by Toby Olson
It took him a little over an hour to get the seventy miles to Tombstone. As he got closer to it, things along the road became increasingly familiar. The first thing he noticed were the small white crosses at the roadside, markers for the places where accidents had occurred in which people had been killed. When he saw them he remembered how he had seen them when he was in high school, living in Bisbee, twenty-five miles the other side of Tombstone. He knew the road between Bisbee and Tombstone better than this stretch, but he had traveled here some too. He remembered a place, a looping turn from a long downhill slope, where there were more than twenty crosses clustered like a small graveyard at the roadside. Driving into Tombstone with friends, they had dared that turn in the road often, laughing and joking but not untouched by the danger and its evidence in the crosses. Mostly, he had driven to Tombstone with his father for his quack arthritis treatments, baths and massages, that were supposed to produce wonders. They had moved from Chicago to Bisbee for his father’s health. When he was in his second year of high school, his father had died there.
He remembered the last turn into Tombstone, and he slowed down as he entered it. There had been considerable building on the edge of town since he had last been there close to twenty years ago, but after the turn, Boot Hill still sloped up to the left, a low-brush rise with its wooden and stone markers, now with an out-of-place cyclone fence surrounding it. A little farther down on the right was the O.K. Corral, and by the time he reached it he had slowed to a crawl. The O.K. had changed also; it had been “restored” with new paint and a new sign, and some boards had been replaced, and the grounds had been worked on. Down the streets beyond the O.K., little signs had been hung out in front of the various stores, markers with historic names wood-burned into them. He turned at the corner of the Crystal Palace Bar, drove down a half block, and parked. There were tourists walking the streets, cars with various out-of-state plates, but there were not a lot of tourists, and the town did not look to be thriving. Across the street from the Crystal Palace, he saw the vaguely remembered Bird Cage Theater and the Tombstone Epitaph, the old newspaper, beside it. He turned into the Crystal Palace, pushing one of the swinging half-doors and slipping through it like a hesitant cowboy.
There were six men sitting at the bar, five facing the long glass mirror behind it, the other at a place where the bar turned in an L to the wall, a position where he could see the door. In front of the mirror, obscuring its lower part, were hundreds of bottles of liquor, about half of which were phonies, empty bottles with Old West labels on them. The mirror was high, long, and beautiful, its edge framed in gilded wood or plaster. The bartender had a striped shirt and a handlebar mustache. He nodded to him as he entered. Two of the men at the bar were cowboys, real ones, in boots, Levis, pearl-button shirts and Stetsons. The three men beside them were tourists, all of them heavy and dressed in various combinations of seersucker and brushed cotton. The man at the turn of the L-he thought this was his man the moment he entered-was young, about thirty; he wore a tailored cowboy shirt, dark blue, but he was hatless. A beer bottle stood on the bar in front of him. He smiled as the stranger approached. Allen got there, sat down, and ordered a Lone Star.
There was the sound of gunfire outside, and the two cowboys sitting beside him laughed when it came, shaking their heads.
“The bloody Chisholm battle is on again,” one of them said.
“No, that’s Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, I think,” the other said.
“Maybe so.”
“Think it is,” the bartender said.
He remembered the Frontier Days weekend that occurred each summer in Tombstone, in August he thought. There were reenactments of all the famous Old West battles that the town in its heyday had witnessed, at least twenty of them. All of the historic businesses would be enlivened by people in traditional Western costumes. The Bird Cage Theater would be open, presenting the shows that had been popular in the middle of the last century. And there would be a lot of beer drinking, some real fights, and a lot of barbecues. He remembered that one of the traditions was to try to get enough beer drunk on that weekend so that by the end of it the block at the center of main street would be covered, from curb to curb, with empty cans and bottles. This end was usually accomplished.
“Frontier Days?” he asked.
“Naw, that’s not till August, the twelfth this year, isn’t it Ray?”
