Wolf Moon

by Ed Gorman

  It would take a whole lot of bank robbing to buy a place like this.

  Just as I nudged the roan forward, I heard a rifle being cocked behind me.

  "Howdy," a man's voice said.

  He knew I'd heard his Winchester.

  I tugged the roan to a halt.

  "I said howdy, mister. Ain't you gonna howdy me back?"

  "I'll howdy you all over the place if you'll put the rifle down."

  "Just want to know your business out here."

  "Far as I could tell, this is a public road."

  "Yeah, but you ain't been on the road for ten minutes now. You been on Mr. Reeves' property."

  A horsefly, having partaken of the splash the roan had just emptied on the road, buzzed near my face, loud in the sunny silence.

  "You gonna say anything, mister?"

  "I'm gonna say that I'm an old friend of Mr. Reeves."

  "No offense, mister, in case you are and all, but a lot of people say that to get inside here. They're usually looking for handouts."

  "With me it's the truth, though."

  "You got any way of proving that?"

  "You just go tell Mr. Reeves that the man who helped him with his bank in Dunkirk is here."

  "Didn't know Mr. Reeves ever lived in Dunkirk."

  "You do now."

  Now it was the guard's turn for quiet.

  The cry of jays and the screech of hawks played against the lazy baying of the cows.

  His shod horse took a few steps forward and he came around so he could take his first good look at me.

  "You don't look like no businessman, son. Don't take that personal."

  "Didn't say I was a businessman. All I said was that I'd given Mr. Reeves a little help."

  He was fat and fifty but quick for his size, and his dark eyes gave you the feeling that he was capable of just about anything. He held a Winchester in gloved hands and spat tobacco in sickening streams, chawing not a habit I'd ever taken to as either participant or spectator. His sweated white Stetson looked too big for him, as if his head was shrinking in the heat.

  "Name's Hanratty. What's yours?"

  I told him. He looked as if he thought it was a fake. "You ride ahead of me," he said.

  "Past the gate?"

  He nodded.

  We went inside, along a cinder path, to the right of which an old black man was now raking leaves.

  We ground-tied the horses in front of the long, shadowy porch. He took me up and inside the house. Two feet inside, a tiny, white-haired man in white shirt, paisley vest, and dark trousers appeared. He had a tanned simian face with bright brown intelligent eyes. He reminded me of a smart monkey. He carried a dust cloth in his right hand and a small bottle of sweet-smelling furniture polish in the other.

  "Fenton, this man would like to see Mr. Reeves." Fenton looked at me as if Hanratty had just told him some kind of joke.

  "I see," he said.

  "He looks unlikely as hell, I got to admit that." Hanratty laughed.

  "Very unlikely," Fenton said. "And the nature of your business, sir?"

  "Mr. Reeves and I once did a little business with a bank in Dunkirk."

  "Dunkirk, sir?"

  "Yes, he'll know what I mean."

  "I see."

  "So I wish you'd tell him I'm out here."

  Fenton glanced at Hanratty again, then disappeared down the hall.

  "I got to get back to my post," Hanratty said. "Good luck." He grinned and leaned to my ear. "Reeves ain't any nicer than he was when you knew him before, believe me."

  I grinned back. "Nice to know some things never change."

  I stood alone in the shadowy vestibule. Directly ahead of me a large, carpeted staircase rose steeply to a landing that glowed in sunlight. On the wall of the landing was a huge painting of Reeves in an Edwardian suit, trying hard to look like the illegitimate son of J. P. Morgan or some other robber baron. To my right was a wall with three doors on it, each leading to hushed rooms. The floor was parquet; almost everything else was dark wood, mostly mahogany. The effect was of being in a very fancy library.

  Far down the hall, to the left of the staircase, a door opened. Footsteps-and Fenton-approached.

  "Mr. Reeves will see you now."

  He stayed several feet away. He didn't know what I had but he sure didn't want to catch it.

  I went down the hall, the rowels of my spurs musical in the silence. I knocked on the door Fenton had just left, but nobody responded.

