Friends (4 page)

I winked and showed young Jenny my deputy badge again, tipped my hat, and stepped out in the street to quiet things down.

Walking steady was a chore, I remember. Most times, just a word would settle whatever the trouble was, but I admit that I often let things quiet themselves.

A few people was gathered down close to the livery and I knowed that's where I'd find the fireworks. After pushing inside the crowd, there was the boy from the livery bent over my pardner. Clete's face was all blood and he didn't seem to be breathing much. Dark blood was flowing too fast from a deep gash that run from in front of his ear to beneath his jaw. I got my handkerchief on it and pressed it as hard as I dared. It wasn't a gunshot wound, that was plain, and it looked like nothing else I had ever seen done to a man, except by an axe or maybe grizzly claws. His gun was still holstered, so he hadn't even fired at whoever'd done this.

"You there, Clete?" I yelled at him.

His eyes didn't open, but he mumbled something or maybe he just moaned, I don't know which. At least he wasn't dead.

I can't decide now if I'd a done things any different if I'd a been sober. I told the Lowrey boys to take Clete to Doc Plum-mer's and get the sawbones there right away if he was somewheres else. I asked the men standing there, but nobody'd saw it happen, and I convinced most of them to go inside so that I could have a quick look around to see if I could catch whoever done this. I also asked Bill James if he'd heard two shots, like I thought I had. He said, no, but he thought he heard the shot echo, which was strange in town, he said. No one had rode in or out of Two Scalp since the shots, that much was clear to me. Janey's boy Lyle come over, and I got him and his friend Bob to walk down the other side of the street to see if we could find someone moving around, but we couldn't.

"You look kinda peaked, Mr. Goodwin," Lyle said after we had holstered our guns and was walking back up the street. "You all right?"

"Yeah," I answered, but I wasn't. Everything was spinning so and I didn't know what to do next. Why in the
hell
had I ever let Clete talk me into being his deputy, anyway? I couldn't hit an elk with a shotgun if I was riding it. Never could, drunk or sober. And I sure as the devil didn't know what to do-there was no one at all to shoot at or punch. And I could feel everyone's eyes on me, everyone in town expecting me to go somewheres or do something right away, but damned if I knowed what it was.

After a few minutes of just standing around, I told Lyle and Bob to ask the people I hadn't spoke to if they saw what'd happened. I went over to the office, where I kept a bottle, and flopped down on my ass.

I thought about it being in the drawer, but I didn't have none. I knowed I was already too drunk to walk around anymore, and I didn't have an idea in my head about who might of done this. Maybe I should have went over to Doc Plummer's to see how Clete was doing, but I didn't want to know, if it was as bad as I thought it was. And, besides, I wanted to figure out what to do next, if I could.

After a while, I walked down to the livery to look again at where Clete'd been hit. Blood marked the spot, the blood of my friend, where a foul deed was done against him. I looked and stood and looked some more, but I couldn't see nothing that helped me understand what'd happened there.

I went in the livery and the boy was the only one there. "You want me to saddle your horse for you, Mr. Goodwin?" he ask me. He saw how drunk I was and was only trying to help, I see now.

"He'll, no!" I yelled at him. "The day comes I can't saddle my own horse, you can bet that'll be the day I'm dead!" That's another bet I would of lost.

I was trying to throw up a saddle-and it wasn't even mine-on my gelding and it went over the other side. Last thing I remember, I was sliding down that horse's flank and heading for the floor.

A hammer was smacking the back of my brain when I woke up the next morning. The livery boy or someone had throwed an overripe horse blanket on me and put my horse in another stall. Rolled me onto some fresher straw too, I discovered. I stood up as best I could and got outside before I threw up the first time. Fresh air cleared my head some and after a while my legs would work nearly right.

By the time I got to Doc Plummer's I was feeling as good as I was going to that day. Plummer was by himself in his office, a square little room with whitewashed boards at the back sectioning off the room where he had a couple of beds.

"You look sick," that lanky old man growled as soon as I was in the door. "Are you sick?"

"Never mind me," I told him. "How's Clete?"

