by George Wier
“Mildred Carswell is shooting at people?” I asked.
“She damned sure is,” Amos said.
“Well I’ll be damned,” I replied. I thought of the woman I’d met in the hospital, what seemed like a lifetime ago. She’d had something pent up inside her. Maybe it was the calm before the storm.
“I think,” I said, “that one of us needs to go across the way and see to that woman, whoever she is.”
I looked at Paul, he looked at Amos, and Amos looked back at me.
“So you two are electing me?”
“You’re the Texas Ranger,” Paul said.
“Hmph. Okay, if you two will start shooting towards the house, I’ll make a run for it. Just keep the fire going and don’t stop until I’m down.”
“We’ll take turns,” Paul said to Amos. “When I’m empty, you start shooting right away.”
Amos’s shaking fingers managed to get his speed-load into the revolver and close the breach.
“I’m ready,” he said.
“Okay,” Paul said. “On the count of three.”
I knelt down like an Olympic runner about to run the hundred-yard dash.
“One,” Paul said. “Two!”
He stepped through the open doorway and said, “Three!” and began firing.
I launched myself headlong forward. I couldn’t recall running quite so fast ever before. My eyes took in every detail of the ground before me—every tuft of grass, every potential hazard that had the remotest chance of tripping me up, every little divot where a bullet had found its final resting place mere minutes before.
I didn’t count the shots. There was no sense in doing so. They were going to come and they were going to pass whether I made it safely there or not, so I ignored them. Their timbre abruptly changed and I knew that it was Amos shooting with the .38, as opposed to Paul’s much larger and louder .44.
The instant I went behind the front of the cruiser, aimed as it was away from the house at an angle, the last report rang out.
I tumbled into the grass and rolled, as I did, I snapped a look to my right.
It was Bee.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I very nearly shouted at her as I scrambled to her side.
Above us, one of the windows in the cruiser exploded and little squares of blue-green safety glass cascaded around us.
“I followed you,” she said. “I had to see what was going on. Also, I didn’t...”
“What?” I asked.
“I didn’t want Hank to get hurt.”
“Oh my God. Okay, you do not, repeat, do not have to worry about that old man. He can handle not only himself, but a whole phalanx of adversaries. I’ve seen him in action. He’s a one-man wrecking crew.”
“Really? But he’s so...soft-hearted.”
“Criminy. He may seem that way, but it’s sort of like how soft an anaconda might feel right before he squeezes you to death.”
She started to rise from behind the sheriff’s cruiser, but I grabbed her arm.
“Stay down,” I said. “One of those rounds can take your head clean off.”
She ducked back down and I was somewhat mollified.
“How did you get here, anyway?”
“I had my friend taking care of the office, in case someone needed to be bailed out while I was watching over Gray down at the hospital. When y’all left me at the Sheriff’s office like that, and my car was still at the hospital—remember that I drove Gray in his Ranger’s car because his head wasn’t completely right—well, I walked across the street to the bail bonds, borrowed Lucian’s car, and drove down to Ronson’s.”
“You tailed us.”
“Of course I did. I couldn’t let Hank go and do something...stupid.”
“Hank’s been doing stupid shit his entire life. And so have I. And I can’t believe what I’m admitting.”
“I know, right?” she said. “You’re kind of foolhardy, Bill.”
“Amen to that. You and my wife would get along just fine.”
Bee quickly snapped a look through the glass of the driver’s side door of the cruiser. “Bill, um...”
“What?” I asked.
“What does it mean when they switch from a regular rifle to something else with a fat tip on it?”
“What kind of fat tip?” I asked, and I felt my stomach grow cold, like I had just chugged a quart of freezing cold milk.
“Big, round, red stripes on it.”
“Shit,” I said. “It means...RUN!”
I stood up, took in the scene—the smoke drifting across the pockmarked field, the last position where I’d seen Hank and Amos and Paul and a couple of deputies, and then at the rear upper window of the main house where the fire had tracked me in my headlong rush back to the car to save Bee. I grabbed Bee’s wrist and pulled, even as she attempted to gain her feet, jerked her up and began running as fast as I could away from the car, pulling her along behind me. I was mildly surprised she could keep up.
I suppose I could say that I’m a veteran, although not of any declared war. That is to say I have seen my share of action, and have been the unwilling participant in explosions. As a veteran, I can say that any explosion is one too many.
This one lifted me and Bee up into the air, held us for an exquisite moment—a moment in which it added an unexpected element, that of rending teeth into one of my legs—then flung us face first into the wet, unmown high grass of the Carswell back forty like a couple of flies caught by a flyswatter.
At first I couldn’t breathe, but then the air came, thick and sharp, with tiny fingers of smoke blended into it. I choked and coughed and then lay very still.
Something was wrong, I wasn’t at first sure what.
