Dark Trail

by Ed Gorman

  Then he’d think maybe he should get on the train, the way Rittenauer suggested, and hold Sarah’s hand till they were in some new land all shiny with promise and hope. He did not want to die, in fact was quite afraid to die. The irony was that, with Beth gone, he felt dead already. He wanted to cry, right here in front of the goddamn kids, bawl his eyes out because he felt sick inside, sick in a way no disease could ever make him feel, the sickness of irrep­arable loss.

  “See, I tole ya. He ain’t fer shit. He missed that can clean. Sh—it. Fancy fuckin’ gunny.”

  The kid, a towhead with fiieckles and big buck teeth, spoke these words at exactly the wrong time. Because Evans could no longer abide them crowding him this way with the stupid opinions they’d gotten from their parents.

  He whirled, thrusting his gun back into his holster, and picked up the loudmouth by the front of his shirt, slamming him against the oak tree that provided leafy shade for the horses.

  “You say that to my face, you punk, and see what happens!”

  But before the chubby twelve-year-old could say anything—he was just dangling there in Evans’ iron grip—an ironic male voice said, “My, my, Mr. Evans. One would surely hope that your nerves are steadier when you face Mr. Rittenauer this evening.”

  Evans turned to see Tom Adair’s man Hollister walking toward him. There was a certain switch in his gait and a certain sweetness in his smile that troubled Evans. Maybe being around a powerful, angry man all the time made you into a woman.

  Evans set the boy down.

  The boy said, “He’s gonna kill you, Evans. Just like my old man says.”

  “Then you can come out to the cemetery and piss on my grave, can’t you?” Evans said harshly.

  All the other boys laughed. Evans asked, “Anybody here think I’m going to beat Rittenauer?”

  No hands showed.

  Evans looked at Hollister. “Somebody could make a lot of money betting on me.”

  “Yeah,” the chubby towhead said, “but you ain’t gonna win.”

  “You boys git now,” the old black man said. Even in this heat he wore his coarse blue button-up sweater. He was the color of mahogany, and he had eyes as brown and sad as the roan in the corral. “Git and git good and git now,” he said again, clapping his hands as if he were scattering chickens.

  The boys ran away, tossing curse words over their shoulders.

  Hollister said, “I thought I’d come over and offer you a ride out to the ranch.”

  “I can find my own ride.” There was a harshness in Evans’ voice. Definitely something about Hollister that he didn’t like or trust. “Anyway, that isn’t why you’re here.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No. You wanted to see if I was gonna go through with it.”

  The too-sweet smile was back on Hollister’s too-sweet lips. “You’re a very observant man, Mr. Evans.”

  “Well, for your information, I’m not backing out. I’m going out to Adair’s ranch and get that ten thousand dollars.”

  Hollister said, the smile almost but not quite gone, “I’m told the woman went back to him. What’s her name—Beth?”

  Evans could have gotten angry, even slapped Hollister for pushing him this way. But he just said, “You like to push people, don’t you, Mr. Hollister?”

  Hollister smiled. “I suppose I do, now that you mention it.”

  “Be careful who you push,” Evans said. “They might push back.”

  He left Hollister standing there. He went back to his room to wash up for the ride out to the Adair ranch.

  By 1886 it had all started to end for many large cattle ranchers. With bank failures and big Eastern investors nervous about the cattle industry, dollars were tight and banker lending boards conservative. And without a banker, and a ready line of credit, even the most swaggering of cattlemen were reduced to meekness.

  Tom Adair remained the exception. His ranch claimed nearly 800,000 acres in four different counties, with nearly 95,000 head of cattle. It was boasted—at least by Adair himself in moments of whiskey pride—that he had invested in more than 4,000 miles of barbed wire to keep his claim inviolate. When he stood on the hill where he’d buried two generations of blood kin, including an irascible yet beloved father, everything he saw sprawling to the line of the horizon belonged to him.

  The ranch house itself was the centerpiece of his spread, a Victorian fortress so exotic in its layout and decoration that a woman from Chicago had taken a train out here just so she could write about it for her newspaper. Adair liked to stand on the hill just at dawn and look at the sun rising just over the edge of the spired roof. In the early morning, the red roof tiles were still damp with dew and they shone like fire in the slanting golden sun rays.

  Because of the ranch, he’d become a favorite of the wealthy and the powerful. A short-haul train line had built a leg of track that came within six miles of the westernmost edge of his spread. Surreys, stagecoaches, and wagons picked up an unending stream of passengers, important men in dark suits, walrus mustaches, and top hats; women beautiful in bustles and picture hats and small steady smiles meant to please.

  Many nights, beneath an arc of midnight sky and furious western stars, violin music could be heard on the prairies. Or there was the voice of a celebrated diva, or the lively cadences of a marching band, the trumpets bright as Fourth of July fireworks.

  You could tell a rancher’s importance by the kind of people he could attract to his ranch. Tom Adair, twice married, twice divorced, restless, a man who’d once paid a Negro one hundred dollars to shoot three Chinese in cold blood because one of Adair’s friends had never actually seen a living person die—Adair got only the top of the list, from governors to businessmen to the whores most popular in any given season.

