Give-A-Damn Jones: A Novel of the West

by Bill Pronzini

  JIM TARBEAUX

  The coach on the rattling, bucking four-car Great Northern spur-line train was stifling hot, none of the windows open more than a couple of inches because of the danger of flying cinders. I shifted position to ease the stiffness in my back, then leaned up to lift the window shade. The rolling prairie was familiar and I could see a portion of the river shining in the distance. Getting close. Wouldn’t be long now.

  Jim Tarbeaux’s homecoming, I thought with some of the old bitterness. I should have let the town council know when I’d be arriving. Maybe they’d have had a brass band on hand to greet me.

  The seat springs creaked as a heavy weight settled down beside me. The fat man who’d been pestering other passengers through most of the trip said through a fat smile, “Box Elder in eight minutes, by my watch.”

  I ignored him.

  Undaunted, he said, “Bagby’s my name and whiskey’s my game. Fred T. Bagby, traveling representative for the Jesse Moore–Hunt Company of San Francisco. AA brand rye and bourbon whiskey and imported Scotch and Canadian whiskey my specialties. Old Crow and Thistle Dew are both excellent, but my personal favorite is O.K. Cutter. The finest rye in the nation, bar none. You’ve sampled it, I’m sure.”

  “No.”

  “Well, you’re in for a treat when you do. Yes, sir, a real treat. Wyoming and Montana, that’s my territory. I come to Box Elder once a year and always a pleasure to return. Fine little town.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Getting off there yourself, are you? Or traveling on to another of the river towns?”

  “Getting off.”

  “Live there? Or stopping on business?”

  “Both.”

  “Mind if I ask what business you’re in, sir?”

  “Breaking rocks the past five years,” I said.

  “Eh?”

  “I’m an ex-convict, five days out of Deer Lodge Prison.”

  The fat man jerked a sideways look at me. Either what he saw in my face or what I’d said slid him off the seat, sent him away to sit with one of the upright citizens in the coach.

  We were coming into the outskirts of Box Elder now. The town had grown some since I’d been away, more than I’d expected. The railroad was responsible—it had only just expanded into this part of the Territory when I was sent up, and the spur line was in the process of construction. Until ’83, stagecoaches, freight wagons, and shallow-draft steamboats had been the main methods of transportation to and from Box Elder and the other small towns along the upper Missouri, Yellowstone, and Powder Rivers. There were more farms in the area, too, now, Mary Beth had written in one of her letters—parcels deeded off to homesteaders along the river and feeder creeks where once there had been nothing but rolling rangeland. Everything changes, sooner or later. Land, towns, men. Some men more than others.

  I lifted my grip from the floor between my feet onto my lap, rested my hands on it as the train chuffed through switches and finally ground to a halt at the depot. I waited for the other passengers to leave before I followed, a wave of noonday heat slapping at me as I stepped off. Cattle pens stretched out on the north side of the tracks now. On the near side, the extension of town known as Shantyville seemed to have about the same number of saloons, lodging houses, and shacks. I thought ruefully of the nights I’d spent in the Ace High and the Free and Easy. That last night in particular, one I would never forget because it had been the beginning of the end of my freedom.

  Mary Beth had written me that Tom Kendall died in his sleep in ’85, and that Bob Kendall had lost the K-Bar after the terrible winter of ’86–’87 and moved south to Laramie. I’d been sorry to hear of both. I held no hard feelings toward the Kendalls. They were no different from the rest of the people in and around Box Elder, believing Rufus Cable’s lies and that there’d been larceny as well as kid-wildness in me. You couldn’t blame them for feeling betrayed. Only one man was to blame and that was Cable.

  The main street, Central, a continuation of the wagon road from the northwest, slanted southeast to the river. Nine blocks long, it ended at the bridge that’d been built when the steamers stopped running, the wagon road picking up again on the far side. On this side, Valley Road split off Central just before the bridge, followed the river out of town through settled farmland, then angled across the prairie toward the Knob; in the opposite direction a track hooked off and dead-ended in a wide, willow-lined flat where Fourth of July celebrations used to be held and probably still were.

