by Bill Brooks
“No need to apologize.”
A soft wind wrinkled the water. The few clouds that floated overhead were mirrored in the green surface.
“You want to go for a swim?” I said.
“No, I guess not.”
Whatever had been there between us, that feeling two people have when they’re new to each other, when there is a mutual hunger, wasn’t there any longer. Whatever it was had passed and we both knew it wouldn’t come back again, that no words or actions could make it like it was for that brief time.
“Want to just sit here then?” I said.
She nodded.
You could see dusk coming half an hour before it arrived, like purple dust. Maize kept going outside the house and looking toward the north.
“He should have been home before now,” she said the last time she came in again, this time with worry in her voice. “He’s never been gone this long.” Darkness had dropped down all around us.
“Maybe because he knows there are men here he might have seen it as a chance to take a little extra time away,” I suggested.
“No,” she said. “It’s not Spence’s way. He’s a homebody. Whatever fun he wanted to have, he’s had it by now. Something’s wrong.”
“You want me to go and try and find him?”
She looked at me with eyes that begged the question but she remained silent.
“I’ll go,” I said.
“I don’t want to put you out.”
“You’ve done plenty enough for us.”
Tom was sitting there at the table, some of the color back into his face, his swollen arm resting next to his cup, his fingers still fat.
“It’s no use going tonight,” she said. “If something’s happened to him along the way you won’t find him in the dark. If he’s not home by morning…”
“I can leave now.”
“No. Maybe he’ll come tonight. If not you can go in the morning. If something’s happened and he’s fallen along the way, you’ll be able to spot him.”
“You sure you don’t want me to go right now?”
She nodded.
We all went to bed early, only this time I slept on the floor by the stove and Maize didn’t say anything about it when I suggested it.
But sometime during the night she came and lay next to me and took my arm and put it around her and I pretended that I didn’t hear her crying softly.
Chapter Twenty
I was already up and saddling my horse when Maize came out of the house carrying a cup of coffee she handed to me. Bunches of gray clouds had gathered off to the north and it looked like they had rain in them, and a cold wind blew loose sand and rolled tumbleweeds across the open places.
I took the coffee from her and sipped it and our eyes met and held for a moment.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll find him and bring him home.”
“I know you will.”
She put her hands over mine as I held the cup, an embrace of friendship more than love, it seemed to me. Comforting.
“About yesterday and what happened the night before…”
“It was what it was,” I said. “I don’t regret it and I hope you don’t either.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t regret it either, Jim.”
I asked her for directions to Clancy’s Corners—the direction Spence would have gone, and she gave them to me.
“It’s just a place with a whorehouse, a saloon, small trading post, and a loading pen for the train when it stops,” she said. “If he’s there you’ll be able to find him.”
I nodded and drank the rest of the coffee and tightened the cinch and slid my rifle into the scabbard then forked the saddle.
“Tom’s better,” I said. “He was awake when I checked on him.”
“I’ll see to him,” she said. “And thank you.”
“No thanks necessary, Maize. If we aren’t anything else, we are at least friends. You and Spence.”
She touched my knee and I handed her back the cup then rode off toward the north.
It was about five miles, she said, from their place to Clancy’s Corners. I looked for his body along the way, one of his dogs perhaps, anything that might indicate he never made it there, or made it back. I didn’t see anything until I saw a few buildings below as I topped a slight rise of loose rock and sand. There were the railroad tracks, a water tower, a large wood pen, and two buildings that looked like hastily thrown together shacks. The place had the look of impermanence, like in a few years it wouldn’t be there anymore; that it would all be blown away and forgotten and nobody would remember it ever having been there.
I rode down cautious, not knowing what to expect.
There were several saddle horses tied up out front of one of the buildings. No sign or nothing to indicate what it was. Just some scoured gray boards nailed together under a rusted tin roof. The stock pens were empty, the tracks quiet, their worn steel rails dull in the cloudy light.
I tied off and went in.
Several men, the number matching the number of horses out front, stood at a rough plank board propped on two wood barrels on one side of the room. The opposite side looked like a dry goods—the trading post, I assumed, Maize had spoken of. A man in a plug hat stood behind the plank bar pouring liquor from a bottle into one of the glasses in front of the men. They all looked up when I came in. None of them looked friendly.
I said, “I’m here looking for Spence Walker.”
Their eyes fell on me like I’d come to collect taxes.
Nobody said anything. So I repeated myself, something I hated to do.
The man behind the bar in the plug hat had sideburns like tangled wire that came down to his chin. He wore a black eye patch over his right eye.
“Spence Walker, you say?”
I walked up to the bar.
“I’m a friend of his,” I said. “You must be Clancy.”
He looked at me close with the only eye he had like he was trying to see through water, his eyebrows bunched. He had an odor like something old and sour with a hint of cheap perfume mixed in. His striped shirt was soiled with dark stains all down the front like spilled coffee or tobacco juice.
“That’s right,” he said. “I’m Clancy and I own everything your eye falls on ’round here and Spence Walker is no friend of mine.”
