The Big Gundown (7 page)

W
ILLY
S
ILK THOUGHT,
If I'm gone kill a man, maybe I ought to practice. Thing is,
he wondered,
how do you practice killing a man without actually killing one?

The train pulled into Bismarck, just as the sun settled onto the prairies like a bronze plate set on end, its last light spilling out over the grasslands.

Willy departed the train behind an old gent with a bent back using a cane to steady himself.

The old timer had told him during the ride that he had once been a fur trapper.

“Back in twenty,” the old man said. “Got in near the end of it when all the beaver was about hunted out. Young buck like me didn't care. I wanted to go see the elephant, see what it was all about. Met Jim Bridger once at a rendezvous. Son of a buck could screw Indian gals like nobody I ever seen—have himself ten or twelve a night. Toss 'em out of his teepee when he was finished with 'em. They'd cry all over their daddies to let them marry him. But Jim wasn't the marrying kind, and when he had his fill of Indian gals and liquor and trading, why, off he'd go, by his lonesome. Didn't like partners no
how. He said to me, ‘You skinny little peckerwood, the Blackfeet is gone catch and scalp you, then stake you out to a termite hill after they cut yer pinions off.' I said to him, ‘I ain't made of wood, I'm all flesh and bone, and they better bring a whole passel of 'em if they plan on cutting off my pinions' and he laughed like a son of a bitch and fell into a fire and had to be pulled out by his Indian gals.”

Willy Silk had only half-listened to the old man. His mind was wanting to concentrate on how he was going to practice killing a human.

The old man said just before the train pulled into Bismarck, “Them cold creeks ruined me, wrecked my bones, give me the arthritis and the lumbago, bent my backbone like wire. Feels like I'm walking with stones in my shoes all the time. Gets worse ever year. I'll be so damn crooked of body when I die they'll have to bury me sitting up.”

Then the train's whistle blew and the conductor announced “Bismarck” and the old man looked lost in his thinking and didn't say anything more. Willy waited impatiently for him to descend the step the conductor had put there.

“Take care yerself, young feller,” the old man said over his shoulder as they walked away from the train, its belly shooting clouds of steam.

Willy stopped in at the first saloon he came to—the Union House. It wasn't the rowdy sort he was used to: stamped tin ceiling, long polished bar, pictures on the wall in gilt frames—one of Custer, one of Lincoln, both looking into the camera lens like they could read their future and saw it wasn't very good. The picture frames were still draped in black crepe. Imagine that.

Willy ordered a whiskey and a beer back.

“You ain't the new dentist, are you?” the barkeep said. “I got a rot tooth that's been nagging me like a wife for near a week now.”

“I look like I make my living pulling teeth?”

The barkeep shrugged, said, “I'd not know what a man who makes his living pulling teeth looks like, but I'd buy him a bottle of the best whiskey in the house and help him drink it if he was to walk in here now.”

“Hell no, I don't pull teeth,” Willy said. Willy dropped back the flap of his coat enough to reveal the nickel-plated pistol he wore high on his hip. “That's what I do for a living,” he said. “Case you was extra curious.”

Willy drank in silence. The place was as dead as a funeral parlor.

“You got any whores working here?”

Willy'd figured out one thing all men enjoy was the company of a woman, and if you wanted to find a man who was of a desperate nature, such as the private detective Shaw had hired—Prince Puckett or the killer himself, this Shade fellow—then you might do best to get acquainted with the local whores. It was Bismarck where the money man said he'd last heard from Puckett.

The barman shook his head.

“We had a good one worked here once, but she quit and moved north. I heard she married a preacher and is out of the whoring business altogether. Then some fellow came through a few months back and hired four of old Sam Tolver's whores he kept over to the Bismarck Gentleman & Sports Club, the best whores this town ever had the privilege of knowing. So when it comes to whores, the town's a little low right now. Think the fel
low who hired them was from some burg called Sweet Sorrow, north of here, two days' ride. His last name was Kansas. Odd name, Kansas, ain't it?”

“Jesus Christ, you always run off at the mouth so?”

The barman looked duly abashed and moved to the other end of the bar, flipping his bar rag over his shoulder.

