I’d almost finished that one when I had my inspiration. Or what seemed like one at the time.
I went home to Madge Tolliver’s boardinghouse and upstairs to my room for the bottle of Doc Christmas’s Wonder Painkiller I’d bought. Outside again, I spied the Ames boy, Tommy, rolling his hoop. I gave Tommy a nickel to take the bottle to the blacksmith’s shop. I said he should tell Patch it was from Doc Christmas and that it was a peace offering, free of charge. Most of the time I don’t hold with lying or having youngsters fib for me, but in this case I figured I was on the side of the angels and it was a pardonable sin in order to forestall trouble. Sometimes the only way to deal with the devil is by using his own methods.
Tommy reported back to me in the marshal’s office. Took him three times as long as it should have; that was because Patch had been away from the shop and he had to wait for him to come back. “He took the bottle all right, Marshal. But then he laughed real nasty and said he suspicioned it was from you, not Doc Christmas.”
Blast him for a sly fox, I thought, annoyed.
“He said now he had two bottles of painkiller, and his mouth didn’t hurt no more, but it didn’t make a lick of difference in how he felt toward that, um, blankety-blank tooth puller.”
“Two bottles?”
“Yes, sir. He got the other from Mr. Flowers.”
“Did he, now. By coercion, I’ll warrant.”
“What’s coercion?”
“Never mind about that.” Orville was a good man but he didn’t have much sand; afraid of his own shadow. If Patch had coerced him, he’d never call him to task for it. “What else did Patch have to say?”
“Nothing. He just told me to go roll my hoop, so I did.”
I left the office and stumped down to the willow flat to see Doc Christmas. There were only a few people around his wagon, it being late afternoon by this time. He had a farmer in the chair, one of the Jorgensen clan, and was yanking a tooth while Homer played his banjo and sang “Camptown Races” at the top of his voice. I waited until they were done and three more bottles of the wonder painkiller had been sold. Then I signaled the doc to come down, drew him off to one side, and told him what Patch had said to me and to Tommy Ames.
It didn’t seem to bother him much. He fluffed up his chin whiskers and said, “As I told you yesterday, Marshal, Homer and I refuse to be intimidated by a philistine such as Elrod Patch.”
“A dangerous philistine. My advice is for you to pull up stakes and move on tonight. Next time you come to Box Elder, if you ever do, Patch’ll likely have forgotten his grudge.”
“That would be the cowards’ way, and Homer and I are men, not spineless whelps. The law and the Almighty can send us fleeing, but no man can without just cause.”
Well, he had a point, and I couldn’t argue with it. Couldn’t order him to leave, either. He was on public land and he hadn’t broken any laws, including the Almighty’s so far as I knew. I wished him well and trudged back into town.
But I felt uneasy in my mind and a little tight in my bones. There was going to be trouble, sure as God made little green apples, and there wasn’t any legal or even shifty-smart way I could see to stop it.
RUFUS CABLE
I spent half of Saturday and all day Sunday in bed, sick as a dog. Fever sweats, coughing spells, puking up what little I tried to drink and eat. All the symptoms of ague, but it wasn’t ague. Or the consumption flaring up again, either.
It was Tarbeaux. A reaction to the way he’d shamed me in the shop, refused to carry out his vengeance threat when he realized the shotgun was empty—and the different vow he’d made. He had seen to it that I would continue to face a slow, frightening death, and he would make sure I didn’t have a moment’s peace until then.
Would he spread the word that I had tried to make him shoot me? Probably. Not many would believe him, but some would. I’d never been well thought of in Box Elder, before or after the trial. No real friends, no family since Ma died, no decent woman after Clara spurned me in favor of that Billings storekeeper. Just a hotel clerk turned saddle maker, never mind a good one once, who nobody paid much mind to, who kept to himself and lived alone in the house he’d hoped to fill with a wife and kids, who watched all his dreams die like dust devils in the wind. Nobody who gave a damn whether Rufus Cable lived or died. Including Rufus Cable himself.