“That’s right, I think,” one of the cowboys answered the bartender and looked over at the stranger. The cowboy was about forty-five years old; he looked very strong and hard. His face was sun-leathered, his eyes a little milky. The man in the L of the bar tipped up his beer, paid for it, and left. The tourists finished up and left too. The bartender went to the end of the bar and gathered their glasses and started to dunk them into a vat of water behind the bar. The cowboy was still looking at him.
“Leak,” he said, and he got up and headed for the door under the sign that said Hombres in the far corner of the large room. When the cowboy got off his stool, Allen saw that the other one was hunched down over his beer, sipping at it by lifting it only a couple of inches off the bar. His hat was cocked back on his head, and he was looking straight ahead into the mirror.
When he saw that the cowboy had reached the door in the corner, he slipped off his stool and followed him. When he entered the wood, tile, and porcelain room, he saw the cowboy standing at a urinal, and he stepped up to one, two urinals away from him. The cowboy looked over sharply at him.
“You know Richard?”
“I know him,” he answered.
“We’ll do it in fifteen minutes. It’s three-thirty now. There’s a place up the street, a sign says Rose Tree. You turn left.
The other side of the rose tree is a house with a lot of bottles on the roof, I mean hundreds of them. Behind that house. You can’t miss it. You better walk over.”
“I know the place,” he said.
“Do you,” the cowboy said, raising his eyebrows a little.
“Fifteen minutes.” He zipped up his fly and left. Allen waited a moment and then left too. He went out the swinging doors of the Crystal Palace, turned left, and headed forthe car. He got into the driver’s seat, reached under it, and got the matchbox. Then he got a small, plastic shopping bag, with hand holes cut into it, out of the glove compartment and put the Diamond matchbox into it. The bag was black and had the name of a store printed on it.
He began to get out of the car but changed his mind. He started the car and drove it around the block, parking it parallel to the road in a space with a driveway in front of it. It was pointed with the traffic, on the street that led out of the town to the highway, back in the direction of Tucson. He got out of the car, the plastic bag in his hand, and walked to the corner, turned left, and headed for the street on which the Crystal Palace was located. He was a block away from the Palace, at the corner where the rose tree sign was, when he got there. He checked his watch. It was three-thirty-seven.
He remembered the rose tree and the house with the bottles because it was near them that his father had come for his treatments. The rose tree had been called “The Largest Rose Tree in the World”; it had cost a quarter to see it, and it had been surrounded by a high fence. The bottle house had belonged to a woman who had for years put bottles on her roof to let the sun stain them. It took close to twenty years to get a good bottle that way, but he remembered them as being very beautiful, and she had sold them for what was then good money, about ten dollars apiece, more for the special ones.
When he had crossed the street and passed the rose tree sign, he saw what he thought was the rose tree fence enclosure on his side about halfway down the block. Above the fence, and further down at the corner, he could see the tops of some bottles sticking up. There was a parked car on the other side of the street, about where the fence was. He saw a man in a cowboy hat sitting in the driver’s seat. The car was in front of a white frame house, and there was another man standing in front of the door. He wore a su
mmer suit. He was pretty sure that the house was the one in which his father had gotten his treatments, but he remembered a sign on the side of the house, something about the kinds of treatments given, and there was no sign as far as he could see where the man now stood. The walkway to the house looked like the one he had carried his father up, but he was not sure of it.
When he got to the fence surrounding the rose tree, he was almost across from the car. A bench had been added to the enclosure, bolted to the fence itself, and above the bench was a sign, the words burned into a piece of heavily lacquered wood; it read: howdy, pardner. rest a spell. He moved to the bench and sat down on it under the sign. He checked his watch; it was three-forty. He looked across the street at the car. The man at the door looked over his shoulder at the man sitting in the driver’s seat. The man in the seat lifted a hand. The other man turned and walked back to the car and got in. The man in the cowboy hat started the engine, and the car drove to the corner, stopped there, and then turned right.
