The Crack in the Lens (6 page)

Or, I Throw Questions at Gustav, and He Throws the Book at Me

“You want first watch or second?” Old Red asked when we got back to our ratty little room at the Star.

“Oh, I ain’t sleepy after all that fuss tonight. I’ll go first. Only…”

I patted my thigh where a .45 should have been hanging. We’d been in such a hurry to leave the Phoenix in our dust, we’d left our Colts, too.

“Somebody comes for us, what am I supposed to hold ’em off with? My toothbrush?”

“You could always clobber ’em with this.”

Gustav swiped something black and blocky off the bed and tossed it across the room to me.

It was his copy of
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
.

“Fair enough,” I said. “You’ve hit
me
over the head with Holmes often enough.”

My brother grunted out a non-laugh, tossed his hat onto a nearby chair, then sat on the bed and got to tugging off his boots. A moment later, he was stretched out still dressed, hands behind his head, eyes pointed straight up.

This was his usual nighttime repose, part of the ritual we’d initiated a little more than a year before: He lies down on his back staring up at nothing, and I read out a Holmes yarn before turning out the light (or turning away from the campfire, should we be on the trail). Then I awake in the morning to find Gustav still gazing into infinity and wonder to myself whether the man sleeps at all anymore.

This night would be different.

“No stories,” my brother said. “Ain’t got no use for fairy tales just now. I got enough to chew on already.”

“You wanna do that chewin’ out loud?”

Old Red didn’t even take his eyes off the stained, crack-webbed plaster above.

“Not really.”

“Well, too bad. Cuz I do,” I said. “What the hell happened tonight, Brother?”

Gustav rustled the sheets with a halfhearted shrug. “We got snookered.”

“That much I figured out myself. It’s the details I’m wonderin’ about. Like was that a trap from the get-go or did our luck just go bad?”

“Trap from the get-go,” Old Red sighed. “There wasn’t time to fetch Ragsdale and Bock in from town after we showed up. They must’ve been upstairs already. And the way Big Bess steered us into the Bridal Suite—that smacks of a plan. So the whole time we was tryin’ to milk Bess for data, she was tryin’ to milk
us
.”

I grimaced. “I do wish you’d take more care with your metaphors.”

“Seemed fishy, Big Bess insistin’ on you and me both bein’ up there,” Gustav went on. “I had no choice but to play along, though. Far as I knew, that was gonna be my only chance to talk to—”

I put up my hands like I was flagging down a wagon about to roll right over top of me. “Whoa whoa whoa! Are you sayin’ you guessed it was a snare before Bess even brung me up?”

Old Red finally looked over at me. “It was just a feeling. I figured I had to take the risk.”

“Well, it wasn’t just you takin’ it, was it?”

“Look, I don’t think they meant to kill us…not at first, anyway. They’re hidin’ something, and best for them if we was to mosey on of our own accord rather than draw attention by turnin’ up dead. That’s why Big Bess was feedin’ us lies. Like that tripe about the ‘stranger’ at the Star. Or Adeline and all her other beaux.”

“Assumin’ that
was
tripe.”

My brother’s face flushed. “It was.”

I was about to ask a dangerous question indeed—“How do you know?”—when another, even thornier thought occurred to me.

“If they was just servin’ up swill hopin’ we’d swallow it and go,” I said, “why not pretend it worked? You say, ‘Thank you, Bess—guess we came here for naught,’ and you stroll out and I follow and that’s that. Instead you go and poke Ragsdale in the eyes, and the whole thing blows sky high.”

“That’s hindsight talkin’,” Gustav growled.

“Not for you, it ain’t. You walked into that room half-cocked for a trap, and when Ragsdale and Bock didn’t spring it, why, you went and sprung it yourself. On the both of us.”

“Alright, I made a mistake. I was pissed and flustered and finally it was me doin’ something dumb instead of you. So I ain’t Sherlock Holmes! I ain’t perfect! If that puts a streak of yellow up your spine, you can just pack your bag and hightail it off to—”

“Oh, don’t give me that horseshit,” I snapped. “You know I’m stickin’ with you to the end. I just don’t want the end comin’ any sooner than it has to. And that means I don’t like stupid risks we don’t gotta take.”

To this, my brother did not reply. He did not retort. He did not offer riposte or rejoinder or rebuttal.

No, he bounced off the bed and he
roared
.

