Savage Guns

THIRTY

I found Rusty and Burtell holding the fort.

“Any trouble out there?” Rusty asked.

“It’s quiet. You fellers go on home. I’m staying here tonight, and can’t sleep anyway.”

“But what if they rush you, try to spring the kid?”

“You’ll hear it, and I’ll have help.”

“Doesn’t seem right,” Rusty said.

“Here’s what you do. Rusty, you patrol Saloon Row and then call it quits. Burtell, you check the rest of the town and call it quits. And I’ll see you both in the morning. You’ll need your sleep because tomorrow we got to be sharp.”

Rusty stared at me. “It’s you that’s carrying a lot on your back.”

“Yes, I am,” I said.

They slid into the night, and I barred the door behind them. There was only one kerosene lamp lit, and the whole office was thick with shadow, which is how I wanted it. I unlocked the jail door, and sure enough, Admiral Bragg started bellowing at me.

“You let me out or you’ll pay for it,” he said.

“You’re staying put.”

“Clean my pisspot.”

“I’ll do that in a little bit.”

He clasped the bars and rattled them. It seemed almost like he could bend them apart and step through and come at me. But the bars held.

Then he picked up the bucket and threw the contents at me. The bucket clanged hard against the bars. There wasn’t much in it, and it missed me and puddled in the aisle.

“Kind of a stink to live with, ain’t it?” I said.

I stepped over the puddle and headed for King Bragg’s cell, down one and across.

He lay on his iron bunk, staring upward. He seemed lost to the world already, as if he had somehow passed away, but he was alive still.

“They treated you all right?” I asked.

He didn’t reply.

“You get the meal you wanted?”

“I don’t want any food. What good is a last meal? A fancy last meal does nothing for a man about to die; it’s offered so the hangman can feel better.”

I guessed that was true.

“You want to come out and stretch in my office?”

He stared, absorbing that, and nodded.

I unlocked, and stepped aside, wary and ready for anything. But the kid just stepped through, and walked ahead of me down the aisle past his pa.

“If you can let him out, you can let me out,” Admiral said.

“I’d be a foolish sheriff if I did that,” I said.

“You already are,” he said. “And you won’t be sheriff for long. You’ll be out of office—one way or other—in hours.”

“Thanks for the warning,” I said. “Your daughter’s told your men to put their guns away tomorrow.”

Bragg loosed an animal yowl that scraped my nerves, but I ignored him. I let the kid out in the office, ready for trouble, but he just stood there in that lamplight.

“Have a seat,” I said.

King Bragg sat, staring at the walls, at the gun rack, at the stuff on my desk, and then sort of sagged into the chair.

“Anything you want to talk about?” I asked.

“No. There’s nothing. There’s no tomorrow, so there’s nothing.”

“Anything you want me to do? To tell people? Anything you want to write?”

He stared into the lamp so long, I thought he wouldn’t say anything. “I have a question you won’t like,” he said. “How can you sit there talking to the man you’re going to hang in a few hours?”

He was right. I sure enough didn’t like that one. I guessed that most hangmen don’t want to meet or know the ones they slip the noose over.

“Just dumb, I guess,” I said. “You want to know how I feel? I feel like opening that door and telling you to fly into the night and don’t never come back to Puma County. But I can’t. I got a duty and I got to do it, and what I feel don’t count.”

“I hoped for it,” he said. “Maybe it would be good. But mostly I’d be a fugitive, my life no good.”

His pa was back there bellowing some. “Let me out, you son of a bitch,” he was saying.

“My ma would take offense,” I said.

“My mother wasn’t like my father. He controlled her, just like he controlled Queen and me and his men, and tried to control his neighbors, and the politicians, and you, and tried to control the rain and the snow and the land and the water and the stock and the game. She simply died, because that’s all she could think to do when she got tired of being his woman. He taught us to be like himself. He gave me a gun four years ago and told me to make the whole world afraid of me, and then I’d be a real king.” He stared at me. “Look what it got me.”

“You and Queen, you’ve both busted loose of him.”

“Too late,” he said. “She set herself free?”

“She did.”

“That’s why she’ll live a good life. I was too late.”

We sank into one of them silences, and I watched a moth flit around the lamp. It’d likely get itself burnt pretty quick.

“Do you think there’s an afterlife?” he asked.

“I’m inclined against it, but I haven’t got it figured out yet,” I said.

“I guess I’m slated for hell,” he said. “If I killed three men, that’s it. So God says, get down there and suffer, and get burned up, and know there’s no hope from now until the end of time. Maybe that’s it. Maybe this is just the beginning. Maybe this is the easy part, getting my neck snapped in one bad moment. It’s the slow stuff, the roasting in the flames. A thousand years from now, ten thousand years from now, I’ll still be roasting away down there, and there’s no getting loose.”

“Sounds almost as bad as heaven,” I said. “I sure get myself in a snit when I think of getting stuck there. I don’t know how to play any harp. I wish there was some sort of in-between place where I could have a rip-roaring time now and then, and then get a good beefsteak and a shot of red-eye, and find me the prettiest gal anywheres.”

“Do you believe it? Really, really believe it?” he asked.

