by Darryl Brock
Our prairie detective disappeared in Laramie, where we had lunch. We then chugged through miles of high, barren land dotted with sage. At Rock Creek we waited for two hours while a derailed freight train was removed from the tracks. The stationmaster told us that sandy soil on this side of the mountains caused constant problems with bridges and track beds.
My attention was attracted by two smooth-shaven men at the end of the car. They’d been with us since Omaha, but had not joined in the general socializing. The older of the two was in his late twenties, taciturn and pinch-lipped. He stood about five ten, with light brown hair, a mouth pulled down as if in disapproval, a long elephantine nose, and protruding jug-handle ears that nearly rivaled Johnny’s. He spent most of his time poring over a battered copy of Pilgrim’s Progress. The book made an odd contrast with the long-barreled .44 Colt revolver strapped to his thigh. Weapons were common now, but he wore his with none of the showmanship that abounded out here. It seemed almost workmanlike, a hammer in a carpenter’s belt.
His companion, about five years younger, was slightly shorter and leaner. He walked with a cane, wincing sometimes as he moved, but carrying himself so erectly that he seemed the taller of the two. He had short-cropped chestnut hair, dark eyebrows over pale hazel eyes, and a nervous blink that came every few seconds. Once, when he glanced up and caught me studying him, he smiled thinly and something icy emanated from him. I looked away. There was the same chill about the pair, especially the younger, that I’d felt from Le Caron; a menacing sort of charisma. Earlier Beard, the dry-goods merchant, had tried to engage them in conversation. The older man had not looked up from his book; the other gave him the thin, icy smile and said, “We don’t know you.” Beard retreated in haste. Another time, when somebody referred to the Confederacy as the “Confabulated States of America,” the younger one snapped, “Don’t ever say that again.” It was not repeated.
So I was surprised when he put aside his newspapers—he read stacks of them each day—and worked his way up the aisle toward me, employing his cane as if to keep from jarring himself. His companion watched fixedly.
“Heard tell you’re a newspaperman.” His voice was thin and nasal; a high-pitched twang and upward inflection made his words almost a challenge.
“That’s true.” This close I saw dark pockets under his eyes; his cheeks were gaunt, his skin pale.
“What paper?”
I told him.
“Enquirer? What’s its politics?”
“Democrat.”
He pursed his lips and nodded slowly, satisfied.
“What sort of articles?”
Before thinking to cover myself, I told him I was meeting the team in San Francisco.
“Red Stockings,” he repeated, screwing up his face like a schoolboy in a spelling bee. “Read of ’em somewhere. Never endeavored that game myself. War busied me. And now there’s the farming.”
Again I heard a hint of challenge, as if maybe I thought there was something remiss in what he’d said. I didn’t ask what a farmer needed with pearl-handled revolvers; the butts of them, protruding from crossed holsters, stuck out from his dark linen frock coat. They must have been encumbrances to such mundane things as sitting down.
“You get news of Western desperadoes up in Ohio?” He pronounced it “desper-A-does.” The question came with studied casual-ness.
“Only what comes through St. Louis,” I replied. “Which isn’t much. Mostly Indian and troop movements.”
He nodded judiciously. “Obliged.”
I watched him move stiffly back to his seat. The older man lowered his gaze to his book once more. Was everybody out here media conscious? I wondered. Was the Old West populated by some whimsical casting agency?
That night I stared out the window at the Wyoming desert, a landscape so dreary that even moonlight didn’t help. My lips were cracked, my eyes stung from the alkali dust that worked its way into the cars and powdered every surface. We stopped at Red Desert, Bitter Creek, Salt Wells. All aptly named. Johnny snored throughout.
I had a nightmare: Brainard was my father and Cait my mother; we huddled like terrified animals as Le Caron stalked my little brother, Timmy. I woke up sweating, thinking at first that I was back on Amtrak—that everything had been a dream.
I sent a telegram from Green River, our breakfast stop, grateful for the twin telegraph lines shadowing the rails. “Trip going well,” I wrote on the dispatch slip, resisting adding, “Wish you were here.”
