Border Fever

by Pronzini, Bill

  He stared after the Apaches, feeling free of his parents’ dreams for the first time in years as the comfortable weight of his remorse sank on him once again. He turned his face to the blaze and muttered, “Thanks.”

  Whispering behind him, like a rustle of feather and leaf, Gramps—only an old white man now, dressed in a silly getup and dragging his skinny ass, looking around with a tear-streaked, dirty face—said it, too. “Thank you. Oh, my brothers, thank you.”

  Chapter Two

  They could’ve at least made a show of it instead of just staring and passing small talk, telling jokes and spinning parasols on their shoulders, with Mrs. Henderson offering lemonade off her front porch.

  The townspeople of Patience didn’t rally with water buckets, because most of the neighbors knew Priest wasn’t really going to make much of a go with the store anyway. Besides, right across the alley was Tolliver’s Mercantile, and a few streets over you had Hasseler’s General Store, and on the other side of town stood Freerson’s Dry Goods Emporium, all of which had stocked Patience for the thirty-five years since the town had been settled. Moreover, none of them came from an insane family or partnered with a big ex-slave who claimed he used to get drunk with Abe Lincoln.

  Priest heard the mumbles and angry whispers. “That’s what a nigger lover gets. Only a matter of time ‘fore somebody burned ‘em out.” Priest laughed it off, because none of them had the salt to say it to Lamarr’s face, or even to his own. At least things were shaking out, and soon he could get on with his business, whatever that might be.

  By the time the ashes had settled and folks began wandering off, Gramps was lying in a ball near the livery trough, scaring the horses. Sheriff Amos Burke sauntered over and took in the scene with a smirk, hoping that Priest was finally on the way to becoming either a lawman or a full-fledged outlaw, just so long as he did some damn thing. Priest was sort of hoping Chicorah would come back and tell him a little more about destiny, and give him some kind of a hint of what the hell he should do now.

  Burke put a little extra swagger into his walk now, expecting the embers of the store to throw enough light to glint against his badge, his bottom gold teeth, and those polished spurs. He wanted it to give him a rosy-dusk glow like he’d just stepped out of the sunset. He tried to keep his eyes steady, but he couldn’t help glancing around to see if anybody in the remaining crowd was watching him.

  Women tittered softly, and several children played hide-and-seek at the other end of the alley. Some of the whores, awakened by the noise, stepped out onto the porch of Miss Patty’s. The Christian Ladies Coalition scurried across the street and made prune faces, reciting scripture as the sunlight started to fade.

  Burke kept posing, showing off his profile first to the left side and then the right. He’d long been an admirer of Susan Murdock, the mayor’s wife, who stood nearby up on the boardwalk. He’d also ached for Miss Patty, the whorehouse madam who was younger than most of her girls, and he actually blushed in her presence. Both ladies took a lot of impressing, though, and Burke didn’t have enough distinction, charm, or money to cause much of a fuss.

  Still, Susan Murdock urged him on as usual, licking her lips while the mayor pointed toward the trough and wrinkled his nose at Gramps. Miss Patty, staring down from her balcony, met Priest’s gaze and gave him a wink. They both understood what was coming.

  Here it was. Burke notched up his strut, really throwing his hips. His brown suit was freshly pressed, and his bowtie had been perfectly centered under his collar. His thick mustache leaned too far to the left, and he cocked his head to that side as if he were about to be pulled over. He stopped in front of Priest and, much louder than necessary, said, “Priest McClaren, don’t you go running off. You hear? You just set right there. I want words with you.”

  As if Priest were sneaking away with stolen bags of bank money and Burke had caught him dead in his tracks.

  Priest wasn’t going anywhere, sitting in the dirt. Gramps, coming back into the world a bit, called “Ethel, Ethel,” and pawed the wet ground beneath the trough. Grandmother had been gone almost ten years, but at least the old man was having white thoughts again.