“You think
I
like it, ya jackass? Well, I don’t! But stupid risks is all we got! We’re here five years after the fact, and there ain’t no clues to be found. ‘Can’t make bricks without clay,’ that’s what Holmes used to say. Well, we ain’t got the clay to fill a thimble, let alone build bricks. So we gotta dig for it—gotta root around in the mud for it! And if that means I take stupid risks, then I take stupid risks. And if I make mistakes, I make mistakes. And it ain’t horseshit to say if you can’t stomach it, you need to get the hell gone!”

I blinked at my brother, stumped for once for something to say.

Our nearest neighbor, on the other hand, wasn’t tongue-tied in the slightest.

“Hey!” a muffled voice called out, followed by three thumps that sent flakes of plaster snowing down from the wall behind our bed. “Shut up over there!”

Old Red spun around and gave the wall his pounding fist seven times in quick succession.

“I…am…sorry!” he hollered, one word to a wallop. “Good…night…to…you…sir!”

Then he dropped back down on the bed, rubbing his fingers.

“Ow,” he muttered—and nothing more. He just grabbed his Stetson, stretched out on his back again, and, as he often will when readying himself for heavy-duty sleep or cogitation, plopped his hat over his face. Then all was still.

Silences, of course, are by no means my specialty. Yet I managed to ride this one out for a good four or five minutes before I spoke.

“Brother.”

No response…but no snores, either.

“Brother?”

Still nothing.

“Alright. Suit yourself.”

I braced the door with the room’s one chair, then settled myself on the floor and did something I’d never done before. I opened up
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
not for Gustav, but for me.

There was a passage I was thinking of, one that Old Red—despite his fondness for quoting Holmes—almost never mentioned. It was just a little aside in the yarn called “A Scandal in Bohemia,” a few tidbits Johnny Watson tosses off before getting down to the facts of the matter.

Holmes, Watson wrote, distrusted “the softer passions,” never speaking of them but with “a gibe and a sneer.” Love he dismissed as “a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results,” “a crack in one of his own high-power lenses.”

I read through all this again, then had to sit there and wonder: If love could crack a lens, what could a
lost
love do? What could the thirst for vengeance do?

Because it seemed to me I was seeing cracks aplenty in my brother. And the longer we stayed in San Marcos, the more likely his whole “lens” would up and shatter to pieces—and maybe the man with it.

Or, We Visit the Town’s Greasiest Spoon—and Dine on Ashes

When I was through reading
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
, I used it for writing: Balanced against my knees underneath a sheet of paper, the book made a decent desk.

Doc Watson’s chronicles were my foundation in more ways than one, for it was a mystery tale I was working on—a short story for my new publisher, Mr. Urias Smythe of Smythe & Associates Publishing, Ltd. Though I had yet to see any of the yarns Mr. Smythe had bought from me in print, I felt at last like a real, professional writer and not just a drifter with an overactive imagination.

Every so often, I was jerked from my work by footsteps in the hall, but each time the sound passed by our door without Stonewall busting through it. Eventually my eyelids and my pencil both got to drooping, and I found that the last “sentence” I’d written was nothing but a long, scraggly scrawl. It was time to call it a night.

As usual, Gustav roused so easy I had to wonder if he’d been asleep at all, snatching the hat off his face and saying, “I’m up,” the second I started toward him. My own slumber came on so quick and deep I can’t even remember making it to the bed, and the next thing I knew the light of day was flooding the room.

The
empty
room, I noticed through a groggy half-sleep haze.

The empty room someone was fiddling with the door to get into.

I snatched up the nearest weapon—my pillow—and let it fly as the door swung open.

It sailed right over my brother’s head.

“You want that back, you can go get it yourself,” Old Red said, “and I wouldn’t dawdle, I was you. Place like this, someone’s liable to grab it and hold it for ransom.”

He was cradling a pile of whatnot in his arms, and by the time I was back with the pillow, it was all spread out on the bed.

Levi’s, flannel shirt, vest, spurs, boots, bandanna, and, to top it all off, a Boss of the Plains, round-crowned Texas-style. Beside all that was the
real
topper: a new gun belt, a gleaming Colt nestled in the scabbard.

It was the cowboy’s uniform, dutifully worn by myself for so many years it got to be like a second skin—a skin I’d been happy to shed. The thought of slipping back into it made me itchy.

“You know,” I said, “if you’re gonna give me a coronary sneakin’ in like that come morning, the least you could do is bring me what I really want.”

“Which is what?”

“Whadaya think?” I popped the hat on my head. Its tall-peaked top made me feel like I’d just put on a dunce cap. “Doughnuts.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll fill that tub gut of yours before we go.”

I patted my stomach. It did jiggle a bit, I admit, but I still felt myself wronged.

