Cord 9

by Owen Rountree

  But Oakley had an answer to each of Cord’s objections. Men were men, he insisted, whether police, Pinkertons, or plutocrats, and facing down men was part of the outlaw game. Then Oakley put down seeing omens in the weather as superstitious claptrap. Cord knew better, but still, Oakley was making sort of a dare and Cord was on the spot.

  As to the goods, Oakley went on, they would simply melt the jewelry down. That made no sense to Cord; it was the expedient answer of the shortsighted. Fine jewelry was worth twice as much as the raw metal; if they were going to melt it down, why not go up into the gold country and rob some foreman’s safe? Cord did not mean to take the trouble to steal jewelry in the big city merely so they could melt it down.

  “No deal,” Cord said. “That’s what I told them.”

  “Ah, but something changed your mind,” Carlisle guessed.

  It was Chi: she had overruled him, told Oakley and Blewin they would think it over. In private, Cord reiterated his arguments, and though she did not refute them, she would not concede. She was in one of her stubborn streaks, for reasons Cord could not fathom. She was going in on this job with Oakley, and Cord be hanged. She walked off on him, leaving a half-finished drink on the bar.

  Next time he saw her was a couple hours later, through the window of the fancy restaurant. Cord was looking in from the sidewalk, and Chi was at a table with Nick Oakley, smiling and chattering, gay as a parakeet. Cord wanted to go in and break some furniture with Oakley’s head, then slap Chi around.

  “The thing is,” Cord said in the Enterprise Saloon, “if I hit her, she’d kill me, then or any day to come.”

  “Do you blame her?” Fiona Cobb said.

  “Not a bit. You-all may have figured this out or not, but fact is that we’ve never shared a bed. Chi and me go our own ways when it comes to close companions. That’s the rule, which doesn’t mean I was always happy with it.”

  “Like lately,” Fiona Cobb said shrewdly. “You are very fond of that woman.”

  Cord blinked and focused on the doctor. She was a puzzlement for a woman. “Never mind that,” he said. “I am talking about another time. Her with Oakley irritated me into some drinking, so when I went to bed, I slept hard enough not to know if she came back to the hotel before morning. So maybe she did, and maybe she didn’t.”

  The next morning at breakfast, Cord found himself watching Oakley and Chi like a hawk for signs of something between them, cursing himself silently all the while for acting like an epicene cuckold in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. So Cord had finally agreed to throw in on the deal; it was preferable to the alternative of Chi running off with Oakley.

  There was nothing complex to the plan. Chi would distract the jeweler and his bodyguard for the moment it took for Cord to get the drop on the guard. Oakley would be the second gun, demanding the loot, while Blewin stood by in an alley with rope and their horses. By the time the two men got untied and ungagged, the four of them would be miles out of town and heading north for Cheyenne. All they had to do was wait for the UP train from Chicago two mornings hence.

  For Cord, the waiting was not easy. The damned heat was no help, and the second night Chi definitely did not sleep in her own room. Cord made damned certain and then confronted Chi. She was compromising the job, he insisted.

  “You ought to be ashamed,” she reproached. “Spying on me.” That was the end of that talk.

  Restlessness came over Cord like a storm front. He fetched his bay from the livery, thinking maybe a ride would settle him. He was crazy, and sitting still would drive him crazier yet. He rode northwest on the post road toward Boulder.

  About halfway along, fifteen or so miles out of Denver, Cord came upon a little roadhouse saloon. It was plain and nameless, but the rude interior beckoned, cool and calming. “I thought I would have a little drink,” Cord said. He held out his glass toward Carlisle. “In fact, I think I will have one now.” Carlisle poured. “Put it on my tab,” Cord said.

  A big kind-faced man tended that Colorado roadhouse bar, and a couple of solid old citizens stood sipping at beer. They turned out to be retired from farming, Cord found out when he got to talking to them. After a time and some drinks, Cord stopped thinking about Chi and that unctuous woman-chasing son of a bitch Nick Oakley. He had some more drinks.

  When the old men excused themselves for supper, it occurred to Cord that he’d best move on back to Denver. A late afternoon breeze would cool and sober his system.

  “Sounds like the right idea,” Carlisle said in the saloon.

