The Big Gundown (13 page)

“Shit,” he said.

Lon scratched up under his hat in the back and tilted it forward so it set low over his eyes and a grin spread across his mouth.

“You want to play again?”

“Okay, but this time I'll take the black ones.”

“That kid comes out colored,” Taylor said, “Dallas may shoot that girl.”

“He might,” Perk said. “It wouldn't surprise me none.”

Then they moved away from the window and went and sat at the table and watched the checker game.

J
AKE WAS THERE IN THE SALOON
when the commotion began. He had arrived back in Sweet Sorrow under a dark red sky. Evening came early that time of year and his journey from Toussaint's had been slowed considerably by the snow that in places had drifted as deep as his horse's belly.

He did not know what awaited him upon his return: whether or not the boys from the Double Bar would be there waiting for him, armed and ready to gun him down. He had thought over both Toussaint and Clara's advice to run. It would be easy to swing the horse north, cross the border, and to hell with everything. But if he found trouble in a far-flung settlement like Sweet Sorrow, there was no assurance that he wouldn't find more of it some other place as well. And what would he do each time he found it, or it found him? Run? No. Comes a time when a man has to stand his ground and take trouble head on. Wearily, he thought that if he had stayed in Denver and faced a trial of his peers, he possibly could have proven to them that it wasn't him who had killed Shaw—his lover's husband—but
her
. But he did not then
trust his fate to a jury of his peers, and his fear had won out and he had run. And now he knew what it felt like to have quit the fight and he didn't ever want to have to feel that way again, even if it meant he might lose his life.
There are some things worth dying for
, he concluded.

So he did not turn the horse north, but rode on to Sweet Sorrow, a place he had come to consider home, if there was ever to be such a thing for him, and when he saw the town's lights twinkling in the rosy dusk, he was glad to see them and rode straight to the Fat Duck Café for some hot coffee and a meal.

He sat alone, even though there were others there he knew. Nobody greeted him; he'd become a pariah to them because of the impending trouble with the Double Bar boys and nobody wanted to get in the middle of it. He couldn't blame them. And he didn't.

Fannie came around with coffee. They seemed as complete strangers now.
Funny
, he thought,
how two people can share the intimacy we had that one time and end up feeling like strangers to each other
. She was cordial in the way that a waitress is supposed to be cordial.

She poured him a cup of coffee and said, “Have you decided what you'll have?”

He looked up at her, but she had a distant look in her eyes.

“I'll have the stew,” he said.

She started to turn toward the kitchen.

“How's everything with you?” he said.

“Everything's fine, Marshal.”

“You and Will Bird getting on okay?”

It was a strange thing to ask her, he knew. But right then he felt like he could use some friendly conversation and thought it might lead to such.

She looked at him then for the first real time and he
could see there was still some old jealousy there because he hadn't taken up with her when he could have, that he had turned her down and now she'd found herself another man, someone who
did
want her.

“Will and me are getting along just fine,” she said, then turned and walked to the kitchen.

He looked around at the tables of other diners. The place itself was long and narrow, squeezed between the barbershop and the dentist's office. The German had a stamped tin ceiling set in and painted green and the walls were eggshell white down to the wainscoting. The flooring was four-inch-wide oak planks and the tables were covered with checkered tablecloths. In the back was the kitchen, where the German did the cooking and baking, and you could smell the foods, the kraut especially, which he cooked in large pots, and the breads he baked, too.

Jake drank his coffee and stared out the window there, just inside the front door where he'd taken the only vacant table left because most did not like sitting near the door in the winter when every opening and closing let in blasts of cold air. Droplets of moisture clung to the windows.

He felt a deep, deep weariness and when Fannie brought his plate of stew, he ate it slowly, letting the warmth sink down into him, warming his belly, and he sipped his coffee slowly, too. And when he finished, he put a silver dollar on the table—seventy-five cents for the stew, a nickel for the coffee, and a twenty-cent tip—then stood and put on his hat and buttoned his coat and went out and down the street to the saloon, where he ordered a glass of whiskey and was drinking it when the commotion began.

