The Big Gundown (2 page)

T
HE WAY THEY FOUND
N
AT
P
ICKETT
was they'd been hunting for geese.

Toussaint had invited Jake to go hunting with him.

“Karen wants me to hunt her a goose for Thanksgiving,” he said. “And since she's inviting you to dinner, I figure you might want to help me shoot one.”

“It's the first I heard about it, being invited to dinner,” Jake said.

“Well, she told me to ask you. I figure two of us will stand a better chance of shooting a goose than if just one of us was to go.”

“Goose, huh?”

“Said it's traditional in her family. She's German, you know how they are. She wants to give the boy a nice traditional dinner, I guess me and you too. She's over to Otis's store right now buying the rest of the works, candied yams and that sort of thing. Says all she needs now is a nice fat goose.”

“I don't have a goose gun to shoot with,” Jake said.

“Hell, I got a pair of shotguns.”

“What time?”

“Need to be there when it gets light—the place where
the geese are. Meet me out to our place. We'll follow up along the creek to a little lake where I think we might catch a few of those suckers napping.”

“About dinner…” Jake said.

“What about it?”

“You think Karen would mind if I brought a friend or three?”

The breed's eyebrows arched.

“Clara and her two girls,” Jake said.

“Sure, bring 'em along. Little Stephen will be glad to have playmates.”

“Okay then, tomorrow, your place, before daylight.”

“A good hour or so before so we can make that little lake, be sitting there with our guns ready. They see us riding in, they'll fly off. We have to be there waiting for 'em.”

“That's how you hunt them, huh?”

Toussaint shrugged, said, “Hell, I guess, I never did hunt any; it's just what I heard from some others who have hunted 'em.”

“And if we don't get lucky?”

Toussaint looked toward the mercantile where his wife and stepson went.

“Hell, then I guess we'll feast on candied yams.”

 

The next morning Jake rode through the black cold, the sky poked full of stars. That hour not even coyotes howled. Everything was asleep except for men wanting to go goose hunting.

He was still thinking about the supper he'd had the night before at Clara Fallon's house. Clara and her girls sitting around the table with him, talking amicably. He liked them all a lot, and being there with them like that caused him to feel halfway normal again. It didn't take very much imagination to think of them all as family.
Later, after Clara put the girls to bed, they sat and talked awhile longer. Then when he got up to put his coat on she stopped him, said, “Jake,” and he knew what she wanted and she must have known what he wanted too.

“It's terribly cold tonight,” she said. The wind had been bothering the windows all evening. They could hear it keening outside. It had a lonesome sound to it, like a train whistle or the howl of a lost wolf.

“You want me to stay, Clara?” he said.

She didn't say anything but instead took him by the hand and led him to the back bedroom and set the lit lamp there by the bed and he watched her start to unbutton her dress.

“I don't want you to think this is something I'd do with just anybody,” she said. He liked how the light fell soft on her face, leaving some of it in shadows. He came and took her hands away and undid the buttons himself, slowly, allowing time for her to change her mind if she wanted.

“I don't think this is something you'd do with just anyone, Clara.”

Her hands now free of the undressing stroked the sides of his face then brought it down closer to her own and their lips touched softly, as though they were old friends who'd not seen each other in a very long time. Their kiss was tentative at first, then they kissed again, their need more needy, and each time thereafter more still, even as his hands worked at the buttons, even as hers fell to raising his shirt over his head. As clothes dropped away, they found themselves in the most passionate of embraces. The lamplight flickered against the flocked wallpaper, causing their shadows to loom large until he reached over and turned down the wick and the light went out of the room and all that was left was just their
breathing, their whispers to each other there in the darkness, their bodies entwined and falling to the bed. But he could still see her in his mind and she could see him.

She said his name again and he said hers.

And later he lay with her in his arms, staring into the darkness and wondering if he'd done the right thing. For trouble was still a hound with a fine nose that pursued him and wouldn't easily give up. And in spite of his not wanting to, he could not help but think of the last woman he'd been intimate with, the one who had betrayed him. And her betrayal would ultimately cause men to once again come looking for him, men who would either want to kill or capture him for a murder he did not commit, but one he could not prove himself innocent of either.

“Jake?” Clara said softly after long moments of silence.

He stroked her hair, said, “Can we just savor this moment?”

He could feel her nodding against his bare shoulder.

In a little while her breathing grew heavy and he was pleased that she felt safe enough with him to fall asleep, for to sleep with another was to be completely vulnerable.

He set a clock in his own head, a habit he'd learned when he had practiced medicine. It served him just as well now that he was the town's marshal. He'd set it for four o'clock and woke nearly precisely at that time and eased himself from the bed and dressed, sorry to have to leave the warmth and comfort of such a fine woman. But even if he hadn't promised Toussaint he'd go goose hunting with him, it was probably best that he not be found there in the morning by her girls. As the town's schoolteacher, Clara had a reputation she needed to protect. He did not want her to become the grist of rumor mills.

The steady clop of the horse's hooves on the cold hardpan gave him small comfort in staving off the loneliness. The dark wind slithered through the grasses. Off to the west a sliver of crescent moon seemed almost biblical, as though he were some sort of wise man in search of the child.

Eventually he saw the light on in the homestead of Toussaint Trueblood, dawn yet an hour away.

When he knocked and Toussaint opened the door, he said, “I don't suppose you saw any geese on the way over and shot a couple of them to save me the trip of going out into that cold beyond?”

“I hope you have coffee on,” Jake said, rubbing his hands.

Toussaint pointed to the pot atop the stove, steam curling out of its spout. Jake drank as Toussaint finished getting dressed. Slipping into a mackinaw that he pointed out had shell loops sewn into the waist which already held several double-ought buck rounds, he said, “You can use this one”—taking a pair of shotguns from the corner and holding one out to Jake.