  “Oh yes,” Cord said, “but then I had one that was even better: Buy a pint bottle of bourbon for the road. One of those brilliant drunk ideas, one of those notions so pregnant with trouble they are nearly miraculous.” Cord studied his crooked distorted reflection in the globe of the coal-oil lamp, watched himself grin sourly.

  He found Chi and Oakley having their dinner in the saloon, cozy as ticks. He sat down to join them, smiling a big smile that dared one of them to say he couldn’t. When that didn’t work, Cord tried a few out-of-line remarks. Chi tried to get him to shut up and eat something. Nope, Cord told her; he was drinking supper that night. Then do it at the bar, Chi snapped, and leave sober people in peace.

  Cord nodded grandly and swaggered over to the bar. Time for another drink anyway. When she finished eating, Chi came to stand beside him. She told him there was no reason for him to act this way, that it wasn’t fair to the rest of them. She reminded him that he must keep his nose out of her love life and stay in shape to do what had to be done the next day.

  Chi spoke her piece softly and kindly, and Cord came back at her with a string of loudmouthed insults. Chi’s expression darkened, but before she could put him in his place, the man behind Cord at the bar put his hand on Cord’s shoulder.

  Cord turned around. This old boy was big and broad and had the smell of the railroad stockyards to him. Cord smiled pleasantly at him. He was drinking with a chum, about as big and scowling about as meanly.

  “You bothering this lady?” the big stock hand asked.

  “Right you are,” Cord said agreeably. “Now piss off.”

  Cord got in the first punch, an ice-hard right to the jaw that set the man down on the floor. But his buddy got his hands around Cord’s neck and rode him down. He was sitting on Cord’s chest and clawing for Cord’s eyes when Oakley rabbit-punched the man in the back of the neck with both hands. By that time the first stock hand was back in the fray and Chi and other patrons were starting to take a hand. The brawl became general, and items got broken.

  After not too long, police whistles sounded. Chi got Cord to his feet and had him off near the back alley exit when the cops came in. They grabbed for whoever was handy and came up with Oakley right off. Cord lurched in that direction to help, but Chi jerked him up short.

  “Estupido,” she hissed. “There is federal paper on us.” She was right, of course: They would not get a week for disorderly conduct but ten years in the penitentiary.

  Cord let her walk him out the back door.

  They went straight to the hotel for their things. There they found Wee Bill Blewin. He listened to their story and allowed that he’d stay around to see if there were anything he could do for his pard. “You’d best get moving,” he said, looking at Cord. “Guess you’ve done all you could.”

  They rode most of the night, and by morning Cord was sober and full of misery. His head hurt, and he felt guilty as all hell.

  In the Enterprise Saloon, Cord pounded his bandaged fist on the table hard enough to make the bottles sway. “Son of a bitch.” A few inches of bourbon remained in the one Cord had been working on. He peered blearily at Carlisle and Fiona Cobb. “I guess Mr. Oakley’s got a right to be sore.”

  “What happened to him?” Fiona Cobb asked.

  “They found an old charge outstanding from when he was a kid and passing through the city dead-broke. Petty larceny—stealing a chicken from a butcher’s yard. The limitations were run out on it, but the judge fig
ured Oakley owed them time anyway, so they charged him with everything they could—public drunkenness, disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, and so on—and gave him nine months in the workhouse. They let him out after six, but he did hard time.”

  “It’s always hard time,” Carlisle said, sounding as if he were speaking from experience. Cord was too drunk to remember if they’d been pacing him—for sure they’d been drinking steadily—yet both seemed to have their wits about them.

  “It was purely my fault that he ended up in jail.” Cord pushed his glass toward Carlisle. “Can’t expect a man to forgive or forget that.”

  “You can’t undo it now,” Fiona Cobb pointed out.

  “Maybe not.”

  “Other men have done worse,” Carlisle muttered, peering thoughtfully into his glass.

  “But not me,” Cord said urgently. “Not before and never since.” Cord held his fresh drink. “Chi was sleeping with Oakley, sure—but I was her partner, before, then, and always. When the police came running and it was him or me, she didn’t even think about it. I’d been brooding for two days and acting like six kinds of moron, but she never hesitated.”

