The Big Gundown

by Bill Brooks

  The woman in the cell watched them as well. And when Frisco noticed her, it did something to him, the way she was dressed, the way she looked. He wondered if she was the woman his daddy had kept in town. She looked a lot like a woman his daddy might take to: She wore a fancy dress.

  The baby began to cry.

  It troubled Gus to no end that it did.

  Frisco went over the cell and looked at the woman and she looked at him. Her cheeks were rouged and her lips were red and wet as licked candy.

  “You the woman that stole my daddy?” he said.

  “I might have been,” Sue said. “You just never know, now, do you.”

  The old woman came and grabbed the boy by the shoulder and turned him around and said, “Shut that little flannel mouth of yours!” Then she looked at the floozy and said, “I reckon there is a good reason why they got you locked up. I hope they throw away the key!”

  Gus said, “Now, ladies.”

  And when they both looked at him as though they wanted to bash his head in, he said, “I’ll go find the marshal.”

  Jake had stopped at the hotel to look in on Tig. The boy was sitting on the side of his bed, smoking a cigarette and looking glum.

  “How is it going, son?”

  The boy looked at him and mumbled, “’Bout the same, I reckon.”

  “You go see the dentist yet?”

  Tig shook his head.

  “You been taking that laudanum regular?”

  Again, he shook his head.

  “I’ve got a problem, son,” Jake said.

  The boy stood and went over to the window and the smoke curled up from his cigarette and butted up against the glass and curled over and hung there in the air.

  “Those who did this to you and killed your friend Nat,” Jake said. “Well, they’re going to ride in here and try and do the same to me. I need to know how many exactly I’m going to be dealing with when they come.”

  The boy looked around for a moment.

  “Five,” he said.

  “Five,” Jake said, contemplating the number. Five was a lot.

  “You any good with a gun?”

  Tig stared at something out on the street for the longest time, then shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “I ain’t no good with a gun.”

  “I’ll be honest with you,” Jake said. “I’ve got no one to back me up. I thought maybe, considering what they did to you, you might want to get even.”

  Tig swallowed hard. The light fell on his swollen face and he smoked the cigarette slowly, each time exhaling against the window glass, his eyes seeming to study the shape the smoke took.

  “Dallas and them will kill you and whoever stands with you,” he said through painful lips. “I got no fight in me. I got to get on.”

  “You run from this, you’ll regret it.”

  “I don’t run, I’ll regret it.”

  He dropped the smoldering butt of the cigarette and crushed it with his boot heel.

  “I was planning on leaving in the morning,” he said.

  Jake said, “I understand.”

  It looked like the boy wanted to say something else, but when he didn’t, Jake turned and went out and went down the stairs and out through the lobby. He was aware now of everything around him—the desk clerk, an old fellow sitting in the lobby reading a newspaper, the slow tock of the Regulator clock above the desk. He had begun to prepare himself for the confrontation with the cowboys and moved with caution, his gaze sweeping and registering everything. His only advantage was he didn’t figure they’d come in separately; they’d come as a crew—it only made sense that they would. He looked up and down both sides of the street, did not see their horses tied up anywhere. Snow stood in drifts up against the boardwalk and along the east walls of the buildings. The wind was sharp and cold.

  Gus Boone met him halfway back to the jail.

  “There’s some people looking for you,” he said. “A kid and a old woman and a young girl with a baby.”

  Now what? he wondered.

  Tig stood watching from his window. He admired the grit of the lawman, but thought him foolish to try and face down Dallas and Perk and the others. But it ain’t my trouble no more, he told himself. I had my time and I lost and this is what they did to me. He moved away from the window and looked at his face in the speckled mirror that hung on the wall above a scarred commode. It was like looking at a ghost, he thought. Something ugly and awful and it caused him to cry to think of what they’d done to him and how he’d never be a handsome carefree young cowboy again. He drew back his lips and it was painful, and looked at the gap in his teeth, then quickly closed his mouth again. As much as he tried not to, his tongue kept finding that empty space where his teeth had been.

  He went over and took the bottle of laudanum and drank some of it and tossed himself down on the bed.

  Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn.

  Jake entered the jail and saw them standing there, gathered around the stove, Frisco glancing back toward the whore in the cell.

  “What are you doing here? Is the baby sick?”

  “He come threatening to kill us all,” the old woman shrieked.

  “Who did?”

  “That damn Dallas Fry!” she said. “He come and said if Marybeth don’t get rid of it”—she pointed toward the infant—“he’ll kill us all.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “This morning.”

  He saw the girl nodding in agreement.

  “We got no place to stay, mister,” Marybeth said.

  “Go on over to the hotel and get a room and tell the clerk to send me the bill.”

  “What about Dallas? You gone arrest him, or what?”

  “Don’t worry,” Jake said. “I’ll handle it. Just go over to the hotel.”

  He waited until they shuffled out, one following the other, saw them crossing the street and shuffling through the snow, a sad line of humanity. His anger toward the cowboys just got worse.

  He looked at the woman in the cell.

