E.L. Doctorow (22 page)

He’s still there, they’re all as they are. I can write with one hand but I can’t dig. Horses shied away from his fall, a man was running toward me, I thought What is he going to tell me? but he had a barrel stave in his hand. I held up my gun and he veered off like a dog on a richer scent.

Across the street Swede’s restaurant was a pile of canvas, humping and shifting, a living thing. He was pulling his wife out from under and I ran over and helped him. We put her on her feet and she grabbed Swede and held on to him, sobbing and hugging him. He was crying too, holding an iron skillet in his hand, his anger making him cry, and when it got the best of him he broke out of her grasp, cursing, and started to beat at the movement under the canvas, swinging that skillet with all his strength.

Helga pulled at him, trying to get him away. People were running every which way, meeting and grappling in the street. It was a lunatic town.

“Swede,” I cried, “get her out of here!”

He came to his senses, I have a glimpse now of his face suddenly calm under its shock of hair, white in the moon’s color. He picked up his wife and walked away quickly, straight out past the sump, going toward the shadow of the rocks.

From Zar’s Palace issued a woman’s rising voice of moans stopping short in one deathly scream.

I had remembered a bale of barbed wire standing behind Isaac’s store, a big spool of it, maybe Isaac from Vermont had been expecting the herds to come to Hard Times. I made for it, proud of my cunning; and I was in such a fever with my idea, the tear in my side didn’t hurt, nor the thought of Molly and the boy awaiting what might be, nor the moment’s glimpse I had, going down the alley of the looters beating down Isaac’s door. Through the walls of the saloon I could hear Turner begin to sing drunkenly, throw the furniture around—and it was thrilling to concentrate my hate.

Now from that spot there was a clear view to the rock hills lying under the moon as far east as the eye could see. I have the image in my mind of John Bear looking on from a ledge up there, although I’m not sure now this was the moment I spotted him. What can I say, he had no hat or shirt as he waited there on one knee while the mob wrecked his shack, by then he had no reason to wear white men’s clothes. I can’t understand how my eye found him, he was so still. But the moon picked him
out for me, it was a lye moon etching him on my brain. There was motion in his stillness, something already done in his pose, and although I was not to see him again there is no break in the picture I have between then and this morning when I found the Russian on the floor by his bar.

Plotting for the Bad Man I couldn’t have understood John Bear last night, if I’d known what he was contemplating it would have made no sense to me. I was dragging that heavy spool up the alley in sweat and in pain and in righteousness. I saw Swede return, striding heavily toward Isaac’s store, and I called him and made him help me with the burden. “Ezra!” came Isaac Maple’s cry from within his store, “Ezraa-a-a!” out of the cracks and crashes from within and the agonized Swede wanted to go help him, but I kept him with me, infecting him with my madness, and like penitents hurrying before God’s wrath we made a bed of barbs on the porch, a trip wire from one post to the other, unwinding the roll, pushing it back and forth, back and forth, as Turner sang.

Swede had a length of planking and with it he climbed atop the overhang and lay flat, waiting; while I stepped back into the street feeling the moon’s light like a desert sun on my back. Behind the man’s horse I crouched, Hausenfield’s bay—a friend, like me, spurred to its bones—and “Turner!” I cried out. “Do you dare come out, Turner!” screaming his name again and again, the voice in my throat someone else’s, some stranger’s voice doing my work while I watched quietly as one by one the gas lights inside tinkled out and the saloon became dark. Then I shut up. My fingers
squeezed out the slack in the trigger, my arm rested across the man’s own saddle, with my other hand I held the bay’s ear twisted tightly in my fist. In the great silence between that saloon door and me there was no movement. But all around there was riot: people were banging on sheet iron, attacking Isaac’s rented boxes down the street; someone was trying to get his wagon going but his horse shied and reared; it was the moment I saw, from the corner of my eye, the hunchback scuttling out of Maple Bros. store with his arms laden, a roll of yard goods streaming out after him.

Well he had the darkness he wanted, if he’d kept the light he might have seen the wire, but he needed to know where I was, where he’d be shooting. He came out, those doors snapping back against the wall, just a shape, a shadow with a hole of fire in its center. Even before the thwack in the horse’s side I had let go my shot. I heard a roar of surprise and saw him fall across the porch, a shadow becoming a man hideously stuck on those infernal barbs.

It is so easy if you have the conviction. I stood up and fired two more times, missing him but not caring, feeling the wonder of the event like a child. A fine spray of blood from the bay’s neck covered one side of my face, I could taste it. The Bad Man was trying to get off the wire, but I had hit him in the leg and he couldn’t raise himself. Swede didn’t have to swing down with that plank, he hung over the edge trying to bash the Bad Man but there was no need, his reach was too short. “No, Swede!” The man turned over on his back on his bed of barbs and shot straight up through the wood.

Swede slumped where he lay, dying like he would,
with no sound. This morning Helga came back to the street from her hiding place. She called him and looked everywhere, poking at bodies in the wreckage, but she didn’t think to look up. Then she caught sight of those long arms hanging over the edge of the porch top, that head of yellow hair—and for a long while she screamed at him to come down. Swede dead was one of my blunders, one of the last great ones in my life of blunders beginning when I came to this land. I clubbed the Man from Bodie till he was insensible but it didn’t help Swede.

And then you see that wasn’t my last blunder at all, for I didn’t kill Turner I stopped too soon. It was still the Trick that made me cry out my misery and feel the shame of my being. Had I finished my work I would have only damned myself. All around the fights were going on, miners and towners trying to cripple and kill one another, hate riding their voices, gleaming on their knives, imprinted behind their running boots. And none of it had to do with Turner. He was just a man, my God! I felt his weight, I felt the weight of him over my shoulder, I smelled the sweat of him and the whiskey, it was blood that ran from his head and matted his hair. He had lost part of a staring eye on the barbs, his leg was broke, all my senses were glutted with him, I held his wrists together in my hands, and stumbled past that patient horse standing in the street and bleeding to death—and what else but the continuing Mockery could have given me the strength to tote him to the cabin?

