The Big Gundown

by Bill Brooks

  He rode among them, then halted his horse and looked at them in general, but specifically the one leaning against the wagon, his hands empty of pick or shovel, figuring him to be the ramrod of the crew, and said, “Anybody here know a hand named Nat? A colored man?”

  He could tell by the change in their faces they knew who he spoke of. Yet their suspicion of the stranger among them kept them taciturn, except for the one leaning against the wagon, who straightened and spat.

  “What about him?” the man said. His hand reaching inside his jacket, now taking out his makings for rolling a shuck. Acting real casual, Jake thought.

  “Found him dead today.”

  “Dead?” a curly-headed young man holding a pick said.

  “That’s right,” Jake said. “Somebody killed him,” seeing how that would set with them.

  The curly-headed youth dropped his pick, leaned and took it up again. He had the look of surprise on him. But the one making himself a smoke didn’t seem at all affected by the news, nor did the other four.

  “That’s too bad,” the cigarette smoker said, licking his cigarette into shape. “He was a fair hand, that boy.”

  “How’d it happen, mister?” the curly-headed one said.

  “Somebody beat him, then drowned him,” Jake said. “Tied him down with some sort of weight around his neck. Wanted to make sure he stayed down under the creek they threw him in. Hard way to die. Imagine dying like that.”

  He saw the youth blanch, saw the way his hands fussed with the pick handle.

  The man leaning against the wagon twisted off the ends of his cigarette, put one end in his mouth, and struck a Lucifer off the wagon’s steel rim, then cupped the flame in his hand as he lowered his cigarette to it.

  Taking his sweet time, Jake thought, perhaps to make up a story he wants to sell me.

  The man took a deep draw off the smoke, then let it out, the wind carrying the smoke away. The others looked cold and he said to them, “Somebody tell you all to take a vacation?” That set them to working on digging the well again, even the curly-headed boy whose sideburns covered his cheeks.

  Then the man smoking looked at Jake and said, “What’s your business in all this anyway?”

  Jake turned over the flap of his coat so the man could see the badge.

  “I’m the town marshal in Sweet Sorrow,” he said.

  “S’at so?”

  Real casual like nothing fazed him, like it didn’t mean anything at all that here was a lawman inquiring after the murder of one of their own. But like Toussaint Trueblood had pointed out, this Nat, this Negro, really wasn’t one of their own except by occupation, maybe.

  “What was his last name?” Jake said.

  The smoking man grunted and turned away to watch the others digging the well, as though he hadn’t heard the question. Jake walked his horse up and bumped the man nearly knocking him off his feet.

  “I asked you what his last name was?”

  The man regained his balance, looked like he was ready to fight, then something made him think better of it and his stance slackened, the cigarette dangling between his lips, his fists down at his sides now.

  “Pickett!” the man said. “His name was Nat Pickett! Least that’s what he said it was, but you know you can’t never trust a nigger completely to tell you the truth about nothing. Maybe that was his real name, maybe it wasn’t. It’s what he said it was and around here we take a man at his word.”

  “What’s your name?” Jake said.

  Their gazes locked.

  “None of your goddamn business.”

  “What? You think I won’t find out?”

  Jake saw out of the corner of his eye the others had stopped their well-digging again, had paused to watch the exchange. He stepped his horse back two steps, looked at them all.

  “Somebody killed Mr. Nat Pickett,” Jake announced for their benefit, fixing his gaze again on the man who’d been smoking. “I’m going to find out who it was killed him and I’m going to arrest them. That’s the deal. Anybody know anything they’d be wise to tell me, otherwise maybe the wrong man gets arrested, put in jail—maybe even hanged for the murder…”

  Then he turned his horse back up the trace toward the house and when he arrived Bob Parker was already standing out front, as though he was already aware there was trouble in the air, had somehow sensed it, and came out to meet it.

  3

  SOME ARE JUST BORN WITH A GIFT.

  An uncle—Reese—came one fine spring day to the farm and stayed the summer helping with the harvest and slept upstairs in the hot airless loft, sharing a bed with the boy—Willy Silk, son to Reese’s brother, Barth, and only child.