“Heaven and hell? No, not like that. Not eternal damnation, not eternal wandering around on streets paved with gold. No way.”

“Maybe just a little time in heaven or hell, and then—you know, nothing?”

“Makes more sense to me,” I said. “But my ma always told me I’m a little slow, so don’t take my word for it.”

“Do you think I’d get to see my mother?”

“That would be the good part of it, if you get the chance.”

“Do you think I’d have time enough to tell her that I got into trouble?”

“Maybe you could tell her you stood up to your pa, and made yourself a man.”

I saw him start to crumble, and I was afraid to say anything more. He didn’t quite. He just struggled to hold it all in, and pretty soon he did.

“I guess you can take me back there now,” he said. “I want some time alone.”

“You want a preacher tomorrow?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I don’t know what I believe, and he’ll just pray for mercy, and that’s about the last I’ll ever hear.”

“I’ll rustle up a preacher; it can’t do no harm,” I said.

“Maybe it will do harm,” he replied.

He stood, making himself stand real tall and straight. I could see that in him.

I unlocked the jailhouse door, and took him back to his cell. We stepped around that puddle of slop. He walked in, and I locked him up, and he settled down on his bunk, staring at the ceiling. He had a few long hours left, and was probably wishing they’d go fast. He wasn’t fighting or pacing or yelling or weeping or even hoping. He was already gone, at least in his head, and probably that numbness was keeping him quiet. It was hard even for me to look at him there.

I started up the aisle, knowing I’d not get past Admiral, and I didn’t.

“Put us out of here, both of us right now, and you can retire for life,” he said.

“I’ll tell Judge Nippers of your kind offer,” I said. “I’d be a lucky feller, getting to retire at my age.”

“You can have Queen if you want her.”

I stared at him, not quite believing my ears. But he’d said it. It didn’t seem worth an answer, so I headed out of there, glad to escape the stink. I locked the jailhouse door, got me the mop and poured some water into the bucket, and then went back there and mopped up his slop. I wasn’t gonna let any man stink up my jail more than necessary. So I mopped it up until it was halfway decent in there, and then locked up the jail again. I decided not to empty the mop bucket. I’d have to go outside for that, and I wouldn’t do that, not this night.

There sure was a lot of quiet in there by then. It wasn’t late. I had a long night ahead, and a longer day tomorrow. I checked the shutters, checked the barred door, checked the gun rack, and all seemed to be as tight and ready as I could make the place. So there was nothing to do but wrap a blanket around me and sit in the swivel chair until dawn.

We had a seven-day clock in there, one you wound up on Saturdays, and it was clicking away. I was glad that the kid wasn’t hearing that clock tick like that, because he would be counting the ticks, adding them up into minutes and hours. So it just ticked away, and I sat in the chair with a scattergun on the desk beside me, and waited for the seconds to come and go.

I got itchy every little while, and hiked around the office and tried to settle back in my chair. The kerosene lamp burned away, and the reservoir went down some. I wanted real bad to see the sky, see the stars that would be up there long after I left the world, but I didn’t want to open them shutters. I didn’t know what was out there. But the itch became so big in me that finally I decided to try it. I turned the lamp wick down until the flame blued out, and it was dark as hell in there. I felt my way over to the window up front, and opened the shutter a little, half expecting a pole or something to crash through the glass. But there was no one out there, and no one could see me looking out in that darkness. The stars were up there, cold chips of light that comforted me some.

It was real quiet back in the jail. I closed and barred the shutter again, and settled in my swivel chair, and left the lamp unlit so it was pure dark in there, and all I knew was the ticking of that clock. I got to hating the clock because pretty soon it would be telling me of the things I had to do, and so the clock was my enemy, ticking away, ticking me toward the time I took that kid up onto the scaffold with his hands tied behind him and fitted the noose around him and turned it a little to the left and tightened it just right.

That’s when I heard a sharp knock on the barred front door.

“Just a minute, just a minute,” I said, tossing aside my blanket. I made my way through pitch dark to the door, and felt around some for the bar.

“Who’s there?” I asked.

“You know perfectly well who it is. Who else, eh?”

“I sure don’t,” I said.

“You’re slow, all right, Sheriff. I keep telling you, smarten up.”

I knew who it was then. “You alone?”

“I wanted to bring that idiot with me, but he sobered up first and got out while I was still soaking the sauce.”

I eased the door slightly, knowing that in pitch darkness I wouldn’t be much of a target.

“Dammit, Sheriff, open that door,” Judge Nippers said.

I did, and he slipped in. I closed it behind him and dropped the bar once again.

“What are you trying to do, save the county a nickel of lamp oil?”

“You just stand right there, and I’ll light up,” I said.

I felt my way back to my desk, found a lucifer, and thought to hold it far from me, just in case I was a target. I scratched it to life with my thumb. The flare was blinding. And there was Judge Nippers, looking the worse for wear, holding his flask of Kentucky, glaring at me.

“That punk Carter Bell perjured himself,” the judge said. “You got some paper and nib and ink?”

“I do,” I said.

“That’s good, because I’ve got some court orders to write,” he said.