A voice startled me on the way out. “Sendin’ out a story?”
He was leaning against the wall, almost hidden behind the telegraph-office door. I stepped from the doorway and saw that he was sweating in the morning heat. The pupils of his eyes were dilated, his breathing labored.
“Just a message home,” I said. “You okay?”
He eyed me as though weighing my words. I felt the menace again.
“Morphine,” he said. “Always brings a sweat. Took a ball near my lung in the war.”
That was a long time, I thought, to be using so dangerous a painkiller. At that moment the man’s companion came around the corner.
“C’mon, Dingus,” he said, ignoring me as he took the pale man’s arm.
I thrust my hand out. “I'm Sam Fowler.”
The older man paid no attention. The one called Dingus said, “J. T. Jackson, Louisville. This here’s Colbourn, my partner.” He said the names carefully, glancing back over his shoulder as he moved away.
What’s with those two? I wondered.
We passed Cathedral Rock, where workers were replacing wooden bridge sections. All along the UP gangs were visible now—young and Irish mostly, dirty and bearded in dungarees and slouch hats, waving to us when their bosses weren’t looking—replacing iron-capped wood rails, converting fueling stations to coal, reworking grades.
Rolling across the wastelands, I wondered if we would all be mummified by the heat and dust. At noon we stopped at Wasatch Station in the Utah Territory. Passengers craned their necks to spot Mormons, those goatsy old devils with harems of compliant wives. At the What Cheer Eating House we ate biscuits that must have been made with alkali.
We climbed through the rugged gorges of Echo and Weber canyons, staring at thrusts of red sandstone towering hundreds of feet above—
Devil’s Gate, Devil’s Slide, Witches’ Rock—as we passed along ledges barely wide enough for the tracks.
The Weber River was spanned by a reconstructed bridge. The original had washed away. This one swayed alarmingly as the engineer stopped in midspan so we could look straight down into a chasm where the river flowed between rock walls three thousand feet high.
“This is worse than the circus high-wire act,” Johnny said, looking away.
“Did you do that too?”
“Once.”
In late afternoon we pulled out of Ogden. For the next fifty miles another set of tracks ran parallel to ours. In the frantic cross-country race for subsidies, the competing railroads had shot past each other. Belligerent Union Pacific gangs had attacked the Chinese Central Pacific workers with stones and bullets. Promontory had been selected as a temporary linking point—there the golden spike was duly driven, sparking a national celebration—but the permanent division was still in negotiation, with Ogden the strongest contender.
We reached Promontory an hour before sunset. At first glance it didn’t seem different from other desert stations. We wrestled for our luggage and lined up at the ticket windows, only to learn that no connecting Central Pacific train departed until the next morning. Curses, threats, and offers of quick cash made no impression. We were all stranded in Promontory for the night.
“This whole place is on the wrong side of the tracks,” Johnny commented; looking around.
Which about said it all. To our left squatted sun-bleached express buildings. In the distance a United States flag marked the site of the golden spike ceremony. To our right stretched a single line of canvas-topped structures with crude signs
.
“Try your luck, gents?” Shills lounged in the doorways of faro and poker establishments. “Two dollars?”
“Could try me for that,” a woman with orange hair said. “Wouldn’t take much luck neither.” After we passed she snorted. “Them two ain’t likely stiff for anything!”
It got a laugh from men who eyed us like wolves inspecting the latest sheep shipment. Among them were knots of the ruggedest, most predatory-looking whores I’d ever seen.
After checking out several lodging shanties we decided on Sunny-side House, like the rest a flophouse where for steep prices you rented a cot in a canvas-topped room shared by fifteen others; but unlike the others it didn’t double as a gambling house, and it promised “guaranteed protection” of luggage and valuables.
Since there was little else to do we ambled back up the street. “This is just an overgrown gambling hell,” Johnny said, pointing at three-card monte and craps tables in front of doorways—convenient for fleecing travelers on a few minutes’ stopover. Even our conductor, not overly solicitous of our welfare, had dropped hints that Promontory’s whiskey was watered—or worse—and the whores who swarmed to greet each train were diseased.