  He felt just as caged.

  22

  WILLY SILK LAY WONDERING about the prospects of death, something he had never allowed to enter his mind until now, with the searing pain in his back just below his ribs where the woman had stuck him with the knife. The man said he would probably not die, but how did the man know if he wasn’t a doctor? And why was he still pissing blood into a bucket? It didn’t take a doctor to figure out things were bad.

  A woman came in to ask if he wanted some breakfast. She was fairly plain to look at, but not unhandsome, he thought. He liked the sound of her voice.

  “No,” he said. “I ain’t up to eating.”

  “Well,” she said, “here is a small bell. If you get hungry or decide you need something, just ring it.”

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “I own this house. It was previously owned by a physician, and this part used to be his infirmary. My name is Clara Fallon.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, I sure don’t think I could eat anything.”

  She said, “Okay,” then started to turn.

  “That fellow,” he said. “One who was doctoring me, said he was a lawman. What’s his story?”

  She turned back, but kept her distance from the bed. There was something about this man that frightened her a little. He had an innocent enough face, but there was something cruel and hardened in his eyes.

  “He saved your life,” she said. “He cleaned your wound and stitched you up. Somebody else might have let you die, but he didn’t. Now, let me ask you something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What’s your story?”

  “Lady, you don’t even want to know.”

  “Sure I do, this is my house and I’d like very much to know who I’m dealing with under my roof.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” he said, his gaze more intimidating than before.

  “Fine,” she said and went out again and his eyes followed her, the sway of her
firm hips beneath the long blue skirt, but he had no interest in her in that way. The stabbing seemed to have ruined him on any woman because he’d been thinking about nothing but how much he hated them, what troubles they’d led him to ever since he had heard his own mother and his uncle Reese whispering behind closed doors that time. It was his first sense of betrayal by a woman and since that time there had been dozens of others.

  He rolled onto his side and lifted himself painfully up and set his feet on the floor. It took a great lot of effort, hard work, like bailing hay or some such, just to do that much. He sat breathing hard, his heart pounding in his chest. Then, when things subsided, he stood and, Jesus, it was the worst damn pain he’d ever had and he had a hard time standing straight up and had to bend slightly at the waist in order to withstand it.

  He shuffled over to a set of tall windows that let in the winter morning’s light. They went from ceiling to floor and had wine-colored drapes hanging from either side, which had been drawn back away to let in the light. He looked out and could see some of the town down the way, the buildings standing under a blanket of fresh snow. The wintry sight reminded him of his childhood, of better and happier times. He looked upon the town with deep regret that it wasn’t his town, his boyhood home. But there was something about it all that seemed familiar to him. He thought and thought through the ache of pain and the fog of laudanum. What was it, exactly, that seemed so familiar?

  Maybe it was something about the man, the lawman. Had he met him somewhere before? Maybe at some shooting match? In a saloon, maybe? The light of sunlight glancing off snow was of such brilliance that it caused him to seek out something dark to stare at—a roof line, a telegraph pole—anything to relieve the ache of glare. He remembered eating snow. It had no taste, just a cold sharp sensation. Those were the days before his uncle Reese came along and ruined everything.

  He shook his head thinking, trying to remember where he’d seen the lawman before. It didn’t seem to want to come to him. Maybe it was just his imagination. For how many men had he run into in his journey, in his carousing and shooting matches? Pimps and gamblers and men who would come up to him after the shows he’d performed in with Colonel Lily’s Wild West Combination. Men who wanted to shake his hand and look at his pistol and get his autograph. Men who wanted to introduce their wives to him, wives that often stole what he considered admiring glances. Maybe it was one of those men, one whose wife came to his hotel later that same evening, and knocked on his door and he would let them in and watch as they took off their clothes, saying, “You are a handsome young boy, Willy Silk. My husband can’t stop talking about you and I couldn’t stop thinking about you.” And he would watch them dress again after brief and almost violent sex and they would shyly, more often then not, say, “Of course you know I’ve never been here, it was all just a dream we shared, Willy, you do know that, don’t you?” And he would nod his head in ascent, knowing that the next day he would be in another town performing in another show and there would be other wives of men who wanted to shake his hand. The scenario repeated itself so often that maybe it was, after all, just a dream, now that he thought about it.

  But honestly, he could not remember any particular face of someone who looked like the lawman.

  He grew tired of standing there, leaning over to one side to relieve the ache, and limped back to the bed and lay down again, feeling sick from the motion. Then some men came in the side door and went over to the bed where the dead man lay and wrapped him in a blanket, grunting as they lifted the dead man, and carried him back out the side door again. They’d glanced at him once as they were doing their work, but didn’t say anything, then they were gone and the room was empty and he was relieved that they had taken the dead man because he couldn’t stand to look at him.

  And later the woman knocked on the door, then came in carrying a silver tray and on it was a china teapot with a rose pattern and a matching cup and she set it down next to his bed on a small carved wood stand and said, “I thought maybe you might like some tea. I know you’re probably one who likes coffee, but tea is much better for you when you’re sick.”

