“Wow,” I said. “A hanging judge if ever I saw one. Intending no disrespect.”
Charles Vaught Jr. smiled. “Let’s simply say he was not noted for mercy.”
A break.
“Did you go to San Carlos?”
“Yes.”
“Tragic. For several years after her admission I went there, too, but she would not see me.”
Another break.
“When are you leaving us, Mr. Butters?”
“This afternoon. Now.”
“Fine. I wish you and Tyler well. Please extend my affection to her.”
“I will. By the way, sir, the transcripts of the two trials are missing. I went through the lot downstairs.”
“Oh?”
Either he had only half-heard me or decided on a change of venue. “I suppose it’s impossible for us to conceive today, what things were like in those times,” he mused. “I remember my father discoursing once. I was quite young, but I have never forgotten his words. ‘This is how it goes,’ he said. ‘First you must have order. You get it however you can, usually with a gun and a rope. Then you need law. You write that and try to live by it. Order and law—these come first, even among animals. When you have them, you can take time to think about wallpaper and a choir for the church and sunsets and indoor privies. Oh yes, and justice.’”
As the town waits, breath held, and watches, eyes wide, Buell Wood continues to walk the center of a soundless Gold Street.
Rather than slapping leather and riding out, the young ranch hands, Tigh Gooding and the Pennington boys, have reeled into the Luna again, mumbling oaths and ordering beers and being unable to drink. They cannot yet comprehend how a few rounds in the air for the fun of it could have resulted in the runaway of a horse and the death of a woman and the injury, perhaps, of a child. But now they sober enough to recognize that the law will be looking for them, that discretion might be the better part of hullabaloo. They spill out of the saloon, head for their horses.
It is not the law looking for them. It is a husband and father. Surprise stops them in their tracks. Bill Pennington takes a reasonable step. It is Buell Wood, and there are guns in his hands.
“Mr. Wood,” he begins, “we didn’t mean no—”
The attorney halts, raises his right arm, fires. The range is only thirty feet, and he intends to hit Pennington in the heart, but he has not used a weapon in four years and is unfamiliar with double-action, hence the round is low. It enters the right upper quadrant of the liver through the short ribs, causing that organ to burst blood in the abdomen. Bill Pennington sinks to his knees, pitches forward, lies still in shock, breathing rapidly.
His brother George and Tigh Gooding have never heard a gun fired in fury, have never seen a human being felled by a bullet. They take to their boot heels, tearing along the sidewalk to careen through the first open door.
Wood follows.
The first open door is that in the center of a brick-fronted building with large glass windows on either side of the door. It is the entrance to the showroom of the local Ford agency. On one of the large windows a slogan is painted in capitals, “WATCH THE 4’DS GO BY!” and on the other “20 HORSES UNDER YOUR HOOD-ALL HIGH-STEPPERS!” Inside the showroom, three new Model T’s are displayed. The center model, near the door, is the Runabout, which features a second, separate “mother-in-law seat” detached from the body at the rear. Behind the Runabout at the right is a completely enclosed Coupe, described waggishly as a “telephone booth on wheels,” and at the left rear of the room, a four-door Touring Car with side curtains attached. All three vehicles gleam in Brewster green with black high-lighting and red striping on the wood wheel spokes, since the entire 1910 mid-year factory run was painted identically. From the radiator cap of each is hung, like a feedbag on a horse, a price placard. The Runabout sells for $650, the Touring Car for $950, and the Coupe for $1,050. And there are, this afternoon, besides the automobiles, four people in the showroom—a salesman, two “lookers,” and perched on a stool at a high desk in a wire-mesh cage by the door at left which connects the room with the garage, the agency bookkeeper, Mrs. Gladys Marsh.
Their interest is aroused by the entry of two young men in cowboy attire who rush for the wide rear door, then by that of Buell Wood, who twice fires a revolver at the runners.
Neither being hit, Gooding and Pennington swerve behind the Coupe, from which cover they draw pistols and return a fusillade in the direction of the Runabout, missing it but shattering the west window of the showroom. It collapses in shards with a crash almost musical, and with it the injunction to “WATCH THE 4’DS GO BY!”
