Winter Kill

by Bill Brooks

  Two men were rapidly approaching each other from opposite directions—one from the east end of town, the other from the west. They had their pistols drawn and aimed. One of the men was Sam Harrison, the other Jim Levy, and both had reputations as shootists. Cole knew them slightly but couldn’t attest to their abilities with side arms, for he’d never seen either of them shoot so much as a prairie dog. He couldn’t hear what they were shouting as they closed the distance between each other, but from about forty paces apart they began firing at each other.

  The sudden eruption of gunshots made the diners drop their forks and dive for shelter under the tables. Cole counted seven shots before he saw Harrison fall. He tumbled to the mud and lay there for a moment, then struggled to rise. Then Cole watched as Levy hurried to the wounded man, stopped a foot from him, aimed his pistol, and fired a final round into Harrison’s skull. Levy did this as casually as if it had been a turkey shoot. He then knocked the spent rounds from his revolver, re-loaded, and sauntered off toward the Blue Star, leaving Harrison sprawled in the muddy street. Cole didn’t know what their differences had been and it really wasn’t any of his concern, but it angered him that one man would kill another in such an indefensible position as Levy had just done.

  Several patrons rushed outside once the shooting subsided and pretty quickly a crowd had gathered around the body of the slain man.

  “Well, isn’t somebody going to do something?” a woman said. She was holding the hand of a child who stared wide-eyed at the dead man. “Doesn’t any of you have a sense of decency?”

  “Don’t know what you’d have us do, Anne. We ain’t got no law since Bledsoe was murdered,” a man in a brocade vest said. “’Sides, the way I saw it, it was a fair fight. Sam just wasn’t as good a shot as ole Jim was.”

  “Pick this man up and take him to Karl Cavandish’s,” Cole said, joining them. “The woman’s right … decent people don’t leave dead men lying on the street.”

  It took a moment before several of the bystanders grabbed up the corpse and carted him off to Cavandish’s Funeral Parlor.

  Cole surmised the woman was mistaken about his intentions, for she approached him and said: “I’m glad that somebody is willing to do something! Will you go and arrest the killer of that poor man?”

  “They were both armed,” Cole said. “No judge or jury would convict him.”

  She glared at Cole for a moment, then turned sharply and pulled the child after her.

  Cole walked over to the Blue Star, entered, and approached the bar where Jim Levy stood drinking with several men who were talking about the gunfight and buying him drinks. He didn’t seem to mind all the attention. Cole took a place along the oak. It wasn’t any of his business. That’s what he told himself. “Hell of a piece of gun work out there,” he said.

  Jim Levy turned toward Cole. “What say?”

  “The way you walked up and shot that man in the head once he was down … hell of a piece of gun work.”

  Levy stiffened. “I never shot two men in one day, mister. Don’t push your luck.”

  “No, Levy, you haven’t shot two men in one day and you won’t today, either, unless you’re a hell of a lot luckier with me than you were with Harrison.”

  His eyes narrowed. “I know you,” he said. “You was one of Ike Kelly’s men. John Henry Cole, that’s it.”

  “Yeah, that’s who I was.”

  “You looking to mix it up?” he demanded.

  Some of the men surrounding him looked eager to see Levy kill his second man that day. It had been a long, boring winter.

  “No. Just saying it doesn’t take a lot to walk up and shoot a wounded man.”

  “Well, maybe I ought to shoot you,” he said.

  “Yeah, maybe you ought to,” Cole said. “But I won’t miss like Harrison did, so you better not, either.”

  Levy’s features slackened and Cole knew the starch had gone out of him.

  Somebody standing to Levy’s right whispered to him that Cole was the one who’d killed Leo Foxx, the previous city marshal, and had sent Bill Longly to the gallows. That took some more of the starch out of Levy.

  “It was a fair fight, Cole,” Levy’s crony said. “We all saw it.”

  “Yeah, it was a fair fight,” Levy said. “The son-of-a-bitch stole a shirt of mine and I called him out on it.”

  “You killed a man over a shirt?”

