by Bill Brooks
In peaceful morning’s yawn, who could
Predict the coming storm? O’ great peace
Where did you flee this bloody morn?
Well, it was a start, even if not a very good one. It was always difficult to convey in lyrical form that which is stark and painful as a broken bone.
He felt suddenly as lost as he’d ever been. What was he doing in this place of such violence anyway? It wasn’t what he truly wanted. It wasn’t Paris or London, a place of peace and civility, a place where the art of poetry was respected and appreciated. Here there were just horseshit and mud and men bent on killing one another over almost any perceived offense.
He immersed himself so completely in the poem that he barely felt the pistol’s butt pressed into his lower ribs until it became physically painful, then took it out carefully and put it in the top desk drawer. Had decided in a moment that he would tell the constable upon his return that he was quitting, that this wasn’t what he was cut out for. And instantly felt relieved at his decision. He would mail off his poems with a return address of Albany, New York—the stately old house of his parents, and move in with them until something broke for him even if he would have to work in his father’s hardware store until that time when a publisher would recognize his talents.
It was such a sweet, pleasant thought until suddenly the door jumped open and two men stood there in the small space of a room with him, guns cocked and aimed—large revolvers.
“We come to post bail for them two you got in back,” the one said. Woody had never seen either man before this moment, but he had no doubt these two were made of the very same stuff as the ones locked up in the cell. He swallowed, and it was as though he was trying to swallow a whole crab apple.
“Get them keys, boy.”
“Yes, sir…”
But Woody did not move.
“I said get them keys!”
“I can’t.”
“Why can’t you?”
“I swore an oath.”
Hatch looked at Willis.
“You believe this stupid son of a bitch?”
Willis shook his head.
“No, I don’t believe anybody can be that dumb.” Then to Woody, Willis said, “Are you that fucken dumb?”
Woody knew the drawer he’d put his own pistol in also contained the keys to the jail cell. Just inches from his fingers. But could he do it? Or would he do it? Therein lay the great question of all time, for all men everywhere—could they, or would they?
“I’m going to paint the walls with your brains you don’t get them fucken keys and get ’em now,” Hatch repeated.
Woody shook his head. His mind was telling him one thing, but his body was in opposition.
Hatch shot him between the eyes. The poet seemed to stare into another world, then fell forward, his head slamming into the desktop, knocking over the bottle of India ink so that ink and blood mixed together upon the poem’s lines—black and red make purple—and drowned the few lines of words as surely as a burst dam would drown the people living below it.
“Dumb fucker,” Hatch said as he searched the drawers for the keys and found them hooked to a big metal ring along with the pistol and walked them both to the back where the cell was.
“Well, we’re into it now,” Willis said.
“We didn’t come here to twiddle our thumbs.”
Cicero and the half-wit were standing at the bars, anxious, having heard the gunshot. They put big clown grins on their faces soon as they saw Hatch and Willis, Hatch carrying the key, putting it in the lock, turning it and swinging the door wide.
“Just posted you boys’ bail,” Hatch said. “You ready to go make some money?”
“Been ready since I was born,” Cicero said. The half-wit stared at the dead deputy, the way his glasses had twisted off his face, the spreading pool of blood and ink.
“You’re a killing son of a bitch, Hatch, just like me,” the Mortician said.
“You can take credit for this one too, if you want,” Hatch said. “Add to your reputation.”
“Shit, I don’t need no freebies, I got plenty as it is.”
Outside Hatch said, “Where your horses?”
“Don’t know, that son of bitch took ’em, I guess.”
“So what’s our play, now that we’re all one big happy family again?”
Cicero told them about the bank.
“I thought maybe that was it when I seen it. Didn’t we think maybe that was it when we seen it, Willis?”
“We did,” Willis said.
Pablo was mucking stalls when four men approached. He recognized two of them, the small one and the big one. Thought the new constable had ’em both locked up. Now here they were with two others wanting horses.
“Sí, I have your horses, señor. But there is the matter of feeding and keeping them. The constable said that I would be paid…”
This time it was Cicero’s turn. He shot the Mexican through the chest.
“That payment enough?”
Black Bob had gotten out of bed that morning in spite of the pain from the horse kick. Soon as Woody came and went again, he began feeling the need to rise up and see his duty done.
“Don’t be getting no ideas about getting out of bed,” his wife warned soon as he tried.
“You got to help me sit up.”
“That horse kicked in all your ribs, man. How you goin’ do anythin’?”
“Got to do somethin’. Now help me up outta here.”
Felt like two loads of bricks sitting on his chest when he tried to move, pain so deep it burned his breath.
“Why you want to fool with this bidness?” she said. “Let them white men be to they own mischief.”
“Took me an oath. Man don’t goin’ to pay me to lay up here in this bed.”
“Man don’t pay you to get yourself killed neither, far as I know.”
“Ain’t plannin’ on it.”
“You don’t know what you be plannin’.”
“Help me put on my boots…”
“No sir, ain’t goin’ hep you do anythin’.”
“Woman!”