  Willy was sixteen at the time and thought to be going off to seminary in a year or two.

  Uncle Reese, on the other hand, had strayed about as far from a seminary or any sort of institution like it in his forty-odd years of wandering. Reese was referred to as the black sheep of the Silks, the prodigal son.

  He said one night when it was too hot to sleep and they could almost hear the corn growing, “You ever had a woman, Willy?”

  “No sir.”

  “But you have thought about getting you one before you go off to that seminary?”

  Then there was a long silence between them and so dark and moonless one couldn’t see the other, even though they shared the same bed.

  “Well, you’ve thought about it, right?” Reese repeated, for when he was onto a subject he enjoyed he was less likely to let go of it than a dog a bone.

  “Nothing wrong with thinking about it,” Reese said. “Nothing wrong with doing it, either. You about come to the right age to be thinking about it. Me, I was twelve my first time I done it with a gal.”

  Willy liked his uncle Reese about as well as he liked anyone, for the man just seemed like adventure: All the stories Reese told him—how he’d been a sailor once, and fought in the Civil War and got caught and escaped, and how he went down to Brazil and looked for gold, and so forth. Reese even hinted he had been a river pirate and spent some time in jail in San Francisco.

  “I reckon there’s nothing wrong with thinking about it,” Willy said wistfully.

  “Hell no.” Reese laughed. “Goddamn but it’s terrible hot. Let’s say we go sleep in the yard.”

  So they did and that night Reese talked to Willy about women and getting in and out of trouble and how much fun it could be as long as you didn’t get caught breaking the law, but hell, laws were made to be broken and if a feller didn’t break a little law now and then, he sure wasn’t doing much real living. It got Willy to thinking about a future other than the seminary.

  And that is how it began that it was learned Willy had a gift.

  For the following afternoon after they’d hoed weeds out of half a field of upstart corn, they walked on back to a copse of trees that stood black and tall against the pewter sky to take their lunch and whilst there, Reese said, “I bet you ain’t even ever shot a pistol have you, Willy?”

  “No sir, but I’ve shot Dad’s old rifle lots.” Reese said it wasn’t the same thing.

  Then Reese took out his pistol with gutta-percha grips and said, “This is a .32 Smith & Wesson five-shooter—what some call a belly gun. See how it fits your hand.”

  And when Willy took hold of it like it was a deadly snake, Reese laughed and told him not to be afraid of it, said, “How’s it feel?”

  “Feels like trouble,” Willy said, and Reese laughed so hard he fell off the log they’d been sitting on.

  “Thing is,” Reese said, “to be careful where you point it. Guns has been known to go off accidental. Probably been more men shot and killed accidental than on purpose. Ho, ho, ho.”

  “Feels real good, Uncle Reese,” Willy said, as he grew used to its weight in his hand.

  “Aim it yonder at that dead limb, see if you can hit it.”

  “That one?”

  “No, that one yonder, just beyond.”

  It was a limb about the size
around of a man’s thumb, sticking up about two foot high.

  “Just hold it straight out in front of you and look down the barrel like it was your finger you were pointing, then squeeze the trigger like you would a girl’s titty.”

  Willy blushed and Reese said, “That’s right. You ain’t never squeezed a girl’s titty, but I bet you have a cow’s. Squeeze it like you was milking a cow’s titty, firm but steady.”

  “Like this here?”

  The pistol barked and that’s when Reese and Willy both found out about the gift Willy had been given. That thumb limb disappeared, most of it, just a sharp piece left, white as bone where the bark had been shot away.

  “Goddamn,” Reese declared. “Knock the rest of it down, so I know it wasn’t no accident.”

  And coolly Willy shot the rest of the limb away with the next shot, so there wasn’t even an inch left sticking up.

  “Shit, boy, you’re a natural.”

  Willy looked like he didn’t want the gun to ever leave his hand.

  “You was to put that pistola down the waist of your pants you’d look just like a desperado,” Reese said. Willy blushed scarlet and felt like something in him was going to burst.

