Hell's Half-Acre

by Nicholas Nicastro

“Figure out what he wants and get rid of them.”

  As if her command was in the perfectly good Russian, the father stepped tentatively to the counter, reached out and plucked a box of matches from the shelf.

  “Матчи. Сколько это стоит?”

  “Take it. Go.”

  After checking that there were indeed matches in the box, the visitor flashed an obliged grin, touching a finger to his cap, and left. The boy lingered a moment.

  “Wery pleased it’s it,” he gabbered. “Thanks you. Thanks you!”

  When they were gone, Almira stood over Kate as she lay in bed.

  “Them boxes cost a nickel each.”

  Kate turned from her pillow and through the tangle of her hair replied, “More than the lot of us is worth.”

  Almira snorted and disgorged a bolus of German curse words in the general direction of Junior, who looked back without offense or comprehension. When she was gone, he continued to stare at Kate. Before long the weight of his scrutiny became too much for her.

  “John, we’ve talked about this.”

  Junior got to his feet, snatched his hat from the table. He took a ­couple of steps toward the door, then stopped and looked at her again.

  “What can you be staring at?” she exclaimed.

  “You don’t have to let it go on like that,” he said. “That Dick feller don’t deserve you. If you want, I can make him pay.”

  She regarded him, not entirely sure what he was suggesting but suspecting it might appeal to her if she listened anymore.

  “Get out,” she said, and turned her face to the pillow.

  LATER, THE OLD man gave the signal from outside. Kate went on sitting at the table, idly turning over her cards as the others scurried to their places. She didn’t rise until the knock came at the door. Standing, she propped her hands into the small of her back and stretched. Another knock. She crossed to the door slowly, not caring if they waited, not bothering to straighten her hair or her apron.

  She opened the door poised to deliver the usual welcome—­but felt the words lodge in her throat when she saw the man waiting there. He was older, of course, and shorter, and dressed in a more citified way than last time they met, in knee-­length overcoat and shiny square-­toed street shoes. He had his saddlebag slung over his shoulder, its fine silver rivets shining in the light pouring from the cabin. His throat was cosseted by a silk scarf the color of new greenbacks; at his hip was a silver-­plated pistol with an ivory handle, set in a tooled holster.

  This was a man who had certainly come up in the world. In place of the old leanness, the filling out of many years and many good meals. Around hale and shaven cheeks, sideburns of mature, almost professorial gray. But the eyes were unchanged. They were the same chilly blue, that same gleaming pitiless facade. Their bottomlessness still chilled her, the sense that she was staring through a hole in the ice toward an azure lake that could have been mere feet away, or a thousand miles. A surface that reflected nothing, including the woman standing in front of him. He showed no sign of remembering her.

  “You’ve come just in time,” she remarked, armored with her smile.

  “Don’t get any ideas,” grumbled Clarrity, “that I’m hard up ’cause it’s dark. I can ride just as far as I please.”

  “I don’t doubt it. I meant to say the good luck is ours.”

  He came in without waiting to be invited. As he looked the place over, the slightest sneer of disapproval came over his face. His pack hit the table with a metallic clang as it slipped off his shoulder—­a sound that set Junior’s eyes dancing with anticipation. Junior’s feet barely seemed to touch the ground as he went out to tend to the rich newcomer’s horse.

  “Got anything to drink?”

  “Some cider, I think. Harder stuff too.”

  “Good. Funny you haven’t asked me my name. Do we know each other?”

  In her disquiet, Kate moved like the marionette of a distracted puppeteer. “Why don’t you tell me?” she asked.

  He narrowed his eyes. “Don’t think so. I would of remembered a proper piece of trail bait like you. So what do you serve here?”

  “Just a fine meal, and a place by the fire for the night if you’re in need.”

  “I’m in need of more than that. But I’ll take the hash for now.”

