“Where is it?”
The old man turned and looked at him. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Your gun. Where is it, tucked under your belt? In your boots? Where is it?”
The old man thought a moment. “It’s in a shoulder holster under my jacket.”
“What kind? Let’s see it.”
“Why? Don’t tell me you’re going to take that too. You might as well know I won’t let you.”
And that stopped him. It was the same kind of standoff they’d been in the day before, only now he knew he couldn’t shoot him. Because he would have done the same thing in the old man’s place, and he realized he was angry because he’d been fooled.
“No,” he said. “If you’d been planning to use it on us, you would have done that long before now. You’ve had enough chances. I’m just spooked from the weather. Like the horses.”
“Sure you are.” The old man stared at him. “It’s an old Army Colt revolver. A forty-five.” He unbuttoned his jacket, reaching in, showing it, a long-barreled western-style like the magnum, but the metal was dull and gray, and there was a crack in the crude wooden handle.
“It still shoots good,” the old man said. “Don’t worry. I can use it.”
“I’ll bet you can.”
Somehow that sounded funny, and he couldn’t help chuckling. Then the old man was chuckling also, and everything was going to be all right.
18
The snow was an inch deep by the time they got back to town, drifting against the buildings, gusting against their backs as they hunched down stiff-legged in their saddles, the manes of their horses matted thickly. Riding by the hotel, he saw Claire come out holding herself in the cold, watching him, and by then he was so frozen through and tired that it was all he could do to nod at her and shake his head as if commenting on the snow. They rode into the stable, unsaddling the horses, feeding, watering them, making sure they were secure in their stalls before the two of them came out, closing the stable doors, turning into the wind to walk up the street through the blowing snow toward the hotel. His eyebrows were caked with snow. He suddenly realized that the old man wasn’t with him anymore. He stopped and turned. The old man was back there in the middle of the street, standing motionless, holding himself.
“Are you all right?”
“I don’t know.” The old man was holding himself rigidly as if any motion at all, a breath even, would break something in him, his face gray against the driving snow. “It’s a cramp or something. From climbing that cliff or heaving those boulders or something. I’ll be all right in a second.”
But he wasn’t. The second stretched on, snow gusting past them. The old man’s face went suddenly rigid, and his eyes closed, grimacing, and then like a shadow that was gone, he was breathing easily again, face loose, eyes opening. “There. You see. I told you I’d be fine.”
“Let’s get you inside.”
“I told you I’m all right.”
They stared at each other. Then the old man was brushing past him, walking heavily up the street into the wind toward the hotel.
Claire was waiting at the door.
“I want to see you,” she told him.
“Why? What’s happened?”
“Now.”
She was walking away from him along the bar toward the kitchen.
“Family troubles?” the old man asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, you’d better see to it. I’ll pass some time with your little girl.”
He nodded, walking slowly toward the kitchen, hearing the old man brushing snow off his jacket, patting the dog.
“What is it? What’s the matter?” he asked Claire in the kitchen.
She was standing by the stove, her back to him. “Close the door.”
He did.
She turned on him. “I went down to the town hall this morning after you left. Sarah was strong enough to walk, and she went with me. We found those records he’s always talking about. A couple of ledgers with about an inch of dust on them on a shelf in back, and they aren’t as full as he lets on, but they’re full enough. There wasn’t any Mexican who was lynched, and there wasn’t any smallpox. The town wasn’t built in 1879, it was built in 1890, and the people weren’t forced to leave. The gold just gave out, and they moved on to better pickings.”
He didn’t know what to say. “You must have missed another set of records that tell a different story.”
Claire shook her head. “We went through that place from front to back. We even checked out the basement and the attic. Believe me, there aren’t any.”
“The difference in dates. He’s an old man. It could be just a faulty memory.”
“That doesn’t explain the business about the lynching and the smallpox.”
“Well, a lynching’s not the kind of thing you want to put in your records. The smallpox might have been on them so fast they never had a chance to mention it.”
