Cottonwood: A Novel

by Scott Phillips

  “Evening, Mr. Mayor. Bill.”

  “Evening, Lowry. Who’ve you got here?”

  “Won’t tell me his name, but he tried to rob a harlot and her client.”

  “That’s a damnable lie and you know it,” the prisoner spat, turning to face Lowry, who quickly went for a baton looped in his belt. At the brandishment of the stick the man cringed, and Lowry snickered. As they got nearer I saw that there was blood dripping down the prisoner’s forehead. All the menace had evaporated from his mien.

  “Is that so? Well, lock him up and we’ll see about him in the morning. Maybe a few smacks from that stick would help jog his memory. Good night, Paul,” Tiny said, and they proceeded to the jailhouse.

  “Shit. Too many damned people to keep track of. I had a man show up this afternoon, wanted to know how he could find his cousin. I said how should I know where your cousin is? He says he was supposed to get here and immediately write back home with an address. Came down from Topeka, heard there was work. Well, he never wrote home, though his father was sick and maybe dying, so the cousin came looking. And there he is acting as though it’s my responsibility to keep track of every damned drifter who wanders down here or doesn’t. Shit.”

  “Won’t be your responsibility much longer,” I said.

  “No, it’ll be Leval’s, and he’s welcome to it.” For a moment he appeared to lapse into a reverie. When we arrived at the saloon I turned toward the door and started to go in, but Tiny stopped me with a hand to the shoulder. “Regarding Leval, Bill, I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you to watch yourself.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You’re bird-dogging that Maggie of his and not making much of a secret of it, and I don’t figure he’s the kind to let that pass.”

  “I’m not bird-dogging anybody. I was invited to dinner, just like you were.”

  He waved his hand as though swatting a horsefly in the air before his face. “I’m not the only one’s remarked on it. Just about everyone’s been there for dinner when you were there’s said the same thing. Now maybe Marc hasn’t noticed, or maybe he thinks there’s no danger his wife might fancy you. But on the basis of what I saw going on between you two tonight I’d say that’s wrong.”

  “Nothing was going on,” I protested, but it rang false even to my own ear.

  “Just don’t give him a reason to want to do you harm. You have a big future in this town, if you don’t get your pecker doing all your arithmetic.”

  “All right,” I said, chastened; I had been certain my desires were well hidden, and the fact that they weren’t seemed to call for reappraisal of all my plans. I pushed the door open and started inside, expecting Tiny to follow.

  “Well, good night, Bill,” Tiny said, continuing off to the south.

  “You’re not coming in with me?” I asked.

  He stopped. “Nah, I’m headed down to the whores’ camp.”

  “Watch yourself,” I told him.

  “Oh, they’re all right down there. It’s a shame that goddamn Barnes had to throw that pair of ladies out of the hotel, though. They were class, those two. Shit, you’d hardly know they were whores if they didn’t ask for payment up front.”

  “Maybe they’ll come back to town when the whorehouse gets finished.”

  “Nah, those two were strictly independents, not parlor house whores. We won’t see them again,” he said sadly, then continued on his way. “See, Bill?” he called to me over his shoulder. “We did talk some city business.” He laughed and went huffing into the dark, noisy murk beyond, and I walked up the plank steps into the saloon. Inside was no one I wanted to talk to, though the room was jammed with friends and acquaintances; I drank a single whiskey at the bar and indulged in melancholy thoughts about my illicit desire for my friend’s wife and, sensing that more whiskey would plunge me into a morass of self-pity, decided to retire for the night.

  There was no one in the lobby except for Ingemarr the night man, who was avid as always for a conversation; for the last month or so the hotel had been keeping a man at the desk all night, and Ingemarr had replaced the job’s first holder, who had been implicated in the prostitution scheme. I had no more capacity for social intercourse, though, and went immediately upstairs to my room.

