The Big Gundown

by Bill Brooks

  Toussaint rubbed his leg up high where it ached, where the pain had gone from the lower part where the bone was broken, as though the pain had to find another place to settle.

  “I’d kill them before they were ready to be killed,” Toussaint said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I wouldn’t wait for them to come after me. I’d go after them and I’d kill them in their sleep if I had to or any other way I could find them.”

  “I can’t do that,” Jake said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t. It’s not in me to do something like that.”

  “Then they will kill you just as bad and merciless as they did that colored cowboy. Sure, you might get one or two if you’re lucky and they come at you straight on. But they’re not going to come at you straight on because they know you’ll be ready for them. My advice, if you don’t want to die, is get in the wind.”

  “I’m not running—not from them, I’m not.”

  Toussaint had a pained look on his face.

  “Not one of those sons a bitches in town will stand with you?”

  Jake shook his head.

  “Just John, but I can’t ask him; he’s not made of fighting stock, not like you.”

  “You could wire down to Bismarck and see if they’ll send some lawmen to help you out on this.”

  “No,” Jake said. “I can’t do that either.” The last thing Jake needed were lawmen who might have a dodger on him.

  Toussaint nodded knowingly.

  “’Cause you’re on the dodge yourself…”

  “Something like that. It’s a long story. Someday I’ll tell you about it.”

  They both knew that the odds were likely Jake would never get that chance.

  “You say the word, and I’ll get my damn shotgun,” Toussaint said. “Hell, I don’t need both legs to shoot with.”

  “Appreciate it,” Jake said. “But Karen needs you and that little boy needs you a lot worse than I do.”

  They both knew it was true.

  “Besides, what would it look like, me having a one-legged man in a gunfight.”

  Jake tried to play it off light, but Toussaint didn’t smile.

  “There’s a lot better places to die than here in Sweet Sorrow,” Toussaint said. “And a lot better ways than what you’re facing if you stay.”

  “Yeah,” Jake said. “I don’t doubt that there are.”

  Toussaint hobbled to the door as Jake went out. Jake met Karen and the boy by the corral. Toussaint watched the lawman stop and give her a hug, then pat the boy on the shoulder before mounting his horse and riding off.

  Karen came and said, “So you want to tell me what it was he wanted?”

  “He wanted to say good-bye, is all.”

  “Men,” she said. “I’ll never understand what it is about you all that makes you want to keep secrets. Get ready for dinner.”

  Toussaint looked down at the boy. The boy looked up at him. Out in the corral the horses nickered. They were restless, he figured, wanting to be free to run like they had been before he and Karen had ridden out and threw ropes around their necks and penned them up. He looked at the rough buckskin filly that had thrown him into the fence and broke his leg, watched the way she circled around in the corral, looking for an escape route. She stopped and looked at him across the distance—her large eyes dark and wet. She snuffled and tossed her mane. She snorted steam. He thought about Jake and those damn boys from the Double Bar and what would happen when they all came together. Then he turned and went back inside and closed the door and sat down at the table again and drank his coffee, feeling miserable.

  It was like that time he found Dex shot dead in the grass. Something he hated and ate at his guts, but couldn’t do any damn thing about it, like now. It came down to a choice between his own family and the lawman.

  What was it that Bible drummer had said?

  Trust in Jesus.

  Well, Jesus would have to be a fool to wander out onto these prairies unless he had a pistol and knew well how to use it. Because one thing was certain: those Double Bar boys didn’t care nothing about Jesus, or the law or nothing else.

  Karen said, “You want more coffee?”

  “Please,” he said.

  But later she saw he never drank it, just let it sit there and grow cold.

  “Whatever it is he wanted of you,” she said, “I know you’d do it. And if you feel it’s something you have to do, go ahead. But I have to say this one thing: I couldn’t stand it if something was to happen to you—but I’d make it through. That boy, though, I’m not sure he could take losing another daddy.”

