I went back up front. I set the keys on Hollister’s desk.
He looked down at them and said, “Well, Chase?”
“There’s one missing.”
“You know which one that is?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The bank key?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“I knew it,” Reeves said. “I goddamn knew it.”
“I didn’t take that key, Chief.”
Hollister nodded. “I believe you, Chase, but I’m afraid Reeves here doesn’t.”
I met Reeves’s gaze now. There was a faint smile on his eyes and mouth. He was starting to enjoy himself. If only one person had the key to the bank other than himself, then who else could the guilty party be?
I stood there feeling like the farm boy I was. I’d never been gifted with a devious mind. Reeves had not only robbed his own bank, he had also managed to set me up in the process—set me up and implicate me in the robbery.
“A little later,” Hollister said quietly, “you and I should talk, Chase.”
I nodded.
“Why don’t you go ahead and start your shift now?” Hollister said.
“Yes, Chase, you do that,” Reeves said. “But you can skip the bank. Thanks to you, there isn’t any money left in there.”
IT WAS A long afternoon. The sun was a bloody red ball for a time and then vanished behind the piney hills, leaving a frosty dusk. Dinner bells clanged in the shadows and you could hear the pock-pock-pock of small feet running down the dirt streets for home. The only warmth in the night were the voices of mothers calling in their young ones. If there was concern and a vague alarm in the voices—after all, you could never be quite sure that your child really was safe—there was also love, so much so that I wanted to be seven or eight again and heading in to the dinner table myself, for muttered “Praise the Lords” and some giggly talk with my giggly little sister and some of my mother’s muffins and hot buttery sweet corn.
There were a lot of fights early that night. The miners, learning that they would have no money tomorrow, demanded credit and got it and drank up a lot of the money they would eventually get. In all, I broke up four fights. One man got a bloody eye with the neck of a bottle shoved in his face, and another man got two broken ribs when he was lifted up and thrown into the bar. The miners had to take their anger out on somebody, and who was more deserving than a friend? Like most drunkards, they saw no irony in this.
Just at seven Gillian and Annie brought my dinner, cooked beef and wheat bread. It was too cold for them to stay, so they started back right away—but not before Gillian said, “Annie, would you wait outside a minute?”
She studied both of us. Obviously, just as I did, Annie sensed something wrong. She looked hurt and scared, and I wanted to say something to her, but when Gillian was in this kind of mood, I knew better.
Annie went out the back door of the station, leaving Gillian and me next to the potbellied stove in the empty room.
“There was a robbery this morning, Chase,” she said.
“So I heard.”
“Reeves’s bank.”
“Right.”
“He did it again, didn’t he?”
“Did what?”
“Did what? God, Chase, don’t play dumb. You know how mad that makes me.”
“There was a robbery, yes, and it was Reeves’s bank, yes, but other than that, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She studied me just as Annie had. “Chase.”
“Yeah?”
“I made up my mind about something.”
“Oh?”
“If you take that bank robbery money, I’m going through with what I said. About leaving you. I’m going to pack Annie and I up and go and that’s a promise. I don’t want our daughter raised that way.”
“He killed my two brothers.”
“Don’t give me that kind of whiskey talk, Chase. Your brothers are dead and I’m sorry about that, but no matter what you do, you can’t bring them back. But you can give Annie a good life, and I’m going to see that you do or I’m taking her away.”
“I love you, Gillian.”
“This isn’t the right time for that kind of talk, Chase, and you know it.”
She walked to the door and turned around and looked at me. “If you break her heart, Chase, or let her down, I’m never going to forgive you.”
She went right straight out without saying another word, or giving me a chance to speak my own piece.
THE FIGHTS WENT on all night. A Mex took a knife to a miner who kept calling him a Mex, and two miners who should have known better got into a drunken game of Russian roulette. They both managed to miss their own heads, but they shot the hell out of the big display mirror behind the bar.
Just at eleven, when I was finishing my second sweep of the businesses, making sure all the doors were locked, making sure that no drunken miners had sailed rocks through any of the windows. I was walking past an alley and that was when they got me.
They didn’t make any noise and they surprised me completely.
Mars hit me on the side of the head with the butt of a .45, and Lundgren dragged me into the shadows of the alley.
“Where’s our money?” Lundgren said.
I didn’t answer. Wouldn’t. Because no matter what he did to me, it wasn’t going to be his money ever again.
Mars took the first three minutes. He worked my stomach and my ribs and my chest.
At one point I started throwing up, but that didn’t slow him down any. He had a rhythm going, and why let a little vomit spoil everything?
By the time Mars finished, I was on my knees and trying to pitch forward.
Lundgren had better ideas.
He grabbed me by the hair and jerked me to my feet and then started using his right knee expertly on my groin.
