"Yours and Pardee's, not mine."
"But what's so wrong about a book?"
"I may not have much else, woman, but I still have my pride."
"Shit!" She let her anger go. "Pride. You've done enough harm to others in your life—can't you do a good deed for once?"
"So that's why you came to see me."
"I came because I need help!" she cried. "And you could give it and you won't, you're too damn mule-mean, you always were! Why should you care anyway—you're dying! I have to go on living—but you don't give a damn what becomes of me! Why should you? You won't be here!"
She had gone too far. He was considering her. And though eleven years had passed, she remembered: against that silent, terrible appraisal of his, nothing prevailed, neither tears nor accusation nor a bullet. She was frightened. She flung herself from the bed to the floor, she knelt between his legs, she tried to reclaim him with her arms.
"Oh, Johnny, shame on me! I shouldn't have said that! It's just I'm in such bad straits and so alone!"
She had an inspiration. "Johnny dear, I still love you, honest I do! I'd do anything for you!" She pulled his face forward, close to hers, and kissed him on the forehead, on the cheeks. She kissed him on the mouth, moaning passionately, forcing her tongue between his teeth. "Sweetie, there is something I can do for you." With one hand she reached between his legs and began to unbutton his fly. "Are you equal to it, Johnny?"
He groaned. His eyes were closed. Confidence returned, she thrust her hand inside his trousers, through the slit of his underwear, searching for his member. "Where's my gun? Will it still shoot, you old stallion? Wouldn't you like one-last lay? Oh, dearie, I would!"
He fell back in his chair. "Go ahead, Ser—see what you find."
"Find? What?"
"The cancer!" he rasped. "That's where it is! If that's what you want, you whore, I'm full of it!"
"Ohhh!" Revolted, she snatched her hand away, she pushed herself from him, sprawling against the bed, sickened. She got to her feet and backed from him, her face a painted mask of loathing.
"You bastard," she spat.
In impotence, in utter despair, he covered his face with his hands. "My God," he said. "That's all you came for. And once I loved you. God help me."
"You killer."
"Good-by, Ser."
"May you rot to death," she hissed.
"In the closet, my wallet," he said hopelessly, his voice almost inaudible. "Take your three dollars. And good-by."
Marshal Thibido let him out of his cell in the city jail at exactly ten o'clock on Tuesday night. He could have been freed that afternoon, for it was the final day of his sentence for assault, but Thibido was adamant: the wet-ear son of a bitch would serve a full thirty days to the minute.
In the office, he gave him back his two Colt's revolvers and double holster and Cobb belted them on, tying each holster down midway of the thigh with a leather thong.
"Thanks for nothin', Marshal."
"You're not welcome. And they're not loaded. If you want to buy ammunition, you'll have to go work for your dad again. Your credit's no good and nobody else in his right mind would hire you." Thibido paused. "If you want my advice, don't buy any. Head for that wagon instead of a saloon. If you don't, if you go on the way you have been, I will hang you one of these days or somebody by God will."
"Thanks for nothin', Marshal."
Jay Cobb drew the revolvers and extended them, handles forward, as though to surrender them to Thibido. Suddenly, by means of index fingers through the triggerguards, he twirled the weapons, reversing them so that the muzzles pointed at the marshal's waistline.
He grinned. "That there's the Curly Bill Spin, Marshal. Ain't many can do it."
Thibido had recoiled at the trick. He caught relish on the faces of the two deputies who lounged against the wall, enjoying the show. To control himself, he took a deep breath.
"Cobb," he said, "you're no Brocius. He was a good criminal, the real cheese. You're a pimple-faced, short-pudded, yellow-assed kid, and you'll never grow up to be a good criminal because you don't have the brains to."
"These was loaded," Cobb blustered, "you wouldn't mouth me like that."
Thibido nailed hands to hips. "You're contaminating my premises. Take those popguns and your ugly self out of here or I'll telephone J. B. Books and sic him on you."