  I could have avoided the business district, taken side streets to where I needed to go, but that was the coward’s way. Walk tall and straight down Central as if I still belonged here. And maybe I did at that, no matter how much grief it was likely to cause me if I stayed for long. Just so none of that grief fell on Mary Beth.

  I set off with my grip. The big, old box elder that had given the town its name still sat inside its rusty metal fence in the middle of Central, the street forking into loops around its broad base. Some of the false-front buildings were familiar, too: the newspaper and land offices, Occidental House saloon and gambling hall, Cattlemen’s Bank, Prairie Mercantile, Box Elder Hotel, Flowers Feed and Grain. Over on the south side were the homes of the wealthier townspeople and the tall spire of the community church I’d seldom attended jutting into the sun-bleached sky. Many other buildings were unfamiliar. It gave me an odd, uncomfortable feeling to know this town where I was born and yet not know it—to be home and yet to understand that it could never be the same home I’d known as a boy and young man. The smart thing for me to do was to sell Pa’s land, move far away—bury the past so I’d have a shot at a decent future. But not until I’d confronted Rufus Cable.

  There wasn’t much activity in the sweltering midday heat. Most of the few people I passed on the boardwalk, on a handful of wagons churning up powdery dust along the street, paid no attention to me. One of the loungers in the shade on the hotel veranda followed me with his eyes as I passed, but I didn’t look the same as I had before Deer Lodge—leaner, no mustache, my hair a lighter brown and cut short—and he couldn’t place me any more than I could place him. Another man, a ranch-hand loading sacks of flour into a linchpin wagon in front of the mercantile, gave me a long look that might have had recognition in it, but he didn’t make the mistake of trying to speak to me.

  My first stop was the jailhouse, on Lincoln a block off Central—still the only stone building in Box Elder, so far as I could tell. Seth Jennison was still town marshal; his name was on the door. He was at his desk inside, one foot propped up on it, fanning himself with a piece of cardboard in one hand and swatting flies with the other. The office looked just as it had the last time I’d been here—same rolltop desk, same potbellied stove, same gun rack on the wall next to the door that led into the cell block. Jennison hadn’t changed much, either, except to grow a mite craggier and balder. He looked mild, almost indolent, but I knew from experience that when push came to shove, he was whang-leather tough.

  “I just came in on the train,” I said. “I thought you’d want to know.”

  He nodded, his expression neutral as he studied me. “Figured you’d be back. Short visit or fixing to stay?”

  “I don’t know yet. Haven’t made up my mind.”

  “Your privilege, either way. Just so long as you keep your nose clean while you’re here.”

  “As clean as folks will allow. I’m not looking for trouble.”

  “’Specially not with Rufus Cable.”

  “Don’t worry, Marshal. What I said to him in court after my trial was just angry backlash.”

  “He thinks you meant it as a violent threat.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I sure hope not. Never did appreciate having to stir my stumps when it’s this blessed hot.”

  I left him to his fanning and swatting and continued downstreet through the shimmers of heat. When I reached Territory Street, I looked north and picked out a chain-hung shingle just off Central that read RUFUS CABLE,
SADDLE MAKER. Mary Beth had written me that he’d bought the saddle shop, a business he’d always wanted for himself—no doubt paying for it with part of the fifty-four hundred dollars before squandering the rest. Waited until after his ma died, then claimed it was money she’d saved and he’d saved that paid for it. From where I stood I could see a CLOSED sign in one corner of the plate-glass front window. I would not have gone to see him even if the door had been standing wide open, not today, not yet. Patience was one of the things those years in the pen had taught me.

  Benson’s Livery hadn’t changed any—same name, same location near the northeast wagon road, same massive hip-roofed barn set back behind a broad compound strewn with old harness and wagon rigs. Same owner and hostler, too, mossy-headed old Sam Benson. He took one look at me when he came out of the barn and said, “Well, Jim Tarbeaux. I heard you was out and might be comin’ back.”

