What the Dead Men Say (2 page)

    In the dusty street, James and Septemus dismounted. They took the carpetbags from their saddles and carried them inside the hotel.

    James appreciated the cooling shade of the fine hotel lobby. Gentlemen in percale shirts and straw boaters and cheery red sleeve garters sat in leather chairs smoking cigars, sipping lemonade, and reading newspapers and magazines. A few yellowbacks were even in evidence. James wondered if any of them were reading
The Train Boy,
which next to the works of Sir Walter Scott was the best thing he’d ever read.

    The lobby had mahogany wainscoting and genuine brass cuspidors and great green ferns. The mustached man behind the registration desk looked as snappy as a man in a Sears catalog.

    “Good afternoon, sir,” the clerk said in a splendid manly voice.

    “Afternoon,” Septemus said. “One room, two beds. And we’ll be wanting baths this afternoon.”

    “Cool ones, I trust, sir,” the clerk said, smiling.

    Septemus didn’t smile back. The clerk, something dying in his eyes, looked mortally offended.

    

    

    Up in their room, they emptied the carpetbags on their beds and then sat in the two chairs next to the window to sip their complimentary lemonade.

    “You glad you came along?” Septemus said. Here it was three degrees hotter than down on the street, but here they could feel the breeze better, too. Septemus had taken his jacket and his vest off. At forty-five he was balding and getting fat, but he still looked muscular and his hard, angular face attracted women and made men wary. He didn’t look at all like a haberdasher.

    “Yessir.”

    “There you go again.”

    James blushed. “I’m sorry.”

    “No need to apologize, James. You’ve just got to remember the things I’m trying to teach you.”

    James nodded.

    “You know why I took you on this trip?”

    “Because you wanted to take me to the state fair.” The fair was in Des Moines, some one hundred miles away. There would be amusement rides and prize livestock and bearded ladies and magicians and probably two hundred girls who were as cute as Marietta Courtney. Or at least James hoped so.

    “The fair is part of the reason but it’s not all of the reason.”

    “It’s not?”

    Septemus looked at James very hard. “I wanted to get you away from your mother’s influence.”

    “You did?”

    “I did.”

    “You don’t like my mom?”

    “I like your mom fine but she’s not the best influence you could have.”

    “She’s not?”

    “Nope. Your father was.”

    “But he is dead.”

    “I’m well aware of that.”

    “And my mom has done a good job of raisin’ us three kids ever since.”

    Septemus still looked solemn. “Your mother is my sister and a woman I respect no end. But she’s a lot better mother to your two sisters than she is to you.”

    “She is?”

    Septemus nodded, then sipped some lemonade. “Think about it, James.”

    “About what?”

    “About what your life has been like since your father died. Without a proper male influence, that is.”

    “I don’t understand.”

    “Violin lessons. Always wearing knickers and a clean dress shirt. Spending most of your time on studies instead of being outside playing baseball. Do you honestly think this is a natural state of affairs for any young man? And that’s what you are, James, whether your mother chooses to acknowledge it or not. You’re sixteen and that makes you a young man.”

    “I guess I never thought of it that way.”

    “When your father was your age, he was supporting a family of three and going to work for the Union Central Life Insurance Company. By the time he was twenty, he had his own office.”

    “That’s right, Uncle Septemus.”

    “And he was a man known to take a drink who could hold a drink, and a man known to hunt who had respect for the rifle and the prey alike, and a man known to please the ladies just by the manliness of his stride and the confidence of his smile. He was one hell of a real man.”

    James couldn’t help it. Hearing his father recalled so lovingly- Septemus and James’s father had been best friends for many years- James got tears in his eyes and had a hard time swallowing.

    “Your father wouldn’t have approved of the violin lessons. Or the musicals in your parlor every Tuesday night. Or all those luncheons your mother takes you to.”

    “He wouldn’t have?”

    Septemus shook his head. “No, he wouldn’t have. And that’s why I brought you along on this trip.”

    James looked perplexed.