I couldn’t hear all that well—it was like trying to listen to a conversation from under a few feet of water. There are sounds, but they’re all run together like so many different colors of paint smeared on a canvas. The air was coming into my lungs, but it smelled of burning gasoline, cooked automotive paint mixed with burning rubber, and something else. This other thing, this something else, set off alarm bells in my head for some reason. After a moment I tried looking around and I figured it out. I was bleeding from my left leg and the smell was a match for the coppery tang in my mouth. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand because I had detected something adhering to my lips. It was grass and blood. I had bitten my tongue.
I tried to push with my legs and winced in pain. My left leg was not only bleeding, but the tip of something was sticking out of it. A piece of metal, it appeared.
I looked around me, shaking my head as I did so in an attempt to clear the cotton out of my ears, and saw the crumpled form of Bee several feet ahead of me.
Bee, and copious amounts of blood.
*****
It took several minutes, but I managed to focus in on the area of the shed from whence I had run when I saw Bee behind the cruiser. There were several men there, one of them larger than the rest. I pegged the man as Paul Simon. There was another, darker man there, and I remembered that Amos was there with him. Maybe both my wits and my senses were returning to me. There were more figures behind them, but two darted past them and zig-zagged toward the pool house as I watched.
I turned to gaze back at the house and saw the figure in the window who had both shot at us with a large caliber automatic weapon, and fired a rocket. It was Abner, that damned shock of hair in his eyes. There was great distance between us, but I was sure he couldn’t see me so well down in the high grass. As far as he was concerned, I had been removed from the equation with the explosion of the cruiser. He wasn’t too far off in that, if in fact I was ever in his calculations to begin with. To a guy like that, there is only the one equation, and it goes something like this: hit, miss, miss, miss, hit.
Abner stepped back from the window and into partial shadow, but I could still make him out. He appeared to be attempting to jam something inside something else. The motion was unmistakable. When he came back to the window,
no more than a pace away, I could clearly see what it was. It was exactly as I had imagined it when Bee had described it to me from behind what I had thought of as relative safety: a rocket!
“Incoming!” I screamed toward the shed.
A head poked out and looked upwards toward the house. I thought that maybe it was Paul Simon, but I couldn’t be sure. And then the man leapt forward and a shadow disappeared underneath him.
An instant later the shed exploded in a flash of light so bright that it hurt my eyes. I pressed them tightly closed out of reflex, but I could still see the light through my eyelids.
*****
When I could see again, a man was coming towards me. I couldn’t make out who it was.
I looked back toward the house and saw that Abner had something mounted on his shoulder. Amazingly, it appeared to be an overly-large cylinder from a revolver, but it was easily three times the size of his head.
And then the sky began raining fire around the man walking toward me across the field.
CHAPTER TWENTY
T he man, whoever he was, walked through the exploding field as calmly as Christ walking across the Sea of Galilee. I could make out no more than a silhouette. The orange and white explosions left little black spots on my retinas and I tried to shield my eyes and look at the same time. I had to follow him, lest he disappear in a wash of flame without knowing his identity.
Then, as the last fireball went off and mushroomed upward to become an ugly black cloud, he paused, turned in profile, and then back again, either walking away or toward me, at first I couldn’t tell which. His figure grew, however, at which point I knew he was for sure coming toward me. I wouldn’t be dying alone. Not this day. Also, I knew his identity.
It was Hank Sterling, of course.
“Bill?” he called.
“Here!”
“Have you seen...?”
“She’s here. She’s bad off. We have to get some help over here or she’s not going to make it.”
Hank came and knelt at Bee’s side, noticed the terrible gash in her side and covered it with his open palm. “She’s bleeding too much,” he said.
“I know. I can’t hardly move or I would’ve done something for her.”
“Why can’t you move?” he asked me.
“I’ve got a piece of something in my leg,” I said. “Hurts like the devil. It feels like it’s close to something...vital.”
“I can’t help you right now, Bill. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. I knew I was bleeding some and that it hurt like hell, but I was otherwise all right. I felt I had to explain it to him. “It’s just that I can’t move right now is all. Because if I could, I’d be charging that house.”
At that moment, as if having heard exactly what I’d just told Hank, the smoke cleared away on a puff of wind and I could see the Carswell manor house clearly. Three groups of people rushed it from three directions, the rear door, the side door, and for a second a small clump of Sheriff’s deputies and city policeman charged through one of the hedges to the inner side of the driveway and toward the front door. For a split second, at the head of them, his white shirt standing out like a gleaming swan amid a gaggle of blue ducks, was Ranger Gray Holland.
“Hank, they’re charging,” I said.
“They’ll have to do it without me,” he replied. “I’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
I watched as the rear door of the house crashed inward.
We waited in silence and watched, Hank with one hand pressed into Bee’s side and the other cradling her neck, and me simply lying there, my left arm pressed down against my left thigh.
“I don’t want her to die,” Hank said. “I really don’t.”
“She’ll make it,” I said, unsure whether or not it was true. I suppose that saying it was more of a prayer than anything else.
From the house, more than a hundred yards away, there was a series of popping sounds lasting nearly a minute, and then silence.
