The Lawbringers 2, page 6
“Why in hell do I always have to choose sides?” Clay cried.
“Because that’s your lot,” Ben said roughly. “Your old man’s dead right, Chico. You’ve about reached the point where you’ve got to show some backbone.”
“Backbone. I just don’t get it.” He picked up the reins of his horse. Lamplight washed softly out of the courthouse windows. “When I was a kid in school, we had an old Mexican woman who used to come in every day from some grub farm up the valley. She used to walk all the way to school every day. I don’t remember her name. The kids used to pick on her something awful—you know kids. The old lady’s wits were kind of slow, but I felt sorry for her because she wanted to learn—don’t ask me why—and she put up with every bit of it. She used to sit in one of those side-arm desks that was too small for her because she was pretty damn fat, and she went grinding away at the lessons. She learned how to read and write better than most of the kids. I guess she’s dead now, but I remember her. That’s what I always called backbone, Ben. I never figured you had to carry a gun around.”
“Nobody’d argue with that, Chico. But it took guts for that old woman to make up her mind and guts to stick by the decision.”
Clay was hardly listening. His mind was off chasing a memory. “My mother wanted me to keep practicing at that piano, as if I didn’t have fingers like so many bananas, and him, he wanted me to apply to West Point. I never could make up my mind, so I bought that ranch.”
He gripped the stirrup in his right hand and twisted it around, ready for his boot. “I guess I’m a disappointment to both of them.”
Ben Harmony said, “Maybe not. Look, maybe what we both need is a little whiskey and a night on the town.”
“I’d better get out to the creek and bed down those cattle.”
“They’re tired. They’ll bed themselves down. Those critters won’t go anywhere.” Ben Harmony flexed his muscles. “How about it?”
“I’ll pass it up.”
Ben Harmony shrugged. “I hope when I’m dead they don’t forget to bury me.” He looked up the street toward the bright lights of the Occidental. “You’ve been out herding cows so long your brains are dried up. You need a loose night, Chico.”
Clay felt silly. He dropped the reins. “I don’t expect to have a good time,” he said.
“All right. Let’s go out and have a rotten time.”
Chapter Seven
The whiskey transported Clay’s mind back into earlier youth, when things were easier, or so they now seemed. But you couldn’t turn around and walk back into those days. Stubborn fingers on piano keys, knowing he was a third-rate talent; book pages by candlelight, poems by Burns and Gray and novels of Sir Walter Scott.
The Occidental bustled with trade—cowhands, miners, teamsters, shopkeepers, hunters, clerks, drifters on the way through to California or Mexico, and here and there a strange new face that could not be pigeonholed. Subdued laughter and talk, scraping chairs and the click of coins on card tables, and everybody keeping a resentful distance. The word had gone around, and it was as if Ben Harmony wore a sign on his back: “Do Not Touch, signed Farris Rand, High Sheriff.”
Ben Harmony seemed to be in a sour mood. He said, “Me, I only drink to pass the time until I’m drunk.” And later he said, “Remember this, Chico. Trust everybody if you want to, but never forget to cut the cards.”
Clyde Littlejack was at a poker table facing the bar. His eyes were shrewd; they studied Ben Harmony with speculative scrutiny. Ben Harmony grinned brashly at him, and Littlejack fumed. Dinwiddie came in, wearing his stovepipe hat, and nodded amiably to Clay. Dinwiddie sat in on the card game, and Littlejack was heard to say, “The game is stud, and the stakes are two bits and four bits. That agreeable?”
“Just deal them,” Dinwiddie said.
The Mexican guitar player came in from the back, pulled up a stool in the back of the room, and began to play. The quiet music filtered through the smoky murmur of the saloon. Clay watched the Mexican’s hands scurry like spiders over the strings. There was more to drink; Clay felt drowsy in the room’s dense, stale heat. A diaphanous cloud of tobacco smoke circled around under the low ceiling.
A foul word escaped Ben Harmony’s lips, but when Clay shot a glance at him, Ben Harmony’s eyes were flashing with wicked hilarity. When he met Clay’s glance, he said, “Never mind, Chico. I’m only as drunk as I want to be.”
