by Ed Gorman
Somebody in the doorway. A faint shoe-scraping sound. Then no sound at all except the wind. Pictured somebody in the door frame. Watching me.
“Hello,” I said.
But there was no answer. Footsteps coming across the floor. The man who’d fired the shots outside? “Hello,” I said again. But this time the wind took my voice. My strength left, too.
The darkness…just the darkness.
Chapter 11
Delirium. Pastpresent. Images of my lifetime merging. Remorse, bliss, fear, remorse.
Traveling. Bumpy road. My guess: bed of buckboard. Awareness: wound hurting. Scratchy blankets. Voice. Voices.
Scents: lamp oil, medicine, woman.
Voices.
“I’m telling you, Marshal, he’s not in his right mind. Most of the time he just babbles. You’ll need to wait till morning before you talk to him. Late morning.”
“His memory’d be fresher now.”
Shivering again. Entire body. Pastpresent. Images of my lifetime merging.
“Now, Marshal, please do what I say and go the hell on home.”
Laugh. “You make a persuasive case, Doc. You should’ve been a lawyer.”
“Careful now or I’ll wash your mouth out with soap.”
Healing from the wound, I’d gotten broth and bits of bread.
From the beating and the dousing I’d taken last night, I got coffee, two thick slices of ham, three eggs and a huge slice of bread gleaming with fresh strawberry preserves.
I also got Nurse Jane.
“You could’ve died if the marshal hadn’t found you in that cabin.”
I was busy eating—I imagined I was making a lot of noise smacking my lips and I didn’t give a damn—which wasn’t all that easy with one good arm. Shoveling food in your mouth usually takes two hands, at least at the rate I was jamming it in.
“Somebody killed the two men who kidnapped you.”
“You know who the men were?”
“Around here, everybody knows who they were. Their names were Bines and Selkirk. They were the last two of a gang that used to rob banks here in the Territory. That was what most people said, anyway. They lived here the past six or seven months and they were always in trouble for little things, mostly involving fights when they got drunk. One time they beat up this other prisoner in jail so badly he nearly died. The marshal got in the cell with them and then beat Bines bad enough to break his nose and two ribs. The marshal hated them.”
I paused, started to speak.
She said, “You have a piece of egg hanging off your nose.”
“I’ll bet I look pretty handsome.”
“Let me get it for you.” She dipped a napkin into my water glass and then cleaned me up. The way a mom would.
I thanked her. “They wanted to know where David hid the gun.”
“Everybody in town wants to know where David hid the gun. It’s all anybody talks about. They even stop me in the street. They think maybe he told me without telling me.”
“How’s that again?”
“You know. They think David probably gave me a hint of where he hid it and that I’ll be walking along the street someday and it’ll just come to my mind. Meanwhile, they have all these guesses as to where it might be. That’s what they always tell me, their guesses.”
“The gun could be long gone.”
“That’s what I tell them.”
“Or one of the four men who came to town to buy may have it and be hiding it somewhere.”
“I tell them that, too. But they don’t listen. I imagine the gold rush days were like that here. Everybody half-crazy thinking they’ll get rich if they can just find it.”
“How’s Fairbain?”
“About the same. Still unconscious. But he’s not getting any worse, anyway.”
“I wish I knew who beat him.”
“So does Marshal Wickham. He’s here twice a day.”
I looked at the empty dishes. “When do I get out of here?”
“The doctor said that he wants to look at you later this afternoon. Then he’ll probably let you go. You have a slight concussion. That head of yours can’t take much more punishment. And you’ve got a slight cold. You could’ve gotten pneumonia.”
I yawned. All the good food had made me logy. But at least the cold wasn’t as bad as I’d feared.
She swept up the dishes with her usual skill and said, “The marshal’ll be here in an hour or so. You should take a little nap.”
“I don’t know if I’m that tired.”
Two minutes after she left my room I was asleep.
I could hear Marshal Wickham glad-handing the hospital staff from the front door all the way to my room. The good ones run for office 365 days a year, not just at election time. Smiles and handshakes and friendly hellos are remembered a lot longer than speeches and reelection fliers, and Marshall Wickham had obviously learned that a long time ago. I’d met a lawman just outside Kansas City who personally delivered donated groceries to poor families. And when the snows came, he spent the day shoveling paths to old folks and invalids. These are the good ones. The bad ones don’t usually last long enough to matter.
He must have been after my vote, too, because even before he said anything he put a sack of Bull Durham and some cigarette papers on the stand next to my bed.
“No need to thank me for saving your life,” he said. And then laughed. “They were a pair, weren’t they?”
“Thought I had the gun. Or the man who hired them did, anyway.”
“I still haven’t figured out who that was yet. One of the arms fellas, for sure. But I figure that between us we can figure out who it is.”
“Between us? You mean work together?”
“Sure. Why not? You got this notion that you Federales and local law can’t work together. I’m here to show you otherwise.”
“I thought you thought I tried to kill Fairbain?”