“This ain’t no tub. It ain’t even a chamber pot. Why, I could work it down to…hold on.” I looked up at my brother.
“Go?”

“Yeah, go. I thunk up a new plan. If we can’t get anything outta the gals at the Phoenix, I figure we should try the next best thing. Their clee-on-tell.”

“Meanin’ punchers? So we’re headed out to a ranch?”

“
The
ranch. The one I used to work for—the Lucky Seven. What with Ragsdale and Bock and all the law around here set against us, it’s about time we rounded up some folks for our side.”

I nodded.

“Makes sense.”

“Oh, I’m so pleased to hear you think so.” Old Red snatched up the Levi’s and pushed them against my chamber pot. “Now stop jawin’ and get dressed. I thought you was hungry.”

He thought right. So when we got to the little hole-in-the-wall lunch counter Gustav had picked out for our morning repast, I ordered everything on the menu. Which wasn’t hard to do, actually: The menu, written on a chalkboard the approximate size of a handkerchief, was only three lines long.

The little hash house was of a kind with a thousand others you’ll find attached like ticks to a cowtown outskirts. It was spitting distance from the stockyards and railroad depot—which was appropriate, as spitting was exactly what a man was wont to do after taking a sip of the gritty black sludge slopped into his
COFFY
cup. Yet the dozen or so other customers weren’t complaining, them being cowboys or railroad men long accustomed to Arbuckle the color and consistency of axle grease.

I was pleased to see my new clothes were already paying off in one regard: I received nary a sneer from our fellow diners…for a couple minutes, at least.

“Mornin’, Ike!” the greasy old coosie who ran the place called out, and within seconds nearly every other man there had taken up the call. The exceptions being my brother, who opted for a hissed “Shit,” and myself, who nearly spit out a mouthful of half-chewed
BAKIN
.

I peeked over my shoulder to find a tall, lean man with a star on his chest sauntering into the cookshack.

There was a red splotch high up on his left cheek the exact size and shape of a shoe heel.

In San Francisco’s Chinatown just a few weeks before, I’d run across the notion of yin and yang: two things that are equal though entirely opposite. Taking my first good look at Ike Rucker, I got the feeling I was seeing Milford Bales’s yin. Or maybe his yang, though that sounds vaguely vulgar.

Where the town marshal was baby-faced and soft-bellied, the county sheriff was as sinewy as a rawhide whip. While Bales had to work hard to put up a tough front, a layer of sweat glistening over the nerves all a-jitter just under the skin, Rucker looked like he’d been born wearing a badge. He seemed at ease, amused, but with an air of command that wasn’t so much haughtiness as complete and utter confidence.

Rucker and Bales may have both been the Law thereabouts, but the men—and the Law as they embodied it—couldn’t have been more different.

“Boys,” Rucker said to the customers lined up along the sagging plankboard counter, and he smiled and touched the brim of his hat.

“What’ll it be this mornin’, Ike?” the cookie asked.

“Oh, just a cup of coffee and—”

That’s when Rucker pretended to spot us.

“Oh, my. Could that be Gloomy Gus over there?” He walked to our table and pulled out one of the empty chairs. “Mind if I join you fellers?”

He was already sitting as he said it.

“Not at all, please, go right ahead,” I said. If Rucker wanted to fake conviviality, then I’d show him how it was done. “Truth is, we’ll feel safer havin’ you with us. I hate to tell you this, Sheriff, but you’ve got some mighty unsavory characters in your county.”

It looked like Rucker was giving me a friendly grin until I noticed something strange: The man didn’t blink. His eyes just kept boring into me, and I had to fight the urge to blink on his behalf or look away altogether.

“I don’t believe we’ve met,” he said.

“Not formally, I suppose, no. I’m Gloomy Gus’s brother, Unstoppable Otto. Three guesses how I got my nickname.”

Rucker casually plucked a piece of bacon from my plate and tore off a bite.

“Boy, they sure wasn’t lyin’ about you,” he said as he chewed. “You are a stitch.”

He stuffed the rest of the bacon in his mouth.

He wasn’t laughing.

“What else you heard about us?” my brother asked him.

“Well, for one thing, that you borrowed horses off a couple Circle B boys last night.”

“Oh, that couldn’t be,” I said, wide-eyed innocence personified. “We don’t
know
anyone from the Circle B.”

The cook came over with Rucker’s coffee, and after thanking him, the lawman picked up my brother’s fork and helped himself to some home fries.

“I’m also told you been harassin’ some of our local business leaders,” he said around a mouthful of tater.

