The Long High Noon

by Loren D. Estleman

  “North.”

  “You caught the wrong train. This one’s heading west.”

  “It was the first one out of the station.”

  “What’s your hurry?”

  He allowed himself a bitter grin. “Gonna get rich up in Alaska.”

  * * *

  It was a long way, a man had to eat, and the jobs didn’t come in a straight line. He loaded bales of cotton and barrels of molasses aboard flatboats in New Orleans, spread tar on the streets of Houston, cleaned and polished cuspidors and swamped up vomit in a saloon called La Perla in the Spanish peninsula of Baja, California. The Mexican government appeared to have lost interest in banishing him from the republic. He slept in barns and stables and out in the open. He was a ghost, a figure of derision in rags with a short nose. He spent a night in jail in Yuba City for jerking his pistol on a gang of boys who pelted him with gravel and horse apples.

  Randy hated boats and such truck; losing his horse and gear when that ferry capsized by Fort Benton in ’77 was as close to a sailing man as he ever cared to get. But unless they built a bridge, he knew he’d have to put up with some ocean. There was too much of it between Frisco and Nome, so he set his sights on Seattle.

  He got as far as Puyallup, collapsed in the street, and lay there two hours before someone noticed and took him to a hospital for the indigent with as bad a case of pneumonia as had ever been admitted there. A month later, still weak but turned out because his bed was needed, he rode with a pile of fish to Seattle, where he put in for cook’s helper aboard a sealer bound for the Bering Sea.

  The captain was clerkly looking, with graying burnsides. He sat with his tunic buttoned to his neck at a table in a room stacked with sacks and barrels and smelling of the sea.

  “Before you sign, understand we’re not putting in at Nome. I’ve had trouble with gold fever and desertions. If you try going over the side, I’ll invoke maritime law and have you shot.”

  Randy signed.

  The cook had about the same talent as his helper, although he made better biscuits. Randy labored visibly climbing to the captain’s cabin carrying dishes on trays, stopped frequently in passageways to lean against a bulkhead to catch his breath, sweated buckets. By the time the ship passed the Aleutians, its master and crew were no longer paying him any attention, except to wonder if they’d have a corpse to send over the side.

  “He’s a curious cuss, that’s certain,” said the first mate. “Always asking landlubbers’ questions and watching how we do things.”

  The captain frowned. “Ordinarily I’d tell Cookie to give him something useful to do with all that spare time; but he’s one played-out fish. Serves me right for taking pity on an old man with only a bedroll to his name. I wasted a lecture.”

  They were creeping along the territory’s northwest coast, the man in the crow’s nest watching for ice floes, when the bosun pointed the stem of his pipe at a glitter in the otherwise solid black off starboard. “Nome.”

  Randy waited until the man went below, then swept the canvas sheet off a lifeboat stored with supplies and provisions pilfered from the galley and sea chest, climbed in, and lowered himself by pulleys to the water.

  It was a hellish voyage: What the crew considered a calm sea was to him a tempest, he was clumsy with the oars, and the scudding fog obscured the lights ashore for minutes at a time, during which he was certain he’d come around and was rowing away from land. That terrified him more than being shot to death; more than prison. A Texas cowboy had no business drowning in a frozen sea.

  When at last the incoming tide took over, drawing the boat into the shallows, he couldn’t wait for it to ground. He bundled his foodstuffs and personals in an oilcloth slicker, got out, and waded.

  Once on the beach, pale in the light from the settlement, the wire broke that had been holding him together. He dropped his bundle and followed it down to the ground.

  Lying on his back chasing his breath, he saw a ragged sliver of moon through a tear in the clouds.

  Everybody knows when the sun’ll come up and bed down; it’s in the Almanac. But the moon comes and goes on its own and nobody knows when.

  That’s on account of God made the sun, and He’s an orderly man. The moon’s the devil’s work.

  “Well, Frank,” he whispered, “I shoveled puke, scoured grease, spit up blood, and crossed a goddamn ocean. If you ain’t here, I’ll track you down and kill you twice.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Upon encountering an old friend after a separation of years, resist the urge to remark upon how much he’s aged. The chances are he’s thinking the same thing about you.

