The Big Gundown

by Bill Brooks

  Willy’s bullet spun him around and he stood there for a moment, facing the wrong direction, like he was looking at the roof on his dugout for a leak and he was trying to figure out where exactly.

  Then without rhyme or reason, Champion Smith fired the last two bullets into the side of the house. And when the hammer clicked, he turned around to face his foe.

  “You want to reload?” Willy asked him.

  Champion Smith seemed stunned speechless.

  “Reload? What kinder damn idjit are you?”

  Then the old man took notice of the blood leaking from his person, some of it spattering the toe of his boots, and he reached up with one hand and cupped it under some of the blood.

  Willy reached inside his pocket again and took out a handful of shells and threw them at the man’s feet.

  “Go on, reload.”

  There was a pause, then Champion Smith said, “Hell, you gone shoot me either way…” as he squatted and picked up the bullets and replaced the spent ones in the chambers of the belly gun. He had a lot of trouble loading and dropped some of the shells and bent and picked them up again, his hands shaky, his fingers bloody and sticky. When he finally got all five in, he held the pistol with both hands and set to cocking it. And he got it raised and nearly aimed when Willy shot him a third time: just about where his belt buckle would have been if he’d been wearing a belt instead of a piece of rope tied to hold up his drawers.

  It forced Champion to take a seat on the ground.

  “It’s like I got to go, only I can’t,” he moaned.

  “I got to know something before I finish this,” Willy said.

  Champion Smith looked up at him, his eyes all anguish.

  “Yeah, I did it,” he said. “I diddled them kids and I diddled goats and horses and ever damn thing else come along. I’ve diddled women, too, but didn’t like it nearly as well. I’m a diddling fool and I’d’ve diddled you, too, if I could have got my hands on you…”

  “Diddle this,” Willy said and shot him in the face—between moustache and bottom lip, the bullet breaking the man’s teeth like a hammer.

  Champion flopped back and did not move.

  Willy stood contemplating the deed.

  It wasn’t at all what he figured it would be, killing another human. It left him with neither a sense of guilt, or of pleasure. It was about like shooting a chicken for supper—something like that, he told himself as he rode away.

  Later that evening Willy located a whore at the Buffalo Head Saloon who said she had a previous encounter with one Prince Puckett: “Rough as a billy goat,” she said. And with further questioning, Willy learned Prince Puckett claimed to her he was indeed a man hunter and was after a particular fellow for a lot of cash money if he could find him and kill him and, she said, “Prince said he had a line on this particular fellow he was after, that he was north of Bismarck in some burg called Sweet Sorrow.”

  Willy thought, all in all, it had been a productive day.

  That night Willy dreamed of his ma and him and Reese altogether in the farmhouse, him and his ma dancing while Reese played the fiddle. It shook him awake about the same time morning light crawled into the room.

  Willy dressed and found a café where he ate a full breakfast and asked directions to the place the whore said, Sweet Sorrow, and was told that there was a stage line that ran up there if he wanted to take it.

  Then he swung by the city marshal’s office and said he had recently come past a dugout where a man lay outside shot dead and described Champion Smith to a tee and further said that not only was he dead as a coot but probably by now the fellow was being gnawed on by wolves and coyotes and that if the marshal wanted to find anything left to bury, he ought to get out there sooner rather than later.

  The marshal was a stern-looking stout man with a broad flat face who said over his morning cup of coffee: “Well, at wouldn’t be the worst news I heard this morning if the sucker you was talking about was Champion Smith. My only concern is that he will make them gnawing wolves and coyotes sick from eating him.” Then he laughed at his own sense of strange humor and said, “Thanks for the information, mister. I might get round to it this afternoon or maybe tomorrow.”

  Willy went and waited for the stage. This man-killing business wasn’t near as tough as he had thought it might be. He smiled and tipped his hat to a woman who walked past the train station. She did not smile back.