  He nodded. “It was wool,” he said.

  “Jesus Christ,” Cole said, and walked away.

  Cole spent the rest of the day buying a new Mackinaw and a pair of boots for his trip to Nebraska and generally trying to kill time that was crawling by more slowly than a mud turtle. He knew, if he let himself, he could get drunk as sin just to forget why things were the way they were. At one time in his wild days, he’d known the bottle a lot better than he had known his own name. Two years of fighting for a losing cause in the War Between the States, then losing a wife and a son to milk sickness had left him adrift in a world where only Tennessee sipping whiskey and the hollow affections of whores could come anywhere close to easing the pain and keeping the nightmares at bay.

  John Henry Cole was forty-one years old and he’d already outlived most of his contemporaries. He felt like a man alone in the world and the hand of desire for old escapes kept knocking at his door—all he had to do was answer. And he almost did answer it that night when Katy O’Brien showed up at his room in the back of Sun Lee’s laundry.

  “I saw the look you gave me this marnin’,” she said. “I know when a man is interested.”

  Cole felt ashamed of himself because she was right. He had looked at her like a man who was interested.

  He’d been lying on the bed in the darkness when he’d heard the knock. Out of habit, he had slid the self-cocker from its holster and told whoever it was to enter. The dim light from the hall behind her was enough to make him ease the hammer down on the pistol and lay it aside. That’s when she told him that she noticed the way he’d looked at her.

  “I won’t lie to you,” Cole said. “But I’m not looking for any company tonight.”

  “I am,” she said, closing the door behind her. Cole sat up on the side of the bed and lit the oil lamp and watched the flame climb up the glass chimney and spread a soft yellow glow in that corner of the room.

  “I’ve brought a bottle of whiskey,” she said. “For us.”

  She set a three-quarters full bottle of Red Thunder—a bust-head liquor made of alcohol, plug tobacco, and snake heads—next to the lamp, then Cole watched her remove her black wool capote and scarf and toss them on the foot of the bed. She still wore the calico dress he’d seen her in at the café. It rustled when she moved.

  “Will you pour me a glass?” she said.

  Cole excused himself and went out to the laundry and found a pair of teacups in a cupboard where he knew Sun kept his plates and bowls. He had no intention of involving himself with Katy O’Brien, but he knew the look of loneliness when he saw it and understood the need for company on a desolate night, so he didn’t turn her out like he felt he probably should have.

  “I sometimes think of killing myself,” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed next to Cole. The glass cup in her hand cost more than a whole barrel of the cheap whiskey held inside it. “Life, you know, it gets hard sometimes.”

  Cole watched her drink from the cup, putting it to her lips and taking a deep swallow before holding it out for him to refill it.

  “I came all this way for a man only to discover that the man I came all this way for didn’t want me after a few months of having me. Strange creatures, men are. They hound you and hound you until they get what they want, then, when you give it to them, they don’t want it any more. Like little boys, really.”

  Her Irish brogue was tinged with deep bitterness.

  “After that, I quit trying to figure it out,”
she said. “I had to eat, to live, you know? And there’s only one thing a man will pay a girl for ’way out here … anywhere, for that matter. So when Garrity left me, I figured why should I give myself to the next man who wants me, only to wind up in the same boat? Why should I do that now?” She turned her face directly toward Cole.

  “I can’t think of any reason,” Cole said, and poured himself half a cup of her whiskey.

  “You are damn’ right,” she said. “So I began charging for it, and I defy anyone to tell me it’s wrong to want to survive.”

  Cole didn’t know what Katy O’Brien wanted, so he just listened.

  “Thing is, a garl can kid herself for only so long. And after a time, after she’s got herself enough of a reputation, you know, ain’t no man going to want to take her for his wife … not when he can get what he wants for a dollar or two and not be troubled with the rest of it.”

  Cole tossed back his drink and reached for the makings.

  “Would you mind rolling me a cigarette, too?” she said.