“Alright Molly? Is it alright now? Is this what you wanted Molly?”

But she didn’t hear me. She stood against the wall as far away as she could and watched me drop him on the table. I could hardly catch my breath, I thought my head would burst and I remember falling and crawling to the cabin door and leaning my back against it because I felt if I lay down I would never be able to get up again. And I wish now I could not have seen what happened, or if I had to see it that my mind could split me from the memory. I would like to die on some green somewhere in the coolness of a tree’s shadow, when did I last sit with my back against a tree? the wish is so strong in me, like a thirst, I believe I must perish from it. When I think that Ezra Maple might have put him up on his mule and ridden him off to learn the storekeep’s trade; or that I might have taken him away myself, in those first hours, before Molly ever put her hooks into him, a carpenter’s son, just a hollow-eye orphan—a groan pushes through my lips like my ghost already in its Hell before I am dead. Helga walks up every few minutes, her hair hanging straight down, and she stands gazing at me with her mad eyes while she slowly tears her dress to tatters. Is it Molly again, those eyes? Is it all the eyes of those dead faces? I think no man has ever had such a watchfulness of dead faces, I have farmed the crop of this country, the land’s good yield along with Men from Bodie.

I told him to get by the door for it wouldn’t be minutes before the looters would reach us. I said with what breath I could gather, “Jimmy, over here, stand here with that gun.” But he was looking at her as he’d been looking for the year or more, he couldn’t do anything but look at her. It was his suffering, it was what she demanded.

What caution was Molly’s, what disbelief as she slowly moved toward Turner, the man of her dreaming, the great insulter, lying helpless in his own stinking juices on the eating table. Yes it was him alright the same one sure enough by God it was him and no need to wave her cross for protection, a knife would do, the stiletto,
now
she would use it. A jab to see if he was still alive, a gentle stick to hurt him awake, and he flinched and groaned. Back she jumped and then forward into another place and he tried to writhe away from the point. “Eh?” says Molly. “Eh?” as if to say remember me? remember your Molly? “Eh?” does this make you remember, or this, or this!—almost dancing with the grace of retribution.

“Molly, oh Lord, Molly stop it, stop it—” I shouted stumbling up, going for her. It was an endless frenzy, I cannot describe what she was doing, God have mercy on her, I saw the boy’s horror, for how many endless moments did he endure it? And how else could he speak, finally, when he had to call her and claim her as a right? How else could he make the sound of his need, create it true again? He spoke as she had taught him, manfully, with the proper instrument, booming of birth.

It was the moment Turner’s arms had closed around Molly as if in embrace. My hand was over the muzzle of the gun but the blast killed them both. Fainting, I could hear people outside tipping over the water tank, and it was that sound I listened to, the spread of water, an indecent gush.

And now I’ve put down what happened, everything that happened from one end to the other. And it scares me more than death scares me that it may show the truth. But how can it if I’ve written as if I knew as I lived them which minutes were important and which not; and spoken as if I knew the exact words everyone spoke? Does the truth come out in such scrawls, so bound by my limits?

But for Helga I have the town to myself, who’s not dead is scattered over the plains. The air is hot, and dry and still. The light of the sun parches me, my mouth is filled with dust, I cannot make spittle. There is no wind to stir the welcome banner, not a cloud. Only the flock of buzzards—sometimes rising, fluttering from some imagined scare—makes an occasional shadow. The street is busy with the work of jackals and vultures, flies, bugs, mice. Together they make a hum of enterprise.

I can forgive anyone but myself. The way I’m facing I can see out over the flats as the afternoon sun bakes
colors across them. Who am I looking for, Jimmy? He’s gone, he’s riding hard, that mule and rig will take him places, another Bad Man from Bodie, who used to be Fee’s boy.

I seem to remember a man saying once they would build a railroad along the wagon trails west. It will bring them along the edge of the flats with their steam engines. I can see if I peer hard enough, I can see those telegraph poles up there like stitching between the earth and sky. Am I dying that slow?

This morning, before I started this, when the pain was too much to sit with, before my arm turned numb, I walked up and down seeing the fruit of the land. Isaac is dead in his store. In the rubble of Zar’s Palace that Mrs. Clement is dead although I don’t see a mark on her. The dealer must be upstairs. Mae is lying across a table, her dress pulled up around her neck. Her skull is broken and her teeth scattered on the table and on the floor.

In front of his bar lies the Russian, scalped expertly. The bullet he got was in his stomach—a red stain over his apron—he must still have been alive when John Bear reached him. As much as anything it was the sight of Zar, who once struck the Indian from behind, which got me to take my books out here and sit down and try to write what happened. I can forgive everyone but I cannot forgive myself. I told Molly we’d be ready for the Bad Man but we can never be ready. Nothing is ever buried, the earth rolls in its tracks, it never goes anywhere, it never changes, only the hope changes like morning and night, only the expectations rise and set. Why does there have to be promise before destruction? What more could I have done—if I hadn’t believed,
they’d be alive today. Oh Molly, oh my boy … The first time I ran, the second time I stood up to him, but I failed both times, no matter what I’ve done it has failed.

Helga is standing here, she will watch me die. Who will take care of Swede’s wife? The mortal stench is everywhere, especially on me, and there is so much carrion in this town I wonder every buzzard on the land won’t be here before the sun sets. It has crossed my mind to set the street afire—that would scatter them. But there’s no wind and it would be hard work, harder than I can do.