by Bill Brooks
“Not so much,” he said to the question of his hunger.
“My woman’s fixing some grub.”
Hairy Legs stepped out into the white landscape, looked around, his nostrils flaring with the scent of clean crisp air, the wood smoke coming drifting down from the chimney, carrying with it the scent of warm bread.
Off to the east he saw the hump of the storm, gray and moving swiftly, leaving in its wake a glassy blue sky with puffs of clouds like smoke from a pipe. The Capitans were once more visible.
“We’ll eat something, then I’ll go to town and get your money.”
“What about the horse killer?”
“I’ll never find him,” Jim said. “This is big country. Men become like ghosts. Besides, with this new snow, it’d take a good piece of luck to pick up his trail again.”
They ate a meal of cooked beef, onions, beans, tortillas, coffee.
“Good,” Hairy Legs said when he finished, having forced away the thoughts of horse. He had an odor about him of smoke and grease and sweat and maybe blood, Luz thought. How much of other men’s blood had the old Indian shed in his lifetime, she wondered.
He watched her closely; she didn’t care for it but did not cut her gaze either; she did not want to show him any sign she was afraid of him or otherwise intimidated.
He liked her. He liked the man too.
“You come back with a horse, I’ll go with you to find the horse killer,” he said.
“What got you to change your mind?”
Hairy Legs looked at Luz again.
Jim noticed the look.
“Maybe I do it for her,” he said.
“I can trust you not to do anything all of us will end up regretting while I’m gone?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll watch out for her.”
“Thank you,” Luz said, irritated. “But I don’t need anyone looking after me.”
The breed smiled in that way he had—an old, wrinkled walnut shell of a smile that was an unspoken history of all the women he’d known.
“Then I’ll just sit outside and wait.”
They stood from the table, and the two men walked outside and Jim saddled his horse, while Hairy Legs watched with those baleful, half-lidded turtle eyes as though his whole being was possessed of a great quietude. Hairy Legs sat on one of the porch chairs, the sun splashing down now turning the flooring warm enough, he could smell the wood planks.
The saddle leather creaked with Jim’s weight.
“I’ll be back in an hour.”
The sun indicated the time was about three hours past noon. Jim started to rein his horse round, then paused and looked from Luz to the breed once more.
“Just so you know, I’m not a merciful man when it comes to a violation of me or my own,” he said.
“Me either.”
“Good, then we understand each other.”
Jim turned the stud toward town. Something told him if he was to be violated again it wouldn’t be the breed who would be the culprit.
And besides, Luz had the ten-gauge right there inside the front door, and he trusted she would use it if it came to that.
Amen for a strong woman.
Chapter Thirteen
The half-wit watched his brother strap on his pistol, check the loads, put a shell in the chamber under the hammer, the chamber he generally left empty so as not to shoot himself accidentally. He checked the belly gun he carried too in the pocket of his waistcoat. Going into a known gunfight, Cicero Pie liked to have all the lead available he could sling.
“I’m going to kill that goddamn old fool,” he said to nobody in particular, the half-wit tugging on his big black boots.
“What about the law?”
“Fuck the law.”
“We still going to rob the bank?”
“Sure we are. Fact is I’m thinking of sending for Hatch and them to help us rob it. Was thinking about it just now when that goddamn fool hammered on my door.”
“Hatch and them?”
“That’s right, you remember old Hatch and his cousin Willis, don’t you?”
The half-wit nodded.
He remembered about old Hatch and Willis as come-and-go-as-you-please men who often appeared at their mother’s place either together or alone. Fact is, last time Ardell saw either of them was when old Hatch showed up by himself, saying he was supposed to meet Willis in a couple of days. Only while he was hanging around, Ardell saw Hatch through the window of his maw’s room standing there with his back to the window and his maw down on her knees in front of him. Old Hatch quivering like a fevered man, moaning like somebody had shot him through the backbone.
Ardell never said nothing to Cicero about it because his maw happened to stand up sudden and see him looking through the window. She approached him later that day—Cicero gone into town for dry goods and to get his drunk on—and warned him.
“What you saw earlier ain’t what you think you saw,” she said to him. Old Hatch was up in the spare room sleeping in the lazy heat of the day in spite of the greenhead houseflies that would worry a man out of his innermost dreams. “I know it looked funny, but the man provides us with a little money, and sometimes a body has to do what a body has to do to survive.”
“What was you doing with him, Maw?”
“Measuring him for a new pair of trousers, son. That’s how I make a little money off him—making him new trousers.” Then she waited a moment before adding: “Sometimes you think you see something that seems like something else, but that’s what I was doing, measuring Hatch for some new trousers, and that’s all I was doing.”
The half-wit tried to remember if he ever saw Hatch wearing a new pair of trousers. He couldn’t think of a time when he had.
“Anyways, I don’t want you to say nothing to your brother,” she said. “You know what a hothead he is, how he’s always so quick to jump the gun. If he thought I was doing anything untoward…well, just don’t say nothing.”
Ardell stood mute.
“You hear me, son. You don’t say nothing to Cicero.”
“Yes, Maw.”