  The door was open an inch or so. I pushed it open a bit more and peeked through. The room was a den with expensive leather furniture, a mahogany desk big enough to have a hoedown on, and enough leather-bound books to humble a scholar. There was a genuine Persian rug on the floor, and an imposing world globe sitting in its cradle on the wide ledge of a mullioned window.

  I still didn't see anybody.

  I took two steps inside, my feet finding the Persian rug. By the fourth step, hearing a human breath behind me, I'd figured it out, but by then it was too late. He did the same thing he'd done to me that night in my brother's room.

  He came out from behind the door and brought something heavy down across the back of my skull.

  My hat went flying and so did I.

  "You sonofabitch. What the hell're you doing here?"

  I was still on the floor, just now starting to pull myself up. I daubed the back of my head with careful fingers, finding a mean little lump and some blood.

  Reeves sat behind his desk, a snifter of brandy near his hand. He was older and heavier, the hair gray-shot, and these days he looked like a successful politician in his dark suit and white shirt and black string tie.

  "You're lucky I didn't kill you."

  "I don't feel so lucky," I said, touching the back of my head again.

  I got to my feet in sections and stood wobbling in front of his desk. Not until then did I realize that he'd slipped my.45 from its holster. I wondered how long I'd been out.

  "As far as I'm concerned, our business is finished," he said. "You understand me?"

  I reached down and picked up my dusty black hat and got it set just right on my head. I was taking everything slow and easy so as to not give him any warning.

  I grabbed his snifter and splashed brandy in his face and then I dove across his desk and hit him twice before he finally pitched over backward in his fancy leather chair.

  I could hear Fenton running down the hall-then banging on the closed door.

  "Sir? Sir? Are you all right?"

  He knew better than to let Fenton in. Otherwise I'd tell Fenton a few things he just might not know about his boss man.

  "I'm fine. I just knocked the globe over is all."

  "You're sure, sir?"

  "Of course I'm sure. Now you get back to your dusting. We're having company tonight, remember?"

  "Yes, sir." Fenton didn't believe him, but what could he say?

  We got to our feet and took our respective places- him in back of the desk, ever in command, and me, dusty and busted, in front-ever the supplicant.

  "You killed my brothers," I said.

  He smiled. "Does that mean you're going to kill me?" But before I could answer, he said, "I've got something for you."

  He opened a drawer, pulled out my.45 and slid it across the polished surface of his desk.

  "Pick it up."

  I just stared at it.

  "Go ahead. Pick it up."

  I picked it up.

  "Now ease the hammer back and point the gun right at me."

  He was a smug sonofabitch, sitting there in a couple hundred dollars' worth of clothes and a lifetime's worth of arrogance.

  I had the gun but he was giving the orders.

  "You're right, Chase-if that's what you're calling yourself these days-I did kill your brothers, and you know why? Because they let me. Because they were just like you, a couple of goddamned farm boys who just couldn't wait to rob banks because it was going to be so easy and so much fun." He shook his head
. "Prison's filled with farm boys, as you no doubt found out." He leaned forward. He was het up now, a blaze-eyed minister delivering the truth to the unwashed. "It's a rough goddamned business, Chase, and I ought to know. I've survived in it twenty years now and it's made me a rich man and I haven't spent one hour behind bars."

  "What happened to your partner after we stuck up his bank?"

  The smile again. "Well, for once my partner figured something out for himself-figured out that I helped set up the robbery to make things go easy. He was about to turn me in, so I killed him."

  "You killed him?"

  He shook his head, as if he were trying to explain a complicated formula to a chimp.

  "I killed him, Chase. And that's the goddamned point which you never will understand. It's the nature of this business-of any business-to do what you need to when you need to." He sat back and made litde church steeples of his well-tended fingers. "I'm able to do what I need to. How about you? Can you point that.45 of yours at me and pull the trigger?"

  "You sonofabitch."

  "Never forget I gave you this chance."

  I cursed him again.

