What the Dead Men Say

by Ed Gorman

  Ed Gorman

  What the Dead Men Say

  ***

  In August 1898, Septemus Ryan is beside himself with grief after his young daughter is killed during a bank robbery. So when his sixteen-year-old nephew, James Hogan, celebrates his birthday by accompanying Uncle Septemus on a trip, it soon becomes apparent to James that Septemus has other plans than visiting the agricultural fair.

  James witnesses his uncle become darker and darker with anguish and despondency, until finally, Septemus kills the one of his daughter's murderers. Now James and Septemus not only have the two other murderers on their tail, but Sheriff Dodds as well.

  Genre: hard-boiled/western.

  ***

  From Publishers Weekly

  This slight, sorry western begins in 1901, when Septemus Ryan takes his 15-year-old nephew, James, on a combined coming-of-age and revenge trip. Septemus has tracked down the three men who killed his daughter, James's favorite cousin, during a bungled bank robbery. He has come to the town of Myles to kill the trio and to teach James, whom he considers a mama's boy, "about manly things." Arriving in Myles, Septemus is recognized by the sheriff, who warns him against vigilantism. That evening James is treated to a Penthouse-meets-Boy's Life episode with a prostitute. Septemus kills one of the bank robbers, then kidnaps another whom he ties up in a lonely cabin, telling his young charge to do his duty by his dead cousin. James can't shoot the man, but Septemus, a raving lunatic by this point, can and does. James and the sheriff try to catch him before he kills again and, in a predictable climax, the youth-according to Gorman's (Death Ground) muddled sense of maturity-becomes a man. The only positive aspect of this lackluster effort is its brevity.

  ***

  From Library Journal

  In August of 1901 16-year-old James Hogan accompanies his Uncle Septemus Ryan, ostensibly to travel to the Iowa State Fair. Along the way, the two stop at a town where Septemus plans to avenge his daughter, killed three years earlier in a bungled bank robbery in Council Bluffs. Septemus drags the fatherless James along to "start teaching you about manly things," including, to Septemus's grief-maddened way of thinking, revenge. Gorman has written a gritty tale of a boy's coming of age. Memorable characters and the author's detailed knowledge of the locale make the story believable. Desperadoes really did roam Iowa (e.g., Jesse James and his gang). Highly recommended to public libraries.

  ***

  Scaning & primary formating: pagesofdeath.

  Secondary formating & proofing: pua.

  ***

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The title of this novel is taken from a short story by Philip K. Dick. I felt it was appropriate here.

  I used John Madson’s excellent Stories From Under the Sky (Iowa State University Press) as background in two scenes. If you’re interested in nature lore, you’ll like Madson’s book as much as I do.

  The newspaper account told it this way:

  On the sunny morning of June 27, 1898 a thirteen-year-old girl named Clarice Ryan walked into the First Trust Bank of Council Bluffs, Iowa.

  Out of school for the summer, Clarice was helping her father Septemus, one of the town’s leading merchants, by taking the morning deposit to the bank.

  Ordinarily, Clarice always stopped by the office of bank president Charles Dolan. The banker is said to have kept a drawerful of mints for the express purpose of giving one to his “lady friend,” Clarice, each working morning.

  On this particular morning, however, Clarice was unable to visit her friend Dolan. As soon as she walked into the bank, she saw immediately that a robbery was in progress.

  Against the east wall, four customers stood with their hands up as a man with a red bandana over his face held a shotgun on them. His two companions, one wearing a blue bandana, the other wearing a green one, stood near the safe while two clerks and Mr. Charles Dolan himself emptied greenbacks into three sailcloth bags.

  The man in the blue bandana ordered Clarice to stand over next to the other customers. Like them, she was told to put her hands over her head. Witnesses said the young girl smiled when she was told this. Scared as she was, she obviously found the order to be a little silly.

  When all the greenbacks had been taken from the safe, the three thieves gathered in the middle of the bank. At this point Dolan and the two clerks were moved over to join Clarice and the other customers.

  It was then that policeman Michael Walden, who had seen what was going on from the window on the boardwalk outside, came through the door with his own shotgun, ordering the men to lay down their arms.

  The rest of the story remains confused, Deputy Walden insisting that he fired only because one of the thieves opened fire on him. Two of the customers insisted that it was Walden who fired first.

  At some point in the minute-long exchange of gunfire, one of the adult customers was shot in the shoulder. One of the thieves was also wounded, though all three managed to escape. Clarice Ryan, shot in the heart, was killed instantly.

  Several rewards have been offered for the capture of the thieves. “I guess I don’t need to say dead or alive,” Council Bluffs Police Chief Dennis Foster told assembled reporters. “And a lot of folks would just as soon as see them slung over horses and brought in dead as otherwise.”

  Investigation into the death of thirteen-year-old Clarice Ryan continues.

