What the Dead Men Say

by Ed Gorman

  The grin again. “I kinda figured that out for myself, son, I mean, I can see the whole room from here and I can see that it’s empty except for you.”

  James flushed, knowing he’d been gently but absolutely shown his place.

  “Any idea where I could find him?”

  “Huh-uh.”

  “Any idea when he’ll be back?”

  “He said a couple of hours.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “’Bout an hour, I guess.”

  “Will you remember to tell him that Sheriff Dodds is lookin’ for him?”

  “Doesn’t seem like the kind of thing I’d forget to mention.” This time the grin was accompanied by a whiskey laugh. “Say, you were bound and determined to pay me back for that crack I made, weren’t you?”

  James felt himself flush again. That’s just what he’d been doing. Trying to show Dodds that he was a lot smarter than the lawman might think. “Guess so.”

  Dodds lifted the white Stetson he’d been keeping in his hand and cuffed James on the shoulder. “Damn straight, son. I’ve got a smart mouth on me and every once in a while somebody needs to put me in my place.” He grinned again. “Damn straight.”

  Then he nodded and was gone.

  James closed the door. He thought about lying down but he was too stirred up now. What would a sheriff want with Uncle Septemus?

  He went over to the window and the billowing sheer curtain and stuck his head out. It was like leaning into an oven. Even though the water wagon had been over the dusty main street once today, dust devils rose in the still, chalky air. A crow sitting on the gable to James’s right looked over at the boy with sleepy curiosity. The bird looked too tired to move.

  There was no sign of Uncle Septemus.

  James looked in every direction this particular window afforded. Then he looked again and saw nothing.

  What the hell would a lawman want with his uncle?

  He took his shirt off and went back and lay on the bed. There was no possibility of a nap now. He was too churned up.

  Nor was he any longer angry with his uncle about the man implying he was a mama’s boy. They could settle that particular matter later.

  He lay on the bed. Another black fly started walking around on his red freckles.

  What the hell would a lawman want with Uncle Septemus, anyway?

  3

  “You telling me you don’t believe in a divine being?”

  “No. I’m just telling you that I’m tired of a prayer that goes on for five minutes.”

  “It’s not just another prayer, Dennis. It’s grace. It’s thanking the Lord for all his wonderful gifts.”

  “And just what gifts would those be?” Dennis Kittredge asked his wife.

  They were at the dining room table, the festive one with the red and white oilcloth spread over it, a small blue blown-glass butter dish the shape of a diamond, and a pair of salt and pepper shakers got up to look like stalks of sweet corn.

  His wife Mae was a small and fine-boned woman who was given to excessively high collars and excessively long skirts and excessively stern looks. In her youth she’d been high fine company, a tireless attender of county fairs and ice cream socials, and a somewhat daring lover. While they had never committed the ultimate sin in the time before their vows, they had many nights come very, very close: especially downriver near the dam where fireflies glowed like jewels against the ebony sky, and there was music to be heard in the silver water splashing down on the sharp rocks below.

  Then two years after their marriage Mae had become pregnant, but she’d lost the child in a bloody puddle in the middle of the night, on a white sleeping sheet she’d later burned.

  Ever since then she’d been lost to God. Her juices had seemed to dry up till she was an old and indifferent woman about sex, and even worse about festivities. Nights, after Kittredge was home from the farms where he worked for twenty-three cents an hour, she played the saw as her mother had taught her, and in the soft fitful glow of the kerosene lamp read him the Bible, the only part of which he cared anything for being the Book of Job. Oh, yes; Job was a man Kittredge could believe, all pain and rage and dashed expectations. The rest of the biblical prophets struck him as stupid and they bored him silly. But Job…

  “You ready now?” she said, as if he were a little boy she had only to wait out.

  He sighed, a scarecrow of a man with a long, angular face and furious black brows and dead cornflower blue eyes. “Yeah, I’m ready.”

  “Then proceed.”

  Why the hell did he stay here anymore? It was like living with your maiden aunt. But where else could he go?

  He said grace and he said it the way he knew she wanted him to. No mumbling, no sloppy posture. He sat up bolt straight and he spoke in clear, loud words, with his head bowed: “Bless us O Lord for these our gifts…”

  There was one sure way to irritate her; to keep your head up or spend your time eating up the food with your eyes.

  “God likes it better when you bow your head,” she’d told him once. So that was that. Ever since then he’d bowed his head. It just wasn’t worth the grief he’d have gotten otherwise.

  “You say it nice,” she said when he’d finished and was already helping himself to the boiled potatoes and tomatoes and chicken. “You’ve got such a strong, manly voice and the Lord appreciates that.”

  He glanced up at her for a dangerous moment. He almost asked: And just how do you know all these things the Lord wants so much? Does he come and visit you at night after I’m asleep? Or maybe he comes during the day while I’m working; comes in and helps himself to the teakettle and sits in the wooden rocker next to the window and tells you exactly what he wants me and you to do. It must be something like that, Mae, because there’s no other way you could possibly know so much about his likes and dislikes. No other possible way.

