by Gerald Duff
“Yeah, that’s right.”
In his Moroccan leather chair, Jimbo Reynolds let his wrist relax in the cuff holding him in place and dropped his head. Thy will be done, Father, he prayed. Both these fuckers are crazy, and my life is in Your hands. There is no help in this world. But Lord, please do consider letting this cup pass from me.
“Thing we got to do, Colorado,” J.W. said, “is take up good positions so when they come out we do the surprising. How many are in that room? Three, I reckon, not counting this one.”
“Two white men and the big Indian. I think he might be a half-breed renegade.”
“Worst kind,” J.W. said. “Name wouldn’t be Tonto, would it?”
“Yeah, that’s it, partner,” Randall Eugene said. “How’d you know?”
“I’ve had some dealings with him, me and my partner have.”
“It’s good to have a partner,” Randall Eugene said. “I never had one before Ricky. What’s your partner’s handle?”
“Tyrone Walker.”
“He’s a brother, then.”
“Yeah, he is,” J.W. said. “A Memphis style brother, and he acts like a real one sometimes, too. The knucklehead.”
“Ricky liked what you just said,” Randall Eugene said. “Hear him laughing?”
“Yeah, I guess I do, but I’ll tell y’all what. Don’t you let on to Tyrone Walker I called him a knucklehead behind his back. He’s liable to take that serious.”
“Ricky’s really laughing now,” Randall Eugene said. “Just listen at my partner.”
***
Inside the counting room, Bob Ferry stood with his ear up against the steel door, trying to hold his breath to listen. The problem he was having was with his heart rate and respiration, and all he could pick up was the sound of their function, sucking in air and hammering away as though his lungs were about to break through the wall of his chest cavity.
“Stand away from that fucking door,” Coy Bridges was saying. “Unless you want to get in the way of my nine. I’m fixing to punch me some holes in some motherfuckers.”
“You’re not going to do shit shooting at the door, Coy,” Tonto said. “All we’ll get out of that in here is ricochets.”
“That door ain’t wood?” Coy said. “Let me try it and see.”
Tonto didn’t bother to answer, reaching instead into his pocket for a cigarette and lighting up. At the first whiff of smoke, the ventilating system in the ceiling of Jimbo Reynolds’s counting room kicked on, making it even harder for Bob Ferry to listen for sounds on the other side of the steel door.
“What’re we going to do, then?” Coy Bridges said. “Just sit here and wait that jig cowboy out?”
“He’s not the one to worry about,” Bob Ferry said. “Is he, Tonto?”
“Nope, he’s not,” Tonto said, taking one more puff and stubbing his cigarette out on a table next to him, one still covered with stacks of bills. “They’ll be here in a couple of minutes, if they’re not outside there already.”
“Who?” Coy Bridges said. “You don’t mean Memphis cops, do you?”
“Duh,” Bob Ferry said, stepping back from the door and shaking his hands before him as though they were wet and he couldn’t find a towel to dry them.
Taking a quick step to put himself in range, Coy Bridges slapped Bob Ferry on the left side of his head with the flat of the Sig Sauer, not getting a lot into it but enough to cause Bob to drop to his knees.
“Shit,” Bob said, holding his head with both hands and looking up at Coy. “Why’d you do that?”
“Because I been wanting to ever since I first laid eyes on your candy ass,” Coy said. “And you know what? It felt even better than I thought it was going to.”
“Get up, Bob,” Tonto Batiste said, “and get the fuck out of the way. Coy, you swing that door open when I tell you. I’m going out first, and I’m going to be as low to the floor as I can make it. You come right behind me, and don’t get excited and shoot me in the back, motherfucker. You do, and I swear I’ll gut you if it’s the last thing I do.”
“No,” Bob Ferry said, up now and propping himself on the edge of the heavy oak table where the cigarette butt was still smoking. “All we got to do is stay where we are, and when the cops get here they won’t let that kid shoot any more of us.”
“One thing you don’t seem to understand, Bob,” Tonto Batiste said. “I’m not going back inside again. I’m not waiting another minute to get through that door. Get ready, Coy.”
