The Watchman (12 page)

Doctors make mistakes, said Christmas Janders. Even doctors. Am I better than anyone of their noble calling, Mister Alt?

Chief of Police Smitherman yawned slowly and rose briskly to his feet.

And so. Mister Alt, said Christmas Janders. The hunters— you and I. We loose our hounds, hear them bay at the iSnd-

ing of the spoor—and follow. Have you hunted much in your life, Mister Alt—game, I mean? Animals, I mean? I hope you have. Because it's an animal we're hunting, you and I— though I reckon I should call you the hunter—the trapper— the man with the gun. You fetch home our game. Then I take over—dress him, skin him, build the fire, drive the forked stakes, spit our beast on a skewer, season him nicely and settle back to watch him roast. A rather apt image, isn't it? Can I fetch you a glass of water, Mister Alt?—you look a little sick.

I am, landers, said the Sheriff. Sick to hear a man talk about a dirty job like it was a Baptist barbecue. You really love the manufacture of your little convictions, don't you, Lawyer?

I like keeping my job—if that's what you mean. Mister Alt Don't you?

No. I hate my job, said Luther Alt levelly. I have despised my life's calling since the day thirty years ago in Corpus Christi when I buckled my belt on and took the star.

Well, now—^wouldn't that be disenchanting news to the good people of Mound County? smiled Christmas Janders. Why have you been a Sheriff all these years, in all these towns, if you despise it so?

Because it's filthy, said Luther.

I don't quite get that, said Janders. If you think it's filthy why do you do it?

Because if I didn't do it someone filthier than me would, said the Sheriff. Lawyer, do you know what's kept me a lawman all these years? It's what I know about lawmen—sadists, gun-slinging, Colt-happy killers to the end of the list. I can't fill all the sheriffs' boots in the world but, By the Lord, I can fill two and that means two boots that won't be strutting around beating in the heads of creatures God forgot to fijiish—^two less boots in the world to stomp on the faces of men, women and children whose indictment seems to be that they got sick in the soul instead of the stomach or lungs or heart. I tell you this—though I know I might as well not bother. For you'll not know what a word of it means, he said suddenly; a fury behind his composed and stoic face. When I was a boy I learned early what Life was to ask of me. Are you grasping anything I'm saying, prosecutor?

Christmas Janders smiled, unruffled, stretching his legs under the long table and leaning back in the hard chair.

I'm a lawyer. Mister Alt. Admitting that some lawyers

are idiots I am not considered stupid—jSrst in my class at the University of Virginia in 1930—no, I think I am reasonably intelligent. Go on. I find this personal testament very interesting.

Luther looked away from the other with as much disgust as his face could ever show; his eyes fixed a moment on the window and then softened in the lambent cider-yellow of the autimm afternoon.

My daddy was a lawman, he said, speaking abstractedly somehow, as if he were addressing his words in apostrophe, in penitence. My daddy shot a drunk Apache in the legs once while I watched, ten years old, in an Amarillo chiH-joint. Then he went over to where he lay and spent ten minutes kicking him to death. The Indian was drunk though and even when he was sober he was crazy and he was an Indian so it didn't much matter. It didn't even much matter to me then—I was only ten—and children aren't too finicky, I reckon. But then I sew him do it again six months later— this time to a sixteen-year-old Mexican boy who did chores in the Uvery stable behind our house. And it came over me that this time it wasn't a drunk person nor even a crazy person that my daddy killed and I saw the picture in focus, so to speak, for the first time. I saw my daddy's crazy, deputized, legal, frozen eyes—saw him weave and smirk with that smoking old Navy Colt in his fist—and I knew who it was in that picture who was drunk and crazy. That night I ran away from home. Well, Lord God knows what makes it come over a man that way—a hurt maybe, a shame, a wife run off, something maybe he's clean forgot. What makes it come? What makes men like that be? I've asked myself that for more than fifty years and I always come round to the same judgment—that the same things mould lawmen as mould the men they hunt: fear and cruelty. Are you understanding a single thing I'm saying, prosecutor?

landers stirred, his eyes thinned, watching as he would watch the progress of a trial.

I do, Alt, he said. I am a lawyer.

