Lawless

by John Jakes

  “Jollification,” Jeremiah repeated, unbuttoning his vest.

  Sergeant Amos Graves saw the butts of the Starrs and swallowed. His right hand twitched. The whiskey glass fell, rattling and rolling on the bar. The spilled liquor reflected amber light. The smell of the whores’ perfume filled Jeremiah’s nostrils.

  “So you had jollification with him, did you? Let me tell you why he was here: because I was laid out with a fever and he wanted to find a doctor to help me.”

  “Well, now—look. If you knowed him, why didn’t you say—”

  “I wanted to hear your explanation first. You murdered an innocent man, Sergeant. My partner.”

  His right hand moved, crossing over to the left side of his belt. Before Graves could so much as gulp, he was staring at the drawn revolver.

  With that odd, lipless smile, Jeremiah flicked his glance toward the barkeep. “This muss is only between the sergeant and myself. You’ll be wise to stay out of it.”

  “All right. Sure.” The barkeep nodded. “Anyway, I wasn’t on duty the night it hap—”

  “Shut your mouth.”

  Jeremiah returned his gaze to the sergeant. He pointed the revolver at Graves’ too-tight belt.

  “You killed a fine man. I don’t care if you did lose a brother to the Cheyenne. You had no call to do it.”

  “How—how did you hear about—”

  “Never mind.”

  “I—I dunno what you—what you want now …” Graves’ voice trailed off.

  Jeremiah smiled. “You know.”

  “Wait. Wait!” Fat white hands flew up to protect his face. With the Starr barrel Jeremiah knocked them down. Graves squealed and sucked on a knuckle.

  Jeremiah’s eyes swept the rest of the customers and employees. “I wouldn’t interfere. I don’t want to deal with anyone except this dishonorable gentleman. But I will if I must—is that clear?”

  A townsman nodded vigorously. No one else moved.

  Spittle glistened at the corners of Graves’ mouth. “Listen, I’m sorry about your friend. I was liquored that night.” He stared at the motionless Starr, then at the unresponsive face behind it. “Listen! Nobody out here takes a gun to an unarmed man—you know that. An unarmed man isn’t fair game. It’s cowardly to—”

  Graves yelped as Jeremiah took two long strides backward. The younger man’s left hand darted under his vest, yanked the other Starr free of his belt, slammed it on the bar and slid it just hard enough so it skidded to a stop beside the sergeant.

  “Now you’re armed. You have an advantage my partner didn’t enjoy.”

  “No.” Graves’ cheeks shone as though covered with oil. “No, no—”

  “Pick it up, you yellow bastard.”

  Seconds ticked by.

  Jeremiah’s field of vision included an overweight whore with a hand pressed to her mouth; a townsman with his fist trembling at the seam of his trousers; the young blue-clad borrower leaning back in his chair, petrified; the other two soldiers blinking at one another in confusion; the monte man with a pale hand locked around his cards, a bemused spectator’s smile curving his mouth.

  Amos Graves looked into Jeremiah Kent’s eyes and saw no reprieve. He turned, a clumsy, heavy motion. He practically fell against the molded edge of the bar, slumping over it and clawing the Starr with both hands. Off balance and poorly positioned, he tried to pivot back with the revolver. But he could never have gotten off a shot and Jeremiah knew it. No man could say his adversary was unarmed, however.

  While Graves was fumbling, Jeremiah fired.

  Graves screamed and was lifted off his feet, the Starr spinning up from his jerking hand and thumping on the floor next to his boots. Someone retched as Graves toppled backwards, his dark blue blouse wet and smoking. In that instant, the foolish barkeep stabbed his hands beneath the bar.

  What weapon he’d concealed, no one ever saw. Jeremiah shifted slightly and fired. The barkeep’s right temple exploded. Bits of hair and bone spattered on the mirror behind him as his spasming hand dragged down six bottles.