He must have used it six, seven times before I couldn’t scream anymore, before I felt the darkness overwhelm me there in the dust that was moist with my own blood and sweat and piss …
Just the darkness …
Part 19
Six years ago, two Maryknoll nuns on their way to California stopped through here. They stayed just long enough, I’m told, to set up an eight-bed hospital. It’s nothing fancy, you understand, but there’s a small surgery room in addition to the beds, and everything is white and very clean and smells of antiseptic.
Doc Granville got me into his examination room but then had to go out to get a man some pills. Apparently, people felt comfortable stopping by at any hour. While I was in the room alone, I looked through his medical encyclopedia. There was something I needed to look up.
When I was finished, I went back to the table and laid down and Doc Granville came in and got to work.
He daubed some iodine on the cut across my forehead. I winced. “Hell, son, that don’t hurt at all.”
“If you say so.”
“Miners do this to you? I know they’re raising hell because their paychecks are going to be late.”
“I didn’t get a real good look at them. But I think it was Mexes.”
“You must be at least a little bit tough.”
“Why’s that?”
“That beating you took. And you’re up and around.”
I thought of mentioning what I’d just read. I decided not to. Things were complicated enough. “I’m not up and around yet.”
He laughed. “I don’t hand out that many compliments, son. Just accept it with some grace and keep your mouth shut.”
I smiled at him. For all his grumpiness, he was a funny bastard, and a pretty decent man at that.
The pain was considerable. He had me on the table with my head propped up. He’d fixed the cuts on my face and then carefully examined my ribs. They were sore. Not broken, he said, but probably bruised. I tried not to think about it.
He was about to say something else when knuckles rapped on the white door behind him.
“I told you I’d be out in five minutes, nurse. Now
you just hold on to your britches.”
“It’s not the nurse.”
And it wasn’t.
“Your boss,” Granville said in a soft voice.
I nodded.
“They’re going to hurt like a bitch when you get up, those ribs of yours.”
“I imagine.”
“Nothing I can do for it except tape it up the way I did.”
“I appreciate it.”
He went to the door and opened it.
Hollister, in his blue serge, walked into the room with the kind of military precision and stiffness he always used when he was trying to hide the fact he’d been drinking.
He nodded to Granville and came straight over to me. He scowled when he saw my face.
“What the hell happened?”
So I told him the Mex story, the same one I’d told Granville. It was better the second time around, the way a tall tale usually is, but as I watched him, I could see he didn’t believe a word of it.
“Mexes, huh?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Two of them.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m told you didn’t sound your whistle,” he said.
“I didn’t have time.”
“Or use your weapon.”
“I didn’t have time for that, either.”
“They just grabbed you …”
“Grabbed me as I was walking past an open alley.”
“And dragged you …”
“Dragged me into the alley and—”
“Why did they drag you into the alley?”
“Because I saw them in the alley, fighting—one of them even had a knife—and I told them to stop, and they turned on me.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“Before you could do anything?”
“Before I could do anything.”
Granville was watching me, too. He was pretending to be sterilizing some of his silver instruments, but he was really watching Hollister try to break my story.
Hollister suddenly became aware of the doc. “You do me a favor, Doc?”
“Sure, Ev.”
“Wait outside.”
“If you want.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
“Sure.”
Doc looked like a kid disappointed because he had to stay home while all his friends went off and did something fun.
Doc went out and closed the door.
Hollister didn’t talk at first. He went over and picked up a straight-backed chair and set it down next to the table I was lying on. Then he took out his pipe and filled it and took out a stick match and struck it on the bottom of his boot. The room smelled briefly of phosphorous from the match head and then of sweet pipe tobacco.
He still didn’t say anything for a long time, but when he did speak, it sure was something I paid attention to.
“Only one way those two boys that stuck up the bank could’ve gotten that key.”
I didn’t say anything.
He said, “How much did they promise you, Chase?”
I still didn’t say anything. I just lay there with my ribs hurting every other time I inhaled. I had never felt more alone.
“Reeves estimates that they got away with fifty thousand. If they didn’t give you at least a third of it, you’re not a very good businessman.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with the robbery, Chief. I honestly didn’t.”
“I took a chance on you, being an exconvict and all.”
“I know that and I appreciate it.”
“And now here I am kicking myself in the ass for doing it.”
“I’m sorry, Chief.”
“Every single merchant in this town knows what happened, how you threw in with those robbers.”
“I didn’t, Chief. I really didn’t”
I closed my eyes. There was nothing else to say.
“They didn’t hesitate to kill that clerk at the bank this morning, and they sure won’t hesitate to kill you.” He puffed on his pipe. “That beating they gave you was just a down payment, Chase.”
He was trying to scare me. I thought of scaring him right back by telling him about that wife of his and Reeves.
He stood up and walked over to the table and faced me.
He jabbed a hard finger into my taped-up ribs.
I let out a cry.
“They worked you over pretty good. Maybe you should take a few days off.”
