Valley of the Lesser Evil

by Carl Dane

  The crowd hushed, some from surprise and some because they couldn’t hear what I said. I could sense them leaning in, which was the way I wanted it. I had their attention.

  Toad searched for a response but whatever machinery lay behind his reptilian eyes seemed to turn slowly and after a few seconds of indecision he settled for telling me to go fuck myself.

  So I spit in his face and threw my right arm up, over, and across his hands, spun a half-circle to my left, pretty much turning my back on him, and pulled away with all my strength, going low so I could put the full strength of my legs into the effort.

  I knew that Toad’s reptile brain would telegraph his body to hang onto my shirtfront, even though his wrists were trapped for the moment under my right armpit and my spinning motion had imparted to me considerable leverage. I’d dragged him two steps in my direction and he almost fell forward.

  If Toad were smart he would have let it happen because he would have been right and top of me and could have had his way. But the unfocused fury in his mind was instructing him to show me that he could pull harder than I could. He braced himself, let out an enraged grunt, and yanked me back toward him.

  He was, in fact, monstrously strong – so strong that when he drew me toward him with such violence he probably tripled the force of my elbow as I uncoiled like a spring and landed it on his temple.

  There was an impossibly loud crack and a crunch. More than a few onlookers gasped.

  Then there was dead silence for a moment as his eyes lost their light and he crumpled straight down, collapsing into a pile of himself like a giant candle melting into a puddle of wax.

  He was a tough son of a bitch, I’ll give him that. Hurt as he was, arms and legs quivering, his head lolling on his chest, he kept repeating – this time in a strange mewling whimper – his instructions to perform that particular action on myself that as far as I can tell is anatomically impossible.

  I kicked him until he stopped.

  Chapter 3

  Mrs. Adler kept her eyes fixed on me like I was a cobra poking its head out of a basket. She slid the badge across the desk with her fingertips.

  “Here,” she said, and snatched her hand back.

  “I am overwhelmed by the majesty of this ceremony and flattered by your confidence,” I told her, and it was obvious my sarcasm was not appreciated nor understood. She just nudged her chair back a little more.

  “But before we seal the deal I need some answers,” I said.

  “You cracked that man’s skull,” she said, apropos of nothing. “My God. The sound.”

  “He’ll live. I checked with the doctor last night. He’ll heal up no stupider than when I found him, which is probably not possible anyway. And I might remind you that it was he who laid hands on me. And I might further remind you, Mrs. Adler, that you hired me for rough work and knew what you were getting into. Don’t you get on a high horse because I got my hands dirty.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m just tired of all the fighting and hoped against hope it could be solved another way. Don’t you get tired of violence sometimes?”

  “An inevitable part of the human condition, I believe. Plato said that only the dead have seen the end of war, Mrs. Adler.”

  She sighed and bit her lip, and we both regarded each other across the oak desk until her eyes dropped to her folded hands. The early-morning sun slanted through the window, a harsh and dissonant element in an environment that is more suited to amber lantern light. Saloons, even the back rooms, just don’t look right first thing in the morning, nor do they smell right. The lingering aroma of last night’s beer, piss, and puke is astonishingly rank at 9 in the morning.

  “Please, call me Elmira,” she said.

  “Princess.”

  She began to stare at me again.

  “Your first name is an Arabic word for princess,” I said.

  “You are the goddamned strangest hired gun in the world,” she said, balling her hands into fists and glancing toward the ceiling, as if imploring for divine guidance. “I just want to get these goons off my back and I get a head-breaker who lectures me about Plato and translates my name.”

  I held up a hand. “Fair enough. Let’s stick to business. Look, it’s my neck on the line and I have to know what’s going on…what’s really going on. You’re telling me half the story. Now, I’m not saying you’re dishonest. Everybody has their own recollection of events, but something you don’t mention because you think it’s unimportant or embarrassing to you could cause me to miss something and maybe get myself killed. So let’s hear the story from the beginning.”

  She sat immobile as a sphinx. Sometimes, when you’re trying to get someone to tell you things they don’t want to tell you, you have to prime the pump to get the words flowing.

  “But fair’s fair,” I said. “Do you have anything you want to ask me?”

  She chewed on her knuckle for a second.

  “Does my name really mean Princess?

  Chapter 4

  About an hour later I had extracted what I would guess was half the true story, which is about all you can hope for when you’re pulling on a string connected to sex, politics, and murder.

  And it was quite a story.

  Mrs. Adler – Elmira – was captured by Apaches when she was a young child. The Apaches killed the rest of her family but kept her to be raised as one of their own. That was not uncommon. While it made little sense that some children in a family would be massacred and some raised as Indian children, I’ve learned, from books and life, that it also doesn’t make sense to assume that everyone thinks and reasons the same way you do.

  She escaped when she was eighteen, after her Apache husband was killed by Comanches. But her return to the white world was not a smooth journey. She was viewed as “tainted” – her words – and marriage and a traditional job were not in the cards. She played the only hand available to a woman in her circumstances.