  But he couldn’t ever bring himself to do this because then he’d remember the horror he’d seen in her the night she’d miscarried on the bed in there, and the way her skinny white fingers had so reverently touched the bloody puddle, as if that itself were her child. Even after the doctor left she’d been unable to talk, and then he’d held her on his lap in the darkness in the rocker by the moonlit window. She’d surprised him by staying still, no tears and no words, just the rocker creaking until the crows and the roosters woke at dawn, and every once in a while he’d look at her face, at the worn-out girl of her and the birdy but pretty woman she’d become. And he’d realized then that he was holding a woman so sorrowful she was beyond any human solace, beyond it for the rest of their lives. Oh, in the spring they’d tried to have another child but it hadn’t worked, nor had the attempt a year later. It was sometime then that she’d become so religious and it was around then that he’d lost his job over at Rochester and it was after that that the bank robbery went so wrong and the little girl was killed.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  She looked up from cutting her chicken. “Thank you?”

  “For saying that about my voice.”

  “Oh.” She offered him one of her rare smiles, and he saw in the smile the girl she’d been, the girl he’d fallen in love with. “Well, you know it’s true. All my friends used to say they wished their men had voices like yours.”

  He stopped eating. “Maybe it’d do you good to see them.”

  “Who?”

  “Your old friends. Susan and Irma and Jane Marie.”

  She shrugged. “Oh, I see them every once in a while but I embarrass them.” She shook her head. “They think I’m too religious. A fanatic.” She looked straight at him and broke his heart with her madness. “They don’t seem to know that the Lord is walking right alongside them and judging everything they do. Why, if we hadn’t sinned before we were married, we’d probably have us three fine young children today.”

  This was another point in the conversation when he had to stop himself from speaking. Maybe it was the only way she could understand not bein
g able to bear a child-through something she’d done wrong. But to him it was just sad foolishness, a judgment on them both, and just one more way in which he felt separated from her.

  She patted his bony hand with her bony hand. It felt funny, like the cold touch of a stranger. “You’re a good man, Dennis. The Lord’s going to reward you on Judgment Day. You wait and see if he don’t.”

  She had just settled into eating again, when they heard the neighbor dog yip and saw a shadow fall on the grass outside the kitchen window. Somebody was knocking on the back door.

  “You finish eating,” Kittredge said. “I’ll get it.”

  He did not like who he saw framed in the door.

  “Who is it?” Mae asked.

  He decided to lie. Mae was harsh on the few friends he could claim. He’d convinced her he’d long ago given up the likes of Carlyle. “Kid from the smithy. I’ll step outside. Want a smoke anyway.”

  She nodded to his plate. “You ain’t finished yet, Dennis. You know how I worry about you.”

  And that was the terrible hell of it. She did love him and did worry about him just as he loved her and worried about her. But it was passionless. They might as well have been sister and brother.

  ***

  He went outside into the fading day, into the fading heat of the fading day, and the first thing he did, right there on the stoop where his pa and grandpa had stood generations before him, was slap Carlyle right across the mouth.

  “You know better than this,” Kittredge said.

  More humiliated than hurt, Carlyle touched the spot where the slap still burned and looked at Kittredge out of his poorshanty hurt and his poorshanty pain and said, “Onliest reason I did it was ’cause Griff told me to.”

  “Griff told you to come here?”

  “That’s exactly what he told me.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “You go ask him.”

  “You know what my missus still thinks of the likes of you.”

  “Well, maybe I don’t think a whole hell of a lot more of her, truth be told. You ever think of that? She gets flies on her shit the same way I do.”

  Kittredge looked back at the door, through the glass to where Mae had her head down eating. She never gained weight; there was a rawness to her skinniness. He looked back at Carlyle. “You don’t use language like that in this house.” Carlyle smirked. That was how Kittredge always thought of Carlyle-that poorshanty smirk over a dirty joke or a jibe that hurt somebody’s feelings. “You know better than to push it with me, Carlyle. Least you should.”

  “Griff wants to see us. Tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “West end of the Second Avenue bridge. Nine o’clock.”

  “You heard what I asked. Why?”

  Carlyle shook his head. The smirk reappeared. He liked to smirk when he told you something that was going to scare you. He said, “That little girl’s father came to town this afternoon.”

  “You’re crazy, Carlyle. How could he track us down?”

  “I don’t know how he done it; but he done it. He’s here and he’s got a Winchester and he means to kill us.” Carlyle ran a trembling hand over his sweaty head. “He was waitin’ for me when I left Griff’s.”

  “He tell you he means to kill us?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Pretty much doesn’t mean that’s what he’s got in mind.”

  Carlyle shrugged. “You wasn’t there. You didn’t see his eyes, Kittredge.”

  “Your food’s getting cold, dear,” Mae called from the table.

  Carlyle smirked. “Must be nice havin’ a little lady call you ‘dear’ like that all the time.”

  “I’m not going to believe any of this till it’s proven to me,” Kittredge said.

  “You better be there tonight or Griff’s gonna be mad.”

  “I didn’t know that Griff had become my boss.”