  The gaunt, moustachioed barkeep of the Broadway Saloon sighed when he recognized Frank shoving his way through the crowd to the bar.

  “No, mister,” he said, “I ain’t seen no mangy piece of wolf bait today. Leastwise not one answering to Randy Locke.”

  “Who the hell was that?” asked a prospector drinking a beer, jerking his head toward the departing man.

  “I forgot his name the minute he give it. Been in every day for a month asking the same question.”

  Frank worked all the way down Front Street, asking the same question in the Dexter, the Cosmopolitan, the Acme, and all the rest; identical, every one, hung with moose heads and snowshoes and smelling pungently of unwashed wool steaming in the heat of a cookstove. He got the same answer, as he had every day since he’d arrived in Nome.

  There was no reason to leave a description of the man he was looking for. Neither man had ever shied from leaving his true name, and in all candor any description he might give would fit half that population of frostbitten prospectors caked with blue clay to their boot-tops, even if it was any good after fifteen years. When Randy did show up, he’d make the same rounds Frank had, asking after him.

  The next day he started in fresh, not even having to ask the question now and leaving without a word after the answer. In the Parisian he was already turning away when he realized he’d hit paydirt.

  * * *

  “I ain’t just certain,” said the barman. “He was drunk and mumbled the name. I locked him up in the storeroom to keep him from getting his throat cut for what was in his pockets.”

  “Mighty big of you.”

  “I’m a Christian, mister.”

  Frank watched him unlock the door to the room behind the bar and followed him through. Randy lay spread-eagled among the barrels and crates, snoring loud enough to rattle the empty bottles awaiting refilling on the shelves.

  “He’s high-smelling. I’d be obliged if you’d take him on out of here.”

  Frank sent him away with a cartwheel dollar and hauled Randy to his feet by one arm. An empty bottle of Old Pepper slid to the floor and rolled to a stop against a rat trap, springing it with a loud snap.

  In the New York Kitchen Frank half-dragged, half-carried him to an oilcloth-covered table and dumped him into a chair. Two men seated at a nearby table picked up their plates and moved to the other side of the room.

  A waiter with a full beard and a white apron that hung to his knees appeared.

  “We don’t serve tramps. You want to buy him a bowl of soup, you send him around back.”

  The muzzle of a Remington revolver planted itself against the waiter’s forehead.

  “Mister, you got two choices.”

  “What’ll it be?”

  Frank lowered the hammer and holstered the pistol. “Coffee. Bring the pot.”

  When it came, Frank filled a thick china mug, pulled Randy’s head up from the table by his hair, and poured coffee into his open mouth. He choked, sputtered, shook loose of the other’s grip, and slapped at his hip. Frank slapped him harder across the face and went on slapping until Randy’s eyes came into focus.

  “You son of a bitch!”

  “That’s what my daddy said.” He sat down, filled the mug again, pushed it across the table, and watched him raise it to his lips with both hands. They shook. His shirt was full of holes and he smelled
as if he’d rolled in a puddle of rancid grease. “You keep on with that skullbender you’ll cheat me out of what I got coming.”

  “It’s the only thing here that’s cheap.”

  “They stir it up on the spot and refill the bottles. You can buy two for the price of an egg. When’d you get in?”

  “Last night late; waded in. I had to thaw out. This place is colder than the winter of ’81.”

  “They say it gets worse come November.” Frank pushed some banknotes across the table. “Finish that pot and buy yourself some decent clothes. I can’t shoot you in this condition.”

  “Struck it rich?”

  “It’d surprise you how much money you can make busting rocks fifteen years. I didn’t spend none of it inside and I’m camped out on the beach. You can look for me there when you stop shaking.”

  Frank was almost at the door when a hammer cocked behind him. He spun, clapping his holster with one hand and snatching out the Remington with the other, just in time to see Randy’s Colt blow a hole in the waiter’s apron. The man was still holding his sawed-off shotgun when he hit the floor.

