Rage Under the Red Sky, page 6
part #3 of Hawke & Carmody Series
It occurred to me that when this was over we needed to have a talk with that jeweler about the pocket watches we’d been harvesting off local thugs, but put the thought out of my head while we dealt with the issue at hand.
“It’s 4:45 now,” Carmody said, snapped the cover shut, and thought for a full minute, drumming his fingers on the desk.
I have no idea what goes on inside his head when he goes into those thinking spells. Maybe he was summoning up a mental map of the streams and tributaries uphill and upriver from us, or doing some estimations involving the amount of rainfall per hour, or maybe he just wanted to make me believe his prediction was the outcome of some sophisticated calculation so I would take it seriously.
“Eleven,” he said.
Chapter 24
A wall of water cascaded into the bank at 11:01.
That’s what the bank’s clock said, and while time around here is sort of a collective hunch – the bank manager sets the clock by looking up at the sun at mid-day, and those who have watches and clocks set them according to his best guess – I was impressed with Carmody’s predictive powers.
The bank manager, a nervous little man named Jasper Lovejoy, hadn’t made it in until about 10:30. His house was cut off from town by a stream that had swollen to ten times normal size, and it took some fancy maneuvering for him to find a place where his horse could ford it.
Carmody and I kept swinging by the bank until Lovejoy rode in. We were on horseback. The water was beginning to rise in the streets and horses have quite a bit more ground clearance than we did, along with that extra pair of legs for stability in swift current.
Carmody has unusually acute eyesight and spotted Lovejoy coming over a crest.
“He’s waving his hands and slapping himself in the head,” Carmody said. Man’s beside hisself. Looks like he’s plumb out of his mind.”
“Means the same thing,” I said, having nothing better to do while we waited, or, at least, until Lovejoy got close enough that I could see Lovejoy’s paroxysm. “‘Beside’ and ‘outside’ used to mean the same thing, and early English used it to mean ‘out of his mind.’”
Carmody nodded and figured out a way to top me.
“Like the translation in the King James Bible: ‘Paul, thou art beside thy self, much learning doeth make thee mad.’”
I knew there was more coming.
“It was in Acts, 26:24. Don’t know if they taught you that when you was going to school to become a professor.”
He said it perfesser.
“Too much learning making a man crazy,” Carmody said. “Interesting concept. Reckon that’s what mighta happened to you?”
Just then Lovejoy saw us and let out a series of panicky whoops. Like some sort of bird call.
“This man apparently done a lot of learning,” Carmody said out of the corner of his mouth, “because he sure has gone loco.”
Lovejoy had dark eyes and a pointy noise and coal-black hair swept back from a low forehead. He’d lost his hat, if he had worn one, in the wind, and his hair was matted sleekly to his skull. His eyes darted manically between us and the bank. And he kept making the whooping noise.
He sounded like a bird but looked like an insane mole.
“We need to do something,” he said, and waved his arms and whooped. “We need to do something.”
I told him that we expected a crush of water soon and that whatever couldn’t fit in the safe or the small vault should be bundled up and moved to the jail. We figured the safe and vault were too heavy to be pushed anywhere even if the whole building were toppled, but anything else we’d lock in the cell for safekeeping.
Lovejoy shooed us away with a frantic gesture of panicky, flitting fingers.
“I’ll bring it over, I’ll bring it over.”
“You can’t. You can’t,” Carmody said.
I wondered if Carmody was making fun of him or if Lovejoy’s mannerisms were contagious.
“You’ll drown. You’ll drown,” I added.
Lovejoy dismounted, plucked a ring of keys from his coat, and waded to the front door. The water was already ankle-deep and swirling.
“Go away. Go away,” he said, and stamped his foot like a toddler, splashing us.
Carmody spoke softly.
“I’m going to say this once. We got a crisis and can’t fuck around here any longer. Lock up what you can, grab what you can grab, and we’re all going to get out of here.”
Carmody’s quiet menace scared Lovejoy. It scared me, for that matter, and I’m the one with the glare that can mortify girlfriends.
We each carried a bag of undetermined contents – Lovejoy had stuffed various papers into various bags seemingly at random – after wedging almost all the loose cash into the safe.
He hooted the whole time and kept glancing longingly toward his office as Carmody and I implored him to leave.
Carmody finally grabbed him by the back of the collar, told him that if there was something else get it now, and when Lovejoy burst into tears Carmody pretty much lifted him off the ground and Lovejoy reluctantly danced a panicky tiptoe ballet step as we escorted him out.
The water was up to our knees and pushing with mighty insistence by the time we’d mounted up.
We rode away but kept the horses to a trot because we were unsure of the footing
There was a groan and cracks like rifle shots, and we looked back and saw the building start to break loose from its foundation.
Chapter 25
The wind began to die down at two, but the water kept rising.
And so did tempers.
Vern Miller, the druggist, had managed to make it in before noon on a forlorn little horse with a narrow face that somehow resembled Miller. They could have been relatives.
