by Bill Crider
“The old bastard looks all shriveled up,” Jink said, looking through the doorway.
Obviously Gerald had company, which came as a surprise to Jonathan. He did not know that his son had any friends, and he did not recognize the voice.
“Maybe he’s dead already,” Ben said. “Damn sure looks like it.”
Not yet, Jonathan thought. But close enough.
“He’s not dead,” Gerald said. “He’s just asleep. He sleeps all the time.”
Jonathan laughed inside himself at how easy Gerald was to fool. All a man had to do was lie there with his eyes closed, and Gerald thought he was asleep.
“Perhaps we should wake him up, then,” O’Grady said. “And see what he has to tell us.”
He walked over to the bed and looked down at the old man’s face. It was creased and leathery, covered with a week’s worth of bristly whiskers. His eyelids seemed so thin that O’Grady imagined he could almost see the eyeballs underneath them, and his lips were so pale that they were almost white.
O’Grady almost hated to wake the old man, but he put his hand on Jonathan’s shoulder and shook him gently.
Jonathan tried to keep his eyes closed, but even the small movement that O’Grady had caused sent fresh spasms of pain shooting through him.
He jerked on the bed and raised his head slightly. “Juana?” he said.
“Who the hell is Juana?” Ben said.
“The woman who cooks for us,” Gerald said. “She’s not here today. I sent her to visit her daughter in Blanco. Here, let me talk to him.”
He walked over to the bedside and looked at his father. It was hard to believe that the wasted old man lying there had at one time controlled half the rangeland around Blanco, had ridden from daylight to dark on the old cattle trails, had faced down his enemies and bested most of them.
“Juana?” Jonathan said again.
He knew very well that Juana was nowhere around, but he’d be damned if he was going to let on that he had any idea what was happening, especially since he really didn’t know. Maybe if he could keep his mouth shut, Gerald would tell him.
“It’s Gerald,” his son said. “Juana isn’t here today.”
Jonathan moaned. He didn’t have to fake that. He would have liked to scream aloud, but he bit down hard, snapping his teeth together.
“He tryin’ to bite somethin’?” Ben said.
“He does that sometimes,” Gerald said.
“Ask him about the money,” O’Grady said.
“All right,” Gerald said. “Father, something’s happened to your money. Did you know that?”
“Money?” Jonathan moaned. “What money?”
“The money that you keep in the bank in town,” Gerald said. “That money. Something’s happened to it. Can you tell us about it?”
“Money?” Jonathan said.
“Goddammit,” Jink said. “The old son of a bitch is out of his head. He ain’t gonna tell us a thing. He don’t even know we’re here. I say we kill him and take what we can find in the house. Then we get out of here.”
“I think we oughta eat, too,” Ben said. His disappointment at hearing that the cook wasn’t there was almost as great as his disappointment at finding that the money they had stolen was so much less than they had expected.
“Killing him would be doing him a favor,” O’Grady said.
Right you are, son, Jonathan thought, suppressing another moan.
“And killing him won’t help us find out about the money, either,” Gerald said, trying to keep them thinking about what was most important.
“How do we know that you didn’t fiddle the money out of the bank some way or other?” Jink said. “And then leave us to take the blame when we robbed it.”
“I think you’re giving Gerald credit for a bit too much imagination,” O’Grady said. “I don’t think he would do anything like that.”
He sure as hell would, Jonathan thought, almost smiling now that he had some idea of what had transpired. He hadn’t felt quite so happy for days. Weeks, probably. It was pretty damn funny.
He knew just how much imagination Gerald had, and that was why he’d had his money transferred to an Austin bank right after he’d found out how sick he. He’d suspected that Gerald would try some way of getting his hands on the money, and he’d taken precautions. He hadn’t bothered to mention them to Gerald, however.
Of course, he’d never dreamed that Gerald would get himself involved with bank robbers, but now that he realized what had happened, he wasn’t really too surprised. Gerald might have imagination, but he’d always been lazy as an old yellow hound. He’d do anything to avoid working himself. What would be more natural than for him to find someone to do the work for him and take all the risks?
Jonathan felt a laugh rising up all the way from his stomach, and he opened his mouth to let it out.
But what came out was not a laugh.
It was a scream.
Ellie didn’t sleep at all that night.
The bed was comfortable enough, much softer than her and Burt’s bed back at the house. The sheets were clean, and ironed crisp.
But all Ellie could do was think about Burt.
They had taken her by to see him at Fowler’s, but the thing she saw there didn’t really look like her husband. He was covered to the chin by a thin sheet. Later, Mr. Fowler would dress him in the suit she had brought, but Ellie didn’t think that would help.
There really hadn’t been much Mr. Fowler could do about his face and head.
“Do they know who did it yet?” she said.
Fowler, a genial man when he was not doing his job, was also a man who liked to talk. He was not merely Blanco’s undertaker; he was also one of the chief sources of information about what was going on in town.
