The Big Gundown (5 page)

S
NOW SEVERAL INCHES DEEP
lay over everything. Dawn broke cold as iron and the kid shook himself out of his blankets, pulled on his boots, and trudged to the privy, his boots crunching in the snow. All night long his mind fretted about Nat, what that lawman said had happened to him.
Nat was a good old boy
, Tig kept telling himself, the morning air clamping down on his bare head and hands like something with teeth.

He got inside the privy and closed the door and latched it and sat there in the dark with the light coming through the cracks. He could see his breath. It looked like he was smoking a cigarette. Sat there cold and miserable, trying to go and thinking about poor Nat.

What'd they have to go and kill him for?

But truth was, he already knew why.

God
damn
but it's cold. He shivered trying to get finished up. He had thought about it and thought about it and figured it was only the right thing to do: to ride into town and see that marshal and tell him what he knowed about Nat and why they killed him. But it would mean turning on the others, and if they knowed he was even thinking about it, he'd end up like poor Nat, only maybe
at the bottom of that well they were digging and not some creek.

He finished up and pulled up his drawers and peeked out through one of the cracks toward the bunkhouse. Some of the others had come out of the bunkhouse and were trudging off toward the back kitchen of the main house where Hector fed them, pausing only long enough to give the pump handle a pump or two, in order to draw water to splash over their sleepy faces and string through their hair. He saw Taylor and Harvey and Lon, but he didn't see the other two: Dallas and Perk. Perk was like Dallas's shadow. Perk would jump through fire if Dallas told him to. Hell, he'd jump
into
fire if Dallas told him.

God
damn
, oh, god
damn
.

He waited until they went into the kitchen, then saw Dallas and Perk coming out of the bunkhouse, walking off just a ways to piss in the snow; too lazy to walk all the way to the privy. Bob had warned them not to be pissing in the snow, said more than once to them: “My woman might look out that window some morning and see you boys holding your peppers, and I sure as hell don't want her to see nothing of that sort of thing, so do your business in the privy, like civilized folks.” But they no more listened to half of what Bob said than they did to each other, except for Dallas. Dallas was the leader, even though nobody appointed him anything, even though Mr. Parker, who they all called the boss, didn't pay him a dime more than the others. He won the leadership with his fists and his quick temper. Would fight to the death anyone who dared challenge him. It was rumored he had killed several men down in New Mexico. Tig didn't doubt any of the rumors; some men just had a way of putting cold fear in you and Dallas Fry was one of them.

Tig thought about what poor Nat must have went
through those final minutes of his life, surrounded by those sons a bitches, knowing he was going to die at their hands. And Dallas and them would do it slow. They'd make it hurt.

Tig waited until Dallas and Perk finished their business and headed for the kitchen without even bothering to wash their hands. He swung the door open and the cold stung his skin as he stepped lively, the dry crunch of his boots in the snow following him as he went. He jacked the pump handle until water came rushing out and splashed it over his face. He dried off with the towel tied there and went on into the kitchen, acting normal, and took a seat at the table and waited for Hector to bring him a plate. He reached for the coffee pot and saw some of the others looking at him, Dallas most especially.

“You ain't said nothing since yesterday,” Dallas said. Dallas had those dark mean eyes that looked like they were going to pop out of his head any second.

“What you want me to say?”

“You and that nigger was close. Surprised you ain't had nothing to say about him getting himself killed. Why is that?”

“I don't know nothing to say about it,” Tig replied. “We wan't that close.”

“Sure you was. Two of you all the time going into town Saturday nights together. Getting drunk together. Screwing whores together.” He saw the way Dallas was grinning now, the others grinning with him, only it wasn't the type of grinning happy men or teasing men will do. It was evil grinning.

Tig poured himself a cup of coffee, trying his level best to keep his hands steady and said, “Sure, we went into town a few times together, what of it?”

“Just was it my friend, I'd have something to say about
him getting killed, is all. I'd want to know who done it and take out my revenge on him who did.”

“Well, it ain't none of my business who done it, now, is it? I mean I ain't no law or nothing. Sure I feel poorly to hear of it, but what can I do about it?”

Tig purposely put a little edge in his voice to keep out the sound of fear. He felt twice as bad now, having denied his friendship with Nat.

“No, I guess it ain't nothing you can do about it…Goddamn it, Hector, where the hell is my grub?”