He put his hand on the shopping bag on the seat beside him and got up. He walked along the rose tree fence, passed a house, and then came to the one with the bottles on its roof. There were not as many bottles as he had remembered, but there were still plenty of them; they covered the entire roof, but now there was more space between them. The sun hit against the bottles; there were some flashes where the few newest bottles stood, but most of the light was absorbed; the older bottles had a way of doing that. He suspected that the market for the fine things that the bottles were had slipped some over the years. The colors in and on the bottles were amazing in their gradations and shades, and the reflective and absorptive qualities of the bottles lit the roof up with similar variety. The sun gave a solid and sharp light to the day, but the roof was a complex of shadows, twinkles, and colors.
He moved to the back of the house. There was a dirt road running behind it, and beyond the road, though he could see a few scattered houses in the distance, there was mostly open desert, and he was on the literal edge of the town. He stood there for a minute, then he saw a pickup truck turn into the dirt road, about a block away from him from the direction of the town. The truck came slowly up the road. When it got about twenty feet from him, it stopped. He could see the cowboy through the dirty windshield, his Stetson square on his head. The truck stopped short of the edge of the property of the house with the roof of bottles. There was a low picket fence and a small yard with a meager cactus garden behind the house. A sand path ran between the cactus to the stoop; the door was a screen door. The cowboy had his arm out the window of the pickup cab resting on the doorframe; he lifted his hand from where it gripped the frame and motioned. Allen walked over to the window of the pickup. On the seat of the cab beside the cowboy, he could see a revolver, what he thought was a six-shooter.
“Never mind that,” the cowboy said. “Give me the shit.”
He lifted the bag up. As he extended his hand to the cab of the truck, he noticed that the cowboy was not looking at him, but past and behind him. Then the truck lurched forward, the rear frame of the door hitting his hand, spinning him around and sending the bag flying off beyond the dirt road and into the edge of the desert. The truck was already well underway when it got to the corner of the house, and its tires squealed some when it bent to the right and shot down the blacktop in the direction of the rose tree.
He saw the car slide to a stop about forty yards from him, the man in the summer suit jump out, and the car, with the door still open and flapping, accelerate after the truck. The man, in jumping from the car, had tripped; he fell, went with his roll, and came to his feet. A sleeve of his jacket was ripped, and he jerked at it with his other hand as he ran, breaking his stride. There was a gun in the hand of the arm with the ripped sleeve, and as Allen turned toward the house he saw the gun disappear as the man pulled at the sleeve to rip it away and free himself.
In two strides Allen was over the low picket fence and in the sand. When he got to the screen door, he ripped it off its hinges as the hook lock pulled loose, and it flew back behind him. The force of the wrenching set the house into slight motion.
“Shit!” he heard, and then a crashing, as the man with the torn sleeve and the gun got tangled in the flying door.
He could see the light at the end of the house, and he headed for it. He could hear the bottles, fall and roll and break above him. He passed an old woman who was half risen from her crocheting of a tablecloth at a large oak dining-room table. He hit the screen door at the front of the house with both of his hands out; his right hand ripped through the screening, and the other hit against the left frame, sending the door free of the latch and open. It slapped like a rifle shot against the side of the house.
He cleared the front stoop in the air, heard the tinkle and crash of bottles above and behind him, ran down the front walk, crossed the street, hit along the side of the house across from the bottle house, and then came to the rose tree fence. He vaulted over it, using the howdy pardner seat bench, landing on both feet in the dirt near the rose tree itself, its huge trunk in front of him. There were no visitors, and he grabbed onto a low limb and climbed up into the rose tree, scrambling into the higher branches, where he saw that he could reach the roof of the house against which the enclosure was built. He reached for the eave, the hot shingles burning his fingers, and hoisted himself up and over. There was a large, uncapped chimney rising a good six feet up from the middle of the peaked roof, and he headed for it.