  Yet for all the amusements he’d brought to his ranch, the gunfight this evening was perhaps his best idea yet. As the guests arrived throughout the day, he teased each with a promise of “something very special tonight.” His guests knew enough to be excited. If Tom Adair said something was very special, it would indeed be.

  Down by the horse barns there was a big corral where Adair often staged rodeos, particularly in the fall when breeding stock was being rotated. It was here that he had built a small grandstand, replete with colorful pennants crackling in the cool prairie winds. The grandstand, as he never tired of pointing out, easily sat two hundred.

  Tonight, inside the corral and directly in front of the grandstand, Adair would have Rittenauer and Evans face off.

  He stood in the center of the corral now. The Mexes had combed the dirt this morning, raking it free of horseshit and pieces of broken horseshoes.

  He stood in the dusty sunlight imagining how it would happen tonight: the two men at opposite ends of the vast corral, the tense crowd watching rapturously, the men drawing closer, closer, and then the sound of gunfire, one man beginning to crumble a few moments after the shots were fired.

  Would they ever stop talking about it? He could hear them now in their dens and country clubs and salons. Did anybody ever give better parties than handsome Tom Adair? Why, did you hear about the night he had a gunfight staged right on his own ranch? And a man actually died?

  Now, as he circled the corral, looking up at the grandstand from the point of view of the gunmen, he thought of his father and how much the old man had hated rich people. Even when the old man had owned as many as twenty banks, he still thought of himself as poor and oppressed. And he’d lived that way, too, washing his clothes again and again till they were rags, whining when the day came to buy new ones, and never buying anything fancy for the house when a perfectly functional version of the thing could be had from Sears, Roebuck or Montgomery Wards.

  The old man certainly wouldn’t have enjoyed himself here tonight. Not his sort of folks.

  But for Tom Adair, tonight would be a golden moment. Never before at one party had he had two senators and a governor.

  If people didn’t know that Tom Adair was importan
t before, they would certainly know it tonight.

  He took one more look up at the grandstand.

  My God, he could hear their screams and shouts now. When the gunfight started. When one of the men fell down dead.

  Oh, no, they’d never quit talking about what they saw this evening. In every fashionable gathering place from Ohio to California, Tom Adair’s ingenuity as a host would be celebrated.

  Even above the prairie winds now, he heard it; the gunfire as it would be tonight.

  Then he went to greet a newly arrived stage, just in time to glimpse the nicely turned leg of a woman stepping down to join the other guests already off the stage.

  “You must be Tom,” she said, in a discreetly flirtatious way, obviously impressed equally with his good looks and the ranch.

  “Yes, yes, I am,” he smiled.

  And he sounded quite happy, even smug about it, as if there could be no fate better than being Tom Adair.

  “When’s the last time you ate?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, eat something now.”

  “I’m not hungry now.”

  “Eat anyway.”

  “Shut up, Leo. I’m sick of you talking.”

  There was nothing to say to that.

  He sat silent and smoked his cigarette.

  “You should have let me shoot him.”

  “No, I shouldn’t,” he said.

  “He’s going to kill Frank.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe? You know he is, Leo.”

  Guild sighed. They were in a restaurant. In the late afternoon the place was hot and smelled of cooking grease. A man sat at the counter eating pork chops. His mouth and hands were greasy and he smacked his lips loudly as he ate, which irritated Guild irrationally. Guild wanted to go over and tell the guy to eat like a civilized man or throw down the chops and get the hell out of here.

  From the pocket of his shirt, Guild took a small blue ticket. He laid it in the center of their table.

  Sarah looked at it. “What’s this?”

  “Ticket. Train ticket.”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  “Train leaves in half an hour.”

  “To where?”

  “East.”

  “Who do I know in the east?”

  “You’ve got a sister in Maine.”

  “I haven’t seen her in fifteen years.”

  “Maybe now’s the time to go see her.”

  “You think I could just leave here knowing what’s going to happen tonight?”

  He smoked his cigarette some more.

  “He’s a better man than you think, Leo,” she said.

  He said nothing.

  “You want to see him die, don’t you, Leo?”

  “You know better than that.”

  “Because of what he did to you. Or what you think he did. But it wasn’t him, Leo. It was me. I was the one who hurt you.”

  The waitress and the man with the pork chops were pretending not to hear any of this. Right now, Guild didn’t give a damn what they heard.

  “Can we go see him, Leo?”

  “For what?”

  “To try and stop him.”

  “It won’t do any good, Sarah.”

  “Just one more chance. Then I’ll take your train ticket and I’ll leave.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  He looked at her. “You really think he’s worth it, Sarah?”

  Very quietly, she said, “Yes, Leo, I think he is.”

  Guild sighed. “We don’t even know where he is. Maybe he’s already left for the ranch.”

  “I’ll find him. He can’t hide from me.” She sounded young and excited now that she was going to see Frank again. And she sounded desperate.

  “Train leaves in twenty minutes.”

  “I’ll be on it. Just like I promised. And Frank’ll be with me.”

