Get Up Offa That Thing, page 2
“Still does,” he said. “You said it would bring us both good luck.”
“I might’ve been wrong there.”
For a moment, neither of them spoke. The sun, low now in the sky behind her, lit up her hair like a halo. More memories.
After a long silence, Emily said, “Let me ask you a question.”
Buck stayed quiet, waiting.
“How many of this…this part of the gang…have you caught by yourself? Caught or shot, I mean?”
“Counting Holland,” he said, “three out of the four.”
“You said you had to kill Joe Talmadge—how will you claim the bounty on him?”
“It’s complicated. Normally, I’d have to bring the body in. In this case, his horse had gone lame, so I buried Talmadge, marked the grave, and took his huntin’ knife. It’s in my saddlebag. Got a big JT cut into the handle. The marshal’ll recognize it.”
She paused, then said, “And how much are you getting paid for each of ’em?”
“A thousand apiece.”
Her eyes went wide. “So, are you telling me you got three thousand dollars in your pocket right now?”
“I got a thousand. I’ll have three when I report Talmadge dead and turn Holland in.” He studied her carefully. “What are you smiling about?”
“It just occurred to me you’re gonna make something of yourself after all, Buck. Landowner, cattleman—everything you could want.”
He nodded. “Almost everything,” he said.
Their gazes held. Above their heads, birds played and sang in the cottonwoods, and twenty feet away, the stream gurgled softly as it made its way south. Here in the shade, this late in the day, the air was beginning to cool off a bit. Not much, but a little.
“Something else just occurred to me, too,” she said.
“What’s that?”
She ran a hand through her curly hair, wiped her eyes, and looked up at him.
“I never been to Montana neither.”
He didn’t look surprised, as she’d expected he would, and also didn’t smile, as she’d expected he might.
“You really think you might want to go with me?” he asked.
“I’m giving it sincere consideration.”
“Because of my three thousand dollars?”
“Because I’m seeing you in…well, a new light.”
He seemed to do some considering himself. “You sure you could even make it up there?”
She grinned and said, “Try me.”
He didn’t reply right away. What he did instead was pause for a long moment, long enough for her to wonder if she was doing the right thing, and just as she was opening her mouth to say I wouldn’t want to talk you into anything, she heard the sharp, flat CRACK of a rifle shot somewhere on the hill behind her, above the creek. She jumped and turned to look, but saw nothing but trees and blue sky. When she focused again on Buck Clayton, he had drawn his pistol, but it was hanging limp in his fingers. The palm of his left hand was pressed to his chest. She watched his gun fall to the ground in front of her, watched him tip slowly out of the saddle. Somehow, both boots slid free of the stirrups, and he fell in a dusty heap at her feet.
She was still staring—bug-eyed and frozen—at his dead body when she heard hoofbeats behind her. Shocked into action, she knelt and picked up his revolver, then turned dazedly to look up at the lone rider. It was not only the face of a stranger; it was the face of a woman. She was tall and redhaired, her mannish clothes brown with trail dust.
“You shot him,” Emily said. She still couldn’t believe it.
“That I did,” the woman replied. She’d fetched up ten feet away, and sat poised and ready in the saddle, one hand holding the reins of a pawing white stallion and the other a long Winchester like the one Emily’s father had taught her to shoot when she was a little girl. “I been after him three days. I was tracking him while he tracked Joe Talmadge, and after he caught and killed Joe, I followed him here.” She eyed Emily up and down. “I guess you know you look pretty damn stupid in them boots.”
Emily felt her face heat up. “I oughta shoot you for that.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. I saw what you done to Holland there.”
At the sound of his name Deke Holland started cussing again, straining at his ropes. “Shut up, you son of a bitch,” the woman called.
Emily’s head was spinning; she couldn’t seem to think straight. She was scared, for sure—her knees were shaking—but somehow she didn’t feel overly sad for Buck. More than anything, she was mad. Mad as a wet rooster, and frustrated too. She swiped at her teary eyes with the sleeve of her dress and said, “You’re Annie Bates, ain’t you? Part of the gang he was after.”