“Is that an order?”
He sighed. “I can’t prove you actually gave them that key, so I’m not going to fire you, even though every merchant in town wants me to.”
“That’s white of you.”
He shook his head. “Chase, I thought you were smarter than all this.”
“I didn’t throw in with them, no matter what you say.”
“Then where did they get the key?”
I stayed quiet. I didn’t want to drag Reeves into this. That would only complicate things.
“You got any answer for that, Chase?”
“I don’t know where they got the key.”
“But not from you?”
“Not from me.”
He took the last noisy drags of his pipe. “You’ve got a nice wife and a nice little girl. You don’t want to spoil things for them.”
“I sure don’t.”
“Then I’m going to ask you once more, and I want you to tell me the truth.”
“You don’t even have to ask. I didn’t give them the key.”
He walked over to the door. His boots walked heavy on the boards of the floor.
“You going to tell me why they came after you?”
“I told you. It was two Mexes.”
“Right. Two Mexes.”
“And they were drunk.”
“Real drunk, I suppose.”
“Right,” I said. “Real drunk.”
He looked sickened by me. “You’re wasting your goddamned life, Chase. You’ve gotten yourself involved in something that’s going to bring down your whole family. And you’re going to wind up in prison again. Or worse.”
He didn’t even look at me anymore. He just walked through the doorway, slamming the door hard behind him.
I lay there, quiet, still hurting from where he’d jammed his finger into my rib.
Part 20
Gillian put a match to the kerosene lamp and then held the light close to my face and looked over what they’d done to me.
I watched her closely in the flickering lamplight, older looking tonight than usual, her eyes moving swiftly up and down my face, showing no emotion at all when she got to the black and blue places. She didn’t touch me. I knew she was angry.
I’d been home ten minutes, sitting at the kitchen table, rolling a cigarette in the dark, trying to wake neither Gillian nor Annie, but then I’d dropped my cigarette, and when I went to get it, my rib hurt so bad I made a noise, and that had awakened Gillian.
Now she finished with her examination and set the lamp down in the middle of the table and went around and sat across the table from me.
She just kept biting her lip and frowning.
“Two Mexes,” I said, keeping my voice low with Annie asleep in the other room.
“Don’t say anything, Chase.”
“I’m just trying to explain—”
“You’re not trying to explain anything. You’re lying, that’s what you’re doing.”
“But Gillian, listen—”
“You got yourself involved in that robbery somehow, and it all went wrong just the way I knew it would, and now Reeves is after you.”
She started crying. No warning at all.
I sat there in the lamp-flick dark with the woman I’d loved so long, knowing how much I’d let her down. To get Reeves the way I wanted to get Reeves meant destroying her in the process.
“I’m so sorry, Gillian.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Well, I wish I was sorry, at any rate. I just wis
h I didn’t hate him so much.”
“And I just wish Annie didn’t love you so much.”
She went to bed. I sat there a long time. After awhile I blew out the lamp and just sat in the moonlight. I had some whiskey and I rolled two cigarettes and I sort of talked to my dead brothers the way you sort of talk to dead folks, and I thought of Annie in her white dress in the sunshine and I thought of sad Gillian, who’d been done nothing but wrong by men all her life.
It was near dawn when I went to bed and slid in beside her.
Part 21
The next day, I fell back into my routine as husband and father and policeman.
Before work I went up the hill and knelt down by the deserted well. The day was gray and overcast. The wind, as I pulled the well cover back, was cold and biting. I could smell snow on the air.
Last night I’d dreamt that I’d run up the hill to the well only to find it empty. Behind me stood Lundgren and Mars. When I found that they’d taken the money, they’d started laughing, and then Lundgren had leaned over and pushed me down the well.
The rope still dangled from the spike. I reached down and gripped it and pulled the canvas money sack up the long dark hole.
I put the sack on the ground and greedily tore it open and reached inside.
I pulled up a handful of greenbacks and just stared at them momentarily. I gripped the money tight, as if I had my hands around Reeves’s neck.
“You’re destroying this family, Chase. That’s what you’re doing.”
In the wind, I hadn’t heard Gillian come up the hill. She stood no more than two feet behind me. She wore a shawl over her faded gingham dress. She looked old again, and scared and weary, and I tried hard not to hate myself for what I was doing.
“This money is going to save us, Gillian,” I said, packing it all back up again, leaning to the well and feeding the rope down the long dark tunnel. I didn’t let go until I’d tested the rope. Snug and firm. The spike held. The money was back in a safe place. I pulled the cover over the well and dusted my hands off and stood up.
I took her by the arms and tried to kiss her. She wouldn’t let me. She just stood stiff. Her skin was covered with goose bumps from the icy wind.
She wouldn’t look at me. I spoke to her profile, to her sweet little nose and her freckles and her tiny chin.
A Century of Great Western Stories Page 46