Edge 60, page 12
‘Right. It turned out the timber business was only gonna get big up north in Oregon and such places like that. And when the timber went the same way as the silver, there was just farmin’ left. Which you’ve seen there still is, up in the hills to the north. And the stores and the bank and the saloon and such that the farmin’ folk need from time to time.’
‘Yeah, I’m obliged for everything you’ve told me,’ Edge said. ‘And where we’re comin’ to now,’ the girl went on like a well-practiced guide, ‘is that part of Rikersville where there’s still some kinda life to be had, mister. If a man don’t want to have himself a rip roarin’ old time. In which case, he just has to ride right on through town. Head a few hundred miles south to Frisco. Which is where, one day, I’m gonna get a man to take me and we’re—’
Now she started deliberately to press her breasts into his back, rub herself against him a little so her nipples swelled. At the same time, she made her interlocked hands into claws, dug the fingertips into his belly. But before he was able to speak the thought in his mind, which was to tell her he was not the man she hoped for, a woman with a world-weary voice instructed:
‘Gretchen Erlander, you get down off that gentleman’s horse this instant, you hear. I’m real sorry if Gretchen has been a trouble to you, sir. But you must understand, my little girl is not quite right in the head and—’
Edge had turned his head to the right, to look at the woman who gently rebuked the girl and fervidly apologized to him. But before he was able to gain anything but a fleeting impression of an elderly woman hunched in a rocking chair outside of a store, a man broke in, his tone of voice much harder:
‘He looks to me like a man who understands most things real well, Mrs. Erlander. Which I hope means he’ll understand I ain’t the kind of man who talks just to hear the sound of his own voice. Gretchen Erlander ain’t what I reckon you think she is, mister.’
He was leaning against the doorframe of a building that shared the roofed sidewalk with several stores, two doors along from the one outside which the old woman sat, on the western side of the street. The window beside the doorway was similar in size to those of the stores, but it was glazed with frosted glass which had once been painted with gold blocked black lettering to spell out two words. Now just three letters of each word could be discerned, off-center and at different levels: AL’S and ICE.
But the silver star in a circle pinned to the broad chest of the man who stepped out of the open doorway, hooked his thumbs inside his gunbelt and half turned toward Edge to ensure the badge was prominently displayed, left no doubt of what the missing letters had once spelled.
‘I wouldn’t claim most things, Marshal,’ Edge answered as he appraised the lawman with the same kind of long and cold-eyed glaze with which he had been examined.
Saw a man five feet ten inches tall, broadly built with more excess weight than muscular development. Closer to sixty than fifty, with a lot of black hair, shot through with gray, a bushy mustache of the same mix and a sun-burnished, leather-textured complexion. His eyes were brown and had seen much of the darker side of life, and the line of his lips suggested he had come to terms with all he had seen, but would never get to understand the reason for much of it.
He was dressed in fine quality clothing, past its best but with plenty of wear left in it if need or personal preference demanded. A cream shirt, black pants, black spotted white kerchief, shiny boots with spurs and white Stetson hung halfway down his back by the neck cord. There was a far from new, unfancy Colt jutting from the hip holster on the right side of his gunbelt.
‘Shit,’ Gretchen Erlander said, softly but forcefully into Edge’s ear. Then she released her grip on him, slid lithely off the horse and raised her voice to complain sourly: ‘How old’s a person gotta be in this lousy town to get treated like she ain’t no little kid with a runny nose and no—’
‘Gretchen, don’t you start to talk dirty about the parts of a female body, you hear!’ the marshal cut in. And the way he spoke, the way he looked at her—and she looked back at him and hurried toward the old woman in the rocker—indicated there had been occasions before when he had needed to take her to task: and she had learned from unpleasant experience to do as he told her.
‘I wasn’t gonna, Uncle Bernie,’ she said, sounding like a contrite small child.
