Cord 1, page 11
Cord turned, moving slowly and calmly, and the young cowboy threw up both hands, empty and palms out, as if to push away whatever was coming next.
Cord hit him once, very hard, just where his upper lip met his nose. There was a snapping crunch of shattering bone and cartilage coming loose from its moorings, then a quick wash of blood covered the man’s face. He slammed backwards into the piano, and there was a crash of tinny notes. Pell looked down from his perch and flicked cigar ash on the cowboy. No one moved to help him.
Cord rested both elbows on the bar and leaned back against it, facing the room, trying to focus on it. Things had all at once gone dizzy on him. The harsh light reflecting off the polished tables and the blank faces of the men staring at him was shattering apart as if in a series of mirrors, and the whiskey was burning up inside him. Cord fought to keep it down.
He pushed away from the bar, took one step forward, and fell to his knees, teetered there a moment, and then the room began turning and he went backwards and was staring up into the brilliant detracted chandelier gas-light.
“Look what that son of a bitch done to Red,” someone said from above him, and then there was the sound of scuffling and a boot smashed into his ribs, just under his armpit.
“Hold him,” someone shouted, and a boot grazed Cord’s temple. Three or four men crashed to the floor, half on top of Cord, struggling over a weapon. Cord rolled away and got himself propped against the bar.
A gun went off, sounding like a great metallic hammering in the crowded room, and somewhere wood splintered. Everyone stopped, frozen, and for a moment the silence was entire.
Dallas stood framed in the bat-wing doorway, and beside him stood Chi, but both had their weapons holstered. So it wasn’t them, Cord realized. He bobbed his head to the right, saw Pell staring at him with a manic grin, his oversized Navy Colt still dribbling a wisp of black-powder smoke.
Pell glanced at the bartender, who nodded, then said, “Drinks, boys, are on the house.” Cord got himself to his feet and rested both elbows on the bar. There was a dull fire cutting along his left side. Very slowly, with voices no higher than a murmur, men started moving toward the bar, careful to give room to Cord.
One man started to stoop to the fallen Red, but Pell cracked the barrel of his pistol against the piano, and shook his head no when the man looked up. The man moved away, leaving the young redheaded cowboy in his sprawl against the piano.
Cord stared across the room at Dallas and Chi, watching as Dallas took a step toward him. Chi took his elbow and stopped him. Cord let them stand like that for a moment, then pushed away from the bar toward them, weaving among the tables, looking at no one.
“I’ll take him to the hotel,” Dallas said.
“Don’t worry,” Cord said thickly, and then he took another step and his knees gave way. Dallas caught him under the arms and Cord’s head banged against the marshal’s chest. Cord reared back and tried to clear his eyes.
“You always going to be this way?” Chi said.
Cord saw three of her.
“All your life?” Chi pressed.
“Yeah,” Cord said. “That’s right. All my life.”
Almost none of the rest of it stayed with him, when he came to think about it in the daylight of morning. Hands under his arms steadied him and someone walked him down the boardwalk and into the hotel and halfway carried him up the stairs and down the hall. There was trouble with the key in the door, and then whoever it was pushed him and he fell and bounced limply on the bed. The door shut, and the room was dark except for the streak of light from under the door, and the noise from the street came at him from a great obscure distance.
Then, some later, he heard someone work a key again. The door to the room opened, and he came awake just enough to remark shadow slipping through it. Darkness took the room again, and Cord slipped back toward his sleep, unable to draw himself into more than some oblique side-angle of awareness that he was no longer alone in the room.
Whoever it was unbuckled his gunbelt, pulled his boots, and stripped off his shirt and pants. That was fine. Cord let himself be rolled over and felt cold hands undoing the catches on his union suit, then covers being tossed over him.
He drifted further away, and almost did not know or at least remember the cold hands working at him, then the soft weight of flesh half on his own, hair brushing electric against his skin, the sound as the woman sucked at her breath, before he fell away into sleep for true.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The freckled girl from the New Hopes Cafe came into the room carrying a pot of coffee in one hand and two cups in the other. Outside the sky was starting to lighten, but there was no glint of sun and no clear dawn, just a gradual lifting of the flat darkness. There was no sound but Cord’s heavy breathing interrupted by an occasional snort and the clink the coffeepot made when the girl sat it on the bedside table.
The girl was concentrating so hard on not looking toward the bed that she gave a start when the woman spoke.
“This is for your hope chest,” the woman said. She reached out one long white arm. The girl plucked the gold piece from her fingers, still not looking up. “You understand that you are not to tell anyone, don’t you.”
The girl nodded, staring at the floor.
“Good,” the woman said, not unkindly. “Now, I want you to go to the livery and tell Mose to give you my gelding. He’ll know you are coming. Then I want you to ride out to my father’s ranch and seek out Mrs. Martin. She’ll have a place for you and some work for you that will take a day or so. Will you remember all that?”
The girl nodded again.
“Good. You leave right now.”
