Kick Back

Four

In his big Customline outside the takeaway joint Sugarfoot was resting his head, waiting for his knot of bitterness to ease. Then the pain and the shame and the need for comfort told him he couldn’t stay out here all night. He fired up the big motor and drove away from Bargain City, over the Westgate Bridge again and across to his place in Collingwood. He drove slowly, one hand on the wheel, one shoulder against the door. He believed that if he moved he would fracture.

He reached his shabby terrace house feeling as though he’d been away for a week. The lights were on. The others were home, fuck it.

He went in by the back porch. In the laundry he ran cold water into the sink, leaned over, sluiced out his mouth, and washed the crusted blood from his cheek and forehead.

On the way through to the stairs he paused in the kitchen doorway. The wood stove was alight, softening and warming the room. Tina had her numerology chart open on the table. When she was not reading it or absorbing energy from crystals, she volunteered at Friends of the Earth. Rolfe was tinkering with a bicycle lamp. He wore shorts all winter and the high point of his day was running five times around Victoria Park. As far as Sugarfoot was concerned, they were both off the planet. Luckily the house was big enough for him to avoid them most of the time, and they were too up themselves to be sus about what he did for a crust.

Tina glanced up, her face as tight-arsed as ever, then down again. Usually she wore overalls but tonight she had on what looked like a T-shirt the size of a tent over purple tights and about a dozen other garments, so Sugarfoot still had no idea what sort of body she had. She didn’t notice his cuts and bruises.

He went upstairs to his room and closed the door and drew the curtains. He had all night and he was going to ease his mind.

He got out his trunk and unlocked it. With the.32 now in Wyatt’s hands, all he had left in the way of handguns was a replica, a Colt Python.357 with the six-inch ventilated barrel. But he had a Winchester rifle-a.460 magnum, blued metal, burled walnut stock. The genuine article. The problem was size and noise and getting rounds for it. Sugarfoot dreamed of close work with a sawn-off Remington eleven-hundred shotgun firing pellets the size of.38 slugs.

He had a few grams of Columbian left, hidden in a plastic bag in his shoe cleaning kit. Plastic drinking straw, mirror and razor blade. He chopped and sorted the coke into two lines and bent over them with the straw in his nostril. Two quick, strong snorts, one in each nostril, and wait, not long, for the expansion it always gave him.

Then turn on the VCR, slide in The Long Riders, watch the unfolding story of The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid. He was in the wrong century. He belonged then, not now. Carry a gun, use it, no questions asked. Quick raids on lonely towns, then slip away where they couldn’t track you down.

None of that crappy work Ivan made him do, Ivan calling him the Enforcer like it was supposed to make him feel good. Going around collecting debts, putting the hard word on mugs late with the interest. Using his muscles, never his mind.

A long film. Towards the end, Sugarfoot sat forward in his chair, feeling concentrated and alive. He would never tire of this: minutes of beautiful camera work, the action slowed down, complex angles and sound effects so you were actually in there, hearing every shot fired, hearing that incredible low whirring howl of a flying bullet, hearing it hit, a dull slap, plucking bone chips and blood.

The horses rear. The Younger gang regroups. Sugarfoot Younger saves others even as bullets slam into him. Outside the town he slumps over his saddle and when his men prop him up, concerned, he says, ‘Go, save yourselves, I’m finished.’ They don’t want to leave him but he insists. They lift him from his horse and place him behind a fallen log. ‘Give me my Winchester,’ he says. ‘I’ll hold them off for you.’ Already they can hear the posse. Troubled, close to tears, his men mount up again, wheel round and gallop away. Sugarfoot has held up his thumb to them but they don’t see that, or see him settle his Winchester on the log, firing when the posse appears between the trees.

That night, his men come back. They take his body to a secret burial place. Now, at the same time every year, silent, grim-faced men gather at the log. Every year there is one man less. You don’t survive long in this line of work.

Of all the stories in his head, Sugarfoot far preferred this one. After seeing The Long Riders he liked to go back over the action, fine-tuning it.

In another story he sometimes played with, his end is witnessed by a huge crowd and millions of viewers, television cameramen in risky positions filming him picking off Asians, wogs and poofters with AIDS-pinched faces. The government tries to play down his death and his funeral, but it’s impossible, he’s hit a nerve with the people.

But it was a problem getting all the details right in that one.

So he rewound the video. A new story came to him. In this one he uncovered the job Wyatt was bankrolling and picked him off and ran with the take.