by Ed Kurtz
“Rode in, riding back,” said the marshal. “Hurry up. Daylight’s burning.”
Piece by piece, my eyes adjusted to the sunlight enough to see that there were five men altogether, Willocks included. I’d never laid eyes on any other lawmen in Darling, though I hadn’t really been looking, either. Could have been they were around all the time. Seemed likely Willocks would have left at least a couple back in town to keep the peace and brew bad coffee. Didn’t seem too likely that he had six or seven deputies already on the payroll. My guess was these fellows were new to his employ and that he hadn’t gone hiring the most upstanding young gentlemen from the Sunday meeting. These were gun hands, hastily deputized if at all.
In a word, killers.
I stepped up in the saddle and took a hold of the bridle. Willocks held onto his with the one good hand he had left.
I said, “Which ones she get, anyway?”
“Fuck you,” he said.
Once everyone was mounted, the sheriff stepped out onto the boardwalk to bid the marshal farewell. Earl looked more than a little sour about it, having been forced to defer to a higher authority. I almost felt bad for the man.
“Don’t worry, mein Freund,” I said. “I’ll make sure Tom here notifies you about the execution.”
“Viel Glück,” Earl said.
Tom said, “Cut that God damned German talk and let’s ride, for Christ’s sake.”
Two deputies rode on either side of me, and two in a line behind me, with Willocks up front like he figured he was Phillip Sheridan or somebody. Dangling from the saddle strings behind his cantle was a burlap sack with what looked like a cannon ball weighing down on the horse’s right flank. We went right up the big street in the middle of Revelation and drew a crowd of curious townsfolk who by then had probably heard what I was charged with and wanted to see what a cold-blooded killer looked like. Further on to the edge of town we loped by a heap of construction, where men worked with hammers and saws and heaved lumber into frames that would be new buildings. I closed my eyes to the onlookers and listened to the cadence of the hammers and nails. It was strangely soothing.
We rode on past the outskirts of Revelation and past the garbage pit, which I smelled but did not see on account of my eyes were still closed. We crossed the railroad tracks and one of the deputies got to whistling until Willocks snapped at him to stop it. After a while I couldn’t hear the hammers any longer and I listened to the hooves of the six horses and the creak and jangle of rigs and spurs instead. Nobody spoke for a long time.
Then, when I opened my eyes again, I found that Willocks had fallen back and taken up the position to my right. The deputy who had been there now rode in front. The marshal of Darling, Texas regarded me like he was looking at a bug, or maybe a pile of horse dung. The sack strung to his saddle was starting to interest all sorts of buzzing and crawling things.
I said, “Well, mornin’, Tom.”
He sat his piebald mount and narrowed his eyes at me. The one that had swollen was looking better all the time.
“They had a big fire up in Chicago this summer,” he said. “You maybe heard about it.”
“I don’t hear much,” I said.
“Had ’em a much bigger one few years back,” he went on. “This one wasn’t so big. Still burned damned near a thousand buildings, though.”
“That’s a lot,” I said.
“It’s a hell of a lot,” Willocks agreed. “Thing like that gets written up in all the papers.”
“Expect it does.”
“Even in other countries. They know about it in England and such.”
I nodded.
“On the other hand,” Willocks said, “a whole damn town can burn to the ground and ain’t nobody knows anything about it if they ain’t heard about the town in the first place.”
“No reason to know it, then,” I said.
“And things folks don’t know about, they don’t care about, either.”
“I guess not.”
The marshal was silent for a several long minutes, like he was letting me think over what he’d said. I wasn’t thinking about it. Mostly I was thinking about how many of them I could get to before they killed me. I arrived at an estimate of two, which wasn’t a number I liked too much.
Willocks lifted his bandaged right paw and examined it like it didn’t belong to him. The bandage was getting dirty with trail dust and red was beginning to seep through.
“Bleeding again,” he said.
“What you told her true?” I said. “About her mama in California?”
