Gunman's Song

by Ralph Cotton

  “Want me to go get Sheriff Bratcher?” Dawson asked.

  “It never changes anything,” Shaw said absently, keeping his eyes on the gunman, at the same time looking past him and from side to side, making sure nobody was hidden with a rifle just for backup. “The sheriff can’t stop it.”

  “No,” said Cray Dawson, “I meant to witness it, make sure you don’t get accused of any wrongdoing.”

  “Wrongdoing…I never get accused,” said Shaw, raising a hand slowly, pressing Dawson farther away from him. Dawson took the hint and moved back on his own.

  “What is it, mister?” Shaw replied to the gunman, already stepping slowly sideways to the middle of the street.

  “You know what it is, Shaw,” said the man. “It’s five thousand dollars. That’s what it is.”

  “Dang!” Cray Dawson whispered, “five thousand dollars?”

  Shaw answered the young gunman. “That’ll get you into the ground real proper with a lot left over. But it’s your call.”

  From inside the Ace High Saloon the old sheriff had heard the young gunman call out Shaw’s name. He stepped out through the saloon doors with his hand on a big Walker Colt holstered on his hip. Beside him stood a young deputy with a tin badge drooping down from his sagging shirt pocket. The deputy raised a sawed-off shotgun with his thumb lying across the hammer. “I know what it is too,” Sheriff Bratcher called out to both gunmen, “And I ain’t having it. You want to get Shaw to kill you, take it somewhere away from Somos Santos.” As soon as Sheriff Bratcher spoke, he turned to the deputy and said in a lowered tone, “Freddie, get out from under me. Spread out along that boardwalk where you can do me some good. I hate for one shot to kill us both.”

  “Howdy, Sheriff Bratcher,” Shaw said from the middle of the street without taking his eyes off the gunman.

  “Howdy, Shaw,” said Sheriff Bratcher. “I see you’ve brought more trouble to my town.”

  “I didn’t bring it, Sheriff; it was here waiting for me,” Shaw said.

  “I notice you didn’t try talking him out of it, though,” said Bratcher.

  “I figured that was your job, Sheriff,” said Shaw. “I won’t kill him here in Somos Santos if I can keep from it.”

  “I got news for you, Fast Larry,” the young gunman called out, “you ain’t killing me nowhere, nohow. So let’s get ’em pulled.”

  “You heard the sheriff, mister,” said Shaw. “He said no gunfighting here.”

  “To hell with him,” said the young man. “He can’t stop it.”

  “Whoa, now that’s not using your head,” said Shaw. “We pull iron, the sheriff here and his deputy are going to be pulling iron too. When the smoke clears it won’t matter what kind of showing you made against me…you’ll never know about it.”

  “I ain’t going to be talked out of this, Shaw!” the gunman shouted. “I’m here to kill you, and nothing’s going to stop me.” He cut a quick glance to where Freddie the deputy had hunkered down behind a wooden barrel. “You’ve got no right shooting at me…that’s like you’re taking his side!”

  Freddie rose up with the shotgun hanging slack in his hands and looked along the boardwalk at Sheriff Bratcher. “Is that right, Sheriff?” he asked, looking confused. “Are we taking sides?”

  “No, it ain’t right, Freddie!” Bratcher barked at him. “Now get down and stay put!” The sheriff directed his next words to the young gunman. “I’m on the side of whoever is defending himself. I know Shaw here ain’t going to draw first…so you’re starting off in the wrong. If you was to kill him, which I know you won’t, then I’ll see to it you get tried for murder and hanged, or else you’ll make a move on me, and we’ll kill you where you stand. Now that’s where you’ve put yourself today. It ain’t working out quite like you had it figured, is it?”

  The young gunman bristled. “I’m doing it! Shaw, come on, you ready?”

  Shaw didn’t answer. He only stared.

  “I mean it, Shaw! It’s time!” he shouted.

  Shaw stood silent.

  “Don’t you want to know my name first?” the gunman asked.

  Shaw only shook his head slowly.

  “Son of a…” the gunman raged. His hand moved fast, as fast as any Shaw had seen lately. But not fast enough. Shaw’s shot hit him dead center of his forehead before the young man got his pistol up level enough to get an aim. The gunman’s shot went straight down in front of his boot. Shaw’s Colt didn’t stop even for a split second. It cocked toward the man in the bowler hat.

