Dutch Uncle

by Marilyn Durham

  ‘Me? Goddamn it, I was forty feet away!’

  ‘But I knew you wouldn’t miss. You’re still Dutch Hollander, Jake — whether you like it or not.’ He peered at Jake nearsightedly before adjusting his glasses, then snorted again at what he saw on Jake’s face.

  Jake groaned. ‘Christ, you’re worse than Paco!’ He didn’t know what to make of such a person as Clem. ‘If you knew I wouldn’t miss, you knew a hell of a lot more than I did! The ammunition in this piece is so old, I didn’t know if it was going to misfire or blowup in my hand!’

  Clem was instantly sober. ‘I’m sorry, Dutch. I didn’t think about there being any danger to you. You shouldn’t have taken the risk.’

  ‘Oh, for— Come on — get your ass back into the cantina before Carrie catches you, and I’ll buy you something to settle your nerves.’

  *

  Before the day ended, the ridiculous story had gone around town, and a dozen locals came trotting to beg Jake to repeat it for their benefit with their own bottles or an apple. Clem’s head was still the most popular choice for a target base. When he made his rounds he was greeted everywhere with pats on the back and offers of free drinks. In the eyes of the Arredondans the incident had made him neither a hero nor the fool that he feared, but simply one of them. They were ready for friendly roughhouse and a personal recounting of the McNaughton slaughter from the man who had seemed too cold, dry, and colorless until now, whatever his ancient fame.

  Jake, as always, withdrew from camaraderie the more it advanced on him. But he tried to endure it, because there was nowhere to escape it but back in the empty jail office.

  As he expected, plans were drawn up for a re-enactment of the event. Without his participation, target bearers as game as Clem were hard to find. Bottles were tossed instead, and were either blown apart in midair or smashed on the street. There was a massive destruction of liquor and glass at the intersection of Hassayampa and the stage road. The more sober residents began to complain because he wasn’t doing, anything to stop it, either.

  ‘You are the cause of this, Jacob Hollander,’ Carrie said. ‘Go out there and do something!’

  ‘They’ll cool off in a while. Meantime, they’re not killing anything but their own whiskey.’

  ‘You mean you just intend to loaf here and watch?’

  ‘What do you want me to do? I can’t arrest them all. If I pull a gun out now, everybody is likely to get killed. Besides, your brother is as much to blame for this as anybody. Look at him right now — happy as a firebug in hell.’ Clem was standing in the office door absorbed in the street scene. Carrie looked at him doubtfully, but rallied at once.

  ‘That’s a shoddy way to avoid your own responsibility, Mr Hollander. Anyone here knows how hard Clem has worked to bring some kind of civilized order to this town, even to the point of hiring you, useless as that was. He detests this sort of irresponsibility; he always has. And he’s been willing to stand up against it with every edition of his paper.’

  Jake snorted. ‘I know what he prints. But he’s what you might call a sunshine peace lover. Every now and then he likes a little violence to sweeten the pot.’

  She looked grim. ‘If you aren’t man enough to stop this, perhaps I can,’ she said, and swept around him to the corner, where Bert Kelly, the gloomy owner of the Red Front, stood in his own door. He was cradling a double-barreled shotgun in the crook of one arm to protect his property from any further raids on its stock. Jake saw her snatch the gun from Kelly. He uncoiled himself from his lounging position as rapidly as he could, to reach her and take it from her while she was still fending off Bert.

  ‘Bert! Carrie! Damn it, what do you think you’re going to do?’

  ‘Get their attention!’ she shouted. He put her back with one hand, cocking both hammers of the gun with the other, ‘then let it off at the sky. The roar brought a startled pause to the play in the streets.

  ‘Is that what you had in mind?’ he asked. Then, to the crowd: ‘I’ve got an announcement to make! Mr Clement Hand of the Arredondo Arrow has offered to sponsor a shoot next Sunday afternoon, outside of town. He’ll get up some prizes for marksmanship with pistol or rifle. He doesn’t know just what yet, but he’ll think of something.