‘I believe you, honey,’ the old woman said, and held out her arms as if to offer comfort to a wrongly-scolded child. ‘But you have to stop doing this to every strange man who comes into Rikersville, making up to them and—’
The girl suddenly whirled away from the woman in the rocking chair, quickened her pace and lunged through the open doorway beside the window filled with a display of pots and pans, pails and brushes. The door began to swing with a forceful shove. But by accident or design, Gretchen’s snarled curse was clearly heard on the street just before the crash of the slammed door into the frame.
‘Shit on all of you!’
‘Please excuse my Gretchen, sir,’ Mrs. Erlander asked plaintively as she rose slowly from the rocker, her movements arthritic and her face contorted by a frown of pain. ‘She’s heard so much about the world but has led such a sheltered life herself. The poor child doesn’t know how to act around grown up folks. She being the age she is and not having all her ...’ She had picked up a cane she needed to walk, used a pointed finger of her free hand to make a circling motion beside her head.
‘Ma’am,’ Edge acknowledged, tipped his hat.
This drew a gentle smile from the gray-haired old lady who was at least sixty, with a heavily wrinkled face out of which bright blue eyes sparkled when she was not enduring the pain of stiffened joints. She wore blue denim dungarees that were a loose fit above the waist, tight from there down.
‘It’s good you understand,’ she said, then moved to go into the hardware store, maybe to try to console the girl after her humiliation on the street.
‘I’m real glad you took it so well, too, Mr. ...?’
The marshal looked and sounded as sincere as Mrs. Erlander as he stepped to the front of the sidewalk, leaned a meaty shoulder against a roof support and took out a cheroot from a shirt pocket.
‘Edge.’
‘Brogan,’ the lawman traded names. ‘Bernard Brogan. We’ve had some problems with one or two passin’-through strangers and Gretchen. Lately that crazy kid has taken to spendin’ most of her days lookin’ out to the north. Hopin’ to spot a rider. And when she does, she hares off up to the north end of the street. Feeds the man a line that’s supposed to make him want to take her away from Rikersville.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I figured she was feeding me,’ Edge said as he swung down from his saddle, his good and reckless feelings of a few minutes ago totally dissipated now.
‘Trouble was, Clarice Erlander and her late husband had the girl much too late in life. Was touch and go whether the baby would make it through the first year of her life. In that time, somethin’ must’ve happen in her brain, folks say. Hell of a thing. Mostly she lives in a world of her own. Tells a whole bundle of lies all the time.’
‘She told me I could get a square meal over in the saloon,’ Edge said, gestured toward the balconied building across the street. ‘Same as a young farmer—’
‘That you surely can,’ Brogan confirmed, struck a match to light his cheroot, dropped it on the street and put out the flame as he stepped down off the sidewalk. ‘I was just about to stroll across to Tex Ford’s place and have myself a beer. You can get a bowl of beef stew any time of day off Tex. Not the best-cooked grub in California, I guess, but the quantity’s sure value for money.’
‘About what the farmer, a feller named Shelby, told me,’ Edge answered as he and the lawman started across the street toward the Lucky Seven, that looked as ill cared lor as all the other buildings on the south side of Rikersville. Like the business of supplying the needs of the local farming community had started to suffer the same fate as the silver-mining and lumber enterprises that had provided the earlier stages of the town’s development.
As well as the marshal’s office and the stores that stocked the basic essentials of daily life for people who did not want, could not afford or had no need of the luxuries of life, there was at this end of Main Street a livery stable across a wagon-wide alleyway from the saloon, a church, a schoolhouse, a bank, a stage line depot and a telegraph office.
‘Yeah, Jonathon and Martha Shelby, I know them,’ Brogan said, a little wistfully. ‘A fine young couple. Have a newborn baby to take care of now. We’re all hopin’ they make a go of the old Henderson place. Maybe if they’re seen to do that, more of their kind will come to settle in the Rikersville area. Young couples, startin’ to raise families. Committed to stayin’ around, havin’ to stick it out come hell or high water because they got responsibilities. In place of the soured-up old-timers that never really did give it a go. Because they come out here to this neck of the woods to do somethin’ else besides farmin’.’