  “Don’t shoot!” the man pleaded, throwing his hands up. He backed away, stumbling a bit.

  At the hitch rail a spooked horse had reared, causing its tied reins to snap the crossbar from the rail. Shaw’s pistol swung toward the horse, then lowered and uncocked as someone appeared with his hand raised in a show of peace and settled the animal.

  “My God, Shaw!” Cray Dawson said, stunned by Shaw’s speed, “that ain’t like nothing human!”

  Shaw didn’t answer. He looked down at the gun. Gray smoke curled upward around his hand as if being caressed by a serpent’s tongue. He raised the gun and let the spent smoking cartridge shell fall to the street. He replaced it with a fresh round from his holster belt, keeping his eyes searching back and forth along the empty dirt street.

  “This happens everywhere I go. Are you sure you want to ride with me, Cray Dawson?” he asked sidelong in a solemn tone of voice, clicking the Colt chamber shut and out of habit giving it a spin.

  “Yeah, I still want to ride with you,” said Cray Dawson gravely, “right up until I see Rosa’s murderers dead.”

  Chapter 2

  It was past midnight when Lawrence Shaw walked through the door of the hacienda and placed his Stetson on one of the hat pegs along the wall. He carried a newly opened bottle of rye in his right hand, having already emptied a bottle drinking shot after shot in the Ace High Saloon while talking to Sheriff Bratcher, Cray Dawson, and Freddie the deputy. There were a couple of others there but Shaw couldn’t recall who they were in his present condition. Shaw was drunk, but not nearly as drunk as a man should be given the amount of raw rye he had poured down himself. He was still in control of his faculties, he thought. Yet, in the flickering glow of a candle Carmelita had left burning inside a glass globe, he weaved a bit before catching himself with one hand on the back of a tall wooden chair. The chair legs made a scraping sound on the stone floor and brought Carmelita up from the darkness where she had been lying on a deep wooden-framed sofa with a woolen Mexican serape around her.

  “Lawrence? ¿Está usted?” she asked, her voice not sounding like that of woman awakened from sleep.

  “Sí, estoy yo…I mean yes, it’s me,” Shaw said, for a second speaking as he would have to Rosa, then catching himself quickly. Not that it should have mattered, his speaking Spanish to Carmelita. But it did somehow. There was something to it that he could not explain, but somehow it mattered.

  “Are you hungry?” Carmelita asked. “I prepared some food. I can warm it.” Her eyes moved across the bottle in his hand, then moved away.

  “No, I’m good,” said Shaw, sobering a bit now that he had to in order to speak clearly.

  “Is there anything I can get for you? If there is, tell me,” said Carmelita, stepping in closer, picking up the candle and holding it up for better light.

  Lawrence Shaw looked into her dark eyes, so overcome by the resemblance to his Rosa that he resisted the aching need to hold her to him. “I’m not hungry,” he said, averting his eyes from her, turning and walking through the darkness toward the bedroom at the end of the long hallway. Carmelita followed him with the candle, holding it up to light his way. Shaw avoided looking over at the broad hearth across the room. When he had arrived off the trail earlier that day, Carmelita had just finished scrubbing the hearthstone with a coarse brush and a bucket of soapy water. Shaw had pretended not to notice the pinkish color of the water or the two bullet holes in the hearthstones.

  In the bedroom,
Carmelita set the candle on a table inside the door, then raised the globe of an oil lantern, lit it, and trimmed it to a soft glow. “Let me help you,” she said. Yet, turning toward him, she saw he had set the bottle on a nightstand and stood unfastening his gun belt. She watched him loop the belt, rebuckle it, and hang it on the corner of the bed within reach. She gazed at the gun and holster, at how they seemed so at home hanging there. When she looked back at Shaw he had seated himself on the side of the bed. He dropped a boot to the floor. She hesitated for a second, wondering if her offer of help was welcome, or even needed.

  “I talked to the sheriff,” Shaw said, reaching down, struggling with his other boot. “He told me the details.”