  ‘You’ll have to supply your own ammunition, so you better start saving it now. Also, this hell-raising is disturbing the ladies and children! Cut it out; you’re wasting good whiskey. If you keep shooting up the supply, you’re going to run up the price to where we’ll all have to drink beer!’

  The grumbling that had begun dissolved into laughter. Jake grinned at them, relaxed deliberately against a post.

  ‘Miss Hand, here, says she’ll have to clean up this mess you made if you don’t do it first. I don’t think she ought to have to cut her pretty little fingers on all that glass when some of you are so horn-handed you could scoop it up like feathers. But I’m sure she’ll be glad to supply a box to dump it in so it won’t lame the mules when you pull out for home tonight.’

  His last appeal brought out all the drunken valor and barehanded foolishness he thought it would. He returned the shotgun to Bert and met Carrie’s eyes briefly. He couldn’t read her face at all.

  *

  Later, she came to the door of the jail to look in on him, hands clutching her upper arms as if she were cold.

  ‘Did they get it all cleaned up?’ he asked without much interest.

  ‘Yes. Then I had to use up all the iodine and bandages I had. Some of them will hardly be able to hold a pick tomorrow, thanks to you.’

  ‘Or a gun?’

  ‘Yes. That’s what I came about. I want to apologize for saying what I did. You — you handled them very well, and you weren’t afraid of them. I could see that. I’m sorry I said you were.’

  ‘Don’t be too sure everything you see is so. If I’d come out sounding like John Law they’d have made a sieve out of me. They might have anyway. I was lucky, like this afternoon.’

  She winced, looking from him to his feet on the table between them. ‘Yes, Clem told me he had, something to do with that, too. I’m also sorry for that. I know he sometimes drinks, more than he should, and then he tries to find some way to — prove himself, I suppose.’

  ‘Prove himself?’

  She looked uncomfortable. ‘Prove that he’s the same as — other men. I don’t say anything to him about it, because he has enough to bear.’ He was silent before her embarrassment. She got herself in hand and looked at him again. ‘Well, I am sorry for putting all the blame on you. That’s what I came to say. We’re all weaker than we’d like to be. I suppose when we’re denied the indulgence in one human frailty we tend to overindulge in another. My brother sometimes drinks too much, and I — talk too much. Good night, Jacob.’

  *

  The day had seemed eternal. He had accepted too many free drinks and had not had enough to eat. He had a dull headache. Paco’s chatter would have driven him crazy if he had been forced to endure it, but without it there was no proper period to the day. He fell asleep with difficulty, then woke sometime in the night, oppressed by the same sad, dreaming lust that had waked him that morning and the morning before.

  He got up and lit a cigar to put things back into perspective and went outside, in spite of the chill air, to smoke it.

  When night came in Arredondo it was absolute. There wasn’t a sound or a light anywhere except at the cantina, where there was always a light. The moon was down.

  He was going to have to make peace with Delia pretty soon, or lower his standards and find comfort at the cantina. If he hadn’t been so thin skinned he’d be up at the Moon now, in that big soft bed of hers, with her making little sleepy protests maybe, but — Christ! Stop that, he thought, before you start, acting like some pimple-faced boy.

  Still, he looked toward Delia’s, wondering what she’d do lf he went down and tapped on her door now. Laugh her head off, then slam the door in his face, he supposed. He sighed.

  A shadowy figure emerged from th
e larger darkness of the Golden Moon, walking carefully. It stopped once to look back, then hurried across the street in Jake’s direction. Jake froze, cigar in mouth, watching it. Before it passed the light from the cantina he had identified the walk.

  It was Clement Hand.

  16

  Clem saw the glow of Jake’s cigar as he was about to turn into the walkway beside the Arrow building. He faltered, then walked forward more slowly until he reached the jail.

  ‘You’re up late, Jake.’

  ‘Couldn’t sleep. Like you.’ Jake made a bitter sound between a cough and a laugh at the silent figure. ‘You really are some kind of miracle man, Hand. You ought to write yourself up.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Well, it’s news, unless I’m as dumb as Carrie. I never knew they could grow back again — like tonsils.’

