by Bill Brooks
the man who shot him growing hot in his head as he
began planning where exactly he was going to shoot
the man who shot him: in the spine first, then through
the neck. Make the sumbitch suffer a little before I
put out his lights altogether.
It made him feel some better thinking about how
he was going to make the man suffer.
Felt like those invisible dogs had their teeth sunk in
all the way to the bone and wouldn’t let go.
Shit fire.
“Well, now, what do you think of that high and mighty
son of a bitch just turning his back and walking away
like we wasn’t any more to him than dog shit?” Zack
said to his brothers when Jake left them standing there.
“I think he’s lying to us,” Zeb said. “I think he in-
tends on collecting that reward for himself.”
Zane remained quiet, squatting on his heel. His
head ached from drinking too much the night before
and the thought of his sins, like God was pressing his
thumbs into his eye sockets.
“What do we do now?” Zack asked.
“I’m thinking,” Zeb said.
“We could follow him,” Zane said, standing.
Both his brothers looked at him with surprise.
“See where he goes, see if he’s got that fellow lo-
cated somewhere. Might be he’s going there right
now to arrest him, or kill him and collect the reward
money.”
“Guddamn, would you listen to that,” Zeb said.
“Our little brother’s got his thinking cap on.”
All Zane wanted was to get it over with so he could
start confessing his sins, collect the reward money for
a stake to make a fresh start—get shut forever of his
brothers. The sooner the better, the way he figured it.
They stood there for a bit waiting, Zeb saying how
they’d have to play it cool and not let on they were
watching the lawman.
“We might have to fight him over Sunday,” Zack
said. “You see those double pistols he was wearing
when he flashed you his badge?”
“Two-gun man,” Zeb said. “You ever fought a
two-gun man?”
“I ain’t never fought one, have you?”
“I ain’t never fought one, neither, but it don’t make
monkey shit to me ’cause we got three guns to his
two.”
“We’d have had more guns if they hadn’t got stole
with our horses,” Zack said.
“Shut your pie hole about them damn stole
horses!” Zeb was easily irritated by what he consid-
ered foolish and unnecessary comments. “You wasn’t
so stupid, we wouldn’t be needing to discuss the
matter!”
They waited until the lawman turned a corner then
began to follow. They came around the same corner
in time to see him enter a big house then come out
again. They watched as he walked up the street and
entered a smaller house and come out again. He
hadn’t stayed long in either place.
“I think he’s trying to shuck us off his trail,” Zeb
said. “Thinks he’s smart by acting like he don’t know
we’re following him.”
Fact was, Jake hadn’t noticed the trio until he left
Clara’s.
Shit.
He could think of only one thing to do and he did it.
Sam Toe was picking the feet of a horse when Jake
arrived.
“Got that gelding saddled?”
“Inside the stable,” Sam Toe said, pointing with
his hoof knife.
The Stone brothers stopped a block short of the stables.
“Now what?” Zack said. “Look’s like he’s getting
ready to ride out.”
“What’d you do with them damn horses we stole
off that woman?” Zeb said.
Zack shrugged. Both he and Zeb looked at Zane.
“I put them in that corral.”
They saw the lawman ride out leading the stolen
horses.
“Where the hell’s he headed now?” Zeb said, his
voice a whine of irritation.
They watched him ride off onto the grasslands.
“Shit fire!” Zack said. “He’s got to know they
been stole and is taking them back to that woman.”
“We should have just gone on and killed her.”
They again turned their attention to the youngest
brother.
“See what you did now?”
“Oh go to hell,” Zane said. “He may know they’re
stolen but he don’t know who stole ’em.”
“He will soon enough,” Zack said. “Then he’ll
come back here looking for us.”
“Since when has you sons of bitches been afraid of
anybody?” Zane asked.
“Shit, since never,” Zeb said. “Who gives a fuck
what she tells him. We find that Sunday, we’ll kill him
and get in the wind. And if we don’t find him before
that marshal gets back, well, it’s his poor luck, cause
we’ll kill him, too.”
Jake was hoping the men would follow him, but when
he got a mile out he stopped and waited and when
they didn’t come, he circled back. Those bounty
hunters would find William Sunday as easy as a fox
finds chickens; it was just a matter of time.
William Sunday stood in the parlor of the big
house waiting for the marshal to return. He was
dressed in his best suit, one he’d purchased for just
this occasion. He looked at the fine woodwork of the
house. It was a good house. Clara would enjoy living
in it. He noticed, too, that the pain in him wasn’t so
bad even though he hadn’t taken a drop of laudanum
in the last hour. He’d heard that when a man’s time
gets very close all the pain and suffering go out of
him, he becomes at peace.
