Cottonwood (36 page)

“So he loves you. You don’t owe him anything.”

“He gave my child a name, and he took me in marriage when a lot of respectable men wouldn’t have. And he stood by me even after seeing what people thought of me.”

“Goddamnit, Maggie, you’re not going back to Marc.”

“I can’t go with you again and have it go the way it did last time. I have a life here and I won’t throw it away again.”

“The hell you do. You think people will forget about this?”

“They won’t forget me leaving with you again.”

With that she began stroking my cock through my trousers. “Stop that until you can tell me. Are you with me or with him?”

“Tonight I’m with you,” she said. “After I let him stew a few more nights I’ll be with him.”

“We don’t have to go. I could stay here,” I said. I grabbed her by the wrist, harder than I meant to, and she wrested herself away.

“You’d go again, Bill. Soon as you got bored, which wouldn’t take long.”

I went to the door, and though she called me back I kept going until I was out the Braunschweigs’ back door. I took a circuitous route, first north, then west past the Leval mansion, and then up Main toward the boarding house. Passing the saloon I stopped in and spent a few minutes talking to Gleason. He was still concerned that Mr. Smight was going to try and kill me, and I tried to reassure him that there was no longer any need to worry about Smight and me. Just to change the subject I told him I’d seen Clevenger that morning.

“Old Clevenger comes in here once in a while,” he said. “Doesn’t drink all the time, but when he does he has to be picked up and carried home.”

“I thought he lived up in Wilson County.”

“Not for a long time. He lives out north of town, a ways north of where you used to farm.”

“He farms?”

“His son does. He used to have something to do with the flour mill. I think he owns a piece of it.”

When I got to Clyde’s, the house was dark, and I was glad for that. I went to sleep, wherein I dreamt sad, horny dreams until the dawn.

5

LABETTE COUNTY, KANSAS APRIL, 1890 Vortices

It was warm that morning, verging on hot, and it was muggy, too. I was to open the studio in the afternoon, but I went to the saloon and asked Clyde if I might switch days with him. He agreed with no evident curiosity as to my motive; doubtless he assumed that it was something to do with Maggie, and I didn’t bother to enlighten him. I hired another horse, sans buggy, and rode in the direction of the brick factory. Since my first visit a new complex of a dozen circular kilns, each the size of a house, had been built, and the warehouse had been replaced with a three-story monstrosity. Herbert’s office occupied essentially the same spot in the new building, and his secretary waved me on through.

“Just came by to tell you I’m going, probably in a day or two.”

“Maggie going back with Marc?” He said it apologetically, and I was sure he’d known it before I had.

“Don’t think there’s much chance she’ll soften on it,” I said.

“Why don’t you give it a day or two? Hell, she’s not thinking straight. If it’s money she’s worried about, you’re going to make plenty around here.”

“I don’t know what she’s worried about, but I’m not staying to find out.”

He tried some more to talk me out of it, and after a few minutes I left.

The horse I’d been assigned was a spotted gray gelding, and he moved with great reluctance, as if he resented being hired and ridden on an overly warm day when he might have been home inside his stable. I wasn’t in any particular hurry, though, and I didn’t rush the beast forward; instead I watched in a leisurely way the road I traveled every day back when I was running the saloon and trying to be a farmer at the same time, noting the myriad small changes to the route. When I passed a slight curve in the road I remembered that this passed close to a shallow creek where I used to take Clyde wading, and I found myself wondering about Clyde’s coming son or daughter, and whether he’d take the child swimming there, too. Perhaps I’d return one day and see the child, even take him wading in the creek myself.

Not much farther up the road I passed my former homestead. I could see five children I assumed to be Haxley’s playing in a puddle near the road, and I called out a greeting to them. The oldest ones waved back, laughing, just as the gelding reared back in a panic.

