by John Larison
—
I stayed that night with Ingrid but I barely slept. Agent Thorvald would soon know there was no Jesse Landcaster and then what?
I swore off whiskey for a hundredth time and really meant it. I wrapped my winnings and all the shells I could carry in a satchel and buried them in the hay of the barn. I checked Ingrid’s shoes and cleaned out the old mud with a pick. When the time come to make a run for it, we’d be ready.
The next morning Constance found me in the barn. Her riding clothes was clean as they always was and she flicked the lead to quiet Enterprise. “You’re readying yourself for a long ride.”
“That ain’t the case.”
“And what’s that roll of blankets then?”
I kicked some hay over them. I looked out the window toward the house. “I don’t reckon we should be talking. Ain’t that the senator’s carriage yonder?”
“We are soon to go for a ride. He feels we haven’t learned enough about each other. He feels I’ve been keeping aloof from him.”
She picked her teeth with a point of hay. “I plan to ride him up the steep face of the mountain. These eastern men fancy themselves prodigious riders. Give them a polo club and a lawn and they may be, but they are no match for the West’s uneven ground. What good is riding if you only ride manicured grass? Give me a mountain and a game trail and I will ride a thousand years.”
I checked my hands. They was so dirty compared to hers. “How come you ain’t said a word to your father if you reckon I done broke into his office?”
Constance put a hand to her top button. “What makes you think I didn’t tell him straightaway?”
I shrugged. “On account I’m still breathing.”
Enterprise called out and Ingrid whinnied in response. I settled her with a brushstroke to the bottom of the neck.
A third whinny sounded from outside. I leaned for a look and saw the senator leading a saddled buckskin.
He walked in and looked direct on me though he spoke to Constance. “Are you ready, my dear? Lead that animal of yours into the light and I will join you promptly.”
I kept my eyes on the brush I was passing over Ingrid’s haunch. Constance led her animal from the barn without a word.
The senator lingered long enough to say, “Don’t think I haven’t already conveyed my suspicions to your employer.”
* * *
—
Drummond fetched me from my guard duties. “Boss is waiting on you. You alone.” In Drummond’s eyes I saw he had knowledge unknown to me. There was no mistaking something had turned him against me. I knew Drum too well by then.
“What’s this about?”
His eyes moved to the distance. “You best come along, kid.”
I didn’t have no choice but to follow Drummond to the front of the estate. There Will was holding two saddled buckskins. The Governor was there, the wind throwing up his jacket. When I approached, the Governor said with no humor in his eyes, “Glad you could join us, Mr. Straight.”
He hadn’t called me “mister” in months, and I could not temper the terror that swelled in me at that one word.
Out stepped Agent Thorvald, and on his hip was a sawed-down scattergun. His eye did not waver from me.
“Come,” the Governor said. “Join me on a ride.”
“Just us?” I asked. “Where to?”
Will held the buckskin as the Governor swung up. The Governor spun his horse and said, “There now, do not tarry. We have a most vital appointment.”
Will winked. It was a warning, clear and simple.
He put his open hand to the buckskin’s nose as I swung up, and then knuckled the animal along its brow. He knew just how this particular horse wanted to be touched.
“They call him Dash.” Will’s eyes held mine. “As in, dash far, far away.”
“This direction!” The Governor heeled his animal and Drummond slapped the hindquarter of mine, and at once we broke through the sage and the gulch and across the flank of the mountain, toward what fate I could not know.
* * *
—
The timber finally slowed the Governor to a walk.
“Where we going, Boss?” I called to his back. We was riding single file through the limbs.
“I am coming to believe, Mr. Straight, that the poor man is the quintessential American. He is the only one to possess the qualities of the soldier and the saint. He might feel burdened from time to time by what other men have that he doesn’t, but in the poor man’s core is a fundamental gratitude for the little he does possess.