Claire shook her head again. “The ledgers go right up to when there were only a handful of people. The last entry is just a formality, a note by one of the last people here to say he’s closing the books off. If there’d been smallpox, he surely would have mentioned it.”
“If he took the time to close the books, why didn’t he take them with him? Are you sure they’re even for this town?”
“The name’s right on the covers. For all we know he was planning to come back and get them and he never did. That’s not the point. That old man’s crazy, and I don’t feel safe around him. As soon as it stops snowing, I want us out of here.”
“But where else is there to go?”
“I don’t care. I don’t feel safe with him around me and Sarah.”
Sarah, he thought suddenly and turned, opening the door.
She was directly across from him, huddled in her sleeping bag in the corner, the old man sitting on the floor beside her.
“Just about this time of year,” the old man was telling her. “And it was snowing then, too, just like now, not enough to make it hard to get around but bad enough to let you know there was more coming and you had to get your work done and get out.” The old man was sitting with his back turned to the kitchen, his words droning on and on in a low-voiced monotone, as if he was working a spell or telling a story he’d told so often that he knew it by heart, and the voice was so hypnotic that it drew Claire and him out of the kitchen over to the bar.
“A river valley like this too,” the old man was saying, “only there wasn’t a town like this but a village and the people weren’t white but Indians. You could see their horses and teepees and cooking fires small down there from up on a bluff like your father and I went to this morning, and the fires were smoking from the snow, and you could see the women walking around clutching blankets. That’s when I was sixteen, why I went away and came up here.”
Claire was standing beside him at the bar, staring. He didn’t know why but he was afraid of what was coming.
“They’d been stealing horses, you see,” the old man was saying, “and not content with that, they’d started stealing cattle, and two of them had been caught breaking into the general store down on the rangeland. Then the townspeople down there caught one of them messing with a white woman and they lynched him. That’s what finally started it.”
Sarah was wide-eyed, unable to speak.
“They sat around getting liquored up all night, and in the morning they decided to teach those Indians a lesson. So about forty of them rode up here drinking and talking and laughing, and when they got up close enough that they didn’t want to be spotted, they left their horses and spread out along the bluff to see how best they could do this. That’s when it started snowing, and they knew that whatever they were going to do they needed to be quick about it.
“But not too quick. Because they’d already figured out that if this was going to work they had to do it just like the Indians would have. Which meant no horses, no wild shouting ride down there into the camp, giving them time to mount up and get out or grab their rifles and start defending. No, they were going to climb down off the bluff and spread out in a circle, coming in on foot from every side, using the long grass for cover. And now that they thought about it, the snow was a good thing after all, giving them extra cover. So they had a few more drinks, passing the last bottles around until they finished them, and then they started down. It was late afternoon when they finally moved in through the grass, and it was another hour before they were close enough.
“I was one of them. Like I said, I was only sixteen and I didn’t know any better. I wanted to see what was going to happen. So they let me come along, leaving two other boys to watch the horses. They put me with a man named Arondale. He’d been good friends with my father, but my father was dead by then, and this man had become like a second father. He often visited my mother. I think he would have married her. I admired him so much you can’t imagine. He used to take me up hunting a lot, and he showed me just about everything I know. A big man. Huge shoulders. Face like a rock. Kind of gentle, though, like your father.”
For the first time, he realized that the old man was aware that he was listening. Claire shifted closer to him at the bar.
“I was with him moving through the grass. I had a shotgun like the double-barrel I use now, and I never forgot how that grass was stiff and bent over in the snow as we crawled trough it. Wore the knees out of my pants that day. And when we were so close that we could see the grease on the women’s faces as we peered out at them through the grass, Arondale held up his hand for me to be quiet, and we waited. There was a time when we had all agreed to start, you see. When we knew we would all have had a chance to get in position. Five o’clock. I remember the pocket watch he used to check that. The glass was cracked. Somewhere coming up he’d knocked against a rock and cracked it. Then somebody started shooting on the other edge of the village, and we couldn’t tell if it was one of us or whether one of the Indians had spotted us, but there was a lot of shooting then, and we were jumping up out of the grass, running and firing. I remember the squaws nearest us dropping, and all around our side of the camp I could see men firing, and we were running. Arondale ahead of me, shooting the first Indian that came lurching from the teepee ahead of us to find out what was happening.