“Gang’s a lot smaller now,” Bates said.
“You gonna kill me too?”
Bates hesitated. “I ain’t decided. See, I know some things about you, Emily Johnson.”
“Things about me?” Emily said, blinking. “How?”
“Deke Holland and me been travelin’ together the past few months, least when he wasn’t with you. And he told me once, during a rare spell of sobriety, you could shoot the eye out of a coyote at a hundred yards. That true?”
She straightened her back. “Give me that rifle and ride out a ways and I’ll show you.”
Bates barked a laugh. “I bet you would.” She paused then, her head cocked as if in deep thought. “You know how to use that Colt, too?”
Emily looked down at Buck’s pistol in her hand. She’d forgotten it was there. “I know how,” she said. “What do you care?”
“Well, I don’t know. I was just thinkin’, with this recent shortage of partners…”
“Stop beatin’ around the bush and tell me.”
“I was thinking maybe I could use somebody like you.”
Emily just stood there, breathing hard. Her fear had drained away, leaving only confusion and still-simmering anger. Not only had she been unknowingly running with outlaws, she’d just lost two beaus in less than twenty minutes. Who wouldn’t be confused?
In a voice as uncertain as her thoughts, she said, “Are you serious? You’re saying you want me to go with you?”
“I’m saying we could try it out. See if it works.” Bates was sitting relaxed in the saddle now, her rifle balanced on her lap. “We could use a tough, goodlookin’ gal on the team, that’s for sure, use you to get us close to some of the folks we need to rob. We could make a lot of money, the four of us.”
“Four?”
“You, me, and the Lassiters. Ned and Billy. That’s where I’m headed next, to meet up with ’em.” She grinned. “I bet they never saw nobody in a yellow dress and boots before.”
Emily fell silent, working that over in her mind. Leaving home to become an outlaw was a fantasy that had honestly never before entered her head. She turned to look at Deke Holland, tied and draped over the back of his horse like a deer carcass, or a drunk cowhand.
“What about him?” she asked. “I ain’t going nowhere if Deke goes along.”
“Me neither. We’ll leave him here.”
At this, Holland started cussing with renewed vigor, and thrashing around.
“’Scuse me a second,” Bates said. She walked her horse over to Holland’s and gave her squirming partner a firm whack on the head with the rifle barrel. He slumped and went still. When she returned, she said, “Dirty bastard told me he never wanted to see me again. That suits me just fine.” She slid the Winchester into its scabbard. “So how about it, girly? Want to see Dodge City?”
In the gathering twilight, Emily glanced once more at Holland, then stared down at Buck Clayton’s body lying in the sand, then looked around at the narrow stream and the tall cottonwoods and the shadowy clearing that now held memories both good and bad.
She looked up again at Annie Bates. “How cold’s it get, in Dodge? Cold as Montana?”
“Just about. The winter wind over them plains can set your teeth a-rattlin’.”
Emily nodded, pondering that. “And what would my cut be of all this money we might make? A fourth?”
“No. Not a full share. But better’n you could do here.”
Another nod. “How long would it take me to make four thousand dollars?”
“Four thousand?” This got a smile, and not a nice one. “That might take a while,” Bates said.
Calmly, Emily raised Buck’s gun and shot Annie Bates in the middle of the forehead. Bates’s hat flew off her head and landed behind her horse in the dirt. She continued to sit there in the saddle a moment, surprise frozen on her face, and then fell to the ground not ten feet from Buck Clayton’s body.
“Wrong answer,” Emily said.
It took fifteen minutes to wrestle Wild Annie’s dead body onto her horse (she was heftier than she looked), tie her down across the saddle for the trip to the marshal’s office, transfer the thousand dollars from Buck’s pocket to Emily’s saddlebag, and find the proof of Joe Talmadge’s death—the hunting knife with the JT carved into the handle. She sadly decided to leave poor Buck’s body and his horse where they were and ask the marshal to have his men ride out and fetch them later tonight. By the time she mounted her little bay and rode out of the cottonwood grove leading Bates’ and Holland’s two horses and their silent burdens, it was full dark with a moon rising in the east.
