The Messenger

by Bill Brooks

  “You go . . . straight to hell, Royce Blood.”

  It tore me up inside to hear her talk that way. But I was determined. I was taking her with me.

  She turned and grabbed the liquor bottle and tipped it to her mouth and drank.

  “You want anything else it will cost you three dollars,” she said.

  I just stood there, trying to find the right words.

  “You shoot those damn’ cowboys?” she said. “I heard a gunshot.”

  “No, I didn’t shoot anybody.”

  She laughed in the false way people do when they want to mock you.

  “Those boys will go get their friends and come back and drag you with a rope until you’re just rags,” she said. “You better get the hell out before they do.”

  “I told you, I’m not leaving here without you,” I said.

  “Then you’ll be waiting a damn’ long time.”

  I grabbed the bottle from her hand and she slapped me.

  I saw the look in her eyes as soon as she did. She started to cry.

  “Let it be,” I said. “Just let all of it be and come home with me.”

  “No,” she said. “I can’t go back there.”

  “Then we’ll go somewhere else.”

  “No.”

  “I shouldn’t have left you, Ophelia. I know that now. I was just all screwed up in my head. Can’t a man make a mistake and own up to it?”

  “You left me,” she said again. “When I needed you the most, you just left me.”

  “I know it,” I said, my own words breaking apart as they came out.

  She started to cough and the coughs racked her entire thin body. She spat into the pan, and it was a bloody foam. I took hold of her as she started to shiver, grabbed the spread off the bed, and wrapped it around her.

  “I’m freezing,” she whispered. “I can’t stop shaking”

  And yet her skin was fevered, so warm I could feel her heat through my own clothes.

  I lay on the bed with her, holding her close.

  She coughed and shook, and I held her until she settled some. The minutes and hours crawled, but soon enough she fell asleep, and still I held her and somewhere in the long night I feel asleep, too, and dreamed.

  The dream was of the three of us, picnicking under a large tree, the grass all around us tall and leaning over in the wind, the sky above blue and full of large fluffy clouds, Nicholas saying they were sailing ships in the sky. Then something dark loomed over us. The bear. I shot it, one, two, three times. The bang of my pistol was sharp and loud.

  Only it wasn’t my pistol but someone banging on the door. I started, reaching for my gun.

  “Alice!” a voice yelled. “Alice, you in there? Open up!”

  I went to the door, gun in hand, cocked and aimed and ready, and opened it.

  A large man with heavy red moustaches stood on the landing. His hat had snowflakes on it that were falling out of a red sky and into the light cast from inside the room.

  He looked at the piece in my hand, then past me trying to see into the room. Behind him lined up on the stairs were three other men in heavy coats. One of them had a scarf tied round the crown of his hand and under his chin.

  “Alice?” the man on the landing said again.

  “She’s asleep,” I said.

  He looked at me with his heavy lidded eyes. His jowls hung like slabs of ham.

  “You might want to put that hog-leg down,” he said. “Before it goes off accidental.”

  “It won’t go off accidental,” I said. “It goes off, it will be on purpose.”

  “I’m here to arrest you,” he said. “Sheriff John Poe is my name.” He turned his head slightly. “These are my deputies.”

  “Arrest me for what?”

  “Shooting Willy Nickel,” he said.

  “I didn’t shoot anybody. It was his old man who shot him.”

  He shifted his gaze to back over my shoulder again, then to my piece.

  “I guess we’ll figure it all out once we see the judge,” he said. “What’d you do with Alice?”

  “Her name’s not Alice,” I said. “I’m her husband. Now leave us the hell alone.”

  He blinked. Snow still fell on his hat.

  “Husband? I didn’t know she was married.”

  “She is.”

  “I want to have a look-see, make sure she’s all right.”

  “She’s sick with fever.”

  “We need to work this out,” he said.

  “Nothing to work out,” I said.

  “Them fellows are off the Double Bar,” he said. “They’ll go back and round up their compadres and come back and tear this town up looking to kill you.”

  “Then there will be some blood shed,” I said.

  He shook his head. “How about I get a doc for Alice, and then you come by my office first thing, and we’ll talk about your future?”

  “OK,” I said.

  I closed the door and heard them clomping back down the stairs. I had noticed the silver wedding band the sheriff was wearing, figured he was a practical man when it came to dying, figured that’s why he was willing to back off. Me, I had nothing to lose.

  I turned back to the bed where Ophelia lay.

  I knew soon as I touched her that she was dead.

  Somewhere in the long night of our sorrow, she had passed. I wanted to believe her spirit was with that of Nicholas’s, that they were walking together on streets of gold. But I’d lost whatever faith I’d had in such things up in those mountains, ruminating on why my boy had been killed by the bear.

  I poured fresh water into the pan after throwing out the old and washed her body, taking tender care. Her legs and arms were scabbed over in places from old sores. Her ribs ridged under her skin. Her mouth was still delicate but that was all. I brushed her hair, found a fresh nightgown in the little trunk—one I remembered seeing her in during the happier days of our lives. It was trimmed in silk ribbons. And when I finished, it looked like she was just sleeping.

