Sudden Country (2 page)

Oh, I'm a good old rebel,

now that's just what I am!

For this fair land of freedom.

I do not care a damn!

From that day to this I have never seen a man who appeared so obviously bereft. Even in my innocence I could see the evil he wore like a physical deformity. I stood pegged to the spot while he passed, trailing a pungent mix of sour sweat, ancient horse, and green whiskey. His back was to me when I turned at last and said, "Mr. Flynn?"

His quickness was rare in an athletic boy, astonishing in a middle-aged man who had been locked away half his life. Before the roll and saddle hit the boards he was upon me, the front of my shirt bunched in one fist, its mate grasping the handle of a knife with a blade as wide as my hand. The point pricked the underside of my chin.

I could not move. The conductor, seeing that I had located my party, had swung back aboard the train, leaving us alone on the platform. I saw Flynn's face then, for we were crowded together under the brim of his hat: two red-veined eyes with shrunken pupils set in a gray pallor, a nose that was little more than a pair of holes in a lump twisted like hemp, brown teeth with black gums grinning in a thicket of wiry hair. I saw it from a distance of two inches, my eyes watering before breath of an unholy vileness, breath of the kind that must be said to have escaped rather than been released, of rotten teeth and half-digested spirits and corruption of the soul. I felt dizzy.

"Who are you, and by whose leave do you call me by that name? Answer true, or I'll cut your tongue out the hard way." And for emphasis he deepened the knife's bite. Blood trickled into my collar.

"David–I'm David Grayle," I said. "I–my mother owns the Good Part Boarding House. Judge Blod sent me to bring you back."

I hadn't moisture in my mouth to do more than whisper, but he had no trouble hearing me at that distance. "Show me you're from Blod."

Fortunately, I had been carrying one or the other of the two Knickerbocker books doubled up in my hip pocket for almost a week. When he slackened his grip on my shirt, I scooped out
The Morgan Gang at Skeleton Gulch
and held it up in front of his face. He stared at the garish cover for close to a minute. If I'd known then that he had never learned to read I might have swooned from dread, if not from the stench of his breath. As it was, the pen and-ink illustration of Deadeye Morgan shooting the buttons off a sheriff's vest mesmerized him long enough for his murderous instincts to subside. At length he thrust the knife into a stiff rawhide sheath on his belt.

"Hoist that saddle, boy. I been hauling it for two hunnert miles and my hand's set up."

I did as directed, using both hands and swaying under the weight. He picked up the blanket roll and we started for home.

Or so I thought. For home was but the first stop on a journey that would carry me far from familiar things. But I am getting ahead of myself.

There is much to tell.

JOE SNAKE

Oh I'm a good old rebel,

now that's just what I am!

For this fair land of freedom

I do not care a damn!

I'm glad I fought against it,

I only wisht we'd won;

and I don't want no pardon

for anything I done.

M
other had prepared a room for our new lodger across from the Judge's. It had been occupied until lately by a young type-writer from New Hampshire who had married her employer and moved out, leaving behind blue chintz curtains and a faint trace of lemon verbena. The latter fled quickly when Flynn unrolled his disgraceful blanket upon the bed. He had been carrying two crockery jugs inside it, and the acrid fumes that issued forth when he slipped the knot announced that one at least had broken, probably when he'd dropped the bundle on the depot platform. Immediately the air in the room took on the aspect of Price's Saloon in Panhandle, whereupon Flynn left off singing and began cursing. He had the voice and vocabulary for it, and it would likely have continued for some time had not Mother appeared at the hall door.

She was then just two years past thirty. She always wore her hair pinned up, but not tightly, and standing with the sun behind her she seemed haloed in rosy gold. As far as a boy notices such things about his mother I was disposed to confess that the high color we shared suited her far better. I was not alone. I had once overheard Roundtree Zimmerman remarking to a customer in his bather chair that Evangeline Grayle's face and configuration had a more potent effect on him than lithographs he'd seen of the Jersey Lily. I remember it had troubled me, for I thought that my mother had been likened to a prize cow.

Her sudden appearance at that moment was sufficient to halt Flynn in mid-invective. He considered her, his jaw hanging, and then he dumbfounded me by snatching off his hat. His brow was simian, his hair flat and slick like an otter's coat.

Assuming the cordial air she reserved for boarders who held no romantic interest for her, my mother introduced herself and said, "Welcome to my house, Mr. Flynn. Judge Blod has arranged for your first week's stay. Meals are served downstairs in the dining room at seven, noon, and six. I must ask that if you plan to drink in my house, you will keep your door closed."

"Yes, ma'am."

"David, the woodbox is empty."

"The Judge asked me to tell him when Mr. Flynn arrived," I said.

"I think he knows. But don't take too long about it. Mr. Flynn." She grasped the doorknob.

"Pleasure, ma'am."

For a time after we left him, Flynn was quiet. I reported his presence to the Judge, who indeed was aware of it, sifting with his foot in a steaming basin and sipping Mother's soup in a spoon. He said that he expected to be ambulatory soon and would visit his guest then. As I went out, drawing the door shut, the deep hoarse voice started up again across the hail.

I hates the Yankee nation

and everything they do.

I hates the Declaration

of Independence too!

