Sliphammer

by Brian Garfield

  Nine

  The angry sun stood straight overhead; the undertaker’s wagon creaked past and Jeremiah Tree stepped off the walk to cross the street to the Inter Ocean. His face was a twisted, ugly mask of fury.

  McKesson came out onto the veranda when Tree was halfway to the place. The sheriff opened his mouth to speak but Tree didn’t even-look at him, just went straight for the door, and so McKesson planted himself in front of the door and stiff-armed him to a halt.

  Tree’s lips peeled back from his teeth. “Stick it up your ass, Sheriff.”

  “Walk through that door the way you are now and you’re dead,” McKesson said flatly, staring him in the eye. “Just stand still and wait for your brain to start functioning, Deputy. Right now you’re no good to anybody—least of all yourself.”

  “I’m going to do your job for you,” Tree snarled.

  “What job is that? Arresting Reese Cooley? I already did that. The Judge turned him loose on his own recognizance after Cardiff’s lawyer got a writ.”

  “Pretty damn fast work,” Tree said icily.

  “Yes, well, it happens like that when you’ve got powerful friends. Cooley will face a preliminary hearing and if he’s bound over he’ll go to trial.”

  “A trial, Sheriff—or a farce?”

  Tree was facing McKesson, his eyes at the level of McKesson’s white thatch of hair; he was still feeling the shortness of breath, the debilitating massive rage that flooded through all the tissues of his body. His hands were formed into tight fists and he lifted one of them to the level of his waist. He was about to tell McKesson to get out of the way when a new voice slapped at him from just inside the door: “All right, Ollie, thanks. I’ll take over.”

  It was Wyatt Earp. In his rage Tree had lost all alertness; Earp had come within six feet of him without his even knowing.

  Earp was in his shirt sleeves, probably to eliminate any flowing coat cloth that might get between hand and gun. His shoulder-holstered guns hung heavy under his arms and his hands were held in front of his chest as if he were holding poker cards, only there were no cards; he was two inches from drawing his guns.

  Earp said, “Now don’t say anything and don’t get stupid notions until you’ve heard me out. You’re in no shape to try me with a gun. Are you listening?”

  With stubborn muteness Tree looked straight at him. Earp’s sleeves were rolled up; his golden-haired forearms were powerful and sleek. Tree hadn’t seen him angry before; now it was strong enough to reach through his own rage: it chilled him, a bleak coldness that came off Wyatt Earp like death.

  “Now hear me,” Earp said. “You see men all the time who go around begging to get killed. They take a swing at you if you even brush by their sleeve without meaning to. They pick a fight over nothing, they accuse you of cheating at cards—anything. They go out of their way to make enemies of dangerous men when they know they haven’t got a chance of winning a fight with them. They beg to get hurt. And sooner or later they always find somebody to oblige them.”

  “If you’re talking about Rafe—”

  “I am.” Earp cut him off roughly and went on: “Your brother was begging for it. Making brags he knew he couldn’t keep. Talking it up in saloons, telling everybody in earshot what he’d do to me and my so-called gang if he ever got an excuse. I heard him and Cooley heard him. Maybe you heard him too.”

  “It was just talk. Kid talk. Cooley’s going to pay—”

  “Cooley will pay,” Earp grunted, “sooner or later, but not here, not now, and not for this. Listen to me, amigo. Your brother came boiling out that door over there at a time when guns were going off on this street. He didn’t just stick his head out for a look. He came running. When you’re in the middle of a gun battle and you see a man running at you and it’s a man who’s made threats against your life, you don’t stop to ask the bastard if his intentions are peaceable. I told you before, I wouldn’t wait to find out if he was bluffing. I told you to hpbble him. You didn’t, and he’s dead, and now you want to blame your own mistake on Cooley. Cooley had no choice.”

  “No choice! Are you trying to tell me he forced Cooley to kill him when he didn’t even have a gun in his hand?”

  “He was armed. He came ramming into a fight that was none of his business and it was his own stupid fault he got shot. We didn’t have time to wait to see whether he was going to start shooting at us. By God, how do I make you understand? There were guns going off!”