“The hell time’s it?” Clay muttered. He reached for his glass and emptied the dregs down his throat. The guitar strummed listlessly. “Let’s go, huh?”
When he hit the open air, it revived him. Ben Harmony said, “Where to?”
Clay shrugged elaborately. A cowboy turned the corner with his head thrown back, howling a song.
Ben Harmony said, “Hello there, Vestry.”
The cowboy looked down from the sky, got his bearings and grinned. “Ben!” In his enthusiasm he swarmed all over Ben Harmony. “Ain’t seen you in a—I mean, a dog’s age.”
“You mean a coon’s age, don’t you?”
“Sure. Sure I do, Ben, and no offense meant.”
“All right,” Ben Harmony said. “Like you to meet my friend Rand.”
The cowboy swept his hand around in a grand gesture. “I sympathize, Rand. With this crowbait for a friend you got no need for enemies.” He grinned loosely and took Clay’s hand in an exhausted grip.
“Sure,” said Ben Harmony. “You look all rode out, Vestry.”
“For damn sure. I been to Hannah Early’s. Still can’t walk straight.” The rowdy flavor of Vestry’s grin was vital and frantic. “You headed down to that cathouse? Man, that Hannah, she looks like Andrew Jackson and one of her goddamn biscuits fell off the table and damn near bust my foot, but by Jesus she’s built like a brick cathouse. She do bring it all with her, for sure.”
“Now, maybe that’s an idea,” said Ben Harmony.
“And more power to you,” Vestry said. He shook his head in amazement and wandered past.
Across the street in the storefront window of the Canaanite Mission stood a big hand-lettered sign, lamp lit like a theater stage: REPENT. Ben Harmony grinned crookedly at that and clapped Clay on the shoulder. “Lead the way, Chico.”
“I don’t think I want to—”
“Nonsense.”
“I’ll show you the way,” Clay muttered. He stepped off.
It was a flimsy building of doubtful tenantry, judging by its façade. In the entryway powerful raw perfume registered keenly in his nostrils. He heard laughter; he banged on the inner door.
Hannah Early began to smile, but then she saw Ben Harmony. “What’s this?”
“An initiate,” Clay said, pronouncing the word with slow care.
Hannah Early was outrageously homely. Her nose was too big, her mouth was too big, her ears were too big. But she had a splendid body.
She gave out a bray of laughter and said in a scratchy baritone voice, “Then you came to the right place, young Mr. Harmony.”
“How’d you know my name?”
“Ain’t nobody in town don’t know you,” she said. “Come on in.”
Her breasts, as she walked back into the parlor, bobbed and surged inside her dress. Hannah yelled up the stairs.
The room was piled with plush-heavy mauve draperies and furniture stuffed to the point of explosion—a riot of colors crowned by an enormous baroque chandelier.
A girl trotted down the stairs, and Hannah said to Clay, “Mr. Rand, this is Sue. She’s a fine girl. Sue, this is Mr. Rand. He’s a fine citizen.”
Clay said, “No, thanks.”
The girl pouted. “Don’t you want to be friendly?”
Hannah said, “Why don’t you two dance while I see to your friend?”
Clay poked his thumb toward Ben Harmony. “Ben here loves to dance. He studied with St. Vitus.”
“Really?” said Sue.
“My friend,” said Ben Harmony, “you’re looking at a man without character. I’m about to steal this young prize chicken away from you.”
Clay regarded him as if marveling at Ben’s depthless depravity. Then he switched his glance to Hannah. “Why are you looking at me?”
Hannah said, “Why are you looking at me?”
The girl Sue passed Clay with a slow flirt of the shoulder. He heard Ben’s Rabelaisian laughter. Hannah said to Ben, “You are wondering whether beneath all this gilding there actually exist any lilies.”
“What?”
“Don’t be afraid of him, dear,” she said to Sue. “He’s at least half human.”
Ben Harmony said again, “What?”
Hannah addressed him. “She’s no young child of the woods, Ben Harmony. You don’t have to be slow.”