  He rolled each of them one and they smoked in silence, the slow burn of the paper replacing whatever words they might have shared for that time. She drank her whiskey and asked for more, and Cole filled her cup again and she drank that. Then she leaned over to set her cup down next to the bottle, and, as she did, she kissed him. Her mouth was soft and wet and her inexperience at such an intimacy proved itself in the awkwardness of the kiss. Cole didn’t kiss her back, and he didn’t pull away. He was torn between his own loneliness and hers, knowing for her, at least, it didn’t matter who or what he was, just as long as he was willing to drink with her and listen to her and share the empty hours with her.

  The kiss lingered but a moment, then she pulled away and looked at him.

  “You saying you don’t want me?” she asked. “Am I not woman enough for you, or is it because I’m a prostitute?”

  “You’re young enough to be my daughter,” Cole said.

  “I thought men liked that. Men are always telling me how much they like it that I’m young.”

  “Maybe some men, Katy, but not all of us are like that.”

  “You don’t have any desire for me?” she said, her hand resting on Cole’s knee.

  “Yes, I have some desire for you, and for that I’m ashamed. I’ll drink with you, and I’ll sit here and talk with you and listen to you, but I won’t sleep with you.”

  She looked duly disappointed.

  “I’ve come to that,” she said. “Where a decent man won’t have me even for free.”

  “How much is passage to New York?” Cole said.

  “What?”

  “I’ll be happy to buy you passage back to New York, if that will help.”

  “Do you think a garl like me will fare any better in New York than out here on the frontier?” she wondered. “Ha, the only thing different would be that back in New York I’d have a pimp to see I worked and gave him every dime.”

  “Then what’s the answer for you, child?” Cole asked.

  She lowered her gaze and let her hand slide from Cole’s knee. “Answer,” she said. “There is none. I am what I am, what the fates have made me. I’m a young whore who will soon be an old one and we all know what happens to them, eh?”

  “It doesn’t have to be like that.”

  “Oh, surely it does, sar. How else can it be?”

  Cole took $20 from his saddle pocket and placed it in her hand.

  “You can do with this what you want, Katy. You can spend it on liquor or opium, or buy yourself passage back to New York. It’s not much, but it could be a start.”

  She stared at the money for a long time.

  “I don’t want it,” she said, and tried to give it back to him.

  Cole curled her fingers into a fist. “Keep it,” he said.

  “I’d like to do something for you,” she said.

  “Maybe someday you can.”

  She kissed him again, then stood and put on her capote and scarf, and took what was left of her whiskey and said: “I thought it would surely be a cold day in hell before a man ever gave me money without me giving him something in return.”

  “Judging by the sound of that wind outside,” Cole said, “it surely is.”

  “Cheyenne and hell,” she said. “It’s all like the same place, ain’t it?”

  “One and the same.”

  “Yes, exactly.” She laughed and waved her bottle and slipped away.

  Cole lay on the bed for a long time and stared at the darkness and listened to the wind chattering against the glass, and it sounded like the teeth of hunger gnawing at his soul.

  Chapter Five

  A hard knocking and a loud feminine voice shattered the dream Cole was having. He opened his eyes to the dull, margaric light of morning that angled its way through the window of his room. It took him a few moments to get his bearings. The dream had been about a woman and a moonlit river that ran red.

  “John Henry! John Henry!” The voice was Cleopatra’s.

  Cole pulled on a pair of drawers and opened the door.

  “You’ve got to come!” she said. “It’s Karl Cavandish!”

  “What’s happened?” Cole asked as he put on his shirt and boots.

  “You won’t believe,” she said. “Come quick!”

  When he emerged from Sun Lee’s, he could see a crowd gathered at the far end of the street and directly in front of the Blue Star saloon.

  In his rush he had grabbed up the self-cocker but had left without his hat. A man on the streets of Cheyenne without his hat wasn’t considered fully dressed. Cleo hurried ahead of him toward the crowd, holding her skirts and high-stepping through the mud. For a crowd, it was a quiet bunch. Cole pushed his way through and that’s when he saw Cavandish and Long Bill Longly—well, the corpse of Long Bill Longly, stiff as a board and trussed to a hitching rail with baling wire. Cavandish had himself a mean-looking shotgun that he was aiming at the dead man.