Hector, like most ranch cookies, was a former top hand himself, bronc breaker, and all-around hand. But time and horses had busted him up and worn him down. In his younger days he might have killed a man for cursing him like Dallas did. He served up Dallas's plate without comment, then the others. The whole time a lit cigarette dangled from his lips with the smoke of it lifting into his squinting eyes.

They ate in silence, except for the scraping of forks on the plates, the slurping down of coffee, the scrape of their chairs on the floor.

Tig ate more quickly than usual this morning. And when he stood up to leave, Dallas said, “Where the hellfire you going in such a hurry?”

“Got a bad tooth been aching me all damn night. I'm gone ride into town and see if the dentist will pull it.” Then to add to the ruse, he rubbed his jaw and winced.

“Shit, old Perk'll pull that damn tooth for you. Why spend the three dollars? You'll pull Tig's tooth, won't you, Perk?”

Perk looked up from his plate. You could never tell which eye the man was looking at you with; one was his bad one and one his good, or maybe they were both good; it was hard to say because they each looked off in
different directions. Nobody knew for sure which eye to look at when talking to him and nobody dared ask because Perk was touchy about the subject of his eyes. He had once beat a whore half to death because she asked him about them: what made them so damn crooked like that, was he knocked in the head as a child, or dropped or something?

One of his eyes settled on Tig, the other was sort of still staring at his plate.

“Sure, I'll pull that son bitch, just let me finish and get my plars.”

Some of the others snorted.

“No thanks, I'd just as soon have a professional dentist messing with my teeth than have you pull it with your pliers.”

“Well, go on then, damn you,” Dallas said sourly.

Tig saddled his piebald mare and rode away without looking back. They found out what he was really up to…Hell, he didn't even want to think about if they found out.

 

First light Jake opened his eyes. Clara was asleep beside him.

She'd invited him to spend the night again after they'd returned from Toussaint and Karen's. It was late and pitch-dark and colder than a steel bolt. Jake had walked her and the girls to the door and she said, “Why don't you come in for a toddy?” He consented and waited until she got the girls settled into their beds.

They sat on the divan together and drank their toddies and listened to the fire crackle in the fireplace and once he looked over at her and saw the way the light danced in her eyes, for it was the only light in the parlor. She looked at him shyly.

“It was a lovely evening,” she said.

Then she was kissing him and he was kissing her back and at some point she took him by the hand and led him back to her bedroom. The full moon cast enough ghost light into the room they didn't need a lamp to see by. He sat on the edge of the bed and watched as she began to unbutton her dress, the moon's light upon her, and he said, “Come over here.”

And when she did he stood and finished the job of undoing the buttons and let the dress fall to the floor with a whisper.

“Are you sure you want to try this again?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “How about you?”

“No, I'm not…But then I'm not sure I
don't
want to, either.”

Her hands were already working at the buttons of his shirt and she said softly, “We can weigh the morality of this thing to death, or we can simply let it be…”

He could feel her warmth and he wanted that warmth for his own, but the memory of another woman came to him and he was hesitant because of it. She sensed his mood, his inner conflict, and soothed him with her kisses, made whatever it was vanish with her caresses as they slipped under the heavy quilt, nestling and nuzzling until all doubt and concerns fell away.

Later she whispered his name, “Jake…” Then, “The girls…”

He rose quietly there in the still predawn dark, the room grown cold, the bed with Clara in it a warm temptation to return to; he dressed quickly, quietly, then left.

 

The snow that had fallen during the night, the snow that they did not hear, lay everywhere and for once the town
looked beautiful and bucolic, like something an artist might paint in depicting a frontier town in winter, he thought. He felt famished in spite of the large supper he'd eaten at Toussaint's. He felt something else, too: contentment. A thing that he'd not felt in a very long time. He walked up toward the center of town and found the light on in the Fat Duck Café and went in and took the table by the window. And as he sat having his breakfast, he thought of Clara and what she meant to him. Thing was, no matter how he felt about her, he told himself, it wouldn't be fair to get her too involved with him. He was still wanted by the law and any day somebody could arrive to arrest him, or another assassin could be sent to kill him. He couldn't let Clara get in the middle of a thing like that.

He finished up his meal, gulping down a last swallow of coffee to brace himself against the cold, and walked over to the small one cell jail with its office and started a fire in the potbelly. Gus Boone, the part-time jailer, was asleep on the jail cot. He sat up when Jake rattled the door to the potbelly and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes.

“Don't you have a home to go home to?” Jake asked.

Gus coughed once, then stood.

“Got one, but sometimes I don't go there.”

“Why is that?”

