She backed out of the kitchen and felt her way to the stairs, her eyes always on the kitchen, in her ears the sound of the man trying to get in the house to kill Don.
At the top of the stairs, Don came around the wall edge and almost collided with her.
“What are you doing?” he snapped.
“I heard Billy crying.”
She heard something snap in the darkness and realized that he’d set the hammer of his army automatic.
“Didn’t you tell the police that he said he was going to kill you?”
“I told them.”
“Well, where are they, then?”
Her words choked off. The man was breaking through a back window.
She stood mute, listening to the fragments of window spatter on the kitchen linoleum.
“What are we going to do?” Her whisper shook in the darkness.
He pulled away from her grip and moved down the stairs without a sound. She heard his shoeless feet pad cross the dining room rug. In the kitchen the man was clambering through the window. She gripped the banister until her hand hurt.
There was a rush of sight and sounds.
The kitchen light flickered on. Don leaped from the wall and pointed the gun at something in the kitchen. “Drop it!” he ordered. The house was filled with the roar of a gun and something crashed in the front room.
Then Betty sank down on the steps in a nerveless crouch as Don’s pistol only clicked and she saw it drop from his hand. Between the banister posts she saw him standing in the light that flooded from the kitchen.
The man in the kitchen laughed.
“Got you,” he said. “I got you now.”
“No!” She didn’t even realize that she’d cried out. All she knew was that Don was staring up at her, his white face helpless in the kitchen light. The man looked up at her.
“Turn on the light,” the man told Don. His throat seemed clogged; all the words came out thick and indistinct.
The dining room light went on. Betty stared at a man with lank, black hair, white face, an unkempt tweed suit with an egg-spotted vest buttoned to the top. The dark revolver he held in a claw of hand.
“Come down here,” he told her.
She went down the steps. The man backed into the kitchen, kicking aside Don’s gun.
“Get in here, both of you,” he ordered.
In the fluorescent light, the man’s pocked face looked even whiter and grimier. His lips kept drawing back from his teeth as he sniffed. He kept clearing his throat.
“Well, I got you,” he repeated.
“You don’t understand,” Betty was able to speak at last. “You’ve made a mistake. Our name is Martin, not Tyler.”
The man paid no attention to her. He looked straight at Don.
“Thought you could change your name, I wouldn’t find you, huh?” he said. His eyes glittered. He coughed once, his chest lurching, spots of red rising in his puffed-out cheeks.
“You’ve got the wrong man,” Don said quietly. “My name is Martin.”
“That’s not what it was in the old days, is it?” the man said hoarsely.
Betty glanced at Don, saw his face go slack. Something cold gripped her insides.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Don said.
“Oh, don’t you!” snarled the man. “It was okay so long as the riding was high, wasn’t it, Donsy boy. Soon as things got hot you cut out quick enough, didn’t you? Didn’t you, you son-of-a—”
She didn’t dare speak. Her eyes fled from the man’s face to Don’s and back again, her mind jumping in ten different directions at once. Why didn’t Don say something?
“You know what they did t’us?” the man went on in a flat voice. “You know what they did? Sent us up for ten years. Ten years; count ’em.” His smile was crooked. “But not you, Donsy boy. Not you.”
“Don.” Betty said. He didn’t look at her.
“And you got married,” said the man, the gun shaking in his hand. “You got married. Ain’t that—”
A cough shook his body. For a second, his eyes filled with tears and he stepped back quickly and banged against the table. Then, in an instant, he stood, legs wide apart, holding the gun out before him, rubbing the tears from his pale cheeks.
“Get back,” he warned. They hadn’t moved. His eyes widened, then his face grew suddenly taut. “Well, I’m gonna kill you,” he said. “I’m gonna kill you.”
“Mister, you got—” Don began.
“Shut up!” screamed the man.
Then he was quiet, his dark eyes peering toward the dining room, the stairs. He was listening to Billy crying again.
“You got a kid,” the man said slowly.
“No.” Betty said it suddenly. She stared at the impossible face of the impossible man who had just said he was going to kill her husband, who was asking with unholy interest about her son.
“This is gonna be a pleasure,” said the man. “I’m gonna pay you back good for what you done t’me.”
She saw Don’s face whiten, heard his voice, frail and unbelieving. “What do you mean?”
“Get in the dining room,” the man said.
They backed into the next room, their eyes never leaving the man’s pock-marked face. Betty’s heart thudded. She shivered without control at the sound of Billy’s crying.
“You’re not—”
“Get up the stairs.” A violent cough shook the man.
Betty shuddered as Don’s hand gripped her left arm. She glanced over at him dazedly but he didn’t return her look. He was holding her back from the stairs.
“You’re not going to hurt my boy,” he said, his voice husky.
The man prodded with his gun and Don backed up a step. Betty moved beside him. They went up another step and with each upward movement, Betty felt waves of horror grow stronger in her.
“Simpson, kill me,” Don begged suddenly. “Leave my boy alone.”
Don knew his name. Betty slumped against the wall weakly with the knowledge that everything the man had said was true. True.