“My man in Goliad heard from his contact in San Francisco,” Willocks said. “Seems there’s an old Siamese woman goes by the name of Pimchan does the cooking and washing up in some horrible Barbary Coast cathouse. Too old to fuck, I reckon.”
“Probably not too common a name.”
“Not anywhere that ain’t Siam,” he said. “Which is how come when your bitch gets there, my friends’ll be waiting for her.”
“Probably she’ll expect that.”
“She ain’t dumb,” he said.
“That’s for sure and for certain,” I agreed.
“But don’t you worry none. They’ll get her. And they’ll bring her to me.”
“That right.”
“That’s a fucking promise.”
“You do have a mouth on you, Marshal.”
“Only when my blood is up.”
He sort of half-grinned, half-frowned. With his face as beat up as it was, it was hard to tell what he was going for. Thinking about that, I got to chuckling a little. Then I was sure it was a frown he was aiming to make.
“You know what I think is funny?” he said. “What I was saying about nobody knowing or caring about a shit-hole town like Red Foot. You and your breed bitch burnt it right to the ground, the whole God damned town, and I ain’t never seen one word printed up about it. And I read all the papers, Dutchman—not just Texas rags, but St. Louis, Cheyenne, New Orleans. All the good God damn over. It just don’t capture the imagination the way something like that fire in Chicago does.”
“Never thought of it that way, Tom,” I said.
“You can call me Marshal Willocks or you can just say Marshal, but if you call me by my Christian name like we’re friends one more time I will knock you out of that saddle and trample your head.”
“That’s right understandable, Marshal Willocks,” I told him. “I think you’re right that we should be all formal-like, the way things are. You may call me Mr. Splettstoesser.”
“Fuck you,” Willocks said. “That’s what I’ll call you.”
“Easier to say.”
“Here’s how things are, Dutchman. You was some famous outlaw, or you done something everybody knew about? Sure, then I’d have to be sure I brought you in. Wheels of justice turn slower than Christmas, but that’s the way it is. ’Cept that ain’t how this is.”
“Do tell.”
“Me and my boys here are riding back to Darling without you.”
“That so.”
“Be my plan.”
“And I don’t ’spect that means you’re going to turn me loose.”
“It don’t.”
“Lynching,” I said.
“Call it whatever the hell you want,” Willocks said. “Nobody ever going to hear it, anyway.”
“Simple out here.”
“Couldn’t be simpler.”
“Harder in San Francisco.”
“Not yours to worry about.”
“On account of I’ll be dead by then.”
“That’d be the reason.”
He kept his eyes on me but didn’t smile or frown. He just looked. I broke the look and turned to see if I could still make out Revelation behind us. The prairie was pretty flat and there was still some view, though getting smaller in the distance. I could see steam from the train at the station and smoke further out that I couldn’t identify. Could have been anything. Unless you were looking for something in particular you didn’t te
nd to linger on things like that. Folks had their own problems to look after.
The nag nickered underneath me. I said, “This poor beast been watered proper?”
“Probably shoot it after I’m done with you,” said the marshal. “Put it out of its misery.”
“Some Apache do that,” I told him. “When a warrior falls, they kill his horse so he has something to ride into the other world.”
Willocks laughed.
“Some shitty horse to have to ride in heaven,” he said.
“Better than walking.”
The marshal just grinned and, almost imperceptibly, put the heel of his boot to his piebald mount’s side and rode up ahead. We rode most of the rest of the day in relative silence, apart from the odd chatter amongst the deputies, none of which had anything at all to do with me. One of them, a hulking brute who kept at the back of the convoy, said nothing at all and occasionally dry-shaved his face with the blade of his knife. I supposed all of them had killed their fair share of men, maybe women and children too, but this was the one I’d have bet killed more than anyone else among us. I wondered where a town dandy like Tom Willocks had become acquainted with rough men such as these.
