into the bedroom again.

  To the bed, the overcivilized eastern chick brings a book about whatever trendy group-grope or self-realization or consciousness-cuckoo thing she is presently into. At any point in the copulation she is apt to stop, turn on a light, and read a few pages. Afterward she graphs her orgasms, critiques your performance, and may or may not thank you for the therapy. Tyler Vaught is a westerner. Usually she loads the wagon and together you set out over the Simmons like pioneers. You break trails, ford rivers, scale mountains. Up and down the innersprings you slay Indians, skin buffalo, drive cattle, smash saloons, hang rustlers, build fences, settle towns, and fly, finally, the red, white, and blue. And when the last ripsnort reel is run, partner, and your golden spike is reduced to a tin thumbtack, you have WON THE SEXUAL WEST.

  This time, however, the second, was a first. This time was a shocker. I lay, not with a woman, but with a girl. It was like a long, serious conversation with a child. On and on it went, the girl putting questions to the man. Innocent, desperate. What does the sea say? Asked her hips. Is there a God? her breasts. How far is it to a star? inquired her buttocks. Where will I go when I die? her thighs. Who am I? her fingers demanded. Is there a Santa Claus? her tongue. Are my father and mother really my father and mother? pressed her belly. What shall I be when I grow up? her arms. When I was born was I wanted? asked her nipples. Why do men kill one another? her teeth. To such childish queries the adult mind can give no answers, the adult heart does not dare. I tried to tell her with my body, tried till I was bathed in sweat and groaned aloud, but in vain. When it was over I was diminished. She had stripped me of all pretense to maturity. I was a boy again.

  “Jimmie?”

  “What?”

  “Now do you know I love you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you still love me?”

  “Yes. Goddammit.”

  “Would you like me to come back to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And marry you again and have your children?”

  “Would I.”

  “And live with you always?”

  “Yes. Oh hell yes.”

  “Then I will. If you’ll do something for me.”

  “Such as.”

  “Find out what happened
to Max. If he really was murdered. And who did it.”

  It took seconds to sink in.

  “What?” I sat up. “What!”

  “You could do it in a week. Then when you come back, we’ll-”

  “Tyler, you mean—me? You mean, go out there myself? Like some private eye?”

  “Not like that. But you do research, Jimmie, you solve problems, you—”

  “My God girl, are you out of your mind?” I swung legs over the side. “If he actually was murdered, I could be, too!”

  “No, no. Max was different, more aggressive. He rubbed people the wrong way.”

  “Max is no damned loss to anybody! I would be—at least to me!” I threw a tantrum. “What’s going on here anyway? I don’t see you or hear from you for six months and suddenly we’re back in the hay and after a couple of juicy screws you’re shipping me to New Mexico! Two thousand miles away! To play games with the men in big hats! What is this?” I bounced up and down on the bed. “I don’t like violence! I’m a city man, and probably a coward! And not ashamed of it! You pitched me about going out there when we were married and I wouldn’t buy! Why for Christ’s sake would you ask me to go now?”

  She turned over, buried her face in the pillow. “Because if he was murdered,” she muffled, “I’m responsible. I killed him.”

  “Bullshit!” I roared. “If you have to know, Tyler, you go!”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  I bounced to my feet. “Can’t tell me! Well I’ll tell you, kiddo! No way will I pin on a star and gallop after the bad guys! And no way will I let anybody con me into an early grave with love and children and a vine-covered condominium—my God that’s base! That’s the all-time low!”

  She was crying. I whipped open a drawer and grabbed pajama bottoms and banged the drawer shut and marched into the living room and hauled on the bottoms and switched off the lights and tried to sleep on the sofa and eventually argued myself into a righteous doze. Interrupted by flashcuts of a coffin coming down a conveyor belt.

  The scream of sirens woke me to my usual chills. The room was a dirty gray. Dawn comes to New York like a tourist these days. Cautiously.

  I yawned into the bedroom. She had cried herself to sleep, clutching her pillow. Naked, beautiful, helpless. I knew Tyler Vaught not at all. I loved her terribly, and pitied her somehow, but there remained, at the same time, a residue of last night’s anger. Suddenly, in the light, the glint of metal in her overnight case, open on a rack. I went to it and took up the old gun. It was cold and heavy in my hand. I loathe lethal weapons. It was a Colt revolver. She took it everywhere with her, like a doll, even on our honeymoon. It was the only thing she had written me to send her after she left me to live with Max Sansom. And now, except for clothing and cosmetics, it was all she had brought with her from his apartment.

  I carried the gun into the living room. Stamped into the frame above the cylinder was the serial number 40177. It was one of a matched pair, she had told me, belonging to her grandfather Buell Wood, and with it, and the other, he had killed three men. I wondered where its mate might be, the gun numbered 40176 or 40178.

  I put it down and got out a Rand-McNally to see where Harding was. Fifty miles or so west and north of El Paso. In the middle of nowhere.

  I picked up the Colt again, intending to return it to Tyler’s case, but passing the full-length mirror in a closet door stopped at my reflection. Dimly I confronted myself. And what was in my hand. I slumped shoulders, spread and planted bare feet, let the gun hang loose by my pajama leg. On impulse I tried a fast draw, and my quickness pleased me. Fixing my face in a smile-when-you-say-that-stranger mask, I tried another. Jimmie Butters, GUNFIGHTER.

  In the last hour of her life Charlotte Wood drives a buggy behind a cob horse into Harding. Since she does not know she is to die she thinks not of death but of her errands in town. To stop by the Standard Grocery and pick up two twelve-ounce cans of Dr. Price’s Phosphate Baking Powder. To check the sale at Clardy’s, which is offering ladies’ pumps and oxfords at half price. To have a look at men’s Kuppenheimer “Air-o-Weave” suits in gray at the Tog Shop, advertised at $15 in the Graphic, and if they please her, to try tonight to persuade Buell to shed his legalistic black serge for the summer.

