The Crossings

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ALSO FROM JACK KETCHUM & CROSSROAD PRESS:

NOVELS:

Ladies' Night

The Woman

Stranglehold

COLLECTIONS:

Sleep Disorder – with Edward Lee

ESSAYS / BIOGRAPHY:

Book of Souls

"Mommas, don't let your babies

grow up to be cowboys..."

—Ed and Patsy Bruce

ONE

Here is what she told Hart and Mother and me about how it began.

She said it was the noise.

Said that the chickens were so loud clamoring for their morning meal that Elena never heard the horses' hooves over the din inside the barn.

She had always hated chickens and now she had them to thank for all the rest of it.

Sleepy-eyed this morning like any other she had watched them swarm across the floor of the barn and tossed the feed from the bucket out the door to lure them outside and watched them flow like lava into the yard and thought as she sometimes did that they were more akin to ants than anything else she had observed in nature or perhaps like darting schools of fish feeding in the river. Though no ant or minnow would ever stink as they did. That they depended upon her amazed her in some way. They were quick and moved with violence and their eyes were cold. How and why creatures this fierce had come to the reduced state of pensioners disgusted her.

She by then had called out twice for her sister Celine to come gather the eggs but Celine was young and lazy mornings and she had to call again before she saw the door flung open and her sister appear in the doorway, pretty and half-asleep and petulant looking so that despite her annoyance Elena had to smile. The door slammed shut and she watched her father behind the cloudy window pulling up his suspenders, glancing at them and turning away.

She passed her sister wordlessly in the yard and as Celine disappeared into the barn spread the last of her feed in a series of wide arcs from the heavy old bucket and then headed for the house and that was when she saw them riding toward her just outside the yard.

Four men. The horses young and strong.

Three of the men Mexican. The fourth Anglo. All of them filthy with the dust and sweat of travel. Armed with rifles, pistols. Bandoliers slung across their chests.

Warriors
, she thought.

Their presence frightened and angered her. The huge bald Anglo especially who watched her deliberately with grey eyes unwavering as he rode through the sea of chickens scattering them beneath his horse's hooves until he was close enough so that she could see the livid scar, the letter
D
branded across his cheek from jaw to cheekbone and back again.

To hell with you
, she thought and returned his gaze.
We have had enough of war
.

She heard the Mexicans laugh as they giddied their horses into the yard maddening the chickens and perhaps the horses too unused to so many small creatures darting under and away beneath their feet so that they bucked and whinnied. She heard the slide of rifle out of scabbard and saw the tall thin one with the Indio blood like her dead mother's blood raise his carbine and fire into the hardpack and saw dirt fly and the man fire again and this time where once there was a chicken there was now only some headless wingless carcass clawing toward its end.

It happened very fast then.

Except for the Anglo who remained calm and still all of them began firing riding into the chickens shouting
comida! comida!
yet creating more confusion than damage to the birds. She saw Celine peer out from the barn at the gunfire and dart back in again but not before the fat one she would later know as Fredo noticed her and rode inside. She glanced at the window and saw her father and watched him turn away and knew he had gone for his rifle.

When the fat one rode out of the barn he had Celine up astride the saddlehorn in front of him squirming and kicking and trying to scratch. The man was laughing. So were his friends. Even the Anglo was smiling. She took three steps forward and swung the heavy wooden bucket at the back of the fat man's head and heard a sound like a stone dropped into a deep dry well and felt the impact all the way up to her shoulder and with great satisfaction saw blood fly.

The man howled and dropped her sister to the ground and only a lunge for his saddlehorn prevented him from falling but she said it was exactly then that her father appeared in the doorway and the Anglo drew and fired four times in rapid succession. Her father fell back through the doorway with a bullet in his forehead and his blood arced high across the old wooden lintel.

She didn't tell us what she felt just then and we didn't ask. There hardly seemed any need. It was the night before we crossed the Colorado and her face glowing in the light from the campfire had the look of something ancient wrought from carved and polished stone. We ate beans and salt beef and bread and rattlesnake and it was the first she'd really talked to us and even Mother was mostly silent for a change.

She said she asked the Anglo his name and he told her. She said, "Take your chickens and go, Paddy Ryan." And he said, "Thanks, we will."

They got down off their horses and that was when they had them first, right there among the chickens in the yard.

TWO

John Charles Hart and I met in 1848, the year the Mexican war ended, in what later would be called Arizona, in a grown-overnight booming little town called Gable's Ferry just across the Colorado River from the California gold fields north and Mexico to the south. I was drunk and barely twenty-one and Hart was playing cards with two other men in the Little Fanny Saloon. I'd seen him in there nearly every night but we'd never spoken a word to one another.