“Sometimes me and the old woman I live with have a falling out and I sleep here.”

Jake shrugged, looked out the window. The sun was breaking over the horizon now and lighting up the snow, causing it to sparkle where the sun struck it.

“I helped old John dig a grave yesterday and I'm stiff in my shoulders,” Gus said, working his shoulders, trying to work the soreness out of them. “We buried that col
ored boy and it was Thanksgiving, too. That's why my old woman and me fell out: me digging a grave on Thanksgiving. Said, ‘Why do you have to dig a grave on such a day?' I said, ‘It's money is why.' Well, it just went south from there—the whole conversation. So I took the two dollars John paid me and went to the Three Aces and drank my supper, then come here and spent the night.” Gus stood up and wrapped the blanket around his shoulders and moved over to the stove, holding out his hands to warm them and gazing toward the window, the street beyond.

“I guess I should go on home and see how she is this morning,” Gus said.

Then the door rattled open and the curly-headed hand Jake encountered the previous day at Bob's walked in, stomping snow off his boots.

“Don't mean to make a mess,” he said, looking at Jake.

“You came here to tell me something about Nat Pickett,” Jake said.

The boy's eyes widened.

“How'd you know?”

“No other reason for you to be here.”

The boy looked at Gus and didn't say anything.

Jake said to Gus, “Go on over to the café and get yourself some breakfast.”

Gus looked sheepish.

“What?” Jake said.

“Got no money,” Gus said.

Jake reached in his pocket and took out a dollar. Gus looked grateful. Jake said, “That's for food, not whiskey.” Gus said, “Hell, I know it.”

And when he left, Jake turned to the boy.

“I'm waiting.”

“Nat…He was sort of a friend…I feel bad about what happened to him…”

Jake saw the fret.

“Who killed him and why, is all I need to know, son.”

“There's this girl…”

“I
WATCHED YOU OUTSHOOT
the Englishman today,” Shaw said. The man looked to Willy Silk like a judge or banker with his Prince Albert coat, sateen cravat, and diamond stickpin.

“So'd a lot of people,” Willy said, wondering why the man was buying him whiskies. Queerfish maybe. Willy had met such a man in Chicago—a dandy son of a bitch who mistook Willy for his own kind until Willy set him straight by breaking his nose with the barrel of his pistol and a few of his teeth too in an alley that stank of week-old garbage and human piss.

“I could use a man of your skills,” the banker or judge said.

“Mister, let me get something straight between us—I ain't no queerfish.”

The man held up both palms defensively.

“Is this what you think I'm about, sir?”

“I don't put nothing past nobody. So if that's your game, you been fair-warned.”

“Believe me, young man, I've no interest in you in that way.”

Willy waited until the man ordered him another
whiskey and sipped the fire that warmed the blood and soothed the demons.

“And what way is it that you
are
interested in me then?”

The banker or judge or whatever he was looked about and said, “Let's retire to that table where I might speak in private with you.”

“Bring along a bottle to keep us company,” Willy Silk said.

Quincy Adams Shaw thought a man who was a slave to liquor, as it seemed the young shootist was, might prove an empty vessel in the long run, but he was willing to take the chance in order to get revenge for his murdered son. He bought a bottle of the house's best and followed the youth to the empty table that stood in the far and lonely corner of the saloon.

It was by now midafternoon and raining quite hard outside, which only added to the air of gloom.

Willy'd had a dream the night before that he had murdered his uncle Reese and climbed into bed with his mother. He awoke in a night sweat that neither liquor nor the nameless woman he'd picked up could alleviate and some of the dream still plagued him.

Willy waited, unsettled, for the stranger to state his business, for he did not care for the company of strangers, except for those who wore skirts. He noticed the dandy had smooth hands and wore a signet ring on one finger when the hand gripped the liquor bottle.

“I've a money proposal for you,” the man said finally.

“I'm all ears,” Willy said, figuring to hear the fool out, then ride on to Cheyenne, where he heard there was another big shooting match.

So Shaw laid it out for him, quick and clean as a razor cut.

Then when the dandy stopped talking, Willy said, “Kill a man, that's what you want to pay me to do?”

“Yes, exactly” came the simple reply.

“A thousand dollars, just to plug somebody?”

“Simple as that.”

Willy sneered.

“Nothing simple about killing a man,” Willy said. “I could hang if caught.”

“May I ask if you ever have shot anyone for money or otherwise?”

“You can ask any goddamn thing you like, don't mean I'm gone answer it. What's my business is my business. You ever fuck a horse?”