  She coped with an unaccustomed tangle of feelings as she faced Clarrity again. Showing him to the table, bidding him take the spot of honor beside the canvas, she felt suddenly deprived of all her accumulated wisdom. Before him, she felt herself shrivel to girlhood. She was in that hallway again, back against her father, confronted again with the man’s mulish sneer and arrogant stink—­albeit masked this time by some blossomy cologne he might have picked up in the upscale shops in Denver. She felt diminished, but at the same time charged with a kind of anticipation that made each breath seem sweeter, her teeth sharper, her stomach twist amidst the cords of her innards. For he was entering her sphere now, embarked on a path she had designed. He was the hapless one now, tied to a fate whose string trailed into darkness.

  “Mother makes the best stew pot in southeastern Kansas,” she said.

  He fetched up a little laugh that said “the best in southeastern Kansas is as good as the best nowhere at all.” That irritated her, but she had the presence of mind to intercept Almira before she rounded the partition with the bowl. Clarrity was nothing at all to Junior or the old man, but Kate knew that Almira had known him longer than she had, in ways she’d had no occasion to experience. He would recognize Almira, and by association he would recognize her too, and the consequences of that she could not foresee.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Almira, who was loath to give up the stew.

  “Just stay back and keep your mouth shut,” Kate whispered. She glanced at Flickinger. The old man was in position, smoothing the head of his hammer like a fastidious man tending a cracked fingernail.

  She watched Clarrity for a while after she set down the bowl. His wardrobe had improved but not his table manners. He held the spoon with a tweezer-­like grip at the base of the handle, so close to the stew it stained his fingertips. The spoonfuls went into his mouth at such a rapid pace he hardly seemed to have time to breathe. When he did exhale, it was to give a deep, rumbling, wet belch, the wind of his eruption striking Kate full in the face.

  She smiled. “I’d ask if you like the stew, but I don’t think I have to.”

  He pushed the near-­empty bowl away and leaned back as if to rest, until the canvas yielded under his weight and he bolted upright again.

  “Anything would do after a day on this damnable desert. Lord what dull country! I’d sooner shoot myself than stake a claim here.”

  She leaned closer, practically inviting him to recognize her. In the way she’d known to beguile her guests, she shook her hair from her shoulders so it broke in a slow wave around her cheeks. She said, “You must see much finer places on your travels.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Oh, see enough travelers comin’ through, you get a sense for these things.”

  “Do you?” he mocked, then bit off the end of an uncut cigar and spat it on the floor. He pinched at his vest pocket for a box of matches; before Kate could summon him, Junior was at his side with the light struck. Clarrity accepted the favor without acknowledgment, like a man used to being waited upon. Instead, he kept his gaze locked on Kate, until a smile broke on his face that revealed a row of green, rot-­stripped teeth.

  “We have met, haven’t we?” he said.

  “I’m insulted, sir, that you need to ask.”

  “St. Louis? Chicago? Denver?”

  “I couldn’t put a name to the camp.”

  He puffed grandly, “Well, I must have made an impression, if you still remember me.”

  “You did. There aren’t many who would forget the man who
kidnapped them.”

  “Oh, you might be surprised what folks are prepared to forget!” He laughed. “With the proper incentive.”

  “Is that so? What are you offering?”

  He gave her a long look, as if to confirm that she was serious. As he did so, she perceived the instant when he recognized her: there was a momentary widening of his eyes, a brief unfurling of the whites. Then he vented, hiding behind the smoke as it wrapped around his head. When he came visible again, his sneer was back.

  “I must say this is strange hospitality, young lady! Accusing a man of a hangin’ crime not ten minutes after he sets at your table . . .”

  “By certain measures, we’ve shown better hospitality to you than most.”

  “And besides,” he went on, as if not hearing her, “I don’t recall any kidnapping. It was more in the line of a business arrangement—­of relieving a man of unwanted freight in exchange for a debt. It happens every day.”

  “You lie every day,” she retorted. The suggestion that her father was complicit in Clarrity’s crime kinked her viscera.

  “Careful who you call a liar.”

  He then showed her what she had been too preoccupied to notice: his unholstered pistol held at gut level, though not yet pointed at her.

  It didn’t scare her. Instead, that he feared for his safety—­feared her—­gave Kate a definite sense of satisfaction. Raising her hands to where he could see them, she reached for his bowl.

