The Long High Noon

by Loren D. Estleman

  Frank was friendly and liked to talk about himself. He was too old to wrangle or herd, but he was kept busy working as an extra in what they called outdoor dramas. Directors liked his looks, with his Buffalo Bill whiskers and long silvering hair worn long to cover the hole where one ear was missing, and used him to dress up saloon sets and necktie parties; he looked good in his range clothes holding a flickering torch and was usually up front for Bill Hart or Tom Mix to shoot him first and dispel the mob.

  I asked him why all the fuss with Randy. It was no surprise he had an answer ready.

  “You ever try to drive a nail and it just won’t go in straight? It’s never the fault of the nail; there’s a knot in the wood or you just ain’t a good nailer. But you blame the nail anyway, just like it’s a bad man or an ornery dog. You just plain hate it, and for no good reason.

  “Well, sir, that there’s Randy in a nutshell.”

  I never could get Randy to sit down and talk. He ignored me the first time, growled at me the second, and as I approached him for one more try he gathered up his cook’s apron in one hand and rested the other on his Colt. He was an extra part-time—if you went to the pictures and saw an old man smoking a pipe and rocking on a front porch, it was him more than likely—and did some cooking for the cast and crew when a company went on location.

  He was a disagreeable old cuss, and his enemy genial; but I liked Randy better. Frank was full of himself, and I suspect he pumped up his personal exploits considerable. I didn’t dislike him so much as I thought he was a clumsy liar, laughing self-consciously at his own tall tales like a poker player who couldn’t bluff. Randy didn’t care what folks thought of him, which is an appealing trait. We might have been friends if Frank had never left Pennsylvania. Like any good hunter, Randy thought only of his prey.

  I was going to write a scenario about their generation-long feud; I had a story editor at Triangle mildly interested in it as a possible vehicle for Mix and Carey. But I never did. There was no redemption in it to iris out on at the end.

  * * *

  Hollywood, California, was the last western boomtown. It had all the vices you expect of such places, but they got played up more in the newspapers because the people who practiced them had their faces plastered on full-color posters in neighborhood theaters across the country and grinned and snarled and wiggled their eyebrows on screens where their faces were blowed up twenty times life size. You saw them on the covers of magazines, read about what they slept in and how they ate and what kind of automobiles they drove, so when a matinee idol got arrested in a men-only brothel or a little sweetheart fell down a flight of stairs with a snootful of cocaine, the story drove President Taft clean off the front page.

  There was killing, too; and long before those sordid cases involving fat actors and big-time directors.

  Westerns were the moving pictures’ most popular product. After the industry moved to California to take advantage of the light, it found all the mountains and deserts it needed to represent any territory in the old frontier without having to paint a single backdrop. And it struck paydirt in talent. When the last of the great ranches stopped hiring, all the boys gathered up their gear and headed to where the jobs were. They looked after the picturesque livestock for wages, sometimes wandered into a shot or were invited into one because of their look, and the outfit saved on wardrobe and equipment because they came with their own. A few of them even became stars. Will Rogers and Hoot Gibson went straight from scratchy bedrolls to silk sheets.

  There was no lack for work. At a saloon called the Watering Hole in the heart of Los Angeles, a man with range experience could stand on the corner for a couple of hours and see everyone he knew, doing rope tricks and such to attract the attention of a passing casting director. A tenderheel from back East named Harry Carey hung around stealing authenticity.

  I never could find the tracks in publishing after I left the Cody outfit. I think those marathon Indian fights and saving homesteaders’ daughters from runaway horses ruined me for writing literature under my own name. I killed more men in a chapter than Crazy Horse at the Little Big Horn. When my money ran out in Dayton, Ohio, I left behind a trunkful of manuscripts and another trunkful of rejections and joined the westward migration. In no time at all I landed a spot polishing a scenario for Thomas Ince on his five-thousand-acre backlot north of Santa Monica—the place was rolling fat with actors and directors but thin on writers—and after Custer’s Last Fight came in under budget and ahead of schedule I was offered a steady job. I accepted; the work was easy, and because no words were spoken on film, except on title cards when explanation was needed, a forty-four-minute two-reeler ran about ten pages. It paid better than working cattle and you could do it in your long-handles.

