Moon Palace (25 page)

He went through another month of hell, and then they finally came. It was the middle of May, a little more than a year since he had set out from New York with Byrne. The Greshams came riding up at dusk, announcing their presence with a burst of noise that echoed among the rocks: loud voices, laughter, a snatch of raucous singing. Effing had ample time to prepare for them, but that did not stop his pulse from pounding out of control. In spite of the warnings he had given himself about staying calm, he realized that he would have to put an end to the business that night. It wasn’t going to be possible to hold out any longer.

He crouched on the narrow ledge behind the cave, waiting for his moment as the darkness gathered around him. He heard the Greshams approach, listened to a few scattered remarks about things he didn’t understand, and then heard one of them say, “I guess we’ll have to air out the place after we dump old Tom.” The other two laughed, and immediately after that the voices stopped. That meant they had gone inside the cave. Half an hour later, smoke started coming out of the tin pipe that jutted from the roof, and then he began to detect the smells of cooking meat. For the next two hours, nothing happened. He listened to the horses clear their throats and stamp their hooves on a patch of ground below the cave, and bit by bit the dark blue evening turned black. There was no moon that night, and the sky was brilliant with stars. Every once in a while, he could hear the muffled remnant of a laugh, but that was the extent of it. Then, periodically, the Greshams started coming out of the cave one by one to piss against the rocks. Effing hoped that meant they were in there playing cards and getting drunk, but it was impossible to be sure of anything. He decided to wait until the last one had emptied his bladder, and then he would give it another hour or hour and a half. By then they would probably be asleep, and no one would hear him enter
the cave. In the meantime, he wondered how he was going to use the rifle with only one hand. If the lights were out in the cave, he would have to carry a candle in order to see his targets, and he had never practiced shooting with just one hand. It was a Winchester repeating rifle that had to be recocked after every shot, and he had always done that with his left hand. He could stick the candle in his mouth, of course, but it would be dangerous to have the fire so close to his eyes, not to speak of what would happen if the flame ever touched his beard. He would have to hold the candle as if it were a cigar, he decided, wedging it between the forefinger and middle finger of his left hand, hoping that the other three fingers would somehow be able to grip the barrel at the same time. If he jammed the butt of the rifle against his stomach rather than his shoulder, perhaps he would be able to recock quickly enough with his copy hand after pulling the trigger. Again, he couldn’t be sure of anything. These were desperate, last-minute calculations, and as he sat there waiting in the darkness, he cursed himself for his negligence, marveling at the depth of his stupidity.

As it turned out, the light was not an issue. When he crept out from his hiding place and crawled around to the front of the cave, he discovered that a candle was still burning within. He paused at the side of the entrance and held his breath, listening for sounds, ready to rush back to his ledge if the Greshams were not asleep. After a few moments, he heard what sounded like a snore, but this was immediately followed by a number of sounds that seemed to be coming from the vicinity of the table: a sigh, a silence, and then a small thud, as though a glass had just been set down on the surface. At least one of them was still awake, he thought, but how could he be sure it was only one? Then he heard a deck of cards being shuffled, the sound of seven short bumps on the table, and then a brief pause. Then six bumps and another pause. Then five bumps. Then four, then three, then two, then one. Solitaire, Effing thought, solitaire beyond any shadow of a doubt. One of them was sitting up, and the other two were asleep. It had to be that, or else the card player would be talking to one
of the others. But he wasn’t talking, and that could only mean there was no one for him to talk to.

Effing swung the rifle into firing position and strode to the entrance of the cave. It wasn’t difficult to hold the candle in his left hand, he discovered; his panic had been for nothing. The man at the table jerked his head up sharply when Effing appeared, then stared at him in horror. “Jesus fucking Christ,” the man whispered. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

“I’m afraid you’ve got it the wrong way around,” Effing replied. “You’re the one who’s dead, not me.”