Jay Cobb did not know how to respond. His mouth opened and closed. He was twenty and ugly. His face had been scarred by acne, and there were swellings on each side of his neck, pustules, some of them open and inflamed. To compensate, he had taken early to guns. He practiced handling and marksmanship regularly down by the river, fanning his Colt's and cutting sunflower stalks in two. Gillom Rogers had spied out his pastime, and in return for secrecy Cobb had let him fire the weapons. Sunflowers grew wild and high in a large patch there—the very patch in which George Scarborough had killed Martin Morose while Morose was on his way from Juárez to confront John Wesley Hardin, who was living with Morose's wife in El Paso. Cobb knew that. He liked learning to use his guns with death nearby for a teacher.
"Old Books," he sneered. "He's dyin'. You call 'im and tell 'im to come see me. I'll hurry his dyin' along."
"So you broke some dude drummer's jaw," said one of the deputies. "You faced anybody killed anybody?"
Cobb's mouth opened and closed.
"Go home before I puke," Thibido said.
Cobb's mouth opened and closed. He looked as though he wanted to kill someone or cry.
"Go home and wash your face," said a deputy.
Jay Cobb did go home, but not to the house beside the creamery. Entering the creamery by a back door and skulking between the separators and churns and stacked milk cans to the sales counter in front, he first reloaded his guns from a Bull Durham bag of ammunition he kept hidden in a drawer. He then opened the tin box in which his father stored the cash receipts before banking them on Fridays. Since quitting school, Jay had driven the delivery wagon and would be expected by his parents, who were meek, scriptural people, to take the route again now that he had been released from jail. Emptying the box of its contents, less than a hundred dollars, he left the building and the odors of milk and cream and butter, as far as he was concerned, forever.
He went directly to Tillie Howard's parlor house on Utah Street, by consensus the most lavish sexorium in town, its girls the most beautiful and expensive. The house was new, made of yellow brick with dormer windows and balconies before the windows on the second story, a circular drive, and a carriage house. He was admitted to the living room, a grand salon of crimson velvet draperies, silk and satin upholstery, oil paintings in gilt frames, cut flowers, and Aubusson rugs. There were few patrons this Tuesday night. Young Cobb whiled away a pleasant hour in the salon, pigging good whiskey and being edified by the staff until he made his selection. Choosing a blond enchantress in her late twenties named Vickie, and a full bottle, he escorted her upstairs to her room and locked the door. He was quite drunk by this time. And he had never kissed a member of the opposite sex other than his mother, much less known one carnally.
After both had disrobed, he took Vickie and bottle to bed, but such was his state of inebriation that he was unable to consummate his desire. Blaming her for his impotence, Cobb flew off the handle. In a demented fury, taking out on the unfortunate girl a marginal intelligence, a repellent exterior, an adolescence spent upon the seat of a creamery wagon, thirty days in jail, and his treatment by the marshal and deputies, he pried open her legs and attempted to rape her with the barrel of one of his Colt's. He tore her labia with the sight. She bled. She screamed. He beat her savagely with his fists.
Summoned by her appeals, the girls flew up the stairs in the wake of Jim, the general factotum of the house, a giant Negro who wore full dress in the evenings. He was nicknamed "Gentleman Jim" after James Corbett, the heavyweight boxing champion only recently deposed by "Fighting Bob" Fitzsimmons. Jim battered down the door of the room and, obtaining Jay Cobb
by the neck, dragged him downstairs and hurled him out the door.
He lay naked on the graveled drive while Vickie was ministered to by her colleagues. Presently they gathered in a bevy on a balcony and threw down to him, at him, in addition to expletives of a gender more masculine than feminine, his belongings—underwear, boots, shirt, hat, and eventually his guns. One of these hit him. He came to. Groveling for a revolver, he commenced firing at the balcony. Jay Cobb failed to kill any of the girls, who took refuge behind the balusters, or even to wound one, but he would have if he could have.
"You seem in fine fettle today," she said.
It was the first time she had seen him on the bed during the day.
"I should be," he smiled. He was patently glad to have her for a visitor. "I am full of alcohol and opium."