  “You seem to like the stew. Want more?”

  “I would, if I were the devil’s own fool.”

  “You’re kin to the devil, but I wouldn’t call you no fool. Besides, if I was going to poison you, wouldn’t I have done it already?”

  “Maybe. But I’d just as soon be on my way.”

  “Suit yourself. But just one question before you go . . .”

  He snuffed out his cigar against the tabletop and smiled. “You know, even as a nipper you loved the sound of your own voice. Never let it be said I begrudged a lady her due. Ask your question.”

  Thus invited, she hesitated, as she hadn’t anticipated this opportunity. When the words failed to resolve in her mind, she flushed—­for so profound was her loathing of this man, and so deep her wound, she could not find a single question worthy of her feelings.

  “Come on, then. Or has a life of whoring made you stupid?”

  “Did you . . . ever think,” she began, measuring out her words, “what it would feel like to suffer what you did to others? Did it ever cross your mind, the harm you caused?”

  He seemed to ponder this as he tapped the loose ashes from his cigar and tucked it in his breast pocket. Then he gave her a twisted smile that seemed to cleave his face right up the cheek and through his mocking eye.

  “Don’t have to think about it. I’ve only ever done what’s been done to me—­no more and no less. You think you had it so bad, girl? Let me tell you how my folks celebrated my fifteenth birthday. My pap started with boxing my ears bloody. Then he broke my left wrist twisting my arm back. After that he put a gun in my right hand and told me to go ahead, air out his guts. I couldn’t, so he put the muzzle against his breast and screamed in my face to pull the trigger. I dropped it. He called me a woman. Called me a low-­down gutless worm for not murdering him. Then he picked up the gun and told me that was all the educatin’ I would need in this world. And I was out that day, without two pennies to rub together.

  “You had it so bad? At least I gave you somebody other than your own pap to blame. There’s a blessing in that, after a fashion.”

  He paused, gauging her reaction as he scratched under his chin with his gunsight. When the pistol came down, it was still not pointed at her.

  “Even so, what’s the use in thinking about it? It’s the way the world’s made. Does the painter hink it over before she puts her claws in a buck deer? Surely not. That’s a good way to go hungry, and leave her cubs hungry too. Where would the mercy be in it?

  “A painter’s an animal,” she replied. “You are a man.”

  “A peculiarity that makes no difference at all.”

  Now it was her turn to deal him an ambiguous smile. “You declared it,” she said. “Not me.”

  He was opening his mouth to reply when Almira rounded the partition. As the two old acquaintances locked eyes, Almira fetched up short and, in a girlish gesture, crossed her arms as if to insulate herself from him. Momentarily astonished, Clarrity softened his posture, letting his head brush the canvas.

  A strange, inhuman cry sounded behind the partition, like the strangling of a vulture. When the blow fell, a fine mist of blood exploded, leaving a Clarrity-­shaped outline on the canvas as his head snapped forward. He sat there for a moment, trembling. His expression was less one of agony than puzzlement, like a man who had mislaid his pocket watch. Then, in a slow, twisting swoon, he found his place on the floor.

  What followed this, the first Bender murder in four months, was both the same and unlike the others. The old man rounded the partition right away, hammer in hand, to make sure the deed was complete. Junior cleared the table away from the trapdoor. They opened the cellar and rolled Clarrity below as Almira looked on with an expression of dispassionate appraisal. Kate gave her a glance that asked, Is he anything to you?

  “Make sure to go through all of his pockets this time,” she said to no one and everyone, and retreated to her post by the hearth.

  Clarrity hit the slab with a mixture of hollow thud and metallic clang. Junior rolled up his sleeves to follow, but Kate stopped him.

  “No. I’ll do it this time.”

  Having spent too long around a laundry pot in her time, she would not risk getting her clothes splattered. She stripped naked in the sight of God and the devil and all the demons in between as Junior, halfway between shock and wonder, bore witness. When her chemise had passed over her head and she stood bare-­breasted before him, Junior became desperate to quit the place, wagging his head from side to side as if to avoid staring at her—­but with eyes swiveling in their sockets to keep her in view.