  I lay back down beside her and held her for the last time in my arms and slept peaceful for an hour or two. Whenever it was, the first cold gray light of dawn came in through the window like some old cat creeping into the room and crawled up on the bed and lay softly over us.

  I rose and put on my hat and coat and stepped outside into the brittle air and drew it deeply into my lungs, then descended the stairs.

  I walked into town and met a man sweeping out front of his storefront and asked him if there was a mortician. He directed me to the barbershop, and I went up there and waited until a fellow in a derby hat arrived, high-stepping across the muddy street, the patches of snow, and puddles of dirty water.

  “You need a haircut or a burying?” he said.

  “Burying,” I said.

  “Obviously not you,” he said.

  “Obviously not,” I said.

  We went inside and the room smelled of toilet water and soap, and there was a barber’s chair with a padded leather seat and a shelf of bottles and a mirror.

  “My funeral business is in the back,” he said, indicating a room behind a curtain.

  I told him about Ophelia—the woman they called the Rose of Cimarron, or Alice—and he nodded.

  “Didn’t know she was a married woman,” he said, hanging up his coat and hat. He was bald. I thought barbering an odd profession for somebody without any hair.

  I explained what I wanted.

  He gave me a price.

  “I want a priest for her, too.”

  “Not a problem,” he said.

  I wondered privately if he had been with her at one time or another. Then I pushed away the thought. I paid him.

  “See it gets done today,” I said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  I asked him how to get to the sheriff’s office, and he told me.

  I went up there.

  The old man was sitting behind his desk, drinking coffee when I entered. He looked half surprised to see me.

>   “How’s Alice . . . I mean your wife doing?” he said.

  “She died.”

  His brows furrowed.

  “Sorry to hear.”

  “What’d you want to see me about?” I said. “You still planning on arresting me? Because I’m not going to let you arrest me.”

  I could see that didn’t please him much. I didn’t care if it pleased him or not.

  “Those boys from the Double Bar . . .” he started to say.

  “To hell with them. I’m not running.”

  “Nobody asked you to run.”

  “Sounds like that’s what you were suggesting.”

  He shook his head, blew steam from his cup, holding it in both hands. It was a china cup with blue figures painted on it.

  “Them boys stick tight together,” he said.

  “Then they’ll die together,” I said.

  He sipped some of his coffee, looked thoughtful, grandfatherly, for a moment.

  “What is it . . . you want to stay around for the funeral, or just raise holy hell in my town, or what?”

  “I’m not staying for the funeral,” I said.

  “I’ll see to it the town pays for her expenses.”

  “Don’t bother. They’re already paid for.”

  “Then what is it you want?”

  “I want to kill somebody,” I said.

  “Kill somebody? For what reason?”

  “I don’t know. I just do.”

  “Son, that’s a bad way to think.”

  “I know it.”

  “I believe you about the other night, that the kid’s old man shot him. I’ve no intention of arresting you. But I’ve no intention of letting you stay any longer in my town than necessary, either. You want some coffee?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Sometimes life is just plain shit,” he said.

  I nodded, walked out and back down the street, mounted my horse, and rode away.

  Chapter Four

  I began to drink hard. I was looking for trouble, looking for a way to shed myself of my anger and hurt, and there wasn’t any better way of doing that than getting drunk and looking for trouble, a fistfight or gunfight. I wanted to hurt somebody and I wanted to hurt them bad. I was hoping maybe somebody would kill me, do the job I couldn’t bring myself to do.

  I’d get drunk, get into fights, but nobody killed me. I don’t know why they didn’t. I just didn’t run into the right man is all I could figure.

  I drifted aimlessly from town to town, letting my horse decide the journey we’d travel. We tended to drift sideways, north and south, east and west. I don’t know what that damned horse was thinking except grass, water, rest.

  I’d fall off it drunk sometimes, and, whenever I’d wake on the ground, I was surprised it hadn’t run off on me or somebody hadn’t stolen it.

  I’d run out of money drinking, and then find some sort of menial work—just enough to buy me another bottle, maybe a cot for the night in out of the cold and rain and wind. I ate little, lost weight. I saw myself in a storefront window once and didn’t recognize myself. My beard had gotten long.

  I hocked my guns in Belle Forche just for some whiskey, a little food. The man gave me $15 for my Henry and my pistol. I kept drifting all that winter and into the summer and on through it into the autumn.

  I finally drifted into Deadwood Gulch. I got drunk, fell off my horse. I woke up and saw an old miner’s shack with the door missing. I crawled inside and fell upon the cot. The mattress was gone and the windows busted out and the walls were covered in old newspaper and catalogue pages that were curled and yellow and brittle as butterfly wings.

  I don’t know how long I slept.

  I woke to the sound of a hard rain shattering against the tin roof. I was shivering from the cold. I got up and poked around inside the potbelly stove standing in one corner of the room. There wasn’t anything inside but ashes and a rat’s skeletal remains.

  I cursed my luck. I’d stopped cursing God sometime back. What was the point of cursing something I no longer believed in?

  I flopped back down again, covering myself the best I could with my sougan.