  E.G., 1990

  CHAPTER ONE

  1

  From the second-floor hotel veranda he could look down into the dusty street and see the women twirling their parasols and hurrying about in their bustles. These were town women with sweet Christian faces and sweet Christian souls. Carlyle, six years out of prison at Fort Madison, wanted such a woman. He imagined that their juices were tastier, their love by turns gentler and wilder, and their soft words in the darkness afterward balming like a cool breeze on a hot July afternoon. He would never know. Sweet Christian women had never taken to Carlyle. He had put his seed only in whores and long ago his seed had turned to poison.

  Right now, though, Carlyle wasn’t worrying about women, sweet or otherwise. He was looking at the two riders who were coming down the middle of the street, one astride a roan, one on a dun. A water wagon followed them, cutting the dust with sprays of silver water. Behind the wagon ran some noisy town kids waving and jumping and laughing and carrying on the way kids always did when they were three days out of school and just beginning summer vacation.

  The two riders didn’t seem to notice the kids. They didn’t seem to notice much, in fact. The small midwestern town was a showcase hereabouts, what with electricity, telephones, and a depot that President Harrison himself had once told the local Odd Fellows club was “most singularly impressive.” Anyone could tell, therefore, that the two riders came from a city. Country folks always gawked when they came to Myles. City folks, who’d seen it all already, were too cynical and spoiled to gawk.

  One of the riders was a boy, probably sixteen or so, tall and lanky, with a handsome rugged face. But it was on the other rider that Carlyle settled his attention. The man was short, somewhat chunky, packed into a dark vested suit far too hot for an afternoon like this. He wore a derby and carried a Winchester in his scabbard.

  Carlyle knew the man. Oh, didn’t know him in the sense that they’d spoken or anything, but knew him in the sense that the man was in some way familiar.

  Carlyle raised his beer mug and sipped from it just as, sprawled in a chair behind him, the whore yawned again. She was too wide and too white. It was for the latter reason that she liked to sit out on the veranda, so the sun would tan her arms and bare legs. In her petticoats she was damned near naked and it seemed she could care less. Her name was Jenna and she and Carlyle had been living in the same hotel room for the past
eight months. Last night she’d started talking marriage again and Carlyle, just drunk enough and not impressed by her threats of leaving him if he ever slapped her again, doubled his fist and poked it once straight and hard into her eye. Her shiner this morning was a beauty. Of course, he’d had to offer her something in compensation. Not marriage, he said; but teeth. Store-bought teeth. Hers were little brown stubs that made her mouth smell so bad he had to down two buckets of beer before he could bring himself to kiss her.

  “What the hell you lookin’ at so hard?” Jenna wanted to know.

  “Man.”

  “What man?”

  “Man on a dun.”

  “You never saw a man on no dun before?”

  “Wonder why he came here.”

  “Came where?”

  “To town. Myles.”

  “Free country.”

  “Yeah, but he wants somethin’ special.”

  “How you know that?”

  “You can see by the way he rides. Like he’s just waitin’ for somethin’ to happen.”

  “That’s how I was last night,” Jenna laughed. “Waitin’ for somethin’ to happen.”

  He looked back at her. “You don’t like it, you whore, you can always move out.”

  “Just a joke, Henry. Jus’ teasin’. Too much beer affects most men that way.”

  But Carlyle was no longer listening. He had turned his attention back to the street and the two riders. Halfway down the block, and across the street, they were dismounting in front of the McAlester Hotel. Unlike the place where Carlyle and the whore lived, the McAlester didn’t have cockroaches and colored maids who went through your room trying to steal stuff.

  “Sonofabitch,” Carlyle said.

  “What?”

  “I just recognized who he is.”

  “Who is he?”

  "Sonofabitch,” Carlyle said again.

  He went back to the whore and tried to hand her his beer mug.

  “I don’t want that thing. I ain’t your maid,” she said. She could get real bitchy, this one.

  Carlyle threw the beer in her face.

  “You ain’t got no right to do that,” she said, spitting out suds.

  “Hell if I don’t,” Carlyle said. “Long as I pay the rent on that room, I got a right to do any god damn thing I please.”

  Then he was gone, inside to his room and then into the hallway and then down the stairs to the lobby. He took two steps at a time.

  He had suddenly remembered, from all the pictures in the newspapers right after it happened, who the man was.

  He did not stop hurrying until he was two blocks from the downtown area, and running down a side street so fast people stopped to look at him.

  2

  The kid’s name was James Patrick George Hogan, George being his confirmation name, taken for the saint who slew dragons. In his Catholic school book there had been an illustration of George in armor and mail standing triumphant with his huge battle sword near a slain dragon. The dragon’s scales and reptilian snout had captivated James.

  Looking at illustrations of dragons and dinosaurs was his favorite pastime. He could stare at them for hours, imagining himself living back then. The only thing wrong with this was that back then there would have been no Marietta Courtney, this being the fourteen-year-old public-school girl James had been steadfastly stuck on since he’d seen her a year ago riding her bicycle, her red hair gorgeous in the sunlight, her smile in equal parts impish and unknowable.

  These were some of the things James had thought about on the last part of the journey to Myles. His uncle Septemus Ryan had fallen into one of his silences. Of course, James knew what the silence was about: a few years back his uncle’s girl-and James’s favorite cousin-Clarice, had been shot and killed in a bank robbery back in their hometown. This had been particularly hard on Septemus, because only two years previously his wife had died from whooping cough.