Partly a lawyer, said the Sheriff. The other half of the store, so to speak. You're a prosecutor—and that's no lawyer at all, in my judgment. It came over me long ago—my Uncle Jody was a circuit lawyer and by the time he had got a man set to swing he'd be off on his jennymule and six hundred miles across the Brazos before they even got the rope on the poor devil's neck. That hastiness, I should say.

deprived my Uncle Jody of half the satisfactions due him. But still it was him that set me off into the consideration of lawyers—a whole world full of them: one half trying to jail men—the other half trying to see they didn't. It hit me that it was like all the doctors in the world throwed in together and agreed that half would spend their time making people sick and the other half trying to cure 'em. Some years later I found this doctor notion wasn't too far from the whole truth. Take the head medicine man you've got here in Adena —Snedeker. A hundred and fifty men under his care last year with t.b. gnawing at their lungs. Half his time he spends inside the prison and the other half out. He was a neck specialist when they hanged men up there and now he's something I bet they haven't even got written up in the doctor journals: an electric specialist. For the Hve men up there he doctors and the killed ones he reports on for the coroner— I don't know which I'd rather be.

Mister Alt, there is every reason for you and I to get along together, said the prosecutor. At least, until our killer's in his cage.

That is my job, Mister Janders, said the Sheriff. It seems to

me you've made that pretty clear. My job and mine alone.

Very well, said Christmas Janders. Your job to catch him.

Mine to finish off. Isn't that a perfectly fair cutting of the

pie?

It being perfectly plain, said Luther, that if, for some reason or other I don't come up right soon and set before the hungry crowd my half of the pie, then I'll be finished here —done here—off again to some new town and maybe another badge if I'm that lucky.

Mister Alt, it's hard—very hard for me to think of Mound County's good people ever losing their faith in you.

All right, said Luther. Yes. Of course. You're one of my most devoted admirers. I think we can cut out all that two-talking nonsense, Mister Janders. I'm not a jury so save your honey till supper time. You've never liked me since the day I came here six years ago, so let's talk level.

In my profession, Sheriff Alt, said Janders genially, I've never been in the position to let myself like a man or dislike him either.

Yes, I know, prosecutor. You've got one of those blindfolds on like her in the nightshirt out yonder.

There's too much at stake for likes-dislikes, Janders went on. A certain balance, for example, has to be struck in the

matter of county officials. Importance appropriate to their office—popularity and respect that hasn't gotten exaggerated and run out of hand. Sheriff Alt, I told you earlier—I don't think you know your status in this county—what a stature you tower to in the people's mind. Almost a god. Now, it's not your fault, surely. You've never strutted and bragged and puffed out your chest so the star would scratch their noses. And maybe that's the secret of it—your modesty, your silence, your strong stillness and tacit composure. When a man doesn't say much more than five sentences a week people decide he's either simple or a divine oracle and they wait for what he does say when he says anything so they can take it home and either laugh it to death or press it like a flower in the family Bible. Now, you're not simple. Sheriff Alt.

I thank you for a most lawyerly dismissal of that charge, Mister landers, said the Sheriff, letting his eyes long for the autumn light beyond the window-dirtied day.

But which is worse, Sheriff Alt?—for the people to look up to a man like he was a god—or down at him as the town simpleton?

Like, for instance, they look at Chief Flick Smitherman, said Luther.

Which, I say, is worse, Mister Alt? said Christmas landers, assuming an expression of moderate sadness.

Between the two, said Luther, I'd a damn sight rather have them see me as the idiot and pelt me with road-apples every time I walked down the street. Because—because I am not a god. I'm not even what the sharpest-eyed amongst them would even call a good sheriff if they knew the truth of me. None of them knows the truth of me. Not since I left Christ's Body, Texas.

Christ's Body, Mister Alt? Is there such a town in Texas? A hamlet, perhaps?

On the contrary, Mister landers, a large coastal port. You might know it as Corpus Christi.

Oh certainly, certainly! Corpus Christi. But why Christ's Body, Mister Alt?

Because that's what it means, snapped the Sheriff, flushing slowly like wine rising darkly in a milk-glass goblet. Christ's Body, sir. For reasons which are my affair, I dislike the name of Corpus Christi. I hate the word Corpus—it makes me think of my Jane Nancy's death. And the Christi —the Christi is meaningless, sir, meaninglessl I come from

Christ's Body, Texas, Mister landers, and now, if you will do me the courtesy, let us leave the subject there!

Luther sniffed once, shook something away from his face with an angry head gesture of an animal that has been hurt. He lowered his eyes, staring them into his big hands, while behind the weather-grained patina of his prairie-seasoned face the dark blush slowly drained, leaving the flesh beneath his leathered mask pallid and mutton gray. And with that subsiding color went, it seemed, all surly defiance as well, his jokey quickness, the slow but jaunty measure of his irony. Christmas landers studied that face with new interest, puzzled, seizing one reason after the other and as swiftly discarding it.