“Crossed my mind, I’ll admit that. But then I started realizing that you wouldn’t have any particular reason to kill him. Then when I saw you tied up in that chair…” He made a gift of his big hand. His palm was as coarse as old leather. “Well, I can only hold these arms fellas a few more days. Once they’re gone, we’ll never be able to figure anything out.”
“I agree with you there.”
“Doc tells me you need a good night’s sleep. When you get yourself ready in the morning, stop in and see me. I may be in court. The county attorney brought charges against this land developer who took all this money from some locals and then never got around to developing any land.”
“I could see where that would tend to piss somebody off.”
“Yeah, just a mite, especially if it was your life savings you handed over to him.” He grinned. “Now get some sleep. And when you wake up, Jane’ll be here taking care of you. No wonder you like this place so much.”
After he left, I turned the lamp down and lay there thinking about the gun. It didn’t weigh that much, it wasn’t pretty except for its ability to fire a few more bullets with a little more precision, the mechanics of it weren’t even all that different from the existing Gatling model. But men, intelligent men, chased it the way they chased that beautiful woman who’d always just eluded them, the woman glimpsed on a sunny street, or in a dim train window or turned into a work of art on canvas. There was an almost sexual fervor about the chase for the gun. The difference being that the chase for the woman inspired beauty; the chase for the gun inspired death.
I had a smoke and thought about Jane for a time. Finally, the gods merciful, I slept the peaceful sleep of a ten-year-old who’d exhausted himself swimming and playing baseball all day.
What was supposed to be a routine surgery went bad in the morning—the doctor had ended up keeping me overnight—and the hospital became a grim and frenzied place. Both doctors and all three nurses spent the time in surgery trying to save the man’s life. I hadn’t been told what had gone wrong. I probably wouldn’t have understood, anyway. I too
k a sponge bath, shaved, dressed in clothes some helpful citizen had brought over from my hotel room, and then left the hospital in search of the world’s finest breakfast.
What were probably pretty ordinary eggs, ham, and sliced potatoes tasted like something not even a king should expect. The coffee, four cups of it, went down mighty fine, too. The last cup went down even better with a cigarette I rolled from the Bull Durham Wickham had given me. For the length of time it took me to burn the cigarette down, I thought back through the investigation so far and realized that I hadn’t spent much time at all at the ranch where David had lived for so many months. I needed to go back through everything, step by step, and then catch myself up to date. I reasoned the way Wickham did. We didn’t have much time left to hold the four men who’d come here to bid on the gun. We had to get going.
Turned out Wickham, as he’d suspected, had gotten tied up in court. I went over to the livery and got myself a saddle and a horse and headed out for the ranch. Real fall was setting in. Despite the blinding beauty of the golden red leaves and the clean, blue sky and the pastoral look of farmers following plow and horse as they tilled their land, the bite of winter was on the air. It was nearly eleven a.m. and the temperature was around forty, and despite the full, clear sun there was no promise of it getting any hotter.
When I reached the crest of the hill that looked down on the ranch, I wondered for the first time if David had found any peace here. We’d always been a restless pair. And though we’d grown up on a plantation packed with privilege for two little white boys, there’d always been a streak of unhappiness in us. Every once in a while, and for no particular reason, my mother would go upstairs and close the door on her sewing room and sob. There was never any explanation for it. One time I heard my father trying to soothe her: “I wish you knew why these damned moods came on you, Susan.” And she’d said: “I can’t even explain them to myself, dear.” Maybe it was Mother’s blood that explained the unhappiness, the restlessness, the sense that happiness was motion. If you could run fast enough and far enough it wouldn’t catch up with you.
I made my slow and careful way up to the ranch house. I avoided the barn. I had to work up to that. Images of David with his throat slashed—I went through the house first. I was inside for maybe a half hour—not turning up much—when I heard him.
What he did was trip over a section of drainpipe on the ground. I didn’t realize this at first, of course. All I knew was that somebody was outside, at the back of the house, and that he was making some kind of noise. I slipped my gun from my holster and went to have a look.
I found him on the side of the house, his hand to his forehead like a visor, peering in through the window.
“If you’re looking for me, I’m right here.”
He was maybe five feet tall, with a shiny, bald head and a pair of store-boughts that clacked even when he wasn’t talking. He wore a faded, red, woolen shirt and a filthy pair of butternuts. He had a knife the size of a sword stuck through the front of his belt. I could smell him from ten feet away. “Where’s Ford?”
“I’m Ford.”
“The hell you say. You ain’t Ford.”
“I’m Noah Ford.”
“Noah Ford?” He made it sound as if the concept that there could be two Fords on the planet was just too much for him to deal with. “This some kind of trick?”
“No. I’m his brother. Or was. He’s dead.”
“He’s dead? That sonofabitch.”
Despite the stench, which was considerable, I moved closer to him. “I’d be careful if I was you. Like I said, he was my brother.”
“Yeah? Well, mister, he owed me money. So that makes him a sonofabitch in my book.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Hobbins. Wylie Hobbins.”
I stopped moving toward him. The odor halted me.
