The Big Gundown Read online

  She said his name again and he said hers.

  And later he lay with her in his arms, staring into the darkness and wondering if he’d done the right thing. For trouble was still a hound with a fine nose that pursued him and wouldn’t easily give up. And in spite of his not wanting to, he could not help but think of the last woman he’d been intimate with, the one who had betrayed him. And her betrayal would ultimately cause men to once again come looking for him, men who would either want to kill or capture him for a murder he did not commit, but one he could not prove himself innocent of either.

  “Jake?” Clara said softly after long moments of silence.

  He stroked her hair, said, “Can we just savor this moment?”

  He could feel her nodding against his bare shoulder.

  In a little while her breathing grew heavy and he was pleased that she felt safe enough with him to fall asleep, for to sleep with another was to be completely vulnerable.

  He set a clock in his own head, a habit he’d learned when he had practiced medicine. It served him just as well now that he was the town’s marshal. He’d set it for four o’clock and woke nearly precisely at that time and eased himself from the bed and dressed, sorry to have to leave the warmth and comfort of such a fine woman. But even if he hadn’t promised Toussaint he’d go goose hunting with him, it was probably best that he not be found there in the morning by her girls. As the town’s schoolteacher, Clara had a reputation she needed to protect. He did not want her to become the grist of rumor mills.

  The steady clop of the horse’s hooves on the cold hardpan gave him small comfort in staving off the loneliness. The dark wind slithered through the grasses. Off to the west a sliver of crescent moon seemed almost biblical, as though he were some sort of wise man in search of the child.

  Eventually he saw the light on in the homestead of Toussaint Trueblood, dawn yet an hour away.

  When he knocked and Toussaint opened the door, he said, “I don’t suppose you saw any geese on the way over and shot a couple of them to save me the trip of going out into that cold beyond?”

  “I hope you have coffee on,” Jake said, rubbing his hands.

  Toussaint pointed to the pot atop the stove, steam curling out of its spout. Jake drank as Toussaint finished getting dressed. Slipping into a mackinaw that he pointed out had shell loops sewn into the waist which already held several double-ought buck rounds, he said, “You can use this one”—taking a pair of shotguns from the corner and holding one out to Jake.

  Jake looked it over, tested its weight and balance. It was a Colt side hammer, double-barrel twelve-gauge. He put the stock up to his shoulder and looked down the long blued barrels, then took it away again and held it by the middle in one hand.

  “What’s that one?” he asked Toussaint, who hefted the other one as he reached for his old black felt hat.

  “Thomas Horsley model. My papa gave it to me, along with a railroad watch that never did keep the right time and his old razor—about everything he owned, except for a deck of playing cards had drawings of naked women on them I lost somewhere. I cut the barrels down four inches. You know, for close-in work, case I needed it.”

  They drank down the hot coffee, then went out into the yawning morning. They could see the first signs the sky was turning off to the east. They rode in silence, except for the creak of their saddle leather; it was too cold and too early to carry on a conversation. A warm bed seemed about the right place to be.

  They came to where Cooper’s Creek cut slightly westward, then angled north in a serpentine manner and followed it for a time, then turned off through the dead grass for another ten minutes or so. Here the land rose slightly like a calcified ocean wave, then topping it they saw below the small lake sitting like an unpolished silver platter under the graying sky. Cattails bordered its edges and shifted slightly in a light northerly wind.

  Toussaint led the way down to the lake and they stopped several yards short of the water’s edge, dismounted, and ground-reined their mounts. Carrying their shotguns, they eased down to where the cattails were, then worked their way in among them. Toussaint said, “This seems about as good a spot as any.”

  “You’re the expert,” Jake said.

  “They’ll come out of the north, the way I figure it,” he said, pointing. “They won’t see us till they get right on top of us. They’ll see that water, then they’ll see the cattails but not us, not at first. Least I hope not.”

  Jake looked up at the sky, which had some streaks of pink growing in it. He didn’t see any geese.

  “That the way you heard they come, out of the north?” he said.

  “Only makes sense for ’em to go south in the winter, north in the summer, like every other creature that is restless.”

  They squatted on their heels and waited, watched as the sky grew lighter, could see the bands of pastels, of pink and ochre, and as the sky became lighter still, the wind picked up and stirred the cattails even more and set them to knocking against one another and sent ripples over the previously mirrored surface of the lake.

  “Flyway,” Toussaint said.

  “What?”

  “It’s what the goose hunters call such a place—a flyway. Because there is water for ’em to set down in and rest. I reckon they been flying like this all their lives and know every speck of water between here and Mexico. I reckon they been using these flyways for a thousand years.”

  “Hunting seems to turn you philosophical,” Jake said.

  “Just makes me wonder how they know such things,” Toussaint said.

  Then they heard it: the distant honk of geese.

  “Hear that?” Toussaint said.

  Jake nodded.

  “Better get ready.”

  “I’ve been ready since last night.”

  “Remember, all we need are to knock down a couple of fat ones, one at least. The rest we’ll let go on.”