  Prostitutes, or as she referred to them, doves, had hard existences. I told her that her words reminded me of how Thomas Hobbes had described the despairing state of mankind – lives that were solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

  She rolled her eyes and kept on with the story. She had a head for business and after a few years in the trade and opened up a series of bordellos in which, if you believe her version of events, she took good care of the doves, seeing to their medical needs and protecting them from the more violent clientele.

  Her husband – now missing – partnered with her to start the Silver Spoon, and turned it over to her during the war, when he served with a cavalry unit for less than a year before losing a leg on the battlefield and returning home.

  The Spoon had prospered but not spectacularly so. It was a tough business. Running a bordello requires keeping a delicate balance of payoffs and power. Gannon did what most lawmen did to make ends meet: He took a cut for not enforcing the local ordinances against gambling, laws that many towns in the West have on the books but ignore when it is convenient or profitable or both.

  Gannon was basically honest, she told me, and most importantly he kept the peace because he scared even the strongest and craziest of the local parasites.

  But when Gannon was killed, all the predators slithered out in the open.

  Eddie Moon, who’d always been sort of amiably ruthless, seemed to grow a mean streak and hired an increasingly devolving species of thugs to run her out of business. The campaign started with some local toughs, including the currently incapacitated Toad, and recently moved into a new phase involving some brothers named Duran she said were gunfighters up from Mexico.

  Elmira stopped and asked me if I still wanted the job, knowing what I now knew. I thanked her for her honesty and told her yes. And then she told me there was one more thing.

  There’s always one more thing.

  She’d heard rumors that Zach Purcell was somehow behind all this. When she said it, she unconsciousl
y whispered his name.

  Elmira asked me if I’d heard of Purcell, and I said yes, but didn’t elaborate. We finalized the money arrangements, I signed some papers, pocketed my key, and left to check out my new office, pinning on my badge as I closed the door behind me.

  Chapter 5

  Except, of course, I had absolutely no idea where my office was. Going back and asking Elmira would have spoiled my dramatic exit, and I realized that I would not enhance my image by asking for directions.

  I figured the easiest way would be to walk the alleys north of the town’s main street, which was called Front Street, and reconnoiter from the back. About five blocks east I came to a brick building with the rear window covered with bricks of a lighter shade. That would certainly be the holding cell for the office. I would have bet that it used to be a window with bars, not an unusual thing in a marshal’s office. But a barred window is an invitation for slipping in contraband – including guns – and I knew Billy well enough to know that he would have bricked that window over himself within an hour of taking office.

  I circled around front, drawing the attention of a group of lean young men loitering on the boardwalk. I stared them down.

  I found the marshal’s office unceremoniously wedged between a cigar store and a millenary shop. There was a sturdy but crude bench to the left of the door and a fire barrel of water to the right. Iron latticework covered the door and window, and a formal and ornately hand-lettered sign reassured me that I’d found the right place: “City Marshal Office, Shadow Valley, Texas.”

  The lock, of course, chose that precise moment to be fussy, and I could feel eyes on the back of my neck as I fiddled with it for a full minute as I contemplated my face-saving move if I couldn’t engage the tumblers. Should I kick the door in? Shoot the lock off? I settled for pushing the key far forward into the lock and pulling back on the knob and jiggling it, which eventually resulted in the infinitely satisfying sound of the bolt turning.

  As is my habit, I opened the door by stepping to the side and pushing it open with an outstretched arm.

  “You’re a right smart fellow,” said a voice from inside, a voice larded with a thick mountain twang. It came out: “Yer a rot smart feller.”

  I peered around the door and saw him sitting in the cell. He seemed not at all surprised to see me and picked up the conversation as if we’d just finished lunch.

  “Never know what you’ll find behind a door – snake, man with a gun, man with a snake, or a snake with a gun.” He raised his eyebrows and awaited my reply.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “A guest of the fine people of Shadow Valley,” he said, “a town where, and please don’t take offense, I would really rather not be. I would, in fact, rather be in hell with a broke back than here in this cell pissing in a bucket. But forgive my manners, my name is Tom Carmody.”

  He stood and removed his hat. Carmody was tall, maybe six-five, with a mountain-man build, lean with wide shoulders, thick wrists, and arms with ropy veins. His clothes were standard-issue trail-hand, and he had a scruffy beard that looked like it was made out of wire brush.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked.

  “’Bout a week. The marshal” – he eyed my badge – “the previous marshal, locked me up the night before he was shot. I had a little set-to at the Full Moon and made me a regiment of enemies all at once, so Marshal Gannon figured I’d be safer here. For the record, he seemed like a nice guy and all, and I am sorry for your town’s loss, but I don’t need no baby-sitting and I would just as soon be on my way.”

  I crossed over and sat at Billy’s desk. My desk.

  “You mean you’ve just been locked in here for a week? How do you…well…”

  “To answer what’s on your mind, there’s a kid name of Wheeler who is some sort of custodian of the place. He lets me go to the outhouse in the morning and he holds me at gunpoint with his hands shaking. I ain’t afraid of being shot on purpose but I would deeply regret cashing in my chips by accident. Anyway, rest of the time I pee in this bucket and at night Wheeler goes to the restaurant, has them put stuff in a poke, and throws it through the bars like I’m some zoo animal likely to bite his hand off.”

