The Last Hard Men (6 page)

He had to quit twice to forage for beer bottles. Late in the afternoon the noise attracted an audience of half a dozen kids, who stood on the bank behind him and watched solemnly. He said hello to them, courteous and distant, and one or two of them knew who he was, passed the word around; nobody pestered him. The kids volunteered to go looking for more bottles for him and he sat in the lengthening shade while they scooted through the trees, found cans and bottles, and raced each other across the river to set up targets for him.

He was not above showing off. He finished the afternoon in a blaze of glory, like fireworks: started with his back to the targets; jacked a chamber into the Marlin; wheeled and began firing at an earsplitting speed, so that the racket of each shot nearly blended into the next; the air was full of flying pieces of glass. When he had emptied the carbine he let it hang in his left hand while he slapped the revolver up from his hip and blazed away, holding the revolver out in front of him at eye level where you were supposed to. He didn’t miss one of his six shots. When he walked away toward town the kids were watching him as if he were William S. Hart. He didn’t let them see his pleased little smile.

His ears were still whistling and ringing when he walked up. to his front door and went inside. Susan appeared at the kitchen door and began to say something, and saw his guns and stared.

“Just practicing,” he said. “Up on the Rillito. I had to wait awhile for the tram car. Didn’t realize it was getting so late.”

I’ve waited supper for you.” She pushed her lower lip forward to blow hair off her forehead. “Lay off your things and get washed up.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said dryly. Susan grinned impudently. He put the guns in the front parlor, leaving them out because after supper he would clean them and oil them; he went upstairs, feeling very light on his feet, and worked the pump handle to bring water up to the second-story tank before he went into the bathroom they had built four years ago.

His clothes were covered with dust. He chastised himself for not having changed into old clothes before he went out to shoot. He had to change; it wouldn’t do to sit down to supper in dusty garb.

When he came down she said crossly, “It’s getting cold. Maybe I’d better warm it up in the oven.”

“No. I don’t mind” He held her chair for her and then went to his place at the head of the table. As he sat down he saw she was looking at the grandfather clock. He said, “If you’re going out tonight I’m sorry I held you up.”

“There’s time,” she said. “Maybe I’ll cancel it anyway.”

“The Brickman fellow?”

“Yes.”

“He’s a good man, you don’t want to keep putting him off.”

She said, “Quit trying to marry me off.”

“Time you got another man, Susan. Time you got married again.”

She was thirty-one, a tall girl with big eyes and good bones, high strong cheeks, a full expressive mouth. He was too close to her to know whether she was pretty but he’d heard men make admiring remarks about her. She had long hair that shone in the lamplight, dark brown hair like his own had been before it went white; her eyes were dark and dramatic and she had a soft contralto voice, low and smoky. Winters she taught fifth grade; summers she kept the books of the city police department. Nine years ago, to Burgade’s intense displeasure, she had married an unambitious young deputy sheriff named Ned Hayes; Burgade had only slowly, and grudgingly, realized Hayes’s virtues—he was steady, honest, dependable, not as dull as he looked at first glance, and had a good chance of making undersheriff and possibly even sheriff. Burgade had finally learned to like him and had taken Hayes under his wing, teaching him the bits and pieces of wisdom he had picked up along the backtrail of his experience. Two years ago last month Hayes had made undersheriff. A fortnight later Hayes had been shot dead by a store burglar when he’d stopped to investigate on his way home from a night of card-playing at the Cosmopolitan.

Burgade had brought Susan back home with him. She had cried her grief out but she’d composed herself rather quickly after the funeral—perhaps too quickly. He had a feeling some of it was still bottled up inside her. Very matter-of-fact, she’d gone to work, organized the house-hold, mothered him insufferably, and made utterly no efforts to resume the social contacts she’d had before her husband’s death. Her old friends, her age, had come around to see her but she had greeted them with exact courtesy, nothing more, and they came around less and less frequently. She encouraged no beaux. Once in a while a young man made a determined attempt to get through to her. The most recent was a young mining engineer, Hal Brickman, who had a clean-cut college-dude appearance and usually went around in baggy riding breeches and a snap-brim Eastern hat. Brickman had a good heart and a quick mind; maybe he wasn’t the kind of tough outdoorsman who’d always run in the Burgade family (Sam Burgade’s forebears had fought in four American wars, explored the Northwest with Lewis and Clark, trapped with Carson and Sublette, trailed cattle with Chisum) but he was solid, substantial, steady, sturdy—and Susan was thirty-one years old, and all these things weighed in Sam Burgade’s considerations.

In reply to his remark about getting married she said, “I wish you’d quit trying to run my life, Father.”

“I’m not telling you what to do. I’m telling you what in my judgment you ought to do. There’s a difference.”

“I don’t love Hal Brickman.”

“Seems he loves you,” he said. “Maybe at your age you ought to stop looking to find a storybook romance and settle for something that could turn out to be just as good in the long run—a steady man who loves you and a kid or two to raise and love.”

“It terrifies you to think of me drying up into an old-maid spinster, doesn’t it?”

“Susie, I’m an old man and I know about loneliness. I don’t wish it for you.”

Her expression changed; she looked away quickly, addressed herself busily to her meal. Her lashes covered her eyes but he thought he had seen a moist glint in them. He pushed his chair back and held his arms stiff, braced against the edge of the table. Full of sudden low anger he said, “Goddamnit, Susie, I will not have you waste your young life looking after a tired old man like me. I had no intention of letting that comment about loneliness give you any excuse to think I need you to look after me for the rest of my life. I can damn well take care of myself. I did while you were married.”

“You were younger then,” she said in a small voice, not looking up.

“When I’m too old and feeble to look after myself,” he roared, “I’ll move myself in the goddamn Pioneers’ Home.”