“A rich girl will always have trouble in this world. A rich girl will doubt the Lord’s order. She trusts too deeply in the permanence of her own comforts, you understand. Such trust is the least of American qualities. It is that trust we warred against in 1812. I suppose if I had been a better father I would have adopted her off to some collection of the righteous downtrodden and thereby let her loose into the lowest rungs of this world so that she might climb up on the strength of her own might. But alas, I did as her mother preferred and gave her only the best of everything. And so I should not be surprised by our current predicament. Some elements of character are not passed with the blood, I fear.”
The Governor blocked a branch with his forearm. “The wedding is in three days and now she tells me she cannot marry this man. She says either I let her out of this marriage or she will flee from my keeping. A girl alone in those mountains? I doubt it strongly.
“She has changed in that manner all women change when they have known the touch of a man. Like a fruit half plucked that now wears a bruise, my Constance has been spoiled. Don’t you see? That girl wants away from me but not into the arms of her intended. She has a beau, I think we all know it.” His eyes looked to the ground between us. “Have you heard word?”
“I have heard such gossip, sir, but I put no stake in it.”
“Yes, so rumors swirl. Some would say it has been a long time brewing. Only I believed my daughter’s good sense would overrun her native impulse for the beastly and carnal. And frankly, I trusted in the permanence of due gratitude from those I rescued. I should’ve known this generation would default on their debts. That is the difference between my age and yours, Straight. My generation remembers that all we have rests on the struggles of those who came before. Yours seems to believe there was no generation before. There are the aged and the young, and the world will forever belong to the young, and the young will not age.”
We rode through the forest without the benefit of a trail and the animals hurdled a log and put us through limbs. The Governor gripped his hat as he ducked. He was no stranger to hard rides.
“I think you know there is no Jesse Landcaster in the county registry. So think about this from my position, Straight. A young man arrives at my home. I invite him in and grace him with good fortune and kind living. Maybe I let his talent get the better of my judgment. And then he twice lies to me with the most fundamental and primary of all confessions between friends. We are friends, aren’t we? I honestly believed so.”
“Friends, sir?”
“Yet I don’t even know your honest name, Straight.”
“I can explain the—”
The Governor rose a finger. “You’re lucky, son, that I can see through men. I know by your eyes that you haven’t muddled my daughter. There is no doubt in me that you value your knighthood more than you value congress with the princess. Not all men are built thus, but you are. Frankly, so am I. My secret in this life, if I may, is I have never been as moved by flesh as I am by victory. Such is a supreme advantage.
“I also know that you have lied to me about your name because you are embarrassed by the raw fact of your greasy lineage. On your first night here, in my office, I let you lie to me about your family. Your blood is not your fault, Straight. I have always been prone to trust men who are propelled b
y shame. It is these men who will stop at nothing to prove themselves to me, as you have done in every manner that counts for anything. But tell me now. Is it Hernandez or Delano? Both were in the country registry. No, never mind. Your name doesn’t matter. In my mind, you are nameless. I prefer it this way. Only the nameless man has a future. Do you want a future, son?”
The Governor put a match to his cigar and turned it against the flame. He licked two fingers, pinched the match, and dropped it to the dry needles.
“Mr. Cliffpatrick brings his best man and a terrific sum of money. If you win this wager, I will forgive your deception. I will offer you a blank slate on which we may write your new, brighter future. Agent Thorvald, frankly, advocates I put you in the earth. But you and I share something that none of these others do. Isn’t that right?”
“Sir?”
“Maybe it originates in the burying of our fathers in our coming-of-age. Maybe it lies in our ambition. We are both poor men blessed with ambition. No, I am not ready to give up on you yet. I am, above all else, a loyal man, a patriot. We are maybe the only true Americans left, you and me.
