The Big Gundown (4 page)

A big match in Denver drew his attention. Put on by a rich man who they said didn't have nothing better to do than entertain himself, a man who featured himself as fine a pistoleer as could be found on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. An Englishman named Tidwell.

Willy took the train from El Paso to Denver, leaving behind a woman named Lucy who had kept him in fine shirts and fresh cigars by doing what she was best at: selling herself to men—though Willy was special and got it free as long as he professed his love for her, which he did clear up until the day he boarded the northbound without so much as leaving Lucy a note of farewell.

 

In the audience that day was one Quincy Adams Shaw, bereaved father of Tecumseh Shaw, murdered, he was convinced, by a man named Tristan Shade who had fled the scene. The bereaved man had previously hired a private detective—one Prince Puckett—to locate and bring about justice, or revenge, whichever came first. But said Puckett had disappeared off the face of the earth—dead himself, figured the elder Shaw, probably by the same hand that had killed his son.

And so Mr. Quincy Adams Shaw was drawn to the highly touted shooting match in hopes of finding a new
man
most handy with firearms to see the job the missing Puckett had begun completed.

Willy Silk didn't give a shit about what other men might want of him.

Life had boiled down to one thing—money, what it could buy.

He'd become hard as the old trees behind the cornfields he once hoed weeds out of with his uncle Reese. Just as hard and black inside.

The match begun in a light rain.

It soon enough got down to just Willy and the Englishman, who used a set of custom silver pistols with staghorn grips. Son of a bitch could fire with either hand
and nearly equally as well. Willy sweated under his stained Stetson, thinking it might be just one more match he'd lose in a long series of losing lately.

The Englishman shot forty-nine in a row. But a raindrop fell into his shooting eye just as he fired at and missed number fifty. Smiled like the cat that ate the canary, knowing hardly any man but himself could hit them all in a light rain turning harder by the minute.

Willy shot them down like ducks he wanted to eat for supper, forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine—reloading in between—then took his sweet time, knowing the worst he could do was tie the Englishman, the rain like a curtain of silver threads between himself and the target.

Quincy Adams Shaw looked on with rapt interest, knowing he would offer the winner whatever money it would take to find one man and shoot him like a glass ball.

The Englishman stood aside, watching, too, his soft gray bowler speckled dark from raindrops, looking confident. Thinking:
You bloody Americans…

Willy thumbed back the hammer on his nickel-plated Mervin & Hulbert .44-.40.
It feels good, Uncle Reese
, he thought bitterly.

The sounds of the shot and that of the glass ball breaking were as one.

Shards of glass sprinkled the wet air like a handful of tossed diamonds. The crowd let out a collective breath, then applause.

“Most extraordinary,” was all the Englishman said. “We shall have to do it again sometime.”

Willy holstered the piece, its barrel hot to the touch, held out his hand for the prize money, then pocketed it
and went off to the nearest saloon, where Quincy Adams Shaw found him.

“Can I buy you a whiskey?”

Willy said, without looking up, “Sure, why the hell not.”

B
OB
P
ARKER WAS LARGE
and thick as a slab of beef. But the thing you noticed most about him was his eyebrows. They looked like a set of thorn bushes riding the ridge of his brow; thick and wiry, untrimmed.

“Marshal,” he said by way of greeting before Jake could even bring his horse to a complete stop. “What brings you this way on such a brittle day?” His gaze went from Jake to scouring the threatening sky.

“Gone snow,” he said. “I can feel it in my feet.”

“One of your hands, a young colored man named Nat Pickett,” Jake said. “Found him dead earlier.”

He saw the scowl creep over that big pan face, the eyebrows bunch.

“Dead? Dead of what?”

“Murdered,” Jake said.

Bob looked off, up the trace to where the men were digging a new well. One of the old ones had gone dry. There were four on the spread. Wind brushed the grass down flat, then let it up again and brushed it down flat again.

“Murdered you say? You know this for a fact?”