In front of the Switch Key Saloon we ran into a man from our car who shamefacedly confessed losing forty dollars in less than fifteen minutes. We glanced inside and saw poker and faro games in full swing. Men clustered in the street around tables and lurched through doorways signed REFRESHMENTS. A few wore expensive clothes, but most were in typical plains garb: broad-brimmed hats with felt bands, wide leather belts holding guns and knives, thigh-length coats, pant-legs tucked inside high boots.
They were discharged railroad workers, miners, livestockmen; many were drifters now, dirty, ill-smelling and lice-ridden—I saw one whose eyebrows crawled. The sort who got their jollies watching dogs rip each other apart—which happened now in the street, prompting a rash of betting on which animal would survive.
Guns fired every few seconds and yelling was constant. I eyed the formidable weapons around us, thinking my derringer would intimidate few here. At least we didn’t need to pretend Johnny was my servant. If a man had money he was welcome in all establishments, regardless of race. Everyone was ripped off equally.
“Let’s get a drink,” said Johnny. “I’m dryer’n dust.”
We stood before a shanty modestly named the Palace Saloon. What the hell, I thought. Old West research. It was much darker inside. I paused beside the doorway to let my eyes adjust, first seeing only halos around the lamps. Beside me, Johnny muttered something.
“What?”
“Sam, it’s them.”
His tone puzzled me. An instant later, as something hard jammed into my back, spurring terrible memories of Le Caron behind me in the Newark station, I realized with sickening clarity who he meant. All my body systems seemed to hit the brakes.
“Move on up there,” a voice growled in my ear.
We were prodded toward a poker table in the far corner of the room, where McDermott and Le Caron sat holding cards, eyes fixed on us. With them were four others, two I didn’t recognize, and two I did: Jackson and Colbourn, the taciturn pair from our car.
“Attend to you in a wee bit, Mr. Fowler,” said McDermott nonchalantly, as if I were his early-arriving client. To the one behind us he said, “Any shenanigans, kill the big boyo first, then the nigger.”
Le Caron’s jet eyes stared into mine. He smiled dreamily, as if all his fondest hopes had come true. I cursed my stupidity. Why hadn’t I guessed that this would be the interception point? The only place between Omaha and Sacramento where everybody had to detrain.
The gun nudged my back, almost probing, in that same place. Something very strange began to happen to me. I thought I smelled earth and wet leaves, and my vision grew milky.
It couldn’t have lasted more than a second or two, but while the images and sensations took over me, time stretched into an infinity. It’s impossible to describe accurately, but at exactly the place where the gun was prodding me I seemed to feel my skin explode, the flesh ripping—but outward, as if a projectile were exiting, not entering—and then a bright tracer shone through my chest like a laser beam, impaling me, and I hurtled backward, arm flung high in a tunnel of light formed by walls of encircling greenery; for an instant before my body blended with the loam I glimpsed leaves and birds and a terrified face, a face I recognized though it was grimy and younger, the glass-blue eyes crazy above a smoking pistol. . . .
It’s fairly unsettling to learn that your body seems to remember its own death and that your brain holds a picture of your killer. And now I was to die again. The gambling room was washed in milky half-light. Roaring filled my ears. I must have slumped, for the gun jabbed me abruptly—but in a different place. The pain presented a focus, helped bring me back.
“Some sort of trouble here?” The pale man was talking. Jackson. I squinted. He sat two places left of McDermott, across from Le Caron. On his right was the older one, Colbourn.
“No trouble.” McDermott sounded expansive, jovial. “Not now.”
Maybe I could yell. Scream they were going to kill us. Hope Jackson would do something. But although I was tracking better, speech seemed beyond my capacity. I realized that Jackson was studying me quizzically. He glanced away and with a lazy movement pulled his coat back to reveal the handles of his pistols. It was a gesture few in the room could have missed.