At right center, the two ‘lookers” dive full-length under the Coupe.
The salesman gapes.
Mrs. Marsh sits as though turned to stone. Buell Wood has taken his own cover behind the “mother-in-law seat” of the Runabout. Thinking to flush the pair into the open, he lets go two rounds at the Coupe. One breaks a door window, the other pierces a headlamp. It is a Jno. Brown Model 15, mounted with both doors opening from the center to facilitate lighting the burner. Wood curses the Colts. It is clear to him already that the New Navy will never be a satisfactory target weapon. The light, smooth trigger pull which distinguishes single-action simply cannot be obtained.
The Coupe responds. The Runabout’s windshield disintegrates, as does a glass panel in one of the brass, kerosene-burning sidelamps—Jno. Brown Model 60’s—below the windshield adjacent to the aluminum hood.
The fact is, Tigh Gooding and George Pennington cannot at this point hit a bull in the ass with a bushel basket. Finally—after all the stories they have heard, the dime novels they have read, the Western movies they have seen, the fantasies they have played out to gory and heroic conclusions—finally they are eye to eye and gut to gut with the real thing. The showdown with somebody over something they have dreamed of and drooled for has come at last. And they are totally unprepared. And terrified. If a new century has reduced them from cowboys to pimpled, ignorant ranch hands, truth drops them now to the lowest rung of the ladder. Truth turns them into bite-tongue, itch-crotch boys who sweat panic from every pore.
“You quit this! You quit!”
It is the salesman, shouting, standing his outraged ground with hands on hips, swiveling his head to confront as many participants as possible.
“This here is a business establishment! I won’t have no shooting—”
He is interrupted by the report of a gun and, almost simultaneously, a deafening, metallic explosion. The three Model T’s shake and shimmy. Icicles of glass cascade from the top of the west window of the agency, broken earlier. Bits of brass clang the bookkeeper’s cage with buckshot impact.
Determined to drive his prey from shelter, Buell Wood had climbed into and laid prone across the front seat of the Runabout, which is upholstered in diamond tufts of genuine leather installed over horsehair pads. Using the seat side as a rest, he had placed his revolver barrel over it, taken dead aim, fired. He had put a bullet through the brass skin of the carbide generator mounted on the left-hand running board of the Coupe. This was a cylinder divided into two tanks, in the lower a supply of calcium carbide, in the upper a volume of water which dripped slowly onto the carbide and formed a head of acetylene gas. Routed from generator to headlamps by means of red rubber tubing, the gas, once the burners were lit, provided the night driver a flickering illumination for his way. Blowing up the generator, however, proves only partially fruitful.
George Pennington dashes from the Coupe to a place of safety behind the Touring Car. One more sally and he can be through the side door into the garage.
The salesman flings himself under the Coupe and attempts to crawl over the two “lookers.” He has, unfortunately, an abundant rump. It wedges between the backside of a “looker” and the six-rivet rear axle housing so solidly that he is immobilized, his legs exposed.
On her stool in the cage, Mrs. Marsh has not moved.
Tigh Gooding remains behind the Coupe, r
eloading his pistol. Like his partner’s, it is a .30-20 center-fire Army Colt, nationally known as a “Peacemaker” or “Frontier Special,” bought secondhand, infrequently cleaned, and used principally to the sorrow of cacti and tin cans.
“Goddammit, Wood!” he yells. “We’re sorry, goddammit! We’re sorry!”
Somehow the salesman extricates himself, turtles from under the Coupe, runs out the rear door of the showroom.
Buell Wood lowers himself from the front seat of the Runabout to lie flat on the floor, to aim under the car and under the Coupe at one of Tigh Gooding’s boots. He fires.
The slug strikes Gooding’s left leg above the ankle, smashing both tibia and fibula. He howls. He lifts the leg. His ankle and foot hang loose from the leg, attached only by tendon and soft tissue.
“I’m hit, George!” he howls. “My God, my leg, my leg!”
He drops his pistol, tries to hop on his right leg from Coupe to Touring Car and his friend, left ankle and foot flopping grotesquely.