“No, I’m wrong. When I said we all jumped up firing, I was wrong. I didn’t fire at all. I just kept running, and I must have thought I was firing, but I wasn’t, and there was a kind of rhythm to the attack that just drew me into it. Arondale shot three more Indians coming out of that teepee, and when he ran to the next one, he didn’t bother waiting, he just emptied his rifle into the deerskin, bullet holes all across it, and then he turned and clubbed an Indian that was running past him, and then there was so much commotion, so many people running and screaming and shooting that I don’t remember clearly after that.
“Except that I was standing in the center of it all, that much comes through to me, and I was never sure how I made it through that day without getting shot. The real fighting only took five minutes. Mostly all the Indians were dead by then, and there were some of the townspeople running around finishing the wounded, and there were some others that started in on the horses and cattle. I never understood that, how if the stolen horses and cattle were a lot of the reason they’d come up there in the first place why they’d set to killing them, but they did, and the next thing I remember is an Indian girl, sixteen maybe, looked as young as I was. She’d been pretending to be hit, lying on the ground by her dead mother, hoping nobody would come around, but Arondale did, nudging her foot, and she bolted up like a rabbit.
“She’d lost one moccasin, her blanket was off her, showing a deerskin dress with red beads on it, only now that I think about it the beads could just as easily have been blood, and she was running into the wind and the grass, her long black hair streaming after her. I don’t know why but I was running too, and Arondale was ahead of me running, and he’d been in the cavalry. He had a long saber dangling by his side that he’d saved from the war and had put on as a joke, running after her, not bothering to tackle her or anything, just drawing his saber slashing at her. It must have been freshly sharpened. He slashed at her sideways, and he was a big man remember, the force of it cut her deep.”
Over at the bar, he felt Claire clutch his arm.
“But she didn’t die right away,” the old man was saying. “Don’t ask me how, but I came running up to where Arondale was standing looking down at her, and she was still alive, breathing, opening her mouth to say something but she couldn’t, blood coming out of her mouth and her body. There wasn’t any white to her eyes, just big and dark and wide, and you could still see how pretty she’d been as I looked and Arondale was doing something with his pants, unbuttoning them.”
Claire clutched him harder, her fingers digging into his skin as he pulled away from her, walking over, standing behind the old man, and the old man didn’t let on he’d noticed, just kept droning on. “He was cutting her skirt off and—”
He had his hands around the old man’s throat, choking him, digging his fingers in under the old man’s voice box, crushing, and the old man already had his hands up, prying at the fingers, gripping the little finger on each hand, working them back to snap them.
The old man screamed, and he shouldn’t have been able to talk, let alone scream. He was working at the fingers pressed into his neck, trying to snap them, screaming, “And that’s when I shot Arondale. Put both barrels to his head, and that’s why he never married my mother, and that’s why—”
The old man was suddenly free, spinning around. He had a knife that must have been hidden on him. “You want to know what she felt like?” he yelled, red-faced, his eyes bulging. “You want to find out? You touch me once more, sonny, you lay a hand on me again, and I’ll slit you open and let your guts drop out.”
19
He didn’t know what came first after that, Claire’s scream or the explosion that blew apart the left front window. It could have been Claire’s scream first, because of the old man’s knife. Or she could have been screaming from the explosion. He never knew. And his first thought was that somebody had thrown something through the glass or that the wind had broken it, but then it registered on him that two bullets had whacked close together into the wall beside him, and he dove to the floor.