  Sticking my key in the lock I sensed that something was amiss; turning it clockwise I felt no tumbling and heard no click, but my mind was on other things as I entered the room and undressed in the near total darkness. I slipped under the bedclothes, thinking regretfully of my old buffalo robe, and tired though I was I found myself thinking of Maggie and of a particularly languorous gaze she’d favored me with earlier. I began allowing my hand to creep downwards, thinking to relieve myself as I had almost nightly since Hattie’s elopement; before it reached its destination, though, I was interrupted by a minute rustling, as of someone moving very slowly and deliberately to avoid making a sound. I opened one eye a fraction of an inch and saw nothing, but shortly thereafter I heard another faint friction near the door. I prepared to throw myself from the bed at whomever it was, feigning as I did so a light snore, thinking to lull my visitor into carelessness.

  This had the desired effect, and he moved somewhat more quickly now, sufficiently so that I saw his shadow moving along the wall toward the door. I leapt up, sprung from the bed in his direction and landed upon his back with a cry of rage that was easily outdone by his own terrible, high-pitched shriek of terror and surprise. Yanking him to his feet, I smashed my fist into his nose, and as he fell to the floor I heard the stirrings of my neighbors. I picked him up by the collar and punched him again, this time in the teeth.

  “Help,” my opponent cried out, “murder,” failing to anticipate that the other guests would assume that it was the room’s legal occupant under siege and not its burglar; he continued to cry out when I opened the door to permit the entry of Ingemarr, who had come running up the stairs at the commotion. The other occupants of the floor soon joined us, and we rousted the intruder to his feet. I dressed in a trice and removed my Colt from the nightstand, grateful he hadn’t got that far in his prowl, and stuck it into his ribs.

  “Downstairs, quick,” I said.

  We descended to the lobby along with Ingemarr and several of the other residents. The malefactor was a boy of about eighteen, skinny and pimpled. Some of his pimples were white with pus, and several of those had broken open when I slugged his face. Though he was trying to play the part of the snarling tough his shoulders shook and his eyes watered, and the visible effort of not weeping appeared overwhelming. In his coat we found watches, cash, and jewelry, some of it assignable to guests present in the lobby. Ingemarr went upstairs and began rousing the other guests, room by room, so that the rest of the stolen property could be redistributed.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Wallace,” he answered.

  “Wallace what?”

  “That’s my last name. First name’s Clay.”

  “You from around here, Clay?”

  “Nuh-uh. Dubuque, Iowa.”

  “What are you doing robbing hotel rooms?”

  He didn’t answer, and he got a little colder looking. Paul Lowry walked in the front door a minute later with one of the guests.

  “So, what have we here, a sneak thief? What’s your name?”

  The boy wasn’t talking now, so Ingemarr spoke up.

  “Clay Wallace, that’s his name,” he said, and the boy scowled.

  I told Lowry how I’d found the boy in my room, and we showed him that part of the booty which hadn’t been returned. I could smell whiskey on Lowry’s breath as we talked, and his eyes were red with it, too. When I finished, he looked down at the boy, who was considerably better composed than before.

  “Well, Clay, you got anything to say for yourself ?”

  The lad looked as though he’d like to spit at Lowry. He said nothing.

  “All right, then. How’d you like to spend the night in the calaboose?” Lowry laughed and hit the back of Wallac
e’s chair with his baton. “Get up.” The boy rose as ordered and the two of them moved to the door. “Now don’t try and bolt or I’ll have to give you a walloping.” Leering in my direction and still brandishing the baton, he pantomimed a swing at the base of the boy’s skull. Seeing this I felt compelled to accompany them to the jailhouse; I was unlikely to get to sleep that night anyway, and so I followed them into the crowd that still milled through the streets.

  Our jail was a tiny structure containing a thin accessway between two cells, each large enough for two men, and until a few months previous all either one generally ever contained were boisterous drunks. Now the drunks were sent home, sometimes after a beating to quiet them down, and brawlers got the same treatment. It took a real crime to get a place in the Cottonwood jail any more, and most nights it was full of four or five miscreants. Tonight, however, found only Lowry’s other anonymous prisoner in the hole, and when Lowry and Wallace entered the structure and the keys jingled I heard the man stir and mumble, as though waking up and trying to place himself.

  “Hey, killer,” Lowry called. “I brought you some company.”

  After a moment’s silence a dry croak came from the cell. “You go to hell.”

  “You’ll see it before me,” Lowry said with a chuckle as he unlocked the cell opposite.