Were it not for the gold at Sutter's Mill that January neither the Little Fanny nor the town for that matter would have had reason to exist. It certainly wasn't Mexico that drew the bulk of those pilgrims. But there was a narrows in the river there that made it a natural place for a ferry so an old roughneck named Gable had built one and manned it with his shotgun and a pair of well-trained dogs. Just a primitive barge-and-cable affair that you knew the river would swallow whole come flood time but for now it did what it was supposed to do and word had got around.

I'd been there pretty nearly from its inception. I'd seen barrels of whiskey and billiard tables come in and fancy wear and ready-made clothing, card sharks and whores and trappers and tradesmen and miners pouring through each day. Within a month or so we had a makeshift saloon and whorehouse, a dry goods store and another saloon, a stable and a grocery. Everything in fact except a church, a schoolhouse and a jail.

Though most would maintain that only the last was needed.

Prices had gone mad. Across the river inexperienced miners were pulling a hundred twenty-five dollars a day and everyone knew it. At Gable's Ferry you could pitch a tent, set some cots inside and charge a dollar a night lodging and plenty of men were willing to pay it. Old rusty mess-pork left over from the war and dried-out worm-eaten apples could fetch as much as seventy-five cents a pound. Over at Reardon's Dry Goods Store a good canteen would cost you ten dollars silver. By contrast a whore at the Little Fanny went for a dollar.

I didn't know what in hell I was doing there.

I was making decent money with my dispatches on the reconstruction and the occasional gold-dust yarn to the
New York Sun
but it wasn't the steady income I'd had during the War — when the byline Marion Bell appeared in the paper on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. The money from my father's estate in Massachusetts was not going to last forever. At Gable's Ferry prices I was drinking that up at an alarming rate. Trying to forget what I'd seen in Mexico City more than anything else I imagine.

My paper awhile back had run a cartoon of General Winfield
Old Fuss 'n Feathers
Scott in full ceremonial uniform holding a sword above his head and perched atop a pile of human skulls. That about said it all.

Playing five-card draw that night were Hart, an old German miner named Heilberger and George Donaldson. I barely knew Heilberger but rumor had it that Donaldson was a horse-thief and a card-cheat and the night would bear out at least the last of these rumors.

I was sitting behind Hart slightly off to the right so I could see his cards but he didn't seem to mind. In his left hand he held a short leather thong with one die studding either end and these dice he would pass through his fingers knuckle to knuckle and over and under one another in a smooth fluid motion the trick to which I could not immediately fathom. It may be that whiskey had something to do with this. I was on my fifth and what I thought might be my last glass of the evening but I wasn't making any promises to myself either.

The bet was to Heilberger but he folded so that left Hart and Donaldson.

I don't know how much was on the table but it was a lot. The Little Fanny was crowded that night with Irish and German miners mostly plus the local entrepreneur here and there and the whores of course and when Donaldson bet, thirty one of the miners whistled low, but loud enough so that you could hear it over Sam Perkins' drunken fiddle-playing.

While Hart was thinking it over Donaldson rolled himself a cigarette and drew the sack shut with the string held between his teeth and when he raised the match there it was, a jack of diamonds staring out at us between his ratty shirt and wool jacket. I saw it and Hart saw it and probably so did Heilberger. I guess that like me Hart simply couldn't believe what he was seeing.

"Jesus and Mary on a broomstick," he said. "You could at least be a little careful, couldn't you?"

He didn't seem angry, only more or less annoyed with Donaldson, but he drew his gun out nevertheless — some huge grey antique of god knows what vintage — and set it on the table and when Donaldson saw this monstrosity pointed in his direction he began fumbling for his own gun and Hart said
don't do that
which stopped him for a moment but then he went back to fumbling again, just some fool in a panic and Hart said
dammit, George, don't
do
that now
but by then Donaldson had his own gun out so Hart had no choice but to pull the trigger.

You expected a lot from a gun that big and people were already moving away from behind Donaldson but all we heard was a click.

"Aw shit," said Hart, "that goddamn firing pin."

And Donaldson's face went from white to smiling. It was not a nice smile and it was certainly my turn to move away out of the line of fire but damned if I could. I sat frozen in my chair watching Hart roll the dice between his fingers and over and under his knuckles like he was still considering his card-hand and nothing more and Donaldson fired. And for a split second nothing happened then either.