skeletons (22 page)

Light. Gray, unnatural light filtered through old glass in long rectangular windows in the four walls of the tower. Walls of brick. I opposed the north wall, into which, somewhere above, was set the clockface I had been lied to, then told the ultimate truth by, as I stood beneath it moments before. This lower chamber of the tower lofted at minimum thirty feet from floor to ceiling. Two flights of railed iron steps ascended. The lower flight along the north wall, past the windows, turning to join the second at a landing. The second ascended the east wall along the bricking to reach a square aperture leading into an upper chamber. The chamber of the clock. From another square in the floor of that chamber, which was the ceiling of this one, down the full thirty feet to the floor, a four-sided column of wooden slatting, a protective cable cage, had been built. Through openings in the side before me I could see the dangling cable. And on the floor at the foot of the column a pyramid of flat iron weights.

The clock installed in Harding Courthouse, then, was a gravity clock. It was wound up weekly. Turning a handle in the higher chamber wound the cable up, hoisting the weights inside the cable cage to the ceiling. As the weights enforced the verdict of gravity and descended, the cable turned a chain wheel which, by means of spider gears, motivated the clock to move its hands.

I went to the cable cage. A brass name plate was nailed to a slat.
“Rudyard & Rowe Clocks Troy New York
1910.” Tortuously I thought through the engineering. To slow the clock when it gained time, remove weights from the end of the cable. To speed it when it lost time, add some. To stop the clock entirely, detach the weights entirely from the cable. I squatted, squinted into the bottom of the cable cage. Yes. The pyramid of weights rested upon an iron coil. The hook of the cable was detached. The clock in Harding Courthouse had been stopped by separating cable from weights. This was a tower in which time stood still.

11:14.

I knew the when—the year, month, hour, minute—the clock had been stopped.

And now, with gut-sickening, heart-breaking, mind-concussing finality, the why.

Climbing.

The staircase trembled.

Staring out a window at the sleeping town. Did clocks tick by their beds? For how many men and women living here had time died long ago?

Fly by my face.

A friend of Frisby? Here?

Idea. Always came when you least expected them. In the process of jetting Frisby off to Africa—or was till I was rudely interrupted. What if, after Africa, instead of international travel he decided to see the U.S.A.? The West? Action, adventure. Kids in the East didn’t really know the modern West. FRISBY FLIES WEST. Eureka.

The landing.

White smears on brick. Droppings of birds.

Climbing again.

Hand on the rail.

Knuckle in my teeth.

Three steps more. Three steps and my head would be through the square aperture and above floor level of the clock chamber, the top of the tower. Then I would know what I knew. Then I would see what no man should be asked by life to look upon.

One.

Two.

Oh God, forgive me if I don’t believe in You. But I am one of Your children. I close my eyes now. Please don’t let me open them to see something which will make me a man.

Three.

There they were.

Juan Sanchez, Taurino Garcia, Jesús Alvarez, Luis Obedo.

SKELETONS.

In humid climates putrescence and decomposition of the cadaver proceed rapidly. The body bloats. The skin slips and splits. Scalp and follicles and hair slough off. There is liquefaction of fat and muscle. The internal organs extrude. Should the corpse be fixed in an upright position the rectum, for example, may prolapse, or slide, from the anus. At a certain point, dependent on the damp, the anatomical structure will no longer bear the stress of bloat. The body explodes.

The southwestern United States, however, is very arid. Annual rainfall in Harding, New Mexico, averages only 6.7 inches per year.

COMPREHEND.

This was the upper chamber. The apex of a tower too high and mighty for its base. A tower conceived to be symbolic, when erected in 1910, of the statutory law which would supplant the lynch law of the frontier. A tower which weighed upon the courthouse like a guilty conscience.

The clock was centered twelve feet above the floor upon a scaffolding of wood. From its simple works four iron rods braced by crossbeams extended to the four faces telling time outside the tower. North, south, east, west. As the weights descended, as the cable unwound from the chain wheel, the four rods turned and turned the hour and minute hands. Let them turn and they would fray, soon sever, a rope. Stop the clock, stop the turning of the rods, stay the measurement of hours and minutes, and a rope would bear its burden sixty years.