  That evening at supper Willy’s mother—a man-sized woman—served ham smothered in red-eye gravy, a pan full of warm biscuits, sweet potatoes, and said, “I heard shooting going on this afternoon. You two know anything about that?”

  “I was taking some target practice out in them woods of yours yonder, Ethel,” Reese said.

  Ethel Silk never cared much for Reese’s sort and would not have tolerated him in her house had he not been Barth’s brother. She thought him footloose and irresponsible, a man who figured to get by on his charm and handsome looks, a sweet talker and a rogue. And she wouldn’t have had him around even then, except the weeds in the corn was growing wild and the roof was leaking and about ten hundred other things needed fixing when he showed up out of the blue. So she let him stay on, thinking at least till most of the man work got caught up on.

  “I don’t want you firing guns around Willy,” she said. “One of those bullets could ricochet…”

  Willy started to confess the truth, that it was him doing the shooting, but Reese gave him a look that warned he’d be better off not owning up to something like that unless forced.

  “A man packing a gun might as well be carrying a lit stick of dynamite for all the trouble it will bring him,” she said. “I don’t want you getting any notions in your head, Willy. You tell him, Reese.”

  “Tell him what, Ethel?”

  “About what sorts of trouble a man with a gun can get himself into.”

  “You listen to your ma, Willy,” Reese said. “And pass them sweet taters if you don’t mind.”

  It was the Fourth of July and Willy’s daddy had been dead close to a year already. That night they all went into Hopewell to watch the fireworks display and eat ice cream and for the first time in a long time, Willy could see his ma was in a good mood and it made him feel good that she was; she’d been real down in the mouth ever since his pa had died. And later when they all came home again, Reese cracking jokes in the wagon on the ride back, his ma laughed aloud and said, “Oh, stop it, Reese, you’re making my sides ache.” And once they got there, Reese told Willy he reckoned he’d stay up for a time and for Willy to go on to bed. A summer rainstorm rushed in and cooled everything down to a pleasantness that allowed Willy to sleep in the upstairs room and he fell asleep fast enough only to be awoken sometime later by the crash of thunder.

  “Reese?” he said, sitting up in the dark. Then flashes of light from the storm filled the room and he could see the room was empty. “Reese?”

  He thought he’d go and look for Reese, see if he was drunk maybe and sitting out in the rain, perhaps asleep out there on his back in the yard, as he’d found him once before, his mouth open with the rain filling it up.

  He tugged on his drawers and went down looking for Reese, went out and stood on the porch, the rain falling so hard it sounded like water boiling.

  “Reese?” he said, calling out his name just loud enough to be heard over the rushing rain. “Reese?”

  But he didn’t see a trace of Reese in the lightning flashes: not sitting there on the porch or lying out in the yard, or nowhere else. It just didn’t feel right somehow, but wasn’t nothing he could do about it. Maybe Reese had taken off, left for parts unknown. He could have gone off with as little notice as he had arrived; it was Reese’s way.

  Willy felt abandoned at the thought that Reese had left.

  He waited a time there on the porch, hoping maybe he’d see Reese coming through the rain, thinking it possible he had gone to the barn to check on the horses or out to the privy. But there wasn’t any sign of him and after a time Willy went back inside the house and started up the stairs. Then he heard something coming from his mother’s room, a conversation—muted beyond the door. He stopped and put his ear to the door and listened and realized who it was talking. His heart sank.

  He went on up the stairs to his loft and listened to the rain and tried not to think about what he’d heard downstairs. Tried not to think about what Reese and his mother were doing. It seemed unthinkable to him she would let Reese in her room, the way she was so openly scornful of him. The air seemed charged with something that caused the hair on his arms to stand up and made sleep hard to come by.

  The next day when he saw the two of them sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, empty plates before them, not speaking or even looking at each other, he didn’t say anything, just went about as usual, as though he didn’t know anything about the way the two of them were acting. But later, when he saw them heading off to the woods together, he went in and found Reese’s pistol and took the money he knew she kept in a cigar box on the top shelf of the closet above her dresses with the scent of potpourri and cedar. He put the money and a few clothes in a satchel, went out to the barn, put a halter on the work horse, and rode away bareback and grim.