“Found him at the bottom of Cooper's Creek, bound and trussed like some poor animal. He had a rope around his neck, weighted down, but by what exactly I couldn't say. Was hard enough to get him cut free. He was beaten pretty bad, too.”

Bob took a deep draw of the cold air and exhaled slowly.

“I'm a son of a bitch,” he said. “Don't know why anybody would want to kill that boy. He was a good hand, knew horses, knew cows, too.”

“What can you tell me about him?”

“You mean like where is he from?”

“That too.”

“Down south from somewhere—like most, all over. Think I heard him mention Oklahoma once.”

“He have any family you know of, somebody I could write to and tell them he's dead?”

The rancher shrugged his broad slopping shoulders.

“Don't get into the hired help's business too much. They come and they go—like the wind, most of 'em. Maybe you should ask one of them yonder digging that well.”

“I did but that didn't get me anywhere.”

“Yeah, they're a tight-lipped bunch. Some of 'em is souther'n boys; always knew them souther'n boys to be tight-lipped. You ask Tig?”

“Which one is he?”

The rancher pointed toward them and said, “That curly-headed boy. I think him and Nat was close, but I couldn't say for sure. I seen 'em riding off toward town together sometimes.”

“I'd like to take Pickett's personal things, see if I can't locate a relative and send them on,” Jake said.

“Sure, I can understand that,” Bob said and stepped
off the porch and walked toward the long low building that was the bunkhouse and showed Jake which bunk was the colored boy's. Underneath there lay a soogins rolled up and tied and Jake pulled it out and set it on the bunk and untied it and rolled it open.

A blue shirt. Razor, razor strap, pair of dungarees hardly worn, almost new, two pairs of socks, one that needed darning, a copper-framed tintype of a group of colored folks looked like they were standing in front of a church. One bone-handled knife in a sheath.
He could have used that,
Jake thought. A bird's-eye-handled Colt revolver.
He could have used that, too
. No wallet. Jake made a mental note to ask the undertaker if he'd found any possessions in the clothing the boy was wearing.

“That's it…” Bob said. “Not much to show, but then none of them boys would have, always drifting from job to job like they are wont to do.”

Jake rolled everything back up again, tied the end strings together and carried it out again and settled it across the pommel of his saddle.

“What'd you do with him?” Bob asked. “Nat's body?”

“Tall John is probably burying him as we speak—there in the cemetery just outside of town.”

“Wait a minute,” the rancher said and went into the house and came out again a few minutes later and handed Jake a twenty-dollar double eagle. “If it comes to more than that, let me know. He wasn't due his pay till end of month, but considering the circumstance…”

Jake pocketed the coin. Wind ruffled the horse's mane. The sky sat about as low as a man standing now and there was a strange sound to the wind.

“I'm sorry to hear of such a tragedy on a day meant to give Thanks,” Bob said. “You're welcome to stay to dinner.”

“Got a long ride back,” Jake said. “Best I get going.”

Bob offered Jake his hand and Jake shook it, then forked his horse and turned it back toward town. He judged it to be about midday.

 

He dropped off Nat Pickett's personal effects at the jail, then rode over to the livery.

Sam Toe was clearly drunk, almost too much so to stand.

“Here's to turkey and all the trimmings,” Sam said in a salubrious salute, holding the nearly empty second bottle he'd worked on that day. “Happy Thanksgiving, Marshal.”

Jake traded him out the horse for a wagon with a team and together they got the team hitched to it, Sam mumbling the same name over again like a curse: “Rowdy Jeff. Rowdy Jeff…” Jake didn't know what he was talking about, but didn't much care either.

He picked up Clara and the girls. Clara had baked a gooseberry pie to take along.

“You look worried about something,” she said when they'd gone a few miles in silence.

Jake didn't want to tell her about the drowned boy, especially not in front of the girls.

“The weather,” he lied. “Might come a hard snow the way everybody's talking. If it does, we might be stuck out there at Toussaint's overnight.”