Willy saw the dandy blanch, knew he wasn't used to such crude talk, didn't care.

“Point well taken,” the dandy said. “Will you do it?”

“Details,” Willy said.

So Quincy Adams Shaw told the youth what there was to know—how his son had been murdered by a man who'd violated the man's wife and then escaped and so on and so forth, embellishing the facts and details, bending and shaping the story into a bowl of sympathy for justice unserved and a life of promise snuffed out.

“I reckon was I to agree to this, you're aiming to tell me how I'd find your boy's killer?” Willy said. “It's a damn big country.”

Here is where the man shrugged, said, “Last word I received he's somewhere in the northern territory of Dakota. I confess you aren't the first man I hired.”

“What happened to the other one?”

“I don't know. After receiving word he was in a place called Bismarck and heading north, I never heard from him again. Dead, I assume, or quit.”

“So maybe this killer of your son killed your hired man, too, is that it?”

“I won't lie to you—it well could be the situation.”

“I'm not in the killing business, mister,” Willy said, deciding a thousand dollars was just a lot of one-dollar bills stacked up together, and what would he have once he spent the money but the same as what he already had and possibly the law down on his neck to boot.

“How much would it take to get you to do it?”

“Now we're getting down to brass tacks.”

They drank some more before striking a bargain—travel expenses, of course included. And that night Willy found himself a whore, surprisingly old. Why he chose her above the younger ones, he could only guess: She looked somewhat like his ma and he was feeling mean-spirited.

“What's your name?” he asked the woman once they were back in his room.

“Ruth,” she said.

“Ain't you a little long in the tooth for this business, Ruth?”

“It's what I've done all my life. I don't know no other way. With age comes experience. Most want 'em young—I think because they lust after their daughters…But some prefer a woman with experience to teach them the ways a woman likes. Mostly the young ones like yourself. Or maybe its just some sort of fancy they get in their heads—wondering what it's like to be with an older woman. It's always the old wanting the young and the young wanting the old in this business.”

Willy swallowed hard, took off his boots, fell back on the bed, and watched Ruth undress and there was something abhorrent in watching her.

She smiled and draped her bloomers over the end of the bed and came to him wearing only her stockings and
leaned over him and kissed him on the mouth. She smelled like dead flowers, a cloying disturbing smell that should have put him off to her but ended up having the opposite effect.

“You think they's something wrong with me, being young and wanting you 'cause you're old?”

“What's it matter what I think, young master?” she said and kissed him again in such a soft and tender way. He closed his eyes and let happen what was to happen and for the shortest moments, he felt safe in the midnight of his soul.

 

And when the first beams of morning light pierced the windows of his room, he looked about and saw that she was gone and only the scent of her remained near to him. Her scent and his memory of her soft and ample flesh, how warm it was.

He went and heaved into a corner of the room, then dressed and left out of that place, bought a train ticket north from the down payment in his pocket to kill a man—something he'd never done before, but he was down to desperation, it seemed, in all phases of his young life.

 

He never expected to encounter his uncle Reese in Cheyenne, but that is where he found him, swamping out a gambling den, looking wasted, his hair down to past his shoulders and gone almost completely white.

He waited till dawn the next day to confront him on the street outside, put the muzzle of his pistol up hard against Reese's jaw, and said, “Move into that alley or I'll kill you right here if that is what you want.”

“Willy,” said Reese, once he recognized who it was assaulting him.

“I ought to just blow your fucking head off,” Willy said.

“Oh hell, Willy, go ahead if that is what you want.” Reese began to weep and fell to his knees and looked pathetic, like a penitent, a sinner waiting for God to either forgive him or strike him dead.

“You sure ought to do just that very thing, Willy, for I did you and your mama wrong, I'll admit. Go on and pull that trigger and shoot me…I got no reason to live no how. I'm just skating on borrowed time as it is.”

Willy thumbed back the hammer of his pistol and Reese didn't even bother to look up.

“I ain't afraid of dying, Willy. What I'm afraid of is living.”

Willy brought the gun down close to Reese's sweaty skin, there just above the brows.

“I ought to, Reese, I mean, what I heard is you cleaned Mother out of everything she had.”

Reese shook his head back and forth like a hamstrung steer in agony.

“I admit to it, but it wasn't all as one-sided a thing as you might have heard. Still, that ain't no excuse for the things I done.”

“You goddamn right, it ain't.”

