Sudden Country

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I wasn’t referring to the troop train at Centralia. I meant the federal payroll train outside St. Louis in 1863.” The Judge pretended to read his notes, but from my angle I could see he was watching Flynn sideways under his lashes. Flynn belched.

  “I don’t know that one. I was down with fever most of ‘63.” He sang:

  They died of Southern fever,

  and Southern steel and shot;

  and I wisht it was three million

  instead of what we got!

  The interviewer didn’t pursue the point immediately. He spent some time exploring Flynn’s relations with Captain William Clarke, Quantrill and Frank and Jesse James, then left the war to examine the raider’s career as a bandit during peacetime. Flynn’s responses were detailed, gleefully unrepentant, and (for I must be as candid) sufficiently bloodthirsty for the ears of an impressionable boy of thirteen. Had my mother known what I was hearing, I have no doubt that her infatuation with the Judge would have been greatly strained, if not ended. In his defense I must depose that he seemed to have forgotten my presence entirely. As for Flynn, he positively enjoyed performing for a larger audience, cutting sly glances my way whenever his narrative waxed especially graphic. He became vague only when Judge Blod’s probings entered the year 1863, particularly the details of the St. Louis payroll robbery, and the days immediately preceding Flynn’s arrest for murder in Amarillo six years later. Whenever the conversation turned in either direction he would grow morose, renewing his assault upon the contents of the flask.

  “Why did you kill Peckler?”

  “Son of a bitch cheated at cards.” The flask went up

  “You weren’t playing cards.”

  “I recollected suddenlike.”

  “You cut out his heart with your Bowie and left him bleeding on the saloon floor while you ordered another drink. He was your only friend in Texas.”

  “A friend don’t call a friend a liar.”

  “You said he was a card cheat.”

  “That too.” The flask went up.

  The Judge had stopped writing moments before. He was studying Flynn openly now. “What do you hear from Black Ben?”

  I have said that Flynn’s face was pale–doubtless a legacy of his lifetime in Huntsville. Now it became positively colorless. His eyes smoldered like cinders on a pillowslip. Suddenly he lurched to his feet, clawed for balance, and groped for the knife on his belt. But his inebriation had dulled his reflexes and Judge Blod, quite forgetting his sore foot, leapt from a sitting position onto the porch. He nearly kicked me over.

  “You are weary from your journey,” he said. “I shall leave you to rest.”

  He retreated inside. Belatedly, I reached for the door as it was closing. Flynn’s knife sprang handle-first out of the wooden frame next to my head.

  “Hand me my sticker, boy.”

  Hoping that history was not preparing to repeat itself, I worked the blade free with difficulty and crept toward the bench. My intention was to place it there and withdraw indoors before he could move. A hand horny with old filth and callosities pinned my wrist to the bench.

  “How’s your eye, boy?” His breath was as rank as before, but now something new had insinuated itself, a metallic odor that if he were anyone else I should have said was fear.

  I stammered that my vision was satisfactory. He held on. “Spot a stranger, would you?”

  I nodded. He let go of me then, searched among his clothing as if for vermin, and produced a stained leather pouch which he extracted a handful of notes, some new, some greasy and dilapidated, and one the color of parchment that stood out among the greenbacks. He left it there, peeling a crisp dollar off the outside and holding it up. It was last year’s issue and I supposed it had been given to him by the Judge.

  “This here’s yours,” he said. “Another one for every face you see in this country you didn’t before. Particular I want you to look out for a big man with a black mark on the left side of his face like branded Cain and a Judas eye. You feature that?”

  “What is a Judas eye?”

  “Glass, boy. With a wicked shine in it as like as if he could still see with it. It’s the ones he’s murdered he’s looking at. You see a man who answers to that, you rabbit-run back here and tell old Flynn and there’s four more of these for you Johnny-on-the-spot.” He grabbed my hand just as the flow of blood was returning and crumpled the dollar into it. He closed my fingers over the note and held on. His eyes looked as if they were floating in blood. “You see someone like that and I don’t hear it from you, I’ll cut off your ears and cure them and hang them from my watch chain. You feature that?”

