The Rock Child (41 page)

“He says go now, he let woman alone. She look plenty funny anyhow, he says. You go, keep going, he watch to see if stop. Take belongings and go to stage today. If stop, he take woman.”

The Reverend got up his best hero voice, and said, “Tell him we accede.”

The packing up went real quick. Saddling too. Last I saw from my saddle was Sir Richard and the Paiutes starting on the boiled potatoes.

CHAPTER THIRTY

That Tuesday morning opened warm and sunny. All of us looked at each other over Maggie’s breakfast with the same thought. Any day might be the last warm day of the year at Lake Tahoe. Pretty quick would come the kind of winter that froze the bodies, minds, and morals of the Donner party. We were all going to be here one more day. Then Sun Moon and Sir Richard would be off to San Francisco, Daniel back to Virginia City, and me, well me maybe into another world, a Washo.

Daniel spoke for everyone. “How about a day of fun!”

“Angling,” said Sir Richard. He had his eye on Daniel’s rowboat.

“Lying in the sun,” said Daniel.

“Bathing,” said Sir Richard, which was his John Bull way of saying swimming.

All of them sounded good to me.

“You go,” Sun Moon said. Her look said, You go act like boys.

OK,
thinks I,
let’s do
.

Sir Richard had brought a fly-fishing outfit to Lake Tahoe, one of those rigs where you cast a made-up fly. We put out onto the lake and rowed around and took turns casting those flies in every direction. I had a good time rowing and a good time looking into the amazing blue of the lake and getting near mesmerized. I wondered about those fish—what kind of critters would eat flies anyway, flies of hair or, worse, real
flies. Luckily, we didn’t catch any, or even see any, so our peace was perfect.

The big man
watched the fishermen on the blue lake. He wore a black duster and a black slouch hat and stayed well in the shadows of the trees on the little rise and eyeballed the men and the boat. He didn’t have a Dolland like the John Bull did, so he couldn’t say if they were the ones. They probably were, if the Chinaman was telling the truth. A hundred bucks oughta buy good information from a Chinaman, but you never knew.

He looked at the lodge. Since he was a patient man, accustomed to waiting for quarry, he watched it for a long time. No sign of activity. Once in a while he watched the boat and the passengers, too, but they never came near the shore.

His instinct told him they were the ones. In a twenty-year career of killing, he had learned to trust his instinct.

It felt very good. He had traveled a thousand miles by coach, bumping over the worst roads in the country, to find these people. He had hunted in Utah, in Nevada, in California. He had endured the parching heat of the deserts and the foggy cold of San Francisco Bay. He had doubted himself, he had cursed himself. Now he had found them. It felt
very
good.

But where was the woman? She was his real quarry.

Porter Rockwell squirmed. A figure was walking out of the lodge. A woman. Not the woman, though. This one was heftier and older. She carried something by one hand, a basket, it looked like to Rockwell. She walked to the shore, set the basket down, and walked back into the lodge.

Where was the nun? In the lodge, probably, doing women’s stuff. She hadn’t left. The breed and the John Bull wouldn’t have let her journey to San Francisco alone.

In a minute, while the men were still playing on the water, he would go down and slip into the lodge. If the nun was there, he would settle with her.

“Let’s eat!” says I.

“Let’s swim,” says Daniel.

I rowed the boat toward the beach in front of the lodge.

“Let’s swim and then eat,” says Sir Richard.

“All right, all right. But I’m hungry.”

“You’re about to get hungrier,” said Daniel.

The cove was shallow, and Daniel said that kept the water warmer. I shipped the oars, stood un in the rocking boat, and started to take off my clothes. I looked toward the lodge. Yeah, it was far enough for modesty. In a jiffy I stripped, teetered on my board seat, and jumped into the lake.

It was like jumping into sherbet.

I flailed all ten of my arms and legs and splashed back to the boat. As I grabbed the gunwales, I took thought. Daniel’s ruse should not be spoiled. “Damn, it’s good!” I spouted.

Sir Richard leapt into the sky and plummeted into the ice water. Surfacing, he shook his head madly and looked daggers at Daniel. But he kept up the spirit. “Splendid!” he exclaimed. “Nothing finer!”

By that time I was back in the boat, shaking like a trill on the keyboard.

To give Daniel credit, he jumped in, too, and grinned stupidly when he surfaced.