  She wasn’t sure if he’d heard her or not. He never acted like he did or didn’t. He just sat there with his cup of coffee growing cold.

  17

  THE BUNKHOUSE WAS LONG and low-slung, made of logs dragged in from farther north. Nobody bothered scraping the bark off them. They were notched and chinked with mud and shakes were cut for the roof and there was stovepipes—one at either end—fed by small potbellies that heated the interior during the cold months and in between there was a space where cold air lingered and the boys never sat in the middle but closer to the stoves.

  Along one wall was a row of bunks with tick mattresses and on each bed were two blankets wove of wool. Some of the hands kept their personals in small trunks they set at the end of their bunks and others kept their things in saddle bags hung over the head of the beds or wrapped up in their soogins they kept underneath their bunks. They hung stiff lariats and their chaps on pegs along the opposite wall. There was a long table with spoke-back chairs they pulled up close to one of the stoves in the cold months and took outside to eat off of in the warm months. A pair of bull’s-eye lanterns sat on the table and a deck of worn playing cards, and somebody had at one time or another left a checkerboard there, but some of the checkers had been lost over time, so when the boys played the game, they used Mexican pesos to replace the missing pieces because you couldn’t spend a Mexican peso in any of the local establishments. One of the boys had been down in the border town of Neuvo Laredo and that’s where the pesos had come from.

  Dallas and Perk sat across from each other. Taylor, Harvey, and Lon sat along the table down from them. Taylor was stitching a hole in the elbow of a shirt, and Lon and Harvey were just smoking.

  “When we gone do it?” Perk said, his crazy eyes moving back and forth.

  “When I say is when,” Dallas said.

  The others listened without speaking.

  “What we waiting for?” Perk said. “Why don’t we do it and get over and done with?”

  “I want him to sweat some,” Dallas said. He took out his makings, which were near empty—the sack having maybe enough for one more smoke in it—and shook the tobacco into a paper he’d grooved, then rolled up, licking along one edge, then twisting off the ends.

  “Longer he has to think about it, the more nervous he’s gone be. That’s how I want him.”

  Perk picked at a scab on the back of his wrist.

  “Longer he has to plan on us coming, too.”

  Dallas lit the shuck and took a draw off it, then let the smoke curl out of his mouth, some of it climbing up into his eyes. He had the weathered face of a man who’d spent most of his life on horseback and doing outdoor work. He had the look of a man who’d met a lot of disappointment in his life.

  He looked from Perk to the others.

  “You all with me on this?”

  Taylor tugged at the end of the thread with his teeth trying to bite it off. He shrugged and said, “You’re the one who’s a planner, Dallas. Ain’t none of us planners much. You want to wait and go in later, that suits me.”

  “How ’bout you?” Dallas said, looking at Lon and Harvey.

  They shrugged as well.

  “Fine by me,” Lon said.

  “Fine by me, too,” Harvey said.

  Then they all just sat there for a time, Dallas and them smoking, Taylor examining t
he stitched hole in the elbow of his shirt. He shook it out and held it up. It had been washed so many times it had grown thin over time. He could see light through it. It was a shirt he wore only now and then, on special occasions, like when he got duded up to go into town and drink and get with whores.

  Perk stood away from the table and went to one of the two small windows cut into either end of the bunkhouse to let some light in and rubbed frost away with the heel of his hand and looked out.

  “It’s snowing to beat the band,” he said.

  Nobody said anything.

  “I guess was we to ride in there today and kill that son of a bitch, it would be tough going just to get there and back. Snow’s piling up like the dead at Gettysburg.”

  Perk had fought in the war, had been at Gettysburg. He’d seen the way men got shot down and stacked up one atop the other in some places—the cornfield, for one. He saw them afterward, too, in the heat, several days later, their bodies swollen tight inside their clothes. He remembered how death smelled, like it was yesterday he’d smelled it. It had made him want never to be in a hot country again. He liked winter. He liked the way it looked, the snow laying deep in white drifts. He liked the sound of his boots crunching in it, liked the taste of it even. Most of all, he liked its clean silence.

