The Long High Noon

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I need a saddle horse.”

  “You can have Patty. She’s old but she’s gentle.”

  “I said a horse, not a rocking chair. And a decent saddle, not one of them dishrags.” A row of brittle-looking saddles drooped from a wooden rail, cinch straps stiff as straw. He’d sold his good one in Lincoln for the fare to Arizona Territory; he’d had his fill of cold and thought he might try his luck prospecting for silver in Tombstone or Bisbee. But the money ran out in Phoenix, just in time for him to see the notice in the Herald.

  The livery man frowned, tossed the empty sardine can into a pile of manure, wiped his hands on his overalls, and got up to trot out a short-coupled sorrel mare with thick haunches. Randy looked at its teeth, felt its fetlocks, and inspected it for fistulas. “How much?”

  “For the day or the week?”

  “For the horse. I don’t figure to be coming back here.”

  They traded, agreeing finally on thirty for the horse and ten for a McClellan saddle that looked as if it might last to Calabesas. Randy lashed his bedroll wrapped around the Ballard rifle behind the cantle and swung into leather, awkwardly on account of his leg but fast enough to satisfy the livery man he wouldn’t fall off in town and bring shame to the enterprise.

  * * *

  Ralph Potter, the foreman, was a lean man in a leather waistcoat and whipcords, with stovepipe boots and a flat-brimmed, round-crowned hat like a town Indian’s. He wore a self-cocker in a stiff cavalry holster on his hip. His pale blue eyes looked like steel shavings caught in cracks and he was burned deep cherry from sweatband to collar and from wrists to fingertips and likely was creamy white everywhere else, like an honest man. Randy figured he was honest enough, but disliked him on sight. He was inhospitable, but that was neither here nor there. There was something lacking in the man—not as obvious as a missing limb or a blind eye, but easy to spot just the same.

  Decency, that’s what was missing. Randy had seen it before, often enough to know better than to argue himself out of the suspicion.

  “Goddamn it, I told ’em the Apaches are down in Chihuahua, holed up in caves avoiding General Crook. I’d sooner they sent a good working jack.”

  “Well, I’m here.”

  They had tents set up, the nearest shade being where they had come from and where they were headed, which was about the same distance. The graders were hauling their drags, the gandies dropping the rails into place with businesslike clanks and swinging their sledges, the Irish singing something from the old country, the Chinese working silently, no jabbering like their fellow expatriates who worked in town. A Negro boy in a flop hat and overalls carried around a bucket of water from which the Irish took a dipper and drank or sloshed it over their heads or both. The Chinese never sloshed, and some of them skipped their turns at a drink, seeming almost annoyed at the interruption to their labors. There was a covered chuck wagon and a dray loaded with barrels of water. Randy wondered what sort of man was in charge of the chuck.

  Damn, now he was even thinking like a cookie.

  Potter watched him watching the crew.

  “The chinks are hard workers, and dependable as clap in Kansas City. They don’t get drunk, don’t fight among themselves, never go on strike, and stay away from whores.”

  “What about the Irish?”

  “Ignorant as mules and twice as stubborn. Oh, they give you a week’s work in a day, when they ain’t hungover or beating each other’s brains out or got a bee up their ass over some little thing. If I could breed ’em with the chinks, cross the micks’ muscle with the yeller boys’ sense of responsibility, I’d have this spur finished. The Irish are talking strike, just when I need ’em to work through Sundays before the monsoons shut us down for a month.” The foreman shot a stream of tobacco, just missing the toe of Randy’s boot; testing the distance, thought the other; between his indecency and Randy’s patience. “Seeing’s how you’re here, you can draw your pay at the end of the week, then go wherever you like, so long as it ain’t here.”

  “I was promised six weeks.”

  “Not by me, you wasn’t. I can’t stand to see a man drawing pay sitting in the shade. It gives the Irish ideas.”

  “What shade? That rake handle over there wouldn’t keep the sweat off a sand flea. I didn’t come all the way from Nebraska for no twenty dollars. I spent all the up-front money on trains and that fat town mare holding up a Yankee saddle.”