  McKesson, at Tree’s shoulder, said in a strict voice, “Your brother was the one who had the choice to make, Deputy. He could have chosen not to come out on the street. When a man deliberately steps into the line of fire you’ve got to assume he means to take a hand in the fighting. He could hear what was happening—he wasn’t deaf, was he?—if he’d had any sense at all he’d have stuck to cover.”

  Wyatt Earp said, “Just one more thing. You can come inside and try to take Cooley away from us, but I don’t recommend it. You’ll want better odds. Go home and think about it. Give yourself a chance, for the love of God.”

  Abruptly, Earp backed inside and disappeared beyond the door.

  McKesson reached for his arm; Tree shook him off. He stood staring at the closed door as if Earp were still there.

  Finally he said in a low, throbbing voice, “What really happened here? I can’t get a straight story out of anybody.”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t here either. Don’t you believe him?”

  “Why should I?”

  McKesson said, “I was beginning to think you liked Earp.”

  “I was beginning to think he believed in justice,” Tree answered darkly.

  “How do you know he doesn’t?”

  “Rafe didn’t have a gun in his hand, did he?”

  “All I know is his gun was in the holster and it hadn’t been fired.”

  “Yeah,” Tree said. “So.”

  “So at least you’re starting to ask questions, which indicates to me that you’re no longer suffering total mental paralysis. I talked to Cooley. He said he saw the kid come barging out of the lunchroom door and he remembered all the threats the kid had been making and he didn’t have time to stop and ask his intentions. I tend to believe that. At any rate I don’t see how you could disprove it to the satisfaction of any court of law, rigged or honest, makes no difference. You’re sworn to uphold the law. All right, Cooley’s on your shit list, but don’t go after the whole Earp crowd on that account.”

  Tree scraped the back of a craggy hand across his mouth. McKesson punched him lightly on the shoulder. “I rise to remark that once you’ve thought the whole thing over and had time to simmer down, you’ll chalk the whole thing up the same way you’d chalk it up if some fatal disease had killed your brother. You don’t go out to kill somebody because a brother died of smallpox—you can’t get revenge on smallpox. You can’t avenge an accident, and that’s what this was. When you spend as many years peace-officering as I have, you’ll learn things are never as simple as the old eye-for-an-eye philosophy would have it.”

  “Sheriff,” Tree said, “if there’s one thing I don’t need right now it’s one of your speeches.”

  “You’re wrong. I think it’s exactly what you do need. Why, I recall one time when—”

  Tree turned away and left him there, trailing off. He went blindly across the street and strode through the town in a stiff, stunned way, not knowing where he was going, not caring. He didn’t even want to find a place to hole up and think; the last thing he wanted was to think. For it seemed clear that McKesson had to be right: no more chance of getting vengeance than of trying to fight a smallpox fever with a gun. He hated Cooley but even killing Cooley would solve nothing, would not be the answer. There was no answer, and it was that fact which stupefied him as if he had been clubbed. That, and the fact that he couldn’t put out of his head what Earp had said, so cruelly: J told you to hobble him. You didn’t, and he’s dead.

  Hindsight, he thought, desperately grabbing at straws;
it was no good. Neither killing Cooley nor blaming himself would bring Rafe back.

  He just didn’t want to think about it.

  He found in time that his steps had taken him into Poverty Row, the fringe of the tenderloin, inhabited by the dregs of Gunnison. Flimsy unpainted pine shacks under the plaid shadows of a railroad trestle. At midday Poverty Row was asleep. At first he saw no one; two blocks farther, he stopped to let a loose-bodied woman cross his path. She wore a shabby night-robe, nothing else; she padded across the dusty gulch in bare feet, carrying a bottle of cheap wine, and disappeared into a tumbledown crib with drawn curtains that had obviously been chopped from an army blanket. She hadn’t even glanced at him.

