Rides a Stranger

by Bill Brooks

  “Then I what, quit, after he’s made me look like a fool?”

  “Better quit and looking for another job than the alternative.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “Nothing else, you’ve got a wife you say you love, just like these councilmen have got wives they say they love. You lay it out for them—how Waco will come and burn their town down and scatter them like sheep and a thousand will look cheap.”

  He stood and put on his derby.

  “What the hell,” he said. “I guess it don’t cost nothing to ask,” and went out.

  I waited till he came back pretty sure none of this was going to come out right. He was right about me, I never was much of a planner. I just did whatever needed doing at the time it needed it. I remember something my old man told me a long time ago: “Don’t ever do something just for the money.”

  Less than an hour and Chalk Bronson was back in the office. He took an envelope from his inside pocket and tossed it on the desk. It looked fat—like a thousand dollars fat.

  “Your move,” he said.

  “I’ll go get your ex.”

  “Leave off with that shit, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I picked up the envelope and went back up to the hotel. She was sitting there on the bed the same as she had been when I left—the plate of food untouched.

  “You should have eaten something,” I said.

  “What are you, my father?”

  “No, but if I was, I’d make you eat something.”

  I threw the envelope on the bed.

  “Count out half and put on your coat.”

  She looked at it listlessly.

  “I need a drink or something.” Her hands were trembling as she counted out half the money, folded it and put it in her coat pocket then put the coat on.

  “I’ll stop at the Bison and pick you up a bottle.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and I felt she really meant it.

  “This will work out,” I said.

  “I don’t even care anymore,” she said.

  I felt like I was leading a lamb to slaughter, looking at her, the sad way she seemed. She reminded me of everything wrong there was about life and little there was right about it.

  Don’t ever do anything just for the money, Jim.

  Chapter Seven

  We walked over to the jail and went in and Chalk was there standing at the window and he looked at her with eyes that were full of some deep sorrow only the two of them knew about.

  “Antonia,” he said.

  She started to speak then didn’t.

  He looked at me.

  “I want to know something,” he said.

  “Go ahead, we’re all friends here, right?”

  “I got word you might be John Wesley Hardin.”

  I had to force myself not to smile. “The kid at the hotel, right? Or the old man.”

  “Raford,” he said. “The old man.”

  “What if I was, how would that make any difference about what we’re doing here?”

  He chewed his lower lip. I could see he was armed with a bulldog revolver in a short holster.

  “The council knew I just handed over a thousand dollars of their money to John Wesley Hardin, I’d be fired.”

  “Might be a stroke of good luck for you then, considering.”

  “I’m not fucking around here, are you or aren’t you?”

  “No,” I said. “Jim Glass, like I told you.”

  “Shit,” he said, and put on his hat and coat. “I rented a buggy, Antonia. I got it pulled around back.”

  “I thought I’d tag along,” I said.

  “Suit yourself,” he said.

  I fell in behind them on the westbound road. Wind blew in our faces, sharp and cold. You could tell it was going to be an unpleasant day, and I had to tug my hat down tight to keep it from blowing off my head and turned up my coat collar. I figured the two of them had some things in private they would probably want to talk over—or maybe not, so I maintained a good distance behind them. At one point, about two hours into the ride, he stopped the buggy and I heard the two of them arguing and saw the bottle I’d bought her go flying. I spurred ahead and said, “There a problem?”

  “The fuck you buy her whiskey for?”

  “Because she asked for it and looked like she could use it.”

  She looked at me with half-lidded eyes.

  “What the hell do you know about anything?” he said.

  “She’s entitled,” I said, “considering she’s putting herself on the line for you, wouldn’t you say?”

  He lowered his gaze then dismounted the wagon and walked out on the prairie until he found the bottle. He wiped the dead dry grass from it and walked back carrying it in one hand and held it out to her, and she took it and cradled it against her as he climbed back up into the wagon and snapped the reins. We rode on the rest of the day like that and I felt like I was part of something that was not only unkind but downright cruel, and I had to keep thinking about sacrifice. Only it wasn’t my sacrifice but hers, and it was easy for you to think about it if it wasn’t you doing the sacrificing but someone else. And it didn’t make me feel any better by a long shot.

  We stopped before the darkness behind us caught us and swallowed us whole.

  I said, “I thought it was just a day’s ride?”

  Chalk said, “It is if you’re riding a good horse and not a buggy and hauling a sick woman.”

  There was a stream that ran crooked as a dog’s hind leg through the dying grass, and I gathered pieces of kindling and started a fire while he set up a small pup tent he’d taken from the back of the buggy along with a sack of foodstuff and a coffeepot. She sat there on the ground sipping from the bottle, staring off into the long nothingness and empty places.

  Time everything was ready, he scraped her some beans and salted pork onto a plate and held it out to her. She refused it.

  “Eat something, please,” he said.

  “You eat it,” she said. “I don’t want it.”

  I got myself a plate and sat back against my saddle and the night folded over us till there was just our shadows playing in and out of the firelight, the flames licking at the night.

  “I don’t feel good about this,” he said to her, the fire between them. “Just so you know.”