“So I want to confess something of my own. You may not consider me the confessional type, but I . . . Think of Jesus, Lord to so many but friend of none. How lonely He must have been for earthly honesty. . . . A man of my stature must select his moments of confession with keen discernment. I have never trusted the preacher as thoroughly as I have the shamed man who owes me his very right to breathe. Now that is you. After today you will owe me your salvation. Do you understand?”
“Sir?”
He drew a deep breath. It was the first time I had seen the Governor bolstering his resolve. “I told you I made a fortune along the Californian rivers in the forty-nine rush. That is true, in a sense, but I did not pan for my fortune as most assume, as I may let on in conversation. I did not pull myself up by sweat and toil, not in the traditional sense at least. In the course of one night I became the owner of three mines and the commander of all their men, and in the coming years I reaped ridiculous profit from their labors.”
“In one night, sir?”
“You will never tell of this. I know that. But even if you did no man of substance would hear you. They believe in me, Straight. And nothing a hired gun says could ever change that. So what if those mines and their men came to me by way of cards? So what if the games were not level? With trickery I ruined my mentor in an hour. He died a year later from a knife when one of his debts could not be repaid. But he was not as generous as I have been. So rest assured that I only improved the world by taking stewardship of his fortune. None of this troubles me. I did the right thing. He called me ‘son.’ He had lost his boy as I had lost my father. I let him trust me. For the betterment of this Republic, I did what I did.
“Let me give you some advice, Jesse. Only profit—oh, yes, the salvation of earned bounty, the lordly return upon investments made—only hard-won profit can earn real redemption. It is profit that unites us. Profit is the future we share, and the reason you still draw breaths.
“So onward then, faster yet, we must not be late for our future!”
* * *
—
We arrived at a timbered basin far from the eyes of newspapermen. Cliffpatrick wasn’t yet there and so on the Governor’s suggestion I took some practice and tried to settle my mind on the task ahead. I wondered who would throw the saucers. I assumed Cliffpatrick must be bringing them.
I heard the cracking of limbs first and turned to see two men ride into the basin. Both was on powerful black stallions. The first man wore white and was older than even the Governor. This was Mr. Carson Cliffpatrick. He called in his plantation drawl, “Ready to try again, eh, old friend? You western men insist to learning the same lessons on new days. It remains amusing, anyway, to serve your tutelage.”
The Governor smoothed his moustache. “I was beginning to doubt you, Cliff. Thought maybe you, like those Southern generals you so fancy, had tucked your tail and ran.”
The second rider was black and just this side of Drummond’s age. He wore a hat and a sheepskin vest and upon his hips was a pair of gleaming silver six-shooters with a make I’d never before seen. They looked to shoot fifty-caliber loads. He swung down from his stallion and hitched it to the nearest tree and then took hold of his boss’s ride and offered the man a hand as he climbed down.
Cliffpatrick nearly fell backward once upon the ground, but the shooter caught him by the shoulder and kept him upright. Cliffpatrick swatted at the help and said, “This here is your gunner? How old are you, boy? Does your momma know you’re out here with us grown men?” He wore a thin goatee and a white hat with a black band and carried fifty pounds of extra flesh, all of it in his thighs.
The Governor elbowed me. It was a signal to run my mouth. “Did your Negro help you up onto that horse too? Surprised he could lift you.”
Cliffpatrick laughed. “He does have a tongue on him, I’ll give you that, governor. It’ll be a shame to see it go still in some minutes.”
“Still while I count my winnings,” I said.
The old man smiled. “Now isn’t that something.” He pointed a thumb at his shooter. “This bear here is my man Johnson. Don’t look him in the eye or he may maul you.”
“What’s our game?” I asked.
Cliffpatrick laughed. “Oh, your employer didn’t say?”
I looked at the Governor now. He shrugged. “It’s a duel, Jesse.”
The old man waddled close and patted my cheek with his icy white hand. “Now where’d that tongue go, boy?”
“Shall we prepare?” the Governor asked.
Both men pulled gold watches from their pockets. Cliffpatrick said, “Twelve fifteen.”