  “Could be she grabbed whoever was closest,” Carlisle said.

  Cord struck the table with his fist again.

  “Careful of your hand,” Fiona Cobb said.

  “My hand.” Cord slugged back his drink. He knew, even besotted, that he was nearing the end of that period of seeming lucidity and heading toward the big crash. He pushed back his chair and stood, swaying some but able to stay upright without holding on to anything. He smiled foolishly at Carlisle and Fiona Cobb, peered around the room, and lit on the snake, asleep in its jar on the far end of the bar.

  Cord went to it, bent with hands on thighs, and stared at the reptile blearily. It lay motionless, eyes open but oblivious. Carefully, tentatively, Cord lay his good hand on the glass.

  Nothing happened for a good thirty seconds. Cord imagined he’d see the rattles go first, but he was wrong. The snake twitched and struck, shooting his fangs at Cord’s hand as if lightning-struck.

  Cord jerked his hand back and swore. The snake withdrew lazily, recoiled itself.

  Carlisle laughed.

  Cord turned on him, stabbed out a finger. “Can you do it?”

  “Once in a while,” Carlisle said. “When I’ve drunk enough.”

  “We all have, for tonight,” Fiona Cobb said. “Let’s close up, Richard.”

  Carlisle gave no sign of hearing her. Cord said, “Come on, take a turn. Don’t be a pill.”

  Carlisle came over, and Cord stepped back out of the way. Carlisle looked at Cord and then at the snake.

  “I’m still fast,” Cord said. “One thing I can do drunk nearly good as sober.”

  “What?” Carlisle licked his lips and set his hand on the bottle near the snake. “Stop babbling and let me concentrate.”

  Cord drew his Colt and fired. The bottle exploded under Carlisle’s hand, and the noise of the gunshot echoed like death in the room. Carlisle screamed and leaped back, slipped on broken glass, grabbed for a chair and upended it as he went down.

  The snake slithered off the bar and dropped to the floor, its rattles chattering madly. Carlisle scuttled back away from it. Cord started to laugh. The rattler turned in Cord’s direction, and in his drunkenness Cord remembered that he hated snakes.

  He shot the rattler in the head, and when its body continued to twitch, Cord put a couple of shots into its writhing length as well.

  “That’s enough,” Carlisle said weakly. “Jesus, Cord.”

  Fiona Cobb was standing beside Cord, touching his elbow. “I prescribe some sleep, Cord.” She ran her fingers along his forearm. Her touch was soft and warm through his shirt. “Are you going to be all right?”

  Cord peered down at the tops of her breasts. “Yeah,” he said thickly. “Always. All my life.”

  “Good,” Fiona Cobb said. She held on to him a moment longer, and Cord thought he saw something in her expression. She bent, picked up the dead snake without ceremony, and flung it out the back door. “Good night, Cord,” she said. Cord watched every step as she went out.

  Carlisle stood, brushing bits of broken glass from his trouser legs. “Nice goddamned trick,” he said.

  “It got your attention.” Cord was staring at the open front door. “She is a job of work.”

  “Forget her.”

  Cord smirked at Carlisle.

  “You can be a real muttonhead when you are drunk, Cord,” Carlisle said. “Anyone ever tell you that?” It was true enough, and Cord’s jaw dropped. “Wind the clock and put out the cat,” Carlisle said. “I’m going to bed as well.”

  “You gonna lock up?”

  “From whom? The night riders want whiskey, they’ll kick the door in. Who else is there?” Carlisle opened the front door. “Sleep upstairs in a bed or here on the floor. Whatever suits you.” He went out.

  Cord took his glass back to the table and emptied the rest of his bottle into it. That made an even quart. A nice round number. He tried to roll a cigarette but gave it up for a bad job. He sipped the drink to make it last, and after a time got a new stupid idea.

  Outside in the street’s darkness, the hot breeze still blew, and the blades of the windmill made a faint whir, like crickets. The Milky Way swept brightly overhead, down the street a light burned in the side window of Fiona Cobb’s place.