  “Bother you that I did?”

  “Why should it? You paid your debt.”

  “You were on the jury, Sam.”

  “Sure I was,” he said. “And I voted you guilty along with the rest based on the evidence. But that don’t mean I was happy about it. Something I can do for you?”

  “Rent me a horse and saddle.”

  “For how long?”

  “Long enough to look over Keystone, decide what I want to do about it.”

  “You ain’t thinking of staying on permanent?”

  “Why not? I could just dig up the stolen money from where I hid it and use it to fix the place up, couldn’t I?”

  He just looked at me, his jaws working on a cud of blackstrap.

  I said, “Does it matter to you if I stay?”

  “To others, maybe, not to me.” He spat onto the dusty, hoof-beaten ground. “Fifty cents a day, if you got no preference. Seventy-five cents if you pick one of the better horses. I’ll settle for, oh, two dollars in advance.”

  “No preference. You make the choice.”

  The horse Benson and his helper, a copper-skinned half-breed called Robbie, picked out of the corral and saddled was a blue-tick roan that had seen better days but seemed sturdy enough. I paid Benson the two dollars, which left me with slightly more than fifty from the prison-earned pittance I’d been handed along with a cheap sack suit when I was released. I would need plenty more than that whether I stayed to make a pass at resurrecting Keystone or moved on, and where would I get it with my record? Not from Mary Beth, even if she had money of her own to offer. Somebody might give me a temporary job in town or on one of the other small ranches, but if so it would be grunt work and wouldn’t pay much.

  No sense in worrying over it now. Time enough for that later, too.

  I rode across the bridge, passed the schoolhouse backed by a motte of cottonwoods, and on across the prairie toward the half-dozen small ranches, Keystone among them, at the upper end of the basin. The tawny blanket of summer-cured buffalo grass and clumps of sage were sparser than I remembered, and there were nowhere near as many cattle grazing as there had been in the spring of ’84.

  The brutal string of blizzards a year and a half ago—the worst winter the west had ever seen after a series of hot, dry summers—had devastated the heavily overstocked ranges in eastern Montana and parts of Wyoming and the Dakotas. Word was that the weeks of bitter cold and the lack of stored hay, forage, and shelter had starved more than three hundred and fifty thousand head in Montana alone, driving scores of ranchers and speculators into bankruptcy. Keystone hadn’t been one of the ranches because Pa’d had the foresight to store enough winter feed to save half of our small herd. About the only good thing in my being locked up in Deer Lodge was that I hadn’t had to see and deal with the rotting carcasses strewn across the land, as Pa and hundreds of others had come the ’87 spring thaw.

  The Keystone marker at the track that angled off the wagon road hung askew now, faded and bullet pocked. The ranch buildings were grouped in a cottonwood-shaded hollow where Little Creek flowed on its winding course to the Yellowstone. My first look at them was painful. Pa had died eight months ago, his health ruined by hard work and shame and the Big Die, and nobody had lived here since. There were gaps in the roofs and wallboards, missing rails in the fences. When Ma was alive there’d been a vegetable garden and even a few flower beds. Nothing now where they’d been except some dried-up vines and weeds, like dug-up bones in a cemetery.

  I rode on into the yard, reined in near the house. It would take a hell of a lot of time and effort and no little expense to fix it all up if I decided to stay. And what would I live on meanwhile? Bleak damn prospect, hopeless—

  The front door flew open all of a sudden and somebody came running out. The angle of the sun was such that it took a couple of seconds for me to see that it was Mary Beth.

  MARY BETH GREATHOUSE

  “Jim!”

  I couldn’t restrain myself, I rushed straight into his arms as soon as he dismounted and clung to him fiercely. It had been so long since we’d last held each other, so long! At first his embrace wasn’t as strong as mine, a little tentative, but then his arms tightened and he was holding me with the same intensity. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t cry and I didn’t, but I had to blink fast and often to keep my eyes dry.

