by Gene Curry
Pardee didn’t have much more to say. “I mean now, John.”
Drunk or not, old John was still thinking about money and property. “I’ll go you one better, Vince. I’ll make you a proposition. You got no family, neither do I. Whoever comes out alive gets everything. One big ranch all to himself. Is it a deal?”
“A deal,” Pardee said with a sneer in his voice. “I came here to talk about justice for two dead boys, but that’s all right. Any time you’re ready.”
The light from the first barrel of oil began to die while he was still talking. Then it went out and the red-hot barrel made a clanging sound. Soon the second barrel would start to go too; already it was throwing long shadows.
The men on both sides were starting to get edgy. We were about evenly matched, men and guns, and a lot of us were going to get killed if it wasn’t stopped. Warning the men to stay out of it while the two old-timers had their shoot-out would be useless because some fool with the jitters would be sure to join in; and when that happened you’d see a slaughter.
John started to edge his horse closer to the wire; on the other side Pardee began to do the same thing.
“Not now,” I yelled. In moments all the light would be gone.
“You talking for John?” Pardee yelled back. “What’re you up to, Saddler?”
John got hopping mad. “Nobody talks for me. Let’s get at it, Vince.”
I shouted them down. “Not now. Do it in daylight. That way nobody gets killed but one of you or both of you—but that’s all.”
There was a long silence broken at last by Pardee. “I don’t mind that, Saddler, but it’s not for you to decide.”
I spoke quietly to John and he finally agreed.
“We’ll do it by day,” he shouted, “but not on your land, not on mine. Neutral ground. In front of the whole town so there’s no argument later about whether it was a fair fight. How does that suit you?”
“I don’t care, John. Just so it gets done. Is that all you have to say?”
“No, Vince. I don’t want the sheriff there. Get your tame sheriff out of town and we’ll do it there. No sheriff and no tricks!”
That ended it for now. Pardee took his men away from there and we went back to the ranch. Some of Pardee’s boys started hollering as they rode away, some of my boys hollered back, but that’s all there was.
The distance between us grew longer and the yelling stopped. We rode through the darkness, John between Jessie and me; he cursed and threatened a lot, but you could almost hear the fear gnawing at his guts. I wondered if Pardee was feeling the same way. They were both old men, stubborn as only old men can be; but it’s been my experience that the closer a man is to death’s door, the less he wants to walk through.
When we got back Curly Fitch took John’s horse and put it up for the night. Jessie followed me to the corral; I knew she wanted to give me an argument about what was going to happen the next day in town.
She got started. “You know it isn’t right for Mr. Wingate to do this, Saddler. Every time I try to do something for Mr. Wingate you get in the way.”
“You mean I should have let you murder Pardee. What do you think would have happened if I let you do that? John would have been dead the next minute.”
“No need for that to happen. While I was killing Pardee you could have knocked Mr. Wingate off his horse. The light was almost gone. You could have dragged him away under cover of the dark.”
I turned away from her and headed for the house.
“More of that teamwork you keep talking about? It wouldn’t occur to you that Pardee is not a tin can.”
I was mad and Jessie had to walk fast to keep up with me. She was angry too, angrier than I was. “What the hell do I care about Pardee? To me he’s nothing but a target and the sooner somebody put a hole in him the better for all concerned. I asked you this before—whose side are you on?”
“The answer is the same—the side that pays me. Which doesn’t mean I have to turn into a sneak-killer to earn my wages. You wouldn’t understand that, would you?”
She pulled at my arm as I was going up the steps to the porch.
I turned back to face her. “Well, would you?” I said.
“No, it wouldn’t. I don’t even think about it. You’d do a better job than you’re doing if you looked at it the same way. I won’t see Mr. Wingate killed. I don’t trust Pardee. I know he’s going to try something sneaky.”
I pulled my arm free of her grip. “And you want to beat him to it.”
“That right. What’s wrong with that?”
“If you don’t know, then I can’t tell you. Look, Jessie, if I thought Pardee was planning something dirty I’d go out tonight and kill him.”
Jessie said, “That’s not a bad idea. You want me to go with you? With Pardee dead the rest would scatter or come to work for Mr. Wingate.”
“You killed those two men on the north range, didn’t you?” It was time to get it out in the open.
“Who says I did?”
“Nobody. I’m saying it.”
“You’ve got no proof.”
“I don’t need proof. If it hadn’t been for that I might have been able to work out a peace. Now there isn’t much chance of that. If John does get killed tomorrow I’ll be talking to you, missy.”
I had been thinking of nothing else all the way back from the boundary wire. If John got killed I would have to do something about it.
“Might be a good thing if you moved on right now,” I told her. “I mean tonight. Ride out and don’t come back. Bad or good, leave things as they are. Those two men are dead and there’s nothing to be done about that. They were no friends of mine so I can’t get worked up about it—not unless something happens to John.”
I went into the house and she followed me. I thought I would find old John hitting the rum bottle; instead he had gone to bed.
Jessie threw her hat on the table and sat down. “I’m not leaving and nothing’s going to happen to Mr. Wingate. If you still want me to leave, why don’t we let Mr. Wingate decide. You just work here, Saddler.”
