by Ian Weir
“Good old Wally Palmer,” Bill Lundrigan would reply. “My gosh—is old Wally still alive? Well, you be sure to give him my best, if you happen to see him.”
I’d even applied directly—in person—to Will Hearst himself, the Boy Wonder. This is a true story. Swear to God, not a word of a lie. I was outside the Examiner Building one fine September day, just after noon—this had been a few months earlier. Just lingering a bit—as one does—in hopes of bumping into Bill Lundrigan, or one of the others, on their way out to lunch. Well, the front door opened, and who should emerge but William Hearst. A dapper young dynamo, preposterously young, with unearthly blue eyes and a wisp of blond mustache—such was my first impression. He was flanked by two other men, and bound for a carriage that awaited on the street. But before he could step into it, I introduced myself and made my pitch for employment.
He heard me out, too. I had fifteen seconds of his undivided attention, at the end of which he gave me a look of piercing appraisal and asked me a question that cut to the quick of my aspirations.
Anyway. Hearst wasn’t at Mulvaney’s when I arrived, on that evening of April 26. Neither was Lundrigan, or any of the others.
I’d had it in mind that someone might stand me a drink, and possibly even offer up a couch where I might sleep for a night or two. Also, I may have had a notion that the men of the Examiner might rise to my defense, and denounce William Rourke from the Editorial Pages. No such luck. A newspaperman’s tavern—and not a single damned newspaperman on the premises. None had arrived by nine o’clock, either. Or by ten. Or eleven-thirty.
Midnight found me sitting alone at a table in the corner.
I expect I was drunk, by this point. Drunk, and muttering. I’d run out of money, but had managed to cadge a last pitcher of steam beer from Fat Charley the barkeep. Stale beer pooled on the tabletop; the blue fug of smoke and sour malt sagged down from the rafters. And where was I supposed to go from here? I was homeless.
“Two kinds of men come to San Francisco, I find.” That’s what Hearst had said to me, that September afternoon. “There are active and energetic men—intelligent men, who come west in the buoyancy of youth, to make their fortune. And then there are those who have washed up here, on the eddy of repeated failure. So the question I ask, is—which are you?”
“God damn him straight to hell,” I said.
I muttered this to the tabletop, not to Hearst. And I was actually brooding upon William “Ichabod” Rourke. As time had ticked past, my thoughts had grown progressively dark. I began thinking to myself: Perhaps it’s time to settle this—once and for all. Just the two of us, man to man. I began to think: I should kill him.
“I s’pose you could give it a try,” said a strange high voice.
I jerked round, startled.
Behind me, a little man sat alone, in shadow. He’d been there for awhile, I’d guess, at a low table on the other side of a pony-wall, nursing a glass of steam beer and jotting with a pencil in a notebook.
“I’ve had the same thoughts myself, from time to time,” he said. “About killing someone.”
“Killing someone?” I exclaimed, sputtering a little. “Who the hell said anything about killing someone?”
“You did.”
“I never!”
“Just now.”
Oh, Christ. Had I really been talking out loud?
There are moments in life when we see ourselves, shockingly revealed. This was one of those moments—and, oh, the prospect was dismal. Evidently, I was becoming That Person: the solitary drunk, ageing before your eyes, who twitches and scowls and mutters to himself. And we know what comes next, don’t we? The swallowings of dregs from other people’s mugs; the fishing out of dead cigarette-ends, and the painstaking straightening of them out; the lurches and the staggers and the outright pissings in pants.
“You’re Weaver, aren’t you?” the little man said. “Yes, you are. I’ve seen you around, here and there.”
And I recognized him. Ty-something. Tyree—that was his name. So people called him, anyway. He had a corner newsstand, farther east on Market Street. You’d see him out in all weather, selling newspapers and tobacco.
“Barry Weaver,” he continued, nodding sagely. “Otherwise known as B.W. Colton, creator of Deadeye Ned Hartland.”
“Who told you that?”
“Oh, someone did. Heard it somewhere. Stuck in my brainpan. The Gallows Tree, The Last Trail, and the third one—there were three of ’em, the Deadeye Ned books, I know that. What was the third title? Never mind; it’ll come to me. They always do.”
