Friends (32 page)

DuShane's head snapped around and he looked at us, his pale gray eyes flashing fire. Though I'd been studying his sign for weeks, that was the first good look I got at his face, which was long and skinny like the rest of him. His nose was more like the beak of a hawk than a regular nose, and his teeth, the few he had, was yellow as piss. A big ugly scab stretched above one eye, probly where the barrel of my .36 hit him. The whole front of his shirt was dried brown blood. His dark hair was streaked with gray, thin in front and long, and it was plastered to his face and red buzzardy neck and down into his eyes. To say it plain, he looked like hell. Fresh blood'd oozed from the wound all down his muddy pants, and his foot there laid right out to the side-out of joint at the hip. Must have hurt him bad, but his face didn't show it. What it did show was what he'd a liked to do to us.

Of course I was surprised at what Clete said, about hanging him. It was something an Indian or a Pinkerton would say, tell you what he was going to do to you before he done it, just to watch you squirm, but it wasn't like Clete to act that way. I thought on it some more while I pulled on my boots. Somehow, I just couldn't believe he would take it that far, even after I thought it over good. "Why you going to hang him?" I ask.

He sopped up the last of his bean and bacon juice with a bite of bread, then chewed and swallowed before he answered. "Well," he said, smacking his lips some, making me think of Banty Foote. "Partly because it's a waste of time not to. And partly because I don't feel like nursing him all the way back to Two Scalp, where they'd just hang him anyway. Mostly, though, I'm going to hang the bastard because I feel like it. On top of that, I asked him something and the sonofabitch won't answer me." Clete tossed his tin plate next to the fire and poured us both a cup of coffee. When he handed me mine, I seen just the hint of a sly smile on his face.

Well, of course I understood then. I seen that Clete was just throwing a scare into DuShane to get him to talk, trying to find out whatever it was he wanted to know. After he finished his coffee Clete stood up, fished some paper out of his saddle bags and walked off into the brush.

DuShane sat and stared at me.

"What'd he ask you?" I ask him.

"None of your gawdamn bidness!" he spit out. You could hear the rebel clear through his talk, the surly way they like to draw out their words when they're mad.

I had a sip of my coffee and lit my pipe. "Well, it's your funeral," I told him. "But it'll cost you your life, of course, not telling him what he wants to know. Clete Shannon is not a man to trifle with, as you have already found out once today. You better understand. He'll really do it-hang you, that is. Course, it's your life, and if you want to toss 'er away this afternoon, you found the certain-sure way to do 'er. I seen him hang men for less cause." Naturally, that was a lie. I never even seen Clete so much as shoot at someone who wasn't trying to kill him, let alone take a man's life in cold blood.

But that old boy didn't even blink an eye.

Clete come back and just stood there a minute before he spoke. "Let's get this over with. Help me boost him into my saddle."

I led his horse up close, and then Clete took his rope and tied a noose while DuShane sat there and watched him do it. Clete got on one side of him and me the other. DuShane started to squirm when we begun to lift him, and his hurt leg, which was on my side, twisted more out to the side and he let out a terrible howl and then went limp, which made it easier to set him square into Clete's old McClellan. As tall as he was, he didn't seem to weigh nothing at all.

He come to with a start and didn't appear to reconize us for a minute, but he seen the fix he was in, all right. "Help me, Lord, help me!" he shouted, trying to look up through the pines to the sky.

"You'd be better off praying to the Devil, you sonofabitch," Clete said. He put a foot in the near stirrup, put the noose over DuShane's head and then tightened it on his neck before stepping back down. "You earned this when you set that old woman's house on fire." He handed me the end of the rope and walked downstream a ways, looking up.

DuShane watched him and then turned to me and spoke, looking and sounding a little nervous both. "What's he doin'?"

I took off my hat and rubbed the different sore spots on my head. "Why, I suspect he's looking for a stout limb to hang you from. If I was you and wanted to live 'til sundown, I'd tell him what he wants to know. What was it, anyhow?"

"Go to hell, you damn Yankee! I ain't answerin' to him or you or
nobody
!"