  It is a pure spring afternoon. Sunlight glisters on the Tres Hermanas, or Three Sisters, three conical peaks close to one another in the west. The glass blue of sky, the prance of the cob, the drum roll of pebbles on the undercarriage of the buggy—these fill Charlotte Wood with pleasure. On the seat beside her, in a cocoon of shawl and cradled in an Indian basket, her infant daughter Helene sleeps to the lullaby of wheels.

  She is happy. Her baby is beautiful. She is in love with her husband. She is twenty-nine.

  In the Luna, a saloon on Harding’s main street, three young men enjoy their final minutes on this earth. Since they do not know they have only minutes they think not of dying but shoot loud pool and swill ten-cent beer and get brag drunk. They are Tigh Gooding and two brothers, Bill and George Pennington. They work on nearby ranches. They costume themselves as cowboys, deport themselves as cowboys, but rather than branding and yahooing and bunking under the stars they mend fence and doctor sick stock and repair machinery, so they are ranch hands, not cowboys. It is a “come-down.” It is a matter, almost, of emasculation. This is why, when they ride into town every two weeks, they get drunk as cowboys always did in the good old days; and why, though the carrying of weapons is prohibited by town ordinance, they conceal guns and cartridge belts in their saddlebags in case there may be, they hope, some kind of showdown with somebody over something.

  Shortly before he is to kill, Buell Wood sits in his office drawing a will for a widow. Since he does not know he will kill he thinks not of the deed and its consequences but of his wife and child. Charlotte will be driving in from her father’s ranch now, he reckons, Helene in the basket beside her, and she will stop at the Tog Shop, he guesses, to have a look at the Kuppenheimer suits he has seen advertised in the Graphic. If they please her, she will probably begin a campaign tonight to get him into one for the summer.

  Until four years ago, Buell Wood had been sheriff of Harding County, an officer with a reputation for disinterest, accuracy with firearms, and a readiness to use them. Pat Garrett, famous as the Lincoln County sheriff who laid Billy Bonney low, had said of him in public: “I would rather have Wood with me in a tight than any man I know.” On his resignation, a grateful citizenry had made Wood the gift of a matched pair of pistols.

  Cob, buggy, Charlotte Wood, and Helene enter Harding from the south, trotting a half circle on Silver Street around the new Harding County Courthouse. They turn left onto Gold Street, the principal thoroughfare.

  As they turn, Tigh Gooding and the Pennington brothers leave the Luna and swagger to their horses tied in front. One of them has an idea. It is to defy the ordinance, and the town, and the civilization which has reduced them from cowboys to ranch hands, then ride away hell-for-leather, leaving only the echo of their laughter. They open saddlebags, buckle on cartridge belts and holsters, pull their weapons.

  After his resignation, and the appointment of Blaise Gilmore to succeed him as sheriff, Buell Wood went to El Paso, read law at a firm there, returned to Harding, hung out his shingle, and commenced at once to earn a living. Two years ago he fell in love with and married Charlotte Dampier, daughter of a prosperous rancher. An inheritance from her mother bought the couple a house in Harding and built for Buell a one-room office at the west end of Gold Street.

  As she passes the Luna, Charlotte Wood reins the cob over to avoid a wagon laden with sacks of chicken meal.

  Tigh Gooding and the Penningtons fire revolvers into the air.

  Buell Wood tenses.

  Gunshots.

  Down the street.

  He waits.

  At the reports, the cob horse rears and bolts.

  The buggy lurches, the righ
t front wheel slams into, is broken and held immovable by, the left front fender of a Marmon sedan.

  Charlotte Wood and child are hurled from the buggy, mother headlong into the concrete base of a watering trough, daughter into the rear compartment of a Packard touring car parked beside the trough.

  Terrorized, the cob horse tears itself free of the shafts and charges down the street, trailing harness.

  Tigh Gooding and the Pennington brothers stand by their mounts staring, guns in hands, astounded but not yet sobered by what they have done.

  Buell Wood waits.

  Galloping.

  A runaway horse.

  He relaxes, pushes chair from desk, elevates his boots, tilts back, clasps hands comfortably behind his head, gathers wool. The office is sparsely furnished. Against the opposite wall looms a massive glass-fronted bookcase containing his entire library: the Corpus Juris, Blackstone’s Commentaries, Daniels on Negotiable Instruments, Stephens on Pleading, the Cyclopedia of Law and Procedure, and the Acts of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of New Mexico. These volumes are all he needs now, but one day soon, when the Territory achieves statehood, he will start to fill the shelves with Reports and Statutes.

  His door flies open.

  “Mr. Wood! Oh Mr. Wood!”

  It is a clerk from the Guarantee Electric Store, a youth with yellow shoes and a white face.

  “Your wife—oh my God, sir, she’s dead! They were drunk! Shooting in town—that’s against the law! Her horse took off! The baby’s all right but Mrs. Wood my God! Out of the buggy headfirst! But the baby’s all right! Those toughs!”

  “Whoa, boy,” says Wood. “My wife is dead?”

  The clerk bobs.

  “Who was shooting?”

  The delivery of such tidings appears to have cost the boy every breath in his body. “Tigh. Gooding. Bill. Pen-nington. George. Pennington,” he gasps. “Mr. Wood. So sorry. Dead. The most terrible—”

  “Where are they now?”

  “The Luna. They went. Back in.”

  “Get out.”

  The clerk bursts into tears.