by Carl Dane
But tonight, Carmody informed me that I was not up to par. He leaned on the piano and spoke to me ital sotto voce.
“Can’t you pound out a pick-me-up tune? Take a look around. This stuff is making people want to slit their wrists. Maybe slit yours too, while they’re at it, so I’d be careful.”
“It’s German music,” I said. “They are a very melancholy people.”
“I know it’s German. It’s Wagner, and it makes me want to just set the place on fire and die tragic and all while I yowl like a coyote.”
“How the hell do you know this stuff?”
“I ain’t no dummy. I look rough, but I’ve been to a few concerts, I read some, and I see things. Right now I see there’s something eating you.”
“No,” I lied, “not really.”
“Suppose the shoulder don’t make your mood no better. I know this is kind of obvious, but if you have to grit your teeth when you play maybe you could back off them ivories for a few weeks.”
“An artist must suffer for his work,” I said, and Carmody shrugged and walked away.
I decided to heighten the gloom with some Tchaikovsky and after a few more trail-hands finished their beers and walked out Elmira apparently figured she had no choice but to intervene.
We’d spoken very little in the past few days, only perfunctory stuff, and events had recently conspired to further darken my mood.
She sat next to me on the bench and looked straight ahead.
At least she didn’t try to sing. She is tone-deaf and can’t recognize it, which is part of being tone-deaf, and makes wild-animal sounds when she attempts to harmonize. I was pounding out a death scene from an opera, though, and maybe her style would have fit it.
“I’ve told you that I’m sorry,” she said.
“Yes, you have.”
I played a little louder.
“I’ve told you that Gillis lied, he said everything would be for our own good in the long run. And it sounded good. I believed that he was just trying to establish some order in town and straighten out this railroad mess. I believed him.”
“You fell for him. You swallowed all that stuff about how much he cared for women when you knew he slapped the girls around when he got drunk. You believed all that crap about him wanting to help the town when you knew he was in it for himself.”
She sensed this was going nowhere, following the same path as the last half-dozen or so conversations we’d had on the matter, and before she started talking about big pictures and greater truths, she gave up and changed topics.
“Look,” she said, “let’s just enjoy tonight. Your friends should be here soon.”
“I imagine you’re looking forward to that more than I am.”
She didn’t get my meaning, and as subtlety is largely wasted on her I dispensed with it.
“You’ve been spending a lot of time with Tom lately.”
“Carmody? My God, Josiah, I like him but you’re –”
“Harbold. Tom Harbold. I heard one of the girls say you were out with him all morning yesterday. Having a picnic or something.”
She laughed. For real.
“Josiah, I didn’t even know ‘Tom’ is Harbold’s first name. And yes, we were out all morning. I’ll show you why.”
She returned in a minute with my Boss of the Plains hat and laid it atop the piano.
“Carmody, who I am not sneaking around with either, told me how upset you were that you lost your hat when you were ambushed. Carmody can’t really ride much until he heals up, so he told Constable Harbold about where the ambush happened. We went out to look for it together. I found it stuck on a tree branch.”
I stopped playing, thanked her and put it on.
Then I kissed her.
It was a great hat, especially in the heat. There’s a sweatband on the inside and the crown is very high, which allows for air to move around to keep your head cool.
And the bullet hole would probably help with ventilation, too.
Chapter 65
Weed, Harbold, Carmody, Munro, and Lydia Davis pulled a table and chairs over to the piano so we could talk while I played. Elmira said she would be over in a minute.
The bargirl stopped at Weed first. He was undecided and took a moment to look around.
“I’ll have a mug of whiskey,” he said.
Carmody cleared his throat.
“Whiskey in places like this is a little tough to guzzle by the mug. Maybe a mug of cold beer would be a mite more refreshing. Been a hot day.”
“All right,” Weed said. “I usually don’t tell people this, but I don’t have a lot of experience in these kinds of places.”
“We’ll keep that to ourselves,” Carmody said.
Weed loosened up a little after a few drinks. We all did.
Munro filled us in on what was happening in Austin. Gates Davis was in jail. Harbold had arrested him personally.
“Good,” said Lydia, who actually was drinking whiskey by the mug. “He’s an asshole.”
Jefferson Gillis was in jail, too. Harbold couldn’t figure out any charges that would stick and was anxious to let Gillis go so he could watch me beat the shit out of him, but it turned out there were four warrants out for him on various fraud charges in Texas and New Mexico.
And on the subject of beatings, I satisfied Munro’s curiosity about Taza. In return for his help with the ersatz cannons, I agreed to teach him what I knew of Siam kickboxing so he could practice for the storied day on which he would beat me to death.
Munro had some good news: There was a thousand-dollar reward for the capture of Tremaine, dead or alive, and as I’d arranged the former circumstance, Munro told me, it would be coming my way.
But he tempered it with some bad news. The railroad project was delayed, held up in byzantine politics. While it was still likely that it would pass through Elmira’s property, turning her scrub back lot into a bonanza, it was no longer a certainty.
Powerful political forces from other constituencies wanted a piece of the pie, he said, and were lobbying to re-draw the map to benefit their districts.