  Clem sagged against a post of the corrugated-tin sun roof. ‘Oh,’ he said softly. ‘She told you what she — I — didn’t think she would — could.’ He sat down on the edge of the boardwalk.

  ‘She left something to my imagination, but she wanted to make sure I’d know how much I owed it to you to stay here.’

  ‘Oh my God. I’m sorry, Dutch.’

  ‘I’ll bet you are! You know, the longer I’m in this flapjack town, the more like a boy from the country I feel. I thought I’d heard every con, gull, rook, and bluff that could be played on a poor sucker, but you people can pull off some of the damnedest things! How in the name of hell could you let a woman think a thing like that about you for eighteen years? It’s impossible! No, it isn’t, because I can tell she believes it. But why? What for? What do you get? It doesn’t make any damned sense at all!’

  ‘I guess not. It’s — complicated.’ Clem seemed to want more prodding from Jake, but didn’t get it. The end of Jake’s cigar burned furiously, and a ghost smoke drifted on the moving air. Clem cleared his throat.

  ‘I don’t know where to start, except to say that it never really had anything to do with you, whatever Carrie thought. Oh, it’s true that Ben McNaughton hired four saddle tramps to cut you up, and they came to me when they couldn’t find you. That chicken-livered sheriff told them I’d be the one to ask. I guess he had a little hankering for revenge against me after what I said about his conspicuous absence during the whole McNaughton trouble.

  ‘So they came to scare your whereabouts out of me. But the rest of our own particular grief — Carrie’s and mine — was my fault, and I can’t explain it any more than I can tell you why I let Gowdy put a bottle on my head and start to shoot it off.

  ‘Maybe it’s got something to do with my size. I’m short, I’m half blind, I can’t fight and never could. When I was a boy, every other boy in town, and two or three girls, could and did beat me up whenever they took the notion. I never won. But, Dutch, I never backed down, either! Never! I can’t, to this day. It isn’t that I’m not afraid. It’s that something happens in my head when I’m threatened and I—’ He ran his hand over his face and through his hair. ‘This sounds stupid,’ he muttered. ‘What it boils down to is, they broke in on us that night, demanding to know where you’d run off to, terrifying Carrie with their talk about what they were going to do to you when they caught you, tearing up the office. They were ignorant tramps. I should have given them a direction, to go looking in, and cleaned up the mess.

  ‘But I couldn’t do that. When they started to push me around I turned stubborn. I wasn’t afraid of them for the moment. In my great, fatheaded certainty I thought they wouldn’t have the guts to hurt us if I faced them down, because I was on the side of righteousness — and because I thought you were coming back.’ He laughed softly. ‘I really thought you were on your way to get about a dozen U.S. marshals to come down and arrest Sheriff Cobb and clean out the whole McNaughton family. It’s what I would have done myself if I’d had your chance.’ He sighed. ‘That isn’t funny. None of it was funny. Not even the part where I was mentally composing the blistering editorial I was going to write the next day, while McNaughton’s men were pitching my type into the stove. They took us out to McNaughton’s place and worked me over like I was a bag full of snakes. McNaughton wasn’t there. That was his defense at the trial, that he didn’t know; they were drunk and I’d provoked them. He testified against them. Everybody in town knew he’d hired them and for what, but he got fined and they got a year in jail.’

  ‘A year? For trying to kill you?’

  ‘No, for assault and battery, breaking. and entering, destruction of private property.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then how did Carrie get the idea they’d cut you?’

  After a pause Clem said, ‘She was there. They put her in the barn while they were busy with me. They threatened to do it; she heard them. She’d heard before, in the office. They took enough hide off me, I guess they’d have finally made good on their threat, but I passed out, and they left me for her.’

  Jake set the front legs of his chair on the ground.

  ‘She said nothing happened to her.’