“Please, Willy, just pull the trigger and get it over and leave me here like the garbage. It's a proper place for a man like me to die…”

“What happened to you, Reese? You used to be somebody I looked up to, now you just look all used up. You look just like some old bum.”

“I got the disease, Willy. I got the disease they call pox and it's eating me up, and the doc says it will eat up my brain, too. It's all just a matter of time, Willy. I'd just as
soon not go that way. Pussy ruined me, Willy. Pussy and all the things a man will do to get it.”

“Jesus Christ, Reese, I don't want to hear nothing about it.”

“Shit, boy, shoot me if you got an ounce of compassion in you.”

But instead Willy holstered the gun, said, “Get up, Reese, you're like some goddamn mangy dog somebody's kicked. I can't stand to see you this way.”

It took a long minute for Reese to rise to his feet.

“What you gone do, Willy, if not shoot me?”

“First I'm gone get you cleaned up, then I don't know. Put you on a train to somewhere maybe. Hell, Reese, I don't know.”

Reese stood there shaking like a dog come out of a cold river.

“Jesus, Reese.”

They had breakfast after Willy took Reese to the local bath house run by a pair of Chinamen and paid them to trim his hair and had one of them run and buy Reese some new clothes, telling the Chinamen to burn his old ones.

They ate in a restaurant full of good smells and Willy watched his uncle eat like he was starved—which he was—his hands shaking hard enough he had to keep forking up his eggs again and again.

Reese ran over his history as he ate, telling Willy about how he come to get involved with Willy's mother.

“She was lonely, Willy. Real lonely, and I was, too, I reckon. We each of us got past the other's bad points and for a time it was good between us, Willy. It really was. She was upset you left like you did with no word or nothing. She needed comforting and that's what I tried to give her. It just all took off from there.”

“But you left her high and dry in the end, Reese. In the end you cleaned her out and left her yourself.”

“She sold the place 'cause of debts I incurred, because she loved me. I didn't clean her out, Willy. She cleaned herself out because she loved me. I only let her. It was wrong, I know, but I've always been of a certain desperate character. I ain't never tried to deny that. I tried to change, I really did. But a man can't change what he is, not even for love or nothing else when it comes down to it. A man always goes back to being what he was born to be. I can't help being what I was born to be, no more than you can help it, or no more than your ma could help it. We're all just what we are, Willy. Just what we are…”

Reese drank his way through two pots of coffee. Willy could see he was dying, could see the disease had eaten him up so far there wasn't nothing could be done for him.

“What about you, son?” Reese said. “Looks like you put some wear on you since I seen you last.”

“I've gone down lots of trails too, Reese. I was a featured performer in Colonel Lily's Wild West Combination for a time. But I drifted off from that—on my own now, freelancing.”

“I heard,” Reese said. “I read about you in an advertisement in the newspapers once in Council Bluffs in a barbershop where I was getting my hair cut—before I became such a awful mess. I read all about you, Willy. I knew the first time I seen you shoot that little pistol of mine you were made for greater things than planting corn and butchering hogs.”

“Yeah, well, like the Colonel told me when me and him parted ways: What I once was, I ain't no more.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

Willy reached into his shirt pocket and took out the
fold of down payment killing money, peeled off fifty dollars, set it by Reese's coffee cup, and said, “Take that, Reese.”

“No, I couldn't take nothing more off you,” he said without actually pushing the money back across the table.

“It ain't nothing, Reese. I got more where that come from. I ain't worried about it. Go on take it.”

“Where you come by so much money, Willy? You ain't turned to a life of crime, have you, become some bank robber or something?”

“No, Reese. I ain't exactly yet.”

Reese badgered him to know what he meant and Willy took out the wanted poster the man had given him to go along with the money and it had a likeness of the man he wanted Willy to kill—a man named Tristan Shade—and he set it on the table next and turned it around so Reese could see it.

“A man paid me to go find this fellow and kill him,” Willy finally said. “You glad you know now? It make you feel any better you know, Reese?”

Reese swallowed like he had a lump of sugar in his mouth.

“You ought to reconsider,” Reese said.

“Why's that?”

“Lots of reasons, but the main one is there is some things you end up doing you can't turn back from—like killing a man.”

“Hell, Reese, don't worry. I'm sort of on the skids my ownself. Way I look at it, I don't have much more to lose than you.”

Reese looked sorry then, looked off into the room toward the other diners, then toward the street beyond the oily window and hanging checkered curtains. It was like
he was looking for something that no longer existed, but he wanted it to. It was a look of longing Willy saw in Reese's rheumy eyes.