  11

  HE WAS SURE THAT DALLAS and a few of the other hands working Bob Parker’s place had killed the boy, but he had no real proof. He wondered if he could legally arrest them on suspicion of murder. He just didn’t know.

  There at his desk he wrote the mother of Nat Pickett.

  Dear Mrs. Pickett. The wet ink caught the light from the desktop lamp, then dried to a dull blackness…I regret to inform you that your son, Nat, has passed away… He tried to summon the right words, to make the news less ominous sounding, less tragic than it was. But how do you make the murder of a son sound less tragic?

  He suffered an accident. I can assure you that all that could be done, was done. I’ve taken the liberty to see that he was interred… he thought about that word, then continued…here in Sweet Sorrow, Dakota Territory, this day, Nov. 18th, 1881. If you have further questions regarding this matter, feel at liberty to write and I’ll do my best to bring you whatever comfort I may. Most sincerely, Jake Horn, City Marshal

  He set the pen aside and stared at the letter. It seemed too little. He folded it and slipped it into an envelope and sealed it. Come morning, he’d walk it over the post office so that it would be sent on the next day’s stage.

  Clara came in, the evening sky just settling in to a dark rose. Her cheeks were red from the cold.

  “Will you come to the house for supper?” she said.

  “Do you think this is a good idea, Clara?”

  “It’s just supper, Jake. It’s not a proposal for marriage.”

  He felt unable to tell her his mind, the fact that he couldn’t really get involved with her, even though a large part of him wanted that.

  “I think tonight’s not a good idea,” he said.

  He saw the disappointment in her eyes, even though she did her best to hide it behind a forced smile.

  “It’s not a problem,” she said. “I just thought you might like a warm meal someplace other than the café. Well, I really should get back to the girls. Take care of yourself, Jake.”

  He stood to try and explain, but she’d quickly turned and left. He went to the window and watched her go down the street, passing in and out of the lights of the businesses that were still open, until the shadows swallowed her.

  He took his hat from the hook and slipped into his coat. The goddamn gun in his pocket felt like an intrusion, like something that should not be there. What the hell you doing with this thing? he asked himself, taking it out and looking at it. He set it on the desk, then went out. He was in need of a whiskey, something he could sip and let it do its work.

  The Three Aces was in full swing. He ordered a whiskey, then found a table along one wall, directly below one of the new stuffed animal heads Ellis Kansas had ordered from a taxidermist in Bismarck. A pronghorn antelope that looked like it was still wondering what had happened to it stared with glass eyes.

  There was laughter and good cheer in the room—or perhaps it was just the false bravado of men who drink too much. They talked loudly among themselves, trying to talk over the sound of the piano played by the skinny man in the top hat. Ellis’s whores worked the crowd, their own particular laughter sharp and higher pitched, more forced than those of the men, enticing, falsely seductive.

  Jake noticed the man he’d met along the road on his way to see the girl: The man in the dirty red velvet coat and beaver hat was standing at the bar. He was talking to a couple of others, the grimy burlap sack he’d had tied around his saddle horn now resting atop the oak. Ellis and his bartender were also talking to the man.

  Then something strange
.

  Ellis poured the man a whiskey and the man untied the string from around the neck of the gunny and Ellis peeked in and drew back his head sharply as though punched.

  The man in the velvet coat laughed. The others looked uncertain.

  Jake could see Ellis pointing toward the door, saying something to the man in no uncertain terms. The man in the velvet coat stiffened, then tied the top of the sack again and pounded his fist atop the bar before taking the sack and stalking out.

  Jake stood away from the table and went to the bar.

  “What was that all about?” he said.

  Ellis looked flushed.

  “Son of a bitch had a head in that sack.”

  “Head?”

  Ellis downed one of his own whiskies.

  “Told him to take his fucken head and get out of my place! Warned him not to come back.”

  “He say what he was doing with it, how he came by it?”

  Ellis shook his head.