He had a certain standing with the local hacks. This would explain his presence in Mulvaney’s, though I didn’t recall having seen him here before.
“Heard about your troubles with young Rourke. Too bad.”
I shrugged.
“Missus Earp, now—there’s a woman, eh? Knows her own mind. A remarkable woman in many ways, though whether she’s actually Missus Earp—well, that don’t signify. Not to the likes of myself, and—The Call of the Plains. There it is. The title.” Tyree glugged a swallow of steam beer; his Adam’s apple bobbed. “I just have one of those heads. Odds and pieces get lodged in there, like gristle between the teeth. No disrespect to your writings.”
He offered the rough sketch of a smile. Oversized head cocked sparrow-wise on a flimsy neck, huge eyes peering through spectacles. The lenses were thick as the bottoms of Mason jars. When the light caught them at an angle they would be suddenly opaque, his eyes as void and vacant as a blind man’s. Thus the name. He’d been dubbed Tiresias by newspapermen who found him to be a source of remarkable information—never for attribution, but seldom mistaken. Tiresias, the sightless seer from the old Greek play. The one who knew what King Oedipus had been up to, long before the doomed king knew it himself. Tyree, for short.
“You’re better than you ever got credit for,” he said. “As a writer, I mean. As a man?” That sketch of a smile. “Couldn’t say. Those books of yours, though—they’re all right. Considering they’re not really your books.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They’re just books you wrote ’cause you guessed someone would like ’em. And I guess someone did, more or less. But they’re not the book you were put on earth to write.”
“And how would you know that?”
He shrugged at that. Eyes still void. Spindle shoulders rising about his ears. “Go ahead. Tell me I’m wrong.”
I opened my mouth to do just that. Then didn’t.
“The hell else do you think you know about me?” I said.
I was finding this uncanny, tell the truth. Damned near shivery up my spine. He closed his notebook, and as he did I glimpsed one of the pages. It was covered in densely compact lines, executed in a tiny, spiky, chicken-track cursive. Oh, he was the strangest creature. Those huge eyes, and limbs like sticks. You’d see him hirpling along the street, head bobbing on that stamen of a neck. Elbows pistoning, as if he must with each step hike balky legs into locomotion.
He had set himself to rolling a cigarette with a grimy leather pouch of makings. I saw now that he was younger than I’d guessed him to be, at first. Maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight—no more than thirty. He had come from somewhere farther north—I seemed to recall having heard something to that effect. Up in Canada, I think. He’d worked at a newspaper in Seattle, setting type; had been a printer’s devil somewhere else. He no doubt had a Christian name, too—something other than “Tyree”—though I couldn’t have told you what it was.
“What else do I know about you, Barry Weaver?” he mused. “Well, I know what you’ve been asking yourself.”
“Read minds, do you?”
“You’re wondering: Could I actually do it? Could I kill William Rourke?”
That sketch of a smile. A flash of the lenses, and the eyes went void again.
I said: “Good Christ.”
“Do you have previous experience in that line, Mr. Weaver? Have you ever killed s
omeone?”
“Good Christ,” I said again. “What sort of man do you think I am?
“Yes,” Tyree said. “That’s the question. The one we come right down to, in the end.” He licked along the edge of his cigarette paper: a dainty dabbing with his tongue. Twisting both ends, he looked up at me again. “There’s killers, Mr. Weaver—and then there’s all the others. That’s been my assessment. All the men who might kill if it came down to soldiering or just blind panic, but only if there wasn’t a way around it. But there’s also the first kind—men who can kill as easy as order breakfast. Men who have a gift, if you’d call it that—it just comes natural and pure, the same way other men might run like deer or sing like angels. I’d suspect Wyatt Earp to be that kind—he’s a killer. There’s others like that too, but not so many.”
“You’ve known your share of pure-born killers, I suppose?” I let the sneer sound in my voice. “Broken bread with them, and such?”
He’d lit his roll-’em as we spoke; smoke curled about his head. “I met three such men in my life,” he said. “One of them hardly counts—an outlaw named Quarles, out of Missouri. A killer, but only in the way that a pack of wolves is a killer, or an outbreak of smallpox. The second was an outlaw, name of Dillashay. And the third was Dillashay’s own half-brother. Strother Purcell.”
