Turpentine

by Spring Warren

  Another whistled through hard breathing. “Can you believe it, come to town public as a zebra. Still, he made it this far.”

  “Luck’s runnin’ muddy now. Let’s go. You can rest when we got the reward.”

  I waited there for a good two hours, sucking in dust motes and straw, more terrified than I’d ever been before. Seeing Curly locked into that miserable box seemed to mark a destination that I was foolish ever to think I could sidestep. There was to be no say, there was to be no law or justice or any kind of truth. We’d been pushed into a river, and though we had swum mightily, we would assuredly drown.

  A couple of men came in and left their mounts. I was almost stepped on by a recalcitrant horse. I told myself I would bear any broken bone rather than let on I was beneath the straw. The horse was led away. Somebody else showed up and paid for his horse’s board, talking about the excitement that was to be had the next day. “A hangin’! Well, we’re ripe for some fun. Haven’t had a fuck or a drunk since the fourth.”

  When it had been quiet for some time, I rose from under the hay, brushed myself off, removed my coat and collar, and crept out. On the side of the barn was the poster; it was as if my own likeness hunted me. Somebody had come along in the two hours since Coy had spotted me and inked a beard on my likeness.

  The three of us, though decidedly shady-looking, seemed so happy together on paper, it was more like a family portrait than a wanted poster. At least we were together. I took it down carefully, folded it, and stuck it in my pocket.

  CHAPTER 32

  Chin and I made our way back to the handcart under cover of darkness. I needed a rest, I needed to think, and I needed a disguise. Inspired by the bald drunk, I shaved my face, then my head, running my hand over my scalp to find whiskery spots. I drew no little blood with my inexperienced blade, but in Ogallala dirt and blood was par for the course. It was odd, really, to disguise oneself by baring oneself, to mask by peeling one delicate layer. How thin is the means by which we know the other.

  Bald-headed and bald-faced, I struggled to find a way to save Curly and emerged from my speculations with one certainty. It was madness to try. The town was rife with bounty hunters. The jail was guarded. I had been spotted and they were looking for me. Even if I had a better disguise than no disguise at all, if I tried to save Curly, if I were to find the backbone and daring enough to make the attempt, it would mean two rather than one would die at the end of a rope. As I had no better disguise, no backbone, no derring-do, and no gun, I also had no choice. Though it sickened me to do so, in the morning I’d throw my bag on Chin’s back and we would head north, away from Ogallala. Away from the gallows, away from Curly’s last anguished breaths.

  Through the night I was tortured by the thought of the distant face in the mine shaft, growing paler and smaller as I was raised to safety. Tortured by it even though I now knew it wasn’t Curly who had been watching me rising out of the mine shaft, maybe tortured because of it. What had happened to that child? Was it my fault that I’d fallen for a mother’s chicanery?

  Had I chosen the right child to save, perhaps I would now be buying books for my Yale education. I would be plotting my life instead of racing to escape a horrible end. If I had chosen correctly, perhaps Phaegin and I … Instead, all was in ruins. That should have made it easier to decide to move on and leave Curly to his own bed, but it did not.

  I was not responsible for Curly, I told myself over and over. He had released me with his confession. Perhaps it was justice for the child left behind by Curly’s charade, but every time I closed my eyes the two children, Curly and the boy in the mine, merged into one, and cried out, “I jus’ don’ wanna hang.”

  It was a cold night. I didn’t dare light a fire, and the weather, having been nudged toward winter so early in the season, now seemed to want to hightail it right to January. I shivered and shook for some time before Chin walked over, blowing vapor into the moonlight, and lay down, coming close to crushing me on her sweeping roll to the side. Once I pulled my blankets out from under her, however, she made a fine sleeping companion, her deep oceanic breaths finally taking me home to the Connecticut shore, back to when I was Edward Turrentine Bayard III, my mother, father, and grandmother sitting on a blanket watching me watch the waves, and in my mind the world was good and hopeful and forever mine.

