Sliphammer (8 page)

“What about you?”

“I've won a few and lost a few. I've seen my fights.” Earp smiled, extracted a cigar from his inside coat pocket, and held a steady match to it while he watched the battle with the abstracted amusement of a wise parent with sense to keep hands off a fight between ten-year-old boys.

The imprisoned miner said in a small voice, “Please let go of my arm, Mister.”

Tree eased the pressure an inch. “Stay put.”

“Yeah—you bet.”

Earp smiled, squinting through his cigar smoke. Tree couldn't help smiling back.

The noise was tremendous. Boots and bodies hit the floor like felled trees. There was a lot of hard breathing and grunting; not much speech. Nearby, the Welsh miner had found his way to Reese Cooley. They were both huge men. The Welsh miner jabbed a hard-muscled blow against Cooley's big taut belly and Cooley laughed. “That your best shot, bucko?” Cooley brought his fist up almost casually. It came all the way from hip level, thudded the miner's face with a sound like the flat of a cleaver striking a side of beef. It lifted the Welsh miner completely off his feet and spilled him over flat on his back with a crash that shook the room. The miner seemed less hurt than murderously enraged: suddenly a knife blade glittered, coming out of the top of his jackboot, lifting in his fist as he came warily to his feet.

The voice was hoarse: “I'm gonna open up your gut, Cooley.”

Cooley had lost his grin. “Think about it, bucko. Next time I'll drop you
in
the ground.” He backed up, both hands raised on guard, until his back ribs hit the edge of the bar. The miner followed him, knife weaving in front of him, ignoring the combatants who wheeled past locked in struggle. Cooley spoke; from this distance Tree couldn't hear the words. Behind the bar, Josie Earp matter-of-factly lifted a full, corked bottle of whisky and placed it in Cooley's fist. Tree heard Wyatt Earp laugh deep in his big chest.

Cooley ranged forward from the bar to get swinging room. The Welsh miner's knife sizzled back and forth, keeping Cooley at bay. Once, the knife clinked against the bottle.

The odds were all in the miner's favor. Tree glanced at Earp, who shook his head mutely, watching for the first time with concern. Warren Earp was across the room somewhere, his voice rising and falling with lusty anger, full of hot juices. Wayde Cardiff had Floyd Sparrow up in the air, lifted above his head; Cardiff made a rush for the door, a man held it open, and Cardiff threw Sparrow outside as if he were a sack of feed. Men were mixing it up in pairs and quartets but there was an open circle around Cooley and the Welsh miner, who went around each other with loud-breathing care, seeking openings. The bottle was a wicked weapon but it was full, heavy, and slow with inertia; the knife was swift and darting. Cooley, fast on his feet, had to suck in his belly more than once to avoid wide sweeps of the glittering blade.

Then the blade made one more arc and Cooley had his opening. The knife went past, breathlessly close to his ribs. Cooley plunged forward and cracked the bottle down.

It smacked the Welsh miner square on the head; it broke with the sound of shattering glass. A dozen bladed fragments and a quart of whisky poured down the miner's face. Blinded, the miner roared with panic. Cooley still had the jagged, broken end of the bottle; he shoved it in the miner's face and twisted with a screwing motion. The miner's scream was cut off abruptly. When he went down he had no face.

Tree had seen a great many brutalities but this one made him turn his face away. When he looked at Earp he saw Earp's Adam's apple go up and down; otherwise Earp maintained his strict composure.

At the bar, Josie whooped, perhaps in approval. Reese Cooley dropped the jagged, bloody neck of the bottle and rubbed the small streak of blood on his cheek where the Welsh miner's knife had nicked him. The miner was down flat, no longer moving or groaning. Cooley kicked him in the head and stepped across him, looking for someone else to fight. His blood was up; his appetite was whetted; he was beyond control. His bald head bobbed through the center of a tangle of men and Tree saw three of them come flying out of the knot. Cooley tramped on through the melee and came in sight with his lips peeled back in an involuntary spasm, a grotesque mockery of a grin; he glanced Tree's way, and his attention froze on Tree, and he roared and rushed forward, his bare bloody fists lifting. There was no mistaking his intent. His. motive was unclear—maybe he had recalled, in some dim animal corner of his mind, that Tree had killed his man Jestro. It didn't matter; Cooley had the taste of blood on his tongue and needed no ordinary excuse.