  Priest stared at Burke for a while, wondering what it would be like to be the sheriff of Patience. Maybe have Lamarr as his deputy, both of them with badges on their vests, strutting around chuckholes, tipping their hats, and saying, “How do?” all the time. He could imagine getting soft in the neck and belly, and trying to find enough wax to keep his mustache from drooping too far to the east. Priest thought it might be worthwhile to never have to pick up a knife again.

  Mayor Frederick Murdock, who rarely strung five words together at a time except during an election, put a hand on Priest’s shoulder and said, “Perhaps you’ll consider farming now, Mr. McClaren.”

  “Farming?”

  “Farming is important to the survival of our community. We need more farmers.” He’d gotten so used to saying pleasant, meaningless things that it no longer mattered to him whether they made any sense. “You’ve strong hands. You would do well with farming.”

  Priest looked around at the red sandstone hills, lava spikes and greasewood, prickly pear and saguaro and Joshua trees, the desolate waste of the boundless alkali flats. He said, “Thanks for your faith in me, Freddy.”

  The mayor smiled happily at that and walked off arm in arm with his wife. Susan Murdock looked backward over her shoulder at the sheriff, who glowered after her, his Adam’s apple bobbing wildly. His scowl brought his brow low enough so that it nearly touched the curled tips of his mustache. Susan wiggled her backside, really pouring on the effect, and the boys in the alley stopped playing so they could watch. Priest thought it might be funny to see Burke tonight, staring into his mirror, washing his face, and mystified at how he’d gotten wax in his eyebrows. Priest stood up.

  Burke said, “We got word that your sister put down Sarsaparilla Sam in Santa Fe two weeks ago. Eleven hundred dollars.”

  “Sarsaparilla Sam?” The hell was the world coming to when they paid over a thousand for a killer called Sarsaparilla Sam? “You mean some idiot really went by that name?”

  “It’s a bad joke, because he dry-gulches the teetotaling drinkers and settlers coming in from the East. His real name is Samuel Wade.”

  Oh, Wade. The one who liked to find lone adobes built by families fresh to the West, thinking they could start some kind of a new life out of the cities. Clerks and their wives, two or three children with at least one young girl, maybe around thirteen years old. Wade liked making the girls watch their homes burn down, showing them what he could do to her parents and brothers with his lasso.

  Molly must’ve had a hell of a lot of bloody fun with him before she’d taken him down.

  “From what they’re reporting, it was ugly. Unduly ugly. She did him pretty raw, McClaren.”

  “Good.”

  “Do you know what you’re saying?”

  Ashes washed over his boots, and Gramps cried out for Grandmother again, his hands like claws scratching at the underside of the trough. “Yes, I know what I’m saying.”

  “You wouldn’t think it was so funny if you knew the details.”

  “I don’t think it’s funny.”

  They’d gone around like this many times before, nearly word for word. Sheriff Amos Burke always lost his composure at about this point, and his voice started to climb a little higher. Part of it had to do with the fact that Burke had never seen blood outside of his own shaving nicks, and also because he thought Molly was sending back wads of reward money to Priest. It put him in the position of being envious, embarrassed, and resentful all in one nasty bundle.

  “Sheriff in Santa Fe said she left headed in this direction, and that she’s pretty heavy with child. She might be coming home to Patience.”

  His sister Molly pregnant? He tried to imagine it but couldn’t bull past the fact that she wasn’t even eighteen yet, no matter how long she’d been on her own. “She won’t be back to stay.”


  “You so sure of that?”

  He wasn’t, but he couldn’t imagine she’d return.

  “It’s not natural for a woman, I tell you.” Burke spoke in a booming voice as if he were giving a sermon, trying to reach the back pews. “Living the life she does. Christ . . . Woman—she’s not yet a woman, a girl her age, for God’s sake, doing what she’s doing.”

  “Natural enough for her,” Priest said, knowing it was true.

  “Don’t you have any feelings at all, man? His body was—”

  “Good.”

  “You’re not letting me finish. If you’d listen you might realize that something should be done.”

  “You’re right, and she’s doing it.”

