Authors: Bill Pronzini
I put Rowdy under me again and rode up to the brow of the hill. When I looked back from there, Parsons was hammering a staple into one of the new fence posts to secure the length of wire. Putting muscle into the job, too; the whacks of his hammer were like pistol shots in the still air.
Strange man, as well as a disagreeable one. I found myself wondering, as I rode on past the farm buildings, why a woman like Greta Parsons had married him; what she had seen in him that had attracted her. Whatever it was, it was beyond my powers of reckoning. And none of my concern, either. For all they seemed oddly mated, they might be happy and content together. You can't tell about a married couple. You would have to be one of a particular pair to understand the way things were between them, and even then you might not be too certain on some counts.
Still and all, I could not help thinking that she didn't
look
happy and content. And that maybe she deserved better than this tenant farm and better than Jubal Parsons.
SEEING GRETA PARSONS THAT AFTERNOON MADE ME WANT to see Hannah that night, I suppose partly because of the similarities between them. I thought about Hannah all the way back to town, and off and on during the afternoon, and while I endured Ivy's pry-and-prattle over supper. Soon after we finished eating I got my coat and went out and walked around on the east side of town for a while, letting enough time pass so that I would not interrupt Hannah's supper and any evening chores she might have. It was near nine when I finally walked back across the bridge and through town and climbed the rise to the Dalton house.
Hannah was on the porch, as usual, and again I had the notion she was pleased to see me. I also thought I detected a measure of concern in her voice when she asked, "How are you feeling, Lincoln?" right after she let me in.
"Feeling?"
"Your head. The prowler last night."
"You know about that?" I asked, surprised.
"Oh yes. All about it."
"How? I didn't see you in town today. . . ."
"I wasn't in town today."
"But I thought that—"
"That I didn't have callers? I don't, usually." She smiled. It was difficult to tell in the lamplight, but there did not seem to be any humor in it. "The good citizens of Tule Bend tell me things on occasion," she said. "Things they want me to know."
"I don't understand."
"Does it really matter, Lincoln?"
"It does to me. Why would somebody want you to know I was hurt last night?"
"You're sitting here with me now, aren't you?"
"You mean because I come here to see you?"
"At night. You come at night."
"Hannah, I . . ."
"The whole town knows about it," she said. "Did you think it was a secret?"
"No. And I don't care what the town knows."
"The town cares," she said.
"To hell with the town."
"You don't mean that."
"I do mean it. By God, I do. It's nobody's business but yours and mine."
"You're naive if you believe that. The town constable keeping company with the town whore—that is everyone's business, like it or not."
Heat had come into my face. I leaned toward her. "What kind of talk is that? You're not a . . . you're not that kind of woman.''
"The town thinks I am."
"Damn the town!"
"Don't shout, Lincoln. Please."
I
had
shouted, the first time I had ever raised my voice to her. It shamed me; she was the victim, not the villain, and I had no right to be railing at her in any case. I sat back in my chair, put a tight rein on my feelings before I asked, soft, "Who was it told you about my trouble with the prowler?"
"I'd rather not say."
"I'd rather you did. I want to know."
"Why? So you can confront the person?"
''I just want to know.''
"It isn't important," Hannah said. "If I give you one name, I might as well give you half a dozen. People are the way they are—you must know that. You can't change them; no one can change them except themselves, and most have no desire to change."
"That doesn't mean I have to accept it."
"But you do. You
do
accept it."
"I don't."
"You live here, you're part of the town. We both are. As long as we choose to remain, you and I must accept what people say and think about us, what they believe we are."
To have something to do with my hands, I got out my pipe and tamped tobacco into the bowl. I did not say anything.
"Lincoln? You know I'm right."
"Maybe so. But I don't have to like it."
When she spoke again there was an edge of strain to the words. "I've coffee made. Or would you rather go?" Leaving it up to me.
I didn't hesitate. "I'd like to stay, if you'll allow it."
"Of course."
She touched my arm, let her hand linger for a second— the first time she had ever touched me with any intimacy. Then she stood and entered the house.
I sat quiet, fancying that I could still feel the heat of her fingers. There was a dull ache down low in my belly—an ache I knew too well, that in the past had led me down to one of the parlor houses in San Francisco when it became too much to tolerate. But at the same time I felt uneasy and confused and not a little angry. People coming up here on some pretext or other, telling Hannah things about me, making their snide comments to her and to each other—and there wasn't a thing I could do about it.
People are the way they are . . . you can't change them . . . as long as we remain here, you and I must accept what people say and think about us. . . .
