The Big Gundown (19 page)

He knocked out the empty shells and replaced them with fresh loads. Thing was, he couldn't cover both doorways—one at either end—at the same time if they wanted to come at him from both ways at once.

He leaned against a stall. The scent of manure and straw was heavy, thick in the air. Horse collars and old traces hung from the rafters. Horseshoes hung from a spike driven into a post. He could hear the horses out in
the corral nickering with excitement having been stirred by the gunfire. He waited.

For a long time nothing, then:

“You come on out or we'll burn it with you in it!” Dallas called. “It don't make a shit's bit of difference to us how it goes. Either way, you're a dead man.”

“That's right!” he heard the other one say, Perk, he thought it was, that sharp high-pitched voice of his. “We're good at burning things down!”

Then suddenly several shots rang out and the bullets bounced off metal buckets and chinked wood and he heard one of them say, “That's for you, you son of a bitch, for shooting Harvey!”

Dallas turned to look at Taylor, his sleeve wet and dark with blood and said, “What the hell you talking about you stupid bastard. You and Harvey were never friends.”

“We was a little, sometimes, I guess.”

Perk grinned.

“Where the hell is Lon, anyway?” Dallas said.

“That son bitch probably killed him too,” Taylor said.

“Go around the other side, Perk, cover that back way.”

Perk scurried wide of the livery, worked his way through the rails of the horse pen, pushing aside the nervous animals, and climbed out the far side that brought him in view of the rear.

“I've got this covered!” he called to Dallas.

“You gone come out or we gone burn you like a witch!” Dallas yelled again. “Go find a lantern and light it,” he ordered Taylor.

“My arm hurts like a son bitch.”

“Just do what I tell you or that arm's gone seem like it ain't nothing when I get done with you.”

Taylor saw a lantern hanging from a nail on the outer wall of the livery. “There's one,” he said.

“Well, go get it,” Dallas said.

“I'm aiming to.”

Dallas said, “I'm all over this if he comes out and tries to shoot you.”

“'At don't make me feel none better.”

“Go on, you damn son bitch.”

Jake saw the man run past the open door and fired off a shot to no effect.

Taylor reached the wall and took the lantern and ran back and Jake fired again and missed.

“Here,” Taylor said. “You want any goddamn thing else, you go get it yourself.”

“Light it up.”

Taylor said, “I can't hardly use my arm at all. You light it up.”

Dallas shook his head disgustedly, reached inside his coat, and took out a match. He struck the head of it off the base of the lantern, then lifted the chimney and lit the wick. It caught and he dropped the chimney back down.

“Now run it up and fling it inside,” Dallas said.

“Fuck that.”

Dallas cocked his gun and said, “Go on, you son bitch, or I'll shoot you where you stand.”

“Shit, Dallas, don't be that way now.”

“I am that way, go on.”

Taylor judged the run to the open doorway to be about fifty feet or so. He took the lantern in hand and stood up and took a deep breath then started off. A single shot knocked him off his feet.

“What the hell?” Dallas said.

The shot didn't sound like it came from the livery.

He looked round.

A slender, wild-haired, scraggly bearded son of a bitch was standing there with his arm straight out, a smoking gun in his hand, the gunsmoke curling out the end of the barrel.

Taylor flopped around on the ground like a rabbit had its back broke.

Dallas fired off a quick shot at the stranger. The son bitch never even flinched; just stood there sideways with his arm straight out, then moved his gun hand just a few inches and pulled the trigger, just as Dallas pulled his again.

Both men went down.

“What the hell's going on!” Perk shouted from the rear of the livery. He couldn't see the action because the horses in the corral were blocking his view. “Dallas!”

Jake had heard the gunshots, too, didn't know what they were about. Then he heard Perk shouting questions.

“Dallas? Dallas, what the hell's going on?”

Perk ran back to where he'd left Dallas, running around the corral this time instead of climbing through. He got around front and saw Dallas lying faceup, his arms flung out wide from his body, one hand still holding his pistol. He saw off to his right that Taylor was down, still moving, but shot to hell. Then he saw the other fellow, a few feet away from where Dallas was, lying on his side. It looked like a damn slaughterhouse, them down, and Taylor still wiggling around, bleeding.