Luther stood up, with the smooth, resolute and swift gathering-together of masses with which some big men move. He stood a moment, knuckling the table with his fists, staring at the County Attorney and yet, it seemed to landers— who had an eye for eyes—not staring at him at all but, rather, through him and beyond him into some bleak and dreadful parable implied in the wave-grained, varnished woodwork beneath the dirty window at his back.

We have talked too much, said the Sheriff. We have talked far too long. Mister landers, for men who do not like each other.

Yet it was good, smiled Christmas landers. For men who must do a job together.

And will you do your job, Mister landers? he said abruptly. Will you see that boy's murderer sent to the chair? No matter who?

No matter who. Mister Alt, said Christmas landers, with a voice that seemed to originate in chambers of cold case-metal. Even if it were my own wife.

Simultaneously, though through different entrances, the three men appeared suddenly in the hotel lobby as if by foreplanned appointment, seated themselves in the old leather upholstery round the window, glancing at one another in sheepish suspicion since their conversion at that moment was entirely coincidence. Ort Dobey, behind the registry counter, noticed none of them: having reached the fourth and last page of that night's Evening Mound, he began to read it through again—and for the fifth time—from the masthead, weather, date, and headlines on page one, all the way through the drugstore ads and obituaries to the last of the classifieds:

I

lost dogs, cattle auctions, constable's sales, and beaded-shade table lamps, cheap and in A-1 shape. For nearly thirty years the night clerk had read the four-sheet Evening Mound over as many as five and sometimes six times and each time more carefully, combing it as if there lurked in the back of his head the suspicion that sooner or later he might chance upon some item of enormous fate-bettering importance: perhaps the death of a wealthy, landed uncle (he had no relatives) whose will was presently to be probated in the favor of an only surviving relative (Ort Dobey was one of thirteen brothers, nine Uving).

Jibbons, the horse trader, squinted toward the doorway to the darkened dining room, his fine nose for mystery hopefully sniffing for something to start an argument over.

Mister Hood, wasn't there someone sneaked in the dining room yonder just as we come in? he said, in his usual, contentious manner.

The old hangman grumbled a negative sound and brooded into the fog, dense as hairs of fair, fresh hemp.

Be damned if there wasn't! said the horse trader. I caught sight of a shadow and a shoe heel just as I come in. Didn't you?

No, I did not, said Matthew Hood.

Just as if someone had been sneaking in there while Ort yonder was reading and the lobby otherwise empty—and then hurried into the dark to hide when he heard us coming. Didn't you see anything, Mister Hood?

God damn it, I said I didn't, snapped the hangman. But if there's anyone yonder there it's the Sheriff's girl Jill and her beau.

No, said the horse trader. They always sit at the window table. I can see the window table from where I'm sitting now There's nary soul there.

The hangman grumped disinterestedly, and mused on, sullen and lone-minded. Jibbons glared at him an instant and then rising, crept to the darkened doorway, peered, blinking and winking myopically, into the shades, seeing no one, not even the (remarkable, since it was big) shape of the man seated in darkness on the stool at the end of the long lunch counter. The horse trader went back to his chair, disgruntled and more testy than before. He had chosen, as he should well have known from experience, a poor night to come looking for a quarrel.

The third man, seated a fastidious distance from himself

and Matthew Hood, was Adena's oldest curiosity and long-retired attorney Colonel William Tansy Jackson Bruce. In his huge brick home amid three acres of property at the dwindling foot of Lafayette Avenue, Colonel Bruce had slept in no other bed but that towering, quarter-ton oaken giant among whose goose-down quilts he had, ninety-seven years before, first sprung, bawling and ready for argument, into the light of a hot Mound County spring. After three years of war and forty years of criminal law he had retired into a disenchanted, hermetic, and angrily literate seclusion, a total isolation broken only by a once-monthly walk of two blocks to the lobby of the Mound Hotel where he would sit for a length of time listening attentively to the chit-chat, dissections, character-crucifixions, and solutions to world affairs and then interrupt. Colonel Bruce's interruptions ran often to a length of two hours and at the sound of any disputing voice his own would merely rise eight or ten decibels of volume and then continue, quietly disintegrating all opposition, lilting occasionally in the heat of informed and merciless enthusiasm, until his audience admitted defeat or, one by one, got up and fled into the fog. Yet, it was rare that any of them did that; they were like men impoverished and bankrupt by years of diseased, obsessive addiction to two-dollar racetrack windows and yet who always were lured back by the firefly hope of someday's long-shot windfall.