A Cold Place In Hell

by William Blinn

  “Front door’s quicker.”

  “Dammit, Willard, I don’t want to be paraded in through the bar.”

  “Front door’s quicker.”

  There weren’t many people in Rooney’s when I was hobbled in, but there was a few, and any was many to my present way of thinking. I knew most of who was in the place, but there was no hellos or nods. They looked at me the way you’d look at a blood spitter in the Miners’ Hospital, like I’d crossed some bridge that put me out there with the animals and boot heels covered with horse dump. I just kept my eyes straight down on the floor. It was wet, just now mopped.

  “Almost there. Almost there.”

  Pacquette peeled himself away from the bar and followed after us. The glass in his hand was brim high with an amber liquid that I didn’t think was apple cider. We got to the back room door, and Billy reached out and turned the knob, pushing the door open ahead of me. I hitch-hopped to the nearest cane-back.

  “Get the leg irons off, Omar.”

  “I don’t take orders from you, schoolteacher. You’re not my—”

  “Get the goddamned leg irons off now!”

  Omar looked at Willard, and got a nod that let him get back down on his knees and start working on the leg irons.

  “We’ll be right outside the door,” Willard said to Billy.

  “Then get there, Willard. I’m anxious for you to be on the other side of the door.”

  I’d never seen Billy take on that much granite before. He knew about determination from the ground up, but it was always quiet before. There wasn’t any quiet in the way he was looking at Willard Ganeel. The marshal and his first assistant deputy moved out of the room and the door got itself closed.

  Mr. Pacquette put his glass on the table, though within easy reach, and proceeded to take the floor.

  “Let me tell you about this case as I understand it from a purely legal standpoint. Obviously, you both feel you know more about this case than I do, and that’s perfectly understandable, but often when someone comes in with a fresh perspective, he can point things out that those who have been more closely involved might have overlooked in the heat of the moment.” He took a sip of the drink, patted his lips dry with the back of his hand, pursed his lips, licked them, and went on. “As I understand it, there was substantial bad blood between you and the late Mr. Fergus Blackthorne. Would that be an accurate assessment thus far?”

  I cleared my throat and shrugged. “He was a hard man to like, I guess.”

  “And he was very active in your selection as deputy?”

  Billy shook his head, stumped. “What in the hell you trying to build here?”

  “Well, I can’t build anything if you keep interrupting, can I?” Billy allowed as how that was probably true, which gave Pacquette the time to take another sip. Lip pat. Lip pursed. Lip licked, he went on. “And as the man largely responsible for your becoming deputy, wouldn’t it also make sense that he would be responsible for your getting paid for your services?”

  “I get paid by Mr. Starett.”

  “For being a hand on his ranch, yes. All well and good. But did you ever receive payment for your contributions as deputy of Salt Springs, Wyoming, Mr. Moss? It’s a yes-or-no question.”

  “Well, I don’t recall ever getting paid specific for the deputy part.”

  Pacquette clapped his hands once. “And there you are. A poor old cowhand willing to put his very life on the line for this town and its citizens, and the government of that very city refuses to pay his due!”

  “Mr. Pacquette—”

  “And that sad sorry cowhand decides to confront the man shorting him! Needing an understandable boost to his courage, he stopped in to the local saloon to get himself a drink. One leads to two and two leads to three and so forth and so on.”

  “Damnit, Mr. Pacquette, that’s not why I stopped at Rooney’s!”

  “Old-timer, do you want me to help you or not?” His next sip emptied the glass.

  “Well, sure I—”

  “Then damnit man, keep your mouth as shut as your long-john trapdoor and we might have a chance! Lonely old cowboy gets righteously angry and decides to do something about it. The old cowboy—”

  “Stop calling me old!”

  “—and he gets himself skunk drunk and goes on over to the stingy lying sonofabitch who’s cheating the old guy out of his rightfully owed money!”

  “That’s not why Wilbur stopped at Rooney’s,” Billy said. “And he’s damn well not going to lie about it.”