Jake stepped out into the light.

“Throw it down,” he ordered.

Perk didn't say anything, just stood there looking down at Dallas, all that blood pooled out into the snow around him like a red soup spilled.

“Throw it down!” Jake ordered again.

Perk turned slowly and looked at Jake.

“He's dead,” he said.

Jake inched forward; they were still a good thirty feet apart in distance. He kept his gun leveled on Perk.

“Drop your piece in the snow, you're under arrest.”

“Fuck if I am,” Perk said and brought his gun up and both men fired at the same time.

Perk pitched forward and fell facedown forward across the body of Dallas so that they seemed to form a human cross.

Then there was nothing but silence and the brilliance of snow where it wasn't stained with men's blood.

That's when Jake saw the boy, Tig, standing there with his gun smoking. Jake realized then that his own shot had missed Perk and that it was Tig's bullet that had shattered Perk's spine and killed him instantly.

“I guess that makes me and him even,” Tig said, then turned and walked away.

F
OR WHAT SEEMED
like the longest time, there was just the sound of the wind, low and lonesome, crawling over the dead and the living alike. The horses in the corral had gathered along one rail and stood nervously, as though waiting for the next thing to happen. Then, in the quiet, Jake heard water dripping from the eaves of the livery, where the sun had warmed the snow enough to melt it. The water dripped into a large wood barrel Sam Toe kept there to collect it and rainwater in. The wind abated somewhat and there was just the sound of water dripping at first.

He knelt by the unkempt young man with the scraggly beard and saw there was still a bit of life in him.

“Why'd you get involved in this?” he said.

Willy Silk's eyes shifted to meet the lawman's gaze.

He smiled slightly and tapped his pocket and Jake reached in and took out the wanted poster.

“Man in Denver…paid me…”

“A man named Shaw?”

Willy nodded.

“How come you didn't, then?”

Willy looked skyward for a moment, then back at
Jake and said, “I don't know.” Then Willy went to meet his ma, who was just over yonder waiting on him. She and his uncle Reese, his pa, and the angels.

Then Jake stood and saw them approaching, the townspeople, coming on slowly, like coyotes after a kill, coming to inspect the dead, to pick over the bones, to feed and retreat. They came on in twos and threes—the lawyer and banker, the barber and Gus and Will Bird, Otis Dollar and Emeritus Fly, the newspaper editor. Men and women, folks he knew, and some he didn't know all that well.

Their shadows came ahead of them, stretched long over the snow and the sky overhead as blue as any sky that ever was. Blood had frozen on his cheek from where the bullet had grazed him and the wound no longer stung; he couldn't even feel it.

He saw the kid, Tig, walking off toward them, how they stepped out of his way and let him pass as though he were some sort of leper, with that awful face of his and Tig never spoke a word to any of them and they never spoke a word to him.

Farther out he saw a wagon coming across the flat white ground and knew that it was Toussaint. He had come despite every reason against it—he was that sort of man, and Jake was silently glad the killing was finished and that Toussaint didn't have to be a part of it.

They came closer and closer, forty or fifty of them: drunks and ranchers, women and children—all coming to witness the spectacle of death—like a Greek tragedy, where admission was free and make of it what you will once you've seen it.

 

Then they were circled around him and the dead men and he looked at their faces and saw in those faces all the
emotions of humanity, realized that they were neither brave faces nor cowardly ones, neither wise nor foolish.

They were just folks, like any other folks, no better, no worse.

“It's finished,” he said. “You all can go home now. You've seen all there is to see. Take your kids and go home. This isn't something they should have to witness.”

But for a time nobody moved and he realized they weren't looking at the dead so much as they were at him.

Somebody said, “You did what you had to, Marshal.”

Others vocally assented. Most said nothing.

“They deserved it,” someone called.

Then slowly they began to drift away except for Tall John and Will Bird, who knew they had their work cut out for them. They'd dig the graves and bury the dead and that would be the end of it. Until the next time.

Jake looked for Clara's face among the crowd.

He was glad to see she wasn't among them.