The Governor corrected his watch. “Twelve twenty then?”
“Make it twelve twenty-five. I do enjoy the anticipation,” Cliffpatrick said. He pointed his thumb and Johnson jogged back to the horses and fetched from a saddlebag a silver flask and two crystal glasses. He jogged in return and handed the flask to his employer and held the glasses in his two big hands. The tumblers looked like shot glasses there.
“The finest Caribbean rum.” Cliffpatrick poured the flask’s contents and said, “The man who invents a method for keeping a cube of ice at a summer sporting match will rule this divided nation.”
The two patrons lifted their drinks and clinked. “To being that man.”
Cliffpatrick refilled their glasses and shook the flask and said, “Mite left. Boys?”
Johnson looked to the earth. “No, sir. Thank you, sir.”
The Governor tipped his head toward the center of the meadow. “Go step it off. We have some wagering to do. Jesse, wait.”
He approached and stood before me. With both hands he righted the collar on my shirt. He licked his thumb and cleaned a smudge of dust from my forehead. “Now, son. A win against Cliffpatrick starts us both with a clean slate. Do you want me indebted to you? Yes, I think you do.”
Johnson and I walked toward the center of the meadow. If I died no one would ever know what come of me. If Noah sought me out, he’d only learn that I had vanished from our ranch in the spring of my seventeenth year and had never been seen again. My stomach lurched and I bent to catch my breath.
Johnson lifted me by the armpit. “There now.” I looked in time to catch him wiping a drop from his runny nose. “Got me a fever myself. Never used to this mountain weather. Wintertime even in the hot months. Where’s your peoples from?”
“I don’t know.”
“Been in the business long?”
“No, sir.”
“Oh, don’t call me ‘sir.’” He glanced over his shoulder at the white men on the hill. “Mr. Cliff pays me real good and he feeds us good too. He put my girls on with his house crew so they out the sun and maybe learn a skill worth knowing. We come for that Kansas land after the war. Fre
e acres for Negros. It was in all the papers. My woman knows some words and she yelled in joy when she read it. So we set out walking her and me, walked through our boots and it took on six months too but we made it. But . . . weren’t no land at all. Not for Negros. Then there weren’t no work on account of all the Negros that come for the land that weren’t theirs. All for nothing but then I meet Mr. Cliff on his new beef ranch. The Lord helped me fall into this real lucky.”
“Girls?”
“Yes, sir. Three, five, eight, ten, and twelve. My woman don’t seem to got no boy in her, but we aim to try again anyhow, Lord willing. A man can’t ever have too many daughters but he needs his son. You got family?”
I didn’t know how to answer.
“It’s okay. You gamed before? Not much to consider. We step off our paces and at their signal we draw. That’s all. I weren’t made good at this by the Lord’s hand to hurt you, I promise. He’ll guide my lead through your heart. These here shooters I throw got a bullet thick as a bit. You won’t feel nothing but air.”
I just looked up at him. My hands tingled. There wasn’t no feeling in me at all but low-down trembling.
He give a sad, knowing smile. “All right to be scared. Nothing to be ashamed of.”
I looked back to the Governor and Cliffpatrick. They was lighting each other’s cigars.
“You don’t got much choice in the matter,” he said. “If you run they’s gonna have me to gun you down. Best you stand proud, take it tall. The Lord will notice. I won’t gut shoot you, that much comes from on high.”
“Feeling dainty, are you?” It was Cliffpatrick.
Johnson whispered, “Be proud of yourself to come this far. Word is you had some talent.”
“Sometime this summer, perhaps?” Cliffpatrick called.
“Yes,” the Governor seconded. “Jesse, pace it off ahead of our signal.”
I felt the heat rise up. I imagined Johnson and me turning on them with our pistols. The thought brought my hands back to my body. It stilled my vision. I tested the balance of my Peacemaker. I wondered if I had it in me.