He moved around the chimney; it was a good three-and-a-half-feet square, but he felt exposed on all sides, and he grabbed at the edge of the chimney above him and pulled himself up to the top of it. It had one flue; it was open, and he saw light below.
He climbed down into the chimney, searching for a purchase on the edges of the brick interior. He found small narrow ledges for his feet, and then he crouched down.
He was breathing heavily, but he could hear the bottles. They were still falling over, some breaking, some rolling around on the flat roof; some hit against each other, tinkling. They sounded like a massive and airy wind chime at times, at others like a piece of odd contemporary music. His breathing was the bass line, the rhythm. A line of bottles would fall like dominoes, some ringing others-the darker ones, he thought, having a hollow sound, the newer ones like crystal. They fell, rolled, crashed against each other, dropped from the roof with dull thuds. And then he held his breath.
He heard the man coming, could hear him opening the door in the rose tree fence, could even hear his breathing. The breathing settled quickly as the man moved around the tree. He heard the final ripping away of the sleeve and a small click. The safety or the hammer, he thought. He heard the man scuffling as he climbed the tree. Then he felt a small quiver in the chimney as the man came up over the edge of the roof and onto it. He heard his feet sliding and scraping on the shingles as he moved to the peak of the roof, then a firmer thudding as he walked along the caps to the chimney. Then the man stopped, and all he could hear was his deep, regular breathing.
He stood very still where he was, looking up. Above him he could see the open sky, and as he watched it, a dark element of clouds began to drift across it into the framed field of his vision. The clouds were very dark, almost pure black and as thick as oil smoke. He heard the man shift around a little as he looked, felt him circle the chimney still looking. Then he stopped. He imagined him looking up at the clouds as he was, their attention focused on the same issue. They were very close together, and he felt embarrassed in his secrecy, wrong and shy. The clouds had moved in, and the patch of sun that had entered the chimney, oddly exposing him, was gone. He felt his hair lifted slightly, his scalp touched by a cool breeze. Then he heard the sound of gunfire. He thought at first that it was thunder or more mock Old West battling, but he heard the man suck in his breath and shift quickly and pause; he could feel his attention.
“Christ!” he heard the man say sharply, and then heard him scrambling down from the peak. He felt the roof r
eturn to its architecture as the man left it. He heard the tree groan and the dull thud as the man’s feet hit the ground. The door to the rose tree fence ground on its hinges a little as the man opened it, and then he could not hear anything at all.
He waited. He remembered living in Bisbee, twenty-five miles from here, when he was in high school. Bisbee was at the top of the low mountains, the southern end of the Continental Divide before it dipped into Mexico. In the winter, it got cold and snowed in Bisbee. But he did not think that it got so cold in Tombstone, at least not cold enough to warrant a chimney of this size. He was not sure about that, though. Another odd thing was the locked screen doors. It was the middle of the day, and he could not figure why she had them locked. He shook himself back, realizing he was beginning to daydream. The first question was, had they got any significant look at him. Second, did they have any line on his car. He did not take time to figure the chances. The car would tell the story; if they got that he was sunk. There was enough in the trunk and the glove compartment to nail him. Hysteria began to creep up in him as he thought of Melinda, the possibility of not making it East with her, but he pushed it back down.
He rose from his crouch, put his elbows on the brick outside of the flue, and hoisted himself up until he was sitting on the bricks with his legs dangling into the hole. He could see the top of the rose tree and the street a few houses away. He knew if he looked around he would be able to see back to the place where the truck had stopped. He was too exposed, and he got his legs out of the hole, turned, and lowered himself down the side of the chimney to the peak of the roof. He saw there was still nobody visiting the rose tree, and though the enclosure made him uneasy, he climbed from the roof to the tree’s limbs, working his way down, and dropped to the ground. It was much darker than it had been before in the rose tree enclosure; the dark clouds hung high and heavy up through the branches. They had moved in over the town and stopped.