  Pacquette’s look was lizard calm. “He’s willing to put a bullet through an unarmed man’s skull, but he’s got qualms about telling a little white lie that might save his life?” He looked back and forth between me and Billy. I nodded. Billy nodded. “All right, you tell me. Why did Deputy Wilbur Moss stop by Rooney’s before sauntering over dead sober to fire off the fatal round?”

  Billy and me looked on each other. Pacquette saw the look and stepped in quick. “Anything you tell me will be held in secret. It’s attorney-client.”

  “How do we know we can trust on that?”

  “Young man,” Pacquette said, “I am a lawyer.” He spoke the last word like he was ending a prayer.

  I pointed a finger at Billy, as I didn’t want any part in telling what Fergus Blackthorne had been up to. I didn’t have the words, and even talking close about it seemed to me like wading into turpentine and sheep dip.

  Billy didn’t welcome me stepping off to the one side on this, but it didn’t look like he was surprised much either. He kept Pearline out of it as much as he could, and never brought in what Pearline did for a living. He said it was all reported by a person about a girl from Honey’s being sent out to service Fergus, with Nicholas brought along for that music, then the dove never getting touched and Fergus taking Nicholas into a separate room, with Nicholas telling what happened after the second night at the Blackthorne house. That’s what had gone on, said Billy, and that’s what got Wilbur Moss fired up enough to go on over there and do what got done.

  Pacquette looked from Billy to me and then back to Billy again. He had the kind of smile you see at a kid’s Christmas pageant. “Gentlemen,” he said, “there is no judge and no jury that’s going to do spit to the memory of the richest man in town on the basis of what he’s rumored to have done to a little nigger boy.” He held out his pudgy hands. “I get the sense that isn’t what you were hoping to hear, but I’m just giving you the benefit of my years before the bench. They won’t harm the memory of a rich white man over a nigger boy.”

  The only sound in the room for a long time was Billy’s index finger tapping on the top of the table. He pursed his lips like he was going to give out a whistle, but all he did was breathe out long and slow. “Mr. Pacquette,” he said finally, “it looks to me like your glass there is bone dry. Why don’t you go back in to the bar and order another one. Tell Rooney to charge to me. He knows me; it’ll be fine.” Pacquette beamed and snatched up his glass. When he opened the door and left the room, we got a quick glimpse of Willard and Omar standing on the other side. They peeked in like me and Billy were naked ladies.

  Billy closed the door hard and leaned against it for a time before he swung around to look at me. “I thought he was a good idea, Wilbur. Looks like I was wide of the mark. You think so, too?”

  “Billy, I’d rather try to give a close shave to a slab of raw calf’s liver than have to deal with that walking tub of oil slime.”

  “I’ll talk to Honey again; maybe she knows somebody else.”

  “Why do we have to talk to anybody? What’s the point?”

  “Wilbur, I said it before. The law’s a complicated thing. We need a man who knows how it works and what needs to be said. You need somebody to talk for you.”

  I always hate it when a thing seems so clear to me and all clouded up to other folks. The older I got, the more that was seeming to happen. “Billy, what’s he going to do? I did the thing. You know that, I know that. Everybody in town knows t
hat. I wasn’t drunk. I wasn’t crazy on anything. I knew what I was going over there to do, so I went on over there and I did it. I’m guilty as guilty gets to be.”

  “He needed killing. That’s what you said to me.”

  “Why? Why did he need killing?”

  “Because, damnit! A man can’t do things like that without someone holding him accountable!”

  I kept my voice low. Billy was the last person in the world I wanted to argue with along about now. “Billy, that’s my point. I did a thing and they’re going to hold me accountable. I knew that was in the wind when I walked up to Fergus’s door.”

  Some wind went out of him. “You want to die, Wilbur?”

  “Nobody wants to die.” I thought that over, then: “Well, hardly anybody, and I’m not one of them.”

  “And that’s why you need someone to talk for you.” He grabbed a chair and pulled it over. “Yeah, you’re guilty and, yeah, that’s how they’re going to find you. But that won’t be the end of it.”

