Moontrap - Don Berry (37 page)

***

He sat up late and, as the whisky ran out, began to
sober. He lost the sense of confusion that had blanketed him, and his
mind seemed to whet itself on the rough stone of fatigue and
purgation. He felt empty still, but his mind cleared, and out of
exhaustion he began to see things clearly, as they were, without the
masking aureole of emotion.

More than the murder was involved. more than Webb,
more than some abstract principle that might be called either justice
or vengeance. justice, he thought, was not in the game or 
someone would have to pay for the death of Mary. The only question
was—who? Andrews had paid for it, in equal coin, but it was a
gesture of vengeance that had not touched the guilty. Thurston?
Oregon City? Or himself. A way of life; could you convict a way of
life for murder? Perhaps that, eventually, was the question that lay
silently at the root.

He also became convinced that Meek was wrong.
Thurston could not arrange the hanging of a man who had done nothing.
Law was still administered by men like judge Pratt, and the temper of
the people would not move that one. But it was also clear that the
murder had been a windfall for Thurston, giving him a tangible focus
for the hatred, a lever to work against the indolence of the sheep.

One thing was strange; in thinking of Thurston he was
never able to isolate the image of the dapper, hard little man. In
Monday's mind there was always a shadowy crowd behind him, a constant
faint murmur of assent.

In the lassitude of his drained emotions, Monday did
not hate Thurston. He could never remember hating anyone, it was a
feeling that seemed to be beyond his range. Thurston acted out of
pressure, the pressure of the eternal shadowy crowd behind him. Like
a rock dislodged by an avalanche he was, at root, incapable of
controlling his own direction. Perhaps the rock, too, had illusions
of leading the thunderous slide, but in the end all power came from
the mass behind, and in time that mass would overtake and swallow the
insignificant individual, and another take his place. In the end
there were not leaders and followers, but only the relentless and
inevitable rush of the mass, carrying everything before it.

He half laughed at his own image in the darkness of
the cabin. It was just as well not to be in the way. But what did you
do when you looked up and found you were in the way? Saw the wave of
stone descending.

While Thurston could not hang him, there was no
question that, with the power of the avalanche behind him, the little
man could run Monday out of the Oregon Country. Could run them all,
and the more he thought of that the more he thought it was what
Thurston had in mind. With the murder of Andrews as his lever,
Thurston could make life in the settlement intolerable for all the
mountain men. All the ex-mountain men, Monday thought. We're nothin'
now, neither one thing nor the other.

And in the end he came back to the same realization;
there was no place to go. They were the pariahs, the ones that didn't
fit. They smelled of wolf, and in any settlement it would be the
same. Suspicion, hatred, sidelong glances in the streets. Like the
Indians. Andrews had said it, something like. It wasn't the Indian's
hatchet that was dangerous, but the simple fact that he existed.

Monday sighed, feeling the ache in his shoulders and
the small of his back intensely. He got up from the table and grabbed
the blanket Meek had left out for him. He took off his moccasins and
stacked them for a pillow. Lifting his legs stiffly, he tucked the
edges of the blanket under, one after the other, and let his head
rest on the soft leather, looking up at the ceiling. He felt numb and
without will.

He closed his eyes and played an old game with
himself. He imagined that his feet faced the other direction and the
fire was to his right, instead of the left. He tried to sense the
presence of the table on the left side, he visualized the door as
being at his head. After a moment he felt it that way, and opened his
eyes suddenly. There was a shock, as the physical reality abruptly
contradicted the image he had firmly in his mind.

There was an odd contrast between Thurston's usual
cajoling reasonableness and the blunt hostility of the evening. And
Monday wondered if it might not have been deliberate, an attempt to
make them angry. If he and Meek did refuse the hunt for Webb, so much
the better for Thurston. It would show the shadowy crowd they
approved of murder, and were thus guilty themselves. And that would
be the end. Another year for them, perhaps, but finally the rolling
avalanche would swallow them up, as in time it would swallow Thurston
himself, crushing them all beneath the mindless, thundering weight.

He rolled to one shoulder, moving his legs to untwist
the blanket. He watched the dying fire for a while, then closed his
eyes again and shifted his head into the hollow of the moccasin
pillow.

A man was nothing but crazy to run uphill against a
rock slide. But there was a chance to survive if he went along with
it. The only chance he had. Go along or go under.
 

Chapter Sixteen

1

The old man rode steadily through the night, twisting
up through the hills that ranged along the west bank of the
Willamette. As the sky behind him lightened with the coming dawn he
was emerging on the broad flat called Twality Plains. It would be
nearly a full day's ride across, and he was tired. At dawn he stopped
for a few minutes to stretch himself and sit with his back against a
tree while the horse grazed. They had a long way go.

"
Wagh!
" he
muttered. "This nigger's gettin' too old f'r this kind o'
doin's."

There had been a time, and it did not seem long ago,
when forced marches through the night were nothing to him. A bad cast
of the dice and he might sit the saddle for forty-eight hours or
more, running  from the Bloods, chasing the Crows. It didn't
matter in the long run, a few hours' sleep after, and he was fit
again. It was all different now, but he had not really learned to
pace himself. He still demanded as much as ever of the bony old
cadaver in which he lived, and was always surprised when it gave
signs of objecting.

"Hya!" he called. Obediently the horse came
over and waited while the old man mounted.

"Move," he said, nudging with his heels.

The sun was warm on his back as the morning grew, and
he let it soak into him gratefully. The horse plodded steadily along
and the old man half drowsed in the saddle. From under the brim of
the loose felt hat he watched the country go by, green-black of the
ever-present firs, the greenish gold of ripening wheat in the fields
he passed. There was a lot of settling on these plains, he thought.