  “Why should you care, Chalk? Why should you care?”

  He looked beat in every way a man can look beat.

  I ate fast then set the plate aside and laid back and pulled my blanket up around me with my head propped on my saddle and pulled my hat down over my eyes like I was sleeping. I didn’t want to be part of their intimacy even if it was conflicted.

  “You think we could just not argue?” he said. “Just this once?”

  “Yes, Chalk. Our arguing days will be forever over come tomorrow when you hand me over to Johnny.”

  I thought of all the ways a woman can hurt a man and the ways a man can hurt a woman, and it wasn’t like they were trying to hurt each other, they just didn’t know how not to anymore.

  I waited until everything fell silent for a time before I let myself go to sleep to a low wind moaning over the grass like sorrow itself.

  We rose with the daylight and took turns going off into the bushes and had some fresh-made coffee and some bacon and cold biscuit sandwiches—at least he and I did; she still refused to eat anything, and I saw the bottle was empty on the ground next to her blanket. A soft rain began to fall by the time we broke camp and I thought it was just an unpleasant morning. My half of the money wasn’t much comfort.

  We rode till about mid-morning and then turned off the main road up a wagon trace and followed it for maybe half an hour more till we topped a rise and there in the distance was a windmill turning in the wind and beyond it some buildings.

  “That’s his place?” I said.

  “We’ve been on his place since last evening,” Chalk said. I could see shorthorn cattle scattered all over the grasslands and riders w
orking in among them cutting some out for branding, which was being done down closer to the buildings. Work sort of stopped as we approached; the hired help stood watching us ride up to the main house.

  I could see Chalk’s features were set hard as stone as we neared, and the woman next to him with her eyes downcast. Three men stood on the porch of the long house.

  “Which one’s him?” I said.

  “The middle one,” Chalk said, and my eyes shifted to him.

  He was tall and wore his pants stuffed down inside mule ear boots and wore a short coat and a pancake hat. He had a long red scarf tied around his neck and looked like something out of a dime novel. The other two flanking him were heeled with revolvers riding high on their hips and one had a quirt in his left hand and they both stood slouched slightly in that loose way men with bad attitudes will stand.

  Chalk halted the buggy a few feet from the porch and nobody said anything, but Johnny Waco was looking at me, trying to assess my reason for being among them, and I didn’t flinch because you just didn’t do that with the sort of man who knew how powerful he was. The other two took notice of me as well. I had made it a point to unbutton my coat before we got there so they could see I was heeled too and had slid the Henry from its scabbard and rested it across the pommel of my saddle. Best way to keep trouble from happening is to be prepared for it. Let a man know what stuff you’re made of so there’s no guesswork to it. If it comes anyway, there was no stopping it but with a bullet.

  Johnny’s eyes finally shifted to the woman.

  “Get down from there,” he said, “and come here to me.”

  She started to get down but Chalk laid a hand on her forearm and stopped her.

  “I want assurances this is the end of it,” he said to Johnny.

  Waco cocked his head like a dog that had just heard something it didn’t know what it was.

  “You get down too, Chalk.”

  They both got down. I kept an eye on the two who were heeled. Any trouble breaking out would come from them first. Waco didn’t look like he was armed, but then you didn’t know what he might be wearing under his coat.

  “Come up here on the porch,” Waco said to the woman. She looked at Chalk then went and climbed up onto the porch and stood there while Waco looked her over like a horse he was considering.

  “Go inside,” he said. I thought maybe she’d look back at Chalk one more time, but she didn’t, just went inside like a beat dog.

  “Then it’s over,” Chalk said.

  “No, not quite,” Waco said.

  “What else?”

  Waco’s gaze again shifted to me.

  “You don’t want none of this action, mister.”

  I noticed some more men had gathered ’round, all of them armed.

  “You don’t interfere here, or you’ll not even have a chance to regret it,” he said.

  Chalk looked back at me.

  “Stay out of this, Glass, no matter what happens.”

  “You sure?”

  “I am.”

  I slid the Henry back into its scabbard.

  Waco nodded his head and three men stepped forward and two of them took Chalk by the arms and the third man took the lawman’s bulldog revolver and tossed it in the dirt. I felt something go tight in my guts.

  “You know I can’t just send you back without folks knowing there is a price to pay for everything when it comes to dealing with me,” Waco said. Then he looked at me again and said, “You pay attention here, in case you ever get it in your mind to cross me, mister.” I didn’t have to look ’round me, behind me, to know that several of the others had drawn their guns and had them aimed at me.

  He nodded again and the man who’d taken Chalk’s pistol from him slammed a fist into Chalk’s ribs, doubling him over, then crashed another blow to his chin, knocking him to his knees even as he was being held up by the two men holding him by the arms.

  It was a hard thing to watch, the way they beat him till his face was a bloody mess and he no longer groaned when the cowboy hit him. The one doing the hitting was a big strapping fellow with long arms that lashed out like whips, and every time he struck Chalk you could hear it, his knuckles smacking meat and bone.