What the hell—I dived back in.

Sir Richard dived back in.

When Daniel got back into the boat, we turned it upside down.

Rockwell eased toward the lodge, quietly, from tree to tree, shadow to shadow.

The woman came out of the front door of the lodge, the nun. Right in the open he stopped still.

He tingled. Here she might see him, and no telling what she might do. He had long since learned, though, that movement is more easily seen than stillness. Better to stand stock still in the open than run for the shadows.

She turned left toward Rockwell!

He held his breath.

After a dozen steps she turned right again, along a huge pile of logs. She walked beside the pile, spread a blanket on some grass, and lay down.

Are you mocking me?
Rockwell squeezed his throat down on his anger.

She rested there, easy. Maybe she even closed her eyes. The top of her head was toward him.

He looked at the double-barreled shotgun, wondering if he should have cocked the hammers.
No,
he thought,
too risky
.

The boat turned toward the shore, and Rockwell understood. The naked men would come to the basket left on the beach for them, probably a lunch. Sun Moon lay behind this pile of logs for the sake of modesty. The pile was huge. Gentleman Dan must be planning a fair bit of building.

Rockwell took a slow step backward. The nun didn’t stir.

He stood very still. With his eyes he calculated how many steps sideways he would need to get a tree between them. Eight or ten. He did a shuffle step to the left. She didn’t react. Another. She was still. Still facing her, he sidestepped behind a tree. Then, slowly, carefully, he crept backward, deeper and deeper into shadow.

Now he would circle behind and check out the lodge. He needed to know all the players in this game. No surprises.

We stretched out on the beach, bare skin to the sun. I only wished I could put back side and front side to the sun at once. I shivered in great ripples. I would always have a vivid memory of the cold of Tahoe water.

“I’m here on the other side,” called Sun Moon.

“Where?” says I.

“On the other side of the logs.”

We all looked at the pile and got it. “OK.”

Still dripping and panting for breath, Sir Richard says to Daniel, “I will not forget how you played me for a greenhorn.”

Daniel had no more breath than Sir Richard, but he kidded, “Appears to me you’ve lost your horn.”

I looked around and saw we all three had lost our horns to the cold. Had Sun Moon peeked at us, she wouldn’t have seen a male thing.

Daniel handed out the sandwiches. Anything would taste good. Anything except the big jar of cold lemonade I saw Maggie had included.

I lay on the grass, closed my eyes, slowly fed my face, and felt the sun on my skin. I wasn’t going to move until my thing was warm enough to come back out.

A pretty picture, thought Rockwell. He was peering out the big windows at the front of the lodge. Behind him the cook who called
herself Maggie was neatly bound, dismissed as a problem. Before him, like a beautifully spread table, lay what he most wanted in the world. The nun, the John Bull, the breed, and the man who blew up the mine shaft. Perfectly naked, the men. Some of them probably napping, or at least with their eyes closed. A picture to warm a man’s heart.

He studied the layout, studied the log pile, and knew where he would stand to command the situation.

I wasn’t asleep, exactly, but I was dreaming. I was in a feather bed, and Sun Moon was next to me, cuddled up innocently. I was feeling my own breathing and listening to hers. I could stay there forever.

Klick-kluck
was what I heard.

I didn’t register what it was until it snapped a second time.
Klick-kluck!
That was the ugliest sound on the Earth if you recognized it, the hammer on a percussion firearm being set. When it came twice, that meant that you were facing a double-barreled scattergun.

I forced my eyes open and edged them around slow, up to the log pile between us and Sun Moon. I expect all three pairs of male eyes headed there warily. And all three saw what was risen up there, black enough to throw a black shadow over a sunny day and a whole sunny life. Holding the klicking shotgun, surely loaded with buckshot, and grinning like a devil that’s caught a clutch of sinners red-handed, stood Porter Rockwell.

“Howdy, boys,” says he.

I heard Sun Moon gasp hoarse beyond the logs.

“Miss Holiness.” Rockwell nodded in her direction. He kept both hands on the scattergun, but he didn’t have any worries. No man was going to rush him, not naked into the face of buckshot, which they say makes an oozy corpse. We were caught with our pants down, no joke.

“I’ve come to finish a job,” said Rockwell. “Sorry I couldn’t get here sooner, I had me a problem.” He stomped his left leg, and I saw now a green hide was shrunk tight on the shin—must have broke it in the blast.