  Again I nodded. He pushed me away and I mounted the porch quickly and opened the door. Before closing it behind me I glanced back and saw him rescue the pewter flask from the ground where it had fallen.

  He was not at supper that evening. Judge Blod was, seated at an angle to the table with his foot supported upon a vacant chair. We had no other boarders at the time, and when Mother went into the kitchen to bring back dessert I took the opportunity to ask the Judge about Black Ben.

  “Some sort of superstition among the men who rode with Anderson and Quantrill,” he said, wiping his lips. “I’ve heard men who would cut a stranger’s throat for looking at them crossly speak the name in whispers like frightened children. Still I was not prepared for the violence of Flynn’s reaction. Whoever or whatever this Black Ben is or was, he does for a bogey among old nightriders.”

  “Do you think Flynn took part in that train robbery?”

  “I think it likely. It will make an ideal subject for the book.”

  There was a hollowness in his words, but I was prevented from pursuing the point by Mother’s return. Judge Blod retired directly after finishing a large slice of blueberry pie and I had not the opportunity to speak with him again that night. When I went up to my own room sometime later, there was a light under Flynn’s door. He did not sing that night, however.

  I saw the first stranger at church that Sunday.

  I was not the only one who noticed him. He was quite as tall as Lloyd Weems, Panhandle’s blacksmith and the tallest man in town, and nearly twice as thick through the middle, although he was not fat. His features were plainly Indian, dark as old blood with sharp black eyes crowding a nose like a bent wagon hitch, a straight line of mouth, and blue-black hair cut in a bowl. He did not go in, but stood outside the door studying each parishioner’s face as it went inside. His clothes were unremarkable except for a canvas coat too heavy for the warm spring morning. I was certain it concealed a weapon.

  He was gone when we filed out after the Reverend Thomharvester’ s sermon. Muttering some excuse to my mother about a forgotten errand, I ran ahead of her back to the Good Part and found Flynn seated alone on the bench in the backyard, gripping his flask. I blurted out my news.

  “Joe Snake,” he said, so low I scarcely heard him. His whiskers were on his chest and it was clear he already had a fair start on that day’s measure, although it was not yet noon. “Alone, you say?”

  “Just him. I think he is armed.”

  “He wouldn’t be Joe Snake if he ain’t. You wasn’t followed?”

  I shook my head. In truth I was not sure, for I had been too full of my mission to take note.

  “Well, they mean to find me if they looked in church.” He swigged whiskey. The overflow glittered in his beard. “Boy, is there a gunsmith in this town?”

  “Mr. Sterner.”

  He set the flask down on the bench, got out his pouch, and handed me a wad of greenbacks. “Ask him has he a Navy Colt’s .36. If he hasn’t, a .44 Army will do. Give him his price and get powder and shot and bundle it back here pronto. Take your dollar out of what’s left.”

  “Yes, sir.” I folded the money into a shirt pocket and buttoned the flap.

  “Flynn’s counting on you, boy.”

  It was as close to civil as he had ever come with me. I said yes sir again and cut across the Fredericksons’ yar
d next door to avoid intercepting Mother.

  The pistol, shiny black with a cedar handle, had a long heavy barrel and a smooth cylinder. Mr. Sterner, whose command of English was too tenuous to phrase questions he wanted to ask, explained in broken sentences that the weapon had been converted to accept cartridges and sold me a box of them as well. I carried my purchases home in a sack.

  When I opened the front door, Joe Snake was standing in the parlor beside my mother.

  Chapter 3

  QUANTRILL’S GOLD

  He looked even bigger indoors. His blue-black head threatened the ceiling, and a parlor spacious enough to allow five full-grown boarders to stretch their bones of an evening seemed scarcely to contain his barrel torso. His scent, not nearly so rank as Flynn’s, but redolent of woodsmoke and worn leather, filled the corners. His coat was open and his right hand rested on the curved ivory handle of a big pistol thrust under his belt in front.

  “Flynn with you?” he demanded, in a rattling whisper that seemed to explain his name.