Several times he passed within shouting distance of
cabins, but he did not stop. Ahead of him there was only an endless
gentle rolling of the land, soft hills all crested with a fur of
evergreens. The silence was good. The sun warmed him and warmed the
land, a golden flood that rolled gently with the hills, filling the
earth and sky with light.

"
Pretty country, right enough," he said
admiringly, looking around. A little soft, a little bit too rich, but
pretty for all of that. No country for him, but he could see how a
man might learn to love it.

Toward midday he stopped again. He gently guided his
animal into a clump of fir, far enough in that he could not be seen
from the trail. He did not expect anyone, but the middle of the day
made him a little nervous. He figured he would have a good
twenty-four hours before they took after him in earnest. He picketed
the horse and stretched himself beneath the heavy web of branches to
sleep for an hour or so. Above him there was a light breeze.
threading softly through the limbs, disturbing them just enough to
make a steady rustling that was strangely comforting. The sun came
through in tiny spots, but the canopy of fir was too dense to let
much in. He slept in the shelter of a green grotto, with the ground
beneath him soft from the packed and matted needles.

He wakened quickly when it was time. He looked around
him at the mass of brush, and he might have been anywhere. The world
ended in undergrowth a few feet from where he lay. He sat up,
blinking. He was still tired, but the nap would carry him through to
the end of the day all right. He intended to have a full night's
sleep tonight, and tomorrow morning it would all be new.

He leaned back against the tree under which he had
slept, wriggling, scratching his back comfortably, grateful for the
simple physical sensation. He sighed and sat still for a moment, his
bony wrists hanging over his knees, his head bent, letting himself
wake up fully.

He untied the fresh scalp that hung from his belt and
put it beside him on the ground. He pressed and smoothed it with his
hands, trying to flatten it out, but it had begun to stiffen as it
dried, and remained half folded. He looked down at it, the dark brown
hair that seemed both unnaturally short and the wrong color. It
wasn't like a scalp a man might be proud of, he thought. The long,
sleek black hair, the hair of a fighting man who kept it long just to
challenge you to take it. It wasn't really a scalp at all, just the
hair of a dunghead white man. It didn't mean anything; wasn't worth a
dance. And in any event, there was nobody left to dance for his
victory.

"
Wagh!
"

Absently he fingered the two long locks that hung
beneath his hat, braiding one of them and shaking it out. Twenty-four
hours, maybe more. They wouldn't find the body until morning. And
then they'd do a vast lot of running around before they finally
buckled down to do anything about it. He chuckled a little, thinking
of the confusion. When he wanted to go, he got up and went. Didn't
have to tell nobody, make a pack of damn fool arrangements.

Just go, when he got it
into his head to go. That was the way he liked it. He mounted again
and started off. He left the scalp of Andrews lying on the ground to
rot as the year turned round. It had disappointed him, and he didn't
have to do with things that disappointed him.

***

The sun was ahead of him now, as he rode into the
afternoon. The brilliance and heat made the earth itself seem
luminous and, despite the shade of his hat, he had to squint to see.
Light rose up from the ground in waves that shifted before him,
distorting the solid reality of the hills and forests into shivering
planes of distance.

By the middle of the afternoon he was within sight of
the first peaks of the Coast Range rising abruptly from the gently
rolling country of the plains. In the waves of heat that stood
between him and the mountains was an impression of flowing water, as
though he looked at the distant peaks through some soft and golden
sea.

In his mind he checked off another point with the
sensation of satisfaction. Now he had seen it, the Coast Range. As he
had seen the Bighorns and the Medicine Bow and the Wind Rivers and
the Tetons and the Blues and the Cascades. As he had seen a hundred
ranges that had no name, but were clear and sharp in his mind.

As mountains went, the peaks of the Coast Range did
not amount to much. Not really mountains at all, just bigger hills,
he thought. Still, he had set his mind to see them, and he had seen
them.

Sometimes at night, just before he went to sleep, he
liked to go over in his mind the mountains he had seen, numbering
them off, bringing them again before his eyes with the perfect
accuracy of his imagination, caressing the granite cliffs that
dropped a thousand feet, glissading over the long basalt slopes,
counting the folded layers of red and gold and a thousand colors
without name as he had seen in the canyon of the Green River. He
counted his mountain ranges as a miser counts his money, each piece
carefully examined and dropped
into the box
of memory.

He sat for a moment, guarding the first sight he had
of this new range, storing it away carefully with the others. Then he
nudged the horse into motion again and moved off slowly toward the
peaks that swam in the heat of the afternoon.

2

Monday was wakened by the sound of voices outside the
cabin. He sat up, blinking the sleep from his eyes, and kicked the
twisted blanket away from his legs. From the closed door that led to
Meek's bedroom he heard a lower murmur. Meek opened the door and
leaned out.

"
Made y'r mind up, hoss?" he said.

Monday nodded. "Ain't much choosin' t' do, when
y' get right down to 'er."

Meek looked at him for a moment. "All right,"
he said finally. "Go on out an' make the boys t' home." He
came into the main room and lifted his rifle down from the pegs over
the fireplace. "I got t' check this here gun," he said. In
a louder voice he called, "Virginia! You 'bout ready?"

Virginia's gentle voice from the bedroom said, "A
minute, Joe."

"Virginia's takin' the kids over t' Doc
Newell's."

Monday nodded. He stood up and went to the door,
opened it in the bright morning sun. There were fifteen or so men
clustered outside talking, and he could see another half-dozen
coming, among them Thurston.

The conversation stopped when he came out on the
porch, and several of the men looked at him curiously. For a moment
they were silent. Then one of them, with whom he'd talked often at
the mill, said in a jocular tone, "What the hell are you doin'
loose, Monday? I heard they was a warrant out f 'r you."