He waved the double-barrel left and right. “I’ll need one barrel in that direction,” tipping the muzzle toward Sun Moon. “That’ll leave me a full barrel for your direction, boys, plus the wallop in my belt,” where at least one revolver stuck. “So I wouldn’t get no ideas.”

He looked back and forth from side to side and spread his stance. That left leg looked a little uncomfortable. “No need for more’n one
person to die here. Unless I start recollecting what nuisances some of you has been. Which I likely will.”

His eyes licked at us like a snake’s tongue.

Rockwell surveyed them. He had caught them with nothing in their hands but their peckers, and them shriveled, all the way shriveled.

“We thought you were dead,” said the man known as Gentleman Dan. The sucker Gentleman Dan, the blaster Gentleman Dan.

Rockwell nodded to himself. It felt satisfying, very satisfying. “I meant you to.”

“You found us through Kirk?” Gentleman Dan demanded.

Rockwell grinned and nodded. “A man that’s for sale is for sale to all.”

Rockwell could near see the Gentleman and the John Bull settling in their mind to get square with Tommy Kirk.
Good! You buggers think on that. As long as I let you think at all
.

Asie got up. Rockwell tracked him with the scattergun as he backed off and eased sideways toward the log-pile divider. The gun followed the breed, but the gunman’s eyes clicked back and forth from him to the others.
You ain’t coming closer
. He knew that would get him killed in a jiffy.
What do you want?
Barefooted, the breed struggled to the top and tenderfooted on toward the woman.
The bitch
.

Rockwell smiled. “You think that’ll be more comfortable for her, dying with a naked man close by?” He chuckled. “You think them buckshot will feel any different tearing through the skin and ribs and lungs and heart if you’re near? Or the blood will spill out slower?”

Sun Moon got to her feet. Rockwell pointed the shotgun at her, and said, “That’s far enough.”

The breed kept moving toward her. Now Rockwell understood. “You wanna stand in front of her? You wanna die with her? You wanna hold her and both of you die?”

Rockwell uttered a laugh so low and growly he thrilled at the menace of it. “Wha’ for? You ain’t even humped her. She don’t let nobody have that precious pussy. That pussy is give up to Buddha or whoever. Ain’t none other gonna have none of it.”

He watched them, but their faces stayed blank.
The little bastard better not have had her
. The beast rage rose up, turned once in his belly, and settled back down, watching.

Sun Moon held up a hand toward the breed, gentle-like. He stepped back onto the pile.

Rockwell cackled. “You wanna fight me alone, little lady? You gonna keep big bad Porter from hurting you?”

He flung the shotgun to his shoulder and KA-BOOMED!

She flinched at the sound. Dirt and rock flew up at her feet, and stung her shins. She looked down and saw her loose cotton pants were torn. She knew thin streaks of blood ran down her shins. She was struggling to regain the balance in her mind, after the explosion.

I know the way. It may be my death, I can’t know that, but I know the way. And it is the truth
. She looked inside herself and considered Porter Rockwell, a man. She told herself,
This is what it means, compassion for all sentient beings
.

Knowing, she began. “No,” she said, “I am not going to fight you. And I am not going to run. I am not going to resist in any way. Perhaps you will kill me.”

“Perha-a-ps!” he drawled mockingly.

He switched the scattergun to his left hand, drew the revolver in his belt, and fired—WHAM!

She heard the death metal whip past her ear.

The noise jangles me. If I fail, if I lose my truth, it will be the noise
.

She took a moment to focus.
I am filled with compassion for all sentient beings. That includes Asie, our friends, myself and Porter Rockwell
.

“I going tell you the truth,” she said.

Now Rockwell howls with laughter. “The TROO-OO-OOT?” In a flash he rearranged his face into a sinister scowl. “‘Pilate said unto him, “What is truth?” ’”

She looked at him neutrally, not knowing that name.

“I going tell you the naked truth,” she said, and started lifting her blouse.
This is what I must do, show the truth, tell the truth. I accept death, and I live the truth
.

Porter Rockwell was eating her with his eyes now. Strange feelings raged in him.
And not lust,
he noted, teasing himself.

She pulled her blouse off. Her breasts were small, and the rosy nipples looked terribly vulnerable. She shivered.