  Biograph was paying better, though, so I quit and went there. But Griffith didn’t like my writing—said it read like a Ned Buntline dime novel—and in less than a week I was through with the best outfit in the business. That’s how I came to be a fellow employee of Frank’s and Randy’s for the first time since 1868.

  Neither man was interested in meeting featured players; stars, folks were calling them now, and the feeling was mutual on the stars’ part.

  The years since they got out of the oil business had not been kind to Frank and Randy. They’d been up and down, down more than up, which is where aging sets in. Frank kept his hat on inside and out because that long hair the directors found so photogenic lost its glamour when you saw his scalp poking up through it. Randy was getting bent, his leg dragged worse than always, and that patch of frostbitten skin that hadn’t patched itself up since buffalo days leaked into his scraggy beard. The sight of it put some off their feed, and so he drifted from one studio commissary to the next, still practicing making biscuits.

  It was 1913. They’d been shooting at each other for forty-five years, longer than many friendships and most marriages. The death of either man—no matter if they were separated by a thousand miles of prairie or a city block—would be known for certain to the survivor the instant the spirit was divided from the body. So deep was their bond of hatred, the only consistent thing in their lives, and to which they were entirely faithful.

  They had, in fact, been separated by considerably more than a thousand miles, and by something less than a city block. For a time, Frank Farmer had joined one of the lesser Wild West exhibitions (“Arapaho Bob’s Frontier Extravaganza and Confederation of Bordermen, Indian Princesses, and Savage Riders of the Plains! No Whitewash, No Hogwash, No Washing of Hands!”), shooting at blown-glass balls with his aging Winchester and not missing many, and toured with the troupe to England while Randy was driving an ice wagon in Bismarck. When Randy Locke lay near death from malaria in Panama City, contracted while digging the great canal, Frank, who’d been stranded abroad when the exhibition went bust, was working his way home by way of Nova Scotia, shoveling coal into the firebox of a tramp steamer.

  Once, when Frank was chasing a rumor that Randy was laying a natural-gas pipeline in Wichita Falls, Randy was on his way to Amarillo, where Frank was said to be doing the same. Their trains passed only yards apart. (Each felt a chill on the instant.)

  Fort Mescalero was shooting outside Palm Springs. The carpenters had gone and built a stake fort in what was supposed to be the Arizona desert, where everything was made of mud because the nearest tree was in Colorado; but then the Apaches all wore Cheyenne warbonnets and five minutes into the first reel the shadow of an aeroplane can be seen sliding across a wagon train. The director was known for never doing retakes and bringing productions in on time.

  Frank was cast as an old mountain man to balance out the cigar-store Indian standing on the other end of the bar in a tent saloon. A canopy made from the same canvas had been staked out to keep the Mojave sun off the necks of the players and backstage personnel when they broke for lunch. They lined up along a trestle table crowded with covered pots heated by cans of Sterno: Indians in feathers who last week had been centurions in armor for DeMille, s
tunt gaffers with limps almost as bad as Randy’s, women in homey bonnets, the same women next day in whores’ silk, codgers with whiskers, tinhorns in tile hats, carpenters, painters, electricians, cowboys dressed as cowboys, and an undertaker in a morning coat who for some reason looked like Woodrow Wilson. They ate whatever the company brought from town, packed in ice in the original chuck wagon that appeared in the film and prepared by professional cooks.

  The third day on location, Frank held out his bowl and stared at the man in the apron ladling clam chowder into it from the other side of the table.

  “Long time no see, Frank,” said Randy. “You want crackers?”

  THIRTY-ONE

  In some languages there is no word for good-bye. One cannot help but think it was a conscious decision, and reflect upon its wisdom.

