by Ford Fargo
If he wasn’t mistaken, one of them was that drummer from the other night, the one with a satchel full of whiskey. It seemed to Rupe he’d been in this same situation the night before, only this time he hoped it might work out better. He giggled out loud.
“What’s so funny, drunk?”
The thick-faced man who’d said it had repeated himself, and it was then Rupe thought maybe he’d been talking to him. The finger poke to his shoulder convinced him he was right. Rupe looked at the man. The bar was busy enough that the man stood bare inches from him, and he wore a serious look.
It took Rupe longer than he expected to focus, so he figured that once again he was drunker than he had guessed. “Laugh all you want, but I’ll have you know I am a good friend to the marshal.”
Rupe was pleased to note that a couple people close by had stopped their chatter and now regarded him in the mirror. He wasted no time in plowing ahead. In his long experience, you get someone hung up on a story you’re telling, and you drag it out a bit, it usually is good for a drink or three—depending on the story, of course. But what did he have to offer? Ahh, the shooting would do.
Rupe cleared his throat. “I am what they call a key witness to the events of just last night. In fact, I am the only witness, except for the killer and the dead man. One of them ain’t talking and the other one ain’t talking—yet.” Rupe winked, then brayed a little too much at his own joke.
He locked eyes with the whiskey peddler once in the mirror—he’d be the one to impress, a stranger with a poke full of whiskey—but the man looked to be moving, crowded out by the usual faces.
“Then by all means, tell us. Who did the shooting, sir?”
Rupe focused on the source of this new voice and found himself right beside the whiskey peddler—he’d elbowed his way to the bar.
“Well,” said Rupe, trying his best not to shrink under the crowd’s stares. “I never did see the man’s face. But now that I come to think on it, maybe I did see just the back of him—yes, I feel sure I could place him if I had the time.”
He scanned the few faces still looking at him, hoping one might have that glint of pity he’d been successful in the past at turning into a drink.
“So,” said the smiling salesman. “You’re saying the only witness the marshal has is a drunk who doesn’t remember a thing, didn’t see a thing, and was probably passed out in the alley long before, and after, it all happened.”
The peddler looked at his new friends, at the dark-haired girl Rupe had watched earlier, and they all laughed with him, loud, roaring laughter that Rupe should have been used to. But something inside him shriveled even smaller.
“Rupe.”
He looked up. The peddler was gone—someone else had said his name. It was Mack.
“Being face-down in the alley, the only thing you’d stand a chance of recognizing is the man’s feet!” The comment was met with a burst of louder laughter that crowded out the piano and stray shouts from the other patrons.
Rupe stared down into the empty glass before him, stared with longing at the back bar with the filled bottles like little liquid angels, then shifted his gaze to the laughers. They’d all turned to their own talk, Rupe already a forgotten thing.
Time to call it a night, well before he wanted to—he still had room for a few more drinks, but that didn’t look likely. Besides, he had the low gut-aching burn that told him he should have peed long hours before, and an empty pocket with no more glorious coins to buy an evening of forgetting. He threaded his way through the crowd toward the front door and headed left to the alley. No need to find the outhouse when a shadow would do.
* * *
Marshal Gardner had tried his best all day to rattle Rupe’s fuzzy mind, but damn if he couldn’t get the soak to recall much, other than that the whiskey peddler had left before him. So the marshal had tried to track the man down all afternoon. There couldn’t be too many more places the drummer could be holed up.
The night was still young—for Rupe, anyway. Maybe that and the fact that he didn’t have any money of his own might have slowed up his drinking. The marshal figured he might catch him at the Wolf’s Den. Maybe the damned drummer would be there, too.
Gardner stood just inside the Den’s door, waiting as he always did without seeming to appear to take much interest, but secretly enjoying the way the voices drizzled lower and the piano seemed to dim when people finally saw him there. He touched brim to a couple of the ladies, then made his way to the bar. The din picked up again as he entered.
“Excuse me, yep, thanks.” He also liked not having to elbow his way in to reach the bar. The drinkers parted when they saw him nearby. “Mack,” he nodded to the bartender and waited for the man to make his way down to his end of the bar.
