Panhandle

by Brett Cogburn

  The little hand she held up was missing the last two fingers—frozen to the quick in that terrible storm, and cut off by the surgeon. It was as if she purposely held it for my examination, as if to say, “This is what I am.”

  I grabbed that beautiful, pitiful little hand and hung on for dear life. I kissed the bandaged stumps of those fingers of the past. “You’re still beautiful.”

  “You’re a blind fool for wanting a crippled woman already carrying a bastard child two months grown,” she sobbed. “You don’t want a loose woman.”

  I stopped such talk with my finger across her lips. Half of a day went by while I pulled her to me and fervently plead my love, coaxing and comforting like some maddened priest from the mountains, come down to whisper prayers in the ears of all the wretched and abused.

  “Will you marry me?”

  “I love you, but I don’t deserve you.”

  “I had hoped you wouldn’t figure out what a sorry catch I am until after I had a ring on your finger.”

  She laughed for the first time, and smiled a little like her old self. I propped open the door to our room, and sat beside her on the edge of the bed where I could hold her. The two of us sat long into the night watching a full moon glowing so big it seemed just outside the door. The cast-iron stove in the corner ticked away the hours while I fell more in love with her than ever.

  Long into the evening she finally looked up to me and whispered, “I’ll be a good wife, I promise.”

  I was sitting in a rocking chair watching her sleep when the surgeon walked in at daylight. After one of those doctor lectures about how much she needed her rest I decided to go see if I could find Billy and settle whatever needed settling between us. I shoved my hat on my head and headed out the door with bad things on my mind. “Remember your promise.” Barby’s voice caught me at the door.

  Right off the bat I was learning that women often couldn’t be made to wake up when you wanted them to, and never seemed to sleep when you needed them to. I turned in the doorway to look at her, for I thought it could be the last time.

  I had ridden to Mobeetie half ready to kill my best friend if Long’s story proved true. Somewhere in the night, after hearing Barby’s story, I had promised to forgive Billy, partly because she gave me no other options. If she and I were to have a life, then I had to act as if she and Billy had never met. I had to act as if my best friend had never lain with the woman I loved, and then dragged her into a blizzard to freeze her and the unborn child near death.

  I nodded to let her know that I would keep my word, and walked out the door. The peaceful look on her face was no match for the hell in my heart. I had agreed to act like I forgave and forgot, but there was no forgiveness or memory loss in me right then. I would try my best, but Billy and I were going to come to an agreement about certain things, one way or another.

  I made a long walk down the length of Mobeetie looking for Billy. Barby had told me the truth about her and Billy in the blizzard, and I could find no fault that belonged to him, except, perhaps for bad judgment in his choice of timing and weather. Still, a man set to steal my woman away and carry her across the plains horseback should keep his eyes on the skyline.

  I guess what I aimed to settle with Billy was the fact that Barby belonged to me from then on. I was going to marry her, and be a father to the child he sired but would never know as his own. I didn’t have a lick of give in me when it came to that. I knew how I felt about Barby, and thus assumed that Billy could feel the same way. Given that assumption, maintaining possession might end up a matter of the last man standing.

  When I asked around for Billy I got a funny feeling and curious looks from people, even if they hadn’t seen him. It seemed that folks were already forming their own opinions about Billy’s escapade with a certain young lady of good standing currently healing up at the Post. Given that almost everybody knew that Billy and I were friends, nobody would tell me what rumors were going around.

  I passed Barby’s father storming up the street. He was making his way from the stage stop, and the driver was yelling after him about what to do with his luggage. Mr. Allen didn’t stop, or even turn back to answer the driver. He was so wrought up with going to see his daughter for the first time that he didn’t even acknowledge the friendly nod I passed his way; he just kept marching to the hospital. I decided I could deal with him later, and kept on my course.

  When I stepped into the Lady Gay I immediately noticed one thing, and failed to notice another. The thing I noticed was Billy standing by himself at the far end of the bar. The thing I didn’t notice was that everyone in the place was giving him so much room to himself that they had crowded back against the walls.

  Billy looked at me over his drink, and a face that was momentarily hard started to soften, but didn’t quite make it there. I still didn’t have a clue just what I was going to say when I asked for a drink beside him. The bartender was taking his sweet time, and that left me standing at a loss.

  “We’ve got some things to settle, Billy.”

  He acted like he knew what was coming, and it bothered me some how he was standing with his right hip well clear of the bar and his right thumb hooked in his gun belt. But the look on his face wasn’t threatening; in fact, I could see the emotion welling up in him.

  “I’m sorry, Nate. I’m sorry for it all.” He said it like he really meant it.

  “You like to have gotten her killed.”

  I watched as he quietly soaked in what I’d said, and he never dropped his gaze from mine. He looked tired all over, and his eyes were bloodshot and haggard. It dawned on me that the five-day stubble of whiskers on his face was the first time I’d ever seen him unshaven.

  “Some people are saying I got scared and left her out in the cold to save my own hide,” he said quietly.

  “I know that ain’t true.”

  “You’ve been to see her?”

  “I sat with her most of yesterday.”

  “She told you all about it?”