An old lawman turned gambler he once knew in
Hays told him on his deathbed: “Bill, whatever it is
killing me don’t hurt no more. I don’t know why it
don’t hurt, it just don’t. If this is anything like what
death feels like, then I’m ready for it,” and closed his
eyes almost as soon as he said it and went into that
long forever sleep.
William Sunday had never given much thought to
God and the afterlife until lately. Seemed strange for a
man to live so short a time then die and be forgotten
as though he’d never lived at all. None of it made any
sense. But then, the opposite argument never carried
much weight with him, either. He recalled saying one
night as the laudanum started to carry him to that
strange place how he’d like to believe—talking to
himself aloud—but that unless he heard a voice
speaking to him that very moment, how the hell was
he supposed to believe in the ghostly world? He heard
no voice.
He thought of it—dying—as about like stepping
through a door and finding nothing on the other side
except space and darkness awaiting him.
Space and darkness.
I never been afraid of nothing, till now.
He heard the turn of a doorknob coming from the
back. Slipped out his pistols wishing it could have
ended the way he wanted. Stood there waiting, waiting.
Jake called out to him.
“It’s just me.”
He eased the guns back into their pockets, grateful
it would end the way he’d planned it instead of on
someone else’s terms.
“Thought you had to be someplace and weren’t
coming back until tonight like we agreed.”
“Plans have changed. I was hoping to lead those
bounty hunters on a chase, shake them once we got
far enough out of Sweet Sorrow. Thing is, they didn’t
take the bait. They’re still in town and I’m guessing
looking hard for you this very moment.”
“Then let’s let them find me.”
“You still want to go through with it?”
“I don’t see any other way. It’s them or this thing
eating my insides.”
“Okay, then. You set?”
“Ready as I’m ever going to be.”
“Let’s go out the back.”
“Lead the way.”
Skinny Dick’s defunct saloon was as stonily silent as a
graveyard. A skin of dust lay everywhere, collected
from the months of disuse; its boarded windows al-
lowed only thin blades of light to cut through the nar-
row spaces of the poor nailed boards. The place had
been waiting to be sold ever since the killings of
Skinny Dick and his whore, Mistress Sheba. It hadn’t
been much of a draw to begin with, and after the
killings there was nobody to buy it and start over. Spi-
ders had been busy, the rats, too, looking at the tracks
and droppings in the dust atop the bar.
William Sunday coughed and it hurt some.
“Pick your spot,” Jake said.
The gunfighter looked around, saw a table and
three chairs around it along one wall just opposite the
front doors and went and sat in one of the chairs so he
had a good view of anyone coming in, but sat enough
in the shadows that whoever came in wouldn’t see
him immediately.
“I don’t suppose this old drinking house has a
drink in it?”
Jake shook his head.
“It got pilfered pretty good of any liquor once
word got around Skinny Dick wasn’t guarding it any-
more with a gun.”
The regulator clock above the bar had stopped
due to no one to wind it. Its black hands stood
frozen at two-thirty.
“Quiet in here,” William Sunday said.
Jake stood waiting.
“If you would be so kind as to get this started,
Marshal, I’d appreciate it. I doubt my respite from the
pain is going to last very much longer.”
“You sure this is how you want it? No doubts?”
The gunfighter nodded as he took out his pocket
pistols and set them on the table in front of him. He
took also a thick cigar and lighted it before blowing a
stream of smoke.
“This is how I want it. My death, my terms.”
Jake approached him, extended his hand, and said,
“Good luck to you, then.”
“Let’s hope those boys are all good shots, for I
know I am.”
Jake turned and walked out the front doors, left
them standing open like an invitation. The light fell in
through them about as wide as a man’s body and lay
there on the dusty floor and William Sunday watched
it knowing it would move an inch at a time either far-
ther into the room or in retreat, depending on the way
the world was turning.
The gunman sat and smoked and waited.
31
Big Belly rode into Sweet Sorrow as if he’d just
bought the place. Hardly anyone on the streets paid
him any attention. A few dogs came out and barked,
then got distracted and went off barking at something
else that interested them. Some kids played with a
metal hoop, pushing it along with a stick. A man in
an apron stood outside a store sweeping the walk.