“A gun out in the open turns me skittish,” he said softly.
“Play out the hand,” McDermott said. “Then we’ll be about our business.” He nodded to Le Caron, who was dealing.
Speech returned to me suddenly. “Why’d he kill Colm?” The words erupted harshly.
McDermott stared in surprise, then grinned. “Who?” he said. “Me?”
“O’Donovan,” I said. “Just like he sent you. But why’d he shoot Colm?”
“Oh, ‘shoot’ is it, now? You know that, too?”
“We playin’ cards here or not?” Colbourn demanded.
McDermott waved a peremptory hand. Colbourn’s scowl deepened.
“To your queries I’ll say aye and leave you the why,” McDermott said, laughing at his rhyme. “You’ll have ample time to ponder it.” His voice hardened. “Shoot the bastard if he opens his mouth again.”
Jackson was studying him curiously. Colbourn still looked pissed. If only I could figure a way to get them on our side. I tried to forget the gun in my back and concentrate on what was happening before me.
Gold littered the table, a pot of at least five hundred dollars. The game was seven-card stud. Each of the six players had two cards down and three up: McDermott showed a pair of tens; Jackson two kings; Colbourn two clubs with nothing else; one of the others looked straightish with a ten, jack, and ace. Le Caron, already folded, dealt the fourth up-card around: no help for McDermott’s tens, a third king to Jackson, another club to Colbourn, no help to the straight builder, who folded Jackson’s fifty-dollar opener. McDermott raised fifty. Colbourn pushed his hundred in reluctantly, probably sitting on a flush but worried that he was already beaten. Jackson raised a hundred back. McDermott matched it. Colbourn folded his hand, eyeing the pot morosely.
I moved my head slightly to see the man behind us.
“Turn around.”
I’d caught a glimpse. He was well back. I tried to catch Johnny’s eye. He was oblivious, staring intently at Le Caron. No chance for signals between us. Jesus. My mind was thawing, but it came up with nothing.
Le Caron dealt McDermott and Jackson their final down cards. Jackson bent the corner of his up and peeked at it. His pallid face showed nothing, but his shoulders squared slightly as he spoke.
“I’ll go five hundred dollars.” He moved stacks of gold eagles to the center of the table.
“I’m thinking I’ll raise you back the same,” said McDermott, counting out a thousand dollars.
Jackson looked at Colbourn. Some message passed between them. Colbourn reached into his coa
t and produced a leather pouch from which he poured coins.
“Raise you the same again,” Jackson said.
McDermott, who had not looked at his seventh card, now did so. His eyes flicked to Le Caron, then away. “It’ll clean my pockets, to be sure,” he said expansively. “But ’tis curious I am by nature, and I’ll not rest till I know what you’re holding so proudly.” He pushed his remaining money into the pot and sat back expectantly.
Jackson turned over his cards: a full house, kings over sevens.
“A grand layout,” said McDermott, leaning back. “Sure and should be a winner every time.”
“Stop chinning, mister,” Jackson said. “Turn up your cards.”
McDermott did so, with maddening slowness. Two of his down cards were tens, making four in all. The room was hushed. McDermott reached for the pot.
“The deal’s crooked!” Johnny yelled. “He’s using a holdout!”
There was a startled instant in which everything seemed suspended. The man behind us snarled, “Shut up!”
I jumped involuntarily as an explosion came from the table. Each of Jackson’s hands held a pistol. Smoke curled from the barrel of the one pointed upward. The other was trained on a spot behind Johnny and me.
“The nigger’s got something to say.” Tension gave Jackson’s thin voice a higher pitch. “If you”—he moved the gun pointed our way slightly—“don’t allow him a chance, you’ll be the first dead.”
Apparently it convinced whoever was behind us.
“That’s good,” said Jackson. Without shifting his eyes he said, “You set, Buck?”
Colbourn muttered something I didn’t catch. He brought up his hands from below the table. They held revolvers.
I waited tensely, ready to spring in any direction. So many guns, so little time.