  When Randy laid the pistol on the table, Frank leathered his. “Obliged.”

  Randy lifted his cup, steadily now with one hand.

  “I didn’t spare you nothing you ain’t got coming.”

  * * *

  Frank was dousing his nerves in the Broadway when a miner came in wearing muddy overalls. “Your name Farmer?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  “You better come get your friend. He’s over at the Sitka, drinking out the joint and calling all the customers every kind of a son of a bitch. They’re fixing to bust him to pieces.”

  The Sitka stood at the end of Front Street with an eight-foot totem pole beside the entrance. Frank ran inside, just behind the Remington. From old habit he ducked the big tin hurricane lamp that hung too far down from the low ceiling, but failed to duck the hard object that struck him from behind.

  * * *

  When he came to himself, wrists and ankles bound and slung facedown across a pack saddle, he knew himself for a fool. The leader of a party of fur-clad locals who dumped him into a snowdrift north of town explained to him that he had been posted out of town under the laws of the State of Oregon for disturbing the public peace.

  “This ain’t Oregon.” Cut loose, Frank sat up, packed a snowball, and pressed it against the tender spot on the back of his head. His rubber ear was missing.

  “Alaska’s governed by Oregon law,” said the man, built bearish with icicles in his beard. “By order of the Organic Act of 1884. We’re special deputies sworn to uphold it.”

  “What peace did I disturb?”

  “We don’t like our waiters getting shot.”

  “I didn’t shoot him. Anyway, he was fixing to bushwhack me when Randy gunned him.”

  “He’s dead on account of you, and since he is, we can’t post him out of town. Anyway, Nome needs waiters more’n it needs gun men. We’re running out of rope.”

  “How’s Randy? Last I heard he was about to get whupped by half of Nome.”

  “That was a story to smoke you out of the Broadway. The bunch that hangs out there disagree with the Organic Act of 1884.”

  “What drift you throw him in?”

  “None. We pulled him out of the New York Kitchen and put him on the last boat headed to the States till spring.”

  “Where do I go till then?”

  The man said something in a language Frank had never heard before to a man with features the color and apparent texture of iron. The man said something back, pointing into the teeth of the stinging wind.

  “There’s a party of Eskimo hunters camped a couple miles due north,” the icicle man said. “I was you, I’d get there before sundown. We got wolves make the ones down south look like squirrels. That’s why we let you keep your iron. Good luck with grizzlies. You don’t want to know how big we grow them.”

  He took it out carefully, saw that the chambers were empty. “I don’t reckon you know what become of my ear.”

  “That what that was? I stepped on it without knowing and it broke. I thought it was a small king crab got away from the New York Kitchen.”

  “It got brittle. No hard feelings, Sheriff.”

  “I ain’t a sheriff. Sheriff’s back in Portland. I’m a special deputy, and if you try coming back to Nome, I’ll make it my special responsibility to shoot you on sight. There will be hard feelings then.”

  * * *

  It was an Aleut camp, actually.

  By day the men, their faces pierced and plugged with ivory ornaments, walked miles out onto the icepack to shoot seals with their bows while their women tended the cook fires and mended and made warm coats from the skins of their prey. By night they slept in skin huts with snow plastered on the outside to keep out the cold. Their chief, who had been baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church, wore a crucifix carved from ivory on a sinew thong around his neck and smoked tobacco through a ptarmigan-bone pipe with an ivory bowl. He had no English, but was eloquent in sign.

  Frank spent the winter, skinning and doing chores for his keep. He traded his extra cartridges for a coat and the fur boots they called mukluks. The women pried loose the bullets and mixed the powder with water for ink to tattoo their chins. Sometimes, when gales raged, howling like the icicle man’s giant wolves and slinging razors of ice, the seal-oil lamps made it so hot in the huts Frank slept naked and sweating.

  He saw one of the icicle man’s gargantuan grizzlies at a distance, playfully batting around a walrus that bellowed and died and the bear ate it. He calculated it stood twelve feet high on its hind legs. However, he was under the influence of a native remedy made from otter piss filtered through fermented trade grain, and distrusted the sight. Alaska was so far out on the frontier it was almost civilization.