He rode past a storefront that had boxes in the
window that white men buried their dead in, and past
another store that had little hats with feathers in the
window. He rode past a corral that had a few horses
in it and a man beating hell out of a horseshoe with a
hammer that rang so sharply it hurt Big Belly’s ears.
White men were the noisiest bastards ever was.
He saw a place where he knew white men drank,
for there were several of them standing out front with
glasses of beer in their hands, the hats on their heads
cockeyed, talking to one another in loud voices. He
decided to pass it up, see if there was another place
less crowded he might slip in unnoticed and get him-
self a drink. A block up the street he saw just such a
place, its doors flung wide and nobody standing out
front. He reined in, dismounted, and tied up his three
horses. Took one of the pistols out of the saddle bags
to use for barter and stuck it in his pants, then tried to
walk like he wasn’t an Indian, a Comanche Indian,
but there was only so much he could do with those
banty bowlegs of his.
Inside it was dark and dusty and not a single soul
in sight.
William Sunday had his pistol aimed at the stranger
waiting to see what his play was. Watched him as he
walked bowlegged up to the bar and stood there. Son
of a bitch must have been sitting horses since he was a
baby to be that bowlegged.
Big Belly stood there waiting for someone to come
and ask him what he wanted. He eased out the pistol
and laid it atop the bar and waited some more, and
when no one came, he slapped a palm on the bar rais-
ing a small cloud of dust that got in his nostrils and
caused him to sneeze.
“Hi-ya!” he called. “Wiss-key!” one of the few
English words he knew.
It sounded like half grunt and half sneeze and the
gunfighter was prepared to drop him where he
stood.
“Wiss-key!” he yelled again.
Sunday eased off the trigger; this man wasn’t there
to kill him, but get a drink. Couldn’t he see the damn
bar was closed for business?
Big Belly rocked on the balls of his feet looking up
and down the bar. Saw a door leading to the back and
went down to it and tried the handle and when it
swung open he called again: “Wiss-key!”
But no one came and he grumbled to himself what
sort of son of a bitching goddamn two kinds of hell
was this place where a man couldn’t even trade a good
pistol for a drink of whiskey?
He never saw the man sitting in the shadows along
the wall with a gun pointed at him until it was too
late.
Jake found the Stone brothers coming out of Tall
John’s funeral parlor. They’d been going into every
business along Main Street asking after a stranger in
town—had any come in lately? His name is William
Sunday and he is a notorious killer of children and
has raped fif
ty white women and shot old men in their
beds while they slept and so on and so forth. And
we’re here to put an end to his reign of terror. It was
Zeb’s idea to make Sunday sound like the devil incar-
nate and instill fear in the listener hoping to gain
quick information.
Tall John saw them for what they were: goddamn
bounty hunters. What they didn’t know was that he
knew William Sunday from years back. He had
buried William Sunday’s wife and the man had pri-
vately paid him double his going rate for a first-class
funeral, asking only that he keep it secret that he’d
done so. William Sunday, shootist—and some said the
worst type of man there was—never showed the un-
dertaker anything but a quiet grieving for a wife lost.
“No, I never seen or heard of nobody like that here
in Sweet Sorrow,” Tall John had told the three. “I
mean if I had, I’d sure enough put you fellows on to
his whereabouts. This is a nice quiet town and we’d
not want any trouble, especially from notorious
killers of children and such.”
He could see their disappointment as they turned
and walked out.
“Hey,” Jake said, as he stood on the street.
They stopped as one.
“I found your man.”
They traded looks of suspicion.
“Yeah, where’s he at?”
“Not very far from here. Up the street at the old
saloon called the Pleasure Palace.” Jake nodded in the
direction of the place. He could see they weren’t buy-
ing it that easy. It was their nature to be suspicious;
men who hunted other men for a living generally
were wary. He anticipated their next question.
“How come you ain’t just arrested him and col-
lected that reward money for yourself if you know
where he is?” Zeb said.
“I’m not in the bounty-hunting business and he’s
not wanted around here for anything. You’d be doing
me a favor removing him from the town. But if you
boys don’t want him . . .”
“No, we want him, all right, and we aim to get
him.”
“What’s he doing?” Zack asked.
“What does a man usually do in a saloon?” Jake
said, and turned and walked away.
“What you think, Zeb?” Zack asked.
“I think it all smells like yesterday’s fish.”
“Well, we going to go get him, or what?”
“What choice do we have? That’s what we came
here for.”
The youngest, Zane, had already started walking