She approached, glancing at the bottle on the library table. "That's the laudanum." She checked it as closely as she might have an hourglass. "Why, it's nearly gone. Won't you need more? I can telephone the doctor."
"No. That will do."
"Do?"
"It will be enough."
"Oh."
"Sit down, please." He nodded at the armchair beside the bed and changed the subject. "Have you got any new roomers yet?"
She seated herself. "No. And I even ran an ad in the paper."
"That is my fault."
"Perhaps. It's probably the sight-seers across the street, too."
"They still come?"
"Every day. At first I thought they must be the town ne'er-do-wells, but I've recognized some of our best people. Cats can look at kings, you know—alley or pedigreed."
"Thibido said we should let them in and charge admission."
She smiled. "Not very likely. Oh, here, I'm forgetting why I came." She gave him a large envelope. "From Mr. Skelly."
He opened the envelope and eased out an eight-by-ten photograph. He stared at it.
"My God," he said.
She rose to look over his shoulder.
"My God," he said. "That's not me."
There he was, posed formally, standing against the flowered wallpaper, shoulders squared, hands in trousers pockets pulling back the lapels of the Prince Albert coat sufficiently to afford a glimpse of what hung in holsters on each side of the vest. And there they were, black handle and pearl, enough of each to titillate posterity. He was a man of medium height. At the temples his brown hair was slashed with gray, as was the mustache which drooped at the comers of his mouth. But it was the face which shocked him. Fine-featured in health, it had been as ravaged by disease as had his body. It was cachectic. The skin, gray of cast, was racked taut over the skull, bringing into hideous prominence the bones of forehead, nose, cheeks, and chin. The eyes were sunken, so that it was impossible to tell what they considered, whether an enemy, a straight flush, or the advent of a civilization in which he must be anachronous.
"This is what I look like," he said, appalled.
"It must have been the artificial light," she consoled, sitting again. "And perhaps the paper, too. I'm accustomed to tintypes."
Books continued to study it. After a minute he opened the drawer of the library table, found a pencil, turned the portrait over, wrote on the back, and gave it to her.
"For you. Such as it is. It may be worth something someday."
"Why, how kind. I'm sure it will be. But isn't there someone else you'd rather give it to?"
"No."
She turned the portrait over. "For Mrs. Rogers with regards," he had written, and signed it "John Bernard Books."
She did not trust herself to speak.
"I am sorry about the candy dish," he said. "I was feeling low, and gave it a good heave. I have smashed a lot of things in my life."
"It's—it's all right."
"No. I said I would not be a burden to you. So I have shot two men in this room and chased your roomers away and smashed some glassware already. Hostetler said one morning I will wake up and not be able to get out of bed. Well, I promise not to let it go that far."
She got hold of herself. "I was delighted to see you had a lady caller yesterday. She asked me not to announce her—she wanted to surprise you. Were you surprised?"
"I was." He looked at her with a measure of amusement. "That's another thing about cats."
"What?"
"Curiosity kills them."
"If you think—"
"Her name is Serepta Thomas," he proceeded. "I lived with her for a time, eleven years ago. She left me for a freighter."
"Did you love her?"
"I did then. Now she is down and out. She asked me to marry her."
"She asked you?"
"Yes."
"Did she know about—I mean—"
"Yes. That was why she asked me. She wanted my name. And what money she could raise from it. Dobkins, the reporter, tracked her down in Tucson and had her come see me. He has a notion to write a book about me full of lies and put her name on it. Mrs. J. B. Books."
"That is despicable!" exclaimed Bond Rogers.
"No worse than the others. I am doing a land-office business these days. Skelly will be selling those pictures of me, and the undertaker intends to lay me out and show me to the public. For a price."
She was aghast. "You don't—you can't be serious!"
"I am."
"That is the most morbid, depraved—"
"There is one consolation. I am going to be a damn sight more popular dead than I have been alive."
She shook her head. "Men. And women, too. I don't know what the world is coming to. Let's not talk about it."
"All right."
The day was clouded, the room gloomy, the silence between them loud.
"How is the boy?" he asked.