Miller was a man of sublime mystery. Even his appearance gave few clues: He was a spare, sour fellow probably about 70, give or take twenty years in either direction. He wouldn’t talk much about his past, although I’d had two interactions with him that led me to believe he’d seen more combat than the aggregate total of most infantry divisions. When I first met him he’d used a musket, of all things, to drill a bank robber who was sighting in on me. I had a hunch the thing had been hanging over his fireplace since the Mexican War and when the time came he plucked it down and used it exactly once, which is all you need if you know what you’re doing, and he did.
The second incident involved him grafting himself onto a rescue party headed by my old commanding officer, Major Munro, who is now a state senator.
Carmody and I had both tried to get Miller to turn around and go home, fearing not only for him but for ourselves if we had to divert our attention to look after him, but Munro had recognized something in Miller that we did not.
Munro handed the old man a rifle and Miller sighted and worked the bolt like he’d carried the weapon for years and a few hours later calmly used it to expertly dispatch several outlaws who wished us the most severe sort of ill will.
But today Miller’s placid façade had disappeared when he found a looter carrying bottles of laudanum through the broken window, which I hadn’t had time to fix.
Stormy weather will put a man on edge and sometimes push you over it.
Miller was kicking the looter in the side. I didn’t recognize the man; probably a cowhand or drifter who’d stopped in town to ride out the storm.
The looter would manage to get to his knees and scurry a few feet before Miller kicked him again, and then he’d splash back facedown into the water.
The pattern repeated about five times before I lost interest.
Here in the center of town the water had reached my shins and moved with a steady flow that, while not enough to knock you down, made forward motion difficult. Back at the bank, near the delta, it had reached waist height and was bubbling in animated torrents.
I had checked on the Spoon a couple of times in the morning and the doors were locked. I let myself in and spied on Elmira each time, and found her snoring away happily under about seven blankets. The window had cracked but did not shatter.
A little later, Carmody and I decided we would start a routine of splitting up and riding north and south along Front Street, our main thoroughfare. I went north, but kept my distance from the swirling waters of the delta, which were still rising.
On my way back, near the blacksmith shop, I found a man lashed to a tree with strips of leather.
I didn’t know who he was, either.
“Why are you tied to a tree?” I asked him.
He flashed me an angry glower, though I thought I’d asked a perfectly polite and reasonable question.
“Hi Josiah,” came a voice from inside the shed.
It was Richard Oak, the blacksmith. Oak was built like Hercules but didn’t know much about guns or combat and, bless his heart, he’d once faced armed gunmen in my defense armed only with his pitiful little plinking rifle, a virtual toy that probably could not fell a squirrel big enough for Carmody’s dinner.
“Caught him breaking in,” Oak said, wiping his hands on a rag. “Not sure what he thought he’d steal but the wind tore my door open and blew it off its hinges.”
I dismounted and walked inside. Oak’s shop was flooded pretty badly; his shed had a dirt floor, unlike most buildings in town that were built up at least a few inches, mostly to boardwalk height or above.
“Sorry,” I said. “You got hit pretty hard.”
“It ain’t bad, but thanks. The building’s still intact, and nothing here is going to be damaged by some water. And dirt ain’t like a floor. It won’t rot because of the water. I might catch a cold from standing in it, but it’s all good. In fact, I’m looking at a good couple of weeks because weather like this brings on a lot of bent wheel rims and horseshoes sucked off into the mud, not to mention busted hinges.”
“Including your own,” I said.
“Have that fixed in an hour,” Oak said. “I’m firing up the hearth right now so I can heat it up and pound it out.”
Oak raised his voice a little.
“And I’m going to get these pokers red-hot so I can torture that guy outside.”
We were inside and out of view of the guy tied to the tree, who couldn’t see that Oak had no pokers on the fire or elsewhere.
“Christ, ten of them,” I said.
“The secret is that you keep rotating them so they never cool off.”
“And you’ve got the special one. The one that fits right into the…well, you know, I don’t like to think about it.”
“Thanks for checking on me, Josiah. I can handle things from here.”
I mounted up and ignored the increasingly desperate pleas from the guy tied to the tree.
Chapter 26
Carmody, who hadn’t had as much to drink as I did the night before, agreed to spell me and let me lie down for an hour.
Elmira had awoken early and bitterly complained about the heat from the seven blankets and the fact that she’d bruised her face by walking into the wall when she got up from a bed that had somehow moved across the room on its own.
I didn’t have the time or energy to explain.
On the way up to her bedroom I passed her at the bar. She’d opened up and was doing a fairly brisk business, although there was a half-inch of water on the floor and one of the walls was cockeyed.
Elmira spotted me and with the unerring instinct she had for determining I was too tired to function, decided that she wanted to talk.
She beckoned me into her back office and I answered her questions about the wind, the flood, Carmody’s predictions, the seven blankets, the moving bed, and the trouble we’d had in the morning.
I asked her why she was dreaming about carrots and she looked at me like I was crazy. Maybe I was, crazy from exhaustion. Beside myself, as they say.
And then she kissed me and told me to lie down and promised not to bother me unless there was trouble.