  One long step and Jeremiah had retrieved the Starr he’d thrown to Graves. One glance and the rest of the dance house patrons knew better than to attempt to stop him. Graves flopped on his back, still, and Jeremiah hurried toward the Dutch door, knowing the patrons were all too shocked and terrified to move very quickly. But the moment he was outside, he sprinted. They’d recover soon enough.

  The café owner appeared against his smudgy yellow window, calling questions into the wind. Jeremiah reached Nat with no difficulty, swung up from the right, Indian fashion, and galloped out of Ellsworth.

  vi

  He rode northwest for seven or eight miles until he located a suitable clump of trees on a hillside well away from the dairy farms he’d glimpsed in the neighborhood. Under the white of the April moon, he used his hands and his knife to break and cut branches and build a platform in a high fork of a tree. Even though pursuers were surely abroad by now—even though he might be caught there was simply no question about taking the time needed to prepare Kola properly.

  As he worked, the cold joy he’d experienced when he shot the two men drained away. He had tried to change, but he’d been an idiot to make the effort. There would always be some dishonorable son of a bitch to send him back to the guns.

  His tally now stood at eleven. Fewer than the tally of that army scout, Hickok, who’d become the darling of the Eastern press. But Hickok was a Yank, and most of his victims had been former Rebs, which helped him kill with impunity. Jeremiah wasn’t so fortunate.

  The cynical thought did little to relieve the sadness sweeping over him. Puffing and struggling, he carried his friend up into the tree and gently laid him on the platform. He folded the Sioux’s hands on his breast. Then he descended, fetched a buffalo robe from his gear, climbed again and carefully covered the Indian. He tucked the robe beneath the stiffening legs and around the shoulders.

  Soon the birds would peck at the dead thing in the tree. They’d tear the robe, the garments, and finally the flesh. The seasons would batter and destroy the body. But all of that was proper. Kola was resting exactly where tribal custom said he should—close to the sky so the ascension of his spirit would be easier, and in the open air so his physical remains would fall back to earth. His body would be reborn in the new buffalo grass that would feed the herds. When his own tribe or another killed and ate the buffalo, his substance would complete the great cycle of the universe and return to his people while his spirit rejoiced in heaven.

  Jeremiah wept over his friend’s remains. Then he got himself under control, climbed down and searched and listened for indications of pursuit. There were none.

  He galloped north, pushing the already exhausted calico much harder than he should. By morning he intended to be far away. Relatively safe and able to stop, sort his thoughts and decide where he should go for sanctuary. East? West? Kansas City? San Francisco? He had two hundred dollars’ worth of shinplasters in the saddlebag. Money wasn’t a worry.

  A memory shook him all at once. For the first time in hours, he recalled Kola’s dream.

  He tried to laugh the prophecy away but he couldn’t. The first part had already become a reality.

  Riding fast on the lathering calico beneath the vast, moon-whitened Kansas sky, he couldn’t quell a rising fear of the prophecy, or shake a conviction that somehow, in ways he couldn’t begin to foresee, the rest of it would come true, including the very last part.

  But who among the Kents would want to strike him down? His father who preached the Christian gospel? The idea was ludicrous.

  Gideon, then? His oldest brother who had moved his family to the North after the war? According to the Irishman Boyle, three years ago Gideon had still been struggling to make a place for himself in New York City. Was he still there?

  Or could it be Matt, the middle brother, who had served on a Confederate blockade runner and then, after Appomattox, traveled to Europe to study painting?

  F
iercely he shook his head. Such thoughts were not only morbid, they were foolish. He would never see any of them again. Unless the vision also meant to say the future was decided, no matter what he did.

  He couldn’t get the prophecy out of his mind.

  There will be no end to the killing.

  For a while the guns will bring great luster to your name.

  Finally the power will fade and you will be killed—

  The words sang on the wind whistling past his ears and muttered up from the calico’s rhythmic hoofbeats.

  Killed by one of your own.

  One of your own.

  Book One

  MATTHEW’S MISTRESS

  Chapter I

  “A Dog’s Profession”

  i

  LA VILLE LUMIERE never glowed more brightly than in that last spring of the Second Empire.