  I laughed in spite of myself. “A poke? You mean a bag? I’ve only heard that word used in one place, Eastern Tennessee.”

  Carmody regarded me thoughtfully. “That’s right. That’s where I’m from, and clearly you’re not. What brought you to my mountains?”

  “I fought alongside some fine troops there.”

  “I take that as a compliment,” Carmody said, smiling. “But now we must confront that awkward moment. I was a sergeant in the First Regiment Volunteer Infantry.”

  “The fact that we were both on the same side apparently accounts for the fact we won the war,” I said. “Josiah Hawke, Lieutenant, Sixth Illinois Cavalry. But interestingly enough, when I rode through Tennessee I did so in a Confederate uniform.”

  Carmody laughed. He caught on fast, and I decided I liked him.

  “You was one of them raiders played tricks all the time. Had the rebs going in ten directions at once. Had a piano teacher for a general, as I remember.”

  “General Grierson,” I confirmed. “That’s right. Unusual fellow. He was a piano teacher and hated horses. Probably the only cavalry officer in history more afraid of horses than of the enemy. But smart. He’d have us dress up like Confederate officers and order troops to charge in the wrong direction. Used to stick logs into the ground and paint them to look like cannons and scare the hell out of the enemy.”

  “Those are fond memories,” Carmody said. “And now that we’ve had the occasion to relive them may I respectfully ask that you let me the fuck out of here?”

  I asked him to give me a couple of minutes and looked through Billy’s drawers. My drawers. As an Army officer Billy displayed something of a fetish for paperwork and I was sure I’d find a detailed arrest report. I did. It was filled in with Billy’s small and precise printing, which looked almost like it was set by a machine.

  “Well, shit,” I said, putting the papers back in the drawer. “Your little 'set-to' injured twelve men. Broken jaws, broken arms, broken noses, broken chairs, broken everything.”

  “They was cheating at Faro. Using horse-hairs to pull their markers off the spot they’d bet on when the deal went bad.”

  “The report says the dealer asked you to leave and you went berserk.”

  Carmody held up a finger. “Now part of that’s true, and part ain’t. The true part is I went berserk. The part that ain’t true is them asking. Nobody asked. They just laid hands on me. I would have left. I just woulda liked it to be my idea, that’s all.”

  I paused as if to think, but I really wanted to fill the air with silence and make him uneasy and gauge his reaction.

  He paused as if to think while he tried to make me uneasy so he could gauge my reaction.

  “I would guess from the way you’re dressed,” I said, conceding that he could out-wait me, “you’ve been punching cows for a while.”

  “That would be correct.”

  “And you’re not in love with it.”

  “A man does what he has to do,” Carmody said. “There’s worse ways to make a living, and I’ve done ‘em all. I grew up living on the land sucking on frozen fish in the winter and eating squirrel jerky in the summer. Few weeks in the saddle don’t scare me.”

  “Gunwork?” I asked. “Have you done that?”

  “You mean hired out? No. You mean protecting myself? Some. You mean in the war? More than I cared to.”

  “Were you good at it?”

  He nodded, and didn’t elaborate.

  “And what did you do in the Volunteers?” I asked.

  “Scouting, mostly. Being where I’m from and who I am it’s natural I’m good with tracking, good with seeing and hearing things, good with keeping my senses and keeping my scalp. Spent a lot of time on boats, too. Lot of wate
rways in my area.”

  “I spent some time assigned to a Navy ship,” I said. “I hated it.”

  “Water’s OK in whiskey. Other than that I ain’t fond of it.”

  “The occasional bath is all right.”

  “I spent the last year all shot up,” Carmody said. “Couldn’t shoot, though I’m healed up good now. I finished off the war as a color sergeant.”

  I’d heard enough; he was telling the truth. The details weren’t the kind you’d make up. He never said too much, so I knew he wasn’t bluffing. He never said too little, so I figured he wasn’t covering up. Not much, anyway.

  “I always thought the color guards were the toughest men out there,” I said. “I’ve seen them seconds from death and still pass the flag to somebody else before it touched the ground. Takes a strong man to put principle before his own life.”

  Carmody just nodded. “Like I said, you do what you got to do.”

  I stood up and plucked a ring of keys hanging from a nail. I guessed that the largest key would work the cell door, and I was right.

  “I’m free to go?” Carmody asked, his eyes narrowing. “Something tells me it ain’t that simple.”

  “Nope,” I said. “Part of the deal I struck with the woman who says she’s on the town council is the authority to hire a deputy. Ten dollars a week, plus ten percent of fines you collect and two dollars per arrest. No plea bargaining allowed. That’s your sentence for busting up the Full Moon.”

  “You know,” Carmody said, “you probably think I’m just a dumb country boy but I learned how to read and write – sort of on my own – and I’ve got a pretty good understanding of the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Mister, if anything qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment, this is it. But if I don’t have to eat no squirrel jerky I’ll take it.”

  I nodded. “Like you said. You do what you…”