What a day, Emily thought. She’d left town a scatterbrained and immature girl on her way to a lover’s tryst with the wrong man, she’d managed to lose the right man—in more ways than one—and she was returning to town a lonely woman with two wanted criminals in tow, one unconscious and one dead. Or maybe two dead; she hadn’t checked on Holland lately, and he’d taken a pretty hard knock on the head.
But she had also left town poor, and would be rich before the night was done. There was more than one way to get a second chance at life.
She felt the beginnings of a smile.
Maybe this place was lucky…
Back to TOC
Escape-ism
Michael A. Gonzales
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“Last stop, Lafayette Hotel,” the van driver announced as he pulled up in front of the decaying Times Square structure that was a home for the homeless. Located in the heart of Manhattan, the 15-story hotel, with its six hundred rooms, was once one of those spiffy spots where Damon Runyon wrote while sipping martinis, Barrymore smoked cigars on the mezzanine and pretty showgirls socialized after their performances. The once grand landmark, with its filthy façade and dirty windows, was formerly a premier location for both tourists and locals, but when the “crossroads of the city” began to lose its luster in the late 1960s, someone from the mayor’s office stumbled on the bright idea of saving the local hotels by placing the city’s growing homeless population inside them. To the cash register clang of hundreds of thousands a month, seemingly overnight, the Carter, the Kenwood, the Hotel Bryant and the Lafayette Hotel soon became sagging hovels for boozy transients, crazed Vietnam Vets, drugged-out freaks and welfare families.
This is where unicorns come to die, seventeen-year-old Ferrara Pérez thought, staring at the cheerful horned creature on the cover of his little sister Patricia’s coloring book. Looking up, he glanced out of the window at the disaster zone that was Eighth Avenue and 43rd Street. As the brutal summer sun beamed down onto the old Dodge van, with its busted air conditioner and shabby seats, sweat dripped down their sorrowful faces.
“You see where your father has led us,” Carmen, his mother, muttered in Spanish. “To the shores of hell, that’s where.” Whenever she mentioned his father, Ferrara flinched. He looked so much like the dark-skinned handsome bastard he knew it pained his mother to look directly into his face. Three years ago, the man Ferrara closely resembled, with his curly hair, broad nose and loud voice, left their small island of Puerto Rico for the big world of New York City and that was the last they heard from him.
Roberto, his daddy, promised to send money every month, but no cash ever arrived. “I don’t understand. Your father had always been a good man. Something must be wrong.” Ferrara wanted to laugh. A good man, he thought. Were they talking about the same person: that unruly drunk, habitual gambler, and notorious womanizer? Still, no matter what he did or who he fucked, his wife’s love refused to fade.
Hell, he loved his gun collection more than he did his family. The one thing Roberto did pass on to his boy was a knowledge of handguns, often taking the boy up in the mountains for target practice. Depending on Roberto’s mood, they’d be shooting bullets at milk, soda, and rum bottles with an Astra .44 Magnum or a Beretta 92F.
Washed-up on the concrete shore of the Lafayette Hotel, Ferrara wasn’t impressed. He sucked his teeth and looked around, surveying the blighted landscape, taking in the peculiar sights. To Ferrara, a relative stranger to the city, the sidewalks looked as though a crazy giant kicked over a garbage can and all the trash ended up in front of this rotting building.
Jumping out of the van, the lanky driver ran to the back doors of the vehicle and began unloading the family’s stuff. All of their worldly belongings were jammed into six plastic garbage bags splitting along the sides. Ferrara, who had worked with his uncle part-time at a resort in P.R., spoke and understood English perfectly, but he still talked to his mother in their native tongue.