  “What will be?”

  “They can decide to fit you for a hemp tie or to send you away for the rest of your days.”

  “Not much of a choice.”

  “It’s the only one you got, pard.”

  I lowered my head and lifted my hand, looking to cover my face. When the hands came up, the chains clinked together. What a sour dismal sound of surrender. I put my hands back in my lap. “Death doesn’t set me on edge, Billy. Death is darkness, and I’m not a man who’s afraid of the dark. Dying, on the other hand, grabs me hard and low. The thought of dropping through a trapdoor with a canvas bag over my head, of being jerked up suddenly and having my neck broke, if I’m lucky, or just hanging there like the bottom string on a shade, twitching and dancing and being choked out, that’s a play I don’t want to see.”

  Billy’s look was soft. I needed that look. “They’ll want to send you to prison for a long time, Wilbur. It’ll end up being a life sentence, even if they just put it out as a number of years.”

  “I know that.”

  “So that’s what you want to happen?”

  “It’s better than dyin’, is all. It’s about the only good thing you can say about prison, I guess. It’s better than dyin’.” I straightened myself up in the chair. “But I’m a tough old bird, Billy. There’ll be days when I can see the sky and feel the wind and hear the thunder bouncing off the sides of the mountains. I heard once they know the old buzzards don’t look to go over the wall, that they let them work in places doing little work. Note keeping and library things and working in places like that. If I got that, there’d be other old buzzards I could talk with and lie to. It wouldn’t be as easy and good as the bunkhouse, but it might be tolerable. Especially when there isn’t any other choice. I might end up being the best prisoner they ever had.”

  “You old sonofabitch.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And that’s why we have to find someone else to talk for you in court. We need to make certain you get those blue skies from time to time.”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “All sorts of things. What are you talking about?”

  “How about you being the one talking up for me in court?”

  His head started moving back and forth right away. “Wilbur, I’m not a lawyer.”

  “We just talked with a lawyer, Billy. He’s smooth as mercury in butter and not worth much more than that. He’s a lawyer and I don’t want a lawyer. I want you to talk for me.”

  “You need somebody who knows the law, somebody—”

  He stopped when I lifted my right hand. I took care not to let the chains talk. I waggled my index finger back and forth. “I’m at a place where just making a choice, any choice at all, is going to be more and more a seldom occurrence. There’s going to be people telling me where to go and where to sit and what to eat and what to wear, what I can and can’t say and do and maybe even feel. My fault, nobody else’s, but that’s what got dealt to me. So be it. So, what I’m trying to do here, Billy, is make one of the last choices I’m ever going to get to make in my natural life. And my choice is you to talk for me at the trial. Are you going to tell me I won’t get the chance to make that one final choice? You going to tell me I ain’t got that right, that I just got to go in the direction I get pointed by whoever’s got the badge to do the telling?”

  The door banged open and Willard stood there. Omar was behind him, hand wrapped around the butt of his Colt. “What the hell’s going on in here?” Willard said.

  “Talking. We’re talking.”

  “You’re lying! That porky lawyer of yours is at the bar drinking corn and sweating stink.”

  “So?”

  “So this little goddamned parlay was for Wilbur to talk legal with his lawyer! I’m looking around the damned room, and guess what—I don’t see any lawyer in here with Wilbur!”

  And Billy Piper said, “Look harder.”

  IX

  Every afternoon, I get to go out into the corral behind the barn and walk around for half an hour to get some air and sun. If it was Marshal Ganeel in control, I had to wear the leg irons. If it was Omar guarding me, he’d let me go out with just the hand manacles, which helped make the air sweeter.

  Geezer was out there, too, and it seemed like I was forgiven for putting him in there after Heflin’s cigar butt had done its damage, because him and me would walk around the corral time after time and I’d talk low and he’d snorfle when the mood took him. I’m not all that brain-fried, so I really do know that Geezer didn’t understand a thing I was saying, but that wasn’t important or mattering. What was mattering in a tilted way was that there was another heartbeat next to mine, because being in a place where you’re the only heartbeat is real close to not being at all.