She watched the girl back out of the room without ever meeting her eyes. Cord was on his back next to her, curled up and facing the wall, the blankets mostly covering his head. She reached under them and ran the fingers of one hand lightly down his back, touching at the several ridges of scar tissue that might have come from a whip or a knife. Above the wing bone of one shoulder was a small round puckered scar where a bullet had entered a long time before.
She rolled away from him, careful not to wake him, and half sat up in the bed, clutching the blankets to her breasts against the room’s chill. She poured coffee into each cup, setting the pot down gently.
Overnight the cold rain had turned to snow, not the light drifting powder of the high plains winter, but the heavy slush of a spring storm. The weight seemed to bear down on the flat roofs of the buildings across the street, and it was melting somewhat as it fell, dripping down from the canopies. It had already turned the mud of the street into an ugly brown gumbo.
She thought: usually it’s so pretty, but this time it’s made everything dirty. How right that seemed for this morning.
As she took the first sip of coffee, warming both hands around the mug, the snoring beside her gave way to a low moan. Cord stirred and rolled onto his back, then seemed to settle back into sleep, moving somewhat stiffly but otherwise whole.
Then he opened his eyes and looked at her without apparent surprise. He took the cup she offered and drank from it.
“Well,” he said. “I guess this was coming.”
“You expected me?” Elizabeth Brocius said, acting as if this surprised her, and at the same time posing in her surprise.
“You’re one of those women,” Cord said. “Can’t be stopped. Thanks for the coffee.”
“Yes,” she said, as if he had asked her something. Whatever had overtaken him the night before was gone now. His eyes were clear, but he was distracted, as if there were something on his mind, not terribly urgent but requiring thought just the same. He finished the coffee in a few gulps and held out the cup for a refill, his hand steady as she poured.
“Did you bring me in last night?” he asked.
“No.”
“Who did?”
She shrugged.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “It snowed last night,” she added, as if that were an explanation.
“Would you roll me a smoke?” he said. “The makings are in my shirt pocket.”
Elizabeth slipped out of bed. She stood naked with her back to him as she went casually through his pockets, and Cord let himself descend into admiring the smooth white contours of her backside, the narrow waist and the blossoming out again. The kind of woman he liked best, with that warmth of space between her thighs where you could fit your hand. Maybe it was just the cold floor that had her prancing a little, but she carried herself with the same undercurrent of haughtiness Cord had first seen at her father’s house two days before.
Two days. Somehow it seemed longer than that.
But soon it would come to the dead-end acting out. Which was fine with Cord.
Elizabeth struck a match and came back to him with the two cigarettes, the fullness of her breasts delicately veined in the dampness of the room, commanding his eyes as if they cast illumination over the cold snowy morning. The whole of her body was held available and yet at the same time a vast challenge to him as she hesitated, displaying it once again before slipping back into bed. Cord laid one light hand on her thigh, but made no other move toward her.
“How will this come out?” She was careful to concentrate on her smoke and not look at him.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does that scare you?”
“No.”
“How do you want it to come out?”
“I don’t know that either,” Elizabeth said. “That does scare me.”
She looked at him then. His hand moved slightly on her thigh and she stiffened, but whether in response or surprise he could not guess. She drew on her cigarette and let the smoke out slowly.
“He really is my father, you know,” she said. “I made sure before I went with him.”
“How?”
“You get to know,” she said. For a moment Cord thought she wasn’t going to say anything more, but then she began talking in a low, slightly unnatural voice, as if this were a story she had carefully rehearsed.
“My mother was a beautiful woman when he met her, a girl really, younger than I am now. She had a picture of them together, and in it she is very tall, with long hair, dark and down her back. She’s slim except for the little swelling of her belly under the dark satin dress. He’s wearing a button-up suit and a four-in-hand, and he looks uneasy and proud at the same time.
“You should understand, especially today, that he’s not an evil man. He sent money, not enough for everything and not all the time, but enough so my mother could buy a house and manage it, near the Oriental piers in San Francisco. She ran the girls, but she never went with the men herself after that.
“I did. She didn’t force me, but I did and she didn’t object. How could she? Anyway, I wanted to, and I liked it ... I still like it. At first I thought ...” She hesitated for the first time. “I used to look at that picture of them together, and think about how it could have been, and I thought that ... the going with men … that it would help me to find out. And it wasn’t bad and then I got to like it. I didn’t learn much about them, but I found out some things about myself. For a time I only did it with men I liked, and then I only did it with men who paid a lot. Either way it worked out all right.
“Then Brocius found me. The one who came was a greasy little man in a bowler hat and a tight waistcoat. I remember thinking, He’d better have lots of money. There was some kind of dark stain on the coat, and his face was badly pocked. He was a Pinkerton, and he’d been looking for me six months. He seemed angry, as if it were my fault, and said it might as well not be a complete waste of time, and went off with one of the other girls. When he came back he told me my father was looking for me, and that if I wanted to go, a man would come for me in a month. The man would have money.
“He shrugged when I asked him about my mother, said that his job was finding me. Now that he had he seemed bored with the whole business.