  She quashed an impulse to laugh at him, as the occasion was serious enough, and even a villain like Clarrity deserved a sober murdering.

  “Give me the knife.”

  He passed her, handle first, one of the ivory-­clad table knives they had picked up in Humboldt. She weighed it for a moment, feeling it become slick with the sweat of her palm. Below, there was nothing to see but a man-­sized blot of darkness against the somewhat lighter gloom of the sandstone. Was she simply going to leap into the pit? She had never done this before, and she had not thought it through. She stood there, the blade scratching against the stubble of her unshaven leg as she considered the embarrassment of giving the knife back to Junior.

  But then she heard a laugh—­a derisive, phlegmy cackle that turned up the hairs at the nape of her neck.

  “What’s the matter, Duchess?” said Almira. “Too good to butcher your own pork?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Then do it. Do it now.”

  She stepped off. In anger, in spite, in revenge, and in her haste to get away from her companions, she fell through air. And in the instant she floated above the aperture she felt a sensation not of plunging but of belonging, of snapping into place. The other killings were acts of complication, adding more knots of lies to the weft of the universe. John Jesperson and Hiram the Mormon and the others would not be missed here, but they would be missed someplace, the consternation caused by their individual fates adding to the sum of fear and ignorance stalking the land. Necessity had damned them, but their ends had created only more necessity. Grief and rage. Hope and retribution and all the other conceits. And so on it would go, without end, leaving the world a worse place for her passage through it. The prospect squashed her spirit as flat as the frozen prairie beyond the door.

  Finishing Clarrity bred no fu
rther necessity. On the contrary, his death would answer many questions. Falling into the pit, she anticipated a great unraveling, a smoothing of a fabric whose design would soon be obvious. Somewhere, her father would understand her act, and raise a glass, and grin in that way he did when he made a big score. Curiously, though she could envision his smile, her daydreams would not disclose the particulars of her father’s face. It would not center in her mind’s eye, and when she made an effort, she imagined only a shadowy ideal, a composite on all the handsome faces she remembered. Forgetting his face left her sad, but not hopeless, because she never doubted that when the time finally came, when he came to rescue her, she would know him at once.

  Cutting Clarrity’s throat left her exhausted yet enervated. Back above, she rested on the floor, grasping her knees to her chest as she trembled from the raw, crackling energy that coursed through her limbs. At last the blood dried and she shivered from the draft rushing up between the planks. Almira draped a blanket over her shoulders, and the old man performed what he thought to be a similar ser­vice by blowing pipe smoke at her. Junior showed up with a bucket of clean water. When she took up the washrag, she had to scrub off the congealed blood, as if Clarrity’s veins had been filled with red grease.

  Clean and clothed in her other chemise, she staggered to her bed. She was tired now, in that deep way she had after an afternoon beating laundry at some camp stream fouled with lye soap and camp shit, or ten hours on her feet waiting on customers at the hotel. The others showed her the quiet respect owed someone who had faced and conquered some Herculean labor. Almira turned down the lantern, conscientiously muffling the clank of Clarrity’s coins and jewelry as she deposited them in the cracker tin. Junior and the old man dealt themselves a quiet game of rummy by the light of one candle, hardly snapping the cards.

  And yet—­her final thoughts before falling asleep were not ones of satisfaction, of laying an old demon to rest. Again, they were of Leroy. Why was it that her mind always seemed to circle back to that pain, no matter how far it had traveled? It was like that wolf they had seen when she first arrived at the cabin—­of all the places for it to prowl, why would the beast venture so close to the habitations of men? Was it the place where it had suffered an injury too deep to forget? Some need to prove to itself it had truly survived? Forever and onward, the beast ranges farther to escape, yet always returns, keeping faith with its wound. She saw Leroy looking down on her, smiling as he once did and never would, and the casual passage of his hand across his brow, clearing his hair from his eyes. And his gaze passed over her then, to another woman, and another, and another after that, each flick of his eye making her lighter, more invisible, until her body faded to a tremulous, unconscious transparency.