Wolf Moon

by Ed Gorman

  She went right straight out without saying another word, or giving me a chance to speak my own piece.

  ***

  The fights went on all night. A Mex took a knife to a miner who kept calling him a Mex, and two miners who should have known better got into a drunken game of Russian roulette. They both managed to miss their own heads, but they shot the hell out of the big display mirror behind the bar.

  Just at eleven, when I was finishing my second sweep of the businesses, making sure all the doors were locked, making sure that no drunken miners had sailed rocks through any of the windows, I was walking past an alley and that was when they got me.

  They didn't make any noise and they surprised me completely.

  Mars hit me on the side of the head with the butt of a.45, and Lundgren dragged me into the shadows of the alley.

  "Where's our money?" Lundgren said.

  I didn't answer. Wouldn't. Because no matter what he did to me, it wasn't going to be his money ever again.

  Mars took the first three minutes. He worked my stomach and my ribs and my chest.

  At one point I started throwing up, but that didn't slow him down any. He had a rhythm going, and why let a little vomit spoil everything?

  By the time Mars finished, I was on my knees and trying to pitch forward.

  Lundgren had better ideas.

  He grabbed me by the hair and jerked me to my feet and then started using his right knee expertly on my groin.

  He must have used it six, seven times before I couldn't scream anymore, before I let the darkness overwhelm me there in the dust that was moist with my own blood and sweat and piss…

  Just the darkness…

  19

  Six years ago, two Maryknoll nuns on their way to California stopped through here. They stayed just long enough, I'm told, to set up an eight-bed hospital. It's nothing fancy, you understand, but there's a small surgery room in addition to the beds, and everything is white and very clean and smells of antiseptic.

  Doc Granville got me into his examination room but then had to go out to get a man some pills. Apparently, people felt comfortable stopping by at any hour. While I was in the room alone, I looked through his medical encyclopedia. There was something I needed to look up.

  When I was finished, I went back to the table and laid down and Doc Granville came in and got to work.

  He daubed some iodine on the cut across my forehead. I winced. "Hell, son, that don't hurt at all."

  "If you say so."

  "Miners do this to you? I know they're raising hell because their paychecks are going to be late."

  "I didn't get a real good look at them. But I think it was Mexes."

  "You must be at least a little bit tough."

  "Why's that?"

  "That beating you took. And you're up and around."

  I thought of mentioning what I'd just read. I decided not to. Things were complicated enough. "I'm not up and around yet."

  He laughed. "I don't hand out that many compliments, son. Just accept it with some grace and keep your mouth shut."

  I smiled at him. For all his grumpiness, he was a funny bastard, and a pretty decent man at that.

  The pain was considerable. He had me on the table with my head propped up. He'd fixed the cuts on my face and then carefully examined my ribs. They were sore. Not broken, he said, but probably bruised. I tried not to think about it.

  He was about to say something else when knuckles rapped on the white door behind him.

  "I told you I'd be out in five minutes, nurse. Now you just hold on to your britches."

  "It's not the nurse."

  And it wasn't.

  "Your boss," Granville said in a soft voice.

  I nodded.

  "They're going to hurt like a bitch when you get up, those ribs of yours."

  "I imagine."

  "Nothing I can do for it except tape it up the way I did."

  "I appreciate it."

  He went to the door and opened it.

  Hollister, in his blue serge, walked into the room with the kind of military precision and stiffness he always used when he was trying to hide the fact that he'd been drinking.

  He nodded to Granville and came straight over to me. He scowled when he saw my face.

  "What the hell happened?"

  So I told him the Mex story, the same one I'd told Granville. It was better the second time around, the way a tall tale usually is, but as I watched him, I could see he didn't believe a word of it.

  "Mexes, huh?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Two of them."

  "Uh-huh."

  "I'm told you didn't sound your whistle," he said. "I didn't have time."

  "Or use your weapon."

  "I didn't have time for that, either."

  "They just grabbed you…"

  "Grabbed me as I was walking past an open alley."

  "And dragged you…"

  "Dragged me into the alley and-"

  "Why did they drag you into the alley?"

  "Because I saw them in the alley, fighting-one of them even had a knife-and I told them to stop, and they turned on me."

  "Just like that?"

  "Just like that."

  "Before you could do anything?"

  "Before I could do anything."

  Granville was watching me, too. He was pretending to be sterilizing some of his silver instruments, but he was really watching Hollister try to break my story.

  Hollister suddenly became aware of the doc. "You do me a favor, Doc?"

  "Sure, Ev."

  "Wait outside."

  "If you want."

  "I'd appreciate it."

  "Sure."

  Doc looked like a kid disappointed because he had to stay home while all his friends went off and did something fun.

  Doc went out and closed the door.

  Hollister didn't talk at first. He went over and picked up a straight-backed chair and set it down next to the table I was lying on. Then he took out his pipe and filled it and took out a stick match and struck it on the bottom of his boot. The room smelled briefly of phosphorous from the match head and then of sweet pipe tobacco.

  He still didn't say anything for a long time, but when he did speak, it sure was something I paid attention to.