“I got this skin disease is what you’re smellin’. It looks even worse than it smells. This here woman saw me without my shirt on and she fainted dead away, and that ain’t no bullshit.” He grinned with his store-boughts. “It’s my secret weapon.”
“What did he owe you money for?”
“Trips to the island. I took him three times.”
“What island?”
“Parson’s Cairn.” He winked at me. “That’s where he took the married ones.”
“He was seeing married women?”
“Yep, two of them. I’d take David and one of them over on the raft and then come back for them a couple hours later. I’ll tell you one thing, he sure didn’t like to pay his bills. From what I hear, he run up debts all over the place.”
I’d forgotten that. Because of the way we’d been raised, David had this notion that people he considered to be commoners—which was basically everybody except our family—should be just double-damned delighted to wait on us and do our bidding in any way we saw fit. And if they wanted to get paid for these services? Well, sir, it just depended on his mood. Or if he liked you. Or if your coarseness didn’t in some way offend his high-born sensibilities.
So David had owed a lot of people money. No surprise.
“How much did he owe you?”
He told me. I dug in my pocket, brought out a nice, shiny, gold coin and flipped it to him. “There you go.”
He caught it, looked at it this way and that, a real trusting gent, shrugged, and put it in his pocket. “Who killed him? Some pissed-off husband?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
“You can bet it was a husband, the way he caroused around. He was one of them fellas that just couldn’t keep his hands off other people’s property.”
“Maybe I could invite you to his funeral and you could pay him a tribute.” But sarcasm was too subtle for this one. “You got the names of the two women he took to the island?”
“You got another one of them gold eagles?”
I wanted to hit him but I had to figure out a way of doing it without touching him. The stench was rotting flesh. I pictured leprosy or some variation of it.
I flipped him another coin.
“Paulie, Stu Paulie’s wife, Della. That was one. And Don Hester’s wife, Irene. That was the other. But they won’t do you no good.”
“Why not?”
“Both moved away. Just picked up and left. Whole families and everything. Don Hester had him a nice hardware business, too. But the shame was too much. Irene Hester, she got mad when she found out about Della Paulie sneakin’ off with your brother and she went right to Della’s husband and told him what his wife was up to. He went to your brother and beat him up pretty bad. Bad enough that he got your brother to tell him about Irene Hester, too.” He was flipping his second gold coin in the air. Sunlight caught it and as it tumbled in the soft, blue air it was the color of flame. “The Hesters packed up and left about a year ago. The Paulies left about three months after. Just couldn’t take all the whispers, I reckon. You know how a small town is.”
“You had yourself a pretty good day.”
He gave the gold coin another toss and said, “I shoulda been doin’ business with you ’stead of your brother. I like the way you pay up real prompt and all.”
I couldn’t handle him anymore. “Get the hell out of here.”
The store-boughts clacked as he laughed. “Ain’t my fault your brother was a no-account.” He started to turn away and said, “You ever need me for anything, you just ask for Wylie Hobbins. People’ll point you to where I am.”
Yeah, I thought, they can tell by the smell.
I waved him away with great disgust.
“He was somethin’, that brother of yours,” he giggled over his shoulder, walking away. “He sure as hell was.”
I returned to town without anything to show for the trip, except for losing a little money to Wylie Hobbins. The first place I went was the hospital. I wanted to see if Fairbain had come to yet or if he was still in a coma. I wanted to talk to Jane, too, but she was busy helping a very old lady walk down the first floor corridor. My m
orning’s bad luck held fast. Fairbain was still unconscious. I supposed it was even worse luck for him.
He was waiting for me outside. At first I didn’t recognize him in the ten-gallon hat. On him it was comical. A New York cowboy, as they were known.
“Had any lunch, Mr. Ford?”
“Oh, it’s you. I just went to see your friend, Wayland.”
“Oh, c’mon now, if you mean Fairbain, he’s no friend of mine. He’s no friend of anybody’s. And neither am I. Not anybody who’s in my business, anyway. We’re competitors and nothing more and nothing less. Now, how about some lunch?”
Two good reasons to take up his offer: I wondered what he wanted and I was hungry. “All right.”
“Up for something fancy?” That was when I realized he’d had a few drinks. He was acting a little tougher than usual.
“Chili’s about as fancy as I feel right now.”
“Cold day, hot chili. Let’s try that café over there.”
A couple of merchants were putting election signs in their windows. Just in case you don’t think the Wild West is dead and gone—if it ever really existed—the signs would convince you otherwise. A man named McLaren was running on three issues: a better school, better garbage collection, and better care of the streets. You can bet that the likes of Wild Bill Hickok and Jesse James never once gave a thought to any of these matters.
The chili was advertised as “Texas chili,” and while it wasn’t as hot as all that, it did make your esophagus plead for mercy at least a couple of times.
“You’re showing me the sights, Mr. Ford.”
“How would that be?”
“Place like this.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Look around. Salt of the earth. Working men. Sleeves rolled up. Heavy clothes so they can work outdoors in chilly weather. Grateful that they’ve got a job. They’re the backbone of this country.”