They rode up the street and tied off in front of the bank.
“You know how you want to do this?” Hatch asked Cicero, who had his mother’s eyes and nose, and when he looked into those eyes, he saw the old lady, there on her knees that day, looking up at him, knowing she hated what he made her do for two dollars, knowing he’d make her do it again if he ever got the chance.
Cicero looked at his uncle.
“Bloody is how,” he said.
“Fine by me. Willis, you and Ardell wait here with the horses; we won’t be long.”
The two of them went in, guns drawn.
Hadley Prine was tying his shoe, bent over in his chair behind his desk at the bank. Glen was waiting on a customer—Joe Toe, who sold supplies for windmills and came through Domingo once a month to deposit his money. Nearly eighty dollars hard cash he didn’t feature carrying around on his person.
The door crashed open, and it drew everybody’s attention, and Joe Toe said, “Jesus Christ, it’s a robbery!”
Hatch shot him where he stood. Cicero Pie shot Glen, a man who moments earlier was as giddy as a schoolgirl knowing he was going to go over to Polly Edwards’s place that evening to have supper with her and maybe a lot more than just supper if it went good as it had the last time they’d had supper together. It was an event he’d been looking forward to all week.
It was not a completely clean and killing shot, and as Glen lay on the floor bleeding out, looking up at the stamped tin ceiling, he told himself over and over again that this was just some bad dream, that he’d wake up and Polly would be there smiling at him from the other side of the teller’s window. That everything was going to be okay, even with the taste of warm blood choking him. And there too was a darkness creeping into him, a dark, indescribable feeling like a man might have if he was being chased by a bear, knowing he couldn’t outrun it.
He heard their voices, those men who shot him and Joe Toe. Heard them shouting orders at Mr. Prine: “Get that goddamn safe open, you son of a bitch! Do it now!”
Glen felt himself slipping away into the darkness. Didn’t want to go, couldn’t stop it, couldn’t do nothing but just let it happen. He clawed the floor trying to hold on, scrabbled his feet trying to keep from sliding off into the void.
“Good gawd! What is wrong with you men?” Hadley Prine wanted to know just before Hatch struck him across the face with the barrel of his pistol.
The cheekbone cracked like an eggshell and shot bolts of pain straight into the banker’s skull like hot needles, causing him to reel like a drunk on a swaying ship’s deck. He had to catch the corner of his handsome desk to keep from falling.
Cicero Pie stuck the muzzle of his pistol into the banker’s face and said, “Your life worth all that money?”
The banker stumbled to the vault and began fumbling with the combination, but his mind was all jumbled. The gun pressed at the base of his skull wasn’t helping any.
I knew I should have become a haberdasher like I wanted instead of listening to my father, he silently berated himself. People don’t rob haberdashers and shoot their assistants and customers…
Chapter Twenty-Six
Hairy Legs, fresh from his liaison with the German’s wife and hungry as a badger from all the energy he’d expended trying to satisfy her—no easy task to be sure, because her own hunger was like a wildfire roaring through dry timber—met the white man on the road to Domingo, the road from his place cutting to the main road at a right angle.
The breed thought it strange the man was coming from that direction and not the other where his place lay.
“You still looking for those horse killers?”
“Found ’em.”
“That a badge you’re wearing?”
“It is.”
“What happen, the white devil decide to quit?”
“He’s dead, made that way by the horse killers.”
The breed blinked at the news.
“Stuff happens fast.”
“Yes, I guess it does.”
“Thought maybe you were still out looking for ’em,” the breed said, looking back the direction Jim had come from.
“Had to go out to Bucky Weaver’s and settle a family dispute.”
“Bucky drunk again, raising hell?”
“He was. Using his wife pretty hard. His boy came and got me. Bucky knocked two of her teeth out.”
“Bucky’s a bad devil with liquor in him.”
“Well, I told him if he did it again, I’d bury him.”
Hairy Legs smiled a pleasant smile, part of it afterglow from his encounter with the German’s wife, and partly because he wouldn’t mind seeing Bucky Weaver put down in a grave. Bucky had tried to run him over once with a freight wagon when he was walking along minding his own business on this very road.
“What about you?” Jim said.
“Going to town. Hungry as a wolf. Eat some of that German’s food.”
“Thought you were going East, find that Free Love Society.”
“Think I already found it.”
“Oh?”
The old breed let a smile crawl across his mouth, a smile most inscrutable.
“Maybe I’ll just save my money,” he said.
They were a quarter mile out when they heard gunshots.
“Shit,” Jim said, and spurred his horse forward at a gallop.
Hadley Prine waited for the bullet to come. Gritted his teeth preparing for it as he turned the last tumbler on the combination and jerked the handle that would open the big steel door. But instead something struck him a painful blow over the back of his head that caused him to stagger, then fall off his feet, swooning into a gray unorganized world as he fell.
He lay there pretending to be dead. Half wishing he was. Through his squinting eyes he looked directly into the staring ones of Glen. Noticed they were pale blue—the first time he’d ever noticed that particular feature of a man who’d worked for him going on ten years.