  I forsook Dawbs’s cart to the wilderness, tossing the blankets and my bag on a strangely acquiescent Chin before dawn the next morning, and attempted to push Curly from my mind. We headed due north, Chin plodding along beside me, and I comforted myself with the gruesome. I told myself Curly’s fears of a long painful strangulation were unfounded. Hanging was a quick end, one that many would wish for instead of waiting out a crippled old age or chronic illness. A snap to the neck, and it was over.

  Chin stopped, looked behind her. I pulled at her mane and we continued on.

  Sure, a heavy man would drop and his weight against the rope would make that noose snap and tighten. The trouble was, Curly was barely a hundred pounds and hardly out of childhood. His bones might still be stretchy on top of it all.

  Chin stopped again; I pushed, cajoled, cussed. She would go no farther north but turned and, once again, faced the way we’d come.

  I stared with her at the crushed trail we’d left, blunt green against the gray-rimed grass. How could I leave Curly to his slow strangulation, eyes bugging against the tight rasp of the horsehair rope raising its weal? I could not. Though by going to him, I was almost certainly meeting my own death.

  I leaned my head against Chin’s haunch. And what would that matter? I was tired of the tack my life had taken. I had grown weary of loss and goodbyes. I did not like this world, as it came. Sick as I was of the greed and the viciousness, the cowardice, and all the sorrow that continued to build and build, death did not seem so bad in comparison.

  Regret was going to have to do for backbone. I would go to Curly, do what I could, meet what I need meet.

  The sun peeked from the horizon.

  In an instant the entire expanse of prairie blazed from one edge of the blue sky bowl to the other, in a brilliant, shimmering, blinding spangle. I put up my hand as shield and in awe. Then at its brightest, the zenith frost capitulated to its moment of heat, and the prairie lost its luminosity. Chin sighed deeply beside me.

  Having decided to meet death if that’s what it took to save Curly, I didn’t travel that path courageously. More than nervous, I trembled, I cramped, repeatedly stopping along the trail with gastric distress. We passed where the cowboys had made their camp two long days ago. There was no sign of them now, only that they once had been there: crushed grass, a mountain of cow pies, and the blackened leftovers of night fires.

  I caught a glint in the grass, almost dismissing it as remnant moisture. It glinted again and I strayed from the path to investigate. My pistol. I checked the chamber. One bullet.

  If I’d had even a moment of shoot-’em-out fantasy, the singular slug ended it. I put the pistol in my belt and we trudged on. The cloudless sky was now spoiling with an uncanny cumulus fleece, great round mountains of vapor, which at their highest reaches shredded in a heavenly gale. I worried over the churning clouds not at all. There were greater storms ahead of me.

  In Ogallala the population had doubled overnight, and with the hordes of hanging-hungry citizens, looking like hell itself was on holiday there, it seemed even less probable I could do anything to help Curly. The crowds sparked with anticipation: not only for the neck stretching, but with the possibility that the rest of the “dwarf’s gang” would make a showing as well.

  I made a desperate visit to an overflowing privy after seeing the ramshackle gallows that had been raised, three lawmen with rifles standing alongside, and then vomited in reaction to the outhouse. Leaning on one knee and wiping my mouth, I spied Coy Hayes, a veritable armory on his belt and in hand, keeping guard at the jailhouse. He swept his gaze from side to side across the crowd, looking like a murderous mechanical toy. I would have n
o words with Curly while he was sentry.

  I wandered through town, searching for a means of rescue, waiting for an idea to grow in my panicked head. Every time I turned around there was some ragtag pinhead with a deputy’s badge on his chest. Coy must have brought a crate full of the tin stars with him on his trip across country.

  I sweated buckets threading through the crowd, head down, desperately hatching one impossible scheme after another that died at the first blink of reason. The mob around me was agitated, like a herd of cattle shying at the oncoming storm. Indeed, the day bruised with an eerie purplish light. I could feel change stirring, a collision of tensions that buckled the still air into a panting breeze.

  Voices raised against the bluster of wind. I tripped on someone’s foot and was hauled up from my hands and feet by a leviathan grip. I was tossed back into the crowd, almost colliding with three soldiers from Fort McPherson. One of them had driven the wagon loaded with roused compatriots and Tilfert so many rainy days ago.