Jake looked it over, tested its weight and balance. It was a Colt side hammer, double-barrel twelve-gauge. He put the stock up to his shoulder and looked down the long blued barrels, then took it away again and held it by the middle in one hand.

“What's that one?” he asked Toussaint, who hefted the other one as he reached for his old black felt hat.

“Thomas Horsley model. My papa gave it to me, along with a railroad watch that never did keep the right time and his old razor—about everything he owned, except for a deck of playing cards had drawings of naked women on them I lost somewhere. I cut the barrels
down four inches. You know, for close-in work, case I needed it.”

They drank down the hot coffee, then went out into the yawning morning. They could see the first signs the sky was turning off to the east. They rode in silence, except for the creak of their saddle leather; it was too cold and too early to carry on a conversation. A warm bed seemed about the right place to be.

They came to where Cooper's Creek cut slightly westward, then angled north in a serpentine manner and followed it for a time, then turned off through the dead grass for another ten minutes or so. Here the land rose slightly like a calcified ocean wave, then topping it they saw below the small lake sitting like an unpolished silver platter under the graying sky. Cattails bordered its edges and shifted slightly in a light northerly wind.

Toussaint led the way down to the lake and they stopped several yards short of the water's edge, dismounted, and ground-reined their mounts. Carrying their shotguns, they eased down to where the cattails were, then worked their way in among them. Toussaint said, “This seems about as good a spot as any.”

“You're the expert,” Jake said.

“They'll come out of the north, the way I figure it,” he said, pointing. “They won't see us till they get right on top of us. They'll see that water, then they'll see the cattails but not us, not at first. Least I hope not.”

Jake looked up at the sky, which had some streaks of pink growing in it. He didn't see any geese.

“That the way you heard they come, out of the north?” he said.

“Only makes sense for 'em to go south in the winter, north in the summer, like every other creature that is restless.”

They squatted on their heels and waited, watched as the sky grew lighter, could see the bands of pastels, of pink and ochre, and as the sky became lighter still, the wind picked up and stirred the cattails even more and set them to knocking against one another and sent ripples over the previously mirrored surface of the lake.

“Flyway,” Toussaint said.

“What?”

“It's what the goose hunters call such a place—a flyway. Because there is water for 'em to set down in and rest. I reckon they been flying like this all their lives and know every speck of water between here and Mexico. I reckon they been using these flyways for a thousand years.”

“Hunting seems to turn you philosophical,” Jake said.

“Just makes me wonder how they know such things,” Toussaint said.

Then they heard it: the distant honk of geese.

“Hear that?” Toussaint said.

Jake nodded.

“Better get ready.”

“I've been ready since last night.”

“Remember, all we need are to knock down a couple of fat ones, one at least. The rest we'll let go on.”

“Any particular color you'd like?” Jake said.

Toussaint grinned.

“Nah, it don't make no difference; I think they're all colored about the same anyway.”

The honking grew louder.

“Must be a lot of them,” Toussaint whispered. Both men had their guns aimed skyward.

Then suddenly they saw them, three groups flying close together in wavering V's, their dark bodies long and the same color gray as the sky, their necks stretched out, their black wings beating the air.

“Wait…” Toussaint whispered.

“You shoot, I'll shoot,” Jake said.

The leading flock flew right over and kept going, as did the second. But the third wave of geese slowed and dropped down out of the sky, their wings rigid, catching air, their bodies thrusting forward at the last moment as the leaders splashed down into the water.

Toussaint leapt up and fired both barrels, even as the others were coming in for a landing. Jake followed suit.

There was a flurry of wings batting the air and the honks and cries of the geese set up the alarm for the others still airborne that swerved away from the water and lifted higher still into the sky. But it was too late for three of them. In an instant it seemed everything was over. They could hear now the distant distress of the last of them flying off.

“Thing is,” Jake said, looking at the three floaters, “how are we going to retrieve them?” Toussaint was already stripping out of his clothes.

“Shit, only one way I know. You coming or are you just going to stand there and watch me drown?”

 

Later, riding back, the game tied to their saddle horns, Toussaint was saying, “That water shrunk my nuts to peas it was so damn cold.”

They were following the curve of the creek again and it was full light now and they felt weary from the hunt and the cold swim and having gotten up early. They were thinking ahead to a warm dinner and sitting around with their stomachs full, to some hot coffee and pie.

Suddenly Jake drew his reins.

“What is it?” Toussaint said.

“You see that?” Jake was pointing at something in the water.

“Where?”

“There.”

Then Toussaint saw it: the bobbing boots, the legs going into them. He saw them, then they disappeared under the water and he kept looking and they resurfaced again.

“Somebody's drowned,” Toussaint said, “in that cold mean creek.”

Jake dismounted and went and stood at the edge of the bank, looking down. Toussaint walked his mule over close, said, “What you thinking of doing?”

“We need to get him out.”

“Yeah, that's what I thought you were thinking.”

It was then that somebody finally helped Nat Pickett. But he never felt the helping hands, nor saw the faces of the men so kind, nor heard their voices as they stood over him and discoursed as to how it was most assuredly murder, with the now cut rope still trailing from his neck.

“Weighted him down with something, that's for sure. I couldn't lift it out of the mud,” Toussaint said, shivering as he dressed again.

“You know this fellow?” Jake asked. “Ever seen him before?”

“No.”

“Neither have I.”

“Well, it's not like this territory is filled up with Negroes,” Toussaint said, pulling on boots that didn't seem to want to go on easy over wet socks. “I suspect once you get him into town, somebody will know who he is.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “Somebody sure should. Will you ride on back to your place and bring a wagon? I'll wait here with him.”