Ben Harmony bowed and swept his hat in a low arc. “If you’re free, ma’am—”
“I’m free,” said Sue, fascinated. “I’m very free.”
Clay turned back to Hannah. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
“Do you think you’re old enough?”
He laughed a little. He knew he was very drunk. But the deep, rich color of the place didn’t hide its flyblown character, and he felt wrong about it. He put his hand to his head and frowned. Hannah said, “The only cure for a hangover is twenty-four hours.”
“Suppose I don’t live that long?”
“Done yourself up proper, I see. What was that question you wanted to ask me?”
“I forgot. Is that a misdemeanor or something?”
Ben Harmony was stumbling upstairs on Sue’s arm. He looked back over his shoulder. “Chico?”
“I’m going home,” Clay said. “No, I’m going to see my girl.”
“You got a girl?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I do.” He batted past Hannah. “G’night, Hannah.” He went outside and waited for the door to slam behind him.
The lights of a carriage passed him, and a wake of dust hung behind. Clay teetered on the balls of his feet. Down the street he could see the glowing porch lamp of Colonel McAffee’s house, indicating that the McAffees had not retired for the night.
He said to himself with great care, “I have not thought of her once today until now,” and having voiced the thought, he frowned at it. But finally he bolted toward the place.
He banged on the door and listened closely, hoping to hear light, quick footfalls. But it was the colonel’s boots that tramped forward, and the colonel’s flaccid hand that opened the door. Nonetheless Clay swept off his hat with as much gallantry as he could gather. “Good evening to you, Colonel.”
McAffee gave him the eye. “It is past eleven, sir, and you’ve had a few drinks, I see.”
So have you, you old mealy mouth. “Yes, sir. I guess I have. I was wondering if Lavender was home.”
“She is not.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, and stood on the porch with his hat brim clutched in his hand.
“She’s gone to the school dance,” the colonel said. He added casually, so that Clay would know it was significant, “With young Bob Rivers.”
“I didn’t hear about any dance.”
“Evidently. Go home. Sleep it off. And find yourself a new girl.”
Clay brought him into focus. “What did you say?”
The colonel’s loose face was as stern as he could make it. “You heard me. I won’t have my granddaughter courted by you.”
“Why?”
The colonel marched backward—he never walked, he marched—and shut the door in Clay’s face.
Clay’s mouth gulped open, shut, open, shut. Finally he stumbled back off the porch and swam opaquely through the night. At the curb he stopped and shook his fist at the house.
McAffee was a blowhard, and his sentiments of the moment were not to be taken seriously. But McAffee had never used that tone to him before.
It must have been Ben Harmony’s arrival that had shocked the colonel. McAffee never let anybody forget where he came from.
Clay thought, the old hypocrite.
In his claw-hammer coat and white hat Colonel McAffee had tried for years to bring honeysuckle gentility to Mogollon County. So far the voters had not seen fit to elect him to any office where he might do any damage. The colonel had compensated for this slight upon his person by designing buildings (one of which, unhappily, had been built), by practicing law after a fashion, and by almost single-handedly assuring the profits of the John Vale distillery in Nelson County, Kentucky. Scotty of the Occidental always stocked six cases of John Vale bonded sour mash, in case an Act of God should delay the colonel’s regular shipment.
Except for his clothes, McAffee hardly resembled the elegant colonels whose portraits adorned his favorite bottles. He was squat and round; his belly made a perilous arc over his waistband. He spoke with a Texas drawl, but his dialect was clipped, not flowing. What was left of his hair was nondescript brown. His nose resembled a fiery toadstool, bloated and veined. He seemed incapable of sprouting either moustache or goatee; even his sideburns were perilously scant. Some said he had suffered typhoid fever as a boy and had lost all his hair and that only tufts of it had grown back.