I figgered it would do no good to explain to that cracker I was a Texan.

"Bring him down here," Clete yelled.

When DuShane and me got there, maybe sixty yards and up from the stream a piece, Clete took the end of his rope and tried to throw it over a high, thick limb of a dead pine, one that'd shed about all its lower branches. After missing a second time, he found a stone the size of his fist, tied that to the free end, and finally got his rope up and over the branch he'd picked out. That done, he yanked it tight so that DuShane had to sit up high in the saddle just to draw his breath. Keeping his line taut, Clete walked out behind his horse a short ways and then throwed a couple hitches around a smaller pine, pretty high up, for he was at the end of his rope.

When Clete come back, he drew his Remington, cocked it, and held it high. "I hope you burn in hell," he said, his voice just above a whisper.

"He was my
boy,
my only
boy
you killed!" DuShane hollered, twisting his head around as best he could so as to see Clete. He had kept himself together up 'til then, but now his face was twisted up with fear and I saw the piss darken his pants and some of it drip from his boot heel onto the dead pine needles.

"Then why the hell did you tell people that Whitey was your brother?!" Clete demanded.

I remember it struck me as odd right then that Clete was going through all this just to find out whether Whitey was this man's son or his brother. I couldn't see how it could be so important to him so as to give DuShane the pain of putting him in the saddle-though after I thought on it, I realized we'd of had to set him up anyway, for he surely could not walk. But at the same time it also struck me odd that Clete was so mad as he was-and he was, for the veins was standing out on his neck. Then again, maybe it was just that DuShane wouldn't answer him for so long. Nosir, Clete Shannon was not a man to be took lightly.

DuShane turned his face front again, more in my direction, and got hisself more under control. "He was my brother. Don't hang me, Sheriff. Don't do it!" And then he lowered his head and started to cry, big sobs that shook him all over.

I thought for a minute he was saying whatever he figgered Clete wanted to hear, anything at all just to save his life. What he said made not a bit of sense until I chewed it up in my mind a minute, but what I come up with, that just couldn't be. "How could-?" I started to ask him before it hit me the way it was. "Well I'll be damned," I said.

"Yeah, and so will he," Clete said, flat as Kansas.

"It was all Ma's fault!" Jezrael DuShane hollered, the tears running down his face. "Climbing into the loft with me, her clothes all off. I wasn't more'n a boy, an' she
made
me do it with her. Pa woulda
kilt
me if he found out Whitey was my boy and not his'n!"

I glanced at Clete and he was nodding his head, a smirky smile darkening his face and making him look mean as Satan. I knowed then what he'd wondered about last night, that he'd figgered this all out, mostly. He knowed for sure now. "Goodbye, mother fucker," he said, and then slapped his horse hard with the flat of his hand and fired his pistol at the same time.

It happened so fast I just stood there froze to the spot. DuShane must of had his good foot in the stirrup on the other side, for when that big strong gray took out, his foot stuck there and I saw that man angled out and stretched out between horse and rope so that he appeared to get longer than he already was, right in front of my eyes. And then his neck snapped with a crack like a splintered oak limb.

Still I stood there glued to the ground. His boot come off and the horse run off and DuShane swung back and forth like the pendulum of a big grandfather clock. The toe of the other boot, his bad leg, twisted right out behind him, scraping little furrows into the deep pine needles on every swing. And while he swung he also spun, facing me and then away and then back toward me again, a startled look on his twisted-up face, his eyes popping out like a fish's and his tongue lolling to below his pointy chin, dripping spit and bloody froth. Already his face was the color of ashes.

It was like I woke up right in the middle of a nightmare, and I run back toward where Clete'd tied his rope. But as I passed him, he reached out and give me a short, square punch to the chin and I went down like twenty pounds of steer liver.

"I figured you'd try that," Clete said, bolstering his Remington and then rubbing his knuckles while I was still on the ground looking up at him. "Let him alone. He's dead, if you didn't know it already. And don't cut him down. When I hang a man, he stays hung." He started downstream after his horse. After a while I heard him down below, giving his loud whistle as he went, trying to call Whatever in.