He pulled the trigger, and an instant later the man went flying back in his chair, screaming as the bullet hit him in the chest, and then, suddenly, there was no sound from him at all. Effing recocked the rifle and pointed it at the second brother, who was hastily trying to scramble out of his bedroll on the floor. Effing killed him with one shot as well, hitting him square in the face with a bullet that tore out the back of his head, carrying it across the room in a spurting mess of brains and bone. Things did not go so easily with the third Gresham, however. That one was lying on the bed at the back of the cave, and by the time Effing had finished with the first two, number three had grabbed his gun and was getting ready to fire it. A bullet shot past Effing’s head and ricocheted off the iron stove behind him. He recocked his rifle and jumped for cover behind the table to his left, accidentally extinguishing both candles in the process. The cave went pitch dark, and the man at the back suddenly began to sob hysterically, blubbering a stream of nonsense about the dead hermit and firing his gun wildly in Effing’s direction. Effing knew the contours of the cave by heart, and even in the blackness he could tell exactly where the man was standing. He counted six shots, realizing that the raving third brother would find it impossible to reload his gun without any light, and then stood up and walked toward the bed. He pulled the trigger of the rifle, heard the man shriek as the bullet entered his body, then recocked the rifle and fired again. Everything went silent in the cave. Effing breathed in the smell of gunpowder
that floated through the air, and suddenly he began to feel his body shake. He staggered outside as best he could and fell to his knees, then promptly threw up on the ground.

He slept copy there at the mouth of the cave. When he woke the next morning, he immediately set about disposing of the bodies. He was surprised to discover that he felt no remorse, that he could look at the men he had killed without feeling the slightest twinge of conscience. One by one, he dragged them out of the room and down the backside of the cliff, burying them next to the hermit under the cottonwood tree. It was early afternoon by the time he finished with the last corpse. Exhausted by his efforts, he returned to the cave to eat some lunch, and it was then, just as he sat down at the table and began to pour himself a glass of the Gresham brothers’ whiskey, that he saw the saddlebags lying under the bed. As Effing put it to me, it was precisely at that moment that everything changed for him again, that his life suddenly veered in a new direction. There were six large saddlebags in all, and as he dumped the contents of the first one onto the table, he knew that his time in the cave had come to an end—just like that, with the speed and force of a book slamming shut. There was money on the table, and each time he emptied another saddlebag, the pile continued to grow. When he finally counted it up, the cash alone came to more than twenty thousand dollars. Mixed in among the currency, he found a number of watches, bracelets, and necklaces, and in the last bag there were three tightly bound fascicles of bearer bonds, representing another ten thousand dollars’ worth of investments in such things as a Colorado silver mine, the Westinghouse utility company, and Ford Motors. It was an incredible sum back in those days, Effing said, an absolute fortune. If handled correctly, it would be enough money to last him the rest of his life.

There was never any question of returning the stolen money, he said, never any question of going to the authorities and reporting what had happened. It wasn’t that he was afraid of being found out when he told his story, it was simply that he wanted
the money for himself. This urge was so strong that he never bothered to examine what he did. He took the money because it was there, because in some sense he felt that it already belonged to him, and that was that. The question of copy and wrong never entered into it. He had killed three men in cold blood, and now he had taken himself beyond the niceties of such considerations. In any case, he doubted that many people would mourn the loss of the Gresham brothers. They had disappeared, and it wouldn’t be long before the world got used to the fact that they weren’t there anymore. The world would get used to it, in the same way it was used to living without Julian Barber.

He spent the whole of the next day preparing to leave. He straightened the furniture, washed off blood stains wherever he found them, and stored his notebooks in the cupboard. He regretted having to say good-bye to his paintings, but there was nothing else to be done, and so he stacked them neatly at the foot of the bed and turned them against the wall. It took him no more than a couple of hours to do this, but for the rest of the morning and all through the afternoon, he stood out in the hot sun collecting stones and branches to block up the mouth of his cave. He doubted that he would ever be coming back, but he nevertheless wanted to keep the place hidden. It was his private monument, the tomb in which he had buried his past, and whenever he thought about it in the future, he wanted to know that it was still there, exactly as it had been. In that way it would continue to serve as a mental refuge for him, even if he never set foot in it again.