“Now let me go fix you something good to eat and here’s a dollar.”
“What you giving me a dollar for, Maw?”
“’Cause you’re a real good boy and ’cause you won’t say nothing to your brother about me measuring old Hatch for some new trousers, will you now?”
“No Maw.”
She patted him softly on the cheek then and fixed him a nice meal of fried chicken, which he and old Hatch ate across the table from each other, old Hatch looking for all the world like what he was: a shiftless soul given to getting by without ever having to hold a regular job anybody ever knew of. Yet him and Willis, every time you seen them, was flashing around money and drinking like they’d bought the last whiskey keg ever made. Willis always had pocket money.
Cicero had told Ardell, when Hatch had shown up at the family homestead for the first time since their daddy had run off, that Hatch had been in prison for robbing a string of whorehouses in Oklahoma. Him and Willis. Cicero saying how the law never did catch up with Willis.
“Willis is just as bad as old Hatch when it comes to criminal activity. And I bet they stole more than money from them cathouses, too,” Cicero said with a wicked little grin. Last the half-wit heard, old Hatch and Willis were living in El Paso, Texas, and running a gambling joint down there together.
“I don’t like him none too much,” the half-wit said when Cicero mentioned he was thinking of wiring him.
“Hell, old Hatch’s all right. I think him and Willis would jump at the chance to rob a good bank like this one here. I’m thinking we pull this one off, we’ll just go into the bank-robbing business altogether, like old Jesse and Frank done.”
“Ain’t Jesse dead and Frank in jail?”
“Goddamn right, which means there’s room for a couple of enterprising men like us. You and me will be the new Frank and Jesse, and old Hatch and Willis will be like the Youngers.”
“Anyway, I got this business needs taking care of,” Cicero said. “Got this reputation to uphold—you know, the Mortician.” Grinned and walked out of the room with a pistol riding high up on his hip, confident he could pull and fire it before the old fool ever knew what hit him.
Tug Bailey waited in the street for the sons a bitches to put in an appearance. He faced the front door of the hotel, the snow having now stopped and the first sun breaking through the suddenly parting clouds.
People who had been on the streets stopped and stared at the old waiter standing out there intent as a bird dog on point, a big pistol in his belt.
“Looks like there might be a fight,” somebody said to somebody else.
“Looks like.”
Then they saw Trout rumbling up the street, the bulk of him not running, but walking at a quicker than his usual pace. Trout had sent Woody off to go find his deputies when he heard Tug was fixing for a fight with two strangers recently arrived in town.
“Who are they?” he’d asked Woody as they exited the Cat’s Paw, “these two men Tug wants to shoot?”
“You aren’t going to believe how they signed their names—least the one did,” Woody said.
“I ain’t got no time for guessing games, poet.”
“Signed their names, ‘The Mortician and his Assistant.’”
It stopped Trout up short. The Mortician? He’d heard that name bandied about. A first-rate man killer if everything he’d heard about him was true, and he had no reason to believe it was not. Of course the West was full of self-appointed bad actors, men calling themselves Kid this and Kid that, Wild Bill this or Wild Bill that. Stuff you’d read in dime novels. But some of these fellows actually were bad.
“You sure that’s how they signed?”
Woody nodded, and that’s when Trout told him to go round up his two part-time deputies and get them down to the hotel quick.
Trout came around the corner and saw Tug standing out in the street, bent and old but standing steady as a statue, facing the front doors of the hotel.
He called to him from a distance of forty paces or so, not wanting to come up behind him sudden like and get his ownself shot by a touchy old fool with a gun.
“Tug, I want you to walk away from here,” Trout shouted.
“Go find you another hand to deal, Constable, this one’s already dealt.”
“Now, Tug, you’re just going to go and get yourself shot all to pieces—two of them against one of you. Who’ll serve me my coffee tomorrow morning if that happens?”
Tug threw the constable a sidelong look.
“I guess you’ll just have to get off your fat ass and get your own coffee, Trout. I’m all finished with that nonsense.”
Trout never knew the quiet Westerner to be anything other than quiet and unassuming like all the other old cusses he’d ever met; men with quiet histories, almost to the point of not even being noticed. This was a whole other side of him Trout was seeing.
“Tug, why you want to fight these fellows?”
“They insulted Little Paris is why.”
“Well now, how’d they do that, Tug, insult her?”
“Said something ungenteel about her. I stood by and didn’t do nothing then, but I’m going to do something about it now.”
“She’s a whore, Tug. I doubt if she’d even noticed or cared.”
“I ain’t come here to carry on a conversation with you, Trout. Why don’t you just walk on down the street and get a haircut and come back later.”
“Tug…”
Then two men came out through the front doors of the hotel: one big as a house and the other smallish, but wearing the flap of his frock coat thrown back and tucked behind the butt of his revolvers—smallish, but those big pistols made him every man’s equal.
“I’m here, you old goddamn idiot,” Cicero said, stepping down from the walk into the muddy street, little patches of as yet unmelted snow still lying about.
The air was cool on the skin, like fresh spring water.