“I swear to you!” Don said.
“Swear!” the man shouted at him, “Twelve years I been after you. Ten in stir and two years running you down!”
Suddenly his face was convulsed with coughing; he shot out his left hand for the banister.
In the same second, Don leaped.
Betty felt a scream tear from her throat as the roar of the gun deafened her. She heard Don cry out in pain and watched in rigid horror as the two men grappled on the stairway just below her. She saw blood running down Don’s shirt and splashing on the green-carpeted steps.
Her eyes grew wide as she watched the man’s hate-tortured face grow hard, the flesh seeming to tighten as if drawn at the edges by screws. The two men made no sound, only gasped in each other’s faces. Their hands, wrestling for the gun, were hidden from her.
Another deafening roar.
The two men stood straight, staring at each other. Then the man’s mouth opened and spittle ran across his unshaven chin. He toppled backwards down the steps and landed in a crumpled heap on the landing. His dead eyes stared up at them.
For a long while, Betty stood quite still.
Then she left the room and went back into the hall, closing the door quietly behind her. She went to the bathroom and got the medical kit.
Don was sitting on a step halfway downstairs, his head propped on two blood-drained fists, his elbows resting on his knees. He didn’t turn as she came down the steps.
She sat down beside him and drew a bandage tight around his shoulder and arm.
“Does it hurt?” she asked dully.
He shook his head.
“I wonder if the neighbors heard,” she said.
“They must have,” he said. “You’d better call th
e police.”
Her fingers grew still on the bandage. “You didn’t call them before, did you?”
“No.”
He began to speak slowly, without looking at her.
“When I was just a kid,” he said. “Eighteen, nineteen—I worked the rackets in Chicago.” He looked down at the dead man. “Simpson was one of the guys I worked with. He was always hot-headed, maybe a little crazy.”
His head fell forward. “Well, when the police caught up with us I . . .” He let out a slow, tired breath. “I got scared and ran. I didn’t think then either. I was just a kid and I was scared. So I ran.”
She looked at him thinking how strange it was to have been married nine years to a man she didn’t know about.
“The rest is simple,” he said. “I changed my name, I tried to live a decent life, an honest one. I tried to forget.” He shook his head defeatedly. “I don’t know how he found me.” He swallowed. “It doesn’t matter, really. You’d better call the police. Before somebody else does.”
She finished the bandage and stood. She went down the steps, avoiding the sight of the man lying there with his blood-soaked chest.
She dialed the operator. “Police,” she said and waited, looking up at Don’s pale face looking at her between the posts of the banister. He looked like a frightened boy who’d been chased and punished and knew that he deserved it.
“Thirteenth precinct,” said the man’s voice on the phone.
“I’d like to report a shooting,” Betty said.
The man took the address. Betty’s eyes were on Don, on the look of resignation on his face.
“The man broke into our house,” she said.
“No,” Don said, “Tell them the truth.”
“That’s right,” she said, “We never saw him before. I guess he was a burglar. Most of our lights were out. We were watching television. I guess he thought we weren’t home.”
Don sagged and closed his eyes as she told the police to bring a doctor. Then, after she hung up she stood looking down at him.
“All right,” he murmured.
The blood started oozing through his bandage then and Betty went and got a clean towel from the linen closet. She went back and sat beside her husband and held the towel against his shoulder until the flow stopped. Then she got up, went to Billy’s bedroom and rocked him gently in her arms.
Downstairs, Don waited quietly for the men to come and take away the body.
THE CONQUEROR
That afternoon in 1871, the stage to Grantville had only the two of us as passengers, rocking and swaying in its dusty, hot confines under the fiery Texas sun. The young man sat across from me, one palm braced against the hard, dry leather of the seat, the other holding on his lap a small black bag.
He was somewhere near nineteen or twenty. His build was almost delicate. He was dressed in checkered flannel and wore a dark tie with a stickpin in its center. You could tell he was a city boy.
From the time we’d left Austin two hours before, I had been wondering about the bag he carried so carefully in his lap. I noticed that his light-blue eyes kept gazing down at it. Every time they did, his thin-lipped mouth would twitch—whether toward a smile or a grimace I couldn’t tell. Another black bag, slightly larger, was on the seat beside him, but to this he paid little attention.
I’m an old man, and while not usually garrulous, I guess I do like to seek out conversation. Just the same, I hadn’t offered to speak in the time we’d been fellow passengers, and neither had he. For about an hour and a half I’d been trying to read the Austin paper, but now I laid it down beside me on the dusty seat. I glanced down again at the small bag and noted how tightly his slender fingers were clenched around the bone handle.
Frankly, I was curious. And maybe there was something in the young man’s face that reminded me of Lew or Tylan—my sons. Anyhow, I picked up the newspaper and held it out to him.
“Care to read it?” I asked him above the din of the 24 pounding hoofs and the rattle and creak of the stage.