  “No no, that’s not what I mean. So just listen. He’d been—”

  Priest didn’t need to have another picture painted for him. “He deserved it.”

  “Ethel, Ethel.”

  With an absurd growl, the sheriff gave it up for the moment, toed the dirt, and checked over at Gramps. “That old man is sick. Sick in his brain.” Burke skinned back his upper lip. He’d been working on his sneer again. He was getting a lot better at it, figuring out just how far he had to raise his upper lip to get it out from under the mustache. “And I fear you’re heading in the same direction. One of these days you’re going to go mad in the streets, tearing out your own eyes and stinking in your own shit.”

  It was a definite possibility. “If it happens like that, I’ll do my best to stay away from the good churchgoing folks and stick to the back alleys.”

  “I’ll help take you down. It’ll be my pleasure, let me tell you.”

  Priest inspected the sneer and said, “Pretty nice, Amos, but you still need a little more practice. You aren’t peeling your smile back quite enough—it’s catching on some of those rotted teeth.”

  “Why, you lousy son of a bitch.”

  A breeze kicked up around them, like tiny hands pushing. There was a moment when it could’ve gone either way, and they both knew it. Burke dropped his hand toward his gun belt and hedged backward, looking for some extra room. Priest took one step forward, which put him too close to draw on.

  Burke’s eyes clouded as he puzzled out whether he should take another step backward and try it again, or if Priest would just move in on him once more. He glanced down at Priest’s belt to see if the knife was still there. He didn’t see it, and didn’t see Priest’s right hand either.

  How’d it happen like that, so fast, without any sound?

  While he was staring, realizing too late that Priest had the knife and could open him up wide in three seconds, Burke decided to live another day and let it pass.

  But the sheriff had learned to take some advice. This time the sneer was a lot cleaner, much sharper. “At least my sister isn’t the only one with guts in my family. Tell me, what’s it like knowing she’s out there avenging your dead parents while you’re sifting here with a crazy fool at your feet, a drunk smart-mouthed nigger for a partner, and so broke you can’t even rub two fifty-cent pieces together?”

  Priest considered it seriously, wondering how Burke’s rage might match up to his own. They’d have to see, one of these days. “Probably not a lot worse than being in love with two women and not getting so much as a kiss or a kind word from either of them. Then again, I’m not really sure. What are your thoughts on the subject?”

  “You bastard, I ought to—”

  “No, you really shouldn’t.”

  “Ethel, Ethel.”

  Priest could reach over and yank the star off Burke’s coat, make a fair wage, and maybe even find a wife to keep his house. Have Gramps live in a room in the attic, or maybe out back in a shed. Someplace where he could sing Apache songs and not bother anybody. Give his sister Molly a guest room big enough for her trunk of rifles and pistols, all the saddlebags full of bounty money. Plenty of tacks so she could hang all the Wanted posters up side by side and study the faces of the men she went after. Lamarr might dry out long enough to handle a steady job, save a little money, quit fighting the long-dead Confederacy. Priest could try not to wake everybody up when he got the shrieking fits in the middle of the night

  “What the hell you gaping at, McClaren?” Burke asked.

  —maybe even invite Chicorah over to the house, along with the Ga’ns mountain spirits Sondeyka said lived inside Priest. He could introduce them around to his wife and her friends at their tea parties, everybody shaking hands and eating finger sandwiches, kids laughing everywhere, one big happy family.

  “I asked what you’re staring at!”

  Priest walked away from the sheriff without another word, leaving Burke seething there and spitting out the now-drooping ends of his mustache. Priest picked Gramps up, carried him to Miss Patty’s, and put the old man to bed upstairs in the whorehouse.

  A Preview of KITT PEAK

  Chapter One

  Bad day.

  They had all been bad days lately. Thomas thought about other times when there had been no bad days, only days to get work done, to work with his hands and mind. Even when bad things were involved — even when death was involved — his days in the Army, as the very first Negro lieutenant in the Buffalo Soldiers, the all-Negro regiment of the cavalry, had been good ones.