  “Any particular color you’d like?” Jake said.

  Toussaint grinned.

  “Nah, it don’t make no difference; I think they’re all colored about the same anyway.”

  The honking grew louder.

  “Must be a lot of them,” Toussaint whispered. Both men had their guns aimed skyward.

  Then suddenly they saw them, three groups flying close together in wavering V’s, their dark bodies long and the same color gray as the sky, their necks stretched out, their black wings beating the air.

  “Wait…” Toussaint whispered.

  “You shoot, I’ll shoot,” Jake said.

  The leading flock flew right over and kept going, as did the second. But the third wave of geese slowed and dropped down out of the sky, their wings rigid, catching air, their bodies thrusting forward at the last moment as the leaders splashed down into the water.

  Toussaint leapt up and fired both barrels, even as the others were coming in for a landing. Jake followed suit.

  There was a flurry of wings batting the air and the honks and cries of the geese set up the alarm for the others still airborne that swerved away from the water and lifted higher still into the sky. But it was too late for three of them. In an instant it seemed everything was over. They could hear now the distant distress of the last of them flying off.

  “Thing is,” Jake said, looking at the three floaters, “how are we going to retrieve them?” Toussaint was already stripping out of his clothes.

  “Shit, only one way I know. You coming or are you just going to stand there and watch me drown?”

  Later, riding back, the game tied to their saddle horns, Toussaint was saying, “That water shrunk my nuts to peas it was so damn cold.”

  They were following the curve of the creek again and it was full light now and they felt weary from the hunt and the cold swim and having gotten up early. They were thinking ahead to a warm dinner and sitting around with their stomachs full, to some hot coffee and pie.

  Suddenly Jake drew his reins.

  “What is it?” Toussaint said.

&nb
sp; “You see that?” Jake was pointing at something in the water.

  “Where?”

  “There.”

  Then Toussaint saw it: the bobbing boots, the legs going into them. He saw them, then they disappeared under the water and he kept looking and they resurfaced again.

  “Somebody’s drowned,” Toussaint said, “in that cold mean creek.”

  Jake dismounted and went and stood at the edge of the bank, looking down. Toussaint walked his mule over close, said, “What you thinking of doing?”

  “We need to get him out.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought you were thinking.”

  It was then that somebody finally helped Nat Pickett. But he never felt the helping hands, nor saw the faces of the men so kind, nor heard their voices as they stood over him and discoursed as to how it was most assuredly murder, with the now cut rope still trailing from his neck.

  “Weighted him down with something, that’s for sure. I couldn’t lift it out of the mud,” Toussaint said, shivering as he dressed again.

  “You know this fellow?” Jake asked. “Ever seen him before?”

  “No.”

  “Neither have I.”

  “Well, it’s not like this territory is filled up with Negroes,” Toussaint said, pulling on boots that didn’t seem to want to go on easy over wet socks. “I suspect once you get him into town, somebody will know who he is.”

  “Yeah,” Jake said. “Somebody sure should. Will you ride on back to your place and bring a wagon? I’ll wait here with him.”

  Toussaint mounted without a word, his countenance grim. The dead man was hardly more than a boy, about the same age as his own boy, Dex, who had been shot to death a few months earlier. It was plain to see they had abused him before tossing him in the creek, whoever it was did this to him.

  “What they did to him,” he said as he held back the reins before heading out, “they shouldn’t have done to a dog.”

  Jake watched him ride off at a lope.

  You’re right, he thought. They shouldn’t have done such a thing, whoever they were. And when he looked at the boy’s battered and blanched face, more ashen than it was brown now, the fingers curled and stiff, he felt sick and angry.

  He shucked off his coat and placed it over the boy’s face and torso, then waited in the cold wind, thinking about the boy and the geese he and Toussaint had shot. How they had been graceful in the air, their bodies warm, their hearts beating, their blood pumping, and then suddenly all that was taken away from them by a single act of will. Just as the dead boy’s life had been taken by a willful act.

  And the sky, soon enough, with the rising sun became clear and beautiful and blue.

  2

  JOHN SAID, “I KNOW THIS BOY.”

  They had Nat Pickett laid out on Tall John’s undertaking table there in a room with shelves of jars whose smells were strange and trays of odd-looking instruments. No place for a young cowboy.

  “Then you might tell us who he is,” Jake said.

  “I believe he is a hand over to Bob Parker’s place, the Double Bar, but the word was would be more in keeping. I have seen him in the Three Aces a few times with some of the other boys from that spread. Saturday nights, usually. Name’s Nat, I do believe, though I don’t recall his last name. Some of the boys called him Midnight.”

  Toussaint stood in the corner, not caring much for the place with its odd smells, with its long wood table. He could see, on a sideboard, various-size needles and black thread, a jar with cotton in it, a brown corked bottle had a POISON label on it. He also saw a contraption and asked, “What is that thing?” The contraption was a copper cylinder with a pump handle and rubber tubes.

  “Embalming machine,” John said.

  “I’ll wait outside,” Toussaint said.