    “To start teaching you about manly things,” Septemus said. “Away from the influence of your mother.”

    “Oh.”

    “So stop being so deferential. Stop always ‘Yessiring’ me. A gentlemen is always polite, but that doesn’t mean he has to be bowing and scraping. You understand that?”

    James almost said “Yessir.” Instead, he caught himself on time and simply nodded.

    “Good. Now why don’t you take a bath. I’ve got to go do a little business. I’ll be back to take my own bath and then we can get something to eat.”

    Septemus got up and stood over James and mussed his hair with thick fingers. “You look more like your father all the time. You should be proud of that.”

    “I am.”

    For the first time since they’d left Council Bluffs, Septemus smiled. “This trip’ll be good for you, James. You wait and see.” Then, his boots loud on the linoleum floor in the drowsy quiet of the afternoon, he went over and put his vest and coat back on.

    James couldn’t help but notice that Septemus also picked up his Winchester.

    “See you in an hour or so, James,” Septemus said.

    Then he was gone.

    

    

    Golden dust motes rolled in the sunlight angling through a hat-sized hole in the roof of the barn. Griff was always meaning to fix it but that would happen only if the Rochester Wagon Works opened its doors again and rehired the eighty-six men they had laid off four and a half years ago. Griff was a big man, blond and open, and in the old days had always been laughing. He had a wife who’d loved him since they’d been kids on adjoining farms, and two little girls who never seemed to tire of running up to him with their arms spread wide, having him pick them up and pretend he was dancing with them.

    But one day Mr. Rochester himself had come to the plant and said, with genuine dismay, “Men, the bank won’t loan me no more money and our bills are just too far backed up; I’m gonna have to lay you all off. I’m sorry, men.” There had been real tears in Mr. Rochester’s eyes, and the men knew the tears were not fake because Mr. Rochester was just like them, a workingman who’d got lucky with his invention for building surreys a certain way, and who then, like most workingmen, got unlucky, too. He knew a hell of a lot about surreys, did Mr. Rochester, but he didn’t know a damn about money; his pride and fear were such that he wouldn’t listen to anybody either, even the well-intentioned bankers who’d meant to help him. So he’d gone bust with a bad hand, and his eighty-odd employees had gone bust right along with him.

    There followed those events that always seem to follow men losing good jobs. Drink turned some of them mean and they beat then-loving wives, and some even beat their children. At workingmen’s taverns blood spilled all the time now, not just during the occasional Saturday brawl. The best of the men, the ones who didn’t turn to drink and violence, tried to get other jobs; but, prosperous as the town was, there were no other jobs, not good ones anyway, not ones that could replace what they’d earned (and the kind of self-esteem they’d felt) as employees of the Rochester Wagon Works. These men took to serving the gentry, for there was a large class of rich people in the town. They became gardeners and handymen and drivers and housepainters; they learned how to say
yes ma’m
and
yessir
so sweet you almost couldn’t hear the contempt in their voices for the spoiled, pushy, inconsiderate rich folks who employed them. They had no choice. They had families to feed.

    It was sometime during this period when the happy Griff became the sorrowful Griff. He worked half a dozen jobs that first year after Rochester closed down, the worst of them being as a helper to one of the town’s three morticians. He had hated seeing how the blood ran in the gutters of the undertaker’s table and he had hated the white fishbelly look to the flesh of corpses and most especially the high fetid smell of the dead that he could never quite get clean of his nostrils. He tried getting back to farming somehow, but this was a time of many bank failures in the midwest, currency shaky as hell, and so he could find nobody to stake him.