You could feel men tighten their shoulders, shift in their boots. It was like some sort of threat but it wasn’t, quite.
“So I heard,” I said. “His sister’s worried about him. Sent me to look for him. That’s what I’m doing, looking for him.”
One side of his mouth curled into a cur-dog smile showing a broken eye tooth, and he poured whiskey in a glass and pushed it forward with the tips of stubbed fingers missing the first joints.
“Have a drink, stranger. On the house this one, but you buy the next.”
“I don’t drink before breakfast,” I said. I could see he wasn’t used to being turned down. “But I’ll make an exception this time.” I tossed the drink back and it was something like you might imagine if you were to drink coal oil.
“Better give me a beer to chase that nasty sumbitch down,” I said.
He seemed to enjoy my discomfort and said to one of the men at the bar, “Farge, piss in that empty glass so this man can have himself a warm beer.” Then looked at me and added: “Farge here is our beer manufacturer.”
Farge was obviously the oaf who took a big glass mug off the bar top and undid himself and took a hearty piss into it then handed to me. I took it and held it aloft, as though to judge its quantity and quality, then swung it in a swift downward arc, smashing it against the side of the oaf’s head so hard it rained piss and broken glass all over that dull smiling face. At the same time I was swinging the mug I pulled the pistol from my belt before the oaf fully hit the floor and jabbed the muzzle against Clancy’s eye patch before he could finish hooting.
“Now you stupid bastard, tell me where Spence Walker is or there’s going to be a new o
wner of everything my eye falls upon.”
The others in the place shuffled back like I just announced I had the plague.
Clancy jerked his head back so hard his hat fell off but I grabbed him by the front of his shirt so he couldn’t go anywhere and cocked the hammer back. The oaf lay out cold on the floor, no doubt dreaming of some past glory he never had, his pecker shrunk back in his trousers like the neck of a turtle.
“He come yesterday and loaded them damn stinking sheep on the train,” Clancy said, his eye bulging. “Kellogg paid him then he went and bought him a gal at the Cajun’s is all I know.”
“Where’s the Cajun’s?”
“Cross the way there by the water tower.”
“I’m leaving now,” I said. “Don’t try and fool with me or I’ll ruin your day. And if I find out different about Spence, that you’re lying to me, I’ll be back.”
I backed out of the place knowing they probably would not fool with me. You judge a man by his actions not his talk, and I’d shown them I wasn’t about a lot of talk.
The only other building that looked habitable was a small adobe standing in the shadow of the water tower. I was still trying to work that terrible taste out of my mouth from the oily liquor.
I wrapped on a heavy wood door and waited until it opened and a skinny woman who looked like she’d just gotten out of bed stood there in a dingy nightgown.
“We don’t do no business before noon,” she said. “Come back then.”
She started to close the door but I wouldn’t let her.
“I’m looking for Spence Walker,” I said.
“And I’m looking for a rich husband, honey, and if you find one let me know.”
“If Spence is inside, send him out, I want to talk to him.”
I heard a masculine voice with a thick accent ask, “Who dat at dey door?”
She turned her head and said, “Some damn cowboy is here looking for Spence.”
“Tell him he can go fuck himself.”
“He said to go fuck yourself, mister.” She seemed to find her relay amusing until I shoved her aside and went in. A consumptive looking man sitting in a chair with a blanket around his shoulders smoking a pipe seemed lost in a cloud of blue smoke. I didn’t give him a chance to set the pipe aside but instead slapped it from his skeletal hands.
“I come for Spence and I’m not leaving here without him,” I said.
The woman started cursing me, asking what right I had to bust in and lay down threats, and I told her to shut the hell up, and she did when she saw I was serious.
The man looked at me dully as though I were some apparition he couldn’t quite believe in, possibly a dead relative or the like.
“Spence?” he said. “Who dey fuck is Spence?”
“Oh, honey, you know Spence,” the woman said. “That stinking sheepherder comes around here to plink Carmella.”
“Sheep,” he cackled. “Carmella? Where dey sheep?” And he looked ’round like a kid at Christmas trying to see where the presents were hid.
The place smelled of sex and worse.
“Come and gone, Spence is,” the woman said. “Was here yesterday, bought himself two pokes off Carmella and left.”
It didn’t sound right, what she was telling me, what everyone in the Crossing had told me so far.
I saw a door and went and threw it open and there was a naked brown woman sleeping facedown on a narrow cot.
“Carmella,” the other woman said. “You satisfied? He ain’t here.”
I went outside again. The wind was blowing hard, throwing sand up against the buildings, rattling the pen rails. The spout on the water tank swung back and forth. The clouds had lowered themselves threateningly. I looked about. Nothing but a spot in the road. Then I saw something small limping way off on the far side of the tracks. A black and white dog. I went to get my horse. Clancy and the others were standing out front of the storefront, some holding drinks, curious to see what I’d do, as though they had all bought tickets to some theater spectacle.
I mounted without acknowledging their presence and rode across the railroad tracks out a couple hundred yards to where I’d seen the limping dog.