“Wait,” Bob Ferry said, taking his hand away from the side of his head and looking with surprise at the blood covering his palm. “We won’t have to do that much time in Tennessee. It’s still just a home invasion. Use your head, Tonto.”
“Coy,” Tonto said. “Shoot this motherfucker.”
Coy did, twice in the face, then stepped over Bob Ferry where he’d fallen, and put his hand on the door handle.
“Now?” he said.
TWENTY-NINE
Let us Pray
In the anteroom, Randall Eugene could feel the time coming, it was on the way, and he took a deep breath to steady himself, being careful not to let Colorado see him show any signs of nerves now that it was getting here. Hoss, he said to himself deep inside his head where nobody but him could hear, it’s coming like a blue norther working its way across the plains. Nobody can see it yet, but the cattle can feel a storm coming before any man is able to know it, and they’re restless and milling around and showing signs of wanting to run, maybe even stampede. You know your job, you’ve rode the range before, there ain’t nothing or nobody but you that can do the job. It’s about time. The hemming and hawing and bullshitting’s over. You got it to do, hoss. You fixing to have to cowboy up.
Colorado’s got your back, though, and you know that, and if he doesn’t have to lift a hand to help you do what you got to do, that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t when the nut cutting starts. He ain’t going to leave you on your own. Colorado ain’t built that way, but he doesn’t have to say that to you. He’s there, he’s your partner, and you feel it down to the bone without a bunch of palavering about it.
The old cowpoke who’s just showed up is right there, too. You don’t know where he’s come from, and you ain’t going to ask him that. If there’s a reason to tell you that, he’ll tell you. But he’s like Colorado. He ain’t going to waste time talking and bragging and strutting and explaining what he’s liable to do. He’ll just do it when the time comes, and there won’t have to be no talk, no words, no posing and styling and putting somebody else down to make himself look big.
He’s long in the tooth, and he’s dressed wrong, and he acts like he doesn’t give a shit about anything, but all that that means is that he’s still around after all the years that put the traildust on him and the lines in his face and the gray in his hair. The old dude has made it to where he is right now by knowing when to act and when not to, and Randall Eugene could feel the respect for the old cowpoke rising in him as he looked over at him out of the corner of his eye.
Later, after the storm has come and gone and the cattle have settled down again, we’ll all sit around with each other, me and Colorado and the old cowpoke, and we won’t have to say much about what took place and how it got that way. We’ll hooraw each other some, I imagine, and we’ll look into the fire at the shapes the flames are making, and we’ll know we depended on each other without having to ask for a hand or justify why we need it. It’ll have been there, and that’s all we’ll need to know, and we won’t have to spend a bunch of words on it and waste breath doing it. We can put out the fire, call in the dogs, go to sleep, and not dream about anything.
The old cowpoke was saying something now, and Randall Eugene leaned his head toward him to let him know he was listening. No reason to say anything. Ricky Nelson wasn’t saying anything, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there in the corner of the room, the shotgun laid across his lap and him ready to do whatever he would have to when the time came.
The Rang
e Foreman, though, seemed to have gone to sleep, his head dropped to his chest and his eyes closed. He was talking to himself or maybe to the Boss, but he wasn’t looking up to do it. He wasn’t meeting anybody’s eyes.
“Colorado,” the old cowboy said. “I need to ask you to do something for me. I hate to, but I don’t see no way around it.”
“What’s that, partner?” Randall Eugene said, hearing Ricky move a little where he was sitting in the shadows. He wanted to hear what the old boy had to say, too, but he sure wasn’t going to waste any words letting people know about it. “What you need?”
“Well, here’s what it is. I expect that bunch in that room there is going to be coming out here in a minute or two, and I don’t know how they’ll be doing it or what they’re minded to do. If you know what I mean.”
“I believe I do,” Randall Eugene said.
“My partner I told you about, Tyrone Walker, is downstairs there waiting, and he needs to be told what’s going on. I’d like to ask you to go down there and let him know what’s going on and what I just told you.”
“I’d purely like to help you out, but if I leave now, that outfit is liable to come out with just you and Ricky to face them,” Randall Eugene said. “I don’t want to leave you shorthanded. I don’t expect the Range Foreman’s going to be any help, even if he wasn’t hogtied to that chair. He’s acting real discouraged.”