  I merely nodded my head at his question. She had indeed told me all about it. She had told me how she’d saddled the palomino before supper time, and then sneaked out to meet Billy outside of town that night. She told me how they laughed and talked on their way across the plains on the way to the dance, unaware of the cold marching rapidly down upon them. I held her while she relived the fear and the cold when they suffered their way blindly into the face of the norther, only to finally seek shelter in the lee side of a cutbank, where Billy failed to start a fire from the leftovers of an old wagon bed. And I had almost cried with the wishing I had been the one there to hold her close while they shivered and hurt as the storm tore over them.

  “She told me she begged you to leave her and save yourself, and she told me you wouldn’t go.”

  “I didn’t leave her until daylight when the blizzard was over. I didn’t have a single match left, and we’d lost both our horses that night. I went to find them or somebody, because I knew I had to get her out of there. She didn’t have anything left in her to get up and go with me.”

  Even though I had heard it all from Barby, I could tell Billy had to tell me himself. I nursed the drink I really didn’t want, and listened.

  “I headed south and walked ten miles looking for those drifted horses. Every mile I was looking back over my shoulder, knowing I was getting farther from her and that the day was ticking by.

  “The odds were long against it, but I found our horses still alive about late morning, but I couldn’t catch mine. I took hers and struck out for where I’d left her, but he didn’t have any speed left to give. It was just about noon when I rode up to where she should have been, only she wasn’t. A bunch of the boys from down south were headed to Mobeetie late, and stumbled across her.”

  As he told it, I remembered how she said she had crawled to the top of a rise and waved at them, and cried out for help with her voice so weak she was sure it wouldn’t carry all the way to the passing men. She had been sure they woul
d ride on to leave her to her fate, and that same fate she had already decided the departed Billy must have shared.

  “I followed them up to town, but they were a half day ahead of me,” he added.

  “I know, Billy, you don’t have to tell me more.”

  “Just want you to know I’m sorry, because I know how much you think of her.”

  “Then why were you taking her to a dance?”

  “Because I think just as much of her.” His tone left no doubt that he meant what he said.

  There it was, out between us. The problem was that only one of us was to have her.

  “We’re getting married as soon as she’s well,” I said without a clue as to how he would take it.

  I believed him when he said he cared for her, and I understood the knife I’d slipped in his gut right then. His face turned harder, and I looked at a man close to the raw edge of something.

  “I suppose you took the opportunity to talk me down a little, and talk yourself up pretty high at the same time.”

  “You know me better than that. I asked her, and she said yes. That’s all there was to it.”

  Billy didn’t like it any more than I would have, but he offered his hand. I was as false right then as Judas, because I took that hand. I shook his hand like all was settled when it wasn’t, at least not on my part. I took his hand, because there was growing in me a terrible, weakening fear of his finding out about the child if I let on like he had more to answer for than just a blizzard and a dance.

  “She couldn’t have done better.” We both knew he said that only because that’s what a friend and a good loser is supposed to do.

  Deep down I knew how far I would have gone had things went differently. I was willing to lose my friend for Barby, but the same didn’t seem to hold true for Billy. Right then, some of the anger in me toward him started to slowly seep out, if even by the stain of my own guilt.

  “Nate, you’d better go along.” Billy’s voice was as hard as nails.

  I thought maybe he’d put up a front as long as he could where Barby was concerned, until I noticed he wasn’t looking at me at all. Instead, he was looking over my shoulder toward the far end of the bar. I turned and saw Rory Donnovan was standing there facing us with a sneer on his drunken face.

  “That man’s been spreading it around that I ran out on her and left her to freeze to death,” Billy said.

  I’d like to tell you that I tried to talk Billy out of what I could see was going to happen, but I didn’t. I knew Billy too good to waste my time, and had I been in his shoes I wouldn’t have taken it either. I’d never liked Rory Donnovan anyway. He was a loud-talking, greasy runt that cowboyed some, but spent most of his time out of work and hanging around with the Mobeetie crowd. Rumor had it that he had killed a man or two, but folks said that about everybody who acted tough those days. All I ever knew he’d done was beat a whore half to death in Caldwell, Kansas.

  There were about ten men scooted back against the wall on the far side of the room, and I joined them. The bartender had disappeared, and I realized then that this trouble had been brewing long before I’d arrived. I’d failed to notice why Billy had one end of the room to himself. I was as dumb as the rest of the bystanders who didn’t haul themselves out the door and out of danger, but like them, I was determined to see the thing.

  Who knows what led Rory to that moment? He spent all his time hunting trouble, and that morning he found some. Rory had a mouth on him, and once Billy got wind of what he was saying there was no stopping what was to come with both of them in town, short of Rory crawling into a hole somewhere. Rory was as proud as he was mean, and he wasn’t going to crawl anywhere.

  I had never known Billy to kill a man, but somehow I knew he could handle Rory Donnovan. Up until that time, nobody had seen any of Billy’s graveyards, yet most recognized him as a man to avoid trouble with. There was just something about him in that regard.