“Don’t blaspheme, Father.”

He snorted. “I will not have it.”

She looked up, finally. “You’ll have to throw me out, then.”

“Don’t think I won’t.”

“Then go ahead. Do it.” Her eyes blazed.

Their glances locked: they scowled furiously at each other until Burgade’s nose twitched, his lip-corner turned up, and suddenly they were both laughing helplessly. He laughed till his stomach hurt; he had to get his breath, and then he dropped his napkin on the table and went to the sideboard and got down the cognac. Rothschild 1887. He poured two snifters.

“Here. Belt that down and listen to me.”

“You old tyrant.”

“Yeah.” He sat down and a crafty gleam came into his eye. “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to put this house up for sale.”

“What? The house? But—”

“I know. You were born here. Well, that was a long time ago. The house is too big, we don’t need it. It just keeps you hopping. I’m going to sell it.”

“And do what?”

He grinned at her. “Move into a flat in Orndorffs Hotel.”

She glared at him, but she was amused. “You old stinker.”

“Yeah. Won’t be room for you there, Susie. I’ll have maids to keep my room clean and a whole hotel kitchen to cook for me. I won’t need the likes of you fussing around after me.”

“You’re bluffing,” she said, “but I love you.”

“I am not bluffing. Next week the house goes up for sale.”

“Do it if you want,” she said, feigning indifference. “But don’t do it on my account. If you really can’t stand having me around, I’ll leave. You don’t have to sell the house.”

“Is that a promise?”

“It is if you’re asking for it.”

Loneliness pressed at him from unseen shadows. But he said, “I’m asking for it.”

She was studying her hands, turning them over, again and again as if they were unfamiliar objects she’d never seen before. “All right,” she said in the same small voice. “All right, Father. But it doesn’t mean I’m going to marry Hal.”

The door clapper banged three or four times. Burgade put down his brandy snifter. “That’ll be your young man. Better get your shawl—there’ll be a cool breeze along the river tonight.”

Her eyes flashed. “What makes you think we’d go walking in that notorious lovers’ lane?”

He only grinned at her. Color filled her cheeks and she went out of the room in a rush. But he noticed she was moving with a light step. Still smiling, he went to the hall door and greeted Hal Brickman while Susan dashed upstairs to get her wrap. Hal wore the customary jodhpurs and engineers’ boots, a charro jacket and a necktie; he had his snap-brim hat in his hand; his hair was slicked back, parted down the middle. A real dandy—but amused by it, not serious about it. Burgade didn’t understand dudes very well but he liked Hal. They sat in the parlor with brandy and talked weather and crime until Susan came down, her hair freshly brushed and shining, her mother’s lace shawl about her shoulders. She looked a little like her mother—not much, but enough to send Burgade’s memory back twenty years.

Hal was saying, “I imagine they’ll catch them before the week’s out.”

Hearing the last of it as she entered, Susan said, “Catch who?”

“Oh, just some convicts who broke out of the penitentiary,” Hal said.

“Oh,” she said, not interested. She came into the room and Burgade rose gallantly from his chair; she pecked his cheek and let Hal take her arm and guide her toward the door. Hal said, “Good night, sir.”

“Always good to see you,” Burgade said.

Susan hesitated. The pink tip of her tongue quested her mouth corner. “Would you like anything from Porter’s store? It’ll still be open.”

“No. Nothing, thank you. And if I did I could get it myself.”

“Don’t be cranky,” she said tartly. “Nothing—that’s your trouble right now, you know. You want nothing.”

Not altogether true, he thought. Right now he wanted Zach Provo. Or perhaps what he wanted was the excitement of the challenge.

They stood a moment in uncomfortable silence, Susan reluctant to leave, until Burgade turned and stared rudely at the bookcase as if dismissing them from his mind and looking for something to read.

“Well,” Susan said uncertainly, “good night, then, Father.”

“’Night,” he mumbled, and took a step closer to the bookcase.

His daughter went out with her young man. Through the window he watched them go along the walk under the gaslight poles. In response to something Hal said, Susan laughed with an open throat; she seemed healthy and girlish, she touched the ground with toes like musical notes. Burgade saw Hal slip his arm around her waist.

He took down the guns and began to clean them. The air in the room was still and close: stale, as if it hadn’t moved for a long time. Full of loneliness. Burgade spread the pieces of the guns on a sheet of newspaper; he sat crosslegged on the floor like an Indian and wiped each bolt and spring and cam with an oily scrap of cloth. The room seemed to grow larger and quieter. In his mind he tried to reconstruct a portrait of Zach Provo. It had been twenty-eight years and the image was difficult to resurrect. Perhaps the man had lost his hair, although that wasn’t common among Navajos. But then Provo wasn’t fullblooded. Perhaps he had gone to fat—but that was hard to credit. The face had been bladed like a hatchet. Hard sinister eyes like two holes burned into a hide. Skin the hue of tarnished copper. It was coming back: the long jaw you could scratch a match on, the heavy black eyebrows, the lean slightly hunched body with its tense quickness of long-corded musculature. A man like that, how much would he change in twenty-eight years? Had prison collapsed the mouth, faded the eyes, thinned the hair, made the hard brown body flabby? Changed the tough, taut, commanding pressure into flaccid weakness? It wasn’t possible. Not Provo. A man like that, hardship wouldn’t grind down; it would only polish him up, like hard steel against a grindstone.

But maybe that was just a hope. Maybe he wanted Provo to be faster and tougher than ever. To increase the challenge.

I’m going to nail him
, Sam Burgade thought, but he felt a little ashamed. He didn’t hate Zach Provo; he didn’t really care one way or the other about Provo. It was only that Provo gave him something to think about besides lonely old age.

I hope they don’t get him before I get a crack at him.