Showdown (20 page)

The old man lay on his back. From the dark circle on his filthy gray shirt, Prine assumed the man had been shot in the chest. He'd been hit in such a way that he couldn't breathe well. When he tried to speak or call out in simple syllables, the words would stop somewhere in his throat and he would clutch his throat with both hands, as if his throat had been cut.

Prine grabbed the only source of light, the ancient lantern on top of the bar, and held it down to the man. The wound, as he'd guessed, was in the chest, though further away from the heart than he'd suspected. There was a wooden box on top of the back bar. Inside, Prine found two canteens. They were both full. He untied his bandanna and soaked it with water.

He spent the next ten minutes exhausting the full extent of his medical knowledge—pulse points, eye dilation, breathing, consciousness. None was very good. The old man muttered words from time, to time but nothing Prine could understand.

Neville showed up and watched as Prine cleaned up the old man's wound so he could get a better look at it.

"They figured he was dead," Neville said. "They weren't far wrong."

"He going to make it?"

"Take a miracle."

"Didn't find anything upstairs. But this must've been a nice little place at one time."

Maybe because they were talking, maybe because the old man knew how close he was to dying and he wanted to talk to somebody—whatever, he sat up a little and fully opened his eyes.

"You ain't them, is you?" he said. His teeth were blackened stubs. His mouth was circle of scabs. He had to blink his eyes to focus. "No, I can see you now. You ain't them."

"They shot you?"

Phlegm clogged his chest and throat.

"They didn't see nobody in here except ole Midnight, so they just figured they had the place to themselves. They wanted to sleep before nightfall." He started coughing up blood. Prine held his frail upper body until the coughing stopped. "When they found me—I always sleep in the back room—they figured I might tell the law on them. Stupid bastards. Closest town is Claybank, and an old man like me ain't never goin' to Claybank and live to tell about it. The one named Tolan, he's the bastard that shot me." Then: "Midnight! Midnight!"

Prine wondered if the old man was hallucinating. There was no evidence of anybody else in the place. Maybe the old man was recalling a childhood friend.

But the old man grew more and more agitated, cried louder and louder for this "Midnight!"

And damned if Midnight didn't put in an appearance. A raven of vast proportion and eerie gaze, it didn't simply fly through the air, it smashed its way, the flutter of its wing violent as a terrible storm. It landed on the bar above the old man. Perched there, looked down at him.

"I just wanted to see him again before I passed." Then: "You been a good friend, Midnight."

The sleek, shiny, somehow supernatural bird made a sound in its own throat. A deep rumbling kind of music that was sustained for several seconds. A music dark as its feathers.

The old man said, "They said they was gonna try and make a train tomorrow morning. Junction Gap. You get 'em for me, will ya? Now Midnight's gonna be all alone."

They buried him out back.

Midnight seemed to understand what was going on.

In the moonlight, he sat sentrylike, upon the fresh earth that Prine and Neville had turned over. The raven raised its regal head once to look at the moon. The dark music sounded again in chest and throat. But this time it expelled the sound, letting it echo off the ragged rock hills and work its trembling, oddly frightening way through the night. Other animals responded in the far-flung darkness and made their own sounds. Even the horses Lattimore had loaned them joined in.

Prine said some prayers for the old man, the prayers of his childhood. He didn't say them often, so many of the words were wrong. He wasn't even sure there was a God, at least not a God as Sunday school teachers espoused anyway. But he did believe in some kind of universal spirit that was the cement of not only this planet but the entire cosmos. He was appealing to that spirit now to take the old man to a good and true place.

Ten minutes after burying the old man, they were on their way again. Now they knew where Tolan and Rooney were headed. They planned to meet the two at the Junction Gap train depot.

K
arl Tolan had never forgotten how his three-year-old sister Daisy died. He still had nightmares about it. He was seven at the time.

He'd been playing behind the crude slab cabin his father had built when he heard a cry unlike any he'd ever heard Daisy make before.

She was off playing on the edge of their property. She liked to pick "pretty flowers," as she often tried to say. What she picked was dandelions.

Karl's mother was inside making bread, his father off trapping.

The cry.

His body wanted to do two things at once—freeze in place and run. He was afraid to find out what had happened to his sister.

He forced himself to go to her.

Her tiny hands were raised almost in prayer to the sky, blood running from them as blood ran in gouts from her mouth.

He knelt next to her, the cry scaring him as nothing ever had, screaming "What's wrong, Daisy? What's wrong, Daisy!" until his mother pushed him out of the way and put her fingers in Daisy's mouth. Daisy cried louder and louder; not even her mother's fingers could halt the plea.

His mother pulled pieces of glass from Daisy's mouth. Karl had a hard time recognizing what they were at first, they were so bloody. But then he recognized where they had come from. He'd broken a bottle yesterday while he was playing games by himself. He swore to pick up the glass when he was finished playing. Otherwise his father would take a strap to him.

But he'd forgotten somehow. And now Daisy, who had apparently mistaken the broken glass for pieces of candy, had started stuffing the glass into her mouth, not only cutting herself but swallowing some of the tinier pieces.

Daisy lived less than ten hours. The way his folks glared at him, he didn't have to ask if they blamed him. Of course they did.

They buried her on a hill where the winds were like cool magic in the spring months and where the surrounding trees took fire in the autumn.

Less than a day after they buried her, some coyotes dug her up and ate most of her. His father killed them, but by then it was too late.