  Billy stood with his thumb still hooked in his belt, and his left forearm resting on the bar. He looked calm if not peaceful, while Rory just looked disagreeable and nasty like he always did. He drank the last of a beer and slammed the empty bottle down on the bar top, then wiped the wet from his lips with the back of his hand. He studied Billy with obvious contempt, and let out a loud grunt of disdain.

  “I’ll say what I please about you,” he said.

  Billy said nothing, and that seemed to embolden Rory all the more.

  “You’re a damned coward to run off and leave a woman in a snowstorm.” He put a hand on his pistol butt.

  “And you’re a lying little son of a bitch.” Billy’s voice never changed or rose in volume when he said it.

  And that’s all there was to it, no long speeches men are supposed to make before they die, or any band to play melancholy music and beat slow drums. There were just two men mad enough to kill, and willing to do so.

  Rory’s gun was out quick, and his first shot went into the wall behind Billy. Billy seemed too slow, but he took that little bit of time to do it right. Even at that short of a distance Billy leveled his pistol at arm’s length and shot Rory through the guts. Rory was falling when he let off his second shot into the floor at Billy’s feet. He fell to a sitting position on the floor with his shoulder and head against the bottom of the bar. He was cussing Billy and struggling for another shot. He didn’t get a third, because Billy put one through his skull just above the left eye.

  We all watched Rory die out with his brains splattered on the bar, and his lifeblood leaking out on the floor. He looked like a twisted, grotesque rag-doll pitched down there at the foot of the bar with Billy standing over him with a Colt’s revolver leveled in his hand. It takes a man time to absorb such as that and we all stood there bound by some unknown law that kept us like silent and immobile Romans, until Billy either moved, or spoke.

  He turned slowly to eye every man in the room except me, and every one knew that all they had to do was ask for it. Apparently nobody there had any issues with Billy, or was willing to take them that far. The old saying that you could have heard a pin drop was never more apt than right then. Billy was still holding his Colt when he walked out the door.

  I was the first to move as I followed Billy outside, taking care not to step in the bloodspot as I passed Rory’s body. I was just in time to see Andy ride up with a spare saddled horse and a pistol in his hand.

  “I guess you got the bastard,” Andy said.

  “Yeah, I got him.” Billy got on his horse.

  Andy grinned at me. “I’m glad you were there to help in case anybody decided to gang up on Billy. A man can count on his real friends when he’s in a bind.”

  Before I could answer, Billy cut his horse between us, looking up and down the street before he looked at me. “I’m going somewhere else while this cools off. Anybody sticks their nose outside that door with the wrong intentions, you kick them in the shins.”

  With that, he and Andy rode off at a trot down the middle of town, with the gawkers already rushing to the scene giving them wide berth. I had to admit that even Andy looked the part of a bold, bad man come to the aid of his leader. The two rode leisurely away while Mobeetie’s finest showed up to purvey the gore.

  So that’s how it was there early in ’82, fresh off a blizzard and a killing. I got married to the woman I loved and Billy rode off with a reputation grown even larger by the killing of Rory Donnovan. What a way to ring in the New Year.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I don’t think Barby laid eyes on another woman for the first three months we were married. I went into the freighting business with Long as soon as I built us a half soddy, half dugout for a home, and turned out a small herd of cattle on the range. I was so caught up in trying to get ahead in life that I didn’t think about a pregnant woman left alone in the middle of nowhere being bothered by it all. Maybe I was just dumb enough to think that the garden and three chickens I left her with were enough to keep her company, or that it was all right as long as I made s
ure to worry about her while I was gone.

  Imagine a woman bellied down with a child five months’ grown working herself silly carrying water, weeding gardens, and chasing centipedes and pack rats out of the house almost every night. She would tell me all about it when I was home, not complaining, but as if the sharing of her thoughts lifted the worry from her shoulders, at least for a time. The work didn’t bother her as much as the being alone. She loved the chickens and her horse, but they were lacking where conversation was concerned.

  The night sounds like to have driven her crazy at first, but she learned to love the coyotes’ howls, and to interpret the stirring of the horses in the corral for what it was. Thunder, lightning, and the wind rattling the plank door on its hinges still made her heart flutter at times, but after a few months she could lie down oblivious to most of the sounds of the night. Most of all, she hoped to hear the sound of my freight wagon rolling up the hill to home.

  Despite her many adjustments to fit in with her new and extravagant surroundings she never learned to more than tolerate the seemingly continuous onslaught of prairie wind. Its constant tug and pull irritated her tired body, and every day was a war whereby she fought to remove the dust driven into every crack and crevice of her home, clothes, and person. At times she felt as if a broom, a bucket of water, and a stubborn will were not enough to combat the dust and wind. She loved the day or two after a rain when the ground was too wet for the wind to pick it up and throw it at her. It was a sandy country, and a little bit of mud was a welcome change.

  All the while she could feel her baby growing inside her, and she listened while I told her what I hoped and dreamed for us. She must have believed me when I laid out the ranch we would own someday, and just like me, maybe she could picture the beautiful home I would build her with white rail fences and fruit trees edging the road to the house. Maybe, like me, she could see it all as clearly as if tomorrow were today. All she had to do was to hold out and persevere. It was a bold hope, but dreamers often make the best pioneers.