  Foolishness, he thought.

  Steel your mind.

  It seemed as if he had spent a lot of time lately steeling his mind. And it seemed as if it was getting harder to do. Retirement did not agree with him; and even the Sherlock Holmes stories, which had always brought him so much joy, and which he still looked forward to receiving every six months in a packet of Strand magazines sent from New York, brought him little solace these days. It was as if his restless mind could no longer concentrate on mere fiction, that the loss of his vocation had, over the last months, begun to turn him into the one thing he had always guarded against.

  You’re soft, Thomas.

  You’re soft and if you don’t watch it, you’re going to get old.

  He rose from the chair he had been sitting in, the one facing the front window of his home on Maple Street in Boston, Massachusetts, and waved an impatient hand at the air.

  Bah, he thought, it’s all foolishness. I’m already soft, and already old. An old man sitting in front of the window waiting for the mail.

  Out of the corner of his eye he caught movement on the street outside, and turned to face the window again. Sure enough, the mailman was making his slow way up the path toward the house. John Reynolds, his name was. Bundled up to the chin against the cold, with his cap pulled down over his earmuffs. He looked like a blue tick.

  The mailman caught his eye through the frosted window, and Thomas started to wave his hand in greeting; but Reynolds merely looked away, scowling. Another bigot in a country of bigots. Thomas was sure that if the force of the federal government wasn’t behind Reynolds, the man would have dropped the mail in the snow and walked away.

  As it was, there was the sound of the mail-man jamming the letters into the box and hurrying away, his back to Thomas as he left the gate open on his way to the next house.

  Scowling himself, biting back his anger, Thomas went to the door, opened it, bracing himself against the blast of cold air that pushed in, pulled the crumpled mail from its wall box, and closed the door again.

  His pension check was not among the creased letters, and, momentarily, another flare of anger rose and then died within him. Damned bureaucrats. Ever since Roosevelt had come to office in 1901, two years ago, the system of government had come to a complete halt. The damned Republican cared more about trees and bears than he did about the men who had fought, and too often died, in Indian wars, making the West safe for white settlers. And Roosevelt of all people, who had at least been out there himself, seen the land with his own eyes, experienced at least some of the hard-ships, and knew what it was like . . .

  A single letter fell from the mass of handbills and fluttered to the floor. For a moment hope rose within Thomas, thinkin
g that maybe the check had come at last. For an instant, he even thought that perhaps Roosevelt wasn’t a bad sort after all —

  But it was not a government check at all. Thomas raised the envelope to the lighted window. There was something dimly familiar about the scrawl of handwriting on the face. The letter looked as though it had been through a war. Besides the mailman’s crumpling, the letter was torn in one corner and stained with something that looked like coffee across the front. The lettering on the address was smudged.

  Thomas turned the letter directly to the light. The coffee stain, up close, was clotted and uneven. . . .

  Chicory coffee.

  Only chicory coffee would leave that distinctive gritty blotch. And the handwriting. . .

  The lettering, he now saw, was not smudged at all, but had been written with a dipped quill in a trembling hand. A blotter had been badly employed, further running the letters. The writing was familiar. . . .

  Adams. Bill Adams, one of the very few white men in the 101st Cavalry worth a spit. He had been Thomas’s friend and confidant, the only non-private, with the exception of young Sergeant Chase, who had been sorry to see Thomas retire.

  But Adams had never trembled over anything, not at Fraser Pass during the war with Victorio, not in the teeth of death in Limpia Canyon, when surrounded by an overwhelming force of rogue Mescaleros commanded by Victorio’s vengeance-seeking brother. . . .

  Thomas almost tore the letter open, and then hesitated over the tear along one edge.

  Examining it more closely, he saw that the tear had been made deliberately, a small thumb-ripped opening that had then been straightened down the edge by the pull of a knife or letter opener. But the would-be opener had hesitated before the letter could be pulled out, and had abandoned his task.