Time ticked away on the Regulator clock above the back bar. The light grew dimmer until the barkeep went around and lighted the hanging lamps that filled the room with a soft buttery light.

Willy kept thinking about how he was going to practice his killing. Then an idea came to him and he called to the barman: “Who's the worst no good son of a bitch you know of around these parts?”

The man offered a sullen glance.

“Oh shit,” Willy said, slapping an extra dollar on the wood. “Don't mind me, I'm just in a bad mood from so much traveling. Let me buy you a whiskey for that sore tooth.” This seemed to meet with the barman's approval.

“Apology accepted,” he said and poured them each a liquor. Willy noted how the barman kept the liquor in his yap, allowing its medicinal properties to take effect on his sore tooth and inflamed gums before gulping it down like it was a whole egg.

“Well, now, let me see,” the barman said, rolling his eyes upward. “There's Blue Henderson, who can't get along with nobody, lives out east of here a mile. Ever time he comes to town he gets into a fight with somebody. Thinks men are always trying to flirt with his missus…real jealous type, but hard to see why, since Mrs. Blue Henderson is ugly as a bucket of worms.”

Willy Silk waited impatiently.

“Then there's Dobbs. Only he's the town marshal and is expected to be mean 'cause if he wasn't mean, nobody'd respect him. He likes to crack miscreants over the noodle with his pistol barrel. Says he learned the trick from some fellow named Wyatt Earp he used to deputy for in Dodge, Kansas…”

Willy poured himself another whiskey and refilled the bartender's glass as well…Jesus Christ, he was as slow a talker as Willy had ever encountered.

“But when it really comes down to the rub, I'd have to say the worst no good son of a bitch would be Champion Smith.”

“Why's that?”

“He is rumored to have molested innocents, if you know what I mean.”

“No, I don't know what you mean. Spell it out for me.”

The barkeep leaned across the oak conspiratorially, putting his mouth near Willy's ear. Whether it was the liquor or the rot of the bad tooth, Willy could not ascertain, but the man's breath smelled rank.

“Screws animals and children, too, the way I hear it.”

“How come this mean marshal of yours ain't locked him up, then?”

“Can't nothing be proved.”

“Why not?”

“Well,” the whiff of the barkeep's breath made Willy's knees go weak, but he withstood it because he thought maybe he'd found the one human he could practice killing on. “Animals can't talk and them kids won't. I think old Champion put the fear in 'em so deep and dark it stole their tongues.”

“What's to say it ain't but rumor?”

“Nothing, I suppose. But two families has moved out because they thought old Champion was diddling their
youngsters. And I am tempted to say the cows and goats and sheep and horses, too, run scared when they see old Champion coming down the street—but that would make light of a serious situation.”

“Indeed, it would. Where might I find this Champion Smith?”

“Keeps him a dugout west of town—out a way from everybody else. He's a loner, never been married, stinks like a dung heap.”

The mention of stink only added to the bad breath; it was all Willy could stand and he had to step away from the bar and out of smelling distance or he knew he'd pass out, then and there.

 

He stopped off at the general store and asked after cheap used pistols and purchased one had a pitted barrel and busted grips, but seemed to be in firing condition, then he rented a horse and rode out across the grasslands toward the west, keeping a keen eye for a dugout and didn't ride far before he spotted it. Rode up to the front of the place: Just logs stacked one atop the other with a tarp for a door and a mound of rusted cans off to one side. Staked out was a swayback dapple gray nag that looked wormy, its ribs and hipbones plainly showing through its sore infested hide. Willy wondered briefly if this Smith fellow had been diddling his own horse as well. It gave him the shudders to think what such a man was capable of.

“Hey, you ugly son of a bitch!” he shouted.

There was a lapse of time filled with naught but silence and a single plaintive cry of a lone meadowlark that balanced itself on a thick blade of brown grass, then fluttered off.

“Come on out here!” Willy yelled.

Finally the tarp of a door was drawn back and a scraggly-faced man in dirty clothes emerged.

“You Champion Smith?”

“Who the fuck's asking?”

“The man who has a proposition for you.”

“A what?”

