Return to Massacre Mesa - Edge Series 5 (7 page)

rest his weary head whenever there was time while he attended to the business that had brought him to Lakewood.

Then he stepped back out of the room and discovered nobody had yet unlocked the door at the top of the external stairway. So he began to retrace his footsteps toward the saloon and nearly collided with a full figured, almost pretty, twenty-five years old, olive skinned, black haired Mexican woman where the passageway reached the balcony. Like one of the women he had already seen in the Wild Dog, this one looked to be newly risen from bed. Her appearance was dishevelled and she obviously had not yet taken any trouble to look any better than her worst. But because of her profession she instinctively adopted what was meant to be an alluring attitude and matched the forward thrust of her body with an attempt at a lascivious smile as she took a step closer to him and said softly: ‘B
uenos dias, senor.
You must be a new
hombre
around here? Am I not right? My name, it is Dolores Jiminez and if you require entertaining company while you are staying at the Wild Dog, you will not find better than me. You understand what I am saying,
mi carino?’

‘Reckon I do, lady.’ Edge tipped his hat and made to move away. She showed the kind of whore’s smile that displayed most of her teeth but did not warm the avaricious gleam in her dark eyes.
‘Bueno!
Whenever you are ready, we can get together and have the
estuoso
time. Okay,
mi carino?’

‘I have to take care of my horse first.’

‘Hey, that is no problem.’ She broadened her false smile.

‘Then I need to clean up.’

‘Fine. Me, also.’ She shrugged.

‘Eat.’

She nodded, but her less than fulsome smile faltered.

‘Get my hair cut.’

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Now she realised for certain that all was not going so well as she had thought.

‘Cut my toenails, maybe.’

She generated an angry glare. ‘I think you are not being serious with me,
senor!’

She ran the splayed fingers of a hand through her unruly hair and asked with an ugly sneer as she swayed her body seductively: ‘I think you do not like women, maybe? It is your loss,
hombre!’

‘And after I’ve attended to my toenails, I’ll maybe need to
–‘

She snarled a string of obscene Mexican curses at him then swung around and strode away, her tread heavy with rage, toward the door at the far end of the passage. She had a key that opened it.

Down in the saloon, Sam Tree was making a start on cleaning up the place, scowling his dislike of what he was doing and taking no interest in anything or anybody else.

Two business-suited, middle-aged men stood at the bar, each with a glass of beer in front of him. The taller, more powerfully built, rugged featured one called to Edge as he headed toward the batwings:

‘That Mex gal sure can mouth a guy off, can’t she, mister? Damn shame you and Dolores didn’t hit it off. If a guy treats her right, that one can make him feel on top of the world! Take it from me.’

‘Gee, Chester, will you get your mind off that whore and start thinking about more important things!’ His companion was slightly shorter, fat rather than well built, with bulbous cheeks and a snub nose.

‘I’m thinking, John, I’m thinking!’ His easygoing mood was unaffected by the other man’s irritability. ‘Just want this guy to know how that Jiminez gal can make a guy feel like he’s giving the best performance of any she ever experienced.’

Edge hooked a hand over the top of one of the batwings and said: ‘Thanks for the warning but I already know the risks, feller. And I don’t reckon I want a whore to show

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me any appreciation.’

‘Warning, mister: I don’t reckon I catch your drift? Or you never caught mine?’

Edge stepped between the doors and said over his shoulder: ‘Seems to me that whether a feller performs good or bad in a place like this he’ll likely get some kind of clap.’

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CHAPTER • 5

______________________________________________________________________________________

BRODERICK GOODRICH who ran the Lakewood Livery Stable was an extremely
fat man with blue porcine eyes, a smoothly pink complexion and a small goatee beard that had remained rust red after the shock of hair on his large head whitened as he aged into the mid-sixties. He was sprawled in a thickly upholstered armchair before an uncluttered desk at the rear of the stable in which six of the twenty stalls were occupied by horses and three by mules.

‘I only feed and water the animals and see to it they have a sound roof over their heads in a stall that ain’t knee deep in horseshit,’ he explained after he agreed to lodge Edge’s gelding in his premises at a reasonable fee on a day-to-day basis. ‘Currying them and their veterinary needs is extra. And likewise, exercising them.’

‘No sweat, feller,’ Edge told the fat man as he led the chestnut into an empty stall with a feed box and water trough that were cleaner than some plates and glasses he had used in places not unlike the Wild Dog Hotel.

‘Course, I don’t do any of the exercising myself. On account of my weight problem which means I’m not exactly what you’d call agile. But I know horses and what ails them. How to take care of them when they’re sick and when they’re healthy. You plan to stay for long in Lakewood, Mr Edge?

‘As long as my business takes, feller.’

‘Enough said. Staying at the Wild Dog, if that ain’t being too nosy?’

‘I heard from Sheriff Russell it’s the only place for a passing through stranger to stay?’ Edge took the saddle off the gelding and hung it on a peg at the front of the stall.

‘That’s certainly true.’ Goodrich showed a broad smile as he hauled his bulky frame out of the creaking chair and took a couple of deep, wheezing breaths. ‘Unless a passing through stranger has a friend or kin living in town: and I guess you don’t have 46

that?’

Edge joined the liveryman in an easy smile. ‘Does everyone in Lakewood go the long way around to get information, feller?’