  “Well, I sure don’t want no biscuits. There’s a cowboy working for Famous Players still digesting it from Colorado.”

  Randy turned to his assistant, a tall bony kid with pimples like smallpox pustules. “Finish this out, will you? I’d go easy on the chili. I didn’t put in no green ones, but it’s commencing to look like a Christmas wreath. No sense poisoning no stars.”

  He helped himself to a bowl of chowder and a cube of cornbread that looked like rotten concrete and accompanied Frank to another trestle table, away from a group of wranglers sweetening their coffee from a bottle. Frank asked if they should borrow it.

  “Go ahead if you want. I give up that hoo-head john after Nome.”

  “I don’t much need it. Once you drank otter piss in an Aleut camp it ruins you for everything else.” They were sitting across from each other. Frank blew steam off a spoonful from his bowl. “What you been up to, Randy?”

  “This and that. You?”

  “Same thing, I reckon. You still lugging that smoke-wagon?”

  “Been wearing it so long I took it into the shower last week. Still got that Remington?”

  “It’s my good luck piece, saved me from the rope in Fort Smith. What become of that Ballard rifle?”

  “Sold it for grub. What become of that Winchester?”

  “The same. Country’s got so crowded you don’t need no long gun to drop a man.”

  “Yakima Jim died last week of pure mean and blood poisoning over a poker game; little bitty belly gun fired so close it set his shirt afire. World’s shrunk and no mistake.”

  “You still unattached?”

  “I taken up with a woman in Glenwood Springs. We never said the vows, but she used my name and had a kid she said was mine, but I got my doubts.”

  “I hope you’re right. I wouldn’t want to think there’s another Locke running around pretending to be a human being. She leave you?”

  “Sure did. The doc said it was dropsy, but she told me near the end it was a broken heart and I was the reason. I was always running off, leaving her alone to chase down some rumor of you.”

  “I believe that.”

  “Maybe so, but if her heart was broke it sure didn’t affect her appetite. By the time she took sick I bet she bent the scale at two hunnert. Galloping her was like trying to hang onto a sack of beans in a runaway wagon. What about you? Ever marry?”

  “Yes, sir. Still am.”

  “Hell you say.”

  “Even so. We sleep in what you might call separate bedrooms. Hers is in Boston, Massachusetts.”

  “Same issue?”

  “There was several, but I calculate that one topped the list.” Frank swallowed a hunk of clam; it went down without chewing. “Ever hear from Cripplehorn?”

  “I heard he tried to get into pictures, then went back East and died.”

  “I heard the same, though it was a tame fit of apoplexy. He’s laying in a Sisters of Charity home in Atlantic City, New Jersey, drinking his supper through a straw.”

  “I don’t envy them sisters. I don’t know how you put up with him in that shack in Frisco.”

  “He was a big sissy. I took the borrow of his toothbrush once and never heard the end of it. He was always saying how when he got rich he was going to trade that ivory eye for a glass one made in Vienna, hire some fellow named Mo-nay to paint it.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t shoot him.”

  “I considered it, but he talked so pretty I figured I’d miss him. It was like listening to Scripture.”

  “He was a tinhorn through-and-through. I don’t believe he ever read a book, much less wrote one. He got himself into some silk-hat company somehow and remembered everything he heard.”

  “He weren’t stupid. Them vendors in that tent in the Strip kicked back half of every pail of beer they sold. He kept the tally in a bitty notebook.”

  “I’d bet a good saddle he never showed it to that Sheridan Weber.”

  The assistant director, a consumptive-looking New Englander with a ladylike strut, blew his whistle. They had five minutes before the next take.

  Randy said, “I’m going to shoot him next.”

  “He’s just doing his job.”

  “I’m going to shove that whistle down his gullet first.”

  Frank changed the subject. “You know, we just missed each other in Carson City last year. I checked in to the Empress Catherine just after you checked out.”