Afternoon melted into twilight in the slow, colorful way it did on the Staked Plains. We moved parallel to the Caprock Escarpment, which loomed darkly to the east with a bank of gray thunderheads overhead, floating on the bruise-colored horizon like a head on a glass of beer. I wasn’t ever sure whether or not I believed in the same kind of God most folks—at least white folks—tended to talk about, but a view like that sure made a man feel small. I could have almost forgotten about the straits I was in looking at the world as it was from that saddle.
Willocks waited until full dark to halt and called on the deputies to make camp. We gathered tight at a copse of cottonwoods beneath the escarpment where everybody dismounted and hitched to the trees, forming something like a small remuda. The marshal directed men to collect firewood and get the cookfire going. I awaited my orders but none came. Instead, I stood in the middle of the clearing with Willocks mugging me down and the other men fussing about to get the camp in order.
“Don’t go worrying your fat head about nothing,” he said to me. “Tonight ain’t the night.”
“Why the hell not?” I said.
“I’m enjoying this too much.”
“If there’s coffee and biscuits,” I said, “I’ll enjoy it some, too.”
There was. The coffee was like tar and biscuits that could have killed a man at ten paces, but a captive couldn’t be all that persnickety. And credit where credit is due, Marshal Tom Willocks did not withhold anything of the night’s victuals from me.
His men took turns playing cards, mumblety-peg, and watching the perimeter of the camp, while Willocks and I sat by the fire and stared at each other. The night sky got so dark I might have guessed all the stars had blinked out, and after a while the four deputies were reduced to two on guard and two asleep on the hard ground. It had started to rain a little bit, but nobody mentioned it or much seemed to mind. I hunched my shoulders and pulled up my collar, which didn’t do much good.
Late into the night, or early in the morning, the shifts changed and the men who had been looking out went to sleep while the other two went groggily to duty. I was getting to where I was exhausted, but the marshal looked as pert and bright as ever, or as pert and bright as a man as savaged as he was could look. I quit meeting his gaze after a while. I could still feel his on me.
“Hey, Lefty,” Willocks said, hours after the last thing anybody said out loud. “Whyn’t you go fetch that sack from my saddle?”
“Shit, Tom,” Lefty said. He was a small man who wore a tremendous bushy beard as if to make up for it.
“Just get it, God damn it,” said Willocks.
“Christ,” said Lefty.
Lefty tromped off to the remuda, and he fussed and cussed until he had what Willocks wanted. He brought it back to the fire like he was carrying a bundle of dynamite with the fuse lit. Conversely, Willocks took it from Lefty as though it was his own newborn child, with care and glee.
I watched him closely. Lefty scampered back to his lookout position. The other lookout—an Irish Paddy—ignored us altogether.
Tom Willocks opened up the sack. The smell slammed into my face almost instantly. I spun away from it and heard Willocks chuckle. The smell got still worse and I knew he was taking it, whatever it was, out of the sack. I heard a thump on the hard-packed ground and though I resisted looking, it didn’t matter. The head rolled right up to my boots.
It was Franklin Merrick. Willocks had given him the same treatment Boon gave the judge back in Red Foot. Only this time, what was left of him had time to rot, which gave poor Franklin a gray pallor with milky eyes, shrunken and sunken into their cavities. I puked right into the campfire. It sizzled, same as the rain.
“First and middle, since you wanted to know,” Willocks said, and when I turned to look at him he was holding his bandaged paw up. “I took this one’s head for the first, and I’ll take the woman’s head for the other. Got the idea from her, as a matter of fact, so I reckon she’ll appreciate it.”
He grinned broadly, showing gleaming teeth. My gorge rose again, but I fought it back down.
“I don’t know she ought to’ve done what she done to that judge,” I said. “But he was plum crazy and aimed to hang us for nothing. His brother shot his own self, and that’s the God’s honest truth.”
“Never met me a judge wasn’t just a little touched,” he said. “But it’s your breed friend who’s crazy. Like a mad dog, that one, and she’ll get put down just the same.”