  John examined the wounds, the gashes on the neck and wrists, from where he had clipped the wire that bound them.

  “This boy suffered brutal,” he said.

  “Yes, I can see that,” Jake said. For, if anyone knew the determination of injuries and their result, it was the lawman who everyone knew as Jake Horn, and not as Tristan Shade, a former Denver physician.

  “A quick burial is in order, considering his condition, unless you know of kin nearby?” Jake added.

  John shook his head.

  “I do not. Fact is, I don’t know of a single other Negro within a hundred miles of here.”

  “Can you get him in the ground today?”

  “It is Thanksgiving, Marshal.”

  “Not for him it isn’t.”

  “Sure, I can get him buried today if I can find someone to help me dig a grave.”

  “Thanks,” Jake said. “Send me over the bill when it’s done.”

  Outside Toussaint sat atop his wagon seat, looking off toward the fallen sky, now heavy with snow clouds, the wind coming down the street sharp as knives that cut a message on the skin: a warning about the coming winter.

  “I promised Karen I’d come right back,” he said. “She’s still a little nervous to be left alone out there, especially so now that she has the boy.”

  “Go on ahead,” Jake said.

  “You still coming to dinner?”

  “Maybe later. I’m going out to Bob Parker’s place to ask after that dead young man. Seems to me somebody has to know something. He didn’t just end up in that creek for no reason.”

  “If any of them had a hand in this, do you think they’ll own up to it?”

  “He was one of their own for a time, maybe one of them might feel some obligation to say something if he knows anything.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it; he wasn’t really one of their own. Not really.”

  Jake understood the breed’s meaning. He walked down to the livery where Sam Toe kept saddle horses for rent. Sam had been resting on two bales of hay, resting and dreaming fitfully about an old acquaintance: Rowdy Jeff Pine.

  He and Rowdy Jeff had been partnered up a summer a few years earlier when they both worked for a big sheep rancher in Montana. They spent that summer in a high meadow full of sheep and wildflowers sprinkled like various colors of paint over the sweet flowing grass. Just the two of them and not a soul within rifle shot, as far as either could tell.

  In the dream Rowdy Jeff had suddenly kissed Sam on the mouth. It brought him full awake. He sat bolt upright, spitting and sputtering, then saw standing there who he believed was Rowdy Jeff. It was hard to tell with all that hammered light behind him and floating hay dust in the air. Then, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, Sam recognized the town marshal.

  His hands shook as he saddled the horse at Jake’s request.

  “Are you feeling poorly?” Jake asked.

  “No sir, just bad dreams that sticks with me.”

  Jake walked the animal Sam had saddled out of the barn and into the cold breath of the world. Sam followed him and stood watching him ride off toward the north, thinking how much that marshal looked like Rowdy Jeff with his dark beard and long moustaches and sharp blue eyes.

  It wasn’t the first time since he and Rowdy Jeff split company at the end of that long summer that he’d had the dream. Sam tried to shake off the memory like a dog shaking off water he’d swum in. The loneliness of that time was a killer to Sam’s spirits as he recalled the constant bleating of sheep, the skulking coyotes they’d had to stand guard against long into the black nights. Just him and Rowdy Jeff, playing cards in between and drinking skunk-tasting coffee until their brains grew numb trying to keep busy and their thoughts off women and whiskey. Rowdy Jeff telling about all the women he’d known, and not a woman within a hundred miles to relieve them. Things like that got to a man after a time.

  He went and found the half-drunk bottle of rye down in the grain bin where he kept it hid and rubbed the sides of it clean before pulling the cork and taking a long swallow, trying his best to drown the memory of way back then. He’d just as soon not have to think about it ever again, but knew the dreams and thoughts of Rowdy Jeff would not l
eave him alone for long.

  Jake rode with the image of the dead boy behind his eyelids. Nobody deserved such a fate. He rode with rising anger toward anyone who would do such a thing—one human to another. It made no sense. What happened to men to cause them to commit such acts? He’d seen much savagery in the war. But war pitted one man against another without necessarily the consent of either and made them desperate with due cause: survival. But this what they did to that boy was a pure pitiless act of the worst sort.

  He rode at a steady pace, hoping to reach Bob Parker’s before the weather turned worse, for he could practically taste the snow.

  The fallow grasslands had turned the color of broom brush and just as dry, spread as far as the eye could see, tan and lifeless and full of empty. Clouds tumbled in the sky. Way off to his left he could see a copse of trees, black and barren, like the charred remains of some old fort.

  Bob Parker’s ranch house, along with several other buildings, sat back from the road a quarter mile. In that flat country it wasn’t hard to see a quarter mile. He saw woodsmoke curling out of several of the stovepipes and he turned up the trace leading to the spread.

  As he drew nearer, several hands were digging a well with picks and shovels. One was leaning against a wagon, watching. They all paused what they were about when they saw him ride up. Some of them looked familiar to him, men he’d seen in town at the saloon or getting a haircut or perhaps in Otis Dollar’s general store.