It was on my tongue to demand where this had been, and when, and under what specific circumstances. But before I could organize the words, he said something more outlandish still. He said: “The thing of it is—the goddamnedest thing—it turns out to be much easier than you’d ever suppose.”
“What is?”
“Killing a man.”
“You’re not going to tell me you’ve killed someone?”
I almost laughed out loud. But somehow, the impulse died. For just a moment, Tyree was faraway. He looked more lost than I have ever been.
“It should be the hardest thing in the world,” he said. “Except it isn’t.”
And another thought came to me, then—the most unsettling one yet, on this strange and disconcerting night. I thought: We forget how long and how deeply they’ve been damned. Even the very least of the lesser devils.
–FOUR–
From The Roadhouse Chronicles of Thomas Skiffings
Near Hell’s Gate
Winter, 1876
FOR FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS, Gimp Tom would have died for his sister and gone to hell. He could only trust that Billie knew it too. If dying alone would do the job, he’d have done it for much less. He would indeed have died for nothing at all, such being the ardency of his true heart.
But five hundred dollars would fetch you the whole hog. For five hundred dollars, he would face down the six most deadly gunmen on earth, armed only with his old Deane-Adams five-shot. Subsequently he would descend into Perdition, with joyful Hallelujahs in his heart and one tear like a diamond glistening on his cheek, dropped there from his sister’s eye as she knelt weeping to kiss his cold, dead lips. He would have proclaimed this to any man—the Man from Decatur, or any other—who might ask him what he’d do for a dollar, in any of its wicked multiples.
But nobody asked him. They asked Billie instead—even though the coin came from Tom’s own ear.
“They” being Cousin Fletch. He was sitting at the time in a wooden chair by the fire. “Hang on,” he said, catching Tom’s arm as the boy passed by too close. He peered into Tom’s left ear, breathing gusts of Missouri rot. “Hey, presto!” he exclaimed, plucking with his fingers and displaying the coin. A United States silver dollar. He proffered it to Billie, who was clearing noon-dinner dishes. This was on the second day, the storm still howling outside.
“Come over,” said Cousin Fletch.
“Why?”
“Sit here with me, and it’s your’n.” His grin was wide and inviting, by which she understood that sit here meant his lap.
“Not likely,” Billie said.
“Why not?”
“She’s got work to do.” Gimp Tom spoke on his sister’s behalf. He’d retreated a step or two, rubbing his arm. He and Billie were alone with the outlaws, John McCutcheon having gone outside. His shape could be seen in the driving snow through the window, labouring with a shovel to keep a path to the outbuildings open. The trails and the Wagon Road would be impassable for days, choked with snowdrifts.
“Did someone ask yer opinion?” Cousin Fletch demanded.
“No,” said Tom, “but I—”
“Then shut yer mouth.”
Young Sprewell, on the other side of the fire, raised his head. That was his name—Dooley Sprewell. Gimp Tom knew this, by now. The Man from Decatur was across the room, lost somewhere in the shadows of his brooding.
“A silver dollar,” Cousin Fletch said to Billie. In case she was in some doubt.
“I can see that,” Billie said.
“Yer too good for the likes of a dollar?”
Billie hesitated, trying to decide what she might gainfully say.
“Or just too good for the likes of myself?” Cousin Fletch’s churchyard grin was undimmed. “Too high ’n mighty for a country boy. That the size of what we’re lookin’ at?”
Gimp Tom said: “What she means—”
“If’n that boy opens up his mouth again,” said Cousin Fletch, still grinning, “I swear I may be required to put my whole arm down his throat, and rip his asshole out.”
Billie found her voice. “I’ll not sit down for a dollar,” she said. “That’s what I’m saying. But I guess I could do something else.”
“Such as?”
“I could sing.”
So she did.