“I was bored myself, and curious. My mother already knew. She seemed ... well, she seemed like somebody who had sat through the story and then was let down because the ending wasn’t what she expected.
“A few weeks later another man came—one of the cowboys you’ve seen hanging around the house. We took the train to Denver, and the stage up through Cheyenne to Miles City, where the other cowboy met us and brought us here. And another thing: I slept with that cowboy, on the train. That was two years ago, and he still hates me. But I own him. I could tell my father.”
Elizabeth paused and took a deep breath and sipped at her coffee, now tepid. “Two years,” she said. She did not go on until Cord looked at her, and then she responded as if he had spoken.
“I have everything I want,” she said defensively. “It’s better than it was.”
“Fine,” Cord said.
“The ones I liked and the ones who paid a lot, none of them ever treated me so well as he does.”
She lay back against the pillow and stared at the door across the room. “Nobody knows except for those two men, and they know everything, more than he does really, and they won’t say anything. Hauk too, maybe, but he’s too afraid.” Something vulnerable had come into her voice.
“It’s the best it ever was for me. He’s not a bad man.”
Cord drained the last of his coffee and leaned across her to place the cup on the table, so his body was half on hers. The movement caused his ribs to ache.
“Why did you tell me all this?” he said, not moving away from her, settling in with their bodies touching.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m afraid of things changing, and I’m afraid of them staying the way they are, and I don’t know, really, what’s going on—you, and that strange woman with you, and the way he’s been acting, even before you got here, or those men who are coming into town—I don’t understand any of this. I want you to tell me, to help me.”
She was looking at him like a little girl on the verge of crying, her eyes already wet, and Cord wondered how practiced she was.
“What you want,” Cord said, “is for me to get you out of here, before the trouble.”
Tears did break then, and ran down her face. She nodded. “Now,” she said, “if you’ll take me we can forget about all of this, be together, the two of us.” She was pleading openly now, all the coquettishness gone. “Will you?” she said.
Cord studied the door a moment. “Nope,” he said.
She turned her head away, and even as Cord moved over her and her arms and legs encircled him and she pulled him closer, deep into her, and their bodies began to move against one another, still the tears came.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Cord took up knife and fork and made himself attack the beefsteak on the plate before him. He would have preferred staying with the black coffee and maybe another cigarette, but the food would settle him down and soak up the whiskey left in his system. He salted the meat, carved off a hunk, and chewed slowly and thoughtfully. It tasted fine, and all at once he was hugely hungry.
Elizabeth Brocius came out from the kitchen carrying a heavy iron skillet with a dishrag wrapped around its handle. She slipped two fried eggs onto his plate next to the steak, and they stared up at Cord like a wild-eyed child. He stabbed one and mopped at the runny yolk with a piece of steak. Elizabeth refilled his coffee cup and went back into the kitchen.
There was no one else in the New Hopes Cafe, and so far as Cord could tell, no one else in New Hopes anywhere. When he and Elizabeth came out from the hotel a half hour before it had been like walking into a ghost town. A single empty boot stood upright in the middle of the street, frozen in the mud. In the saloon, glasses littered the bar and tables, some with whiskey still in them. A horse in the livery stable nickered for feed, and no one responded. Cord had walked through an alleyway, coming out on the residential street, and saw wash still hanging out on a line, stiff with ice. A hound strained at a leash-rope tied to a tree and yapped plaintively at Cord. As soon as Cord untied him he slinked off without looking back.
The snow came down in wet cloths and everything lay under a cold gray blanket of freezing dampness.
Then, as Cord crossed back toward the cafe and the odor of frying steak that came from it, something made him look toward the big white house sitting at the end of the street like a malevolent watchdog. The front drapes were parted, and he knew he was being watched, and that the watcher was Brocius. Well now, Daddy, Cord thought, how do you like your little girl and her friends?
“They’re all gone, aren’t they?” Elizabeth said, breaking into his thoughts. Cord looked up from his plate and watched her slide into the chair beside him, holding a cup of hot coffee in both hands. She had not eaten.
“Not everybody, but almost,” Cord said. “They figure it’s easier to run than to fight. For them that’s probably right. It is easier.”
She brushed hair away from her face, and he thought of her touch, and how much he had liked the beginning of this day.
“If you believe that,” she said, “even a little bit, let’s go. Now. Together.”
“It’s easier,” Cord said. “But there’s more to it than easy.”
“What’s more important?” A slight shrill edge rose in her voice. “Being dead?”
“Maybe,” Cord said, but that was an old idea, and she didn’t react. He wiped up the last of the egg yolk with the last piece of steak, then set the fork and knife carefully on either side of his plate. He took out makings and rolled a smoke, crumpled it in dissatisfaction and rolled another. He struck a match and inhaled with obvious pleasure, then leaned forward and placed both elbows on the table.
“You listen,” he said. “There are reasons for what is going to happen this morning. They may not be good ones according to your lights … chances are they won’t make much sense to you … but there are reasons this must be as it is going to be.”