  “It was the head of a old Chinese, couldn’t tell if it was man or woman.”

  Ellis looked like he was going to be sick.

  Maybe a minute had passed since the confrontation, maybe two. But suddenly the man in the red velvet coat burst back in the front doors. This time he had a pistol in his hand and he came straight toward the bar.

  “Oh, Jesus!” Ellis said.

  “This is for you, mister,” the man said and fired a shot that missed Ellis but shattered the back bar mirror.

  Ellis ducked below the bar and came up with his own gun and returned fire, his bullet swiping the man’s beaver hat off his head.

  The whole population of the place broke into pandemonium.

  The man fired again and so did Ellis, almost at the exact same moment. The man’s second bullet caught Ellis in the neck and a stream of blood arced three feet into the air. Ellis dropped his piece there on the bar and grabbed his throat before falling like a broken vessel. The man in the velvet coat stood staring at the place where the saloon owner had been standing, thinking perhaps, he’d pop back up any minute. Folks were still trying to get out through the doors, front and back. Gunsmoke swirled in the oily light of the suspended lamps. The silence now that the shooting had stopped belied the sudden violence. Ears still rang.

  The man said, “Well, I guess that son of a bitch won’t ever mess with St. John again.”

  “That’s your name, St. John?” Jake said. Every nerve fiber of his was taut, ready to snap. He cursed the fact he had left his own gun back at the jail.

  The man looked at him, as though just now noticing there was someone else in the bar.

  “That’d be me, mister, and if you want some of this, well, I’m ready to serve it up.”

  Jake raised his hands, said, “No, I don’t want any.”

  The man’s eyes worked over Jake like a birddog working a field, then narrowed and he said, “Say, you’re the…”

  Jake grabbed Ellis’s pistol there on the bar.

  Both men fired as one.

  Jake’s bullet tumbled the man off his feet. He went down kicking, holding his chest, making strange noises.

  The man said, “Goddamn, goddamn…”

  Jake knelt next to him and yanked the pistol from his hand. He didn’t want to let it go, but did.

  “That was a stupid thing you did,” Jake said. “Stupid and senseless.”

  “Yeah…maybe…”

  Then the man took one large gulp of air and stopped breathing.

  Jake went around back of the bar. Ellis was lying there in a pool of bright red blood, the wound in his neck pumping less now, down to just a squirt. Ellis’s face was blanched, his eyes all whites. Jake took a bar rag and pressed it to the wound. Ellis’s eyes rotated until their dark centers showed again. He tried to talk, but a bloody foam bubbled out of his mouth instead of words.

  Several of the previous customers had drifted back in, now that the shooting had stopped, some having the bravado to, once safely outside, peek through the windows. Jake enlisted several of them to carry Ellis over to Clara’s—Doc Willis’s old place and the infirmary he kept there.

  Clara answered the knock and saw the men carrying Ellis and led them back to the infirmary, where they laid Ellis on a exam table. Jake set to work, saw that the bullet had passed between windpipe and vertebrae, thus saving Ellis from certain death or paralysis. He had one of the men go and get snow in a pan and bring it in and began packing it around the wound. He did this over and over again until the bleeding clotted, then took needle and thread and stitched closed the blood holes, entry and exit, and wrapped Ellis’s neck tightly as possible with a bandage.

  The men who’d helped carry Ellis over couldn’t hardly stand to watch such doings as a man’s bloody flesh getting sewn like a piece of ragged cloth and had drifted off back to the saloon and continued their drinking. They had something more worthwhile to talk about than the weather or complain about their wives or low wages or no work at all. A good gunfight was good for business. It made men thirsty and randy, too, it seemed. It got them stirred up thinking about how quick things can be over, how temporary life is, and by god if there was anything they’d thought about doing but hadn’t yet, they ought to quick get to it or they might not ever get the chance. Ellis’s girls were still shaken by the sudden turn of events and they weren’t in much of a mood to practice their trade considering, but they were practical-minded women, too. It could be Ellis would die and the place would close and they’d be out of work tomorrow or the day after tomorrow and none of them had saved much money because it wasn’t their way to, even though that was about all they ever talked about: how they were going to save their money and get out of the trade.