  By the time Willy made it to Cincinnati, he was about starved and used up, save for two dollars in his shoe. If it hadn’t been for the poster and his ability to read, he might well have ended up jumping into the Ohio River, just another victim of life’s failure. He’d stood on the bridge and looked down into that muddy swirling water and saw it as a quick way out of a mean life. The water swirled gentle, like it was inviting him. It was a long jump. He figured with luck he’d break his neck and save himself the sorrow of drowning.

  Then he saw the poster tacked there on a crosstie and it read like fate had written it:

  SHOOTING MATCH • SATURDAY, JULY 10TH

  FAIRGROUNDS

  ALL ARE INVITED

  ONE DOLLAR ENTRY FEE

  SINGLE ELIMINATION

  11 A.M SHARP!

  $50 Grand Prize

  Colonel Ben Lily never saw such a goddamn pistol shooter in his entire life. Skinny kid in high-water pants and rough brogans. Straight off the farm, he reckoned. Hayseed and bumpkin combined. But jaysus god the kid could shoot! And when Willy won the first-place prize money, he didn’t know quite what it meant, whether it was luck or something else. It was more money than he’d ever seen, except in a bank once.

  A man in a big fancy hat and butter soft-fringed jacket decorated in quills and bright beadwork approached him and said, “My name’s Colonel Ben Lily, son, and I’d like to make your acquaintance and offer you a job with my Wild West Combination.” That’s how it started, Willy Silk’s professional shooting career—billed as part of Colonel Ben Lily’s Wild West Combination: Willy Silk—The Cincinnati Kid—Boy Pistoleer. Come One, Come All!

  And to sell the thing to the public and make a little extra, Colonel Lily included at every stop in the tour a shooting match offering: One Hundred Dollars to Any Man Who Can Out Shoot the Pistoleer! Ten-dollar entry fee!

  Nobody did in a year, though one man, an old fellow with a burnt face, came close, shooting forty-seven of fifty glass balls, but Willy
shattered them all. And with his growing reputation came the growing adoration of fans—women fans notwithstanding and most especially—and Willy Silk soon understood the pleasures Uncle Reese had talked about those long hot Ohio nights back on the farm—the power a woman carries in her body.

  But with the women came the whiskey, too.

  And liquor was a snake that once it bit you left its poison in your blood in a way you liked and the way that helped steal your own power like a thief, stealing your good sense and resolve.

  By years two and three and four, Willy had begun to fail with regularity the shooting of every glass ball or every bird tied to a stake, and six times lost shooting matches to men who came out of the crowd—one a goddamn farmer, like himself, or like what himself had once been. It was a boy with one blue eye and one brown who said, “My name’s Gerald and glad to meet’cha, Mr. Kid,” then commenced to shatter every glass ball—all fifty—in a row while Willy missed four and Colonel Lily once more laid out a hundred dollars cash to a grinning hayseed.

  “Son, I gotta tell you,” Colonel Lily said one evening toward the end of the fourth season there in Willy’s tent. “What you was when I first seen you, you ain’t no more. Don’t know if it’s the whiskey or the cooze or a combination of the two, but either can and will ruin a man, and the two together is like sticking a fork in your eye and cutting off your nuts—leaves you about useless to me, and I’m going to have to terminate our relationship, don’t you see.”

  By this time Willy had learned to cuss as well and said, “Fuck I need you for old man? I can hire on with any number of combinations, Buffalo Bill’s included. Fuck I need you for?”

  And that was it, his candle flame blown out—or so it seemed.

  Willy set loose on his own, found the going a lot rougher than he’d imagined, thought twice about returning to the farm, but pride wouldn’t allow it. He heard, too, Reese had married his mother, then stole her blind before abandoning her, and she had to put the farm up for sale. He did not know how much was true, how much wasn’t. Whiskey made him not care.