  Frank didn’t begrudge the time lost. He’d been snowed in before, and prison taught a man patience or it broke him. Come what would of the frontier, there would always be strikes and industry, and towns grown up around them overnight. He’d find Randy in one.

  He just didn’t know it would take as long as it did.

  THIRTY

  Opportunity is a cat, not a dog. It won’t come to you; you must go out and bring it back.

  The calendar shed leaves like buffalo hair, singly at first, then in clumps. Buckboards receded from the road, nudged aside by Model T trucks. Mercantiles became markets, filling orders placed by telephone. Electrified streets glowed bright as day in the dead of night. A Johnny Reb named D. W. Griffith moved into the vacancy left by P. T. Barnum, a good Yankee. It seemed the only place you saw an Indian was on a billboard selling chewing tobacco. In Dodge City, they tore down the Lady Gay Dance Hall and put up a roller-skating rink in its place.

  When the first gusher came in at a place called Beaumont, Texas, Frank Farmer took a job protecting wildcat oil wells from slant drillers, driving away anyone attempting to build a derrick within twenty-five yards of his employers’ with volleys from his Winchester. He asked around for Randy—a big chore in a town that had grown from nine thousand to fifty thousand souls in two years—but he never showed. He couldn’t know that his old adversary was stuck in Glenn Pool, Oklahoma Territory, recovering from eight broken ribs on Indian land suddenly no longer worthless; before that he’d worked as a cook for the West Virginia Oil Company, and spent his time off asking for Frank. He’d decided to pack it in and try his luck in Beaumont when a block-and-tackle failed and dropped ten feet of pipe on him. That was in 1905.

  In 1909, after performing much the same duties with his Winchester, Frank got a job helping to transport portable jail cells to overnight boomtowns that lacked such facilities on a permanent basis. The cells were made from iron strips riveted together and looked like big chicken coops when they were loaded aboard the wagon. Communities paid top dollar for the cages, so the wages were good and it was easy work; the recipients were so eager to accept shipment they did the unloading the
mselves. At every stop, Frank bent over the faces of drunks chained to trees while they sobered up, but none belonged to Randy.

  When Randy, making some of the same stops, got into a fight with a drunken Osage oil millionaire in Cushing Field, O.T., he spent a night in one of Frank’s portable cells, but couldn’t sleep for restlessness. He was unsure why.

  Frank tried speculating on his own in 1912. He reckoned that if dry places like Texas and Oklahoma gave up oil, so would Nevada, where he’d be the first to try his luck. He borrowed money from a banker who was impressed with the well-dressed middle-aged man who wore his hair over his ears and tied into a little queue in back, bought equipment, and freighted it to Carson City in a wagon.

  He was checking into the Empress Catherine Hotel when a signature farther up the page caught his eye. He hooked on a pair of spectacles and read Randy’s name in a big round hand. His own hand shook when he tapped the name with his spectacles. “What room’s Locke in?”

  The clerk slid his own spectacles down his nose to read upside down, then poked them back onto the bridge. “He checked out night before last.”

  “Say where he was headed?”

  “He said to tell anyone who asked to look for him in Californy. That’s how he said it, with a y. Your friend isn’t very well educated.”

  “He’s ignorant as a drift fence, and he ain’t my friend. I’m checking out.” He picked up the pen again and drew a line through his name.

  “California’s a big place, mister. How do you expect to find him?”

  “In a big crowd.”

  Frank unhitched a horse from his team and wired the banker to tell him where he could find his equipment. The banker hired the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to find him and arrest him for fraud, but when other speculators went bust looking for oil in Nevada, he considered himself fortunate things turned out as they had. He called off the investigation.

  * * *

  Understand, much of this is guesswork on my part. I got some of the story from Frank in Los Angeles where we were both working for the studios, some from cowboys and wranglers employed by them also who had worked ranches with them after they left the Circle X, and filled in the rest from imagination leavened by personal experience. I don’t pretend that this is a true account; but I challenge anyone else to do better.