We waited for another whole minute before someone came from out of the house. I couldn’t tell who it was over the distance, but Hank saw him, or possibly her, and shouted, “Medic!”
The officer came running.
*****
A city policeman I didn’t know rode with me in the back of the ambulance. He had insisted. I had questions for him and tried to get them out, but the paramedic put an air mask over my face and said something about fentanyl, to take the edge off. I suppose I was a little woozy with all the motion. Possibly, it had something to do with running in a field. I wasn’t sure.
For some reason I said Julie’s name, and then started saying the names of my children, ticking them off one by one, but then the list grew to encompass Penny, and Hank, and Perry, and Nat, and a number of other people who were somehow important to me.
Something struck me as funny, and I started laughing. Something about Grover Cleveland, I think it was. President Cleveland was fairly obese, as I recalled, and there was something true, right, and perfect about him being on the thousand. In my mind’s eye, however, on the front of the large bill draped across my vision, he was holding a tennis racket and had a towel wrapped around his thick neck while sweat rolled off of him in runnels.
Go figure.
*****
I came to in the Atchison County Hospital on the operating table. There was a nasty hole in my leg.
“You were talking about Grover Cleveland,” the surgeon said, “and about how he was a member of your family.” He smiled at me.
“So I was,” I replied. “So I was.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
T he better part of a day had passed, and I found myself hobbling down a long hallway when my wits came fully back to me. I wasn’t supposed to be out of bed, but you know what they say: You can’t keep a good accountant down.
The surgeon had pulled a two-inch long steel fragment out of my left leg around nine o’clock that morning. It had dug deep into my flesh to within a quarter-inch of my femoral artery. If it had penetrated any further, it’s likely that I would have bled out and expired on the Carswell back forty. The best anyone could tell, the fragment was from one of the door handles of the deputy sheriff’s cruiser that had been blown into shards by the rocket launched at me and Bee by Abner.
Bee Lily came through her operation and survived. I was there with Hank in the post-op recovery room when she came to. I had my own saline drip going at the time, and one of those tie-in-the-back hospital gowns, but my dignity is ever so larger than any nurse’s demeanor, and so I had on my last remaining pair of slacks beneath it. The ones I’d been wearing on the battlefield had been cut from my injured body as efficiently as if a 17th Century samurai had done so with the world’s sharpest katana.
Her eyes fluttered open.
“Hey there,” Hank said.
She moaned.
“You don’t have to talk,” he all but whispered to her. “Don’t stress or strain yourself. You went through a pretty rough operation, but they patched you up. You’re in the recovery room. Looks like you’re going to live.”
“Oh Hank,” she said.
“Shhh.”
Hank turned to me, and with a look conveyed the message. He wanted to be alone with her for a bit. I got up out of my chair and dragged my saline drip along with me, out the door and into the waiting room where I took a chair. I was limping. The chances were that I’d be limping for some time. Just call me Gimpy.
Gray Holland entered through the opposite door and the half dozen other faces turned to watch him walk by. Few people have ever seen a Texas Ranger in real life. A real one, like Gray, tends to cut a swath through life. It’s part of the legend, maybe, but mostly it’s all too true.
“You okay?” he asked me, and took the chair at my left elbow as he gestured to my leg. I kept my leg straight because of the tight wrapping around it—a bit of cloth and about ten turns of thick, plastic saran wrap.
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
&nbs
p; “Good bit of work there, although I don’t know that I would have charged across that field like that. Of course, if you hadn’t done so, you and that woman would’ve been blown to smithereens.”
“Saw that, did you? Yeah. I wasn’t thinking when I did it.”
“It’s a good thing you weren’t. Thinking about it probably would’ve stopped you, and you wouldn’t be here. Or at least, not in one piece.”
I nodded. “I thought I saw Paul Simon go down. Did he make it through?”
“I’m sorry to say that he didn’t. But Amos did. What you saw was Paul throwing himself over Amos to protect him. He saved the man’s life, and lost his own.”
“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” I said.
“Saint John, chapter fifteen, verse thirteen. You know the Good Book.”
“I was sort of raised on it,” I said. “My mother wanted me to be a preacher. I don’t think I would’ve done so well with it, though.”
“I don’t know. You’ve been sort of preaching at people since the moment I met you.”
“How do you mean?”
“You preached at Abner and the Senator’s wife, although you were shouting at the time. You preached at those two other women. You must’ve preached a good one to Simon before I came down to the station, because you were wrapping up when I walked in, and I think you changed him for the better by the end.”
“He turned out to be a real law man, didn’t he?” I asked.
“He did. And he couldn’t have done it without you. You do have an effect on people, Bill Travis. You surely do.”
“I don’t mean to,” I said. “Crap, when I get home, my wife is going to take one look at me, and she’s going to start effecting the hell out of me, this I can tell you for sure.”
Gray laughed. He turned his head to peer through the glass and into the recovery room, which was mostly draped with gauzy curtains from within. “What’s going on in there?” he asked.