  Then she stood for a moment staring down at him. She reminded him of his ma a little, only not quite so old. She had a kind face, the sort of face you’d want your sister to have.

  “Thanks,” he said, for that is what he thought she was waiting for.

  He could hear the laughter of children somewhere in the house.

  “You’re welcome,” she said and turned and went out again.

  Tea, he thought. He’d never in his life drank tea.

  What is it about that lawman? he wondered.

  In the hotel room Marybeth Joseph repeated to Jake the incident that had brought them into Sweet Sorrow and he listened with more than a mild interest to what she had to say about how Dallas Fry had come and threatened them and what he said about her getting rid of the baby and the rest of it. He could see she was frightened and worried and wondered how it had come that a girl so young had bought herself so much trouble.

  The old woman sat on the bed, huddled in a blanket, and looked on with startled eyes. Frisco stood looking out the window down onto the snowy street, watching men on horses ride up and down, teamsters hawing their loads, some of the merchants now shoveling paths from their doorways, pushing the snow out into the street. He saw two men standing and talking, one of them smoking a black cigar, both of them in black coats and hats, and wished he had shot Dallas Fry when he had the chance, instead of giving him a warning. His cheek still burned with humiliation at having been slapped and having his rifle taken from him. Soon as he could, he’d go find a store and buy himself another bullet.

  “You got to help us,” Marybeth was saying.

  “Don’t worry,” Jake said, “I think you’ll be safe here.”

  “Will you go and arrest him and lock him up?”

  “Yes.” Jake knew the lie would give them each some measure of comfort.

  “Good,” the girl said. “My baby doesn’t want to nurse too well.”

  “Do you want me to look at her?”

  “Yes,” the girl said and held the baby forth and Jake examined the child and saw that its color wasn’t the best; its skin was the color of pearl, a sign that it was malnourished.

  “Send Frisco to the general store and have him buy a jar of honey and put a tiny bit on your nipples when you try and nurse.”

  The girl offered him a quizzical look.

  “For the sweetness,” Jake said. “The babe will suckle better.”

  “Where’s the general store?” Frisco said.

  “Follow me out and I’ll show you,” Jake said.

  Once out on the street again, Jake pointed out Otis Dollar’s place and told the boy that whatever he needed at the store as long as they were in town, to tell Mr. Dollar to put it on Jake’s tab.

  “Yes sir.”

  “Oh, and maybe get yourself some stick candy.”

  “I ain’t no kid,” Frisco said.

  “I know you’re not, just thought maybe you might like some.”

  The boy stuck out his hand for Jake to shake and Jake shook it.

  “I wouldn’t want to put you to no trouble, Marshal.”

  “It’s no trouble, son.”

  Then Jake watched as the kid went on down the sidewalk, stepping through the piles of snow that the wind had drifted up and he looked just like a small man on a mission with his fists jammed down deep inside his coat pockets and his rough old felt hat jammed down atop his head.

  “You let me out of this cell, let me escape, and I’ll let you have some free,” Sue said to Gus Boone, who was spooning out coffee grounds floating in his cup.

  “Free?” Gus said, looking up.

  She stood holding the bars of her cell door, her face pressed against them, and he could see how blue her eyes were—blue as a summer morning sky.

  “I couldn’t do that,” Gus said.

  “I need to get out of here. I can’t leave Narciss
a be by herself.”

  “You mean the China girl?” he said.

  “Yes. She can’t be by herself, she don’t know how to take care of herself. She depends on me.”

  “You know, I heard rumors about you two.”

  “Oh, I don’t care nothing about rumors. Let folks say what they want to. It don’t make no difference to me.”

  “It’s unnatural, what I heard about you and that China girl,” Gus said, sipping some of his coffee and tasting the grit of grounds caught in his teeth and using a fingernail to pry them out.

  “You let me out of here and I’ll prove to you there ain’t nothing unnatural about me,” Sue said.

  “It’s a tempting offer. I mean, just the thought of it, but the marshal would lock me up and throw away the key if I was to let you escape over something like that. You mind me asking, though, how much is it you’d charge me, say, once’t you was set free legal and working again, and I was to want to buy your services?” Gus had never bought himself a whore; he preferred spending his money on whiskey, thinking that the effects would last longer than they would lying with a woman.

  Sue looked at him with those cool morning blue eyes and said, “If you had all the money in the world, Gus Boone, it wouldn’t be enough for me to lay with you, you hairy son of a bitch.”

  He sort of had to grin about that and went back to picking the stray coffee grounds out of his teeth with a fingernail.

  “You sure got a mean mouth on you, gal. You want a cup of this coffee or something?”

  Willy Silk downed the last of the laudanum and lay on the bed, waiting for the effect to overtake him. And when at last it did, he saw his mother there in the corner of the room standing by the tall windows.

  “Ma?”

  “Yes, Willy.”

  “Ma, I thought you was dead. Reese told me you’d died.”

  She smiled and said, “Do I look dead to you, Willy darling?”