I stood up and looked at that tall, bony man twirling at the end of Clete's rope. He didn't swing no more, but he still spun slow, dragging his toes. Looking at that man's awful face and broke up body, something turned in me. Something changed right then, even though I didn't exactly know what it was. It felt like the morning you wake up and it dawns on you that summer's over, that from then on it's all shorter days and getting colder.

I took out my clasp knife and cut Clete's rope close to where it was tied to the tree. DuShane hit the ground with a thump. I walked back up to my horse to get the folding shovel and saw my hat and clothes there beside the remains of our fire. I had forgot I was still in my union suit and put them on. Then I took the shovel and went back down to where DuShane lay in a heap.

I had the grave about half dug by the time Clete rode in. "I thought I told you–" but he didn't finish it. I didn't look up at him, either, just kept digging. After a minute he rode on up to the fire.

It was hard digging there, I recall. Weren't many stones, but the roots of them pines crisscrossed all over the place and I wisht I had an axe. When the hole was deep enough to suit me, I took the noose off his neck and pushed him in with my foot. He was a man and deserved burying, but I didn't straighten him out comfortable in his grave and I didn't do no praying over him either after I covered him up.

Clete had everything packed by the time I got up to the fire and all I needed to do was put up the shovel. I handed him his rope.

"Well, you feel better now?" Clete asked.

"No, I don't," I told him, mounting the bay.

Clete got up on his horse and we headed down the valley, him in front. We just rode quiet, the sun coming through the clouds every so often, angled over to the west. Going along, I saw a bird I had never saw before, up high in a big pine. Orangy yeller, he was, with some black on his wings and head. White on the wings, too. An oriole, I figgered, but not a kind that I'd ever saw. He chattered at us and then piped a pair of notes, so as to say goodbye, after we passed, and I thought of Mandy then.

Where the trail got wider, after the valley spread out some, Clete dropped back beside me. "Look, I'm sorry I punched you. There was no call for me to do that. You were right. Burying him was the right thing to do."

I didn't say nothing.

"If it will make you any happier," Clete said, smiling at me, "we can step down and you can punch me."

I shook my head. "No, it don't bother me that much being punched. I've been punched plenty before, harder than that."

"What the hell's eating you, then?" His face looked like he was tasting something not to his liking.

"Was it fun fooling me like that?" I ask him.

"Whadda you mean?"

"What do
I mean?
You know damn
well
what I mean! You knowed you were going to hang him the whole time, whether he answered you or not!"

"Of course I did," Clete said. "I told you I was going to hang him. Didn't you hear me say that?"

"Yes, I heard you. But the way you acted, I thought it was all just to make him talk. I didn't even know what you ask him. I figgered it was something important, something … I don't know what. Let's hear you say you didn't try to make me think you was just throwing a scare into him. Go on, let me hear you say it!"

"Ahh, this is bullshit. You're acting like a goddamned old woman." He spurred his horse ahead and we traveled another mile, saying nothing to each other, before he dropped back beside me again.

"You're right, Willie. I needed your help, at least I didn't want to fight you over doing it, not in front of him, and I knew you wouldn't go along with it." He looked at me square and offered his hand.

"No, thanks," I told him. "I don't shake hands with no murderers."

He dropped his hand and looked at me like I'd slapped him hard in the face. "Murderer? I think you're a little confused, aren't you? It was DuShane who killed Banty and those people back by the White and Nell Larson. Remember Nell, Willie? Remember that night she died, all burnt up?"

"Of course I do, and I'll remember this day just as long."

"Well, that's the law business, son. Executing horse thieves and killers is a part of it."

I pulled the bay up sharp and after a couple steps, Clete done the same with his horse and looked back at me.

"No," I told him,
"Executing
is what a judge and jury and a hangman does after a man's had
his
say, tells
his
side of it. What you done, stringing a man up for spite and vengeance and God-knows-what-all, that's lynchin'. And lynchin' is murder. Just the same as if you laid in wait for him in the dark and shot him off his horse when he rode by. Just the same as DuShane. No different."