  “I caught the last train to Gunnison. Sewing-machine drummer I run into in the vertical railway said he talked to a fellow named Farmer there last week. Said he packed a forty-five Remington.”

  “You should stay off elevators. One day that door may slide open and there I’ll be.”

  “I thought the whole point of this confab was to put that to rest.”

  Frank paused with his spoon halfway to his mouth. “You talking truce?”

  “No, sir, I don’t speak that lingo.”

  They slurped soup in silence for a minute.

  Frank said, “I don’t like leaving no job half-finished. That director fellow says we wrap next week. He’s hosting a party at the Watering Hole.”

  “I reckon I’ll see you there.” Randy stood and picked up his bowl. “Whatever happened to that Dutch ear, by the way?”

  * * *

  The place was got up like every saloon in the West, or what some easterner thought it would look like. A fat naked woman lollopped in a chaise longue in a scrolled frame above the backbar, drilled through with authentic-looking bullet holes, and an eight-gauge shotgun was growing dust on a rack made of elk antlers above a Faro table where a group of extras sat drinking and not gambling. The string band that had played throughout the production to create a proper mood played a piece composed for the piano players who would accompany the showings. The director made a speech, said nobody’s money was good in the joint beyond the first two drinks, and sat down at a table with the female lead and the brave lieutenant who’d led the suicide charge against about ten thousand Apaches, a young Shakespearean actor from Hartford, Connecticut. The female lead didn’t appear to object when the director put an arm around her and squeezed a breast.

  Randy had come there straight from the set, where the assistant director was shooting second-unit to fill out the rest of the reel, and cast him as a stove-up stagecoach driver. He wore the costume he’d been given from the wardrobe grab-bag—sweat-stained Stetson with the brim turned up in front, shirt made of ticking, patched dungarees tucked into stovepipe boots with the heels ground down by dozens of pairs of feet. He spotted a pair of slumped shoulders he knew as well as his own at the end of the packed bar. He left the fake Indian he’d been talking with in the middle of a drunken gripe and went over to tap one of those shoulders. He wore his Colt in a prop holster, his old one having worn out in the Oklahoma oil fields. The new one was stiff enough to hold a flagpole; the pistol slid out every time he’d mounted to the driver’s seat.

  No tap was needed. Frank sensed his presence and turned quickly from the bar, resting his hand on his Remington. He had on a regular suit of clothes and a pearl-gray bowler he’d swiped from Wardrobe, also a stiff slick holster just like Randy’s, with a ti
e-down that made a two-handed draw unnecessary and a hammer thong to keep the pistol where it belonged.

  “How do, Frank?” Randy spoke as if they hadn’t seen each other only last week.

  “Not so bad, Randy. Yourself?”

  “Middling.”

  “I forgot to ask you how you found L.A.”

  “I got off the train and there it was.”

  The conversation lapsed. Both men looked embarrassed after this exchange. They’d talked themselves out in the tent commissary. After so much time they had only the one thing in common.

  “Where you want to do this?” Randy asked.

  “It’s still light out.”

  They went outside, Randy first on account of his leg. He’d sooner expect a priest of the faith to backshoot him than Frank.

  It was suppertime. Traffic was light. They waited for a streetcar to pass, then stepped out onto the asphalt and faced off.

  There was no need for talk or signals, no whenever-you’re-readies or dropping of bandannas: That was for Jack Dodger books and moving pictures. When each man was satisfied the other was set, they went for their pistols.

  Both men were at a disadvantage. They were unfamiliar with the fast draw, which hadn’t existed before eastern fabulists invented it, and slower than any movie pistoleer; but Randy had an edge. Frank forgot about the hammer thong, and fumbled with it when the Remington didn’t clear. Randy’s slug pierced his heart just as he got the rig loose. Frank fell cruciform on his back in the middle of Cahuenga Boulevard and didn’t twitch.

  Randy didn’t bother to check for signs of life; he’d known the outcome the moment the pistol pulsed in his hand. He dropped it back into its holster and turned away.