  “Please,” Carmelita said softly, “let us not speak about it any more tonight.” She raised his foot and helped him take off the other boot. “You have had much to drink; let me help you.”

  “I’ll be leaving tomorrow, first light,” Shaw said. “Cray Dawson is coming by. He’s riding with me.”

  “Oh,” she said matter-of-factly. “Then I will prepare some food for you to take with you.” She stepped in close and began unbuttoning his bib-front shirt as she spoke.

  “That’s not necessary,” he said. Feeling her stop, he added, “The food, I mean. It’s going to be a long ride…a day’s food won’t matter much one way or the other.” He thought about what he’d just said, and corrected himself. “Unless you don’t mind doing it, that is?”

  “No, I do not mind.” Carmelita finished unbuttoning his shirt and peeled it up over his shoulders, taking care with his healing wound. She dropped the shirt beside him and touched the tender flesh for a second as if examining it. Then she stepped around the bed and turned down the covers. “Finish undressing,” she said quietly, fluffing the feather pillows. “Will you need a nightshirt?”

  “No, I’ve grown unaccustomed to them,” he said. Feeling a bit awkward with her in the room with him, Shaw took off his socks, dropped them, then stood up and waited for her to leave before unfastening his trousers.

  “Good night, Lawrence,” Carmelita said, stepping away from the bed and to the door. She reached down, turned out the lantern, and left the room with the candle in her hand.

  Shaw crawled beneath the cover and lay barechested, wearing only his knee-length summer johns. He stared at the dark ceiling, feeling the emptiness beside him where once his wife had lain, the emptiness compounded by his knowing he would never feel the warmth of her beside him again. His cheeks were wet with tears—Fast Larry crying shamelessly in the dark—and he thought about his last day in Wakely, after he’d learned of Rosa’s death and of the bodies of the men he’d left lying in the dirt street. He had delivered death so easily, he thought—too easily to be lying here taking death so hard.

  “Rosa,” he whispered, as if she were there in the darkness, or at least someplace unseen but where she could hear his voice. “Rosa,” he whispered even more softly as sleep overtook him.

  But sleep abandoned him shortly and he awakened with a start to the sound of his own voice crying out. For a moment he lay shivering as if suffering a fever, unsure if he had really cried out aloud or if it had happened only in the throes of a tortured dream. The effects of the rye whiskey had all but worn off, and he felt the terrible pain of reality close around him like a tight fist. He wanted to reach for the bottle on the nightstand. He wanted to pour the whiskey down himself and feel the shivering, the hurt, and the emptiness dissipate in a warm surge. But as he lay there drawn up into a ball, he saw the door to the room open in a soft glow of candlelight.

  “Lawrence?” Carmelita whispered, slipping into the room and closing the door behind herself. “Are you all right?” She moved to the side of the bed and looked down at him, her free hand holding her robe closed at her throat.

  “I…I went crazy when I got the telegraph,” he said, his voice blurting it out as if releasing something that had been building up like a storm inside him. “I killed some men in Wakely who had been dogging me, wanting a gunfight. That’s how I got the wound.” As he spoke, he reached out from under the cover for the bottle of whiskey.

  Carmelita reached down, picked up the bottle, uncorked it, and handed it to him.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I know I’ve got to stop drinking whiskey. But right now, it helps some.”

  “Do what you must do,” she said without judgment. “In such a time as this we must all do whatever helps our pain.” She turned slightly back toward the door as Shaw took a long drink, let out a long sigh and held the bottle close to his chest for a moment in silence. Then, seeing her start across the room, he said before he could stop himself, “Don’t leave, Carmelita…. Stay.”

  She stopped and turned back to him, facing him in the circled glow of candlelight. “Stay with you? Are you sure?” she asked softly.

  “Yes…I mean, no,” he said shakily. “I mean, it wouldn’t be right.” As he spoke Carmelita stepped forward and set the candle on the nightstand.

  “Is it right, is it wrong?” she whispered with a shrug. “I do not know. But this is not a night for deciding what is right and what is wrong.” She took the bottle from his hand and set it down beside the candle.

  “But you’re her sister….” Shaw’s words trailed off.