Wyatt Earp grunted to Tree, “Use your guns if you have to,” and stepped away from the corner—certainly not in fear, but perhaps out of obeisance to some obscure code of conventions. There was no question but that if Cooley had chosen out Earp, Earp would not have turned away. Tree only had time for that thought before Cooley stopped, planted his feet, and said between deep heaving breaths, “Turn loose of that bastard and come out here, you son of a bitch.”

The imprisoned miner made a strangling sound. Cooley reached forward to grab the miner. If Tree held on, the miner's arm would break—of course Cooley knew that, but didn't care.

Tree let go of the miner, who scuttled away, rubbing his numb arm, until he ran unsuspectingly into Warren Earp's fist, which knocked him down. The miner looked around in a daze and thought better of getting up.

With the space between them cleared, Cooley laughed. It was a curious, taut laugh—the sound of a man precariously close to the edge of sanity, or perhaps already past it. “Jestro,” Cooley said, his mind grappling slowly with primitive simplicities. “Jestro.” He waded in like a bear, upper body twisting from side to side with his hip-rolling gait. He probably had eighty pounds on Tree.

There was something in the rules that said you couldn't use a gun on an unarmed man. Tree had already forgotten Wyatt Earp's words. It did not occur to him to draw a gun. Nor did it occur to him to square off with his fists and box the man. Fair fights were for dilettantes; Cooley was a killer.

When Cooley was within range, Tree dropped to a crouch, planted one boot flat against the wall behind him, and launched himself at Cooley's knees. It took Cooley by surprise. Cooley went down, over Tree's back. Tree wheeled, up on one knee, lifting Cooley's right foot in both fists. He bent the leg double and twisted the foot almost parallel to Cooley's buttocks. Belly flat, Cooley was pinned and couldn't move.

Tree said, “Now we'll just sit like this until you cool off and start using your head again. Hear me?”

Cooley's only response was to snarl and beat the floor with his fist. Tree glanced up and saw Wyatt Earp frowning at him. Earp seemed about to say something, but held his tongue.

The brawl in the rest of the room was beginning to calm down; most of the miners had been ejected. The sheriff appeared in the door and banged a gunbutt loudly against the door for attention. One last miner was hurled bodily past McKesson to the street; then silence. Pinned by Tree's ankle-twisting hold, Reese Cooley gradually went limp and quit struggling. McKesson turned with a dark scowl to a grinning Wayde Cardiff and snapped, “I wish half of you'd killed the other half so I could have arrested whoever was left. Is that man dead?”

Eyes went to the bloody, faceless miner on the floor. Someone approached him gingerly and spoke in a broken voice: “He's still breathing but God knows how.” There was the sound of retching.

The crowd milled forward to make a circle around the maimed miner. McKesson's voice rode over the growl of the crowd: “Who did this?”

Someone said, “Reese Cooley done it, Ollie, but this son of a bitch had a knife and Cooley didn't.”

“How in hell did he make such a godawful mess of this man's face?”

“Busted bottle.”

Cardiff's voice came through the crowd—Tree couldn't see him. “Cooley done it in self-defense.”

“Nobody could do
this
in self-defense,” McKesson said, voice throbbing. “Where's Cooley?”

Someone must have pointed without speaking; momentarily McKesson appeared on the near edge of the crowd. His eyes fell on Tree, then descended to Cooley on the floor. Tree was still gripping the twisted boot but Cooley was lying quite peaceably, getting his breath, eyes closed with an expression of rank disgust.

Tree said mildly, “Say something, Cooley, and I'll let you up.”

Cooley said testily, “All right, all right. What you want me to say? Uncle? Hell, you got lucky once, that's all. Forget it. I'll try you on some other time.”

“Why bother?” Tree said wearily, but he let go of the twisted boot and got to his feet.

Cooley sat up and massaged his ankle, not ready yet to stand and test his weight. He looked up at McKesson and said, “I heard you, Ollie.”

McKesson said, “That was a terrible thing you did to that man's face.”

“Turrble thang shit. He was all set to carve me in strips. Sumbitch had a knife a foot long.”

Wayde Cardiff said, in a warning voice, “Leave him be, Ollie.”

McKesson shook his head. “Have you taken a good look at the man's face? Or rather, what's where his face used to be.”