THE FOUR VILLISTAS HUNG FROM THE FOUR HAND RODS OF THE CLOCK.

Four circular windows were divided into panes. A pane was broken. Through it birds might come and go. Through it small incessant winds might dirge.

Juan Sanchez, Taurino Garcia, Jesús Alvarez, Luis Obedo.

There they hung in cobweb air. In moonlight flawed by old imperfect glass. There they had hung since 11:14 on a night in March in the year of our Lord 1916. Found innocent by a jury of their fellowmen, their fellowmen had that same day killed them. There they had hung for sixty years, suspended between sky and earth. Between justice and injustice. Words and deeds. The ideal and the actual. In sightless, speechless, timeless equipoise between GOOD and EVIL.

Guests of honor at the last necktie party in the American West.

In arid climates the disintegration of the cadaver proceeds slowly. The bodies of the Villistas had dried, shrunk. Growth of the hair had ceased, but each skull was covered with a thick brown bristle. Birds had consumed much of the flesh. Flies, too, had feasted on it, laid eggs in it, and from them teeming maggots had been born to eat their fill as well. The remainder had mummified.

It was impossible to say which of the hanging men was Obedo, which Alvarez or Garcia or Sanchez, which was the old man, blind in one eye, which the boy of sixteen. All had been small, all had been dressed alike in shapeless jackets and trousers, ragged now.

For the luck that they had hung so long in such preserved state the four could thank three circumstances. High in Harding Courthouse, hidden behind a locked door, they had been relatively undisturbed. Second, the noose had been placed around their necks over the turned-up collars of their jackets. The cloth had served as connecting tissue. Third, human bones, because of their mineral content, endure. Each rope, tightening, had lodged at the cervical spine, at the base of the skull, the occiput. Shirts had been supported by clavicles. Trousers were anchored to the pelvis.

Sixty years had taken in other ways, however, a singular toll. Parts of skeletons were scattered on the floor. Legs. Hands. Feet. Disarticulated at the knees, wrists, ankles. One peon’s body had been separated in the region of the lumbar spine. Half of him still hung. His lower half lay on the floor.

Identification of the man seated in one corner, back to the wall, was not difficult. In life he had been big. In death he was not much diminished. Under the black suit his torso seemed intact. His legs were spread before him flat. One shriveled, mottled hand lay on a leg. He had been shot, evidently, in the back. The bullet had exited through the left breast of his coat, tearing a hole surrounded by splayed fibers, indurated bloodstains.

There he sat, placed in position to contemplate forever the irony of fate. It was he, not they, who was guilty. It was he, not they, who should have hung. From his corner, too, he could keep eternal watch over his clients. Four men whose freedom he had won in fair trial. And in the winning, lost.

A futile watch it was. Contemplate he could not. For his skull had toppled in time from his shoulders. To the floor, between his legs, face down. Bare bone upon the barrel of a Colt revolver.

40176? 40178?

I wept. For Sanchez, Garcia, Alvarez, Obedo. For Buell Wood. For those who, sixty years ago, had done this. For those who had lived with it ever since, lived with it still. For mankind, which can come out of caves and build with hope and hands a house of law—then cap its triumph with atrocity. And for myself.

I stood on the topmost step, tears streaming down my cheeks, staring into that museum of mummies. In my soul, time stopped. I cried as a man cried.

For as I stood there, around something in Bertram James Butters, aged thirty-four, citizen of these United States, a rope tightened. The child in me strangled, died. And with that death, the man in me acknowledged what the child had not: the reality of EVIL.

La Mierda de Dios.

The Shit of God.

Footsteps!

I froze.

Footsteps far below me, ascending the staircase between the second and third floors to enter the tower.

Who? To do what? To kill me? What else, now that I had seen?

Forget who.

Shoot first.

Tiptoe to the floor of the clock chamber. Turned, unbuttoned my coat, drew the Airweight from its holster. Sat down, raised my knees, rested the gun in both hands on them, aimed it at the precise point at which his head would appear above floor level.

Footsteps on the iron stairs. Slow. Soft.

Secret steps.

Finger on the trigger.

He reached the landing.