  I looked at my mother, attired in the blue dress with white ruffles and flowered hat she wore for church and still clutching her reticule. “This gentleman wishes to visit Mr. Flynn,” she said. “He isn’t in his room. Do you know where he went?” Her eyes flickered toward the back of the house, telling me much.

  “I think he went into town,” I said after a moment. There was a silence. Then a hoarse drunken baritone drifted in from the backyard:

  Oh, I’m a good old rebel,

  now that’s just what I am!

  As Joe Snake listened, his broad dark face divided in a horrible smile. The top part seemed to peel away from the bottom exactly in the middle, exposing grotesque teeth like crooked headstones. His head turned slowly. The big pistol came out.

  I pulled the Navy Colt’s out of the sack, or almost. The iron sight snagged the material and the sack dangled from the end with the box of cartridges in the bottom. I hauled back the hammer with both thumbs. It made a loud double click.

  The Indian’s head came back around. The awful grin vanished, but now a black emptiness opened behind his eyes. It put me in mind of fresh graves. “That gun ain’t loaded.”

  I almost gave up then, for he was right. Then I realized that the sack concealed the empty chambers from his view, and that he was merely trying to trick me. I held on. It was not easy. Heavy to begin with, the barrel was weighted down further by the sack and its contents and wanted to pull forward and down. As I fought it, my field of fire drifted from Joe Snake’s chest down to his groin and back up. Perhaps it was my saving grace. Although his own aim upon me was steady, he could not know where I would hit if the Navy went off. In spite of that, he grinned again.

  “Getting heavy, uh? I bet you like to put it down. Maybe I just wait.”

  It was getting to be like holding a flagstaff at arm’s -length. My tendons ached. The smooth wooden grip grew slippery in my hands. My aim was drifting more widely. Mother was in as much danger of being shot as the Indian, or would have been if the Navy were loaded.

  “Maybe I don’t wait,” said Joe Snake. “Maybe I just take that away from you now.” He took a step forward.

  Judge Blod came downstairs, buttoning his waistcoat. A stair creaked and the Indian swung around in a crouch behind the pistol. Mother hit him with her reticule.

  The previous autumn she had read an article in Galaxy about English gentlewomen who had been set upon by Irish toughs in the London Underground. Not knowing what an Underground was, but refusing to wait until the custom migrated to Panhandle, she had taken to carrying a pair of iron doorknobs in her reticule whenever she left the house. Their combined weight struck Joe Snake behind his left ear and he fell to one knee, dropping his pistol. It clattered across the hardwood floor. Mother took two steps and dropped her skirts over it.

  Outside, Flynn sang:

  I won’t be reconstructed,

  I’m better now than them;

  andfor the carpetbagger

  I don’t give a damn!

  The Judge had dropped down when he saw the weapon swinging his way and remained crouched behind a stair rod. The Indian, still half-kneeling, shook his head like a dog, looked around for the pistol, then lurched upright and charged the open door behind me. I barely got out of his path.

  In front of the house a horse screamed and I turned in time to see Mr. Knox, my schoolmaster, drawing rein aboard his black buggy in the street. His dun mare Cassiopeia reared and pawed the air. Joe Snake picked himself up out of the dust where he had fallen almost under the horse’s hoofs, ran across the street, and disappeared between John Everhorn’s house and stable on the other side.

  “Damnation!” shouted Mr. Knox; then, spying my mother standing behind me in the doorway, swept off his gray wideawake hat. As he was still struggling with the reins in his other hand, the gesture was impressive. “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Grayle. That fellow–”

  “The thing is in hand, sir.”

  I looked back. Judge Blod, back on his feet, had come downstairs and retrieved Joe Snake’s big pistol from where Mother had left it. Now he carried the trophy past me onto the front porch.

  “A renegade, imagining he could take advantage of gentle Christians on the Sabbath,” he explained. “It is not the first time I have disarmed one of his tribe.”

  Mr. Knox finished placating Cassiopeia and climbed down from his seat. Standing on the ground in front of the porch he was at eye level with the Judge. “May I?” He held out his palm. The Judge placed the weapon in it.