They had crossed the hundred feet wide street, covering half as much distance again on a diagonal line. The marshal smoked his cheroot and waited patiently with a pensive frown on his face while Edge hitched the gelding to the rail out front of the Lucky Seven.
Up close, the saloon looked in a worse state of repair than some of the buildings that had been abandoned, its paint bubbled, curled or even completely peeled off the woodwork.
Many of its grimed windows were cracked, others were boarded over. The balcony that also provided the roof of the building wide porch looked rickety and several of its railings were missing.
Brogan saw the bleak-eyed way Edge surveyed the facade of the place and hurried to continue his catalogue of excuses for the town and its citizens.
‘Tex Ford’s been here too long, seen too many changes for the worse. One of the old-timers. Like Clarice Erlander, a lot of the others who run the stores. And the bank. The stage station and ...’
The lawman hurled away the barely started cheroot, made no attempt to step on the still glowing end, scowled as he swept his gaze from the saloon and its neighbors to the line of buildings on the other side of the street. Then he stared balefully along its deserted length as he growled: ‘Hell, what young folks are gonna come and take on those kinda businesses when the people that have need of them are dyin’ out? Or uprootin’ and movin’ off someplace else to see out their days?’
‘Don’t look at me, marshal,’ Edge replied. ‘I’m looking for a place, but this ain’t it. And I ain’t young.’
Brogan shrugged his wide shoulders, replaced the frown with weary grin as he asked: ‘You allow me to buy you a beer? Or a shot of somethin,’ stronger? For lettin’ me bend your ear about this town I used to think had a future?’
‘Make it a point always to pay my own way,’ Edge said, as his attention was drawn to the livery stable across the alley, when the doors opened and a black-bearded man emerged, leading a piebald and a chestnut gelding.
‘Bernie,’ the bearded man greeted, his expression and his tone dour.
‘Stanley,’ the lawman responded absently with a casual wave of a hand, then he growled at Edge: ‘Hell, I can’t argue with a man’s right to do that, mister! But what about if I stand treat in return for the bigger favor you did? The way you didn’t try to take advantage of that lame-brained Gretchen Erl—’
He realized he had lost the half-breed’s attention. Saw Edge was peering after the man called Stanley who had turned to lead the two horses up the gentle slope of Main Street, northward.
‘You know Stan Morrissey?’ Brogan asked, a little irritably. ‘He farms out by the Shelby place?’
‘Not the man, feller,’ Edge answered. ‘But the horses look familiar.’
‘What’s that, mister?’
Brogan’s tone had become suddenly sharp as he voiced the demand. And this switch drew Edge’s intrigued gaze back to the lawman, whose fleshy face with the widely experienced eyes and faintly quizzical mouthline had lost all trace of its earlier friendliness.
‘Something, Marshal?’ Edge asked as he stepped up on to the saloon’s stoop immediately outside the doors.
From here he was able to see in over the tops of the slatted batwings: and something he saw in the squalid, sunlit interior of the Lucky Seven made it difficult for him to return his narrow-eyed gaze to the lawman who came up on to the stoop beside him and countered grimly:
‘There sure is somethin’, mister! Them two horses were brought into this town by a breed woman. Claimed they were hers to sell, and sell them she did. To Pete Brinks, the liveryman here in Rikersville. Pete bought them in good faith and it looks like he didn’t waste no time in resellin’ them to Stan Morrissey. Now you tell me them horses could’ve been—’
‘No sweat, Marshal,’ Edge cut in evenly on the earnest toned lawman, and pushed open the batwings, raised his voice so the handful of people in the saloon—including Ruby Red—could hear him when he went on: ‘Just that it was a surprise to see that feller with them. It was the breed woman had the horses when I last saw them. Those two and one other she was riding.’
He came to a halt, feigned mild surprise and then nodded curtly to Ruby Red who sat at a table in a far corner of the saloon with a man. Next he gestured with a hooked thumb as he went toward the center of the bar counter that ran along the wall to the left. Spoke over his shoulder as Brogan entered the Lucky Seven:
‘There’s that very breed, Marshal. Long as it was her who sold the horses, and not somebody who stole them off her, everything’s fine, I guess.’