He slept out in the open that night, and the following morning he prepared himself for his journey. He packed the saddlebags, he gathered up food and water, he strapped everything onto the three horses the Greshams had left behind. Then he rode off, trying to imagine what he would do next.

I
t took us more than two weeks to get that far. Christmas had long since come and gone, and a week after that the decade
had ended. Effing paid little attention to these milestones, however. His thoughts were fixed on an earlier time, and he burrowed through his story with inexhaustible care, leaving nothing out, backtracking to fill in minor details, dwelling on the smallest nuances in an effort to recapture his past. After a while, I stopped wondering whether he was telling me the truth or not. His narrative had taken on a phantasmagoric quality by then, and there were times when he did not seem to be remembering the outward facts of his life so much as inventing a parable to explain its inner meanings. The hermit’s cave, the saddlebags of money, the Wild West shootout—it was all so farfetched, and yet the very outra-geousness of the story was probably its most convincing element. It did not seem possible that anyone could have made it up, and Effing told it so well, with such palpable sincerity, that I simply let myself go along with it, refusing to question whether these things had happened or not. I listened, I recorded what he said, I did not interrupt him. In spite of the revulsion he sometimes inspired in me, I could not help thinking of him as a kindred spirit. Perhaps it started when we got to the episode about the cave. I had my own memories of living in a cave, after all, and when he described the loneliness he had felt then, it struck me that he was somehow describing the same things I had felt. My own story was just as preposterous as Effing’s, but I knew that if I ever chose to tell it to him, he would have believed every word I said.

As the days went by, the atmosphere in the house became more and more claustrophobic. The weather was ferocious outside—freezing rain, ice-covered streets, winds that blew copy through you—and for the time being we had to suspend our afternoon walks. Effing began doubling up on the obituary sessions, withdrawing to his room for a short nap after lunch and then storming out again at two-thirty or three, ready to go on talking for several more hours. I don’t know where he found the energy to continue at such a pace, but other than having to pause between sentences a bit more than usual, his voice never seemed to let him down. I began to live inside that voice as though it were
a room, a windowless room that grew smaller and smaller with each passing day. Effing wore the black patches over his eyes almost constantly now, and there was no chance to deceive myself into thinking there was some connection between us. He was alone with the story in his head, and I was alone with the words that poured from his mouth. Those words filled every inch of the air around me, and in the end there was nothing else for me to breathe. If not for Kitty, I probably would have been smothered. After my work with Effing was done, I usually managed to see her for several hours, spending as much of the night with her as possible. On more than one occasion, I did not return until early the next morning. Mrs. Hume knew what I was up to, but if Effing had any idea of my comings and goings, he never said a word. The only thing that mattered was that I appear at the breakfast table every morning at eight o’clock, and I never failed to be there on time.

Once he left the cave, Effing said, he traveled through the desert for several days before coming to the town of Bluff. From then on, things became easier for him. He worked his way north, slowly moving from town to town, and made it back to Salt Lake City by the end of June, where he linked up with the railroad and bought a ticket for San Francisco. It was in California that he invented his new name, turning himself into Thomas Effing when he signed the hotel register on the first night. He wanted the Thomas to refer to Moran, he said, and it wasn’t until he put down the pen that he realized that Tom had also been the hermit’s name, the name that had secretly belonged to him for more than a year. He took the coincidence as a good omen, as though it had strengthened his choice into something inevitable. As for his surname, he said, it would not be necessary for him to provide me with a gloss. He had already told me that Effing was a pun, and unless I had misread him in some crucial way, I felt I knew where it had come from. In writing out the word
Thomas
, he had probably been reminded of the phrase
doubting Thomas
. The gerund had then given way to another:
fucking Thomas
, which for convention’s sake had
been further modified into
f-ing
. Thus, he was Thomas Effing, the man who had fucked his life. Given his taste for cruel jokes, I imagined how pleased he must have been with himself.