  “You killed that boy, you evil son-of-a-bitch!” Cavandish cursed. There was a dried rose in the lapel of Long Bill’s black suit that looked fresher than its owner, and all in all it was a real strange scene.

  “Karl,” Cole said.

  The undertaker looked around and Cole could see he was, if anything, drunker this morning than he had been the day before.

  “I dug the bastard up, John Henry, just like I said I was going to. Now I’m going to give him some of his own medicine, going to cash in his chips for what he did to José.”

  “Looks to me like Long Bill’s chips have already been cashed in, Karl. You really think this will make you feel better … blasting him with that scatter-gun?”

  “God damn, it took me half the night to dig him up, but I did it! I want the whole town to see what happens to trash that kills innocent boys!”

  Cavandish’s clothes were splattered with mud, even the seat of his pants. Tears ran down his cheeks and his hair stuck out wildly. He was a sorry and pathetic sight. Cole looked around at the crowd but no one said a word. From the far end of town, the engineer on the morning flyer from Denver cut loose the whistle as he approached the station and the sharp blast caused several people to jump.

  “Karl, this would be unseemly if you were to shoot a dead man,” Cole said. “Folks around here would find a thing like that hard to forget.”

  “I don’t want them to forget!” Cavandish shouted. He had a hard time maintaining his balance and staggered about like he was stepping in post holes, trying hard not to topple over.

  Cole was worried that he’d fall and accidentally shoot himself. “Why don’t we go have a drink and talk about this,” he suggested.

  Cavandish blinked, looked around, looked at Long Bill, whose eyes were closed and oblivious to the undertaker’s rancor, then back at Cole. “Soon as I fry his hash!” Cavandish said, trying to s
teady the twin barrels on the stony figure of Long Bill. Death had not been kind to Bill. Some of the skin was sloughing off his hands and cheeks. His color had turned an ash-gray and his hair was stringy.

  “Maybe you should use this,” Cole said, offering him the self-cocker. “Makes less of a mess.” Cavandish started to protest the offer of the pistol until Cole reminded him that there were women and children in the crowd. “You don’t want to leave those little ones with nightmares all the rest of their days, do you, Karl? That’s no way for people to remember you. Besides, some of those pellets might miss their mark, hit someone innocent.”

  Cavandish looked sheepish and a bit contrite. “You’re right,” he said, and started to trade his shotgun for the pistol.

  Just then a voice like the sound of gravel in a bucket stirred from the crowd. “Jesus Christ! I’ve seen about everything now!”

  A voice like that you don’t forget in a lifetime. Parting the crowd of gawkers like Moses parting the Red Sea came Harve Ledbettor, Esquire, formerly of Texas and lately of Denver high society, fully decked out in a beaver hat, buckskin jacket, and striped trousers tucked down inside a pair of fancy hand-tooled boots. He had a hog-leg with a twelve-inch barrel strapped to his hip in a silver-encrusted holster. The gun was a Ned Buntline Special. He even wore a checkered cape like the one Wild Bill Hickok used to wear. He looked for all the world like he’d just stepped off the front cover of one of Dewitt’s Ten Cent Romances, an actor about to give his greatest performance. Wild Bill and Bill Cody would have laughed out loud.

  “Karl Cavandish, when the hell did you start supplying your own business?” Harve cawed. “Why, that man looks deader’n Stonewall Jackson, God rest his soul.”

  It took Cavandish several seconds to recognize Harve, but as soon as he did, tears formed in his eyes. “Harve, is it really you?” Then, seeing the empty sleeve, he said: “Where’s your arm?”

  “Left it up in Rock Creek to a woman with a hoe, nothing but a bone by now, I suspect, all the meat chewed off by the coyotes and wolves. I aim to go back there someday and see if I can find it, take it, and have it bronzed now that I can afford to. Now let me ask you something, why the hell are you getting ready to plug a dead man?”