Behind the Runabout the attorney rises, exchanging the empty Colt for that fully loaded. Standing erect, he aims, fires.
The range is twenty feet. Tigh Gooding is hit just anterior to the backside of the neck. His spinal cord is severed. An instant quadriplegic, he dies before crumpling, for his respiratory centers fail at once to function.
One of the two “lookers” leaves his haven under the Coupe and absquatulates via the rear door of the showroom.
George Pennington has meanwhile reloaded his gun and scrambled into the front seat of the Touring Car. Here he is hidden from sight by the side curtains, designed to protect driver and passengers from inclement weather and secured from doors to top by Murphy fasteners. On hearing Tigh Gooding’s howls, he thrusts his weapon out the flap in the curtain on the driver’s side, cut to allow arm signals, peers through it, and locating the attorney on his feet behind the Runabout, fires several errant rounds at him, then rapidly withdraws the “Frontier Special.” He succeeds only in demolishing the east window of the agency, including the information that with the purchase of a 1910 Ford you will have “20 HORSES UNDER YOUR HOOD-ALL HIGH-STEPPERS!”
Wood, intent on Gooding’s fall, is unable to pinpoint the source of fire at him. But suspecting it has issued from the front seat of the Touring Car, he spaces three shots in the general area. The first hits the steering wheel spider and ricochets through the windshield. The second wreaks singular havoc. It passes through the rubber bulb of the horn, through the Stewart speedometer, Model 26, offered for the first time this year as standard equipment and calibrated to 60 mph, and finally through the Heintz coil box mounted on the dashboard.
The third pierces the door and perforates the ten-gallon gasoline tank beneath the front seat.
After this exchange the showroom enjoys a period of peace and quiet.
The last “looker” rolls from the cover of the Coupe and departs the premises in haste.
Behind the mesh, Mrs. Marsh observes.
Driven from the front seat of the Touring Car by the attorney’s barrage, George Pennington lies on the floor halfway under the four-door. He is twenty-four years old. He had hoped to flee into the garage, but knows now he cannot reach it; and he has now seen the corpse of Tigh Gooding sprawled between Coupe and Touring Car. His mental state borders on the psychotic. Except for the sphincter certainty that if he does not kill he will be killed, his contact with reality is profoundly impaired. He begins to weep. He extends his right arm, sighting the “Peacemaker” through tears on the legs of the man standing behind the Runabout. A stream of gasoline leaks from the gas tank above, causing him to urinate, inexplicably, himself. He pulls the trigger.
Muzzle flash ignites the gas. A flare of flame envelops his forearm, setting his shirt sleeve on fire, singeing hair, producing second-degree burns on arm and hand.
He screams like a girl, drops his pistol. He is out from under the Touring Car and upright in one reflexive effort.
“Oh I’m burnt! I can’t fight no more!” he screams. “Mr. Wood I give up! Jesús Christ don’t shoot me!”
Buell Wood advances on him from the Runabout. He moves to within ten feet of the Touring Car, raises arm, aims the New Navy, fires.
It is an execution. He shoots George Pennington in the open mouth. The hard palate, or roof, of the mouth is fractured into slivers. The bullet then tracks through the soft palate and pharynx and the upper end of the spinal cord. Were it not severed, Pennington would drown in his own blood, for the palate and pharynx are highly vascularized.
The attorney strides to the corpse of Tigh Gooding, nudges it with a boot to be sure of death.
Mrs. Marsh speaks. “Good afternoon, Mr. Wood.”
There is no response.
“How is Mrs. Wood these days?”
“Dead,” he says.
He walks round the rear end of the Runabout and out the front door of the showroom.
Gladys Marsh is to assert for the remainder of her life that she never understood why she stayed on her stool in the cage or why she addressed inanities to Buell Wood. But she has, and it will be she alone who can render, on the witness stand, a detailed, coherent account of the slaughter. In any event, when the attorney has left the Ford agency she rises from her seat, exits the cage, takes two steps, faints.