“Golly, Sheriff…you make it sound like we blew up the Elks Lodge,” I said. “As I recall it,
I
was the one with the gun to his head last night.”

Rucker gave me a glower, then turned to my food, poking at a yolk until it bled gold all over my plate. He sopped up the mess with my egg’s mangled remains and stuffed his mouth full, leaving a yellow slime trail up his chin.

“We wasn’t harassin’ nobody,” Old Red said. “Just askin’ questions.”

“It ain’t for the likes of you to ask questions. That’s my job.” As if Rucker’s badge couldn’t be more tarnished in my eyes, he tapped it twice with his fork, leaving a smear of yolk and grease. “And let me tell you something else…”

And just like that, Rucker’s voice rose and his back straightened and his head went up high. It was almost like he was giving a speech—and from the way the rumble of conversation and the clink and scrape of cutlery came to a sudden stop all around us, I knew he was.

“Pete Ragsdale and Gil Bock provide a service this county needs. That’s what this stick-up-its-ass town doesn’t understand anymore. Oh, yeah, we’ve got a fancy school up on the hill and telephones and electric lights—but the money for all that? It still smells like cowshit, no matter how much perfume these townsfolk sprinkle over it. It’s cattle that made something outta San Marcos and cattle that’ll keep it something. And you can’t push men as hard as ranch work does without lettin’ ’em blow off a little steam at the end of the week. So the boys whore. So they drink. So they get rowdy.
So what?
At least they ain’t rapin’ and robbin’ and shootin’ up the county courthouse. And that’s just what they’d do, run wild through town, if they didn’t have someplace like the Phoenix to turn to.”

I caught a flurry of motion out of the corner of my eye, a little ripple that spread from table to table.

Nods. Cowboy or railroader, it didn’t matter—they agreed with Rucker.

He may have been a rotten lawman, but as a politician he was first-rate.

“Sheriff, with all due respect,” Gustav said, and from his grating tone and gritting teeth, it was clear not much
was
due. “I don’t give a damn about any of that. I just wanna know who killed my Adeline.”

Rucker nodded, an expression of benevolent tolerance on his sun-leathered face…even as he reached out and speared another helping off my brother’s plate. When he spoke, his voice was quiet again, muffled by a moist mouthful of fried egg.

He’d stepped down off the stump.

“Look, Gus…I sympathize. I knew that little gal myself, and it’s a shame what happened to her, but you know what she was. It’s a rough business, and people get hurt. That’s just the way of it, and you’d best accept that.”

Old Red’s lips squeezed tight but his jaw was working, almost squirming beneath the skin. He looked like a man trying to figure out what kind of bug just flew into his mouth. He finally washed the sour expression away with a long slurp of coffee.

Rucker’s
coffee.

“So,” he said, slamming the mug down hard in front of the sheriff, “you ‘knew’ Adeline, did you? You usin’ that word biblical-like? Cuz obviously it ain’t just ranch hands who turn to Ragsdale and Bock for their fun.”

Rucker had been polishing off the last of my potatoes when Old Red got going, and now he froze midchew.

“And tell me, Sheriff,” my brother rolled on. “Them ‘people’ who ‘get hurt sometimes.’ Who would you be talkin’ about, exactly? Cuz if the son of a bitch who sliced Adeline up has done the same to anyone else since then, that’s blood on your hands. And another thing—”

Gustav was cut off by a nerve-shaking clatter—Rucker tossing the fork he’d appropriated onto my plate.

“Listen here, you little shit.” Rucker snatched my napkin off my lap, wiped his mouth with it, then threw it back into my chest. “Do you have any idea why I sat down to talk things through with you all polite like this?”

“Because you were hungry?” I ventured.

Rucker kept his unblinking gaze on Gustav.

“Cuz we’re inside city limits,” my brother said.

“That’s right. Milford Bales’s badge trumps mine here in town. But out there?” The sheriff pointed a long finger to the east, then did the same to the north, west, and south. “And there and there and there? That’s all me, and the law is what I say it is.
Right
is what I say it is. Wrong, too. So sittin’ here in San Marcos, I can only try to persuade you to see reason. But the second you cross the line…?”

Rucker leaned toward Old Red and dropped his voice to a whisper. “I can gun you down easy as swattin’ a goddamn fly.”

Then, quick as that, he was on his feet.

“Quit buzzin’ in my ears, boys.”

Before he turned to go, he smacked an imaginary fly on his shoulder, brushing its little invisible carcass away with a couple casual slaps of the hand.

He was all smiles again as he made his good-byes and left.

Me and Gustav—we were all frowns.