  Finally the two holding him turned him loose and he sank to his knees in the dirt, his blood splotching the ground with drops the size of half dollars. He lay there without moving. Waco nodded toward a man standing by a fire they heated their branding irons in and the fellow pulled one of the irons from the coals and brought it with him as the one who’d done the battering bent and ripped Chalk’s shirt, exposing his back muscles and shoulder blades.

  “Do it,” Waco said to the brander.

  Chalk jerked even though he was out cold when the brand burned into his flesh. The sound and smell was something I knew I’d never forget.

  “Now break his hands,” Waco said. The slugger went to a shed and came back with a hammer and smashed Chalk’s hands with it. I flinched but didn’t look away. I owed him at least that much—not to look away.

  “Now get him the hell off my land,” Waco said, giving me one last hard look. “And don’t you or him ever come back here.”

  I dismounted and lifted Chalk and spilled him into the buggy, then tied my horse on back and climbed into the seat and took the reins and snapped them. It was all I could do to keep my hand off my gun.

  I drove steady the rest of that day and through the night, stopping only when I needed to give the horses a blow. I washed canteen water over Chalk’s face and checked his heartbeat. He’d come to then and would go under again. I did the best I could to keep him comfortable, but there wasn’t much could be done. We finally reached the outskirts of Coffin Flats about the same time as dawn did. The streets were fairly well deserted, the town still asleep.

  Chalk was by then shivering and muttering in his delirium, his face swollen terribly, blood crusted in the corners of his eyes and ears and nostrils. I kept seeing in my mind the way they beat him, smelled the burning of his flesh when they branded him. He held his broken hands out away from him like shattered birds.

  Johnny Waco wanted to make sure that he was never out of Chalk Bronson’s thoughts. I knew looking at the lawman, Johnny Waco was never going to be out of my thoughts either.

  I pulled in at the hotel and went inside and found the kid there half asleep behind the desk.

  “Where’s there a doctor?”

  He looked at me through lidded dull eyes.

  “Doctor!” I said.

  “Doc Flax has a place up the street above the druggist,” he said. Then he realized I didn’t know anything about the town and pointed. “That way.”

  I quickly drove there and pounded on the door at the top of the stairs but nobody answered. Went back again to the hotel. The kid was picking his nose and staring at his finger.

  “Where’s the marshal live?”

  “Up that way,” he said, pointing the opposite direction of the doctor’s. “Little yeller house end of the street and over one—to your right.”

  So that’s where I went.

  I pounded on the door till a woman answered. She was wearing a checked robe and her face was puffy with sleep.

  “You Mrs. Bronson?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Help me get your husband out of the buggy.”

  Together we got him in the house and onto a bed. She was distressed, asking me over and over again what had happened. I told her we needed to get a doctor and did she know where he lived and she said yes and I told her to direct me and she did. I went and found the medico and he hurried back with me his shirttail hanging out, and when he saw Chalk he said, “Good God!”

  I stood out in the living room while they attended to him, and realized I’d not slept in the last twenty-four hours and the world seemed otherwise a shitty place to be. I went and stood out front and watched the soft falling rain that had started and quit and started again ever since the day before—rain like sorrow, like God’s own tears—and wishe
d I had a drink and a place to lay down. I paced then, thinking I ought to do something but not knowing what, if anything would make a difference.

  Finally they came out, the doctor and the woman—Chalk’s wife.

  “He’ll live,” the doctor said. “But it will be some time before he’s back to anything close to normal. His hands are all busted and I…well, I did the best I could for him.” He looked at the wife.

  Chalk’s wife’s eyes were red and teary. They saw I had blood on my clothes.

  “Ma’am, if it wouldn’t be any trouble, I could use a cup of coffee and a place to wash up.”

  They wanted to know what happened and I told them—the part about the beating but not why, or delivering Antonia; that was a little more complicated, considering. I could see the strain on Chalk’s wife as it was and figured why make it worse.

  “Thank you for bringing him home,” she said in a very soft voice. She was dark-haired and broad-faced with gray eyes—what you might call plain, but she had a sense of goodness about her, that deep-down kind of goodness you don’t sense many people have. I thought about how different she was from Antonia, how they must have compared in Chalk’s mind—the two of them, different as night and day on the surface, but maybe the same in ways a stranger like myself couldn’t see.

  Chalk’s wife showed me where I could wash up and then poured me a cup of Arbuckle and I drank the coffee and said I was sorry I had to bring her husband home in that condition and I was sorry there was nothing I could do to prevent it. She wanted to know why anyone would do what they did to him and I said I didn’t know because the truth wasn’t in play just then. She wept, and I stood and said I needed to go but that I would stop back by and look in on her and Chalk. The doctor walked out with me and when we were outside he said, “What the hell is the story here?”

  “It has to do with a woman,” I said.

  “Antonia,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Goddamn it.”

  He looked back toward the house.

  “I warned Chalk to stay away from her.”

  “It’s not exactly like it sounds.”

  “I knew them from before,” he said. “They were good together once, then it all went to shit and now look what’s happened. Somebody ought to go out and shoot that Johnny Waco in his goddamn face. Chalk’s a good man, maybe too good for his own good.”