  Beside him he saw the face of a Chinese girl pressed against a filthy window pane. He walked on, past a row of single-story cribs each of which had the occupant’s name painted on a removable shingle sign: Goldfield Nell, Bilious Billie, French Lil. Toward the foot of the street several of the girls sat spread-thighed on chairs in their open doors, which were overhung by the red railroad lanterns that had given red-light districts their name in the Kansas railhead towns ten years ago. The girls were sixteen-year-old soiled doves, painted ladies of the half-world. Black, Oriental, Mexican, Indian, European. They solicited halfheartedly from their doorways. It was the first time he had seen them close up; he had seen them uptown at night, when the light was poor, parading up and down the street with jangling saloon bands, stirring up business. Now, in daylight, at sixteen they looked all used up. A good many of them were probably addicted to opium and morphine, if they weren’t drunks. As he went by, three or four of them shouted raucous, obscene invitations. He shook his head without speaking and wandered on. At the heart of Poverty Row he came upon the Homestead Parlour House, which had a crescent-shaped sign painted high on its false front: GIRLS TWENTY GIRLS TWENTY GIRLS and, painted under that, Beer 5¢.

  Past that he came to the Bijou Union Saloon. A hand-lettered sign on packing cardboard announced that sleeping space was available on back-room billiard tables, one dollar a night.

  He went inside. The place was sick-eningly rich with the aura of beer, whisky, smoke, vomit, and sweat. There were no windows and it was almost pitch dark. The bar was a row of roughhewn planks thrown across a series of barrels. There were a few half-broken tables, and packing crates which served as chairs. Knowing full well what he was doing, he bought a bottle of cheap whisky and carried it to a table in the darkest corner, sat down, leaned his back against the wall, and began to drink.

  Fuzzily, he supposed it was nighttime. The place was filling up with miners. Trembling violenty, he sat hunched over the half-empty second bottle, hands pinched between his squeezed-together knees. Lamps were lit; it was brighter than it had been during the day. He felt coiling spasms in his groin and knew he had to relieve himself. He stood up—too fast: blood sank from his head and the room got darker. He leaned one hand on the wall to steady himself and tightened his gut, tensing all his muscles to build pressure until finally light came back into the room and he walked across it with shuffling, tentative steps.. He bumped into a few people and was shoved roughly away once. Finally he made his way outside and went stumbling into the alley alongside the saloon. It smelled of excrement. He unbuttoned his fly; he had to brace his hands against the wall to keep himself from falling while he urinated. Afterwards he buttoned up and lurched down the street, dimly aware he had better get back to his own part of town before he passed out; otherwise they would roll him for the few dollars in his Levi’s, and perhaps kill him for the hell of it. He kept a crafty eye out for would-be assassins but no one disturbed him in Poverty Row. A train rumbled across the trestle, showering him with soot and cinders. He staggered into Main Street in time to see an ore wagon run over a dog. The dog crawled a few feet toward the shelter of a raised porch, then lay whimpering in the street, movements slowing. By the time Tree came by, the dog was dead. He hunkered down to touch it; there was no heartbeat. As he crouched there, tears welled in his eyes and stained his cheeks.

  He was violently sick in the alley beside the hotel. He dragged himself inside, ignored the clerk’s righteously arch glance, and lurched back through the corridor to his room. He had emptied himself but he still felt sick. When he opened the door, the tenpenny nail bounced off his shoulder and rattled when it hit the floor. He went inside, kicked the door shut, and sprawled facedown at an angle across the bed. He wanted to pass out, but unconsciousness eluded him crazily. The world spun. He could hear the nighttime revelry from the streets, bands playing, hoarse shoutings, some fool shooting off a gun somewhere. He lay that way in a suspension of time, with no idea how long he had been there—long enough to get cramped and feel pressure on his ribs lrom lying on them. When the dull, stunned feeling left, it unmasked sharp blades of anguish which stabbed him from all directions. He put his face in his hands.

  He was lurching with sobs when someone shook his ankle. He turned his head sluggishly, ludicrously; he couldn’t turn it far enough; he had to roll over on his back; and when he did, he almost fell off the bed. He braced one arm against the floor and from that awkward drunken position saw Caroline, her curved, husky body silhouetted against the faint lamplight in the corridor beyond the open door.