Buell Wood hesitates in sunlight, matched pair of guns which had been a civic gift in his hands. He is a tall, handsome man with dark hair and mustache. He wears a black serge vest and trousers, white shirt, a black string tie. The street is silent as before. Men, women, children, horses, automobiles, wagons, buggies are fixed in time and space exactly as they had been. It is as though, for a staccato of minutes, the heart of Harding has ceased to beat.
He looks left. Bill Pennington, his first victim, lies on the sidewalk in front of the Luna. He has come out of shock, and is on his side, groaning, his face slate, arms hugging his belly and the bullet in it, drawing up his legs, straightening them, drawing them up again. Hemorrhaging has by now flooded his abdominal cavity. The hepatic capsule about the liver has ruptured.
Stepping on a snow of broken glass, Wood goes to the youth, lowers a revolver barrel to his temple, fires, puts him out of his agony.
He pushes guns under his belt, walks then across the street to the buggy and Marmon sedan and watering trough, and stands for a moment over the body of his wife. A woman brings a bundle to him. It is his infant daughter, Helene, wrapped in a shawl, unharmed. He takes the child in his arms, carries her through the pure spring afternoon down the center of Gold Street to his office, opens the door, enters, closes the door behind him.
I I: I4
I I: I4
But I was still burned about that speeding ticket. So instead of packing up and pulling out of Harding I hiked across the street from the courthouse to the lair of the local law, a new slump-block headquarters and hoosegow, demanded to see the sheriff himself, was thumbed into an office posh enough for Park Avenue. It was a toss-up which of us most disbelieved the other.
My ensemble may have been responsible. A double-breasted Halston jacket in Ultrasuede over a rust polka-dot body shirt of silk jersey with a yellow ascot at the neck. Flared beige Cacharel slacks of cavalry twill over above-the-ankle Florentine leather boots in antique mahogany. Informal, perhaps, but quite correct for an afternoon in rural New Mexico searching transcripts and confronting the constabulary.
But if he gave me a twice-over, I gave him a thrice. He wore neither star nor badge nor gun. His chino summer uniform was tailored to a T and creased to cut. His belt was hand-tooled and buckled with turquoise set in silver. His boots were custom-stitched. He was just my size and just as natty.
“Sheriff,” I began, “I want to protest this ticket. Yesterday one of your—”
He held out a hand. His nails were manicured.
I gave him the ticket.
He tore it up over a wastebasket.
“Thank you,” I said. “You know who I am and why I’m here.”
&n
bsp; “Yes.” His voice was soft, almost melodious.
“What have you done to find the guy who hit Sansom.”
“Not much.”
“Why not?”
“He is possibly in New Jersey. Sleeping well. Or in California. On the beach.”
“What happened to Sansom’s car?”
“We called Hertz in El Paso. They picked it up.”
“He must have stayed at the Ramada Inn, but they have no registration card for him.”
“A mystery.”
“They put me in the same room.”
“The plot thickens.” He smiled. He had several gold teeth and a pencil mustache.
“When he was here, did he talk with you?”
“Yes. He did what you have done. Questioned Judge Vaught, drove up to San Carlos, found out that the transcripts are missing. Then he walked across the street to see me.”
“And that night—you’re sure it was hit-and-run?”
“I’m sure. I have seen a hundred of them.”
“Suppose it–wasn’t. Suppose he dug up something he shouldn’t have and somebody here in Harding wanted him to forget it—permanently. Who might it have been?”
He frowned. “Me, probably.”
“You.”
“I didn’t like him. He was a swell-head son of a bitch. A Jewish chingao.”
“Anti-Semitic?”
“There is nothing wrong with being Jewish unless you are Jewish about it. He was. Ego? My God.” Chavez shook his head. “If he wasn’t there, it didn’t happen.”
“Wasn’t where?”
“Oh, the world wars, the birth of Christ, the moon landing. If he wasn’t there, they didn’t happen.”
I had been distracted by six pen-and-ink drawings on the wall behind him. Sensual sketches of full-bodied peasant women fondling babies, manipulating tortillas, caressing melons.
“Pardon me. Are those Riveras?”
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