On the road ahead of me a snake had been crossing, and the horse had nearly stepped on it. The serpent was rearing back to strike, and this time my mount managed to throw me. I landed painfully on my back and scrambled to my feet; I had been thrown from a horse or two in my time, but never within striking distance of an agitated pit viper. I rolled away from the gelding and sat up. I withdrew the Dragoon—since my encounter with Smight I had been going out heeled—and fired a shot that tore a considerable hole into the rear of the snake, which I now judged to be a copperhead. The snake now ignored my mount and turned its primeval anger toward me. The horse had turned tail, but the eldest of Haxley’s children, a boy of about ten or twelve, reached it in time to grab it by the reins and hold it for me.

The wounded copperhead struck at me then, and I stepped aside quickly enough to miss its lunge. I stamped my foot down and pinned its vile head to the dirt, then pressed the barrel of the Dragoon between its eyes and fired, making a mess of it all over my boots. By this time Haxley had come running, carrying a shortbarreled shotgun, to see what the shooting was about.

His children gave him a quick accounting of what had happened as his son, who had managed to calm the horse considerably, led him back to me.

“Copperhead,” Haxley said, looking down at it. “That’ll kill you quick. I’ve heard it said a water moccasin’s worse, but you’d be just as dead with a copperhead bite.”

“Weren’t too many snakes around here in my day. Never saw one crossing the road, anyway.”

“They’ll do that, when there’s a rain coming.” To the southeast the sky was heavy with distant storm clouds, yellow gray in color. We watched the clouds for a minute without speaking, until Haxley’s son broke the silence.

“Remember that snake in the barn, Papa?”

Haxley nodded. “There was a big king snake in the barn when I bought the place, I kept it around for a while to get the rats, but my wife was so scared of it I finally cut off its head with a hoe.”

His son seemed quite pleased with himself when I thanked him for his assistance, and he volunteered that he was eleven years old; I might have added that he handled the horse better at eleven than I did at the age of forty-four. I then bid them all farewell and continued on my way.

I was sweating by the time I got to the Clevenger farm, and the wind had picked up slightly, a warm, wet one from the southeast. It was likely already raining hard in the Indian Territory. The farm was four or five times the size of my old homestead, and I counted five men working, including one who stopped me before I got to the house. I told him I was looking for the elder Mr. Clevenger.

“That’d be my father,” he said, and I explained that I was an old friend passing through. He walked me to the house, one of the biggest farmhouses I had ever seen, and we walked inside. He yelled for the old man, who came down the stairs slowly and with the aid of a hickory stick. The house was sparsely furnished for its size, and the dust that coated every exposed surface in the room seemed to suggest an absence of female habitation. Clevenger wore a frayed old shirt with a large brown stain over his heart, and his pants had holes worn through both knees; the day before in town he’d been dressed as nattily as anyone in those parts ever was.

“Hello, Mr. Clevenger,” I said. “Bill Ogden.”

He nodded, and when his son returned to his labors he indicated a chair in the parlor. “Sit down.”

We both sat, and in the light from the parlor window he looked even older than he had the day before. He was a big man and his enormous paw gripped the walking stick as if he might hit me with it if he didn’t like what I had to say. On his shirt was a tin badge, a circle with a star inside, reading LABETTE CO. DEPUTY SHERIFF, though he appeared too old to stop anyone from so much as spitting on the sidewalk or making fresh remarks to passersby.

“You’re still deputized, Mr. Clevenger?”

“You’re damned right I still am. Took a part-time job with the county when I moved here from Wilson County even though I didn’t need the money. I just like sheriffing.”

“How long since you left Wilson County, anyway?”

“Summer of ’73. Right after I seen you last.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” I said.

He rapped his stick on the floor so hard I jumped, and then he yelled. “Mae!” Getting no answer he yelled again, louder, though the first try had surely been loud enough to hear outside the house. “Mae! Get in here!”

Disproving my earlier theory about the lack of a female presence in the home, a sturdy woman limped into the room, her hair and apron dusted with flour. “What is it, Papa?” Her tone suggested that it was not the first time that morning he’d hollered for her.