  Since these deaths there had been a lot of talk in Council Bluffs about “poor Septemus not being quite right upstairs.” He was given to violent tempers, unending days and nights of brooding, and talking to himself. The latter seemed particularly troubling to Council Bluffians. Here was a leading merchant, and a darned handsome one at that, walking down the streets of town quite obviously carrying on some kind of conversation with himself. What he was saying or to whom was a mystery, of course, and a disturbing one to those who cared about him.

  In the dusty street, James and Septemus dismounted. They took the carpetbags from their saddles and carried them inside the hotel.

  James appreciated the cooling shade of the fine hotel lobby. Gentlemen in percale shirts and straw boaters and cheery red sleeve garters sat in leather chairs smoking cigars, sipping lemonade, and reading newspapers and magazines. A few yellowbacks were even in evidence. James wondered if any of them were reading The Train Boy, which next to the works of Sir Walter Scott was the best thing he’d ever read.

  The lobby had mahogany wainscoting and genuine brass cuspidors and great green ferns. The mustached man behind the registration desk looked as snappy as a man in a Sears catalog.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” the clerk said in a splendid manly voice.

  “Afternoon,” Septemus said. “One room, two beds. And we’ll be wanting baths this afternoon.”

  “Cool ones, I trust, sir,” the clerk said, smiling.

  Septemus didn’t smile back. The clerk, something dying in his eyes, looked mortally offended.

  ***

  Up in their room, they emptied the carpetbags on their beds and then sat in the two chairs next to the window to sip their complimentary lemonade.

  “You glad you came along?” Septemus said. Here it was three degrees hotter than down on the street, but here they could feel the breeze better, too. Septemus had taken his jacket and his vest off. At forty-five he was balding and getting fat, but he still looked muscular and his hard, angular face attracted women and made men wary. He didn’t look at all like a haberdasher.

  “Yessir.”

  “There you go again.”

  James blushed. “I’m sorry.”

  “No need to apologize, James. You’ve just got to remember the things I’m trying to teach you.”

  James nodded.

  “You know why I took you on this trip?”

  “Because you wanted to take me to the state fair.” The fair was in Des Moines, some one hundred miles away. There would be amusement rides and prize livestock and bearded ladies and magicians and probably two hundred girls who were as cute as Marietta Courtney. Or at least James hoped so.

  “The fair is part of the reason but it’s not all of the reason.”

  “It’s not?”

  Septemus looked at James very hard. “I wanted to get you away from your mother’s influence.”

  “You did?”

  “I did.”

  “You don’t like my mom?”

  “I like your mom fine but she’s not the best influence you could have.”

  “She’s not?”

  “Nope. Your father was.”

  “But he is dead.”

  “I’m well aware of that.”

  “And my mom has done a good job of raisin’ us three kids ever since.”

  Septemus still looked solemn. “Your mother is my sister and a woman I respect no end. But she’s a lot better mother to your two sisters than she is to you.”

  “She is?”

  Septemus nodded, then sipped some lemonade. “Think about it, James.”

  “About what?”

  “About what your life has been like since your father died. Without a proper male influence, that is.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Violin lessons. Always wearing knickers and a clean dress shirt. Spending most of your time on studies instead of being outside playing baseball. Do you honestly think this is a natural state of affairs for any young man? And that’s what you are, James, whether your mother chooses to acknowledge it or not. You’re s
ixteen and that makes you a young man.”

  “I guess I never thought of it that way.”

  “When your father was your age, he was supporting a family of three and going to work for the Union Central Life Insurance Company. By the time he was twenty, he had his own office.”

  “That’s right, Uncle Septemus.”

  “And he was a man known to take a drink who could hold a drink, and a man known to hunt who had respect for the rifle and the prey alike, and a man known to please the ladies just by the manliness of his stride and the confidence of his smile. He was one hell of a real man.”

  James couldn’t help it. Hearing his father recalled so lovingly- Septemus and James’s father had been best friends for many years- James got tears in his eyes and had a hard time swallowing.

  “Your father wouldn’t have approved of the violin lessons. Or the musicals in your parlor every Tuesday night. Or all those luncheons your mother takes you to.”

  “He wouldn’t have?”

  Septemus shook his head. “No, he wouldn’t have. And that’s why I brought you along on this trip.”

  James looked perplexed.

  “To start teaching you about manly things,” Septemus said. “Away from the influence of your mother.”

  “Oh.”

  “So stop being so deferential. Stop always ‘Yessiring’ me. A gentlemen is always polite, but that doesn’t mean he has to be bowing and scraping. You understand that?”

  James almost said “Yessir.” Instead, he caught himself on time and simply nodded.

  “Good. Now why don’t you take a bath. I’ve got to go do a little business. I’ll be back to take my own bath and then we can get something to eat.”

  Septemus got up and stood over James and mussed his hair with thick fingers. “You look more like your father all the time. You should be proud of that.”

  “I am.”