Squeeze, don’t pull.

The second flight. Slow steps. Soft. Grains of sand on stone.

Three more.

Shoot first.

One.

Had to know.

Two.

Bent forward.

Who?

I I: 14

11:14

11:14

TYLER!

In gray light a gray woman on the stairs. Gray eyes open, staring into mine, but a woman walking in her sleep. I almost fell apart.

“Tyler! What in hell are you doing here?”

My hiss stopped her. And I had to stop her. I dropped my feet to the top step, leaned out and over to block the aperture.

“Tyler, why did you—”

“Jimmie?”

I thrust the gun into its holster, reached down, took her by both shoulders. “Stay where you are, Tyler. You mustn’t see.”

Now I stepped down to her, put an arm about her waist, t urned her. “Let’s go down, shall we? I don’t want you to see what’s up there. Please.”

“I don’t need to,” she said.

“Need to what?”

“I know what’s there.”

“Sure you do.”

“I do, Jimmie. I’ve been up there before.”

“Sure you have.”

She made no sense whatever, but it was no time to debate. I urged her slowly down the iron steps to the landing.

“There. Good girl.” I blew relief, put my arms around her, laid my head on her shoulder. “Tyler, why are you here? Why aren’t you in El Paso, waiting for me?”

Under the St. Laurent suit her body was as brick, as inanimate, as the wall behind us. She’d been uneasy, she said, after our phone conversation last evening. We were losing each other, losing what we’d had together, and it was her fault. And she’d been restless, tired of her hotel trap. So she rented a car and drove over, planning to persuade me in person to stay another day or two, beg me on bended knee if necessary.

“Or bended bed,” I said.

She went to the Ramada, found my door barricaded, my window open, my luggage gone. Then, instead of retreating to El Paso, she cruised the town. She hadn’t set foot in Harding for fourteen years, she was curious to see how it had changed. “Then it happened. Passing the courthouse. I can’t explain it, Jimmie, but it happened. Just the way it did when I was a girl, when Pingo Chavez showed me my grandfather’s gun that night in the patrol car—I told you, remember? I knew the second I saw it— I’d seen that gun before. And tonight I knew I’d been in this courthouse before, in the tower. You can’t imagine the sensation—something so long ago, something buried so deep in me. I thought of my mother. For a minute I was afraid I might turn out like her.”

You have, I almost said. You’ve flipped, freaked out, Tyler, and I have to whip on a white jacket and handle you as delicately as I did her tonight.

“But I parked the car and came in. I seemed to know the way. Up the stairs to the second floor, then the third, then into the tower. It was all familiar somehow. I started up the stairs to the clock chamber. I knew what I’d find there, see there, because I’d been there before—Jimmie, I have been, I have. But I didn’t know it till tonight, till I saw the courthouse again, and the tower. I’d forgotten it. Or put it away, deliberately, like a bad dream.”

“All right,” I said, playing along. “You’ve been up there before. Why?”

“I can’t remember.”

“When?”

“I can’t remember.”

“That iron door’s been locked for years and years, I’m sure of it.”

“Even so.”

“All right. But convince me.” She might shape up if she could be shown how mistaken she was. “Prove it. Tell me what’s there.”

“The Mexicans,” she said.

“My God,” I said.

“And my grandfather,” she said. “

My God,” I said.

“I told you,” she said.

“Oh my God,” I said. Then let go of her, whispered I. “Tyler ssssh. Move behind me, slowly. Just do it.”

She moved behind me.

I drew the Smith & Wesson again, raised it in both hands, aimed. This damned tower was drawing more damned traffic tonight than Grand Central Station.

Below us, the iron door was OPENING.

“Don’t shoot!”

Ahead.

“Please don’t shoot, Mr. Butters!”

I groaned. “Judge, what in hell are you—”

“I was in my chambers, working late.”

He sidled from behind the door. “I turned out my light, and stood at he window when I saw you cross the street and enter the, courthouse. I heard you pass my door and take the stairs to the third floor and unlock this door. I couldn’t prevent you, physically, but I would have followed had I not heard someone else on the stairs. Excuse me, the light here—is someone with you?”

I stepped aside.