Crockery rattled inside, a different sound than when Ivy rattled it at home—or maybe that was just fancy too. The moon was up and it put a silver tint on the rolling wooded hills to the east, painted a stripe of silver on the black path of the creek. Farther south, dredger lights winked and a flat-bottomed boat with a lantern on a pole drifted around a bend toward the S.F. & N.P. swing bridge. A nightbird cried out somewhere, low and trembly, like a lament for something or somebody that had died.
Hannah came back with her coffee service and set the tray on the table between us. When she leaned over to pour, the lampglow showed me the curve of her breast and hips and I smelled again the sweet scent of her sachet. That low-down ache sharpened. What would she do if I touched her, tried to kiss her? Yield, or slap my face and order me to leave?
You’re not a . . . you're not that kind of woman.
The town thinks I am.
Damn the town!
I looked away from her, scraped my mind clear of carnal thoughts, and worked at lighting my pipe. But it was not lust. Ivy would have called it lust, the bluenoses in Tule Bend would have, but it was more than that, it was purer than that . . . damn the town. Goddamn the town!
Neither of us spoke for a time. The silence was better now, easier. I drank the chicory-flavored coffee and smoked my pipe and watched the night. And glanced at Hannah every now and then, when it got to be too much of an effort to hold my eyes away.
I was looking at her when she said, "Have you found out anything more about the man who was hanged?"
"No," I said. "Not much."
"You will."
"So I keep telling myself and everyone else."
"Don't you believe it?"
"I'm worried, Hannah, I don't mind telling you that."
"Why?"
"Because I haven't found out more than I have—that's one thing. Another is Emmett Bodeen, the dead man's brother, he's a troublemaker, for sure. Then there was that prowler last night. Too much has happened too fast and it makes me edgy."
"You think there'll be more trouble?"
"Yes," I said, "I do. I can feel it."
And I could, too, the way you can feel a storm building long before it breaks. More trouble was coming, all right. I was prepared for it.
What I was not prepared for was how fast it arrived.
THERE WAS A BELL RINGING SOMEWHERE, A LONG WAY off.
It got mixed up with the already muddled dream I was having, then brought me groggily awake. Pitch black in my bedroom—middle of the night? And that distant clamor kept on and on. . . .
Fire bell.
The realization woke me up good and proper. Our fire bell used to hang in the belfry of the old Methodist church on Tule Bend Road, before the congregation raised the money a few years back to build a new church. When the old one was torn down, the bell was donated to the town and mounted on the wall of the Volunteer Fire Brigade on Main. It had a crack in it, like the Liberty Bell, so there was no mistaking its sound. And when it pealed as it was pealing now, loud and steady with no pauses, it meant a big blaze somewhere within the town limits—a major alarm.
I swung out of bed, managed to get to the window without falling over anything in the dark. The window faced north and when I raised the shade, there was nothing to see out that way except a faint reddish tinge. The fire was somewhere on the south side of town, then, or west or east. I turned back to the bed and groped for my clothes and got my trousers and boots on standing up. All the while that fire bell kept hammering out its urgent summons.
I put my shirt and coat on over my nightshirt, not buttoning either one, and stumbled out into the hall. Ivy was coming from the direction of her room, carrying a lighted lamp; in her long white nightdress, her pale face backlit by the lamplight, she looked like a scrawny apparition—one of those female ghosts that are supposed to haunt manor houses over in England.
"Mercy sakes, Lincoln, mercy sakes." Her voice was all a-quiver. But there was as much thrill in it as there was concern, like a tent show preacher's in the throes of a sermon about sins of the flesh. "What is it? What could have caught fire at three o'clock in the morning?"
Foolish questions, so I didn't bother to answer. I ran down the stairs, onto the front porch. Outside the racket from the bell built echo after echo until the night itself seemed to have come alive. I could see lights flare up in the other houses along the block, people starting to spill out through open doorways; I could see the blaze, too, or rather the smoke and the weird pulsing glow lighting up the sky, and it dried my mouth, put a tightness in my chest. Whatever was burning was on this side of the creek, smack downtown.
"Oh, my Lord!'' Ivy, behind me at the door. "It . . . why, half the town must be on fire!"
I had no answer for that, either.
My bicycle was at the Odd Fellows Hall, so I jumped off the porch and ran toward Main, buttoning up the rest of my clothing as I went. Others joined me along the way, one of them Sam McCullough. Under the pealing clamor of the fire bell, voices lifted in shouts of consternation and bewilderment.