I found the dog licking the hand and face of Spence Walker, who looked like someone had tossed him from a moving train. His face and hands were bloody, his clothes torn, one of his dogs lay dead a few feet away. I washed the shepherd’s face with canteen water and he opened his eyes and looked at me.
“Spence, it’s me, Jim Glass.”
“Oh,” he said.
I checked to see if he’d been shot anywhere. He hadn’t.
“What happened to you?” I said.
He shook his head. “I ain’t sure.”
“Can you stand?”
“No, Jim, I think something’s wrong with my foot.”
I looked down and saw his one foot was turned wrong.
“I’ll be back,” I said, and rested his head down gently again and forked the saddle and rode back toward the Crossing, pulling the rifle from the scabbard as I went.
I don’t know what made me say it other than I was pissed off they’d do this to a man then just let him lay there. I knew what it was like to be such a man. When I reined in short of the storefront I said, “I am the Redeemer, the swift sword, the slayer of evil! And you sons a bitches better get that man a horse and whatever money you stole from him and go and bring him here to me, or I’ll start killing you where you stand!”
It was like a sudden hard wind knocked them all back on their heels as my horse danced around, my rifle held in my hand. And when they did not move fast enough to suit me, I shot out the only plateglass window in that snakehead whiskey joint and it crashed raining glass.
“Do it, boys!” Clancy himself said. “Jeez Christ, mister, what the fuck is wrong with you?”
I aimed the rifle at him and said, “You’re about to find out if you don’t do what I tell you.”
Several of them took a wagon out and came back with Spence in the back with his dog. Spence looked confused. One of the men untied a saddle horse standing out front and handed me up the reins and those in the wagon lifted Spence onto the horse’s back then lifted him up his lame dog and I looked at Clancy and said, “Where the hell’s his money for the sheep he sold?”
“He spent it on whores. Go ask the Cajun.”
“I will burn this trash heap to the ground and scatter you like the wind.”
Clancy reached in his jacket pocket and came out with an uncertain amount of money and handed it to Spence, who took it without question and pocketed it. He’d lost his hat somewhere. It wasn’t important. He could buy another one.
“I’ll be staying out there awhile, my friend and I, in case you’re thinking to seek your own redemption,” I said to Clancy. “My friend’s name is John Wesley Hardin and mine is Jim Glass and I’ve murdered almost as many men as he has. We got this running bet going—who can kill more men. So far he’s ahead, but I aim to catch up fast. Keep your men at home or you’ll be burying them like winter potatoes.” It was about the longest speech I ever gave anyone. They took it like kids to medicine.
I spanked the rump of Spence’s horse with the barrel of my rifle and waited till he was well started south again, then I followed and didn’t bother to look back. I wanted them to think I was invincible, and by God I think they must have thought that because no one tried to follow us.
Tom was sitting in the yard when we rode up, and Maize was hanging fresh washed clothes on a line of wire, shirts, pants, a dress, her underthings.
She cried out when she saw Spence’s rough condition. He grinned through the cuts on his face. He had a missing tooth. She helped him out of the saddle.
“I think my ankle’s busted,” he said.
She noticed the dog limping too when I set it down on the ground.
“Where’s Tater?” she said.
Spence shook his head.
“Dead,” he said. “That’s all I know.”
“Th
ey killed your dog?”
“I don’t know what they did, Maize. I was drunk or doped or something. All I know is I woke up on the ground, my ankle broke, Tater dead next to me, Bo limping around. Then I seen this rider with the sun behind him so I couldn’t see who it was. But I knew from the way he rode in here the other day who it was and thank God for him.”
“You damn fool,” she said.
“I know it,” he said.
She helped him limp to the house and I sauntered over to where Tom was sitting.
“How’s that arm?” I asked.
“I can almost bend my fingers,” he said. “Sounds like you raised a little hell out there.”
I looked back the direction I’d come.
“Don’t be surprised we get company tonight,” I said.
“You think we will?”
“If not tonight then I think they’ll leave it alone. I told them I had John Wesley Hardin out here with me. It might make them think twice.”
“You think it will?”
“No.”
“I couldn’t swat a fly with this hand,” he said.
“You’re a two-gun man. If they come, kill ’em with your other hand, you need to.”
His grin wasn’t quite a happy one.
“Trouble is thy name, Jim,” he said.
“That’s very damn poetic.”
“I stay around you much longer, I’ll be cussing and acting like a killer.”
“You know what I told ’em?”
“What?”
“That I was the Redeemer, the swift sword that would cut them down.”
“Maybe that’s what you are and you just don’t know it. Maybe God has sent you on a mission to redeem the lives of others.”
“Ha, now you are talking foolish. I don’t know why I said it. Just mad as hell is all it was.”
You could hear the deep rumble of thunder off to the north where the clouds were bunched. It would come rain soon, and maybe a whole lot more. I couldn’t help but believe that a man with one eye and half his fingers missing was not going to be cowed by somebody like me. With men like him, respect and fear was everything. Maybe he’d see what I’d done as a good excuse to wipe out Spence and Maize, and maybe old Jim Glass and John Wesley Hardin too.