  It was almost twenty years since Louis-Napoléon, nephew of the original Bonaparte, had elevated himself from President to Emperor in the December coup, and begun to re-create the grandeur of half a century earlier. For nearly two decades now, he had succeeded. For nearly two decades Paris had been the most glamorous capital in the civilized world.

  There were treasures on view in the remodeled and expanded Louvre. There were delightful public concerts in the garden of the Tuileries palace. There were thousands of lanterns and gas jets to bedazzle the eye on the night of the Emperor’s birthday, and the greatest courtesans of Europe stopping at the Meurice and the other fine hotels. There was a wink at financial chicanery, and a forgiving shrug for sexual excess or deviation—and there was plenty of each to be found.

  There was an opulent court that moved annually from Paris to Saint-Cloud to Fontainbleau to Compiègne to Biarritz and back to Paris. There was a splendid new look to the central city, which had literally been ripped apart under the supervision of the Prefect of the Seine, Haussmann. At the Emperor’s behest, he envisioned and created new plazas and broad new boulevards and installed a much needed new sewer system. He turned a dark, tangled forest into the Bois de Boulogne. Medieval Paris vanished and what replaced it was much finer—never mind the carping of those who said Napoléon III was the worst of dictators, and essential freedoms were gone, and Haussmann had only made the new avenues broad and straight so that Imperial troops could easily rush down them to crush a radical rebellion of the kind which had terrified the bourgeoisie in 1848 and put it in a mood to eagerly accept Louis-Napoléon’s discipline. Those on the left used the term repression, but seldom in public.

  For those totally uninterested in politics—and Matthew Kent was one—Paris offered a different sort of ferment. The art world was in a continual uproar. Each year’s government-sponsored exhibition, the Salon, brought new assaults on the accepted and the conventional. The bemused public didn’t know whether to be appreciative of all the new forms of art being displayed, or outraged by them, and so held several contradictory attitudes at once. Thus the shockingly realistic paintings of Mart’s friend Edouard Manet could be denounced as “the art of democrats who don’t change their linen,” or it could be dismissed simply as “nasty,” while Edouard himself was treated almost as a celebrity. There were a dozen practicing painters who were intimates in Manet’s circle, or on the fringes of it. Matt was privileged to be one of them and to join their gatherings around the marble-topped tables of their favorite café several times a week.

  Of these men, some were dignified and some were just the opposite—like Mart’s good friend Paul Cézanne, who the critics said “painted with a pistol.” Collectively they were rocking and destroying the foundations of established art. They were throwing safe historical and religious and allegorical subjects into the dustbin and painting what they saw in the contemporary world. Peasants tilling a field. An audience awaiting a Tuileries concert. Or just the artist’s impression of a light-splashed dirt road in the country. Content was radical, technique was radical, and Matt thought it was the most perfect time in all of history to be in Paris learning to be an artist.

  Never mind that Bismarck’s ambition lay like a dark cloud over Europe, and that the Prussian generals were perfecting a new, lightning-swift style of warfare based on use of the railroads and the telegraph, two innovations employed for the first time in the American civil war. Never mind that behind the brilliantly lit façades of the public buildings lay seething slums where rats crawled over the cribs of infants. Never mind that angry proletarians held endless meetings in Belleville and quoted the first volume of Das Kapital by the journalist and social thinker Marx, or the older but not much less radical pamphlets of Proudhon attacking the concept of private property. The poverty, the fear, the rage went all but unseen in the festive glare of the lanterns and the shimmering gaslights. Napoléon III and his empress, Eugénie, had created a gaudy show to divert the attention of both the French and the world.

  But what was unknown to a majority in that last, lovely spring was the fact that the Second Empire had been created fifty years too late. It was obsolete the moment it came into being, and that it had survived for almost two decades was a remarkable piece of luck. Now, in Berlin and Belleville and across the world, forces were moving which would bring it down. Those forces would touch even the Americans who thought themselves safely isolated behind an ocean. They would touch even Matt Kent, who thought nothing could touch him except his two loves—his chosen profession and a young woman named Dolly Stubbs.