We had a backyard that was mostly bunch grass and prairie dog holes, with a bench I had made. from old barn wood where Mother sat while she peeled potatoes in the cottonwood shade. That afternoon Flynn and the Judge shared the bench. Judge Blod dug his hickory cane into the earth and made notes with a soft pencil on foolscap while the old guerrilla remembered aloud, pulling regularly at a handsome pewter flask engraved with the mysterious initials W. A., which he had evidently filled from the unbroken jug in his room. I was allowed to sit on the back porch and listen.

"Bloody Bill told Arch Clement to muster out them Yanks," he recalled. "Arch started the shooting. I reckon I finished it. Well, sir, I got to say that when the smoke lifted, them bluebellies laid straight as fence pickets. Old Abe trained 'em smart. Haw-haw." He coughed, spat phlegm, and took another pull.

"I wasn't referring to the troop train at Centralia. I meant the federal payroll train outside St. Louis in 1863." The Judge pretended to read his notes, but from my angle I could see he was watching Flynn sideways under his lashes. Flynn belched.

"I don't know that one. I was down with fever most of '63." He sang:

They died of Southern fever,

and Southern steel and shot;

and I wisht it was three million

instead of what we got!

The interviewer didn't pursue the point immediately. He spent some time exploring Flynn's relations with Captain William Clarke, Quantrill and Frank and Jesse James, then left the war to examine the raider's career as a bandit during peacetime. Flynn's
responses were detailed, gleefully unrepentant, and (for I must be as candid) sufficiently bloodthirsty for the ears of an impressionable boy of thirteen. Had my mother known what I was hearing, I have no doubt that her infatuation with the Judge would have been greatly strained, if not ended. In his defense I must depose that he seemed to have forgotten my presence entirely. As for Flynn, he positively enjoyed performing for a larger audience, cutting sly glances my way whenever his narrative waxed especially graphic. He became vague only when Judge Blod's probings entered the year 1863, particularly the details of the St. Louis payroll robbery, and the days immediately preceding Flynn's arrest for murder in Amarillo six years later. Whenever the conversation turned in either direction he would grow morose, renewing his assault upon the contents of the flask.

"Why did you kill Peckler?"

"Son of a bitch cheated at cards." The flask went up

"You weren't playing cards."

"I recollected suddenlike."

"You cut out his heart with your Bowie and left him bleeding on the saloon floor while you ordered another drink. He was your only friend in Texas."

"A friend don't call a friend a liar."

"You said he was a card cheat."

"That too." The flask went up.

The Judge had stopped writing moments before. He was studying Flynn openly now. "What do you hear from Black Ben?"

I have said that Flynn's face was pale–doubtless a legacy of his lifetime in Huntsville. Now it became positively colorless. His eyes smoldered like cinders on a pillowslip. Suddenly he lurched to his feet, clawed for balance, and groped for the knife on his belt. But his inebriation had dulled his reflexes and Judge Blod, quite forgetting his sore foot, leapt from a sitting position onto the porch. He nearly kicked me over.

"You are weary from your journey," he said. "I shall leave you to rest."

He retreated inside. Belatedly, I reached for the door as it was closing. Flynn's knife sprang handle-first out of the wooden frame next to my head.

"Hand me my sticker, boy."

Hoping that history was not preparing to repeat itself, I worked the blade free with difficulty and crept toward the bench. My intention was to place it there and withdraw indoors before he could move. A hand horny with old filth and callosities pinned my wrist to the bench.

"How's your eye, boy?" His breath was as rank as before, but now something new had insinuated itself, a metallic odor that if he were anyone else I should have said was fear.

I stammered that my vision was satisfactory. He held on. "Spot a stranger, would you?"

I nodded. He let go of me then, searched among his clothing as if for vermin, and produced a stained leather pouch which he extracted a handful of notes, some new, some greasy and dilapidated, and one the color of parchment that stood out among the green-backs. He left it there, peeling a crisp dollar off the outside and holding it up. It was last year's issue and I supposed it had been given to him by the Judge.

"This here's yours," he said. "Another one for every face you see in this country you didn't before. Particular I want you to look out for a big man with a black mark on the left side of his face like branded Cain and a Judas eye. You feature that?"

"What is a Judas eye?"

"Glass, boy. With a wicked shine in it as like as if he could still see with it. It's the ones he's murdered he's looking at. You see a man who answers to that, you rabbit-run back here and tell old Flynn and there's four more of these for you Johnny-on-the-spot." He grabbed my hand just as the flow of blood was returning and crumpled the dollar into it. He closed my fingers over the note and held on. His eyes looked as if they were floating in blood. "You see someone like that and I don't hear it from you, I'll cut off your ears and cure them and hang them from my watch chain. You feature that?"

Again I nodded. He pushed me away and I mounted the porch quickly and opened the door. Before closing it behind me I glanced back and saw him rescue the pewter flask from the ground where it had fallen.

He was not at supper that evening. Judge Blod was, seated at an angle to the table with his foot supported upon a vacant chair. We had no other boarders at the time, and when Mother went into the kitchen to bring back dessert I took the opportunity to ask the Judge about Black Ben.

"Some sort of superstition among the men who rode with Anderson and Quantrill," he said, wiping his lips. "I've heard men who would cut a stranger's throat for looking at them crossly speak the name in whispers like frightened children. Still I was not prepared for the violence of Flynn's reaction. Whoever or whatever this Black Ben is or was, he does for a bogey among old nightriders."

"Do you think Flynn took part in that train robbery?"