  Lon and Harvey set up the checkerboard, Lon taking the black pieces and Harvey the red, and using the Mexican pesos for the missing pieces.

  “Smoke before fire,” Harvey said and Lon moved first.

  Dallas watched them for a time, then stood up and went out the door and trudged to the privy and dropped his drawers and sat down on the cold wood there in the dark little house with bands of light filtering through the cracks. He sat there until he was finished, then he buttoned up and went out again. The snow fell slantways directly into his face and he had to squint. He had been thinking about the girl, the baby in her, was it his or not his. It made his insides clinch up like a fist to think maybe it was not his, that it was Nat’s kid in her.

  How’s a white woman have any truck with a damn coon?

  He trudged to the corral and looked at the horses, their shaggy coats grown thick already, their eyes black in their heads, their black noses wet. They had small blankets of snow on their backs.

  Inside the cabin Perk was watching Dallas standing there at the corral, thinking, That’s the meanest son of a bitch I ever knew. Then, after a while of watching, he went over near the stove and held out his hands, rubbing them. His feet were cold and he pulled a chair up and straightened out his legs so the soles of his boots were near the hot iron. He thought about Nat Pickett. All he could see was Nat’s big smile, those white teeth in that dark face, how Nat was always quick to laugh at everything and had about him the ways of a kid, always pulling pranks, but never going too far with them because he knew the boys wouldn’t tolerate all that much from a nigger, even if he was a good hand. About the only one who showed him any deference was Tig. They were somewhat alike in their ways—both of ’em always looking at life as though it was a joke. But it wasn’t any joke. Life was hard most of the time, nothing but hard work and ornery horses and too little pay and cheap whiskey and women who only loved you until your money run out. The life of a cowhand was never having no real home and drifting from one place to the next, because you got fired or got tired of it all and quit. Boys like Tig and Nat didn’t understand such things yet ’cause they were too young to understand them. They didn’t know nothing about the old ways, about hard and war and such.

  Perk could smell the leather of his boots after a time from the heat. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell.

  Bob Parker came out of the house and he saw his man, Dallas, standing over at the corral looking at the horses, and went over to him and said, “There something wrong?” He looked at the horses, too, but he couldn’t see anything wrong with any of them.

  Dallas had one foot resting on the bottom rail and his forearms resting on the top and he was just staring at the horses and said, “No, they ain’t nothing wrong.”

  “I want to know something,” Bob Parker said, sort of resting on the railings, too. The air was cold and sharp and he could smell the horses, that sweet scent they had about them, a smell he’d always liked since the first time he smelled them.

  Dallas didn’t ask what it was the boss wanted to know, just stood there, looking, his breath coming in frosty regularity.

  “I want to know did you have anything to do with that boy’s death?”

  Dallas’s mouth moved, like he had something stuck in his teeth and was trying to pry it out with his tongue. He finally turned his head and looked directly into Bob Parker’s face and said, “Goddamn you, to ask me a thing like that.”

  Bob Parker shifted his bulk. He was a good head taller than Dallas and forty pounds heavier. He didn’t know for sure what Dallas might do next. He braced himself, just in case, but told himself he’d whip that rascal seven ways from Sunday if he tried anything.

  “It’s my place, and that boy was my hand, and I guess I got a right to ask any questions I want to as long as you’re working for me, collecting wages out of my pocket.”

  The cold had burned color into Dallas’s hollow cheeks and his nose.

  He spit over the top rail into the muddy horse-tromped paddock.

  “I ain’t even going to answer something like that,” Dallas said, then removed his foot from the lower rail and turned to walk off.

  Bob Parker said, “This is my place, not yours. I seen what you did to Tig, you and the others. You can’t be riding roughshod over these boys…”

  Dallas stopped short and turned and looked at his boss, the snow falling down between them. They were maybe twenty paces apart, about as far as you’d want a man to be from you if you were going to shoot him with a handgun.