The girl came running into the main room—one of Ellis Kansas's working girls. She had blood on her right
hand and somebody grabbed hold of her—another working girl, a Chinese—and their screams cut through the din.

Jake moved away from the bar, unbuttoning his coat as he did, thinking if he had to get to his pistol…

“What's going on here?” he said to the girl.

She looked at him.

“He tried to kill me.”

“Who?”

She pointed toward the back, where the girls took their customers.

Jake drew his pistol and said, “You wait here.”

 

It happened so fast Willy Silk didn't have time to think before he realized he'd been stabbed. The girl's knife went in just below his ribs, where his kidneys were. He'd been sitting there on the edge of the bed taking off his boots, his thoughts garbled, floating on the sea of whiskey he'd drunk. He never thought twice about it when she'd come around him the second time and asked him if he wanted to go to the back.

He said to her, “I thought you didn't like me.”

“Why is that?” she'd said, sitting down at his table.

“'Cause of the way you acted with me and that China girl.”

She laughed and said, “Oh that, that wasn't nothing. I was just putting on a front. I didn't want her to have you. I wanted you for myself.”

He looked at her, that pocked face, and that little bone white scar under her chin. He'd wished it silently and now here she was—this ugly whore who had intrigued him.

“Maybe that China girl could join us,” he said.

She maintained her smile and said, “Narcissa is with
another customer right now. But maybe when she's finished…”

“How much?” he said.

“Don't worry about it,” she said. “We'll work something out.” He should have known, but he was already drunk and nothing made sense to him anyhow.

Then they were walking to the back together and he had his arm around her shoulder and she was saying, “It's just right back down here.” They walked down a narrow hall with doors on either side and she led him into one and said, “Why don't you go ahead and get undressed.”

So he sat down on the side of the bed and began pulling off his boots and that's when he felt the sudden stinging pain and reached around just as she pulled the blade out of him and stepped back. It didn't seem like all that much at first, but then he saw the amount of blood on his hand where he'd reached around and a second later he felt himself sliding off the bed to his knees. Then it felt like a fire spreading throughout his entire body and the pain turned crippling.

“What'd you do that for?”

She just stood there looking at him, the knife still in her hand.

“You men are all stinking bastards!” she said.

He fell over onto his side then, the pain catching real hold, eating him up, it felt like.

“I stuck you good, you son of a bitch,” she said.

He felt sick. Then he wretched all that whiskey he'd been drinking and it burned in his throat when it came up again. Jesus Christ, he'd never felt such pain.

The room was small. Just a small bed against the wall with a lavender spread. The walls were bare except plaster and cracking in places and up in one corner he could
see where it had rained once and water had come through and stained it. A crucifix hung above the bed. The yellow light from a lamp on a nightstand just below it shone upward with eerie effect. There wasn't even a window. The floor was bare and cold underneath him and he pressed his face to it to try and cool himself down a little because he was hotter than hell. Everything had the smell of sex and blood to it and something ominous passed through him like a cloud passing before the sun, cutting off the light.

Then he heard her go out and shut the door behind her.

 

Jake tried the doors until he came to the one with the man lying on the floor. He took the lamp from near the bed and brought it down close and saw the pool of blood underneath him. The back of the man's clothing was wet with blood. He had one boot on and the other off lying nearby.

The man was groaning.

“What happened here?” Jake said.

The man gritted his teeth.

“That bitch stabbed me, is what…” he said.

Others had come and gathered in the doorway—men who'd been drinking in the main bar and had heard the woman's story and had come to set things right, to bring some sort of frontier justice to a man who would assault a woman; whore or no whore, a woman was still held in high esteem and in short supply. Jake could hear them behind him muttering their displeasure with “any son of a bitch who would rough up a woman!”