‘Well, I sure am glad to hear that,’ Brogan said with relief as he trailed Edge across the saloon. Shot just a passing glance toward the table where the city-suited man of forty or so with a pale complexion and slicked down black hair sat with Ruby Red. His voice was friendly again and there was a smile back on his face as he exchanged nods of recognition with a group of four men playing cards, and three lone drinkers. Only he and Edge bellied up to the bar. ‘I like to think that I’m a lawman first and last, but I sure do get irritated when business interferes with pleasure. Beer for me, Tex. And whatever this gentleman is havin’. He did me a favor.’
‘I’ll have a beer,’ Edge told the bartender who had moved along the counter with a wall mirror in back of it. ‘Pay for it myself.’
‘Just so long as somebody pays,’ Ford said as he began to draw the beers, his morose expression not altering by one line as he darted his gaze between the familiar face of Brogan and the fresh one of Edge.
He was more than fifty, short and broad, with a round, unshaven face and a totally bald head. He had the bloodshot eyes and purple nose of a man who had sampled too much of his stock-in-trade. He smelled like he had done a lot of sweating in his too tight shirt and crumpled pants since they were last laundered: his bad odor discernible amid the usual saloon stinks and the more appetizing fragrance of cooking meat.
‘You eatin’ here at the Lucky Seven today, Bernie?’ Ford asked as he set down a glass of beer on the counter in front of each man.
Brogan looked at Edge with distaste, then at Ford with a stronger brand of the same expression. Shook his head and growled: ‘Nah! Suddenly I don’t have an appetite like usual, Tex.’ He shrugged. ‘Man does what he can, holds out the hand of welcome, acts friendly to a passin’ stranger and it gets spit on. In a manner of speakin’. Reckon I’ll just stick to doin’ my job of keepin’ the peace. Give up tryin’ to save Rikersville from dyin’ on its feet.’
He grasped the glass in front of him, tilted it to his mouth and drank the beer noisily without pausing for breath while he rooted around in a pants pocket. Then fished out a coin and dropped it on the counter top when he banged down the empty glass bedside it.
‘Thanks again for not makin’ trouble over the girl, mister,’ he muttered with bad grace. ‘Have yourself a good trip, wherever you’re headed when you leave town.’
He spun on his heels and strode out of the saloon while Edge was still drinking the beer, relishing how its clear coolness washed the trail dust out of his throat. And, in the flaked and mottled mirror behind the bar, watched Ruby Red and her friend holding hands beneath their table as the other customers and Ford peered after the departing lawman with something akin to pity. Then, as the batwings flapped closed, the bartender returned his attention to Edge, picked up Brogan’s nickel, said:
‘There goes a big-hearted man who means real well, mister. Smart, too, most of the time. Except when he won’t admit he’s fightin’ for a lost cause.’
Ruby Red was better placed to see Edge standing at the bar than was the man across the table from her. She suddenly sensed the half-breed’s watching eyes and without her romantic friend being aware of it was able to exchange a glance with him.
At the moment their gazes met her dark eyes expressed gratitude, but an instant later a look of fear entered them: finally tacit pleading when she saw the ice in Edge’s expression was not going to melt.
The dudishly dressed man with her, who had glowered ineffectually at Edge and Brogan when they first entered the saloon and spoke about Ruby Red as a breed, now recognized her dismay. And turned to look toward its source, would have gotten up angrily out of his chair if she had not rasped an entreaty at him.
Edge shifted his cold-eyed gaze to Ford. ‘Lost cause, feller?’ The fat little bartender looked disgusted that Edge had not been paying attention, growled: ‘Rikersville, mister. It ain’t never gonna amount to anythin’, but Bernie Brogan won’t see it that way. Beats me how a man that’s so smart in lotsa other ways can feel so strong about somethin’ that ain’t worth shit.’ Edge glanced again in the mirror and saw Ruby Red was leaning across the table, so nobody but her friend could hear what she was saying. He muttered, his own words hardly audible: ‘That beats me, too.’