“Just that it was the bank robbers,” he said. “No one knows who they are, but there were three of them.”
“What did they look like?”
“No one got much of a look at them,” Fowler said. “Except for the people in the bank. They had their neckerchiefs pulled up over their faces, however.”
“But the people in the bank must’ve seen something.”
“Not enough. One of the men was big, and maybe had a beard. The one who gave the orders sounded Irish.”
“What about the third one?”
“Skinny as a rake,” Fowler said.
Ellie looked down at Burt. “I thought so,” she said.
Fowler didn’t ask what she meant by that.
Ellie stared dry-eyed at the bare ceiling of the bedroom where she lay. The moonlight came in through the windows, and a light breeze played with the curtains, but Ellie did not notice those things.
She was seeing into the past.
She remembered the day she and Burt had been married. It had not been a fancy wedding, just a quick ceremony in the minister’s parlor, but it was enough for Ellie.
She had never really thought she would ever marry anyone. She was already twenty-five, and most women she knew had been married for years by that age.
She knew that there were some men who didn’t like her because she wasn’t at all pretty, not in the soft way that some women were. She could look in any mirror and see that easily enough.
But there was more to it than that.
There was something else about her that men didn’t seem to like, an independent streak, her parents had called it. She wasn’t one to sit back and let someone else take charge of her life, tell her what to do. She had a mind of her own, and it was filled with her own ideas.
By the time Burt Taine came along and showed an interest in her, she was resigned to spinsterhood, and she thought it wouldn’t be so bad. You could do what you wanted to do, and there was no one to order you around, no one you had to satisfy but yourself.
She made a little money by sewing, and she had a good-sized garden in back of the house where she lived with her parents. She sold fresh vegetables, and then she bought some hens and started selling the eggs
. When she had enough money, she bought a cow and started selling milk and cream. It was her intention to buy a small farm of her own when she had saved the cash she needed.
Her parents died of a fever that went around one winter. Ellie nursed them, trying to pull them through, but without success. After their deaths, she lived alone for two years, keeping house, sewing, gardening, doing the milking, gathering the eggs.
Burt Taine had grown up in Blanco, just like Ellie, and he was clerking at Rogers’ Mercantile. None of the girls in town regarded him as much of a catch. They knew that Alf Rogers, Junior, would inherit the store, and they believed that Burt would remain a clerk there for the rest of his life, drawing a clerk’s meager wages. So although he had kept company with one or two of the girls when they were young, they all found someone else when the time came for marrying.
That was when Burt noticed Ellie, as if for the first time, and it seemed that he settled on her from that moment. None of the other girls had known that Burt had a secret ambition, and certainly they would never have guessed that it was the same as Ellie’s.
Not long after the two of them married, they bought the farm with money they had both saved.
And it hadn’t been a bad life, Ellie thought. Burt might not have been the most romantic man in the world, but he seemed to care about her. He treated her as an equal on the farm, and she shared in all the decisions. They were making a go of it, and if there was anything lacking in their lives, Burt had never complained.
But then neither had she. She was a worker, not a complainer, and she had always believed that was one of the things Burt had seen in her.
What had she seen in him?
She had seen a man who had taken the trouble to look beyond her admittedly homely face and see that there was something valuable there, something to be appreciated and maybe even loved, though she did not ever recall hearing him use that particular word.
She had never used it, either.
And if at the end he had died because of what he believed to be an insult to his own honor rather than hers, which she suspected was the case, that didn’t really change anything. He was gone, and she was alone again.
Everything that they had worked for had been destroyed in the course of one day.
The rape had been bad enough, but she had begun to reconcile herself to that. She had been violated, but she was starting to realize that the violation of her body had in no way changed who she was.
She had cleansed herself in the rain, washing away the smell of the two men, washing away the touch of their hands on her flesh, and the cleansing of her body had begun the cleansing of her spirit, though the process was not yet complete. It might not be complete for a long time.
She had not been able to wash away the pain, of course, but that would fade. It was fading now. Though she still felt it between her legs, she knew that within a few days it would be gone.
What would not be gone was the memory of what the men had done to her, but she had thought that even that would fade. It would never go away, she knew that, but still it would fade, especially after the men who raped her were dead.
She supposed she believed that Burt would kill them somehow. He had looked so determined.
But they had killed Burt instead. She did not have the slightest doubt that they were the ones who had. There might have been three men involved in the robbery of the bank, but that made no difference at all. Two of them had been the men who raped her.
And then they had shot Burt, whose death had brought her a pain and a memory that would never fade.
She knew that the Stones must think that she was very cold-hearted for her lack of tears, but she had no tears to cry. Crying was not her way.
Doing things, that was her way, thinking through a problem and finding a solution to it, then putting the solution into action. It was the same with a stump that needed grubbing out of a field or a cow that was having trouble calving.
It was the same now, though no one realized that except Ellie.