Trees and houses obscured my view until I reached Main. Then I could see what it was: two buildings in the third business block, just which ones I couldn't tell yet, both sheeted with flame. Burning hot and fast, the way salt-weathered wood structures will. Sparks and embers flecked the smoke that roiled up into the night sky—and there was just enough wind to carry them to nearby buildings, most of which were also old and made of wood. If the wind picked up any more, the whole block was liable to go up like dry tinder in a stove. I had seen it happen once before in Tule Bend, across the creek near the S.F. & N.P. yards seven years ago; six buildings and two men had died in that conflagration. This one could be much worse. If the fire spread to Far West Milling and Beecher's Lumberyard and Creekside Drayage, it would burn the heart right out of Tule Bend.
"Christ, that's
my
place!"
Sam McCullough, running a few paces ahead of me. His saddlery shop, all right. And the second pyre was Joel Pennywell's carpentry shop next door.
Sam broke stride, gawking in disbelief. I ran past him without slowing. There was nothing I could say to him now, and no time to say it if there had been.
The firehouse was in the next block north of the two burning buildings. By the time I reached it, half a dozen men had the hose and pump carts out and were dragging them, axles squealing, across the street toward the creek. Firelight bathed the street in a ruddy glow that glinted off window glass, made blackened silhouettes of the running, milling citizens.
The man working the fire bell was George Brady, the night operator at the Western Union office. I yelled to him, "What happened, George?"
"Ask Walt Barber if you can find him," he shouted back. "He's the one came and got me. Said he saw somebody running away from Sam's place just after it blazed up."
"The hell he did! Who?"
"Said he didn't get a good look."
Walt Barber was the closest Tule Bend had to a town drunk. He lived in a shack downstream, did odd jobs and ranch-work, drank up most of what he earned. But I had never seen, him falling-down drunk, never had to arrest him for public intoxication or any other offense. Harmless fellow, had most of his wits about him even when he was liquored up. If he had told George Brady that he had seen a man running away from the saddlery, then it was a good bet he had. . . .
No time to fret over it now. Or to go hunting for Walt Barber. That fire was getting hotter; I could feel the heat even this far away, hear it thrumming and crackling as it licked up and around at the dark. Embers danced out of the flame-edged smoke . . . and an exploded pine knot as big as a baseball that narrowly missed landing on the tar-paper roof of Kelliher's grocery. If Kelliher's went up, the next three buildings bunched close on its north side would go too—and fast, like torched haystacks. Then only the narrow expanse of Sonoma Street would separate the blaze from Far West Milling and the other buildings lining the basin on this side.
I raced across the street, past the north wall of the grocery. A score of men were already working along the creekbank, some unwinding and laying out fifty-foot lengths of fire hose and coupling them together, others working with the pumps. I cut over to the nearest pump to lend a hand.
One of the men there was Bert Lawless, the volunteer fire chief. He was also Tule Bend's champion complainer, even at a time like this. He said as I came up, "Goddamn pump don't want to work right. I told Gladstone and the council we needed new equipment, goddamn it I
told
them. . . ."
A sharp sucking noise came from the pump's intake and shut him up. Somebody else said unnecessarily, "She's working now, Bert."
"About the goddamn time."
I said, ''We've got to get Kelliher's soaked down first thing, stop any spread toward the basin."
"Don't tell me how to fight a fire,
Linc
," Lawless said in his cantankerous way. "I
know
what we got to do first thing.''
"Then let's do it."
I helped carry the heavy brass nozzle up the bank and over to the grocery, while other volunteers laid the hose out in a line behind to lessen weight and side-pull once the water started to flow. When we were ready I signaled back for them to start the pump again. The hose and nozzle bucked like a dauncy horse; it took three of us to keep the stream of water aimed and steady.
Kelliher's tar-paper roof was smouldering in two places toward the back. We managed to douse both spots in time to keep the entire roof from catching. Then we drenched the rest of it, and the side wall nearest the saddlery. The heat from the flames was tremendous. Sweat rolled off me in rivulets; the back of my neck felt raw. Once, a piece of burning wood landed on my shoulder and scorched a hole through my coat before I could slap it off.
We were moving around to the front when the pump pressure suddenly fell and the stream of water slackened to a pizzle spurt. Lawless said, "Goddamnit, now what?"
Letting the others have the hose, Lawless and I ran back to the creek to see what the trouble was. Mud clogging the intake hose. By the time we helped clear it, the hardware store on the south side of Joel Pennywell's caught fire. I let Lawless go back alone to continue the work on Kelliher's, and joined one of the hose crews working at the hardware store.