  “If that’s so,” came the voice from inside, “I’ll give your ma a good kiss right on the cunt when I get there, for old times’ sake.”

  In an instant Lowry was at the opposite door, apoplectic and cursing. He choked and sputtered as he worked to open the recalcitrant cell door, treating the prisoner to a string of epithets and counteraccusations of low and illegal birth, adding thereafter threats of violence so grotesque I began to fear for the safety of the man in the cell. The tongue-lashing’s intensity increased with Lowry’s frustration at his inability to open the cell door, and young Master Wallace of Iowa had the presence of mind to take advantage of Lowry’s distraction; he rushed out the door and past me while inside the foul barrage continued. It did not stop until Wallace was well into the street, with me in pursuit, when Lowry came out after him, keenly aware of his blunder.

  “Stop that man!” he shouted at the passersby. “He’s a killer!”

  That may have been untrue, but he was a devil of a sprinter; he evaded me easily, making his way east toward Lincoln. A few men turned to watch his flight but none made a move to apprehend him, though I yelled at them to do so. He was near the saloon, with me a good five yards behind, when a shot rang out and I felt the wind of a bullet to my immediate left. It hit the side of the building, though where I could not say in the darkness that surrounded us.

  I stopped and yelled at Lowry to stop it but he fired again, and though he came no closer to the fleeing Wallace he managed to hit one of the crowd that had filed out of my saloon at the sound of the first shot hitting the outside wall. Some swarmed around the fallen man and a few witnesses, mostly in their cups, staggered toward Lowry.

  The escaped prisoner was gone and forgotten, and Lowry dropped the revolver to his side as the mob advanced and the injured man’s companions carried him toward the hotel, calling out for a doctor. Behind Lowry I saw that another mob was exiting the Silver Slipper, one that seemed as drunk and angry as the first.

  “Bill!” someone called to me, and I looked over to see my new bartender Hans moving toward me. “They’ve shot Alf Cletus!”

  As the door to the hotel opened I saw that the limp, open-mouthed figure being carried inside was indeed Alf, his shirt black with gore. I turned back to Paul Lowry, who was facing down the man’s angry drinking companions. Herbert was taking the lead. As usual he hadn’t bothered to cover his empty left eyesocket, and when he came in very close to Lowry and poked him in the chest with his finger the lawman flinched. “Who the hell you think you are, firing your pistol into a crowd like that?”

  “I’m a fully deputized peace officer of the city of Cottonwood, that’s who.”

  “I don’t give a good goddamn about that. You shot Alf.”

  Lowry was out of breath, and he looked scared. “That son of a bitch sneak thief got away, thanks to you!”

  “That ain’t any concern of mine.” He poked Lowry again, and Lowry made the mistake of raising his pistol at Herbert’s face. The latter grabbed the pistol away from Lowry, turned it around and whacked the barrel good and hard against the lawman’s face. Then he cocked it and stuck it into Lowry’s gut.

  Someone came out of the hotel. “Has anybody gone to get the doctor?”

  No one had. Though reluctant to leave the spectacle before me, I headed over to First Street, where E. J. Salisbury’s home and medical practice were located. As I rounded the corner and walked down the dark street to the house I found Tim Niedel already on the stoop, knocking and yelling in a voice like a yodel.

  “He don’t answer, Bill,” Tim said.

  I went around to the back of the cottage and rapped on the window, hollering for the doctor to come out. Finally I heard a stirring therein, and shortly thereafter the doctor came to his front door. He was fully dressed, and his clothes looked slept in.

  He muttered something unintelligible, which from its inflection and context Tim took to be in the nature of a question regarding our purpose in waking him in the middle of the night.

  “Alf Cletus just got gutshot. He’s down at the hotel.”

  The doctor nodded his head. His lower lip stuck out in grim contemplation and stepped back into the house for his bag. A moment later he was back on the porch holding his satchel; my assumption was that he had also taken the opportunity to cleanse his tongue and palate with a jolt of the cheap bug juice he favored. That was fine with me since we had no alternative to him, and it was better he didn’t operate with the shakes. “Lead on,” he said clearly.