His mother never recovered. Two years later, she smashed a bottle one night when his father was on one of his trapping trips. Karl was so sound a sleeper, he didn't hear the breaking bottle or the rest of it. She hadn't screamed, made a fuss. Which had been very much like her.

She hadn't wanted to take any chances. She slashed both her throat and her wrists. By morning, when he woke up and found her on the far side of the cabin in her bed, her skin was blue-gray in color. He had never seen her eyes so sad. Not scared. Just plain old sad. He'd done it, he knew. When he'd helped kill his little sister, he'd helped kill his mother, too.

After his father got back and they buried her, he got out his long piece of leather and went to work on Karl. He drew blood. He slashed his buttocks to the point where Karl's legs were numb, not just his buttocks. Finally, Karl fell to the floor, sobbing, pleading for his father to stop.

A few minutes later, he heard the father outside. There was just the one shot. Karl knew immediately what it was. He'd have a lot of work to do, burying the two of them. He wanted good, deep graves.

He worked a full day and a half on those graves and he was proud of them. He shot and killed six coyotes in the process. For headstones he took large round rocks that sparkled like fool's gold and drew their names in heavy pencil.

He knew the coyotes would get them, but by then he'd be gone—and damned if he wasn't. Just going on eleven, he packed everything he owned and jammed it all into his father's carpetbag and then headed off to Dexter, the small town to the north. He'd already pretty much forgotten about his folks. They'd never especially liked him and he'd never especially liked them.

Who he couldn't forget was Daisy. Poor little Daisy.

Big for his age, and already with a frightening temper—it not only frightened other people, it also frightened him—he set off west.

Three weeks shy of his fifteenth birthday, he met Rooney in a most unusual way. He was standing on a street corner in Denver and happened to see Rooney, a red-haired runt, snatch a bag of groceries from an old woman. Rooney took off with the groceries. A cop just happened along. One of those coincidences that happen in real life but that you could never get away with in books or on the stage. The cop started chasing him and was closing on him.

Until Karl offered his services by innocently stepping into the cop's path and nearly knocking the man down. The thief got away. What Karl got was screamed at by the bully-faced copper.

Three blocks away, Rooney fell into step with him and said, "You could come in handy, kid."

The "kid" thing amused Karl. Rooney looked several years younger than he did.

From then on, the two became friends of a sort, even though Karl didn't especially like Rooney or trust him or have any respect for him. Friends—even though Rooney thought Karl was stupid, sneaky, and too often reluctant to do what Rooney told him to—friends of a sort.

All these years later, in a saloon in Junction Gap, waiting for a train that was still several hours away, talking to the man he didn't like, trust, or have any respect for, Karl Tolan said, "You think they figured out we paid off Valdez to give us the key?"

"Not all men are stupid, Karl."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning that not all men are stupid."

"Meaning me."

"Uh-oh, Karl's having his monthly visitor again."

"I hate when you say that."

"Yeah, well, there are a few things I don't like to hear you say, either."

"Yeah? Like what?"

"I don't want to argue, Karl."

"Just gimme one example."

Rooney sighed. "You'll just get pissed the way you always do when I offer constructive criticism."

"C'mon, just one example."

"You never fucking take a bath."

"Oh, yeah? I took a bath last week."

"That's just my point, Karl. You need to take a bath more often than once a week."

"What, so I can look like some dude the way you do?"

"See what I mean? I offer you constructive criticism—and at your request, mind you—and you go and get pissy on me."

"Nobody's getting pissy."

Rooney smiled. Pure ice. "Yeah, I noticed that."

"Maybe I won't be goin' to St. Louis with you, after all."

"Fine. It's a free country."

"Maybe I'll go to California."

"Whatever you want to do, Karl. It's up to you."

"Yeah," Karl said, sounding almost mystical, "California."

Rooney just couldn't seem to resist.

"Is this," he said, "anything like the time you were going to go to Montana or anything like the time you were going to go to Alabama or anything like the time you were going to go to Mexico?"

"You really don't think I can pull away from you, do you?"

Rooney gave him his most superior smile. "I was just asking, Karl. Just asking."

W
ith seven hours to go before train time, Rooney told Karl he was tired and would get some sleep back in his hotel room. Emphasis on his. Usually, the two men shared a room, not exactly being in the robber baron category.

This time was different. And for a good reason.

Before heading back to the hotel, Rooney stopped off at a shop, bought himself a couple of good stogies and some magazines to read on the train during the daylight hours.

He also used this time to plan on how he was going to break into Karl's room.

For his part, Tolan went to a whorehouse. He paid six dollars for a lady with an ass of considerable size and a mouth as nasty as a cowhand's.

"You make good money on a gent like me," Tolan told her. "I'm quick."

When she saw how quick, she said, "You sure weren't kiddin' about bein' quick. You're about the quickest man I ever seed, in fact."

As he walked to the hotel, Tolan kept chewing on her remark. Quick, huh? He didn't mind himself sayin' he was quick in a joshin' sort of way. But the way she said it, he wondered if she really was joshin'.

Thinking about it soured him.

And then all of Rooney's superior bullshit came back to him too. Not takin' a bath often enough. Just because Tolan wasn't a dandy like Rooney. Just because Tolan found taking a bath to be a really complicated task. You had to take your clothes off, you had to lower yourself into the tub, you had to soak and scrub and get soap in your eyes and fart in the water, and then you had to get up and dry yourself off and put your clothes back on—it was an additional burden if you had to take your clothes to some Chinese laundry in advance—and then you had to put your socks and your boots back on. Who the hell wanted to spend all that time doin' all that bullshit?