  Next thing I knew I sold my horse and saddle. I bought more whiskey and carried it back to the shack. I figured maybe I might drink myself into a stupor I’d never wake from. Fine by me if it happened.

  Then came a voice from the past, one I never thought I’d hear again.

  “Hullo, the house!”

  It was impossible to mistake the raspy voice of Burt Bee. After two long hard summers on the Texas plains skinning buffalo, I’d gotten to know the voice well enough.

  Burt had suffered some sort of childhood accident. Actually he’d nearly hanged himself trying to swing out of a haymow with a towel tied around his head, playing like he was a pirate, swinging from one ship to another. Only the rope tangled around his neck. And if he hadn’t been such a big kid and the rope hadn’t been so frayed, he said he would have long been in his grave.

  I yelled for him to come on in and he did.

  He stood there, dripping rain off his hat brim and slicker.

  “How’d you know I was here?” I said, sitting up, my head feeling busted.

  “I thought I recognized you when you come into Mann’s Number Ten saloon the other day. I couldn’t be sure it was you because of all that hair you growed on your face, so I thought I’d stop ’round and see.”

  “Well, now you’ve seen,” I said.

  “So I have. I figured to see Jesus before I seen you again,” he said.

  “Maybe I’m Him,” I said.

  He cracked a smile, showing he still had most of his teeth.

  “Well, if you are Him, then all is lost and a lot of them churchgoers will probably be committing suicide.”

  Burt always was a funny son-of-a-bitch.

  “What you doing in the gulch?” he said.

  “I don’t know. Trying to die, I reckon.”

  “You look pretty close to it already.”

  I looked down at my dirty union suit.

  “I reckon so.”

  “Last I heard of you, you was married with some kids living up in Wyoming Territory,” he said.

  “Montana,” I corrected.

  “Hell, it’s all pretty much the same country, ain’t it.”

  “Yeah, I suppose you could look at it that way. What about you?”

  “Me?” He grinned again. “I’m driving stage in this bunghole.”

  “That sounds like a promotion from what you were doing back last time I saw you.”

  He looked around.

  “Clem Small leave you this place?”

  “Who’s Clem Small?” I said.

  “Was a miner.”

  “He must have, because he sure as hell wasn’t here when I got here, and you know what they say about finders keepers.”

  “You look like you could stand a good meal,” he said.

  “I could stand a lot of things, but a meal is least on my list.”

  “What’s first?”

  “A drink.”

  He shook his head, took off his hat and shook it, then set it back on his head again. He took up nearly the entire room. I never had to worry about getting jumped back in those wild Texas towns when we were skinners because just to look at him would put doubt in your mind no matter how mean and drunk and looking for a fight you might be. I’d seen him whip four men one night in a bagnio in Mobeetie—one of them nearly to death. Burt had a bloody nose was all.

  “Tell you what, I’ll buy you a drink after I buy you a meal, how will that be?”

  “That’d be fine.”

  “Get some clothes on . . . we may be wild and woolly and hell on wheels around here, but at least we go out of doors fully dressed.”

  “You sure ask a lot of a fellow,” I said.

  “You smell like you could use a bath too.”

  “Well, let’s not go overboard,” I said.

  “Hell,” he said, and waited outside for me.
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br />   Chapter Five

  Deadwood Gulch was mostly just a slash between the Black Hills, like somebody had cut a road through it to find whatever gold they were looking for.

  The Sioux didn’t take kindly to white men coming without being invited, and, from what little I’d read and heard before arriving there—back in my sober days—they were still finding white bodies in the hills around the gulch stuck so full of arrows they looked like big porcupines.

  The government sent Custer up there to clean out the Indians, and instead they cleaned him out. It proved to be the last big fight the Indians were ever going to win. The United States Army came in full force and chased most of them all the way to Canada. But I bet they were still smiling about whipping Custer’s bony ass.

  I followed Burt to a little restaurant jammed cheek to jowl between a saddlery and a dentist office. We took seats by the fly-specked window.

  “Doc Holliday used to practice his trade next door,” Burt said, settling his hat on a knob of his chair. “I met him once. Eyes like a dead fish, that one.”

  We ordered the stew and biscuits, coffee, and for dessert vinegar pie. I was surprised how hungry I was, then had to excuse myself out the back door so I could puke it all up. My stomach didn’t know much about real food or lots of it; it had grown more accustomed to liquor.

  I came back in and sat down again as if nothing was wrong. Burt had ordered a second plate and was halfway through it. He looked up at me with those horse-big eyes of his.

  “You OK?”

  “Never been better,” I said.

  He went back to eating like he was alone. I sat there and sipped the rest of the coffee in my cup.

  Burt paid the bill and left a 10¢ tip. Then we walked over to Mann’s Number Ten and took up residence, and Burt had a bottle and two glasses brought to our table. I pointed to a chair hung up high on the wall and said: “What the hell they got that chair up there for?”

  He glanced at it.

  “That’s the chair Wild Bill was sitting in when McCall shot out his lights.” Then he pointed to a stain on the floorboards. “And that is where old Bill fell dead, bleeding out.”

  “Well, it does bring a certain comfort,” I said. “Knowing this is such a safe place to drink.”