I shook my head. “He’s got enough on his mind right now, but remember what I said.”
Jessie went to the kitchen and came back with a full bottle of rum. “You want a drink?”
I said no.
“I’m not afraid of you, Saddler,” she said, filling a glass to the brim. “I’m not afraid of any man.” She finished the drink without taking the glass from her mouth and immediately her eyes grew bright and hard. “Twice now you beat me to the draw, but don’t be too sure about the third time. You think it’ll come to that?”
“It’s beginning to look like it. We’ll know for sure after John and Pardee step off tomorrow.”
“That we will,” she agreed.
I said I was going to bed, but before I did I gave her one last warning. “When we go into town tomorrow we ride in together. I don’t want you going out ahead of us to do Pardee dirt with a stolen rifle. I want to see you saddle up with the rest of us.”
She filled her glass again and gave me a mean look. “You’ll see me, you son of a bitch.”
“I wouldn’t cry if I didn’t,” I said. “You’ve been nothing but a headache since you got here. I’m good and sick of your carrying-on. With you it’s kill this and kill that. Don’t you ever think of anything else but killing!”
She was going at the rum pretty hard. “You didn’t say that to me in bed. In bed it wasn’t so bad, but once you put your pants on you’re a pain in the ass. You know what I think your trouble is, Saddler?”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
“I will because I finally figured it out. You don’t really know what you want to be. A good feller or a man people are afraid of.”
“Why would I want people to be afraid of me?”
“When people are afraid of you it means they respect you.”
“Not so,” I said. “It just means they’re afraid of you. It’s not the same thing. You don’t
think so, but fear is not respect. You wouldn’t understand, would you?”
“I think you’re wrong. I’d like people to be afraid of me. They will be before I’m through. I’d like to ride into a town and see people run like rabbits, then walk into a crowded saloon and have them get out of my way without having to say a word. If you don’t want that kind of respect, Saddler, you’re nothing but a fool.”
“Then I’m a fool,” I said.
Chapter Ten
Well, today was the day that was supposed to end the Wingate-Pardee range war to everybody’s satisfaction, and even the dead man wouldn’t be able to complain after the bullet tore through a vital spot. I was up and around before anybody else on the place and, taking a cup of reheated coffee, I went out on the porch and sat in a rocker and waited for first light.
It was still dark, and everything was so peaceful I thought it a shame that one or both old men had to die before the day was over. Yet there was nothing to be done about it short of roping John to his bed and sitting on him. That was one of the useless ideas I had.
There was a light in the bunkhouse by the time the sun came up. War or no war, the chores still had to be done. While I waited, Curly Fitch came out and washed his face and hands in a tin basin and threw away the slops. He went back inside without even looking at me though he knew I was there.
It was a nice morning, with a cool wind from the north. The sun was full up when I heard John yelling for his breakfast. Then he changed his mind and yelled at Laughing Woman to fetch him a bottle. I knew how he felt but one drink is never enough for John. I went back inside to see if I could interest him in some black coffee.
He was sitting by himself at the head of the long table over which he had presided at so many hearty meals. A bottle and glass stood in front of him, and he didn’t look as tough as he sounded. He didn’t look tough at all, just old and tired and frightened, red-eyed from poor sleep and shaking from the effects of too much rum.
But he tried to make a brave show of it. “Pull up a chair, Saddler. You want a little snort to open your eyes?”
I said I was drinking coffee. “Do you good to have some,” I said.
“Not this morning,” he roared, rubbing his eyes as he said it, and I wondered how much of his headache was caused by rum and how much by fear.
The glass rattled against his long brown teeth as he took a drink of rum. Some of it spilled down his chin and he wiped it away with the back of his bony hand. There was a shake in his hand when he put the glass down.
“Come on for Christ sake, join me in a drink,” he roared. “I feel powerful good this morning.”
“Why?” I asked him.
“You mean you haven’t figured it out?”
I said not yet.
His laugh was loud and it was hollow as a dried gourd. “That’s why you’ll never be a businessman,” he said. “You still don’t know why I feel so good.”
I had to confess I didn’t.
“Then I’ll tell you,” he said. “Before this day is over I’ll be sole owner of the biggest ranch in Dade County.”
Now that the first drink was in his belly the second one went down easier. Laughing Woman brought in steak and eggs and a big pot of coffee. Without looking at the food, John waved her away.
“That’s because Vince Pardee doesn’t have a prayer against me,” he said with the courage of two drinks of Old Newburyport rum. “Vince is old and he’s slowed up a lot. I’m no spring chicken myself, but I’m still fast as a rattler.”
He put a sorrowful look on his already mournful Yankee face. “In a way I feel bad about having to kill old Vince. Last night I lay awake a long time thinking about that.”
I could tell he hadn’t slept at all.
“We had some good times over the years,” John said. “You know all about that, Saddler. You never got to know Vince that well, but he never had a bad word for you. Be that as it may, I can’t let him get away with calling me a sneaking ambusher of young cowboys. Can I now?”
“Probably not,” I said.
“Probably nothing.”
“He could have been told wrong.”