“I appreciate that. I see what you’re saying, but Tyrone’s got to be told what’s happening, don’t you see. A man doesn’t want to leave his partner in the dark, you understand.”
“I savvy,” Randall Eugene said. “But I’m sort of between a rock and a hard place. I don’t want to leave Ricky outgunned here.”
“Yeah,” the old cowboy said. “I wonder what Ricky thinks. Why don’t we ask him?”
“We don’t need to ask him. He’s been listening to everything we been saying. He don’t talk a lot, but he don’t miss nothing going on. If he’s got anything to say, he’ll tell us,” Randall Eugene said. Then, “Won’t you, Ricky?” Waiting then to hear what Ricky would come back at him with.
“All right then,” the old boy said. “What’s Ricky say?”
Randall Eugene couldn’t keep from laughing a little, not loud or long, but the way Ricky Nelson put it struck him as funny.
“I’ll tell you,” Randall Eugene said. “Ricky says to go on and help you out, but be sure not to make the same mistake this fool lying over yonder against the wall did. Ricky says to me not to lay my firearm down and wander off without my tools.”
“That makes sense all right, but you know what?”
“What’s that, old timer?”
“If you go down there with that weapon in your hand, my partner might mistake you for somebody he ought to be shooting at. Tyrone, see, is kind of on a hair trigger when he sees somebody coming up to him strapped.”
“Strapped,” Randall Eugene said. “I despise that kind of language. It’s a trashy way of talking.”
“I’m with you on that. I just get lazy in the way I express my ideas sometime. I ought to watch closer how I talk. What do you say, though? Ready to do what Ricky says and help me out?”
“I tell you, friend,” Randall Eugene said. “I don’t question what Ricky Nelson tells me to do. He is the original Colorado.”
“That’s my way of thinking, too,” the old cowboy said. “But I tell you what, Colorado. Why don’t you just let me hold your weapon for you while you go down and talk to Tyrone Walker. You know, fill him in on what’s fixing to come down up here. I’ll keep it ready for you.”
“All right,” Randall Eugene said, beginning to hand the .45 butt first to J.W. Ragsdale. “I rather you call it a firearm, though, not a weapon. It ain’t nothing but a tool to a cowboy, same as a saddle or a set of spurs. He don’t set no special store by it.”
“Firearm, right, I got you,” J.W. said, taking the handgun and sliding it under the armchair he was crouched behind. “See where I’m putting it? When Tyrone sends you back up here, you can just reach up underneath here and pick it up.”
If he will just go on and get down the goddamn stairs, J.W. said to himself, crazy as he is, he’ll say enough to Tyrone for him to key in a call for some help, maybe change the odds a little bit in our favor. Otherwise, it’s fixing to smell more like a shooting gallery in here in a minute or two than it does already.
“Preacher,” J.W. said, watching the brim of the kid’s hat vanish as he moved down the stairs and thinking that Tyrone would have him laid down on his face and trussed up like a Christmas present in no time at all now. “Yo, man of the cloth, cowboy. Tune in here and listen at me.”
“I have put aside childish things,” the man handcuffed to the overstuffed leather chair said. “It’s not in my hands anymore. I give it up to the Lord God of Hosts. Let him sort through the works of man, separating the wheat from the chaff.”
“Tell that to Ricky Nelson. He probably got the time to listen,” J.W. said. “I want you to tumble that chair over and get down under it the best way you can. It’s fixing to be a shit-storm here in a minute, and I don’t see no bulletproof umbrella over your head.”
“Bullets?” Jimbo Reynolds said, “Ain’t there been enough shooting off of guns in my house? It’s already one thief lying here shot all to pieces. Oh Sweet Jesus, Infant Child of God. Don’t let them harm me, Savior.”