Just as it seemed we were winning the battle there, the carpentry shop's roof collapsed in a thunderous roar and a geysering fountain of sparks and embers. One of the volunteers was struck by a flying section of roof beam and knocked flat; I saw that, and I saw his clothing begin to smoulder as he struggled to free himself. The beam had fallen across one of his legs and had him pinned.
I got to him within a few seconds. It was Sam McCullough—as if this night had not been enough of a disaster for him already. Dragging my coat off, I kicked at the beam fragment—I did not dare touch it with my bare hands—and sent it rolling off his leg. Then I dropped down beside him, smothered the burning cloth of his trousers. The inferno's smoke and searing heat robbed both of us of breath, had us choking and me half blind by the time others reached us and pulled us away.
I had to sit for a couple of minutes, back across Main, until my eyes and lungs cleared; but I was sound enough otherwise. Sam had not been so lucky. He had burns on both legs and maybe a couple of cracked ribs. Two of the men carried him over to the firehouse, where Doc Petersen and several women had set up a first-aid station.
Helpless and angry, I sat watching the fires pulse out smoke and throw quivery goblin shadows across the faces of the scurrying volunteers; listening to the heat-crackle, the snapping of timbers, the hiss and spit of water pouring out of the hoses, the shouts and cries and curses. It was like a glimpse of the Pit, and it seemed to go on and on.
The hardware store was burning now too. Forks of flame had claimed one wall and part of its roof. Dry grass in lots on its south side and across the street had also been touched off. When I was ready and able I went back to join the hose crew working there. We extinguished the grass fires before any more buildings were threatened, but there was nothing anybody could do to save the hardware store. Before long it, too, was an inferno.
There were more tense minutes when the saddlery's roof collapsed. But a proper job had been done of soaking down Kelliher's, so the grocery did not catch and there was no spread of the fire in that direction. When the wind began to die down instead of gusting I finally let myself believe we would be able to confine the damage to the lower half of this one block; that we had the fire tamed and close to being licked.
It was another hour, though, and dawnlight was seeping into the eastern sky, before it was completely under control. The final tally was three buildings lost; smoke, fire, and water damage to three others; a few injuries, most of them minor, and no loss of life. Bad enough, but not nearly as bad as it might have been, thanks to the combined efforts of just about every able-bodied man in Tule Bend.
I was exhausted, smoke-grimed and heat-seared, but my work for the night was not done yet. I took a couple of minutes, down at the creek, to wash my hands and douse my head with icy water. Boze was one of a knot of others nearby; I called him over, related what George Brady had told me, and together we went looking for Walt Barber.
It didn't take us long to find him. He was at the firehouse, drinking a dipperful of fresh water from a tub some of the women had brought and filled. Judging from the look of him, he had been on the fire lines too; his lean, scarecrow shape was almost as sooty as Boze's and mine. He was also cold sober, and a little on the shaky side because of it.
We took him aside and I asked him about the man he had seen running away from the saddlery. He said, "I didn't see him up close, Mr. Evans. But from a ways off . . . well, I don't believe he's anybody I know."
"You sure he came out of the saddlery?"
"Well, I didn't see him come out. But he was nearby."
"Which did you see first, him or the fire?"
"Fire. I was just about to run and tell Mr. Brady about it when he come runnin' out of the shadders."
"Where were you at the time?"
"Down toward the creekbank. On my way home."
"Which direction did he go?"
"South. I don't think he seen me."
"How long did you watch after him?"
"Few seconds. I think he was headed for the livery."
"All right. Can you tell us anything that might identify him? How big he was, what he was wearing—whatever you can remember about him."
"Well," Walt said, "well, he wasn't big and he wasn't small. Wore dark clothes." I watched him squinch up his eyes while he worked his memory. "Had long hair . . . yes, sir, long hair. I seen it flyin' out when he was runnin'."
"What color hair?"
"Dark. Black, I reckon. Like a Inyan."
There was a sharpness in my next question: "What about facial hair, Walt? Mustache, beard?"
"Mustache," he said immediately. "I seen it plain."
"Big thick one?"
"Yes, sir. Big thick one."
I fished around in my trouser pocket, found a silver cart-wheel, and pressed it into Walt's shaky hand. He blinked at me and said, "You don't need to give me nothing, Mr. Evans. . . ."
"I know it. But you've earned a drink, Walt. Go find yourself one."
I nudged Boze, and as we started away he said, "You thinkin' what I'm thinkin'?"