Jake lifted away the man's shirt and saw the stab wound. Saw the blood spilling from it, dark and copious. The blade may have gone into a kidney.

Beneath the scraggly beard, the man appeared young,
but he was ill-kempt and smelled of liquor and sweat. He wasn't someone he'd seen around Sweet Sorrow before. There were growing grumblings of wanting to take the fellow outside and teach him a lesson.

“This man's near dead, I need some help carrying him over to Doc's place.”

Nobody stepped forward.

“Gus, get your ass in here.”

Gus Boone stepped sheepishly into the room.

“Take his ankles,” Jake said.

Gus looked around.

“But Marshal…”

“Take his ankles!”

The sometimes jailer, sometimes town drunk did as he was ordered and together they carried Willy Silk over to Clara's, into the rear entrance where the late Doc Willis kept his office and infirmary and where that very moment Ellis Kansas lay with a blood poison and himself fighting off death.

They laid Willy Silk on the exam table on his side and Jake lighted several lamps and brought them in close. Clara had heard them from the parlor and now entered the room.

“What can I do to help?” she said as soon as she saw the blood.

Jake told her while Gus shrank back and then eased himself out the side door. And as he walked back to the saloon, he could see dark splotches of blood in the snow; it reminded him of when he used to kill chickens for a living and how their blood would be everywhere and it made him a little sick to look at it.

And later, after Jake had cleaned and stitched the wound, he and Clara sat in the kitchen across from each
other. She'd gotten down a decanter of sherry and poured them each some and said finally, “Is he going to die, too?”

Jake looked toward the door that led back to the infirmary and said, “I don't know, but there is that possibility.”

“How did it happen?”

“You don't really want the details, Clara.”

“You think that I'm too fragile to know such things?” she said.

“Maybe so. It's enough of a burden to you that I have to use your house for a hospital.”

“I wouldn't have this house if it hadn't been for you.”

She didn't have to remind him of the fact that he'd been instrumental in trying to save her dying father, the famed gunman, William Sunday, and that it was Sunday who had given him the money for her to buy the house.

“It was over a woman,” Jake said. “Something between him and one of the whores at the Three Aces. I don't know exactly what yet.”

Clara poured them each a bit more sherry and drew her shawl tighter around her shoulders.

“Jake. I'm afraid for you. It is as though dreadful things are happening all around you and you're doing your best to stave them off, but in the end you won't be able to. In the end I am afraid that some men will carry
you
in the back door and lay you on the table and I'll have to see you like that—like those poor men back there—maybe even worse…”

She fought back the tears.

“Let's not worry about things that haven't happened, Clara.”

“I can't not worry about them.”

“Can I ask you something?”

She nodded.

“Do you believe in fate? That whatever is meant to happen will happen, irregardless of what we do?”

“I don't know, Jake. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. I don't think you are fated to die because of those cowboys. I think you can choose to run and save yourself, if that's what you mean.”

“No,” he said. “I can't choose that. I think whatever is going to happen is going to happen, no matter if I stay or run.”

She rose and came to him and put her arms around him and drew his head to her bosom and held him like a mother might a child and he felt her strength pass into him, it seemed, and he said, “I'm so damn tired, Clara.”

“I know you are, Jake,” she whispered.

And while the snow fell quietly outside, she led him again to her room.

“I should go,” he said.

“No.”

And with the gentlest care she undressed him and then herself and brought her warmth and strength into the bed next to him. And they lay holding each other beneath the heavy quilt.

He said, “Wake me early, so I can be gone before the girls get up and find us.”

“Don't worry about them,” she said. “Just sleep, my love.”

He closed his eyes. He felt her warm sweet breath on his shoulder.

“Just sleep,” she whispered.

And for that moment the world seemed as peaceful as it looked under the mantel of snow, there in the quiet
darkness of a red sky and the winking of lights along Main Street.

As though the world, too, was exhausted and wanting to sleep.