I told her I hoped to hell there would be no trouble.
And, of course, right on cue, a bar-girl stuck her head in the door.
“There’s trouble,” she said.
Chapter 27
There were three of them behind the bar. They were not only pouring themselves drinks but stuffing bottles into their pockets. One of them even pocketed a shot glass.
The tallest one, who sported a wild shock of red hair and a mask of outrage, which I suspect he wore perpetually, as part of his identity, looked at me, glanced at my badge, and asked me what the fuck I wanted.
What I wanted?
I told him I wanted him to stop stealing liquor and then submit to the beating I was going to lay on him.
For the second time in as many minutes I was getting a look that questioned my sanity and I was getting sick of it.
“Can’t you see what’s happening?” he said, waving a hand as though all the evidence he needed was right before my eyes and I was impossibly obtuse. “We been out in the rain and wind. It’s a disaster. We is victims of a disaster. Least we is entitled to is a goddamn free drink.”
I didn’t quite see the connection between him getting wet and the presumed right to loot Elmira’s bar, but I wasn’t thinking clearly and the task of educating him step-by-step seemed daunting, so I took out my Colt and clubbed him over the head and he dropped straight down, coming to rest jackknifed on the floor with his face pressed against his knees.
The other two headed toward the door but kept the bottles.
“What,” said one, a short man with a long beard that seemed to carry remnants of each of his last week’s meals, “you gonna kill us because we need a drink?”
Something I never understood about the West, before I became part of it, was how much people read. During the war, a novel or a newspaper was a precious commodity. I’d even seen soldiers pore over the label on a box, over and over, just for something to occupy their eyes and mind.
I’d paid a premium for reading material during days when I was on the trail as a guard, or hunting rustlers. I remember paying several dollars for a book called Gulliver’s Travels. I kept it for years, read it over and over, and eventually gave it to Carmody.
I knew enough of last century’s British politics to get most of the jokes, which I believe the author hid in what you might mistake as a children’s book so he could avoid repercussions, which back then could have meant the rack or the gallows.
One of the hidden jibes in the book was about how people who want things to work their way twist logic to claim moral superiority. It never ceased to amaze me how so many people I’ve encountered do just that – start from what they want and work backward for justification. Self-delusion has been used to justify mass homicide, slavery, and – several times this morning – the presumed right to take what’s not yours because a catastrophe provided an opportunity.
And feel morally superior about it.
The man with the moldy beard was feeling superior. He raised his eyebrows and titled his head back.
“So,” he said, infinitely satisfied with himself. “You gonna kill us for these bottles?”
“Yes,” I said.
The hammer on my Colt makes an abnormally loud click when it’s cocked. I don’t know why, and it doesn’t affect the function of the weapon, and in fact there are certain moments when it adds a little necessary drama to the situation.
They set the bottles back on the bar with infinite care, lining them up perfectly, and then they backed out, wide-eyed.
I dragged the redhead out by an ankle and left him in the street, where I assumed he’d either walk away when he awoke or be washed away by the current.
And then I dragged myself up the stairs and went to sleep, but not before I had the bad judgment to tell Elmira to wake me if there was more trouble.
I’d already heard the gunshots and was putting on my boots when she opened the door.
Chapter 28
“Carmody’s already at the bank,” Elmira said.
“What’s happening?”
“Everybody’s swimming in money,” she said, her eyes wide.
I was annoyed. There was gunfire and I wasn’t in the mood to decipher her obscure metaphors.
“Just tell me what’s going on in plain English.”
“They are swimming,” she said, slowly, mouthing the words in exaggerated fashion as though I could get the point by reading her lips, and broadly pantomiming paddling motions. “In money.”
I gave up and let gravity pull me down the stairs two at a time. Pretty soon she’d start talking about carrots again.
It was a short walk but I elected to ride because I could scabbard my rifle and get an elevated view of whatever was going on.
The first object that came into view as I rounded the bend was Carmody firing that buffalo gun in the air.
“I’m going to build a new jail and put everyone one a you assholes in it forever if I have to,” Carmody said.
I spurred the horse forward.
And then I saw it.
At least twenty people.
Fighting, snarling, swearing, gouging.
And swimming in money.
Chapter 29
The bank had been pushed off its foundations by more than twenty feet. The water continued to rush up against the back wall and formed a pool deep enough to swim in. Oddly enough, the fact that the river was effectively dammed up made the pool itself relatively calm.
The people were not calm. They clawed at what I first thought were lily pads, even though that thought made no sense. When I got closer I could see that what covered the lake were clumps of thousands of greenbacks, which made no sense either.
But it was happening.
In the middle of the melee was the owner of the grocery store. He was a rough man with meaty forearms and thick hands and was busily using them to club the owner of the dress shop, a woman who was in her fifties and a head shorter but who nonetheless fought like a wildcat and snarled like one, too. She wasn’t quite tall enough to keep her head above water so she’d bob down from time to time and resurface, shake the hair out of her face, grab for more currency, and scratch at the grocer’s eyes as he tried to reclaim what she’d snatched.