  On the way to the hotel I consoled myself with the thought that Salisbury wasn’t much of a doctor sober, either. When we rounded the corner onto Main we were greeted by the spectacle of the anonymous prisoner, sprung from his cell and held at gunpoint by Paul Lowry, whose revolver Herbert had kindly returned.

  “Shit, look at that,” Tim said.

  “You want to know whose fault this is, here’s the man you want,” Lowry was saying, and the prisoner looked like he’d had the shit scared right out of him. “Tried to kill one of the fancy ladies for the money she carried and her customer, too, could have been any one of you fellows.” I saw Tiny Rector standing at the edge of the crowd, which had enlarged considerably; all the influx was from the direction of Lincoln, and it consisted of men and women alike, the former outnumbering the latter by maybe four to one.

  “Looks like you brought that whole whore camp into town with you,” I said to Tiny.

  “Some kid came running through, saying there was shooting going on and a jailbreak. I bet there’s not ten people left down there right now.”

  “At least the lines are shorter,” someone next to him said, sneering at Tiny.

  Tiny laughed at that. “Maybe my successor can do something about recruiting more fallen women and relieving the burden on those we have now.” He elbowed me and leaned over to whisper, jerking his thumb at his neighbor. “He’s sore ’cause I took advantage of my prerogative as mayor and stepped to the head of the line. This whole commotion started before he got his turn.”

  “Tiny, don’t you think as mayor you maybe ought to take charge about now and stop Lowry before things get all the way out of hand?”

  “Don’t get yourself bothered over a common thief, Bill. Lowry’ll have his fun and put him back in his cell, and maybe tomorrow he’ll be a little more inclined to cooperate. Anyway, what kind of mayor would I be if I stopped a hell of a good show like this?”

  I left him and marched into the hotel to see about Alf. He had been put into a room on the first floor, where he had proceeded to bleed all over the bed. Several of his companions from the saloon stood witness, and they nodded to me as I stepped into the small room. Doctor Salisbury had his face
in close proximity to the wound, just below the ribcage, and he was looking nearly as gray as poor Alf. The noise of the crowd outside was terrible, and a cheering erupted that chilled my bones as much as the sight of Alf lying there, making a horrid wet sound with every labored intake of breath.

  “I don’t know what all it hit, but he’s not improving any.”

  “Can you dig it out?”

  He looked appalled at the prospect, but he nodded. “We can try.” But as he turned to open his satchel Alf gurgled and ceased to breathe; the doctor looked up at me with a mixture of sorrow and relief, and the man nearest the door slipped out. I followed him, unable to bear the sight of my friend’s sightless, bloodshot eyes, and I thought I might try and defuse things with a round of drinks for all at the saloon in Alf’s memory.

  Outside, though, I discovered that things had taken a dire turn. A noose had been strung from the rafter of Tiny Rector’s Dry Goods and Grocery Store, and the prisoner stood on the roof, sniffling and protesting his innocence. Next to him stood a smug Paul Lowry, and several others. A number of lamps had been brought outside from various dwellings and someone had begun distributing puncheons coated in burning pitch; between the lamps and these torches the night was as bright as in gaslit Chicago. I spied Katie Bender again, without the parcel she’d carried earlier, her expression as vapid as if she were watching a patent medicine salesman hawking his wares. I looked in vain for Tiny among the throng, and finally caught sight of him on the rooftop, laughing. It was a noisy crowd, and like the rest of it I didn’t immediately hear the words of the man I’d accompanied out of the hotel, but eventually the phrase he was repeating caused a hush to fall over the assembly, and I hoped the gravity of it would bring the mob to its senses.

  “Alf Cletus is dead,” he kept saying, and by the time he stopped the crowd was silent.

  For a few seconds all that could be heard was the choked sobbing of the prisoner, his hands tied behind him. Then Herbert, standing at the front of the mob, shouted “Hang Lowry, too!” It was quickly enough taken up as a chant, and atop a barrel in front of the store a man began tying a second noose, the work of about thirty seconds. I couldn’t hear what was happening on the roof of the store, but I saw Tiny yelling at Lowry, Lowry yelling back and looking unhappy, and then Tiny going down on top of him.