  I got more and more easy with talking out loud to an animal that couldn’t understand a word. There was never anyone around, so I didn’t concern myself much with someone hearing me and putting me in the same bin with the addled and aggrieved. I was certain about my brain footing, so at first I was scattered some when I started hearing a voice talking to me. It was a Thursday, pretty much middle of the day, when a woman’s voice said:

  “Wilbur, I got some beer and deviled eggs here.”

  That’s what an angel would say, so I don’t know how I reacted when I looked all around and ended up seeing Pearline perched there on the top rail. Pearline is pretty as sun on new wheat, so I expect I reacted in a way she was used to seeing and probably came to like.

  “Hey, Pearline.” I started walking over to her, as it was an Omar day for me.

  “You hear me about the beer and deviled eggs?”

  “I’m walking to you, ain’t I?” I motioned her to lower the tin with the beer, so I could block off Omar from seeing it if he stuck his head out of the barn. Pearline got it right away. I don’t know what chilly gold must taste like, but I’m betting it’s close to what that first sip out of a Rooney’s take-along tin tasted like when it hit the back of my throat. She saw that and she smiled.

  “Pearline, this is a kind thing.”

  “Billy’s idea.”

  “You’re the messenger; you get the ribbon.”

  “He found some books on law in Miz Starett’s batch and he’s reading up as fast as he can.”

  “Why?”

  “Wilbur, he’s defending you. That’s what he told me.”

  I chewed on one of the deviled eggs for a minute. Geezer was edging in toward us, seeing an edible on the nearby. “I’m guilty, Pearline. I don’t see a defense. I did it. I told people I did it. Defending doesn’t change what’s so. If it does, it’s amending, not defending.”

  “He doesn’t want you to die, Wilbur. You know Billy; he’s out to make the world perfect.”

  “I hope not. I hope not for your sake.”

  “What do I have to do with it?”

  “You and Billy want to be together. You and Billy want to be together in some other place doing something other than what you’
re doing now. But if Billy’s out to make the world perfect, he’s going to come in the door every night of his life mad and frustrated and filled with sour things inside. A man lives like that, pretty soon the sour things win out.”

  “How about ‘better’? Suppose he only wants to make the world ‘better’ instead of perfect?”

  “Still a hard thing.”

  “Good things are, I think.”

  I switched my look to her, and a part of me marveled at women and the kind of strength they got inside. I don’t know how her life didn’t twist her smile or make her eyes go dark, but the mark it left on her was inside and didn’t touch anything vital. “Billy Piper’s a lucky man,” I said.

  “I know.” She held out the take-along tin and I took a final sip. “Aren’t you afraid, Wilbur? Aren’t you afraid at all?”

  “Not of anything on the top side of the grass.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Geezer pushed on my shoulder. I looked at Pearline, and her smile handed me permission to hand him a deviled egg. It went down like a gravy gulp. “What it means is that I put my gun barrel right up into the middle of Fergus Blackthorne’s forehead and pulled the trigger, and all there was left was a smaller hole than I thought would be there and no more Fergus Blackthorne on the face of this earth. And while I’ve never been a believer as some would have said it, while I wasn’t that before and haven’t confirmed into one now, I can’t stop myself from wondering what it might be like on the other side if the thumpers are right and there’s an old white-haired man wearing a heaven dress waiting for me and he asks my name at the gates and he listens, and then I can’t stop myself from wondering what he’s likely to say to me, knowing what I done to give Fergus Blackthorne a quick boost over the final fence.”

  “That’s easy, Wilbur. I know what he’s going to say.”

  “Which would be?”

  “That old white-haired man’s going to say: ‘Welcome home, cowboy.’”

  I didn’t have anything to say that words could help out with, so I just took another sip of beer out of the Rooney’s take-along tin, and Pearline just was a pretty bird perched on the top rail of the corral.