There was no smile on his face as he shook his head once. If anything, his mouth grew tighter until it was a line of almost bitter resolve. It is not often you see such an expression in the face of so young a man. It is too hard at that age to hold on to either bitterness or resolution, too easy to smile and laugh and soon forget the worst of evils. Maybe that was why the young man seemed so unusual to me.
“I’m through with it if you’d like,” I said.
“No, thank you,” he answered curtly.
“Interesting story here,” I went on, unable to rein in a runaway tongue. “Some Mexican claims to have shot young Wesley Hardin.”
The young man’s eyes raised up a moment from his bag and looked at me intently. Then they lowered to the bag again.
“’Course I don’t believe a word of it,” I said. “The man’s not born yet who’ll put John Wesley away.”
The young man did not choose to talk, I saw. I leaned back against the jolting seat and watched him as he studiously avoided my eyes.
Still I would not stop. What is this strange compulsion of old men to share themselves? Perhaps they fear to lose their last years in emptiness. “You must have gold in that bag,” I said to him, “to guard it so zealously.”
It was a smile he gave me now, though a mirthless one.
“No, not gold,” the young man said, and as he finished saying so, I saw his lean throat move once nervously.
I smiled and struck in deeper the wedge of conversation.
“Going to Grantville?” I asked.
“Yes, I am,” he said—and I suddenly knew from his voice that he was no Southern man.
I did not speak then. I turned my head away and looked out stiffly across the endless flat, watching through the choking haze of alkali dust, the bleached scrub which dotted the barren stretches. For a moment, I felt myself tightened with that rigidity we Southerners contracted in the presence of our conquerors.
But there is something stronger than pride, and that is loneliness. It was what made me look back to the young man and once more see in him something of my own two boys who gave their lives at Shiloh. I could not, deep in myself, hate the young man for being from a different part of our nation. Even then, imbued as I was with the stiff pride of the Confederate, I was not good at hating.
“Planning to live in Grantville?” I asked.
The young man’s eyes glittered. “Just for a while,” he said. His fingers grew yet tighter on the bag he held so firmly in his lap. Then he suddenly blurted, “You want to see what I have in—”
He stopped, his mouth tightening as if he were angry to have spoken.
I didn’t know what to say to his impulsive, half-finished offer.
The young man very obviously clutched at my indecision and said, “Well, never mind—you wouldn’t be interested.”
And though I suppose I could have protested that I would, somehow I felt it would do no good.
The young man leaned back and braced himself again as the coach yawed up a rock-strewn incline. Hot, blunt waves of dust-laden wind poured through the open windows at my side. The young man had rolled down the curtains on his side shortly after we’d left Austin.
“Got business in our town?” I asked, after blowing dust from my nose and wiping it from around my eyes and mouth.
He leaned forward slightly. “You live in Grantville?” he asked loudly as overhead the driver, Jeb Knowles, shouted commands to his three teams and snapped the leather popper of his whip over their straining bodies.
I nodded. “Run a grocery there,” I said, smiling at him. “Been visiting up North with my oldest—with my son.”
He didn’t seem to hear what I had said. Across his face a look as intent as any I have ever seen moved suddenly.
“Can you tell me something?” he began. “Who’s the quickest pi
stolman in your town?”
The question startled me, because it seemed born of no idle curiosity. I could see that the young man was far more than ordinarily interested in my reply. His hands were clutching, bloodless, the handle of his small black bag.
“Pistolman?” I asked him.
“Yes. Who’s the quickest in Grantville? Is it Hardi? Does he come there often? Or Longley. Do they come there?”
That was the moment I knew something was not quite right in that young man. For, when he spoke those words, his face was strained and eager beyond a natural eagerness.
“I’m afraid I don’t know much about such things,” I told him. “The town is rough enough; I’ll be the first man to admit to that. But I go my own way and folks like me go theirs and we stay out of trouble.”
“But what about Hardin?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know about that either, young man,” I said. “Though I do believe someone said he was in Kansas now.”
The young man’s face showed a keen and heartfelt disappointment.
“Oh,” he said and sank back a little.
He looked up suddenly. “But there are pistolmen there,” he said, “dangerous men?”
I looked at him for a moment, wishing, somehow, that I had kept to my paper and not let the garrulity of age get the better of me. “There are such men,” I said stiffly, “wherever you look in our ravaged South.”
“Is there a sheriff in Grantville?” the young man asked me then.
“There is,” I said—but for some reason did not add that Sheriff Cleat was hardly more than a figurehead, a man who feared his own shadow and kept his appointment only because the county fathers were too far away to come and see for themselves what a futile job their appointee was doing.
I didn’t tell the young man that. Vaguely uneasy, I told him nothing more at all and we were separated by silence again, me to my thoughts, he to his—whatever strange, twisted thoughts they were. He looked at his bag and fingered at the handle, and his narrow chest rose and fell with sudden lurches.
A creaking, a rattling, a blurred spinning of thick spokes. A shouting, a deafening clatter of hoofs in the dust. Over the far rise, the buildings of Grantville were clustered and waiting.
The Best of Richard Matheson Page 33