  "Show me you're not a dumb goddamned farm boy like your brothers."

  I wanted to kill him, I really did, but I also knew that I wouldn't. Not under these circumstances.

  "Go ahead, Chase. Otherwise you're wasting my time and your own."

  The gun felt good and right in my hand, and I could imagine the jerk of his body when the bullet struck his heart, and the red bloom of blood on the front of his lacy white shirt, and I could see my poor brother Don dying from the cuts and slashes the wolf had put on him, and I wanted so bad to pull that trigger, to empty the gun in his face.

  "You sonofabitch."

  "You said that before, Chase. Several times." He stared at me. "I want you to learn something from this."

  I didn't say anything.

  "I want you to learn that you should go somewhere and buy yourself a little farm and find yourself a nice plump little farm girl and marry her and have yourself a bunch of kids and forget all about your dead brothers and forget all about me." He nodded to the.45 in my hand. "Because you had your chance. And you chose not to take it. And so what's the point of wasting your life hating me or trying to pay me back?"

  Before, he'd reached to a right-hand drawer. Now he reached to a left-hand one.

  He drew out a pack of greenbacks bank-wrapped with a paper strip around the middle.

  He threw the pack on the desk.

  "There's five thousand dollars there. That's about what your cut of the job would have been, as I recall. Probably a bit more, in fact. Take it, Chase; take it and get on that horse of yours and get the hell out of this county-get the hell out of this state, in fact-and go start the kind of life I told you to. All right?"

  I stared at the greenbacks. I just kept thinking of my brother Glen's eyes when I'd cradled him in my arms as he was dying off the side of the stagecoach road, after Reeves had double-crossed us and taken the money and killed Glen because Glen had said something smart to him.

  I could still hear the sounds Glen had made, those terrible sounds in his throat, dying sounds, of course, the way I'd once heard a calf strangle on its own umbilical cord one snowy night in the barn.

  I stood up and pushed the money back to him and settled my gun in my holster.

  "Oh, shit," he said. "You're still going to come after me, aren't you?"

  "Two men came into town last night, name of Lundgren and Mars. And I'll bet I know why."

  "Lundgren and Mars. Don't know anything about them."

  But I could see the truth in his eyes. He knew damned well why they were here.

  He tried to look relaxed, but mentioning the two men had infuriated him.

  "You set foot on my property again, Chase, and I'll personally blow your fucking head off. Is that understood?"

  I just stared at him a while, shook my head, and went back to the hallway.

  When I got to the porch, Fenton was polishing some gold candelabras in the sunlight.

  He said nothing, just watched me walk down the steps and start over to my horse.

  It was then I heard the growl from somewhere on the other side of the house. I stopped, knowing right away the origin of the growl. The wolf that had killed my brother, the wolf of glowing coat and midnight-yellow eyes.

  Fenton stopped his work and stared at me. "He's a killer, that one. The master would be just as well off shut of him, if you want my opinion. He's too dangerous."

  I didn't say anything. I walked around the side of the house, and there, in a large cage made of galvanized wire, paced the wolf. In the sunlight his coat shone ivory; but his eyes, when his head swung up suddenly, were still the same odd yellow. An Indian was dumping raw meat through a small door in the cage. On the hot wind you could smell the wolf's shit and the high hard stink of the grass he'd pissed in.

  I walked closer and he started growling again, that low rumble I'd first heard when my brother Don was dying in his bed that long ago night.

  The Indian, still on his haunches, looked over his shoulder. "He don't like you, man." He had graying hair worn long and a faded denim shirt and work pants. His feet were brown and bare.

  "So I gather."

  "He's a bad one, this wolf."

  "Yeah," I said. "I know."

  The Indian pointed to a hole in the ground where a small animal had burrowed up into the cage. "Raccoon. Should've seen what the wolf did to that little bastard." The Indian grinned with teeth brown as his skin.

  I knelt down next to the Indian, gripping the wire with two fingers for support.

  The wolf, who had been growling and going into a crouch, lunged at me suddenly, hurling himself against the cage and ripping his teeth across the two fingers I had inside the cage.