  "Only one way those two boys that stuck up the bank could've gotten that key."

  I didn't say anything.

  He said, "How much did they promise you, Chase?"

  I still didn't say anything. I just lay there with my ribs hurting every other time I inhaled. I had never felt more alone.

  "Reeves estimates that they got away with fifty thousand. If they didn't give you at least a third of it, you're not a very good businessman."

  "I didn't have anything to do with the robbery, Chief. I honestly didn't."

  "I took a chance on you, being an ex-convict and all."

  "I know that and I appreciate it."

  "And now here I am kicking myself in the ass for doing it."

  "I'm sorry, Chief."

  "Every single merchant in this town knows what happened, how you threw in with those robbers."

  "I didn't, Chief. I really didn't."

  I closed my eyes. There was nothing else to say. "They didn't hesitate to kill that clerk at the bank this morning, and they sure won't hesitate to kill you."

  He puffed on his pipe. "That beating they gave you was just a down payment, Chase."

  He was trying to scare me. I thought of scaring him right back by telling him about that wife of his and Reeves.

  He stood up and walked over to the table and faced me.

  He jabbed a hard finger into my taped-up ribs.

  I let out a cry.

  "They worked you over pretty good. Maybe you should take a few days off."

  "Is that an order?"

  He sighed. "I can't prove you actually gave them that key, so I'm not going to fire you, even though every merchant in town wants me to."

  "That's white o
f you."

  He shook his head. "Chase, I thought you were smarter than all this."

  "I didn't throw in with them, no matter what you say."

  "Then where did they get the key?"

  I stayed quiet. I didn't want to drag Reeves into this. That would only complicate things.

  "You got any answer for that, Chase?"

  "I don't know where they got the key."

  "But not from you?"

  "Not from me."

  He took the last noisy drags of his pipe. "You've got a nice wife and a nice litde girl. You don't want to spoil things for them."

  "I sure don't."

  "Then I'm going to ask you once more, and I want you to tell me the truth."

  "You don't even have to ask. I didn't give them the key."

  He walked over to the door. His boots walked heavy on the boards of the floor.

  "You going to tell me why they came after you?"

  "I told you. It was two Mexes."

  "Right. Two Mexes."

  "And they were drunk."

  "Real drunk, I suppose."

  "Right," I said. "Real drunk."

  He looked sickened by me. "You're wasting your goddamned life, Chase. You've gotten yourself involved in something that's going to bring down your whole family. And you're going to wind up in prison again. Or worse."

  He didn't even look at me anymore. He just walked through the doorway, slamming the door hard behind him.

  I lay there, quiet, still hurting from where he'd jammed his finger into my rib.

  20

  Gillian put a match to the kerosene lamp and then held the light close to my face and looked over what they'd done to me.

  I watched her closely in the flickering lamplight, older-looking tonight than usual, her eyes moving swiftly up and down my face, showing no emotion at all when she got to the black and blue places. She didn't touch me. I knew she was angry.

  I'd been home ten minutes, sitting at the kitchen table, rolling a cigarette in the dark, trying to wake neither Gillian nor Annie, but then I'd dropped my cigarette, and when I went to get it, my rib hurt so bad I made a noise, and that had awakened Gillian.

  Now she finished with her examination and set the lamp down in the middle of the table and went around and sat across the table from me.

  She just kept biting her lip and frowning.

  "Two Mexes," I said, keeping my voice low with Annie asleep in the other room.

  "Don't say anything, Chase."

  "I'm just trying to explain-"

  "You're not trying to explain anything. You're lying, that's what you're doing."

  "But Gillian, listen-"

  "You got yourself involved in that robbery somehow, and it all went wrong just the way I knew it would, and now Reeves is after you."

  She started crying. No warning at all.

  I sat there in the lamp-flick dark with the woman I'd loved so long, knowing how much I'd let her down. To get Reeves the way I wanted to get Reeves meant destroying her in the process.

  "I'm sorry, Gillian."

  "No, you're not."

  "Well, I wish I was sorry, at any rate. I just wish I didn't hate him so much."

  "And I just wish Annie didn't love you so much." She went to bed. I sat there a long time. After a while I blew out the lamp and just sat in the moonlight. I had some whiskey and I rolled two cigarettes and I sort of talked to my dead brothers the way you sort of talk to dead folks, and I thought of Annie in her white dress in the sunshine and I thought of sad Gillian, who'd been done nothing but wrong by men all her life.

  It was near dawn when I went to bed and slid in beside her.

  21

  The next day, I fell back into my routine as husband and father and policeman.

  Before work I went up the hill and knelt down by the deserted well. The day was gray and overcast. The wind, as I pulled the well cover back, was cold and biting. I could smell snow on the air.

  Last night I'd dreamt that I'd run up the hill to the well only to find it empty. Behind me stood Lundgren and Mars. When I found that they'd taken the money, they'd started laughing, and then Lundgren had leaned over and pushed me down the well.

  The rope still dangled from the spike. I reached down and gripped it and pulled the canvas money sack up the long dark hole.