Oh Glen, he wanted to say. I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry for never having paid you more attention, for never having asked you even once what it was you thought about, what dreams you had, or who your parents were or where you were born. I’m sorry I never got to know you better. I’m sorry.
He heard the chink of coins being dropped, the crinkle of paper money being stuffed into bank bags, the labored breathing of men robbing the vault.
Let them have it, he thought bitterly. Let them have every damn filthy dime!
Jim reined in at the jail, was off his horse almost before it stopped. The sight of Woody, facedown in a pool of still wet and spreading blood and black ink, stopped him in his tracks. He knew before he went to the back that the prisoners were gone. So were the guns…
He came out again, the breed still sitting the horse, curious now as to what was happening.
Others had come out onto the streets when they heard the shooting, timidly they came, cautiously they came, curiously they came. Most of them were still gun-shy from the previous shootings, and nobody who’d witnessed the killings wanted to be themselves the victims of the next violence.
Jim swung his gaze up and down the street and saw two men in front of the bank astride horses holding the reins of two other horses and he knew what was happening—knew it as well as he ever knew anything.
He jerked the rifle from its scabbard and jacked the lever moving forward toward the pair in front of the bank, stopped a dozen yards short and took aim and hit the big one—the half-wit—the bullet twisting him in his saddle. He let out a yelp like a frightened child that had just been scalded by a hot stove.
The other man with him reined his horse around, a pistol already in his hand, and fired, clipping the dirt in front of Jim. Jim was already levering the Henry again and firing, levering and firing until he knocked that man too out of his saddle.
But the big man turned his horse Jim’s direction and kicked his heels, running the horse straight at him. Yelling, cussing, screaming.
Jim barely got the lever jacked again when the horse swiped him and knocked him spinning into the dirt, the rifle tumbling from his hands. The half-wit whipping the horse back around, trying his damnedest to run over the lawman. Jim rolled away, but the half-wit swung a fat fist down, striking Jim across the back of the head and knocking him into the dirt again.
Jim fumbled for his pistol, but it had fallen out of the holster of his shoulder rig. He saw it lying there in the street and went for it just as the half-wit ran his horse at him again. The force of it nearly knocked him cold, but he managed to grasp the Merwin Hulbert just before he got knocked down.
Then there was a blur—a flash of something—and Jim rolled onto his back in time to see the breed putting all his weight behind the blade in his hand, driving it into the horse’s belly and ripping it length-ways, spilling the oddly colored grayish blue entrails as the animal’s front legs buckled and the big man went tumbling headlong into the street.
“You ain’t the only one knows how to kill a horse,” Hairy Legs said to the half-wit as he struggled to gain his feet.
But before Ardell could get up, Jim shot him again; this time he made sure to hit him dead center, made sure to put him down permanent, and down he went.
Luz heard the gunfire and closed her eyes against the fear. She knew he would be in the middle of it—too many gunshots not to be. She ran out of the house without thinking anything other than she wanted to save him, to give her own life if she had to. She ran and she ran.
They’d come out of the bank firing their pistols. People cleared the street, windows broke, horses tied up at the rails broke loose and ran. One horse collapsed from bullets. Each of the two men carried a heavy canvas bank bag in one hand and a pistol in the other and more pistols stuck in the waistbands of their pants.
They saw immediately that Willis and Ardell were both down. Saw one man standi
ng in the middle of the street, a gun in his hand: that fucking goddamn lawman! Cicero Pie felt a red-hot fury at the same moment that Hatch saw the breed holding the bloody knife.
“Kill them all!” he yelled.
Jim stood his ground even as the breed folded from a bullet.
Held his ground and took aim even as another bullet ripped through his side and another hit him high in the leg. A rain of bullets it felt like. A withering gunfire that no human being could expect to survive given time to think about it.
But there was no time to think about it. There was only time to act. And old instincts took over and Jim Glass stood there firing at the pair of bank robbers and they fired at him.
He was gone now, into that place where men like him went in the face of danger, into that strange, quiet place that doesn’t allow room for self-doubt or fear. Everything was slowed down. Everything framed before him: the gunmen, the buildings, the sidewalks, the dead horses in the street, the dead men in the street, the patch of blue sky overhead. It was his town, it was his problem, it was his life they were trying to take.
Then a sudden explosion and then a second, like the crash of thunder and God Almighty.
And the street was suddenly cleaned of the two men, both blown away in a gray smoke cloud that just seemed to hang there.
Jim looked round, saw Black Bob holding the shotgun leaking smoke from both barrels.
Black Bob saying, “Jeez Christ,” and clutching his chest before sitting down on the edge of the boardwalk to catch his breath, the buck of the shotgun almost like a second horse kick.
Jim saw Luz running toward him.
She was saying something, calling something to him.
He saw again the bright blue sky overhead, then her face above his.
“Jim,” she said. “Jim…”
He didn’t know why she seemed so worried.
“It’s all right,” he said.
“Everything’s all right.”
The sky was as pretty as he’d ever seen it.