“What can I get for you, Marshal?”
“Sadly, I’m not here for a drink. I’m looking for Rupe.”
The big man nodded toward the front door. “You must have walked right by the little soak, Marshal. He wobbled on out of here not a minute ago, maybe less. He always heads off to the alley.” He nodded to his left. “He was in here flapping his gums about that killing. Claims he’s your only witness. Provided us with quite a show, he did.”
“That damn fool.” The marshal shook his head, then thought maybe that meant Rupe had remembered something useful. He looked over his shoulder, then turned back. “Hey, Mack, that new whiskey peddler been in here?”
“Yep,” the bartender nodded, retrieved an empty mug from the bartop. “He was in here a while ago, too. I don’t see him now, though.”
“This is not my best day,” muttered Gardner. “Thanks, Mack. I’ll—”
The distinctive clap of close-by pistol shots, one, then another hot on its heels, sliced through the noisy room and killed all sound. Marshal Gardner had already shucked his sidearm and stiff-legged it to the door, then bent low and peered out the frame. He couldn’t see any smoke hanging in the air. He hoped Croy or O’Connor would have heard it, too, and come running.
“Mack! You keep everybody in here don’t let anyone leave. I’ll be back.”
“But Marshal, I can’t—”
“Do it, damn you, or you’ll answer to me.” With that, Gardner skinned low out the left side of the door and hugged the face of the building. “Rupe!” He whispered loud enough for anyone out there to hear him, but he had to know if that big-mouthed drunk was still alive.
“Rupe, it’s Sam. If you’re alive, let me know. Rupe?”
“Hell yes, I’m alive. No thanks to anybody but me and my lightning reflexes!”
The knot in Gardner’s gut loosened. “You hit?”
“Yes, I’m bleedin’ somethin’ fierce.”
The knot clenched tighter and Gardner drew closer to the alley. “Where are you, Rupe? I think whoever shot is gone now.” He didn’t know that at all, but he had to get to Rupe. And there was no moonlight to be had tonight. He reached for a lucifer, but his boot caught something soft.
“Ouch, hell, Sam. I am shot to pieces and you commence to kicking me? What sort of a lawdog are you, anyway, booting a man when he’s down.”
He bent low over the drunk. “You only get foul tempered when you’re scared, Rupe, so I guess you’re good and scared. Am I right?”
“Damn straight I’m scared.” Rupe struggled to sit up. “Some fool shot me. Got me bad in the head I think.”
Gardner risked a match, thumbed it alight and in the initial flare, saw that Rupe hadn’t lied, his face was half covered with blood. But the thin man was sitting up and had an ornery glint in his eye, a good sign. “Lean forward, Rupe, lemme take a look.”
“Watch that damn match. I ain’t a roasting chicken just yet.”
“This doesn’t look like a bullet wound, Rupe. You got yourself a cut.”
He lit another match, flashed it in front of the stacked wooden crates just behind him. Sure enough a few had been knocked over. “Rupe, I bet you hit your head—I don’t think you were shot.”
&nbs
p; “I know when I’ve been shot, dammit. My head’s all sticky.”
Gardner wrinkled his nose at Rupe’s whiskey breath as it clouded up at him. “Well, we’ll see. I have to get you out of here. You injured anywhere else?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m alive, anyway.”
By then, despite his warning, a number of people from the bar and street had crowded around, enough so that Gardner felt safe to walk Rupe back inside. Where in the hell were his deputies? Could be anywhere, Wolf Creek was a bigger place than just Dogleg City. “Let’s go on inside, see if you’re okay.”
“Naw, if it’s all the same to you. I’d just as soon get away from here. I hate to say it, but I think maybe it’s time to go sober for a spell. Least until we find out who’s after me.”
Sam, still scanning left and right, offered Rupe a hand, and tried to sound casual. “Who’s this ‘we’, Rupe? You got a mouse in your pocket?”
“Well, no. But I ain’t about to let somebody take shots at me and get away with it.”