No one knew what she was planning to do tomorrow, as soon as Burt was buried in the little cemetery just outside of town.
No one knew that she had brought more than just Burt’s Sunday suit to town.
She had put something else in the wagon while Alma Stone was helping to tidy up the house for Ellie’s departure, and it was outside now, wrapped in a blanket under the wagon seat.
The shotgun.
It might not be possible now to wipe out the memory of what had happened, or ever to ease the pain of the loss she felt so strongly, but she was going to try.
She did not care that the men had robbed the bank. The bank meant nothing to her.
But they had violated her and they had killed Burt.
And she was going after them.
She was going to punish them for what they had done to her, but that was not the main thing. What mattered was that she was going to punish them for killing Burt.
She knew that he would have understood her motives, even if no one else would, and thinking of that, she was at last able to close her eyes and sleep.
EIGHT
“Jesus, that old scutter scared the hell out of me, screaming like that,” Jink said, stuffing his mouth full of scrambled eggs, the only dish besides bacon that Gerald knew how to prepare. “You reckon he’s dead?”
“Naw, he just passed out,” Ben said. “And you better hope to hell he ain’t dead. Else he won’t be able to tell us where the money’s hid.”
They were sitting at the rough wooden table in the kitchen of the ranch house, where Gerald had been more or less compelled to feed them. The bacon was too crisp, almost burned, and the eggs were too runny, but no one was complaining. They were all too hungry.
“I’m not sure he knows what happened to the money,” Gerald said. “He’s not really in his right mind.”
He was glad that he had at least been able to convince the others that the money did indeed exist. He had been afraid that they might decide to take out their frustrations at its absence by doing something to him.
“Look at this house,” he’d said. “Do you have any idea how much it cost? Think about that barn you were in. Think about the land that you rode through to get here. All of it’s his, for miles around. There’s money, all right. Or there was.”
They had come to see it Gerald’s way, but they were as puzzled as he was about where it could have gone. They knew for damn sure that it wasn’t in the bank.
“I bet that old man knows,” Jink said, crunching bacon as he talked. “I bet he’s got it hid right here on this place somewheres.”
O’Grady didn’t really believe that the money was hidden on the ranch, and he had a funny feeling that the old man, though obviously quite ill, was not only aware of what was going on but was probably a lot smarter than even his son was willing to give him credit for being. The money was most likely stashed away in some safe place known only to him, or maybe even deposited in some other bank.
If that was the case, there wouldn’t be any use looking for it. At the same time, however, O’Grady didn’t want to take the chance that the money might be right there under their noses and just ride off without making some kind of search.
“What’s your opinion of the matter?” he asked Gerald, who was now making a pot of coffee. “Do you think there’s a chance that the money is here?”
The coffee was ready, and Gerald poured it into thick crockery mugs. He didn’t really know what to think about the money. If his father really was out of his mind, as he appeared to be, then it was possible that he had drawn the money out of the bank and hidden it somewhere on the ranch, though that would not have been like Jonathan at all. Or not like him before he got sick. Who could say what he might have become after that?
“It could be here,” was all he said.
“Then we’ll just have to find it,” Ben said.
O’Grady didn’t like the idea, but he didn’t speak against it.
“We can stay here for
the night,” he said. “They’ll more than likely be thinking we rode straight on out of the area, and they won’t be looking for us around here. If we stay out of sight, we should be all right.” He blew on the scalding coffee and then took a sip. “Tomorrow we can look for the money, starting at first light. If we don’t find it by noon, I’ll be taking my share of the swag and riding on.”
Ben and Jink agreed that O’Grady’s idea was a good one. While they had hoped for much more, the money they had taken in the robbery was still far more than they had ever hoped to have at one time.
Gerald started to ask what his share would be, but he wisely refrained. He would worry about that later.
The next day dawned bright and cloudless. The sun burned down on Blanco and dried up all traces of the previous day’s rain. The ground remained softer than usual, however, and made the job of digging Burt Taine’s grave easier than it would otherwise have been.
Earl Whistler was up early, surveying the ruin of his stable. He had a shovel with him, but it wasn’t for digging a grave.
He stuck the point of the shovel into the mud and leaned on the handle, looking at the ruins of the stable. He’d gotten the horses he’d been boarding for others out safely, and his own nags had been out of harm’s way in the corral around to the side of the stable. Nevertheless, he was pretty much permanently out of business.
He didn’t really mind, not all that much, anyhow. He was seventy-odd years old, and it was time for him to retire. He didn’t have much, but he had enough. He had lived a simple life, living in a little room in the front of the stable for the last ten years since the death of his wife. He had saved his money, and luckily he had never really believed in banks. The money was buried in three jars in back of the stable.
Or what was left of the stable. There wasn’t much. The hay and straw had burned hot and fast, and the old wooden building had been consumed by the flames quicker than he would have thought. Nearly everyone in town had tired to help save it, but they never had a chance.