But it mattered how and when and where I died. I didn’t have to stay on here with Tarbeaux as a constant nemesis. I could sell the saddle shop for whatever I could get, move to Billings … no, not Billings, not with Clara there. Clear out of Montana entirely, head down to New Mexico or Arizona. The doctors had told me I might have a chance to live a while longer in that kind of hot, dry climate. Not recover my health, just live another year or two. Maybe. No guarantees.
I’d tried and failed to talk myself into selling and moving before Tarbeaux came back. Now it was too late. I was in no condition for that kind of long travel, or the effort it would take to establish myself and my business in a strange place. And even if I could manage it, would what was left of my life be any different there than it was here? Would I fit in any better, make friends, meet a woman willing to keep company with a dying consumptive? Would my slow death be any easier? No. Hell, no.
Stuck in Box Elder for however much time I had left. That would be barely tolerable, but not with Tarbeaux hounding me every chance he had. But I wouldn’t confess, not even if he tried again to beat it out of me. If he laid a hand on me, I would press a charge of attempted murder and have him sent back to Deer Lodge. He knew that, he was no fool. No, he’d do his hounding with words and visits. And my God, the unbearable strain that would put on me!
The only slim hopes I had were that something would happen to change his mind, drive him out of the basin for good, or that he would have a fatal accident or be killed some other way. Him dying was the best solution of all.
I wished again that I had the guts to kill him. I’d thought about it often enough, of ambushing him as soon as he showed up, but all the thinking did was make my belly churn and my hands sweat. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t pull a trigger on him even in self-defense. And even if I could, Jennison or the county law would surely find out and I’d be arrested and sentenced to hang. Hanging wasn’t a fast, easy way to die … not when you were locked up for days or weeks beforehand, waiting and watching the gallows being built.
A bullet was a fast way to die, the best way. It had taken all the nerve I have to face him with the unloaded shotgun. And when the time seemed to finally come yesterday, I had been so scared I nearly pissed my pants. I couldn’t go through that again, either. And Tarbeaux knew I couldn’t.
I wished to Christ he was still in Deer Lodge, that the judge had sentenced him to ten or twenty years instead of just five. If he were in prison, I wouldn’t be sick in bed like this, I wouldn’t have to live with this awful sickening fear …
That was when the notion came to me.
It was a crazy notion, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. I could do that, I thought. And why not, after the way I’ve been treated and will be treated if I don’t? The sacrifice was a small enough price to pay, and there was a way to minimize the loss. What I had to do was plan it out carefully before I went ahead. Do it right and nobody would suspect me, the victim once again, the eyewitness.
Studying on it, planning it, I didn’t feel sick any more. Pull this off, and I would be free of Tarbeaux once and for all. And I could live out the time I had left with a measure of peace.
HOMER ST. JOHN
Doc Christmas and me was setting around the campfire behind our John Deere wagon, waiting for the pork belly and ’taters to finish roasting, Doc smoking his pipe and sipping coffee, me strumming a quiet tune on my banjo, when this fella come moseying along the riverbank over by where we’d picketed the horses. Couldn’t tell who he was at first. Full dark now, the moon not up yet, and the firelight wasn’t bright enough to cut through the shadows under the low-hanging willow branches.
Doc tensed up. And I quit strumming. Both of us remembering the threats that big angry blacksmith, Patch, had made. I’m a yard wide myself, and strong enough when needs be, like having to lift up the wagon when one of the wheels loosens up or gets stuck in mud, but I ain’t much of a fighter. No, sir, not me. Mama used to call me her soft, sweet boy when I was a button in Spokane. Well, she had the soft part right, anyway. That blacksmith was half fat and half brawn. Me, I’m all blubber.
But when the fella come out of the shadows into the firelight and Doc and me both seen it wasn’t Patch, we took our ease again. I didn’t know who he was, but I’d seen him in the crowd when we first set up here on Saturday afternoon. One thing about me besides being a fair to middlin’ banjo player, I got a good memory for faces. And a good memory for who buys Doc Christmas’s Wonder Painkiller and who doesn’t. This fella was one who hadn’t.
“Evening,” he says.