  I put the sack on the ground and greedily tore it open and reached inside.

  I pulled up a handful of greenbacks and just stared at them momentarily. I gripped the money tight, as if I had my hands around Reeves' neck.

  "You're destroying this family, Chase. That's what you're doing."

  In the wind, I hadn't heard Gillian come up the hill. She stood no more than two feet behind me. She wore a shawl over her faded gingham dress. She looked old again, and scared and weary, and I tried hard not to hate myself for what I was doing.

  "This money is going to save us, Gillian," I said, packing it all back up again, leaning to the well and feeding the rope down the long dark tunnel. I didn't let go until I'd tested the rope. Snug and firm. The spike held. The money was back in a safe place. I pulled the cover over the well and dusted my hands off and stood up.

  I took her by the arms and tried to kiss her. She wouldn't let me. She just stood stiff. Her skin was covered with goose bumps from the icy wind.

  She wouldn't look at me. I spoke to her profile, to her sweet little nose and her freckles and her tiny chin.

  "All we need to do is wait a few months, and then we can leave town with all this money. Tell Hollister that one of your relatives died and left you a farm in Missouri or somewhere. Even if he suspects, he can't prove it. I'll wrap the money in bundles and put it in a trunk and send the trunk on ahead to wherever we decide to go."

  When she finally turned and looked at me, she seemed sadder than I'd ever seen her.

  "And won't that be a nice life for Annie, Chase? Watching her father scared all the time because somebody might find the money he stole?"

  "I won't be scared, Gillian, because nobody will know except you and me. And it's not stolen money, anyway, not really-it's just what Reeves rightfully owes me.

  "Listen to yourself, Chase," she said. "You've convinced yourself that what you're doing is right. But all you're doing is destroying this family. You wait and see. You wait and see."

  She started crying, and then she was running down the hill, pulling her shawl tighter around her.

  I started after her but decided there was no point. Not right now, anyway.

  All I could do was stand there in the bitter wind, feeling like a kid who'd just been scolded. I wanted to speak up on my own behalf, but I knew better, knew that no matter what I said or how long I talked, straight and true Gillian would remain straight and true.

  After a while I walked back down the hill to the house. Gillian was fixing stew at the stove. She didn't once turn around and look at me as I got into my police uniform, or say good-bye as I stood in the doorway and said, "I love you, Gillian. You and Annie are my life. And this is all going to work out. We're going to have the money and have a good life away from here. I promise you that, Gillian. I promise you that."

  But there was just her back, her tired beaten shoulders, and her arm stirring the ladle through the stew.

  22

  When I got to town, the funeral procession was just winding its way up the hill to the graveyard. A lone man in a Union uniform walked behind the shiny black horse-drawn hearse, beating out a dirge on a drum.

  I went to the police station, checked over the sheet listing the arrests thus far that day, checked to see if the new and more comfortable shoes I'd ordered had come in yet, and then started out the front door. There was still time for a cup of coffee at the restaurant before my rounds began.

  As I walked to the front of the station, I felt various eyes on me.

  A cop named Docey said, "Some of us were talkin' last night, Chase."

  "Oh?"

  "There were six of us talkin', and five of us voted that you s
hould quit." He was leaning against the front door, a pudgy red-bearded man with red freckles on his white bald head. "We got enough problems without people thinkin' we're crooked."

  "I didn't slip that key to the robbers, in case that's what you're talking about."

  He grabbed me then. He pushed away from the door and took his big Irish hands and grabbed the front of my uniform coat. I heard the two other cops grunt in approval.

  I couldn't afford any more physical pain. I used my knee and I went right up straight and he went down fast and sure.

  He rolled around on the floor clutching his groin and swearing. The other two started toward me but then realized that if Docey couldn't handle me-Docey being a mean mick ex-railroad man-they couldn't either.

  I opened the front door, about to step out on the boardwalk into the bitter blustering day, and I saw her shiny black surrey pull up.

  In her dark cape and royal-blue organdy dress, red hair caught beneath a small hat, Claire Hollister was not only beautiful, she was also exotic, like a frightened forest creature you see only once or twice a year for mere moments.

  As she stepped down from the surrey, she nodded good day to me.

  "Afternoon, ma'am."

  "Afternoon." She smiled. "D-Did y-you h-happen t-to see that h-husband of m-mine in there?" As always, her sad eyes reflected her humiliation.

  "I think he's still at the funeral, ma'am."

  "Oh. W-Would y-you l-leave a n-note telling h-him I was h-here?"

  "Sure."

  She turned back to her surrey. As she seated herself and lifted the reins, I saw how sad her face was even in profile. I couldn't imagine why a woman like this- a woman I sensed was decent and honorable-would give herself to a man like Reeves. Sometimes I suspected I didn't know anything about women at all.

  After she was gone, I went back inside. I had to pass Docey and the other two cops, but they just scowled at me and let me go.

  I wrote the chief a note and took it into his office. I started to set the note on his desk but then I noticed an envelope addressed to him. It bore the same handwriting as the note that had told him I was a jailbird.