  “He tell you it was me hurt him like that?”

  “He didn’t say if it was or it wasn’t. He didn’t say nothing, but that he wanted his pay. But he sure didn’t get like that by no accident, either.”

  Dallas knew he’d have to unbutton his coat to get at the pistol he wore. And he could do it, for he didn’t see where Bob Parker had come armed. It’d be easy if he wanted to. But he knew Bob to be well-respected in this country and killing him might just raise a lynch mob unless he could cover his tracks well enough. ’Sides, there were those other boys to worry about if he was just to shoot Bob down—would they back him on it or turn tail and maybe even turn witness against him if it came down to it? Killing that colored Nat was one thing, but Bob Parker was a white man and he didn’t know if Taylor and them would stand up for it or not like they did with the killing of Nat.

  “That’s a hell of a thing to accuse me of, boss. I mean, it’s a hell of a thing. I guess if you go to accusing a man of something like that, you got to be prepared for the consequences. I don’t guess nobody would blame me was I to stand up for myself, you calling me a liar and all. That’s the same as calling a man out round this country.”

  Bob Parker saw the predicament he’d put himself in. He hadn’t come out armed and he knew Dallas never went anywhere without one. He could see the bulge of Dallas’s pistol there under his coat. He felt his nerve failing him a little. Knew he’d stepped into it.

  “I mean, if you want to accuse me of something like that, I guess I’d just have to stand up for myself,” Dallas said again, a harder edge to his voice as his fingers stiffly undid the lower buttons of his coat.

  Bob held up a hand.

  “I don’t guess I’m accusing you of nothing just yet,” he said.

  “Well, that’s good, boss.”

  Just then a shrill voice came from the house.

  “Bob!”

  It was his wife calling.

  Dallas looked past his boss toward the house, could barely make her out there in the doorway with the snow falling hard as it was between them.

  “You better go on, boss. Better go see what it is your wife wants,” Dallas said.

  “I ain’t armed,�
�� Bob said.

  “Yeah, well, you better just go on before this all gets out of hand.”

  He watched as Bob Parker backed up a few steps, then turned and walked toward the house. He made an easy target.

  “What’s he doing?” Taylor said, having set down his mended shirt and gone over to the window and rubbed the glass with the heel of his hand, then looked out in time to see Dallas standing by the corral, him and the boss, facing each other. “Looks like he’s arging with the boss.”

  “Them two never were very friendly,” Lon said. He was up in the game of checkers. Harvey never could think very far ahead on the moves to stay even with him.

  Perk looked up from his stiff boots that had grown hot on the soles.

  “They’s liable to go at it one of these days. Old Bob better watch his step.”

  “Looks like they almost just did,” Taylor said. “Only the boss is walking off toward the house now.”

  “Is it still snowing out there?” Lon said.

  “Yes. Snowing like hell.”

  “He coming back in?”

  “No, he’s getting his saddle. Looks like he’s gone ride off somewheres.”

  “Ride off?”

  “Looks like.”

  Perk stood up, the soles of his boots curled hard from the heat, and shuffled over to the window and looked out, too. Dallas had slipped between the rails and tossed a rope over the neck of a roan and was putting his saddle on it.

  “Where you reckon he’s riding off to?” Taylor said.

  “I don’t have a clue.”

  “You think he’s gone ride into town and shoot that lawman by himself?”

  “No, it ain’t his way.”

  “Why not, as mean a mean son of a bitch as he is?”

  “He ain’t gone take no chances,” Perk said. “I don’t think. Dallas is smart in that way.”

  The snow seemed to let up some, just as Dallas swung aboard the roan and rode it over to the gate and leaned and slipped off the loop of wire holding it, then rode out neatly and replaced it over the post as the other horses watched.

  “No, he’s gone the other way from town,” Taylor said.