  Now she sounded crazy. Guild felt sad for her, and somehow embarrassed, too, that she could believe such a thing. “He’s going to come back to me, Leo. I know he is,” she said.

  Guild got up and went over to pay the bill. The waitress looked at him kind of funny but didn’t say anything. She took his money and made change. She was slow, irritatingly so.

  When Guild turned around again, the table where they’d been was empty. Sarah was gone.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Beth finished packing, two neat carpetbags to hold most of her things, and then went over to the table to write Frank a goodbye letter, that somebody would read to him. She had only gone through the third grade, but because she’d shown remarkable skill at penmanship and vocabulary, people generally took her to be much more educated than she was. Plus, there had been her mother’s friend Eugene, a wealthy and respectable businessman who’d kept Beth and her mother for nearly six years, before his wife took sick and sheer guilt caused him to end the relationship.

  Eugene had loved to share the fine education he’d had, teaching the “girls,” as he always called them (as if they were sisters and not mother and daughter), a “smidge” about poetry, a smidge about literature, a smidge about classical music, and much more than a smidge about table manners and how one behaved in polite society.

  Beth had been eight years old the first time he took her in the bedroom and educated her in a very different area—showing her the things that pleased him in a physical way. This had confused her, of course. She’d been raised, marginally anyway, a Methodist and certainly Methodists wouldn’t approve of such things, but when she went to her mother about it, all her mother said was, “Hon, don’t you think it’s the least we can do for somebody who treats us as well as Eugene does? Why, if it wasn’t for Eugene, we wouldn’t have this apartment or any of our dresses.” Sometimes Eugene had liked it when they both pleased him at the same time. This had always seemed particularly shameful to Beth, but it didn’t seem to bother her mother much at all.

  After Eugene, they moved to St. Louis, where they met other men like Eugene, men of means and education, men strict and demanding about the way they liked to be pleased. By this time, Beth was a teenager and a beauty. Men got awfully silly about her. One young man, quite ugly and quite rich, hanged himself, it was said, because of her. Her mother always said that Beth was “the prize,” the trophy that men wanted for themselves. To possess Beth was to mark a man as special.

  When she was seventeen, her mother died of influenza. She still thought of how her mother looked laid out in the funeral home. Gone was all the beauty; gone was all the grace. The body was hard and cold and quite ugly. And she still remembered that nobody but the plump, effeminate funeral director was there. None of the respectable male friends who had kept them over the years so much as expressed sympathy. She had to find her own men now. At first it wasn’t difficult, but somewhere between her nineteenth and twenty-fifth birthdays, she noticed that her beauty had begun to lose its sheen and luster. Oh, the bones were perfect still, and the grave lovely eyes burned as always with sad inscrutable promise, but the flesh itself . . .

  This was not something she simply imagined, either. The men themselves became lesser, too, not quite so rich, not quite so educated, cruder in passion and pleasure. A few were even violent, something her mother would never have stood for. She saw what ahead for her, of course: the streets. Then she would be nothing more than one of the prostitutes she and her mother used to giggle about so uncharitably.

  She left St. Louis and drifted west, lesser men becoming lesser still. Then she’d met Ben Rittenauer, and for a time, things had been good.

  She liked being associated with a gunfighter; even though he was beginning to bald, and a small protuberant pot was beginning to show above his belt line, there was something dignified about Ben that she liked very much. She felt protected by him. And he understood enough about women to let her cry when the terrible crying came; and he left her alone about sex, too. She didn’t like sex, sex sometimes brought on the terrible crying in fact. And
so she’d please him quickly and then lie there with him in the darkness and he wouldn’t berate her at all for not enjoying herself.

  Frank Evans had been the opposite. It seemed that sex was all he thought of. And so she’d pretended, as she had with all the rich men, that she enjoyed herself endlessly in bed. She saw now that Frank represented the last of her youth—he’d been dashing and loud and funny, and touchingly vulnerable in an odd, swaggering way. And tonight Ben would kill him.

  In some ways, Frank might be better off. He was at the end of his road. He was losing his-skills as a gunfighter, he was losing his looks, and he was losing his ability to make a purposeful life for himself. But still she felt guilty. He saw her going back to Ben as a betrayal. But it wasn’t, not really. She was simply tired, and with Frank there was no rest. Tonight Ben would have ten thousand dollars, and they would take that money and set up the rest of their lives with it. They would be companions in old age. Frank would never understand that.

  She wrote: Goodbye, Frank. I wish we hadrit had that argument today. I’m not mad about you hitting me. I know how angry and hurt you are. I dorit blame you. I’d be angry and hurt, too. But things have changed so much and I’m so tired; and I’m getting afraid, too, the way I was just after my mother died. I know you carit understand this. I know you dorit believe that somewhere in my heart I still care about you, Frank. But ifs true, it really is.

  She signed her name to it and left it on the bureau where he’d be sure to see it. Then she went over and picked up her carpetbags and left the hotel room for the last time.

  Ben was waiting for her in the restaurant downstairs.

  Sarah knocked twice on the hotel room door. There was no answer. But the desk clerk had told her he was still up here.

  “Frank?”