Doing what he was told, Jimbo tipped his chair up on two legs and began a slow tumble to his right, groaning as he followed the piece of furniture in its arc. When he hit the floor, air forced its way through his throat and mouth with a sound which put J.W. in mind of a large shoat in its last tumble at slaughtering time in North Mississippi. He didn’t have time to dwell on the details of the memory teased up by Jimbo’s expulsion of breath, though, because at the same instant it arrived J.W. heard two shots come from behind the steel door closing off the counting room of the Big Corral. Muffled and close enough together to be almost one though they were, the reports were unmistakably nine millimeter.
Wait long enough and maybe they’ll all kill each other, he told himself, moving to a little better angle with reference to the door beyond which the shots had come. Yeah, and maybe Ricky Nelson will pitch on in from behind me with that double barrel ten gauge and take out the first fucker coming through that door, too.
Not likely, J.W. thought bitterly, either possibility. And just when I do a favor for that little cowboy-nut kid and send him out of the line of fire to save to put in jail later, here comes the time when I’d love to see him blasting away with that .45 at anything that moves.
The preacher on the floor was scuffling to get as much of himself under the upended chair as possible, and he had set up a steady mooing as he worked at the job, alternating that sound with pleas for mercy to his own personal Savior, reminding the deity that He had an obligation to fulfill his promises to Jimbo Reynolds.
“You said You would, Jesus,” Jimbo said. “You know You did. You are bound to Your promise, Sweet Infant Child of God, bound by hoops of steel. There is no way to void the reconciliation and the covenant of blood.”
If he doesn’t shut the fuck up in the next minute, J.W. made his own promise to himself, I’ll save that bunch the trouble and shoot this fucker myself. That would be the easy way and it would be wrong, as Dick Nixon always used to say, but I could live with it.
Jimbo Reynolds fell silent for a space, probably thinking up new arguments to make Jesus realize He couldn’t weasel out of the contract He’d made with the leader of the Big Corral all those years ago – once saved, always saved, J.W. thought to himself as he focused on the handle on the steel door and reminded himself not to hold his breath as he aimed – and the tastefully painted door of Jimbo Reynolds’s counting room jumped back from its facing as though a charge of dynamite had just knocked it loose from its lock and back into the room it guarded.
The big Indian, identified by Tyrone Walker as Tonto Batiste in the International House of Pancakes, wa
s the first man through and out of the door, coming low, straight, and hard like a linebacker blitzing a quarterback who hadn’t expected it and was about to have the ball crammed down his throat before he could get rid of it. Look, I ain’t got it, why you picking on me, shit, there’s the man you ought to be mad at, all that alibi running through his head and announced in his eyes in the instant before the wrong-colored helmet would take him in the throat.
The Indian was holding the Glock 9 in both hands, the conventional grip for doing straight-up business, as he came through the door, but something on the hardwood floor of Jimbo’s anteroom caused his left foot to slip, only a little, but enough to make him drop his left hand to the floor, bent as low as he was, and he dipped to that side.
“Police,” J.W. said, loud enough for a man to hear if he was listening for it, thinking, Ricky I wish you would put a load of buckshot in this motherfucker, and then squeezed off two rounds. The first one missed completely, because of the slippage Tonto had suffered, and took out a China lamp with its base in the shape of a lamb being watched by a smiling shepherd with a crook in his hand. The second slug hit high on the Indian’s left bicep, blooming like a flower and turning him in his charge a bit toward J.W.’s right, enough so that the Indian saw who’d just shot him from behind the overturned chair.
Somebody was screaming in a loud voice, and J.W. wondered if it was himself, wishing if it was that he’d be at least a little less high-pitched than what he was hearing. The Indian began to pull the Glock around in the direction from which he’d been shot, his eyes now fixed on J.W., and it was happening slowly as it always does when you see the hit coming and are waiting for it, J.W. thought, wondering that he had time to think about what was happening so fast that if you watched it on tape you wouldn’t be able to believe it had even taken place at all it was so quick and over and done with, and J.W. shot Tonto Batiste in the throat and just beneath the left eye, both wounds simple black holes still with nothing liquid showing yet, but causing Tonto to get a thoughtful look on his face as though he’d stopped seeing any further than a foot in front of him and he was trying to understand why everything was getting so close up to him and why his focus was sharp only when he brought his field of vision to a point just at the tip of his nose, and then that stopped working, too.