Clara nudged a little closer to Jake on the wagon seat and said, “That's wouldn't be so bad, would it?”

He looked over at her, saw that sweet smile she had a way of giving, and he said, “No, I reckon it wouldn't.”

“You sure that's all that's bothering you?”

He looked back over his shoulders at the girls, who
were busy playing some sort of game with each other, chattering like squirrels.

“Nothing I can talk about in front of them,” he said.

“I understand.”

The road had hardened with the cold and old ruts frozen over made for a bumpy ride. A mile or so out, they saw some pronghorns off in the distance looking at them in between grazing on the last of the grasses.

Clara said, “Thank you for inviting us to go along, Jake,” and placed a gloved hand over his holding the reins. It was a gesture that endeared him to her. It did not escape him that the feeling he had toward them all was one of
family
. To a stranger they would simply seem like a man and his wife and children traveling the road from one place to another. He liked the idea.

 

Toussaint came to the door and motioned them all inside. Little Stephen's eyes brightened at the sight of the girls and Clara and Karen kissed cheeks, then everyone removed their coats, Toussaint taking them to the mud room to hang them on brass hooks. The place smelled of warm food and a fire crackled in the fireplace.

The children went off to Stephen's room and Clara pitched in to give Karen a hand with the meal. Jake motioned Toussaint to step out onto the porch and they did without bothering to put on their coats.

“You say anything to Karen about what we found?”

“No, not yet I didn't. Figured this wasn't the day for it. When I came back for the wagon, I just told her it was something you needed me to help you with. You say anything to Clara?”

“No, and I don't want to either.”

“They don't need to know such things,” Toussaint
said. “Troubling things like that. You find out anything out to Bob's?”

“Nothing much, last name is about all. Pickett,” Jake said. “That was his name, Nat Pickett.”

It began to snow.

“Pickett, huh.”

“Yeah.”

Jake saw Toussaint looking off toward the lone gravestone where his son lay buried.
The Negro boy would have been about the same age
, Jake reasoned.
Maybe a little older, but close enough to dredge up memories.

“Bob say anything, about what sort of person he was, that colored boy?”

“Said he was a good hand.”

“Nothing bad about him, that he was the sort to get into trouble, maybe did something to bring on a fight and that's why they killed him like they did?”

“No, he didn't say anything along those lines.”

Toussaint nodded, still looking at the gravestone.

“You know of any sort of trouble a man could get himself into to have someone beat him like that and do him the way they did?” Jake said.

“No.”

“Me either.”

Karen came to the door and said, “Supper's on.”

“We'll be in in a second,” Toussaint said.

She looked at him for a long moment, then closed the door.

Stems of grass rushed along before the stiff wind, mixed with the snow, and oddly enough there was a split in the clouds way out to the west and a shaft of golden light sliced down through and touched the ground and it seemed to Jake a man could go and stand in that light and be somehow blessed and free of anything bad happening
to him. But just as quick the clouds drew closed again, cutting off the light and the whole sky became dreary once more, except for the soft swirling flakes of snow.

“You think you can find them who did it?” Toussaint asked, turning his gaze away from the headstone to meet Jake's.

“I don't know if I can, but I'm sure as hell going to try.”

“I was just wondering if somewhere right now that boy's people are sitting down to a table full of hot food, feeling happy and content they have each other to sit down with, and wondering, maybe, ‘Where is he and what's he doing?' You think that's possible?”

“Sure, more than possible.”

“Better then they don't know. At least not today.”

Jake clapped Toussaint on the shoulder and said, “Let's go eat and try not to think anymore about it for now.”

But all through that meal, the happy talk and the laughter, the stories Karen told on Toussaint, and the giggles of the children, the sweet way Clara smiled at him, Jake could not completely forget about Nat Pickett.

And snow, small and hard beads of it, pecked at the windows while the wind moaned and it was like a choir of sadness, a prairie song written for the lonely and lost among them.