Elmira wasn’t disturbed about the money, she said, and it was the truth. She had a comfortable business and could pay the bills and never worried about such things much, anyway.
But then her expression changed as a thought struck her, and she betrayed an infinite sadness.
“That means that all this killing was for nothing,” she said.
“It usually is,” Munro said, and the indisputable authority of his words, spoken with a voice that had commanded hundreds of men to march and ride to their deaths, hung in the air like the resonant peal of a bell.
He looked at the table while he talked, an odd posture for a man who usually made militant eye contact, drilling those blue orbs right into you.
“Last year they tried to kill Hawke because there was money to be made and he was in the way. I understand that. I don’t approve of it, but I understand it.”
“But this time,” Elmira said, her thought trailing off.
“This time it was for revenge. And something else. Hawke had a good word for it: ‘hubris.’”
Carmody, who I thought had been asleep, raised a finger.
“It means…”
“I know what it means,” Munro snapped, and Carmody went back to sleep.
Munro looked at Elmira.
“It’s what I see all the time at the statehouse, the same shit that I saw at that canyon, and exactly what I saw happen down the street here a few days ago. Battles we get caught up in even though they’re not our battles, and we might not even remember how they started, for Christ’s sake. We just sit and fight blindly. In the long shadows of greed and revenge.”
Lydia took another pull of whiskey from her mug.
“This is getting pretty fucking depressing,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and looking over at me.
“Can’t you play something else besides this fucking funeral music?”
&nbs
p; I cowpoked up some Chopin, the Military Polonaise, a sort of march that’s set to the beat of a cheerful Polish dance. It’s long and loud and if you play it broadly it sounds like it was written for a saloon on Saturday night.
“I like that better,” Elmira said, and I saw her let out a breath. “It’s over, and we’ve got a lot to be thankful for. We all got through it alive…”
“My asshole father’s in jail,” Lydia said.
“That too,” Elmira agreed, and when I looked closer, I realized that in the past hour or so she had not only become cheerful but blind drunk.
“And I’m grateful for to have all you wonderful, honest people around me, even if you do seem to enjoy shooting people more than is normal.”
Weed was on his fourth beer and was almost as unfocused as Elmira.
“I second that,” he said, and then turned serious.
“And I apologize for what I did. I was under Davis’s spell, I guess. I believed him when he told me that everything was all legal. I honestly didn’t know that the money from Gillis was a bribe. Davis told me that’s how frontier judges got paid, and of course I was excited to move onto something bigger than settling property and mineral rights claims. I thought I was doing the right thing.”
“I know,” Elmira said, the words coming a little thickly as happens when she drinks too much and her lips fall asleep.
“I believed somebody too, because I thought what he said sounded good, even though what he did and said were two different things.”
She shook her head.
“It was a bad experience,” she said.
***
When you’re in combat, it takes all the strength you have to go counter to what you really want to do, which in most cases is running away from, and not toward, people who are trying to kill you. The mark of a good soldier is the ability to overcome your natural instincts.
And so I mustered every ounce of resolve I possessed and was able to overcome the temptation to tell her it was for her own good.
Instead, I cowpoked up some cheerful Mozart.
I was suddenly in a very good mood.
THE END
About the Author
Carl Dane is a career journalist and author who has written more than 20 nonfiction books, hundreds of articles, and a produced play. He’s worked as a television anchor and talk show host, newspaper columnist, and journalism professor.
He was born in San Antonio, Texas, and has maintained a lifelong interest in the Old West and the Civil War. He is a member of The Sons of Union Veterans and has traced many of ancestors not only to the Civil War, but also to the War of 1812 and the American Revolution.
Carl often writes and lectures about ethical dilemmas, and has a deep interest in morality, including questions of whether the ends justify the means and how far a reasonable person can go in committing an ostensibly wrong act to achieve a “greater good.”
He has testified on ethical issues before the U.S. Congress and has appeared on a wide variety of television programs, including Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, ABC News World News Now, CBS Capitol Voices, and CNN’s Outlook.
Carl is also interested in the structure of effective and eloquent communication, and has written two recent books on professional writing and speaking for a commercial academic and reference publisher.
Reviewers have consistently praised his work for its deft humor.
When not coyly writing about himself in the third person, Carl lives in suburban New Jersey, where he is active in local government and volunteer organizations. He is the father of two sons.
The characters of Josiah Hawke and Tom Carmody – and the situations they confront – were drawn from the author’s interest in the darker sides of the human soul, and the contradictions built into the psyche of every man and woman.
Hawke is an intellectual, a former professor of philosophy, who became drawn to the thrill of violence after the life-changing events of the Civil War – which not only exposed Hawke to violence but showed him that he possessed considerable untapped skill in that area. Carmody, yin to Hawke’s yang, is a blunt backwoodsman who is no stranger to violence, either, but has fought for survival and not for sport. Carmody wonders if Hawke’s philosophical justifications are merely a smokescreen for seeking out trouble – and he’s not afraid to tell that to Hawke.
Follow Carl at www.carldane.com