“I’ll give you one more chance to apologize,” Tug said, already knowing he was going to be shot, that such men never apologized for their bad behavior. His stomach knotted, seeing the man armed now and that big oaf with him probably also armed under his coat. Tug figured maybe the bullet’s punch would be quick and lethal and he’d never even feel it. Anyway, he told himself, he’d closed all the doors he’d walked out of since he quit his job at the café, and that was okay with him. Now he had just one more door he knew he must step through—the one that led to a great room of eternal darkness. And maybe if he got lucky, he’d take this derby-wearing son of a bitch with him. The thought caused his right hand to tremble a little more than what he liked. No sir, it sure wasn’t the old days, now was it. He caught a glimpse of one-ear Tommy Nettle there at the mouth of an alleyway ran along between the hotel and the jeweler’s, nipping from a pint bottle of something, and it pissed Tug off the damn fool had spent the money he gave him on booze instead of something warm in his belly.
“And I’ll give you one chance to get on your knees and beg me not to shoot you, you old bastard,” the Mortician said.
“Shit,” muttered Trout.
“Hold up, boys,” he called, standing there in front of Dr. Salvador’s dentist office.
The armed stranger jerked his eyes toward the lawman.
“Stay the fuck out of this, dad.”
“I’m the law and if you don’t disarm yourself—”
“You’ll what?” the Mortician said, cutting off Trout’s threat. He wasn’t in any mood for threats. That wasn’t how he operated. It wasn’t how he ever operated.
Trout’s own gun seemed a hundred miles away. But now he was caught up in things and couldn’t just walk away. That was the thing about taking other folks’ money to defend them; you couldn’t always just walk away and make believe their troubles weren’t your own.
Trout’s musing lasted less than a second, for he knew men like the one standing across the street from him did not hesitate. And yet he knew too he was too far away to hit any goddamn thing with a pistol. He needed to close the space by half. And yet that silly old man stood between him and the Mortician.
“Somebody’s going to end up dead here!” Trout warned, stepping down off the walk into the same street Tug Bailey stood in, for there wasn’t any other way of doing it. If he couldn’t hit the Mortician at this distance with a pistol, it was unlikely the Mortician could hit him either. Closing the gap between them was the only way to do it.
“No shit!” the Mortician said. “But it ain’t going to be me.”
He pulled his revolvers so slick and fast, neither Tug nor Trout could react fast enough. Tug got his own gun only halfway out of the waistband of his pants, but that was all she wrote. Three bullets punched into his body so hard it knocked him backward five or six steps, just walked him backward like he was dancing with an invisible partner. Tug’s finger jerked the trigger on his double action, firing a round directly into the mud near his foot, then his hand and fingers didn’t seem to want to work anymore and he sat straight down on his ass. Whump! His breathing coming hard. Like somebody had set a load of bricks on his chest. He could feel the mud soaking up through his crotch, cold and wet. Or was it blood?
Oh, it hurt a hell of a lot worse than he thought it would. Way worse.
Trout saw it coming even as he made an effort to cross the street and close the gap. It was like he was in some sort of play, like the one he’d seen in Chicago that time when Billy Cody and Texas Jack and Ned Buntline performed. Where they shot it out with the Indians—Billy giving a long-winded speech first, forgetting his lines.
Trout had his own gun out now, holding it straight out from him, his arm extended, his thumb drawing back the hammer of the single action. He pulled the trigger, but sure as shit missed the smallish man partly enveloped in
a cloud of his own making. This he knew when the Mortician swung round his way, not more than three, four inches difference in his stance from when he shot Tug. Just enough. And something that felt about like a railroad spike drove in with a nine-pound hammer slammed into his shoulder.
But he was het up now, and he thumbed the hammer back and fired again and again, thinking he had to knock the son of a bitch over with one of those shots. But he never did, and in the end the Mortician was still standing and Trout was tasting mud. He didn’t even know what happened, really. It was just sudden. He was standing there, firing away, and then he was facedown in the street. Couldn’t feel his legs.
Some woman was screaming. It could have been Little Paris. Or it could have been somebody else. Sounded just like some respectable woman who’d seen something she ought not have and cut loose her horror, which is exactly what it was. Woody also saw it all, committed it to memory, knowing someday he’d write a poem about it, or perhaps an article for Harper’s Weekly. Already had some of it written down in his mind:
This day, with the weather so odd and strange as to be something to behold—one minute snowing as if a blizzard, and the next, the sky bright and clean, the sun warm upon the inhabitants, death was dealt in the streets of Domingo…
“You killed ’em, Cicero, you killed ’em both,” the half-wit said.
“No, they ain’t dead yet, neither one. Look at how they’re still wiggling about like worms somebody spilled out of a tobacco can.”
Tug sat there gripping handfuls of mud, clawing at the earth like he was trying to get inside of it—a desire that he sensed would soon be fulfilled. But it was awful, the waiting part, the pain that excoriated with every passing and struggling breath. Wasn’t no way to get around the pain, and what was even worse than the pain itself—knowing he couldn’t do nothing to escape it, that it would ride him right on out of this world.
He saw out of the corner of his eye the constable lying facedown and couldn’t quite figure it out.
“Trout,” he muttered. “Trout…”