“You all right, Mommy?” he asked, concerned for her health. They had come to New York with nothing and were now suffering the consequences of their poverty. Their first night in the city, they took the bus from the airport to Spanish Harlem. His mother insisted on going simply because it had the word Spanish in it. Dragging their belongings down those strange sidewalks after midnight, Carmen walked as though she were in a trance. Passing towering housing projects and leaning tenements, they remained lost until a pair of friendly cops drove them to the ends of the earth and dropped them off at the Lower Manhattan office of the Emergency Assistance Unit (E.A.U.). The E.A.U. was inside an ancient school located on the edge of the East River. Ferrara did all the translating between her and whatever authority figures questioned her.
After sleeping in hard plastic chairs for two days, they finally relocated to the Lafayette. Dressed in too big blue jeans, a Ninja Turtles t-shirt and no-brand sneakers, Ferrara felt like a bum in the ill-fitting clothes. He jumped off the van to help unpack the black plastic bags that contained their belongings. In front of the litter-strewn entrance, a trio of tough teenage boys held a bulky Sony boom box blasting Eric B. & Rakim’s “Follow the Leader.” Each of them had a black pager hanging from their belt. They stared coldly, sizing up Ferrara up as though trying to figure out if he was a striver or a sucker.
A few feet away, as though in another world, four overdeveloped adolescent girls clad in tight jeans, gaudy gold bamboo earrings and tight t-shirts, eyeballed him. “He’s cute,” one of them screeched. A tall, light-skinned girl with long curly hair and a shapely figure, she looked to be about nineteen years old. Suggestively, she licked her cherry red lips and smiled. Ferrara looked back and stared at the sexy young woman as his family walked gravely through the tarnished bronze doors into the abyss.
If the outside temperature was eighty-degrees, inside the building it felt like a hundred and fifty. More than a few people puffed cigarettes. A large cloud of smoke hovered overhead. Two noisy stand-up fans, their blades covered with dust, circulated the foul air throughout the small reception area. A uniformed guard sat at a desk and smiled. “Can I help you?” With his heavy African accent, it took Ferrara a minute to understand. The guard escorted them to a caseworker’s office.
Vincent Notice was the name on the door. Dressed in black slacks and a sweat stained short-sleeved white shirt, a laminated I.D. card clipped to his pocket. It was 2:30 p.m. when they started and damn near four when they finished. Walking across the dirty marble floor towards the rickety elevator, the stench of garbage simmered from the overflowing trash bins filled with shitty diapers, discarded cans and food containers. Ferrara held his breath to keep from vomiting.
Notice had gotten two of the building’s institutional aides to take their bags upstairs. Boarding the lift, Ferrara studied his mother and sister. The little girl had been unusually quiet. “Patricia,” he whispered, touching his sister’s head gently. She was only ten years old and easily frightened. “It’s going to be all right.”
“I want to go home.”
“We all do, but we must find Poppi first.”
“Where is he?”
“Somewhere out there,” he assured her as the stuffy steel box moved upwardly very slowly. As though being pulled by snails, the elevator crept to the ninth floor and stopped suddenly. After rocking back and forth, the box finally steadied, and the doors slid open. In the long hallway, fluorescent lights hummed loud as a hundred cicadas. The fading bulbs generated very little light. They stood still for a moment, waiting for their eyes to adjust.
“Just follow me,” Mr. Notice instructed. The bleak hallway was covered with the filthiest carpet Ferrara had ever seen. Wrinkling his nose at the odor, the teen took his mother’s arm on one side and his sister’s on the other. Behind each door there was a different sound: crying babies, loud sex, blaring televisions, couples arguing, and children laughing.
A few doors cracked open as the silent greeting committee glared at the new arrivals as though warning them with their eyes: “Get out while you can.” Black faces, white faces, yellow faces—a melting pot of sullen, sad-eyed faces warned Ferrara. These are the shadow people, he thought, scared of looking into their eyes, into their broken faces, afraid of falling into the black hole where they dwelled.
As they got closer to the end of the hallway, he saw the aides had piled their belongings against the door where the number 923 was crudely spray painted. “Here we are,” Mr. Notice said, and pulled a key from his shirt’s breast pocket. After unlocking the door, he passed the key to Carmen, who passed it to Ferrara. The air in the room was stale, smelling of unwashed bodies and backed-up plumbing.