  So they did what they knew how to do and the drinking and fornicating went on that night as usual, even if Ellis getting shot was in the back of their minds.

  Ellis fell in and out of consciousness. Jake finally managed to get a spoonful of laudanum down him for the pain, then went out into the other room, where Clara sat at the kitchen table alone.

  “Girls in bed?” Jake said.

  She nodded.

  “Men,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m sorry to bring this to your door.”

  He poured himself a cup of coffee. Noticed that his cuffs were bloodstained, tried to hide them, but he saw her staring.

  “You’re a doctor, aren’t you?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Then why hide it?”

  “Do you really want to know, Clara?”

  “Yes,” she said, “if you’re ready to tell me.”

  “Okay then, I’ll tell you.”

  And when he’d finished telling her about the night he had been falsely accused of murder by the woman he loved, the whole shameful incident of betrayal and infidelity, he sat back and waited for her reaction.

  “You made a mistake, an error in judgment,” is all she said. “It could happen to anyone.”

  “I think I deserved what I got,” he said. “I cuckolded another man, I broke my Hippocratic oath, I was immoral as well as stupid.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You made a mistake. You fell into a trap because you loved the wrong woman. Which of us hasn’t made bad choices in giving our hearts to the wrong one? It doesn’t mean you aren’t a good person, that you don’t deserve some peace and happiness.”

  “It doesn’t change the fact that a man was killed,” he said. “There’s nothing I can do to prove my innocence.

  That’s the really damn frustrating thing. It’s my word against hers. And someday, the law or a bounty hunter will come looking for me and I’ll have to either run or fight. And if whoever it is doesn’t get me the next time, they will the time after. Sooner or later, I’ll pay the ultimate price. Now you know why I can’t let myself get involved with you, Clara. I can’t put you in that danger.”

  She closed her eyes for a long moment, then opened them and looked directly at him.

  “I know a little about betrayal,
” she said. “I know what it is to be fearful that someone who wants to harm you will come looking for you. You’re right, about putting me in danger. But if it were just me, I wouldn’t care. But I have the girls. I can’t let them be put into danger…”

  Into the night he went again, the air chill, the feeling still lonesome. Jake walked back to his hotel. He felt exhausted, emotionally drained. He lay upon the bed, thinking about the events of earlier. Someone knocked on his door and he answered it. Gus Boone stood there with the burlap bag.

  “Go bury that damn thing,” Jake said.

  “He left it on the sidewalk outside of the Three Aces.”

  “Go bury it.”

  Gus looked forlorn.

  Jake reached into his pockets and found a dollar.

  “Here. Go bury it.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Jake closed the door. He wished it would close out everything. That the world would forever remain outside his door.

  Outside Gus felt snowflakes falling on his eyelashes, said to the head in the sack, “Sorry about all this, mister, or ma’am, or whatever you are…”

  It was otherwise a pretty night.

  12

  THEY WERE WAITING FOR HIM when he returned from town. Dallas and Perk and the others.

  “How’s that tooth?” Dallas said.

  Tig started to say, “What tooth?”, then remembered the excuse he’d given for going in to see the city marshal.

  “Doc lanced it, said it didn’t need to come out. Two glasses of whiskey and it’s all but healed. Guess I’m the lucky one, huh.”

  Sun glared off the snow, making it look like shattered glass. The horses moved about in the corral, their coats grown shaggy.

  “You do anything else while you was in town besides get that tooth looked after and drink a couple of whiskies?”

  Tig dismounted and began undoing the cinch strap, keeping his back to the others.

  “No,” he said over his shoulder. “Like what?”

  “I dunno, go have a talk with that lawman, for instance?”