  “You got them, and you got to see some country. I was you I’d leave it at that.” Potter laid a hand to rest on the handle of the self-cocking pistol.

  Randy considered it; but he was saving that fight for someone else. “I’ll draw that twenty now.”

  “At the end of the week, I said.”

  He pushed his hat back on his head, exposing pale skin from where it had rested to his thinning widow’s peak. “Then I reckon I’ll stretch out under the chuck wagon. Have somebody wake me it’s supper, will you? Me, I’d pick one of the Chinese, but I don’t like to tell a ramrod his business.”

  The foreman’s left cheek caved in, getting the works between his teeth. Randy saw a couple of the Irish looking their way, getting ready to lean on the handles of their shovels. Finally he dropped his hand from his weapon and jerked his head toward the biggest of the tents.

  The respective cool of the interior dried the sweat on the back of Randy’s neck. There was a campaign table and chair, a leather-reinforced canvas bag like postmen carried tied in a Gordian knot by its handles to the center pole with a lock securing its flap, a cot, and a ledger the size of a plat book spread open on the table. It was where the foreman doled out the pay. He sat in the folding chair, hoisted a bottle from under the table, and slid it across the table. “No glasses. No fandango dancers neither. Just Old Pepper; and if the micks smell it out they’ll beat each other to death trying to get it.”

  Randy made sure a nearby powder keg was empty and lowered himself onto it. “If you’re looking to drink me under this table to avoid paying me, you better dig a hole.” He uncorked the bottle, tipped it up, and let it gurgle.

  “No. Hell, no. Out there I got to behave like it’s coming out of my own poke, but to me it’s just rebel scrip. I was to do the company out of a dime, they’d hunt me to China and take it out through my kidneys. I reckon you and I can reach an agreement.”

  “The Irish?” Randy wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and scooted the bottle back across the table.

  “When the day’s work’s through and they ain’t stripping the hide off each other’s faces with their bare knuckles, they’re talking strike. I can’t take ’em all on, comes to that. But if an example can be made before they sort out their minds on the subject, I might could buy time, at least till the monsoons. By then we’ll be so close to Calabesas I can finish with the chinks if I have to.” He took a pull and pushed the bottle Randy’s way.

  Randy left it there. “I hired on to shoot injuns on the warpath. I won’t murder a white man just to make a point.”

  “That’s surprising talk, considering what I heard about you; but I’d never ask you to shoot an Irishman. They come in litters and we’d both be fighting ’em off the rest of our lives, which wouldn’t be long.”

  “What, then?” But he was beginning to suspect.

  Potter got up, went to the tent flap, and drew it aside. The view descended a slope to where a group of Chinese in flop hats and overalls were carrying twenty feet of iron rail.

  “Take your pick,” he said. “They’re all of ’em alike.”

  Randy said nothing. The foreman looked back at him. “It’d convince the Irish we mean business. A chink today, maybe a mick tomorrow. It ain’t as if the yeller boys ain’t got a hundred cousins pouring in from Frisco every day.”

  Randy considered; then stood, scooped up the empty keg, and swung it at Potter’s head. The staves collapsed like the sticks they were and one of the iron hoops lit on its side and rolled out the flap and down toward the latest patch of railroad, where it exc
ited some interest, but only for a moment. Then the clank of the rails dropping into place and the clang of the sledges striking home the spikes resumed, echoing in Randy Locke’s mind miles after it had faded from actual hearing.

  In his poke he carried the six weeks’ wages he’d hired on for, freed from the bank bag with the aid of his old worn bowie and his own two hands, worn as well but still of service. Apprised of the atrocity by a wire from Ralph Potter, recuperating from a broken jaw in a mission hospital in Elgin, the railroad man in Phoenix posted a reward for his capture; as was typical of that industry, the amount settled upon was ten times more than had been lost.