“I’d say they sure as hell did get away with it. And besides, you’re no use to anyone in your condition.” He hauled the thin man to his feet, aware once again of what a fragile creature Rupe really was. Held together by spit and booze—and something more, too, a backbone of wire and nerve.
“Mack.” Gardner waited for the bartender to appear on the porch. “Mack, do me a favor and send someone to fetch my deputies. When they get here, tell O’Connor to stay here and send Croy to the jail.”
“Will do, marshal.”
He did his best to hurry Rupe to the jailhouse despite his own limp, peering left and right, flinching at every cough from the shadows and scratching and scurrying from a rogue cat.
“Why would anyone want to take a shot at me, Sam?” Rupe sounded a lot less hot-headed than he had a few moments before in the alley.
“Mack said you’d been in the bar, yammering about how you’d been the only witness to the shooting. Seems to me there’s your reason, right there.”
Rupe groaned, though out of dismal realization of his foolishness or out of pain, Gardner couldn’t tell. “Hang on, Rupe. We’re almost to the jail.”
After he toed open the door and shoved Rupe inside, he let out his breath, shuttered the front windows, and lit an oil lamp. “Let’s take a look at that fool head of yours.”
* * *
Gardner checked Rupe over and found that the blood on his face had come from a cut on his head where he must have fallen. Gardner dabbed it with water and wrapped the drunk’s head with gauze. The effect of the swaddling made the marshal laugh, but Rupe didn’t seem to care. He looked more miserable than ever.
“I don’t suppose any of this knocked loose some scrap of memory that I might find useful?”
“Well, now, let’s see….” Rupe thrust his whiskered chin outward, eyes narrowed. “You know how things can look different, depending on where you’re at?”
The marshal squinted one eye shut, trying his best to figure out just what sort of logic trail his pickled friend was following. But all the squinting in the world didn’t help. “No—no, Rupe, I can’t say as I do.”
Rupe sighed, then closed his eyes. In the oil lamp’s honeyed glow, his eyelids looked thin, like old parchment, as if sunlight might burn right through them. A nerve at the corner of Rupe’s left eye jounced in counterpoint to the fluttering lids.
“No, I don’t expect it’s anything you’d know. I …” Rupe opened his eyes again and, as impossible as it seemed, Tingley looked even older and more drawn to the marshal.
“Rupe, just what are you getting at?” Gardner rattled tepid coffee into a chipped tin cup.
“From the floor, marshal. Down low. I was thinking how things look changed when you’re on the ground. Different perspectives, as they say.”
“Rupe, you confound me. One minute you’re singing or crying, according to the level of booze in your gullet, the next you’re moping around town all hangdog and dribbling out two-dollar words like you had some education backing you up.”
It occurred to the marshal he might just be the case. Just what did he know about Rupe, anyhow? Only what he’d told him when he’d showed up in town a few years before, afoot, drunk, and half-dead from the spring winds that had all but peeled the skin off the skinny drink of water.
“Ah, it ain’t no use, Sam.”
He looked more to the marshal like an injured bird that couldn’t fend for itself, off-balance and trying to make up for it by leaning too far one way, the man’s head wobbling in the other direction. The wet eyes and trembling lip, the shot nerves all told Marshal Gardner his drunken friend couldn’t be long for this world. Then again, he’d seen such characters outlive healthy, working folk. Unfair or not, the Lord does protect a drunk, he thought.
Gardner slid open a bottom drawer on the desk and tossed a boot bottle to Rupe. It arced in the air, halfway to the seated man, when the marshal winced—he’d just thrown a glass bottle to a one-armed man, a shaking, drunken one-armed man, at that. But bird-thin Rupe surprised him. That one good wing fluttered up, snatched and pulled in the bottle, hugging it to his belly. “What’s this for?”
“Ain’t much left, but I figure it’ll even you out. We have some talking to do and I can’t have you spending the entire time licking your lips and thinking about how fast you can get to the nearest bar. I need you to focus on what we’re saying. Call that gargle my payment on a conversation.”