He shook his head and then scratched it good where it was bald in the middle. "I can't tell. He's still out and that's bad. Quite a concussion, I should think, but I could tell a lot more if he was to come around. He caught whatever hit him about seven last evening." Standing up slow, he stretched and then pulled out his egg-shaped pocket watch. "And it's almost eleven now-nearly, oh, fifteen hours. He don't come out of it soon, chances are he isn't going to."

I pushed the door to the other room open a little and saw Clete lying there with his head all wrapped up in a bandage. "What hit him, anyway?"

Plummer had a sneaky little smile that settled over his face once in a while. "Why, I thought you were the law after Clete. Suppose you tell me!"

"Well, it wasn't my fault," I told him. "I'm not hired to be on his hind pockets all the time, am I?"

"Not what I meant," he said, sitting again. "I never saw anything like it, that's all, and I don't like not knowing what happened to a patient. Makes me look stupid and it lowers the fee I can charge."

I saw he was trying to help me out with the way I was feeling for letting Clete get hurt, and I appreciated it and reminded myself to try to do a good tum for that peppery old sawbones when I could. "Don't you have any idea, Doc?"

"Well, it's not a gunshot wound, that much I know. There's nothing left inside, I probed it twice clear to the bone. Looks more like a tear a cannon ball would make than anything else, but that can't be. Gave him one hell of a whack on both his jaw and his skull, too, whatever it was."

Right then I knew what had done this to Clete. "Like a cannon ball, Doc? You mean like a solid ball or like an exploding shell?"

"Why, like pieces of iron thrown out when one explodes, of course!" he hollered at me. "Solid ball would've taken his damn head clean off. Weren't you in the War?" he ask.

"Well, I was, but I never saw a man hit by cannon fire. I have got to go look at something now," I told him. "You sure he ain't awake in there maybe?"

"I doubt it, but you can go see for yourself if you want to," he grumbled, picking up his newspaper.

Clete was a sorry sight. He had bled a little through the bandage that was wrapped all the way around his head and down under his jaw. Both his eyes and most of his cheek on the side he was hit was swelled up tight and bruised nearly black. He was breathing, I could see, but real slow and not deep enough to suit me. I touched his hand and called his name a time or two, but his eyelids didn't even twitch.

Doc had nothing to say when I left the sick room, didn't even look up from his paper, so I went over to Clooney's. While I was standing there trying to figure it out, Tubbs come down and set a shot of rye on the bar in front of me.

I had started to reach for it before I thought. "What's this?" I ask him.

"Why, that's what you always have!" he said. "I can't give you nothing stronger, if that's what you're looking for."

"No, it ain't," I told him squarely. "Take this away and bring me a couple hard-cooked eggs-and a cup of tea, I guess." That's what my grandma'd always give me to settle my stomach.

I thought for a minute he was going to fall over. "Tea? We don't serve tea in here!" After he picked up the shot and drank it himself, he looked me in the eye while he wiped the bar with his rag. "I'll get you the eggs, but we got no tea." He started into the back and then turned around. "I got a pot of coffee I made for myself. You can have some of that if you want."

I nodded and he went to get it.

The coffee helped some, but I could only get one of the eggs down. I knowed if I ate the other one I'd lose them both. After going up to my room and washing my face and putting on a cleaner shirt, I went back to where Clete'd been hit, blood all over the place. That piece of lead that'd hit him had to be somewheres, but after an hour or more I still couldn't find it. I don't know what made me drift toward the livery, about three rods off. There, half of it wedged into one of the weathered boards, stuck in about as high as your chest, was a bright shiny sliver of metal so sharp I cut my finger trying to pull it loose. It was a little more than an inch long and as wide as your thumb nail. Thicker than a slice of bacon and sharp as a razor on three sides.

I took it straight down the street to John Tate's store.

"This here's a piece of one of those musket shells, ain't it?" I ask him right off, plunking it down on his counter.

He looked it over real careful before he spoke. "Looks like lead," he answered, "but I can't be sure. I never saw one before you and the sheriff brought those in the other day. Where'd you find this?"