I opened my mouth to retort—to defend my friend—but it just ended up slamming shut without a word. I would have given my own life to spare Boon’s, but I was not at all convinced that Willocks was wrong about the state of her mind. Killing was a grim business, and it was always different, which is to say that no two killings ever went down the same way. Sometimes they are justified and a hell of a lot of the time they are not. What’s more is there is a very great deal of murky water in between the extremes. The law would have liked to classify all killings in a simple manner for efficiency’s sake, but the reality of it was each one had to be considered individually and of its own variables. In a proper court of law, if I was asked at that moment whether or not the killing of Judge Selwyn Dejasu was justified, I would have to answer in the affirmative. Yes, it was. Yes, he was loco, no doubt about that. Boon and me had no choice but to fight for our very lives, and that’s just the way it was.
But the saw.
The God damned saw.
“Tomorrow, then,” I said low after a while.
“Likely so,” the marshal agreed.
“Bring me back for burial?”
“And let the buzzards starve?” he said, laughing. “Have a heart, Dutchman.”
I pushed Franklin Merrick’s head away with the side of my foot. Still chuckling, Willocks gathered it up and stuffed it back into the burlap sack, which he tossed on top of the fire. The fabric burned up quick, revealing the head once again, this time searing and spitting horribly in the flames.
Lefty and Paddy complained loudly about the smell but Willocks ignored their ire. And me, I watched the awful thing burn while I wondered who was crazier, Boon or Willocks?
Chapter Twenty-Two
In spite of myself, I slept hard when at last I hit the ground that night. Cold and hard as it was, an open sky does more for a man’s rest than a soft cot in a closed cell. The rain, never too strong to begin with, had let up considerably, though my hair and trousers and shirt were damp when I was kicked awake at dawn.
“Get up,” Lefty growled at me.
I said, “Mornin’, Lefty.”
Lefty sneered at me. I grinned. Then, a crackling pop echoed loudly over the flatland. Left turned his head slightly at the sound, just in time to catch a bullet in the throat. With the gunshot still rippling in the air, I could hear the round
punch into and through his skin and windpipe, smash out through the other side in a red mist. Lefty’s eyes bulged and he grasped his throat with both hands, working his mouth like he wanted to say something, only no words were forthcoming. Red-black blood oozed between his dirty fingers. It looked like molasses.
“Shit-fire,” said one of the other deputies, a dark-faced lad no older than twenty-one. He had most of his teeth, but they were already gone black. “Somebody by God shot Lefty.”
Lefty struggled for a breath he’d never take as he dropped first to his knees, then down to his side, still clutching at the jetting hole through his neck. The rest of the deputies scrambled for cover amongst the cottonwoods, though Tom Willocks stood stock-still in the middle of the copse, his arms limp at his sides, peering angrily into the distance.
“Why don’t you get down,” said the huge deputy, the brute who never spoke much.
Another shot cracked out, and a second later a cottonwood was hit in a shower of bark splinters. The shot missed the marshal by about a foot.
“Fuckin’ Indians,” said Blackmouth.
Willocks spit on the ground and rolled his shoulders.
“No,” he said. “It’s her.”
To be truthful, the notion had not occurred to me. But damned if those weren’t the sweetest words I’d heard in days. I just hoped he was right.
“First shot was lucky,” said Blackmouth. “Missed the second, first was lucky. She can’t see shit.”
He was growing hysterical, giggling and breathing hard like a snorting mustang.
Willocks went slowly and purposefully past the cooling firepit to a tree where he’d hung his belt on a low branch. He was quiet and stone-faced as he strapped it on, clumsy and fitful with his bandaged hand, a Smith & Wesson six-shooter bouncing against his leg in its holster as he secured the buckle. He then squatted down to retrieve a Springfield conversion rifle formerly belonging to Lefty. It was a .50-70 with a long, needle-gun firing pin that could most likely take down a buffalo with one good shot. He then went back to the edge of the clearing, the escarpment rising imperiously behind him and all of us, and went down on one knee to survey the broad horizon.