  Cord went along an alley, circled round back of the saloon, and cat-footed along the ditch, coming into her lot from the back, past the privy. He crouched and snuck up under the window. He remembered the touch of her hand on his arm and grinned, thinking: a woman mostly alone in the middle of nowhere, her husband long gone... Cord took off his hat, raised his head with exaggerated drunken care, until he could see above the windowsill.

  Fiona Cobb stood in her bedroom in her chemise, her hair down, her thighs smooth and white in wicked-down lantern light. She clung tightly to a coatless, collarless Richard Carlisle.

  Cord ducked down and froze in position for a long moment before easing away from there, praying to the gods who watch over drunks not to humiliate him utterly by allowing him to make a noise. He moped back to town feeling astonishingly sorry for himself; was this the depth to which his life had descended, peeping in the windows of ladies’ bedrooms?

  He did not have to worry about it long. He barely managed to make it up the stairs to his room and flop onto the groaning bed before the world went away.

  Chapter Eleven

  “¿Qué peinsas?” Chi asked.

  “No se,” Nick Oakley said in a low voice. “We can try to make that corral and run them horses, but I’m not married to the notion. I’d like a better idea of where everyone is and how many are going to want to chase after us.”

  Crouched in the cover of the windbreak trees, they had a clean view of most of the ranch headquarters. They had waited some hours out on the open range for the moon to set, but the sky was still bright with great washes of stars; there was nothing to do for that, though. The big house sat stolid and dark.

  With the cowhands gone, Stringer and most of his men had come in from their hideout in the breaks and taken over the bunkhouse. Two were smoking on the porch, a blond man and a big-bellied short man who had been among the riders they had encountered on their last visit here. The bunkhouse was lit from inside, and the front door was open, but no one seemed to be stirring. It was well past midnight.

  The hot dry breeze from the west whipped at their hat brims as Chi and Oakley hunkered among the willows. This weather was unnatural and somehow foreboding; Chi sensed in it a portent of disaster.

  Her dark thoughts were pierced by a terrible noise, a great loud inchoate roar from inside the bunkhouse. It could have been the brutal sound of an animal hurt and enraged, but it was not. “Madre Dios,” Chi breathed.

  Oakley let out a rasp of air, as if he had been holding his breath.

  The voice howled again, semi articulately this time, a stream
of pointless unconnected obscenities, Stringer bellowing out his pain and rage. Chi wondered how the mad Bliss sitting alone with his harp and his pianos, liked the sound of savagery.

  “Take a closer look?” Oakley suggested.

  “We better.” Chi drew her Colt from under her serape. “Before I lose my nerve.” The first-floor light in the big house went out.

  Oakley put a gloved hand on her shoulder. She looked back at him. “Just wanted to say thanks,” he mumbled. “Good to have at least one gun with me.”

  “Don’t think too badly of Cord. He’s got a bandaged-up gun hand and a man coming to kill him, and not much he can do for either but wait. You got to consider the ways that would make a man feel.”

  “You worried for him?”

  “No,” Chi said, without hesitation. The most immediate potential for deadliness was right here before them, and she did not mean to split her concentration fretting on another fight on another day. “But I’d hate to see him dead,” she said softly.

  They’d spoken little on the ride out, and surely not about the long-ago two-night Denver love affair. Not that it was a touchy point, at least for Chi. She’d had a good enough time; she’d liked Oakley then and did now. He reminded her a bit of Cord.

  Cord: When this was over, he and she had to have some serious straight talk. She smiled in the night. Maybe it wouldn’t be talk; maybe she would just find his bed one night.

  Stringer shouted at his demons again. Chi cleared reflection from her mind. This was no time to resolve her life.

  “Look there,” Oakley said.

  A lamp had flared in the front upstairs room of the big house. Now curtains parted, and Mallory Bliss stood silhouetted behind the window. The mullions crisscrossed his figure, and he looked for all the world like a prisoner.

  “Come on,” Chi said.

  They stayed in the cover of the trees as they circled behind the house. They paused behind a privy near the rear rail of the corral to survey the yard, but no one was in sight, nothing moved save the milling horses. “They’re Canaday’s, all right,” Oakley confirmed in a whisper. Besides his half-dozen, another eight or ten animals, the night riders’ saddle mounts, stood quiet in the night, sleeping or nosing each other’s flanks.