“What’s the difference? He said what he said. He said it in front of a lot of men who won’t forget what he said. If I don’t face him people will think what he said is true. Is that true or not.”
It was true, I said. “Would you hold off and let me try to find out who did the killing?”
I wondered if I could beat the truth out of Jessie; there was no doubt in my mind that she had blasted the two cowboys.
“Too late for that,” John said. I knew he wanted to give me the time, but his pride wouldn’t let him. “No matter what I do or don’t do I’ll still be in the wrong. The only thing I can do right is kill my old friend Vince. I’ve been thinking, Saddler.”
“What about?” I said, forking fried meat onto my plate and topping it with two eggs. When I looked up, Laughing Woman had her head stuck out of the kitchen door and was nodding and smiling at me. She knew I was doing my damnedest to keep her old Yankee alive.
“I was thinking, Vince called me a coward but maybe he’s the coward,” John said. “It could be he won’t even show up. A man with too much booze in him talks a lot. What do you think?”
I knew that Vince Pardee drank as little as any man could and still be called a drinker. I remembered a Christmas many years in the past when we were all kicking over the furniture and singing songs and Vince Pardee sat content with a single drink that lasted the whole night, grinning at the rest of us, while we rang the gong so hard it must have been heard in the next county.
“He’ll show up,” I said.
“I guess he will,” John said slowly, not as cheerful as he had been. Then he straightened up. “If the son-of-a-bitch doesn’t show up I’ll have to go after him. What else can I do if he doesn’t?”
“No other way,” I said. “Why don’t you eat something, John? Food’ll go to waste if you don’t dig in.”
John said he couldn’t eat another bite. “A man doesn’t want to eat so much grub he gets sleepy.”
He hadn’t eaten a thing, but he had knocked back three glasses of rum. Then as if the thought had just come to him, he said, “Where’s Jessie? Here we are up and eating and I haven’t seen a hair of her.”
“I’m here, Mr. Wingate.”
“By God, so you are!”
I knew she had been listening to us while we talked, if that’s what you call what we had been doing.
She came from the flagstoned hallway, where the sleeping rooms were, and into the dining room. Later in the day, if John got shot, I might have to shoot her too; at the moment she was a picture.
During the night I had heard her moving about in her room, and I didn’t know what she was doing. My thought was that she couldn’t sleep; now I knew better—the little lady was prettying herself up for a gun battle. I thought that was one hell of a thing, and I didn’t change my mind after the faint smell of lilac soap came to me. She didn’t have her hat on and her cropped wheat-colored hair was dry and fluffy like the clean fluffy fur of some small, gentle, wild animal that would try to take a bite if you picked it up: a baby prairie dog or a woodchuck or a gopher or a …
I knew better than that. It was the rum thinking.
Jessie was a baby wolf, old enough to give a dangerous bite.
Still and all, she was a picture, all done up to look pretty; and she was. She had bathed and washed her shirt and neckerchief; the not-so-unpleasant smell of benzene clung to her striped pants. Any stains on her small-man trousers had been wiped away. I guessed her hat was still damp from the same benzene she had used on her pants. Now I knew why she had been up all night.
She smiled shyly at old John, hard at me.
Gallant as only an old drunk can be, John rose from the table with his hand outstretched.
The horse’s ass! “A vision of loveliness!” he said.
I thought he was going to stand up to give me a sermon, and he might ha
ve if he hadn’t been so drunk.
“Your heart isn’t in this fight, Saddler. It hasn’t been from the beginning. Whose side are you on, anyway?”
I was getting tired of being asked that question. “I thought I was on your side, John, and as of now I’m on nobody’s side.”
I threw my knife and fork on the table and they skidded to the other side and fell on the floor. “You can go to hell, you mangy old buzzard,” I said. “Any wages I got coming you can stick up your ass.”
If he had been a younger man and if old times hadn’t counted for something I would have wrapped the rum bottle around his baldy head but, friend or not, I couldn’t take any more of his bullshit.
I saw that Jessie was giving me one of her peculiar smiles. “Little Eva here will look after you,” I said.
“Go to hell, Saddler,” John said.
I told him to go fuck himself and reached for my hat.
“You’re the one who’s afraid to cross the ice,” Jessie said to me—and to think I had saved this bitch’s life.
John jumped from the table and ran at me with shaking hands. “I don’t need you, Saddler. Go on, say it—you think I’m afraid to die.”
“Everybody is, John,” I said quietly. “What makes you so different?”
He tried to hit me and I pushed him away with one hand, and that took all the fight out of him.
I put my hat on. John had gone back to his chair.
I was at the door when I turned back. “Remember the old rule, John. Don’t try to be fast because the first bullet isn’t always the one that kills. Not even the second. Get your gun out and line it up on his chest. Even if the bullets are coming at you and some even hitting you that’s what you have to do. More than that I can’t tell you.”
While I was saying it I thought of tired old Vince Pardee, short and bearded and with his mulish sense of honor.
“Why don’t you sit down and finish your breakfast, you damn fool!” John said, swaying in his chair.
Jessie looked disappointed. “Let him go, Mr. Wingate,” she said.