  Five years hadn’t changed how I felt about him one tiny bit. He was the only man I had ever loved, or could love. And that included the Colonel. My father had been a hard man to feel affection for from my childhood on, and when he tried to drive Jim away from me, then refused my pleas to let me arrange for a good Billings lawyer when Jim was falsely accused, I had quit trying. Now I was nothing more than a dutiful daughter living under his roof, and I wouldn’t even be that much longer.

  Jim grasped my shoulders finally and held me at arm’s length so he could look at me. I wished I had on a dress instead of the buckskin riding habit, that my hair hung long and was combed to a silky dark brown sheen instead of wound up around my head and fastened with shell pins to keep it from tangling in the wind. But it didn’t matter, really, because he wasn’t examining me in a critical way.

  I tried not to examine him that way, either, but he looked so different it made me ache inside. He was leaner than he should be, his face gaunt and missing the rakish mustache he’d sported back in ’84, his eyes not as sparkly bright as I remembered them, with none of the devil-may-care boldness that had first attracted me. I reached up to stroke his cheek. When I used to touch him like that, he’d smile and sometimes nuzzle my hand, but he didn’t smile now. His expression was grave. He’d shaved recently, but missed a couple of patches and I was shocked to see that the stubble was prematurely flecked with gray.

  He said, “I didn’t expect to see you so soon, Mary Beth.”

  “I’ve been here the past three days, waiting for you. In your last letter you wrote you’d be coming to Keystone, remember?”

  “Your father wouldn’t like it if he knew.”

  “But he doesn’t. He’s been away in Billings on business and he won’t be back until tomorrow.”

  “He must know I’m out, though. And that I’d be coming back. He can’t be happy about it.”

  “No, but there’s nothing he can do.”

  Jim looked away from me for a few moments, into the middle distance, before speaking again. “He’s got to know how you feel about me, even if he doesn’t know about the letters—the way you’ve spurned other men the past five years. He’s no fool.”

  “You still feel the same, too, don’t you?”

  “You know I do.”

  “Then I don’t care what the Colonel thinks. It didn’t matter before and it doesn’t now.”

  “He won’t stand for us seeing each other again. He’ll make things hard for you as well as me.”

  “He can try. But he won’t succeed. We won’t let him.” I touched his cheek again. “We don’t have to stay in Box Elder, be married here,” I said. “We can go somewhere far away where nobody knows us, make a new life for ourselves…”

  “A man’s p
ast catches up with him more often than not, one way or another. Besides, I don’t much like the idea of being driven from my home a second time, at least not before I have a chance to clear my name.”

  “Clear your name how?”

  “By making Rufus Cable confess.”

  “My God, Jim, not with violence again—they’ll send you back to prison!”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t use my fists on him again.” He released my arms. “Where’s your horse?”

  “In the barn. But I’m not leaving yet, not until we’ve had a chance to talk a while longer. It’s hot out here. Let’s go into the house.”

  He stood without moving or saying anything. I had a tremendous urge to embrace him again, kiss him long and deep, but I didn’t give in to it. It wasn’t the right time for that yet.

  “Please, Jim.”

  He shook his head, but he wasn’t saying no. It was a bewildered kind of headshake, as if he weren’t quite as sure of himself as he sounded. “All right,” he said.

  He untied his grip and we went to the house. Just inside the door, he stopped and stood looking around at the furnishings, the Indian blanket on the wall, the new braided rug covering part of the puncheon floor. His surprise and his pleasure had a touch of memory sadness mixed in.

  “Swept, dusted, aired out, and everything pretty much where I remember it. You do all this, Mary Beth?”

  “Yes. The past four days, and on a couple of visits before that.”

  Jim walked past the horsehair sofa to the pine rocker before the fireplace. The table next to it held his father’s rack of pipes and the framed tintype of his mother. He picked up the photograph, looked at it for a time before setting it down and facing me again.

  “Ma’s china cabinet used to stand against that wall over there,” he said. “And there was a bearskin rug under the rocker.”

  “Gone, along with a few other things. Scavengers. It’s a wonder they didn’t strip the house bare.”

  “Doesn’t look like they did much damage.”