  The pain was instant and blinding.

  I fell back off my haunches, grabbing my bloody fingers and gritting my teeth and trying not to look like a nancy in front of the Indian who stood above me grinning again with his bad teeth and saying, "I told you, man, that wolf just plain don't like you."

  I got to my feet, still hurting, but I pretended that the pain was waning. "Maybe I'll come back here some night and kill that sonofabitch."

  The wolf was still glaring at me, still in a crouch, and still growling.

  "He'd like to fight you, man. He really would."

  I glared back at the wolf and left.

  ***

  Hanratty was still at his post behind the jack pines, Winchester laid across his saddle. He waved, friendly as always in his way, but he didn't fool me at all. If he had to, he'd kill me fast and sure and never pay me another thought.

  That afternoon, Hollister held one of his weekly meetings for the entire eighteen-man police force.

  We stood in the back of his office, at full attention the way he'd ordered, while he gnawed on our asses the way a military man would.

  He had plenty of complaints. One officer, and he said the man would know who he was, was found sleeping down by the mill. The officer would be docked ten dollars from his next check-this was damned near a fourth of the man's pay.

  Then he held up his whistle and showed it around as if we'd never seen anything like it before. "Some of you seem to think it's embarrassing to use this-but I want you to use it anyway. Any time there's a crime, any time you're pursuing somebody, I want that whistle blown so that the citizens and your fellow officers know that you're carrying out your duties. When your fellow officers hear the whistle, they're supposed to lend you a hand. And when the citizens hear it, they're supposed to get out of your way." He held the whistle up for us to see again, put it to his lips and filled the slow golden afternoon air with an ear-shattering blow. Then he said, "If I catch anybody forgetting to use his whistle, I'll fine him five dollars." There was the usual grumbling.

  The final matter was drunks. "Our friends Hayes and Croizer have been getting overeager again. Last Monday night they arrested two miners who
were walking home drunk. How many times do we have to go over this, boys? We're not here to make the lives of working men any harder. Those poor bastards catch plenty of hell during the day-they don't need us to add to it. The rule is-unless a drunkard is causing some kind of trouble, he's to be left alone. If he's having trouble walking, then walk him home if you've got the time, or find a citizen to go get the drunkard's wife or son to take him home. But I sure as hell don't want any more people arrested just because they've got a snootful. Understood?"

  We nodded.

  "Good," Hollister said. "Now get to work."

  We were just turning to leave when Hollister said, "Chase, I need to speak with you."

  I turned around and faced him. He sat himself down and took a pipe from a drawer and put the pipe in his mouth and his feet on the desk.

  "I kind of got my ass chewed on because of you, Chase."

  I couldn't figure out what he was talking about but I got a sick feeling in my stomach. Hollister was known to fire men almost on a whim-especially if he'd been drinking, and he had that look now-and I could feel that old prison fear in my chest. But instead of getting locked in… this time I was going to get locked out- of a good job and wages.

  "Because of me?" I said.

  "That fop of a night clerk at the Whitney Hotel."

  "Oh."

  "You sound as if you know what I'm talking about."

  I shrugged. "Hell, all I did was look at the guest register."

  He smiled. "Without asking that sweet little man's permission."

  I laughed. "So he complained?"

  "Oh, did he complain. He had a letter waiting for me on my desk this morning. He was filled with civic outrage." He sucked on his unlit pipe. "Western towns like ours hate police departments. Just about everything we do, the people consider infringing on their rights in some way."

  He wasn't exaggerating. Ttowns over, a group of outraged citizens, angered that the police chief had imposed a curfew following three drunken murders, took two young policemen hostage and threatened to kill them unless the police chief packed up and left town. The outraged mob had been led by the mayor and a minister. Eastern papers liked to talk about how the "Wild West" had been tamed now that a new century was about to turn. But that didn't mean that police forces-too often crooked and violent-had found acceptance, because in most places they sure hadn't… not yet, anyway.