  “You better,” Carlyle said, sounding like a little kid. “You better.” Then he turned and started away, into a path made golden by the fading rays of sunlight. When he was nothing more than a silhouette of flame, he turned back to Kittredge and said, “You shoulda seen his eyes, Kittredge. You shoulda seen ’em.”

  Then he was gone.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1

  When Uncle Septemus came back into the hotel room, he took off his hat, vest, and coat, set the Winchester against the bureau, and came over and lay down on the bed across from James.

  James was reading a yellowback about cowboys and Indians. The hero was a man named Chesmore who, it seemed, changed disguises every few pages.

  From his carpetbag on the floor next to the bed, Uncle Septemus took a pint bottle of rye, swigged some, then put his head down and closed his eyes. He left the bottle, corked, lying on his considerable belly.

  “You trying to take a nap, Uncle Septemus?”

  Uncle Septemus opened one brown eye and looked at James. “Guess I was till you asked me if I was.”

  “A man came.”

  “A man?”

  “A lawman.”

  “A lawman?”

  “The sheriff.”

  Uncle Septemus propped himself up uncomfortably, still giving James the benefit of only one eye. “He say what he wanted?”

  “Said he wanted to talk to you.”

  “He say about what?”

  James was careful not to say “No sir” and sound too deferential. “Nope.”

  Uncle Septemus closed his eye, lay back down flat, uncorked the rye bottle with his thick fingers, poured a considerable tote down his throat, corked up the bottle good, then gave the impression that he was deep asleep.

  “Uncle Septemus?”

  “Yes, son?”

  “I know you’re tryin’ to sleep.”

  “If you know I’m tryin’ to sleep, why are you bothering me then.”

  “Because, I guess.”

  “Because?”

  “Aren’t you worried?”

  “About what?”

  “About why a sheriff would come up to our room and ask to see you.”

  “Maybe he’s somebody I know.”

  “Huh?”

  “Maybe he’s somebody who came to my store and bought things before. A lot of people do that, and from all over the area, because

  I’ve got such good merchandise. They remember me but I don’t remember them. Whenever I visit other towns, there’s always somebody who comes running up and asks me do I remember him.”

  “You really think that’s why the sheriff came up here?”

  “Your mother sure has turned you into a worrier, hasn’t she, James?”

  There he went again. Another jibe at James’s mother. “Uncle Septemus.”

  Septemus sighed. His eyes had remained closed and he was obviously getting irritated. “What is it now, James?”

  “I don’t want you to insult my mother anymore.”

  “I haven’t insulted your mother. I’ve just expressed my concern that a woman can’t turn a boy into a man. Only another man can do that. Nothing against your mother at all. She’s a fine woman, a fine woman.”

  “You really mean that?”

  “I really mean that.”

  Now James lay down and closed his eyes. The black fly was back, walking on his red freckles.

  Uncle Septemus said, “I want you to wear that fancy linen collar tonight.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Someplace special.” He hesitated. Now he rolled over and up onto one elbow. He looked at James with both eyes. “Look at me, James.”

  James rolled over on the bed across from his uncle and opened his eyes.

  “Do you want me to be treated like a man?”

  “Sure.”

  “A man can give his word to keep a secret and then keep that word. Do you think you can do that?”

  “Does this have something to do with the sheriff?”

  “Forget about the sheriff, James. This has nothing to do with him at all. This
has to do with you being a man. Now can you give me your word that you can keep a secret?”

  “Then I’ll tell you that tonight I’m going to take you someplace very special.”

  “The opera house?”

  “Nope.”

  “The racetrack?”

  “Nope.”

  “The nickelodeon parlor?”

  “Don’t even try to guess. It’s someplace so special you wouldn’t guess it in a hundred years. Now let’s take a nap.”

  So James lay back down. In the stillness of the dying afternoon, the stillness and dust and heat of the dying afternoon, he heard the clatter of horses and wagons and the shouts of men and the fading laughter of children. This town was very much like Council Bluffs and, thinking about home, James just naturally thought of Marietta.

  But then he forgot Marietta because of his uncle’s promise of something “special” this evening.

  James wondered what it could possibly be.

  2

  People made jokes about the way Dodds kept his office. Three times a week he had it dusted, twice a week he had the floor mopped and waxed, and once a week he had the front windows cleaned. When his fancy rolltop desk was open visitors could see that his fastidiousness continued into his personal belongings as well. Everything had its proper drawer or slot. Nothing was left loose inside the desk except a small stack of almost blindingly white writing paper on which Dodds wrote in a labored but beautiful hand, always in ink with an Easterbrook steel pen. He had a son in Tucson and one in New York, and he wrote to them frequently. His wife dead, the sons were the only family he had left and corresponding was the only way he could stay in contact with them.

  Unfortunately, they weren’t so good about writing back. One of the sons had gone and had a baby, Dodds’s first grandson, but before Dodds knew anything about the birth let alone the pregnancy, the kid, named Clarence, was born and already walking around his home in New York, where his father worked as an accountant. Dodds lived in a sleeping room two short blocks from the sheriff’s office. He’d moved here after the missus died, selling the white gabled house they’d lived in on the edge of town, and making himself available to whatever kind of trouble arose.