It was “Rose of Killarney,” a song that her Ma had sung at song-and-supper taverns in London, England. Gimp Tom had heard Billie sing this often and again, in their old life, but it came as a revelation to the outlaws. In the shadows, the Man from Decatur looked up, which Billie noted straightaway. Billie Skiffings was not truly a gifted singer—a sweet voice was all, and uncertain in the higher register. But she left you somehow enchanted. That was the knack she possessed, even then: the trick of living inside a song. You’d swear that each sentiment was her own, wrung from her years in this woeful world and shared in heartfelt commiseration with you alone.
This song she mostly sang to Dooley Sprewell. He was in much pain, but as she sang he began to light right up with happiness. And it turned out that’s what Billie was prepared to do for one silver dollar: to warm the heart of a wounded boy, two thousand miles from home.
*
Dooley Sprewell seemed stronger that afternoon. His spirits were revived a little, and sitting by the stove he managed to banter. He must surely be warm as toast, he said, if only he could understand the situation rightly, on the grounds that such cold as this could not exist in the first place.
“There y’are,” Cousin Fletch said, with a gruesome jolly wink in Billie’s direction. “This young feller’s a natural scholard.”
She could see that, Billie said.
“Gal who catches this young feller, she’ll be popping out lawyers and judges.” Cousin Fletch winked again and waggled his eyebrows. These were tangled as thickets. Coarse hairs poked out at impossible angles, as did the hairs in both his nostrils.
Billie said: “Ho, ho.” She had about her an air of brittle brightness that could pass for vivacity, amongst those who did not know her.
Dooley Sprewell had recommenced to shiver. He had always reckoned himself, he said, a man fit to take on any challenge. But his Daddy never told him there’d be wintertime like this. The worst you’d get back home was a January frost. Snow was a vicious rumour up on someone else’s mountain.
“Where’s home?” Billie asked him.
“Alabama,” Dooley said.
Toward evening, Dooley suffered them to open up his shirt, to see if his wound was healing. A gunshot wound indeed—Gimp Tom saw this clearly, looking sidelong from across the room. A bullet wound in his side, though Dooley tried to maintain the fiction that it had been ca
used by a sharp stick when he’d slipped on wet rocks by the river. A sickly sweetness bloomed as Cousin Fletch unwrapped the dressing.
“There’s a doctor in Yale,” said John McCutcheon. They could send to fetch him in a day or two; sooner, even, if the weather broke. He could undertake to be the messenger himself, he added, looking hopeful.
“This boy don’t need no doctor,” said Cousin Fletch.
Uncle John was not so sure. The wound had an angry redness.
Cousin Fletch just snorted. “We never had no doctor beyond my old grandmamaw—and look at me. Never been infected in my life.”
“I’m fine,” said Dooley Sprewell. “There’s no one needs concern theirselves about me.”
“Hear that?” said Cousin Fletch. “He’ll be up and dancing the two-step, next.”
“I will,” said Dooley. “If there was a one-step, I could prolly dance it this minnit.”
Cousin Fletch eyed him asquint the whole while, as if weighing the odds that Dooley Sprewell would be fit to ride a horse when the weather broke—or on any other occasion short of Judgement Day itself, when the souls of the Blessed might gallop joyful across the Fields of Heaven, should Dooley by some miracle find himself amongst them. Subsequently Cousin Fletch exchanged private words with the Man from Decatur. Both of them took dark long glances toward poor Dooley.
Dooley pretended not to notice, and was almost merry for a time. As if dark glances might go away just like the cold, if you refused to believe that they existed. “Alabama,” he repeated to Gimp Tom, who had fetched some wood for the stove and lingered to talk. “A farm by the Tallapoosa River. I don’t expect you ever been there.”
“No,” Tom agreed. “I don’t expect I ever was.”
It was the most beautiful place in all the world, Dooley said. But now he could never go back there again.
“You never know,” said Gimp Tom.
But Dooley said with sorrow: Yes, he did.
There had been some kind of a scrape. Dooley confided this to Tom while Cousin Fletch and the Man from Decatur were preoccupied with their own susurrations. A misunderstanding, he said, except with guns, down in the Washington Territory. There’d been a worse scrape in New Mexico. Some people had been shot quite bad each time. This had not been anyone’s intention, and certainly not Dooley Sprewell’s. But now he could never go home again, nor back across the Line at all. So Dooley was riding north instead, with his two companions.