  I lurched away, pushing deeper into the coil of strangers. I was nearly trapped by elbows and bellies when a holler mounted from the throng.

  Curly was led out of his lean-to prison and through the crowd. His hands were tied before him, legs hobbled by a figure-eight rope. He shuffled to the gallows, staring at the ground before him like an old man on his last legs. He looked up at the gallows and stopped.

  Coy struck Curly in the back with his rifle barrel. Curly took the stairs awkwardly, stumbling on the last, and stood under the rope.

  With renewed vigor, I pushed my way through the crowd, I elbowed people aside, rammed them with my head, I shoved, heaved, thrust, kicked, and clouted, and only moved forward six yards. In retaliation, I was punched, spit on, slapped. A fat man wheeled and roared, “If you don’t stop, I’m gonna knock you from here to Omaha!”

  I sidetracked his mountainous girth and drove aside the lesser summit of his wife, who piped like I’d goosed her. The mountain grabbed hold of my collar, drove his fist into my kidney, and tossed me behind to a staggering flurry of blind violences committed upon my person.

  I staggered with the blows, unable to catch a breath or to escape being propelled backward to the far reaches of the crowd. I struggled to inhale and could not. A prickle of light haloed against my eyelids, my knees buckled. Finally, as light dimmed into one muted speck, I took a tearing breath, and another.

  When I finally managed to stand, Curly had the rope around his neck.

  Coy boomed from his gallows pulpit, “Does the prisoner have anything to say?”

  Curly did not look up from his shoes. He spoke with only a small tremor in his voice. “I jus’ wanted to be a cowboy.”

  I thought my heart would break.

  There was a titter along the crowd.

  Coy tied a bandanna around Curly’s eyes. The wind lashed into a squall and whipped the red cloth loose. Coy cursed, grabbing at the fabric, and attempted a second knot.

  “He’s a boy!” I screamed.

  A toothless old woman beside me counseled, “Shut up and let ’em get on with it! Goddamn startin’ to rain an’ I don’ mean to get soaked.”

  I again struggled forward against thick humanity, shouting through the tempest of wind and spits of freezing rain. “A boy, eleven years old! What kind of people hang an eleven-year-old boy?”

  A kid beside me said, “I thought he was a dwarf.”

  I continued my screaming objections. “Will you kill a child over dime-novel fantasies?”

  Coy Hayes peered out into the crowd. Around me people were murmuring nervously. “Is it true? He’s only eleven years old? Is that right?”

  I kept moving forward. “I just wanted to be a cowboy. Are those the words of a cold-blooded killer?”

  A woman took her husband’s arm. “Hank, don’t let them hang a child.”

  I kept up my admonitions, shuffling through the crowd, sowing seeds of discontent. The murmur of discomfiture grew and a few people shouted to the front.

  “We don’t hang boys in Nebraska!”

  And “Take the rope off him!”

  The rivulet of unease roiled into protest. The spirit of the mob turned; the moral center of the crowd became evident. I could feel victory. Curly would be spared. It was going to be all right. I had set a fire of decency.

  Then someone shouted, “I came here for a hanging, and I’m gonna see a hanging.”

  And so the back blaze began. Half the crowd shouted for blood as the other screamed clemency. A fistfight broke out beside me and grew quickly into battle royal. I ducked and scrambled amid shouts and screaming. I inched closer, caressing the pistol at my waist, the knife in my pocket. I would take Coy with my single bullet. I’d slice the ropes. Curly and I would escape through the melee.

  Then Coy caught my gaze. I could see recognition behind the scarlet fury on his face. He shouted above the din. “There is the other one! The other anarchist, the bald man! One thousand dollars reward for his apprehension. Whoever collars the murderer is a rich man!”

  The people farther back continued to shout and throw punches, not hearing Coy’s pronouncements. But those in my vicinity gave me hard looks.