According to his claim, he actually had been brevet colonel with the Ninth Texas, but nobody really knew why he had come West and chosen to settle in Ocotillo, which promised to be the one town least likely to benefit from his persistent efforts to reorganize the primitive county legal machinery. Law in the Mogollon district was of the Old Testament variety, and most of the leading citizens preferred it that way. McAffee and Shoumacher, in his way, seemed almost the only critics of Ocotillo’s feudal system of laws, whereby almost unlimited authority was vested in the High Sheriff, whose office combined the functions of peace officer, tax collector, jailer, and justice of the peace. The sheriff was empowered to arrest tax evaders and fine them on the spot. And since this forthright system worked well enough, nobody saw much sense to McAffee’s stuffy protests of irregularity and Shoumacher’s catcalls.
McAffee had disclosed nothing of his past, other than his place of birth and his claim to a colonelcy. Naturally his occluded history had become subject to rumor and speculation, and the less he disclosed of it, the more enormous became the rumors, in light of the curious fact that his past was practically the only topic known to man on which McAffee did not have a prepared oration ready for instant delivery.
He did not seem to object to the circulation of the monstrous rumors that surrounded him. He seemed to enjoy playing the man of mystery and was not beneath contributing sly hints. Once Dinwiddie had speculated that McAffee was really William Clark Quantrill, the notorious guerrilla border raider, hiding out in disguise. Although McAffee’s physique alone was enough to scotch that theory, Clay had several times heard him in his cups mumble vague references to “Bloody Bill” and “Jesse and Frank” and other noted members of Quantrill’s raiders.
The theory given most currency was that McAffee had been driven away from his ancestral manor in East Texas because of his weakness for whiskey—that he was, pure and simple, a remittance man. What lent credence to this assumption was that McAffee had no real visible means of support. His legal practice was woefully small. His architectural genius had gone unpaid—some said he had donated his courthouse design to the county because if the county had been forced to pay, it might have found an architect elsewhere.
Whatever his past, McAffee was a man of grim, if alcoholic, purpose. He came (he insisted) from a land of deep-rooted traditions and proud culture, and he intended to see that Mogollon County got the benefit of his background, even if the citizens had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the trough.
Unfortunately his hopes had gone unrealized, mainly because it was said there was no point in standing up and arguing with him face to face because all you could get out of it was a windburn.
She danced in a whirl of flaring skirts, laughing. Clay watched from just inside the door. She was stunning, red-haired; her hair gathered flame and flowed lawlessly around her shoulders. The dark green dress set off her hair and her big hazel eyes. As she twisted to and fro, it molded her buoyant figure. She looked new, fresh, like a fawn. She was dancing with Bob Rivers, and when she looked into Bob River’s face, her intimate smile was as good as a kiss. Clay fumed.
The dance ended and the caller mopped his face with a bandanna. Fiddles and guitar tuned up. Clay made his way through the crowd. He stared at her until she blushed. She said, “Why are you staring at me?”
“You know.”
The caller announced a two-step. Clay asked her to dance with him.
“I’ve promised this one to Bobby.” She smiled sweetly.
“Bobby has something else to do right now,” Clay said. “Haven’t you, Bobby?”
“Look, Rand—”
Clay set his jaw. The young clerk muttered something and plunged away into the crowd.
She snapped at him. “That wasn’t nice.”
“You don’t seem to get too far being nice,” Clay said.
Suddenly she smiled. “You’re late.”
“Am I?” He danced with her self-consciously, at a distance.
She said, “You smell of whiskey.”
“Yeah.”
She laughed at him. “I won’t break.”
He moved in closer, feeling the warmth of her legs moving close against him. The music was loud and the room hot. She was delicate, lovely, sweet-scented: he loved to watch her laugh. His stare unsettled her again. The dance ended, and he said, “Come outside.”
“What for?”
“Maybe just to prove you’re not afraid.”
It made her laugh and toss her head. She slid her arm into his. He saw Bobby Rivers by the punch bowl, making a point of ignoring them.
Spooning couples occupied the dark corners outside the schoolhouse. To get away from them, Clay walked her down toward the river. It was beginning to cool down; there was no moon. He stopped by the bank of the dry bed, under the overhang of a cottonwood, and the girl searched his face with an odd intensity. She said, “I think it’s dangerous here.”