  “Sí, and I cherish her memory…and I miss her,” said Carmelita. She untied the sash on her robe, slipped the garment from her shoulders, and let it fall down her body. She stood naked in the flickering candlelight. Shaw gasped slightly at the sight of her. When she leaned down over him, raised the edge of the covers, and slipped into the bed beside him, he caught the scent of her hair, familiar, yet slightly different from that of his wife’s.

  “Jesus,” he moaned, “I can’t…I know I can’t. This is crazy.” But even as he said it, he felt the heat of her against him, the steamy heat of her as she opened her legs and drew him to her, the piercing heat of her as she pressed her breasts against his chest.

  “Shhh,” she whispered. “Yes, you can. I will help you.” Her hands traveled down his stomach, and Shaw knew she was right. He felt her mouth warm on his chest, his stomach, then lower as she moved down beneath the cover.

  When he was ready for her, Carmelita seemed to engulf him, and they made subdued, gentle love in her sister’s bed until the two became less and less aware that this was once Rosa’s home, her bed, her husband, and more aware of the need their bodies summoned from one another. “Hold me,” Carmelita whispered afterward as Shaw lay with his face buried in the fragrance of her long dark hair. “Hold me and fall asleep inside me.”

  “Sí, I will,” Shaw whispered, still catching his breath.

  He fell asleep in her arms and for a while felt only the warm darkness embracing him, until he soon awakened again in the night with the same aching hollowness returning to his mind and body. At first he did not recognize his own bedroom in his own home. But soon, as the shroud of sleep lifted and realization crept into him, he sank into the deep sense of dread he had lately come to know. In their sleep they had changed position, and now he ran his hand along the slim arm lying across his chest, following it up to Carmelita’s face, where he felt her breath on his skin. “Oh, Jesus,” he whispered to himself as his recent memory came back to him. For a full moment he wanted to lie frozen in place forever, as if to move in any way and perhaps feel Carmelita’s nakedness against him would further violate whatever degree of reverence he held for Rosa’s memory. Yet something compelled him to touch her. He caressed her warm, slender back to satisfy himself that she was real, and that she was Carmelita, not his wife come back to him through some indiscernible process known only by the dead. Carmelita moaned beneath his touch and snuggled closer against him.

  Suddenly he was moved by a smothering sense of guilt that forced him up from the bed, making careful moves in order not to disturb Carmelita. In the dark he climbed into his trousers, hooked the gun belt over his shoulder, picked up the whiskey bottle, and crept silently from the room. On his way through th
e house he picked up a blanket from the wooden-framed sofa and draped it around himself. He stepped out the front door into the chill of the night and found a seat for himself on the edge of the wide porch. He took a drink from the bottle and sat waiting for the fresh surge of whiskey to calm his belly and dull his pain. She had planned this, he told himself, coming into his room wearing only the robe, nothing beneath it.

  He took another drink, thinking about it. So what? He was a man of the world…his wife had known that about him. He had not been a faithful husband, or a very good husband, as far as that went, he reminded himself. With his and Rosa’s life together over and done, the best he could say for himself was that he had loved her. He took another drink. Perhaps that was as much as any man or woman could ever say about another. And now he had slept with her sister. Well, Rosa was gone, as gone now as she would ever be. A warm, naked woman had come to him in the midst of a bad night and he had taken no more than what was offered. It wasn’t about Rosa. It wasn’t about the dead. It was about Carmelita…and about him. It was about those still living, and the comfort they had to take. So be it.…

  Behind him he heard the door open and close. Without turning or looking up, Shaw held his blanket open and draped it around her with his arm as she sat down beside him. She wore nothing but his bib-front shirt she had picked up from beside the bed, and she shivered a bit against him until the warmth of the blanket and his naked chest warmed her.

  “Are you feeling better?” she asked, burrowing against him.

  “Yes, I am,” he replied. And the two sat in silence until they drifted back to sleep.

  The next time he opened his eyes, it was to the sound of a horse blowing out its breath no more than a few feet from him. He sensed someone standing there, and when he heard a man clear his throat, his hand instinctively snatched the big Colt out of its holster and from beneath the blanket, cocked and ready, in one swift stroke.

  “Whoa, now!” said Cray Dawson, raising his hands chest-high.