  ‘I know. She’s always said that. That’s why I let her believe what she does. Jesus Christ, Jake, if it would have helped her in the least I would have killed them all later, somehow! I would’ve! But when I understood how desperate she was to deny it, how frightened and alone she was with her shame, I couldn’t do anything! I didn’t charge them with rape, for her sake, and I let her think what she thought — when I found out what that was — for her sake, too. Or for my own punishment. She wouldn’t have suffered if I’d used any sense. If I’d cared about anything in the damned world but feeding my own peculiar vanity by keeping stone silent while they knocked me down. God! I didn’t understand what she thought had happened to me until much later. I believed all her tears and secrecy and agony were for herself, as they should have been. When I realized’ — he almost laughed — ‘I didn’t know what to say! And then I knew I couldn’t say anything to her, ever. I was the stupid young prig who had let his sister be ruined for a lie he had told just by refusing to open his mouth. She was eighteen — a baby; my sister. I couldn’t talk to her. I was ashamed to tell her I was all right, that she was the only one damaged. And she couldn’t talk to me about such a thing, naturally. We never have, to this day. Never. It was all just sealed up.’

  He got up and leaned against the post again, facing away from Jake even in the darkness.

  ‘I fixed my own punishment for hurting her. I decided I would have to live as if what she thought were true. We left Willow Bend for a place where no one knew us. I took care of her and she took care of me. I thought when she was a bit older and stronger, when the memory had healed, she’d find someone to marry and I’d be free. You see, at the time I wasn’t planning to make it a lifetime sacrifice.’ One by one he began to toss a handful of pebbles he’d gathered from the street. ‘But it didn’t work out that way. She didn’t intend to marry, because she thought she had to devote her life to me, you see. I’d been the cause of her pain, I’d spoiled her hope for a normal life, but I was going to be served and shielded and cherished for it forever. She thinks I deserve that, for my suffering.

  ‘And if that wasn’t hell enough for me, I made it hotter year by year. Because I cheated her again and again. You see, I found I couldn’t live the pure, monastic life I owed her and meant to give her.’ He let the rest of the stones fall from his fingers. ‘You’d think that as scarce as women are out here, a three-quarter-sized man with poor eyesight and damned little money would have trouble adding fornication to his list of sins, wouldn’t you?’ He snorted. ‘Jake, I’ve never had any trouble at all, wherever we lived. Most of the time when we moved it was because I was afraid Carrie was going to find out about a particular woman. Letting her find out and be done with it has been one of my worst temptations. But it’s the only one I’ve been able to resist. So we’ve moved a lot. And I’ve always found another woman.’

  ‘Like Delia?’

  ‘Like Delia
.’ He turned his head after a second. ‘You don’t seem much surprised. Didn’t you believe what Carrie said about me?’

  Jake sucked a tooth. ‘I’m not much in the habit of believing or not believing. But I saw how you rushed Delia off home that day after she’d been rolling around in the street with that other punk. I guess I thought you looked like a man who figured he had one coming and was in a hurry to collect it. I had other things on my mind then. I do wonder about something now.’

  ‘What can I keep from you after this?’

  ‘Yeah. Well, when you decided to grab me off the stage, was it really for a drunk tender, or did you want somebody who’d keep Carrie busy while you were in bed with Delia?’

  Clem was silent for a while. ‘I don’t know,’ he said finally. ‘I really needed you here, Jake. And I admired you. You used to be what I would have given my soul to be when I was twenty-two in Willow Bend. Didn’t you ever see that? It wasn’t opportunism that made me spread your name all through my paper; it was— I won’t embarrass you with the callow word that comes to mind. About the other, I don’t know. I hope I didn’t want to make a tool of you to use against Carrie, because I love her. But I usually have more reasons for anything I do than I like to discuss with myself.’ He pushed himself away from the post.

  ‘As for whatever plans I might have had for myself and Delia, they’re all off now. She’s through with me, for some reason. I don’t know what’s the matter with her. Tonight she told me that I was the only man she’d ever known who had treated her like something other than a cow. Then she said I was an idiot. She told me that if I ever came down to the Moon again she’d tell Carrie about us. She doesn’t know what the secrecy is all about, but she’s sharp enough to see that it’s the one thing I can’t allow. So — that’s that. I’ll say good night. I have to be up again in a couple of hours.’

  Jake let him go in silence.