“Proposition, you damn fool.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

Willy drew his piece and aimed it at the man. He knew he could pop the dirty bastard's head and make it explode like a watermelon hit with a sledge. Only that would be too easy, wouldn't prove nothing. What he needed was to test himself against an armed man, somebody willing to shoot back. Only hopefully not somebody so good with a pistol the test might prove fatal.

“I'll shoot you where you stand,” Willy said.

“Why the hell would you do that for?”

“Just for the hell of it, mostly. Now I want you to listen to my offer.”

The man scratched his crotch.

“Pretty boy on a pretty horse,” Champion Smith observed. “Hell, why don't you both come in and join me for a bit of repast?” His laughter sounded like wood breaking.

“Don't be a goddamn fool, old man.”

“Make your offer, pretty boy.”

“You any good with that pistol?”

“Good enough to shoot your dick off, though, that would be a shame…”

“I come to kill you, Champion Smith. And if you want to live you'll have to fight for the opportunity or die where you stand.” Champion Smith went from
scratching down below to scratching inside the nest of his head hair.

“Why you want to kill me, pretty boy? I never done nothing to you. Hell, I never even laid eyes on you till now.”

“Because they tell me in town you're a no good son of a bitch who diddles cows and kids.”

The man's nasty grin slowly disappeared.

“That so? That what they tell you? Well, don't believe ever goddamn thing you hear now.”

Willy dismounted.

He reached into his pocket and took out the cheap pistol and tossed it in the dirt at Champion's feet.

The troubling thing was, the man showed no fear whatsoever. In fact, he seemed to enjoy the challenge Willy had laid down for him. Something cold ran down Willy's spine and he had to tell himself to remain steady, that it would be like shooting a glass ball or a game bird—only a lot bigger and thus a lot harder to miss. Willy holstered his own piece. The grungy fellow looked from the cheap pistol to Willy.

“Real pistol artist, eh?”

“You got about five seconds to reach for that iron,” Willy said, “then I start pumping lead into you.”

Champion Smith spat something that looked old.

“How I know that damn gun's even loaded?”

“Trust me, it is.”

“Trust you, huh?” He bent slowly to pick it up, keeping his eyes on Willy the whole while. And when his hand touched it, he brought it up quick and Willy drew and fired and saw dust spank up from the man's shirt near his left shoulder and a small flower of blood bloomed through the ragged material. Champion Smith stepped
back like he was trying to walk down a set of steps backward and missed one of them.

When he righted himself—momentarily examining the bullet wound through his shoulder meat—Willy could see the first bit of fear in the man's eyes.

“Your turn,” Willy said. “Try again.”

This time the codger didn't try and aim, just snapped off a shot from down near the hip where he was holding the gun. The shot probably killed the sky or the prairie, but it didn't come close to killing Willy. He was surprised at how calm he felt as he drew bead and shot the man again, this time through the ribs, even as Champion Smith quick fired two more shots.

Willy's bullet spun him around and he stood there for a moment, facing the wrong direction, like he was looking at the roof on his dugout for a leak and he was trying to figure out where exactly.

Then without rhyme or reason, Champion Smith fired the last two bullets into the side of the house. And when the hammer clicked, he turned around to face his foe.

“You want to reload?” Willy asked him.

Champion Smith seemed stunned speechless.

“Reload? What kinder damn idjit are you?”

Then the old man took notice of the blood leaking from his person, some of it spattering the toe of his boots, and he reached up with one hand and cupped it under some of the blood.

Willy reached inside his pocket again and took out a handful of shells and threw them at the man's feet.

“Go on, reload.”

There was a pause, then Champion Smith said, “Hell, you gone shoot me either way…” as he squatted and
picked up the bullets and replaced the spent ones in the chambers of the belly gun. He had a lot of trouble loading and dropped some of the shells and bent and picked them up again, his hands shaky, his fingers bloody and sticky. When he finally got all five in, he held the pistol with both hands and set to cocking it. And he got it raised and nearly aimed when Willy shot him a third time: just about where his belt buckle would have been if he'd been wearing a belt instead of a piece of rope tied to hold up his drawers.