Doc says, “Evening. We’re closed for business, sir, and preparing a late evening meal. Unless, of course, you are in dire need of my services, for which there is an extra after-hours charge, or you wish to purchase a bottle of my wonder painkiller.”
“Neither one.”
I couldn’t resist saying, “You didn’t buy a bottle last time you was here, either.”
“No need. I’m not in pain, mouth or otherwise.”
“Toothaches come on unexpected sometimes. Good idea to keep a bottle handy.”
“No doubt, but I’ll only be in Box Elder a short while. And I like to travel light.” His nose twitched like a hound keening the air. “Whatever you’re cooking there sure does smell good.”
“Roasted ’taters and pork belly.”
Doc says, quick, “I believe in hospitality, sir, but I regret to say that I can’t invite you to join us. There is only enough victuals for Homer and me.”
“Oh, I wasn’t fishing for an invitation. I’ve already eaten. Out for a stroll to aid my digestion and I heard Homer’s banjo. ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’ is one of my favorite tunes.”
“Indeed.”
“You play it well, Homer,” he says to me. “Much more harmoniously than ‘Camptown Race’ or ‘Buffalo Gals,’ if you don’t mind my saying so.”
I wasn’t offended. Fact is fact and no denying it. “The quieter the tune,” I says, “the better I strum.”
“Mind playing it again?”
“Don’t see why not. ’Taters ain’t quite ready yet.”
I commenced to strum, and danged if he didn’t whip a harmonica out of his sack-coat pocket and join in. He wasn’t exactly a sure hand—or sure mouth—with the instrument, but then again he didn’t play too bad, either. Matter of fact, the two of us playing and then singing together give “The Girl I Left Behind Me” a kind of sad sound a mite different than me and my banjo done alone.
Doc Christmas clapped his hands when we was finished. “Well done,” he says, which along with the clapping is some compliment from him. “You know our names, sir. Yours, may I ask?”
“Artemas Jones. Printer by trade, rolling stone by nature.”
Well, that was us, too, Doc and me. Rolling stones. For three years now as long as the weather permitted, ever since he’d invented his wonder painkiller and decided to sublet his practice in Spokane and take his business and his invention on the road. He was a queer old bird, Doc was. All that mattered to him these days was traveling to parts he’d never been before, fixing folks’ teeth in small towns like Box Elder that didn’t have a dentist, and salting away as much from doing that and from his painkiller as he could. Once he’d satisfied the wanderlust that’d come on him late in life, he figured on going back to Spokane permanent, instead of just to winter there like we was doing now, and open up a dental school.
Except for being some tightfisted, he didn’t give me no cause for complaint. I liked working for him; he treated me more like a friend than his assistant. He’d needed somebody to help him manufacture the elixir, which you could do on the road with ingredients that wasn’t too hard to get hold of, and to assist with his pitch and dental work. That was how I come to join up with him. So far we’d traveled eastern Washington, the Idaho panhandle, and most of Montana, with the Dakotas and Wyoming on the horizon. It was a good life, mostly. Except when we run into somebody like that ornery yahoo Patch, but that didn’t happen too often. Most customer grievances I took care of with hardly any problem. I may not be a fighter, but I can put on a real fierce look and growl like a bear when I set my mind to it, and my three hundred pounds takes care of the rest.
“A kindred spirit,” Doc says to this fella Jones. “How long have you been obeying the call of the open road?”
“More than a dozen years now. And you?”
“Not long enough. I can’t offer you provender, as I said, but there is plenty of coffee if you’d care for a cup.”
“I would at that, thanks.”
He sat down and I poured him one. He took a sip and says right off, “Arbuckles’.”
“You know your coffee, sir.”
“I know the best when I have a chance to drink it.”
So we set there and drank coffee and traded road stories until the ’taters and pork belly was ready. Jones had traveled all over the country, seemed like, places that was only rumors to me—and he was brimful of stories, some of ’em funny. One in particular about doings in a bawdy house in Kansas City even made Doc laugh, which he don’t do too often.