  Randy stopped for rest in a town that was so Mexican he suspected government surveyors of erring in drawing the line south rather than north of it. Every day seemed to be a cause for fiesta: the birth or death of an important saint, the anniversary of some skirmish between patriots and some tyrannical despot or other, thirteen whelps born to an old unparticular bitch thought barren, and she with teats enough to serve the bunch. All the signs were in Spanish and some bored woodcarver had hacked a monkey-faced Christ out of a saguaro cactus at the village entrance. The cantina where he found a room was run by a short broad Mexican with his hair cut in bangs and little triangular moustaches at the corners of his mouth. He put aside the Spanish-language newspaper he was reading to open the registration book. When he spun it his way to read the signature, his eyes stood out from his head.

  “Señor Randy Locke?” said he. “Randolph Locke?”

  “Not Randolph. Not to my face. Not in twenty-five years. Por que?” A man couldn’t remain in Arizona long without picking up some of the lingo.

  The little man spread the newspaper on the cracked piñon surface of the registration desk, pointing a ragged nail at an item in El Noticias Telegrafo. The first English word Randy spotted quickened his pulse: Farmer.

  “How’s your English?”

  The little man glanced out the open front door, which looked out on the Rio Grande, brown and sluggish under the burden of violent history; Mexico three hundred yards away.

  “Señor, I am not certain which language I am speaking now.”

  Randy stabbed a finger at the paper, cutting a cicatrix in the brittle newsprint with the nail. “Read it. In English.” He stood a cartwheel dollar on its edge and spun it with a flick of the same finger. It made a white blur, mesmeric to the little man behind the desk, who snatched it up in mid-spin and turned the newspaper back his way.

  “San Francisco, December eleventh,” he read …

  THIRTEEN

  There is no better way of determining a friend’s true character than to spend three days under the same roof.

  San Francisco had lost nothing of its ability to separate a man from his capital; if anything, it had refined the process since Randy Locke’s visit.

  As damp, foggy winter melded into foggy, damp spring, the rates at the Palace had hollowed a deep gouge in Abraham Cripplehorn’s Chautauqua earnings. Frank Farmer’s more modest poke was reduced to the same state by the demands of the lesser hotels near the crumbling harbor. After some palaver, the two pooled their resources and went partners on a rented house occupied until recently by a shanghai agent known locally as Black Louie, and more recently still as a guest of the gallows. The walls were sufficient to hold up the roof, but held out neither noise nor drafts, and the roof itself had the unique property of releasing rusty water onto the tenants’ heads even when the sun shone.

  “How the devil is such a thing possible?” complained Cripplehorn, when a fresh gout teeming with iron particles and live wigglers suddenly seasoned his soup.

  “A proper roof don’t slant to the middle,” Frank explained. “This one leaves pockets. Think of ’em as unplanned cisterns. If this was New Mexico, you’d be happy to have ’em.”

  “Well, it isn’t, and I’m not. What’s your reasoning on the rats? This morning I found a litter of them in my valise.”

  “Half this town’s built of busted ships. I reckon the critters just come along with the timbers.”

  “What’s keeping your friend? Updegraff says that piece went out on the wires two months ago. Maybe he’s turned into that yellow skunk after all.”

  “I didn’t say them words. That was pure Jack Dodger fiction, and if you remember right I was agin it. Randy’s a lot of things, but he never tucked his tail ’twixt his legs and he ain’t dumb enough to believe I ever said he did; not that it would keep him from coming here shanks mare if he had to. Either he’s so far out in the high country he hasn’t got the word or he’s dead.” Frank finished a game of Patience and peeled the dirty pasteboards off a dirtier oilcloth, one by one. “Either this table needs a new cover or I need a new deck. One more hand and I’ll want a spatula.”

  Cripplehorn upended his last bottle of peach brandy into a tin cup that had come with the house. He ran a finger around the inside of the neck and sucked on it. “I entered this venture intending to clear enough to meet all the crown heads of Europe. Instead I’m incubating vermin and eating nail soup.”

  “Don’t forget the baby meskeeters. A man needs meat.”

  “Do you really think he’s dead?”

  Frank shuffled the deck; or to be more precise, broke it free of itself from time to time like a batch of sliced bacon and rearranged the rashers.

  “Nope. I know Randy better than anybody. He might let himself be swallowed up by a grizzly, if he got bored with the contest, but he’d come out that bear’s ass with his Colt in his fist, asking after me.”