Rupe wasted no time in upending the bottle. His throat worked as if he’d been in the desert for days without water. He stopped with a few swallows left, ran his hand across his lips, then said, “I’ve spent a goodly portion of my time these last few years on my belly, marshal. Mostly because I can’t for the life of me figure out how to get back up.”
“I’ve never pried, Rupe, you know that. But if there’s ever something you need to talk about, well, I’m as good a listener as a bottle—and a whole lot less costly and troublesome.”
“Not nearly so fun, though.” Rupe snorted a quick laugh.
“Well thanks all to hell—I think.”
But Rupe’s face grew serious. “Breedlove said something earlier that got me thinking. You know, Sam, how one thing will lead to another in your mind. Before you know it, you’ve gone so far from where you began, you got no idea where you are or how you got there?”
“That’s happened to me a time or two—take this conversation, for example. I haven’t got a clue as to what you’re on about.”
“Okay, okay. Breedlove, he asked me how old I was. We played slap-and-tickle with that for a minute, but it got me to thinking back to when I was a freighter. I told you about that.” Rupe nodded at the marshal.
Gardner returned the gesture, curious to know here this was going.
“Had my own rig, an old ore wagon I got for a song, fixed her up, painted her blue, and got me a three-yoke team. God, but I loved them boys. Ain’t nothing we couldn’t haul. I’d hire out for pretty near any job, I was that sure of ’em .”
“Good paying work, hauling freight,” said Gardner.
“You bet it was. And it was honest work, I tell you. I had two arms then, and money in my pocket. And for a time, I had me the closest I’ll ever come to a son. Boy I called Davey.” He looked at the marshal with a shine in his eyes and a faint smile on his face. “I never knew his right name, and if he did, he never told me. Never did speak. He wasn’t but seven or eight when I come up on him. There was a burned-out wagon, three dead bodies. It was his ma and pa and sister, I reckon, from what I could make of the scene. Sioux, I’d guess. They laid them low, must have stolen their horses, put flame to everything else.”
“How’d the boy live through it?”
“Hid himself in a gully, but he saw the whole thing. He was a tough character, though. It was most likely a week since it had happened that I come along. Did my best to bury them proper. I was in the midst of it when that kid jumped right on my back! Thought I had a lion on me. I got him calm
ed down in the end.” Rupe smiled to himself at the memory.
Gardner sipped the cold coffee and said, “What happened to him? You never mentioned having a boy.”
“I had him a couple of years. I’d grown right fond of him, never could figure out who his people were, nor where they had come from, where they were headed. So I just took him on as my own. He was tough, by God. I expect he would have taken over the business, but them damned Sioux. Murdering sons-of-bitches….”
The marshal nodded, but said nothing. He’d never heard this story before, but he’d heard plenty of similar stories, and he could guess what was coming.
“They got us one day when we were too far from anywhere to make a run for it. Must have been five or six of them. First thing I knew of it I saw arrows sticking out of my oxens’ backs. They never had time to do more than tear at the traces before those Indians come down at us out of the hill to our right, like screaming birds. I was reaching for the shotgun but damn, I had no time. One of them rode right up, hit me on the back of the head with what, I never saw. It was enough of a blow to drop me from the wagon. Then I got an arrow in the arm, pinned me to the ground just as neat as you please.” He wagged his stumped arm, the ragged shirt sleeve flapped at his side.
“I come around in time to see Davey had been laid right, arrows and cuts all over him, but he was a fighter. Kicking and biting and grabbing, just like a lion. I tell you, Sam, that kid was a tough one.”
Gardner was about to speak, but Rupe continued. “One of them bastards, a fat one, I remember—had no shirt and he was built like a sloppy woman—that bastard knelt hard right on the boy’s chest.”
Rupe’s voice cracked, he closed his eyes and ran his hand under his nose. His voice grew husky, deeper. “Took Davey’s topknot. But it was a messy affair. I suspect that damned Indian’s blade was dull. The boy wasn’t yet dead, still bleeding out, and the blood from his head bubbled and washed down his face, thick like molasses. I can still smell it—hot and raw like something a body shouldn’t ever have to smell. Oh, God, and his eyes fluttered open and he stared right at me. Give me a look.”