I’d’ve liked to hear more of Jones’s yarns, but I was more interested right then in filling the hole in my stomach. Soon as I started to take the vittles off the fire, my mouth watering something fierce, he says, “Well, I’ll leave you gents to your supper.” Then he thanked us for the coffee and went on his way along the riverbank, where he commenced to play a different tune on his harmonica. “The Girl with the Blue Velvet Band,” I thought it was.
“Nice fella,” I says, setting the ’taters and pork belly out to cool enough so we wouldn’t burn our mouths when we dug in.
“Indeed,” Doc says. “A kindred spirit as I stated earlier. There is, however, one thing wrong with him.”
“He didn’t buy a bottle of your wonder painkiller.”
“Precisely. No man should be as healthy in mouth and body as Mr. Artemas Jones.”
ELROD PATCH
I finished off the second bottle of painkiller some past nightfall. Trouble with the stuff was, it killed the ache in my mouth well enough for a spell, but it didn’t last for long. By half past nine the throbbing hurt was back. The other thing I didn’t like about it was that it made me feel fuzzy in the head, as if I’d swallowed two pints of whiskey this afternoon instead. Must’ve had some alcohol in it along with laudanum or opium or whatever the hell else it was made out of.
That gawdamn quack dentist. Painless, my ass. He done yanked my broke tooth so hard it felt like part of my jawbone come out with it, then he wouldn’t give me a free bottle of his pain medicine. Like I told Jennison, and Doc Christmas and that tub of lard works with him, a free tooth yank damn well oughta entitle a man to a free bottle, too, and that went double when the yank kept on hurting like billy bejesus for two days now. My jaw was still swole up so big I couldn’t hardly chew solid food. All I’d had to eat was hardboiled eggs and bread and I was hungry as hell for meat.
The throbbing got so bad I took a couple of swigs from the jug of forty-rod I keep in my room back of the shop, but all that did was make me feel fuzzier in the head and so mad I could hardly see straight. Gawdamn that quack! I wasn’t about to stand for him treating me the way he done. Ain’t nobody diddles Elrod Patch and gets away with it.
Long about ten o’clock I had another swig of whiskey, got my five-pound sledge out of the shop, and headed on over to the willow flat. I kept the sledge under my coat when I crossed Central, lest I run into Abner Dillard, the night deputy. But the only living thing I seen was a mongrel dog that come sniffing around and that I give a swift kick when it didn’t get outen my way quic
k enough. Townspeople were all inside their houses, snugged up comfortable and pain-free in their beds, bellies full of their evening feed. Thinking about that, with my jaw aching fierce and my own belly rumbling from lack of food, made me even madder.
When I come to the flat, I took a tighter grip on the sledge handle and edged into the trees along the bank. Doc Christmas and that lard-butt Homer was gonna be sorry they ever come to Box Elder, and to hell with the consequences!
ABNER DILLARD
Night marshal is just about the best job a man could ask for in Box Elder. Not that that’s my official title, night deputy is, but night marshal’s got a nicer ring to it and that’s how I think of myself in private. The job’s such a good one on account of this is a real quiet town except after the spring and fall roundups when the waddies come in off the ranches with their pockets full of pay, looking to raise a little hell. And there ain’t nearly as many now as there used to be. Once in a while I have to break up a fight or lock up somebody for being drunk in public or disturbing the peace, but most nights pass with nary a whisper of ferment. This looked at first to be another one like that, but it sure as hell didn’t turn out that way.
I finished my last rounds just shy of midnight. Everything quiet and settled, as it almost always is of a Sunday night, Occidental House and all but a couple of Shantyville saloons closed early for lack of business. Nights like this are the beauty part of being night marshal; once I’m satisfied that everything’s as it should be, I go back to the jailhouse for a long snooze until dawn. If any of the cells is occupied, I sleep tilted back in Seth Jennison’s chair with my feet propped up on his rolltop desk. But if all four cells in the block are empty, as they were tonight, I just open one up, shuck off my boots, and make myself comfortable on the cot inside. Seth’s particular about keeping clean cells and bug-free mattresses and blankets, so it’s almost like sleeping in my bed at home.
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