"I've lost all control of him, frankly. Selling your horse was not only the most unprincipled thing he's ever done, it was actually criminal. I am stumped." She had forgotten how comforting it could be to talk to a man. It was a luxury she had been denied of late, and she let her words spill. "I can't discipline him, I can't afford to send him away, and if he doesn't soon reform himself, I can't tolerate living with him. I scarcely recognize Gillom as my son any more. He's a stranger to me. What would you do?"
"I told you. If you can, give him another father. The sooner the better."
She stirred. She longed to ask what had happened between them over the sale of the horse, in this room after she had left them together, but she did not dare. Guilt flooded her cheeks. She could not clear her mind's eye of Gillom in the parlor, on his knees, sobbing at the loss of a second father, nor exculpate herself for having been the one to tell him, to tell the secret with which she had been entrusted by a dying man.
"That's something else I would prefer not to discuss," she said, too sharply.
"Fair enough."
She was miserable. She cast about for a way to make amends. "There is a matter I've been meaning to say something about, Mr. Books." She resolved to be generous yet impersonal. "When you came, after you rented a room, I called you an 'assassin.' I regret that. I've thought about it a great deal. I realize now—the night those men came in the windows—they were here to kill you, and you had to defend yourself, anyone would. I mean, I realize now—this is how it must have been many times—you did not provoke the quarrels—men have always wanted to kill you. So I misused the word— I apologize—it is something about which I know very little— I have been sheltered—I never—"
She was in obvious distress. "By the way, Mrs. Rogers," he interjected, "my clothes are pretty roady. I would be much obliged if you could brush and press my coat and trousers. I will pay you for the time."
"Oh no," she demurred, thankful for the rescue. "I'd enjoy doing it. Are you sure you wouldn't rather have then cleaned?"
"Cleaned?"
"Yes, there's a new method now, called 'dry process cleaning.' We have several shops in El Paso."
"How long would it take?"
"They advertise next-day service. And the clothing looks li
ke new—it's miraculous. Why don't you let me have them now? I'll take them over myself, and you'll have them back tomorrow."
"I suppose I could," he said. "I am not going out. But I don't see—"
She sprang up, coloring. "I was leaving anyway. I'll stand outside, and you hand them to me through the door."
"Very well."
Taking the portrait, she left the room and held the door ajar. Under his breath he cursed himself for requiring so long to get off the bed, get out of his trousers, get his coat from the closet, get to the door.
"Thank you," he said.
"You're very welcome."
As soon as the door closed, Books put a hand in the envelope on the bed, found the photographer's fifty dollars, and cached it in the top drawer of the chiffonier. He went then slowly, in dread, to the washbowl, to the mirror to which he had traded himself for his image every day while shaving. The man in the glass and the man in the portrait could not be one and the same. Either the mirror or the camera had cheated him. He stared.
The mirror had.
He heard the front door open, and Gillom Rogers, drunk perhaps, stumble up the stairs. It was well after midnight.
He thought: I would give anything to have her here, to talk to her. If only I had met her eleven years ago instead of Serepta. But it is too late to love her or let her love me. I am coming to the end of my rope. Besides, it would not be love on her part. It would be pity. I will be damned before I accept pity, from her or anybody.
He took up his newspaper. Except for the advertisements, there was little in it he had not read by now. One of these interested him. He read it twice:
Sweet Cream,
Cream for coffee,
Cream for oatmeal,
Cream for applesass,
Cream for ice cream.
I am now delivering cream on
my wagon guaranteed with proper
care to keep 24 hours after
delivery. Telephone 156.
G. A. COBB
Proprietor, Missouri Dairy
A man named Steinmetz called on him the next day. He was shabbily dressed and spoke with an accent. He owned and operated an oddment emporium on San Antonio Street and might buy, he said, anything of a personal nature Books wished to sell, provided the asking price was not "oudlandish." Books had him get his black valise from the closet and appraise the contents. There was a shirt, spare underwear, two pairs of socks, several handkerchiefs, a set of gold cuff links, and a bottle of hair tonic, in addition to the valise itself.
The Shootist Page 10