    It was then that he evolved the idea of robbing banks. It would be simple enough. He would take two of the men he had worked with at Rochester-Kittredge, because he had good nerves and was intelligent; Carlyle, because he had the kind of Saturday night beery courage you needed in tight spots-and together they would travel in a three-hundred-mile semicircular radius (he had this drawn out on a map) and hold up banks three times a year. Kittredge and Carlyle were happy to be invited in. They had agreed to two inviolate propositions: Griff had the final say in any dispute, and there was to be no violence. No violence whatsoever. It was in the course of their very first robbery that either Kittredge or Carlyle (Griff could never be sure) panicked and the little girl got killed. It had been purely an accident-my God, nobody would shoot a little girl-but that didn’t make her any less dead. The three men had been so sickened by the sight of the little girl lying in blood and dead on the floor that they forgot to grab the money. They left with guns blazing, empty-handed. They were lucky to escape.

    

    

    So now he stood in the dusty sunlight of the long July afternoon in a barn that smelled of wood and tarpaper and hay and dogshit from the girls’ collie. It smelled most especially of the grease and oil he used to work on his top grade surrey, the one expensive thing he’d ever bought in his forty-one years, bought at a forty-percent employee discount from Rochester back in the good working days. The surrey was fringed and built on elliptic end springs, and had axles of fifteen-sixteenths of an inch, wheels of seven-eighths of an inch and quarter-inch steel tires. The gear was made of second-growth timber ironed with genuine Norway iron and the upholstery was Evans leather. How nice it had been to take this spanking new surrey out for a Sunday drive behind a powerful dun, the girls sitting between Griff and his wife, the neighbors smiling and waving. Down Main Street they’d go every sunny Sunday, church done and a beef roast on the stove, past the Southern Hotel and the big stone bank building, the telegraph office and the telephone office, and McDougall the dentist’s. Even a workingman could feel respectable in such circumstances.

    Griff was just oiling the axle when he heard the collie, standing in the sunlight just outside the shade of the barn, start to bark. He looked over his shoulder and saw Carlyle. Carlyle looked upset. He also looked drunk. Ever since the little girl had died, Carlyle had spent most of his time on whores and whiskey. Griff no longer liked the man. “Told you I’d just as soon not have you come on my property.”

    “Don’t give a good god damn what you told me.”

    Griff put down the oil can and turned around. He made fists of his hands. Because he was big and blond and fair, most people mistook him for a Swede, but he was Irish and had an Irish temper. “Don’t appreciate you talking to me that way on my own property.”

    Carlyle didn’t seem to hear. “He’s here.”

    “Who’s here?”

    “Right in town.”

    Griff could see that Carlyle was caught up in his fear and his drunkenness. He reached out and took the gawky man by the shoulder. Carlyle smelled of sweat and heat and soured beer. Griff turned his face away as he said, “I want you to get hold of yourself.”

    “I got hold of myself.”

    “No, you don’t.”

    “I’m tryin’ to tell you, Griff, he’s god damn here.”

    “And I’m tryin’ to ask you, Carlyle, who’s god damn here.”

    “Her father.”

    “Whose father?”

    “The little girl’s.”

    “Jesus Christ,” Griff said. He almost never took the Lord’s name in vain. To him that was a significant sin-even a mortal sin that had to be confessed as such to Father Malloy-but right now he didn’t care. “How do you know it’s him?”

    “We’ve seen his picture, ain’t we, a hunnerd times.”

    “You’re sure?”

    “Griff, I’m positive.”

    “Maybe it’s just a coincidence.”

    “Could be, but I doubt it.”

    Griff wiped sweat from his brow with his forearm. “How the hell could he have found us?”

    “Maybe he never quit lookin’.”

    Griff came out from the cool shadows of the barn to stand in the sunlight with Carlyle. Carlyle looked old now. He had a couple of days’ worth of beard and some of his hairs were black and some of them were white. His nose was kind of running and he hadn’t cleaned the morning dirt from the corners of his eyes.

    “What we gonna do?” Carlyle said.

    “Nothing we can do. Not right now. Not till we see what he wants.”

    “Oh, I can tell you quick and proper what he wants, Griff.”

    “And what would that be?” Griff said. He felt calmer now, more in control of himself, the way he usually did.

    “He wants us dead. All three of us.”

    “Can you blame him? We killed his little girl.”