  The only way to get up was to get down. He rolled his legs and body off the bed, got his feet on the floor, and levered himself clumsily upright; sitting on the edge of the bed he scraped both hands down his face, wiping his eyes.

  She was moving around the room. A match exploded, the lamp came alight; she walked back to the door to push it shut. When he looked up she was standing in front of him, looking down at his face.

  She said, “Go ahead. I already did my crying.”

  “All done.”

  “You feel tougher now, Jerr?”

  His mind was mired, his tongue thick; he had to think out what he said, and form the words with care. He said very slowly, “I think maybe I don’t ever want to be that tough.”

  “God help you if you were.” She sat down on the bed beside him. “You’re drunk, but besides that—how are you, Jerr?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re lying—you feel terrible.”

  “Why the hell should you care?”

  She opened her mouth, closed it, and began again: clearly it was not what she had meant to say. “The funeral’s in the morning, in a few hours.”

  “I’ll make it.”

  “I know you will.”

  “He was my brother,” he mumbled, slurring thick. “Half brother anyway. God damn it I let him down, I killed him, but God damn it God damn it I loved him!”

  There was a stretch of silence at the end of which, with amazing abruptness, she slapped his face.

  His head rocked back; he blinked and squinted at her. “What the hell was that for?”

  “Shut up about killing him. You didn’t kiU him.”

  “If I’d thrown him out of town the way I should have, he’d be alive.”

  “No. He’d just have come back.”

  “I thought you were the one who put him up to it.”

  “If you want to blame me,” she said, “go ahead. I’ve been doing that myself. If anybody killed him it was me, not you. I wanted—”

  He said with savage hastiness, “What did you want?”

  She stood up, She had her back to him. “I wanted to make him into a man like you,” she said in a small voice.

  He cackled.

  It made her wheel. She lifted her hand as if to slap him again. He neither flinched nor guarded himself; he only stared at her brandished hand with a morose, vacuous scowl.

  Slowly her hand dropped to her side. She shook her head. “Don’t you see, you couldn’t have stopped him. You couldn’t have kept it from happening. Maybe not the way it happened, but it would have happened sometime and someplace because I was too selfish and too stupid and too damned mixed up to know you can’t change anybody. I wanted to make him into something he wasn’t and I got him killed.
And now,” she said with acid bitterness, “now I know. I’ had to learn from this that you can’t ever change anybody, you just have to accept them for what they are. Jesus, Jerr, Rafe was a goddamned good wrangler, he loved horses.”

  She wasn’t crying but she refused to look at him; she turned her back again and he saw her small, tough hands bunched into fists, womanly fists, the thumbs inside the curled fingers.

  She said, “Are you listening all right? Can you pay attention?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I have to say something and I don’t want to, and if I don’t say it to you now I probably won’t ever have the guts to again.”

  He shook his head at her back. “I don’t know what you’ve got in mind but I think you’d better save it. Neither one of us is thinking too straight.”

  Her fists tightened; he couldn’t see her face. He had to lean forward to hear her: “I’ve got to, Jerr, I’ve got to—I want you to listen to what I say and don’t interrupt. I put my hooks in Rafe because I wanted him to be you. I took him because I couldn’t get you, do you understand? He wasn’t you, he never would have been—let me finish!—but he was the closest thing there was to you. I tried to change him into you because you were the one I really wanted, and I knew as soon as we were married that I couldn’t do it but I wouldn’t give up, I couldn’t then, and you see what it did to him. It’s not your fault, what happened. It’s mine. Mine and Reese Cooley’s.”

  He didn’t believe her. She wasn’t telling the truth; she meant the lie to show, she meant him to see through the falsehood, she just wanted to give him an out so he’d quit blaming himself. It had to be hke that; her story was too absurd. He said sourly, “Sure—sure. You say I was the one you wanted. You couldn’t get me. You flatter a man, Caroline. I never knew you even knew I existed until you and Rafe decided to get married.”