  “Schofield.” Mr. Knox took it by the frame and turned it, revealing seven notches carved inside the grip. At length he gave it back. “My compliments, sir. Unless the man is a mountebank, you’ve bested a formidable foe.”

  “Constantine Blod–Judge, New York Superior Court, retired.” The Judge inclined his head. “He would have been more formidable but for the estimable lady inside. And the boy, of course.”

  “Henry Knox.” He put on his hat to shake the Judge’s free hand and turned his scrutiny on me, including the Navy Colt’s dangling forgotten at my side. The sack, still attached, rested on the floor. “If you equipped yourself for learning as well as you do for fighting, David, I wouldn’t have to trouble your mother on Sunday.”

  I said nothing, but inside I was seething. It is no sweet thing to have stood off a murderous attack by an Indian only to be dressed down for one’s schoolwork in the very next minute.

  “Professor, Mr. Knox?” asked the Judge.

  “Schoolteacher, Judge Blod.” The smile beneath his moustaches was deprecating.

  “Yet a military man, from your bearing.”

  “I had the honor to serve the Army of the Potomac.” Behind the house, Flynn sang:

  I hates the glorious Union

  ‘tis dripping with our blood!

  I hates the striped banner,

  I fought it all I could.

  “What in thunder is that?” demanded Mr. Knox.

  “My guest, I’m afraid.” Mother’s hand smoothed the hair on the back of my head, a gesture she made only in the presence of Mr. Knox. “Judge, the Federicksons will complain.”

  “I shall require assistance. Mr. Knox, I find it distasteful to prevail.” The Judge sounded hopeful.

  Mr. Knox mounted the porch, towering there. Although he was not as tall as Joe Snake, his leanness and straightness of spine always made him appear to be looking down as from a great height. “Head or feet, Judge Blod?”

  “Feet, Mr. Knox. The spirit is willing, but the back is weak.” I noticed that he made no mention of his “wound,” or indeed, in Mr. Knox’s discriminating presence, of service in the war. The incident of Joe Snake, whose pistol now reposed beneath the Judge’s waistcoat, had done much to dislodge the scales from my eyes.

  It did not quite come to carrying, although it might as well have. Flynn was nearly unconscious on the bench when the pair hoisted him to his feet and, supporting him unevenly with his arms slung across their shoulde
rs, half-dragged him inside. I held doors and moved furniture out of hazard’s way while they trundled him toward the staircase. At the bottom he came to himself and grasped the newel post, demanding to know what son of a bitch had stolen his flask. Mr. Knox nodded sharply over the old raider’s shoulder and I fetched the item from the bench where we had left it. Flynn snatched it from me, swallowed what remained of its contents, and allowed the procession to continue, singing:

  Three hundred thousand Yankees

  is stiff in Southern dust!

  We got three hundred thousand

  before they conquered us!

  When at last they descended, minus Flynn and mopping their faces, I had finished setting places for us all in the dining room. Mother served chicken and dumplings and biscuits with butter that melted into pools in the steaming insides when we spread it. I’d noticed the Judge trying to dissemble his limp on the way to the table, most likely to avoid a last-minute substitution of Mother’s sickroom soup. All of his many deceptions had suddenly become apparent to me.

  “Now, what was that about?” asked Mr. Knox, when we were all seated with heaped plates in front of us.

  “I did not care for the man’s manner,” said Mother, spreading her napkin in her lap. “I do not care overmuch for Mr. Flynn’s either, but he is a guest in my house and I will have no one come to harm in it. David, remove that horrible thing from the table at once. How did you come to have it in the first place?”

  I got up to transfer the Navy Colt’s and sack of ammunition from the table where I had placed them to a drawer of the china cabinet. “Mr. Flynn sent me to purchase it.”

  “Guns are no fit things for a parlor,” she said. “If we had law here we would have no need for them.”

  Mr. Knox buttered a piece of biscuit the size of his thumbnail. It looked like something a former cavalry officer would do. “The nearest law is in Amarillo. That fellow could be halfway to Mexico City by the time it arrived. Who is this man Flynn?”