  I put up my hands. “He’s crazy. I’m one of you, you know me, I homestead not five miles north of here.” A woman wearing a threadbare dress nodded. “That’s right. I seen ’im afore.”

  The wind whipped Curly’s hair; the red kerchief flapped and this time escaped into the air. Curly, clearing from his fog of terror with the slap of the crowd’s turmoil and brace of rain, caught sight of me. His piercing voice carried across the low pitch of roister. “Save yourself, Ned! Run!”

  I still do not know how I escaped. A din of voices claimed my reward. A fury of hands grabbed my jacket, my arms, my ears with such violence it seemed I was being dismembered, disrobed, blinded, and flayed. I reacted like a madman. I bellowed, I howled furiously in a crazy hair-raising pitch. I erupted into a kicking, punching, flailing assault. I twisted like a snake, leaving behind my coat and a goodly amount of skin. I kicked balls, poked eyes, and might have bit someone’s finger clean off. Finally, I dove through the chaos of legs and crawled like a coyote toward open air. All the while I could hear Curly’s pipe. “Run, Ned, run!”

  When I got to the far end of the crowd, I stood and looked behind me.

  Coy kicked the lever. Curly plunged through the trap.

  I raised my pistol, sighted Curly’s jerking form, and sent my last bullet through his temple.

  CHAPTER 33

  With the blast of my gun, there was no time for sorrow or thought, only to take what little advantage the stunned recoil of the people around me afforded. I took a last look at Curly, now swinging peacefully on his rope, feet yearning for earth, and was visited with the image of Curly crouched by the pigs in the cold car. “Hope the end were quick, brother.”

  I ran through the tightening coil of wind and into the labyrinthine alleys of town, rolled under tent canvases, opened doors and ran through shacks, jumped through windows, pushed between tethered horses. Behind me a growing posse; eyes on the lookout, mouths shouting directives that were snatched by the storm so that there was no telling what direction they’d come from. I zigged and zagged through a vortex of rain, in a panicked run for the livery and Chin. I was not two feet away when a fellow shot out of the stable. We collided, staggered apart, I tripped and fell into the freezing mud.

  He yelled, “What the hell! Watch where you’re going!”

  The voice was familiar, and when the stars cleared and I dredged the sleet from my face I saw it was Tennessee. He didn’t help me up, just stared as I struggled to my feet. I shouted through the icy downpour, “Tennessee!”

  He shouted back while shaking his head, “One thousand dollars!” But he made no move to stop me and, after looking at him pleadingly, I dashed past him and into the barn where Chin waited.

  The crowd was close behind. Someone screamed, “In there, in the barn!” But it wasn’t Tennessee. I felt a rush of
gratitude. I was sure as hell done for, but at least it wasn’t a friend who did it.

  Shots were fired. Bits of pine burst from the wall. Cringing and ducking, I wedged the bar across the door. I yelled, “Back off or I’ll shoot!”

  Coy’s voice swept through the door, every other word lost in the blow of wind. “Come … now or … won’t … easy on you!”

  I peered through a crack in the wood. Though it couldn’t yet be ten o’clock, it was almost as dark outside as it was in the gloomy barn, the sun obliterated by the coiling masses of cloud and the sleet turning quickly to a hurricane of snow. The liveryman yelled from just outside the door, “It’s my damn barn, the money’s mine.”

  Someone else claimed he’d been the one to force me in. I ran from one side of the barn to the other, hunkered down against the occasional bullet. The barn was surrounded, the barn’s walls shuddered in the blow. Chin whickered, frightened, from one of the dark stalls.

  “Burn him out!” someone shouted. “That’ll warm things up!”

  The livery owner shouted not to touch his barn, goddamn it, but once the idea’d come on, it was impossible to stop. Someone threw a lantern against a stack of straw. Someone else grabbed a pitchfork and scattered burning straw along the east wall. A refuse pile outside the door crackled. Smoke billowed.

  Horses kicked and screamed as fire licked along the walls. I stooped down, arms over my head in a useless shield, and searched for Chin through the smoke, the fire growing at an unbelievable rate, one side of the barn a conflagration in seconds.