“I ain’t your Papa. Now head on outside, this man and I have some things to discuss.”

“But I’m doing the baking. I won’t listen to what you’re talking about, honest. It’s about to rain, Papa.”

“Get on outside, woman, before I use the stick.” He made as if to rise, and she wiped her hands on the apron and went out the front door, rolling her eyes.

“You’ve done pretty well for yourself,” I said, just to make conversation.

He snorted. “Not as well as some. Your friend Braunschweig, now, him and that Frenchie wife of his, they got a hell of a house.” He turned his head and spat onto the floor, a large gob of mucous and saliva that sat there glistening against the wood floor, blanched in that area and several others near it by what must have amounted to years of such gobs being spat onto it.

“Still. Nice big house, nice big farm.”

“Save your breath, Mr. Ogden. I don’t know what sort of bargain you struck with that son of a bitch Braunschweig, but you won’t get a shiny nickel out of Gil Clevenger.”

“I didn’t come looking for money, Mr. Clevenger.”

“The hell you didn’t, you’re his ally. Money’s all you and him and that Leval ever wanted, and Niedel. Shit, not an hour after you left that night they showed up with that old Bender bitch, all proud for having kilt the other three, and they were going to make her dig up the swag. Problem was she didn’t know exactly where I’d buried most of it. I kept my share separate, see.”

I stared at Clevenger, thinking that I was misinterpreting what he’d said. “Your share?”

“My share. I always kept fifty percent, for taking all the risk.”

“And you just admitted to Herbert and Tim that you were the Benders’ fencer.”

“Shit, no use denying it. I was tied to a damn tree, and there was the old woman yelling ‘There he is, there’s our man, he’ll show you where it is.’ First thing I did when they cut me loose was go for an old shovel and smash the side of her head in. They damn near shot me, but I convinced ’em if they were to keep the money they couldn’t bring her back anyway. So Braunschweig took his piece and finished her there on the ground.” He snorted and spat again. “Shit, it should’ve all been mine. If those half-wits hadn’ta gone and kilt that banker none of it would have happened.”

“Mr. Sheale, you mean?”

“That’s the one. Shit, they shoulda known somebody’d be back looking for him. All they got offa him was five hundred, though, unless they was lying to me, which they was scared to.”

I was amazed; I’d expected to have to drag the truth out of him, but here he offered it to me freely, on the assumption that I knew it already. I decided to ask my biggest question right up front: “Where’d you bury old Mrs. Bender and Katie, anyway?”

“With their men, down by the river.” He chuckled, his eyes focused seventeen years back. “Katie was already dead. Died with the men, which is a damned shame. I would have let her live, if it’d been me. Me and Katie had kind of an understanding.”

“You reckon those two women from Michigan are going to swing?”

He rapped the stick against the ground. “Now don’t get all churchy on me about those two. Camp followers and baby farmers. The old one at least is a killer.”

“The young one’s got a baby.”

“Hah!” He rapped the stick again twice. “Try and tell me that babe won’t be better off by a damned sight raised by Mrs. Naylor. No, sir, this is the kind of business where you don’t want to get religion all of a sudden. Your friend Niedel started feeling badly about what’d been done, and look what happened to him. Killed for the value of two weeks’ payroll.”

He narrowed his little blue eyes as if to let me know that such an unfortunate event could happen again at any time, and I understood that I was, in fact, sitting across from the last of the Bender gang. My hands began to grow numb and prickly, and I tried to remember whether the Dragoon had three or four shots left. I calmed myself, though, and continued speaking with Clevenger as though all our differences were philosophical. The more I talked without suggesting he give me money or suggesting that any of his actions or alliances had been blameworthy the more he warmed to me, and by the end of our interview he considered me his bosom friend and confidante. He told me how he met the Benders, how he moved what they brought him and converted it into cash, what he and Katie did when the others weren’t present, and sometimes when they were. He regarded the whole affair with a sort of warm nostalgia, a happy, blameless enterprise that might have lasted forever if not for the Benders’ rashness.