The big bellied, small bearded man did some more laboured breathing while he waddled to the open double doorway where he leaned against the frame and ran a sleeve of his checked shirt across his sweat beaded brow. ‘Hell no, mister: most everybody hereabouts don’t give much of a damn about nobody else’s business. They got their own lives to lead and they lead them like regular folks. Me, with this weight problem of mine, there ain’t much else I can do with my life but sit around and think.’

He spit into the street. ‘And there comes a time when a man has thought everything he can a dozen times over. And needs some fresh ideas to run through his mind. So I talk too much and I listen some when I got someone to listen to who hasn’t talked to me too much before.’ He glanced over his shoulder into the stable to ask: ‘If any of that makes any sense to you?’

Edge began to rub down his horse as he replied to the rueful voiced fat man.

‘Yeah. But I reckon a lot of people are like that, feller: big or small or in-between?’

Goodrich dug a cigar from his shirt pocket, hung it at the side of his mouth and lit it with a match struck on the sun-bleached timber of the open door.

‘If you say so, Mr Edge. You’ve been around to a lot of places and you’ve met a whole bunch of people on your travels, of that I’m sure. Me, I hail from a little onehorse town in Pennsylvania where I lived for most of my life until I came out here. And I’ve been in this neck of the woods for ten years or so. Seen it grow from a clutch of shacks and the army post to whatever it is today.’ He removed the cigar and blew out smoke. ‘Fort Chance was what it was called back then. The whole kit and caboodle of the army post and the settlement, I mean.’

He clamped his teeth to and talked around the cigar again. ‘Then somebody had the bright idea of changing the name to Lakewood to try to attract folks to come and settle here after the war.’ Now he removed the cigar to spit again and his voice changed tone to irony. ‘Lakewood, would you believe? There’s a creek runs out of the 47

hills when it ain’t dried up. And that big old cedar tree that grows where there was going to be the main square - halfway along the street – that’s what its named for: the creek that’s dry for most of the time and one lousy tree!’

The cigar went back between his teeth and he vented a sound of contempt.

‘Weren’t too many of the folks that came here on account of the name or whatever else that decided to stick around and put down roots. And I ain’t gotten to be friendly with more than a handful of people who haven’t been living here most of the time I have.’

He shook his head reflectively. ‘Course, we still get low lives passing through, same as they always did from way back. Outlaws and such like: and guys with crazy dreams about finding the fortune that’s supposed to be hid in the mountains.’

He shook his head reflectively then made a sound of disgust. ‘And some of the soldier boys who get assigned to the post . . . I class most of them as low life types. It ain’t exactly the cream of Uncle Sam’s army that gets sent to a post like Fort Chance. Where about the only duty the troopers are assigned to outside of parading up and down and guarding the gateway and such like is to try to keep tabs on the bunch of local Comanche hotheads that gets ornery from time to time.’

Goodrich sighed, like he was deeply wearied by the effort of generating this degree of irritation. ‘So I like to listen to strangers who ain’t no account cavalry troopers or saddle-tramps, treasure hunters with their heads full of nonsense and outlaws staying awhile at the Wild Dog. Because folks that live in a back of beyond community like this, they can get a little self-centred and figure nobody but themselves has anything to say that’s worth a damn.’

‘Reckon I can maybe understand how that can be.’ Edge sounded no more than fleetingly interested in the opinion.

‘Enough said, mister.’ He untied his leather waist apron and stepped back inside to hang it over the front of a stall. ‘And I reckon I’ve said enough. Done all the talking while you listened because that’s the way I am and I guess the way you are?’ He went outside again. ‘Be over at the Wild Dog if there’s anything else I can do for you. Which I don’t guess there will be since you’re the self-sufficient type in most things, I reckon?’

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‘It’s the way I like to be, feller.’

‘Billy Russell and me always take something in the liquor line at this time of day. Eases our differing discomforts more than any medicine ever could.’ He started away from the threshold of the livery, breathing loud and hard and trailing cigar smoke. Then he called a cheerful greeting to the sheriff who was waiting in front of the extensive vacant lot beside the law office. The two men started slowly toward the hotel, one hampered by excessive weight, the other impaired by age-stiffened joints. Edge finished attending to the needs of his horse then took the time to roll and light a cigarette before he stepped out on to the sunlit street. He turned left to head toward the area of town where a degree of languid morning activity was more in evidence than at this end of Lakewood’s only street. Halfway between the hotel at the eastern end of the street and the army post at the west, was the lone and stunted cedar that Goodrich had mentioned. The tree was rooted in the precise centre of the thoroughfare where it was flanked to north and south by vacant lots that indicated how this was originally planned as an intersection with a side street running off in each of these directions.

A mid-town crossroads that had been envisaged before Lakewood failed dismally to expand according to expectations: never attracted enough citizens with their day-today needs and long term dreams to require more than a single street. A stone built bank and a barbershop, a land claims registry and a meeting hall, all of them clapboard, were sited on what would have been the four corners if the intersection had ever come to pass.

A few sloppily uniformed and disgruntled looking off duty troopers from the post mingled with some civilians – middle-aged women shopping or old men doing nothing useful – going about their unhurried business. The majority ignored the stranger but a few acknowledged him with an amiable word or nod of greeting. There was some desultory talk but Edge registered that he did not seem to be the subject of any discussion except among three old timers who occupied one of four benches that boxed the base of the wizen cedar.

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He crossed from the eastern stretch of the street to the opposite side of the western and entered a doorway next to a window hung with clean white net curtains behind a sign painted on the glass in blue lettering:
FRANK SHAW – FIRST CLASS