"Stuck in the side of the livery," I said. "About fifty feet from where Clete was hit. Ain't likely this is the piece that hit him, but I'm betting it's a piece
like
the one that did. Now, I need an answer. And if you can't give me one you're a hundred percent sure of, at least give me your best guess. Is or ain't this a piece of one of them exploding things?"

John Tate picked it up again and studied on it 'til I wanted to hit him, he took so long. He carried it over to his bench and filed on it and bit it and I don't know what else.

Finally, he come back. "If I must say yes or no, I'll have to say yes. You see here where-"

I didn't listen to the rest of what he said. I saddled my horse and was out in the hills beyond the livery pretty quick. After looking down at that stable a long time, I got it fixed in my mind where Clete must of been standing when he got shot. I walked back and forth and up and down, and I was about ready to give it up 'til I had better light, when I saw where someone'd laid on his rubber sheet or whatever. And he wasn't so careful about picking up his butts this time, but there were no more exploding shells to be found.

About thirty yards off, down in a shallow ravine, is where he had tethered his horse to some sage, and judging from the piles of horseshit, he'd stayed here some time. Two days, it looked like. I could see the rings where he'd set a bucket, a canvas one likely, so I guess he'd brought feed and water along. This boy knowed what he was about. I followed his trail north and east but it come night pretty fast and I stopped. I wasn't prepared for no chase through the countryside and I didn't know if I ought to go anyway.

I sat my horse for a while and just listened to the night sounds. Those two shots I heard while I was in the bar with Jenny and Corrie Sue, they was really only one shot, I saw, after thinking on it there in the peace and quiet of the evening. The loud one, the one I heard first, that would of been that damn shell exploding. I knew then why Bill James thought he'd heard an echo. The second shot, that would of been his rifle–
whose
rifle? Who in the hell would be trying to kill Jesse Mcleod and Clete Shannon both?

Some bird I didn't know the name of was finishing his sundown song and before he was done, a poor-will started in. I got to pitying myself some, I admit, over how my friend lay hurt and how everyone was waiting for me to do something about it, and I didn't know what to do. My, the world seemed a dark and lonely place. Like standing in a hole where you could barely see the rim up above. In a minute I seen how unmanly that kind of thinking was and put those thoughts aside. A coyote commenced to howl a time or two. I reined my horse around, kicked him good in the flanks and headed back to Two Scalp.

Next morning, Doc Plummer said Clete had come out of it a little, late in the night. Mary was sitting there beside him when I went in the back room, and I wisht then that Doc had told me she was there. I don't like busting in on a man and his intended bride, even if they was only holding hands, which they was. More truthful, she was holding his hand, but it didn't seem like he was holding hers much, because he was still out.

"He's going to be all right," Mary whispered to me, her face one big smile and runny with tears. I stood there just hanging on to my hat for a while. I couldn't see any difference in him, but I guessed Mary knowed what she was talking about. After a minute, I went out to see Doc.

"Is Mary right? Is he going to be okay now?" I asked, pretty quiet.

"More than I can say," Plummer told me, fiddling with the tools of his trade. "He comes in and he goes out, but he doesn't seem to get fully awake before he slides out again." The frown on his face worried me. "And he doesn't seem to hear me when I talk, even when he is a little awake. Oh, she's happy, but that's more than I am."

I asked him some more things, but I didn't understand much of what he told me. A bad bang on the head scrambles your brains like eggs, I understood that. My brother Lewis was kicked in the head by a horse once and the whole time 'til he died he kept asking whether Pa was all right, and he'd been dead for more than a year by then. Doc said they call it concussion, but beyond that I could make nothing out of what he said. Before I left, Doc asked if I could stay the night with Clete. Mary'd stayed last night, and he hated to ask her again. Doc done the night before, and that tall old buzzard looked like he needed more sleep.

I went back out to where I'd followed the track of that sonofabitch who'd sent them exploding shells at Clete and Jesse McLeod. Mostly, I had to remember which way the trail was, for the sign had almost all been blowed away since yesterday. In one place, though, where he'd cut between some hills where water ran, there was some clear prints in the mud. Well, his horse was shod irregular, but I couldn't tell what it was, exactly. They was shaped strange or something, I just couldn't put my finger on it.