  “Can I quote you on that? It would read so well in Harper’s Weekly.”

  Frank pasted a jaded queen of hearts to the disreputable oilcloth. One of her eyes, thumb-smeared and stained with soot, appeared to be winking at him, with the tired automatism of an overqualified whore. “You come out here looking for color, you said. You wasn’t specific as to the picture it got painted with.”

  Cripplehorn drained his cup, wobbled the last taste of civilization around inside his mouth, plucked his last cigar from his waistcoat, which needed mending at the seams, and lit it off the greasy flame from a coal-oil lamp that smoked like a rendering plant. Frank Farmer, he’d discovered, was less than the ideal roommate. He kept to his grooming, barbering his imperials, brushing his suit of unmatched pieces, and bathing when necessary, but as to the rest, living with him was like sharing quarters with one of those wild men one read about, raised by wolves. The outhouse was only ten paces from the back door, but when nature called, the nearest window would do: All the whitewash was eaten off the wall beneath every fenestration on the premises. He seemed to regard passing gas the supreme compliment to a meal well prepared (Cripplehorn considered himself a passably good cook, a condition forced upon him by self-sufficiency), scrubbed out his long-handles in the same sink where Cripplehorn washed his vegetables, and hung them from the same hook that supported the big frying pan in which most of their meals were prepared, dripping onto the iron stove and leaving circles of rust and essence of Frank Farmer on the surface.

  It was about as far a cry from the crown heads of Europe as could be imagined.

  Frank, in his turn, found Cripplehorn fell short of pards he’d lived with in past times. His coffee was so weak a fly could swim around on the surface, practicing its dog-crawl and floating on its back like some Oriental put’n’take, and it wouldn’t wake a man up from a daydream. When the man retired, hanging up his clothes and fiddling with them so the pleats were just so, taking out his Dutch eye and polishing it with a little cloth and sinking it in a glass of water, he thought he might as well be living with a high-toned woman, only without the expected benefits.

  The worst of it was that eye. On nights when the fog didn’t stand between the house and the moon, a shaft passed through the window and lay on that glass. Ivory didn’t sink, and so the eye floated on top, drifting this way and that, the way a real eye did in a human face, and lighting on Frank where he lay on his bunk. He couldn’t shake the feeling that C
ripplehorn was in charge of it and what it saw, and he couldn’t sleep with a man staring at him wide awake from the bunk next to his.

  This night he turned away from it onto his back. He stared up into the darkness beyond the red glow leaking from the poorly joined barrel stove and prayed to the Lord for Randy’s safe conduct.

  FOURTEEN

  No man who has someone he can call upon for help is truly poor.

  WANTED

  Randolph Locke

  is Sought for Assault and Robbery in Elgin, A.T.

  A REWARD OF $1,000

  is offered for information leading to his arrest and conviction.

  Randy spotted the shinplaster tacked to a corkboard in a combination general store and post office in San Diego. His description—height below average, thickset, full-faced—was right enough, but his own mother couldn’t identify him by the pen-and-ink sketch that accompanied it. If he were the manhunting type he could keep pulling men off the street with vapid expressions and faces traced around the bottom of a whiskey bottle all day long and come away empty-handed. The storekeep, who was also postmaster, gave him not a second glance when he filled his order.

  Not that being wanted signified anything. The more miles he put between himself and Arizona Territory, the less economically feasible it was for anyone to attempt to claim the thousand. He’d burned off most of the wages he’d had coming to him for refusing to shoot a Chinaman just getting that close to San Francisco and Frank. If he wanted to arrive with any stake at all he was looking at better than three hundred miles in a cattle car.

  But worse was to come.

  The guards aboard California trains had no regard for tramps. They made a thorough examination of the rolling stock before it moved, which meant jogging along and grabbing on outside the yards before the cars got to moving too fast. With his bedroll slung by a rope across his back, he missed on the first try and was falling behind when someone already aboard hung halfway out the open door of the car by the handle and stuck out a hand in a sooty fireman’s glove. “Grab on, brother!”