  Like the Empire itself, one of those loves would be blown away before the winter came.

  ii

  Out in the stubbled field, the brewer’s boy scowled. The stoop-shouldered man crouching on the bare patch of ground glared right back. He gripped the piece of tree limb so hard, his knuckles turned white.

  The man’s sagging trousers were shiny with grease and daubed with paint. The sun lit a bald spot at the back of his head and the warm wind played with his jutting beard. Some four feet behind him, Matthew Kent knelt in the dirt. He was supposed to be catching for the game, but right now he was hurrying to finish his sketch. Asking his friend to come along on the regular Saturday excursion had been a disastrous idea. Paul was just not the sort who could function as a member of a team. The game was liable to end in a riot.

  “Come on, throw it, you piece of moldering bird shit!” the batter cried, thumping the tree limb on home base and raising dust. The brewer’s boy who was pitching bent over and spat on the ground with studied contempt.

  “We know you can curse, Paul,” he called. “We know you have a large vocabulary of filthy words, and are passionately fond of every one. You don’t need to spout them to make me dislike you, though. I already dislike you as much as I could possibly dislike anyone.”

  Ignoring the scarlet that rushed into Paul’s cheeks, the brewer’s boy turned his back on him and began tossing the ball up and catching it. One by one, he surveyed his four teammates. Two were in the outer field. One stood close to the rock serving as first base. The other had his pants open and was urinating on third. The three players on Paul’s team had returned to their watercolor easels and wine bottles. They had no interest in encouraging the bearded man, even though he was on their side.

  Frowning, Matt pushed a strand of sun-bleached brown hair away from his pale forehead. Dolly was returning from her holiday late this afternoon, and before meeting her, Matt wanted some advice from his friend. Paul was certainly the last man on earth to ask about personal relationships, but Matt did respect his opinion of artistic talent, bizarre though Paul’s own work sometimes was.

  Paul had come up from Aix-en-Provence in preparation for the wedding of his good friend Zola, a pugnacious little journalist who wrote everything from art criticism to melodramatic novels. On the spur of the moment, Matt had invited Paul to join the group of students, practicing artists and working-class boys who tramped out from Montmartre every Saturday for an American-style baseball game. He’d been surprised when Paul accepted the invitation. But then Paul was moody and given to impulses. Matt definit
ely felt his own impulse had been ill-advised. Paul was at bat for only the second time, and the other team was baiting him unmercifully. Of course Paul’s bad manners and utterly foul language begged for it.

  “Come on, come on!” he screamed.

  The brewer’s boy glanced over his shoulder. “When I’m good and ready.”

  Paul gritted his teeth, plainly wanting to rush out to the pitcher and throttle him.

  While the deliberate delay continued, Matt’s right hand kept moving, making slashing strokes with the lump of charcoal. At least the antagonism of the other team gave him a chance to finish his sketch. It was a recognizable likeness of the batter, but no one would have called it a faithful portrait. It was done in Matt’s usual style—a blend of a few graceful, flowing lines and sudden, interrupting angles which perfectly abstracted the essence of the subject and conveyed Matt’s highly personal impression of it.

  He had put Paul in profile, facing an invisible pitcher. He’d exaggerated the jutting beard so that it resembled a cluster of stiff horizontal wires. Shading heightened the dark quality of Paul’s face, and a highlight in the pupil of the eye glowed like a tiny fireball, suggestive of hostility or madness. As drawn, Paul resembled a furious Italian peasant more than what he actually was—an unsuccessful thirty-year-old painter whose father was an altogether proper banker and landowner.

  Quickly he put a last shadow on the temple and, at the lower margin, jotted l’écorché, wondering if he’d spelled the word properly. He was usually too busy to worry about correct spelling. But he wanted Paul’s nickname on the picture. Man without any skin was an apt description of his highly sensitive friend.

  He added Paul—June 1870, and then M. Kent, just as Paul bellowed, “If you don’t throw that thing, I’ll come out there and shove this piece of wood straight up your backside!”