With abject disgust Cooley said, “Shee-yit,” and got carefully to his feet. When he put his weight on the twisted ankle he tested it with great caution and then slowly limped over to the bar, ignoring the group that carried the maimed miner out right past him. At the bar Cooley pounded with his fist and demanded whisky in a baleful, husky voice.

McKesson said to Wayde Cardiff, “I go a good part of the way with you fellows most of the time and you know it, or you'd hire another sheriff. But if I arrest those poor beat-up miners out in the street and Cooley goes scot free, it'll be too much for the town to take. Too much for me to take, which is more to the point. Now how's it to be, Wayde?”

Cardiff waved a hand at him. “Don't arrest anybody, then. That ought to suit them. I reckon they learned their lesson anyway.”

“I doubt it,” McKesson growled, and stalked out of the place, hatless, his white hair a moving beacon.

The crowd began to mill and stir, voices rolling with charged emotions; the fight was done and now the participants and spectators had to post-mortem it into the ground. A few men slipped out of the salopn to carry the tale through town. Everybody began to settle down. Patrons walked around to set tables and chairs right side up and sit down. A kid swamper came in with bucket and mop and began to sop up the spilled whisky and beer, much of which had already soaked into the carpet. Front win dows were thrown open to help ventilate the place. One of the bartenders stood behind the bar stooping, leaning on his elbows, face in his hands, his head shaking slowly back and forth with aggrieved helpless ness. To Tree it seemed a miracle that none of the mirrors, and very little furniture, had been broken.

Tree picked up a chair and set it by the big table,. Josie Earp came over. She smiled at him and he held the chair for her. She said, “Now, then, where were we?” Her grin was childishly innocent. It struck him, then, that Josie had been fundamentally untouched by the experience, by a whole lifetime of experiences. Suddenly she frightened him. He went and got another chair. By the time he brought it back to the table, Wyatt Earp had sat down and was snapping his fingers at a bartender for service.

When Tree sat down, Earp said to him, “You made a mistake.”

“Did I?”

“You had Cooley down—you could have kicked his face in. That was a mistake. It would serve you right if he killed you.”

‘Sure,” said Tree. He was in a sour mood; it hadn't been a cheery day.

Earp said, “If you let that kind of man walk on you, then he'll walk on you. You'll save yourself a good deal of grief—maybe save your hide, if you choose him out right now, stop him cold. Stomp him till he's hurt too bad to want to go around with you again. Otherwise he won't ever quit—you'll have five or six fights with him and sooner or later he'll get the advantage. When he does—well, you saw what happened over there.”

Tree was watching him speculatively. Earp said, very soft, “Do it now.”

“I thought he was a friend of yours.”

Wyatt Earp made no answer. There were, Tree thought, two possibilities. One: Earp respected him and was only giving his honest opinion. Two: if Cooley killed an Arizona deputy sheriff it could prove awkward for Earp, might shift the uneasy political balance, might alienate Governor Pitkin enough to make him sign the extradition papers. Or maybe it was both.

Earp said, “Do it.”

“I guess not,” Tree intoned, and got up from his chair.

“Your funeral, then,” said Wyatt Earp.

It was the second time today someone had^said that to him. He nodded his head with noncommittal gravity and turned to go.

Six

Josie watched the deputy, Tree, thread his way out of the saloon. He had a wide, flat back. The shoulder blades made muscular ridges in his shirt. He had long arms and legs and under the clothes, she was sure, he would be a hairy beast. Wyatt had a lot of hair on his body—fine brown fur. She liked hairy men.

When Tree paused at the corner door to look back, she saw again the good-natured humor that had not wholly gone out of his silver eyes even when he was fighting. He was a big, craggy man with Indian-black hair and ugly powerful hands. He had more substance than all the other men in the place together, Wyatt excluded. She thought, if she had never met Wyatt she could have been real interested in Jeremiah Sliphammer Tree.

As Tree went out the door she was wondering if a left-handed man made love any differently. She couldn't remember ever sleeping with a lef-handed man.

The barkeep brought two drinks to the table. Warren came to the table, sucking skinned knuckles, and said to the harried bartender, “Bring me one of those and hurry it up—I haven't had a drink in at least six minutes.” His grin took the arrogant sting out of the words and the bartender smiled and nodded.