Brian Garfield (44 page)

After Roosevelt took his seat and the shouting and applause and gunfire were done, the crowd flowed away toward the picnic tables and the kegs and jugs.

Pack cornered Roosevelt on his way off the platform. “Now, does this speech presage your return to active political life?”

“It jolly well does not. I'm a ranchman, pure and simple.”

On the contrary, Pack thought. There was nothing either pure or simple about the pompous dude from New York. You never could tell what devious schemes were being hatched behind the protective reflection of those flashing eyeglasses.

Jerry Paddock loomed before Roosevelt like a woolly mastodon. “You talk real loud.”

Roosevelt faced him. “Mr. Paddock, I've heard that you boasted you'd shoot me on sight. Perhaps I've been misinformed. If it's true, I'm at your disposal. Now's the time for you to get at it.”

Roosevelt pulled his coat back to show that he was indeed armed.

Jerry Paddock looked at Roosevelt's gunbelt, then at his face. Jerry let a while go by, and Pack wondered what he was thinking. Finally Jerry said, “I must have been misquoted. Had a few drinks, maybe. You know how it is.”

“Then we understand each other.” Roosevelt did not conceal his scorn. He turned his back and walked away.

Jerry was in an easygoing mood, Pack observed; but then Jerry was invariably in whatever mood he wanted or needed to be in.

A moment later when Pack climbed down he glimpsed Roosevelt behind the platform—bent over, coughing violently.

Pack turned away and strode toward the punch bowl but Bill Sewall was there. Sewall said, “You see he's no longer the greenhorn.”

Pack said, “He needs to grow up. Some of his remarks were all too transparently aimed at the Marquis, who is the bread and butter of this community. Your employer seems to enjoy throwing raw meat on the floor. He is headstrong and aggressive.”

“Being headstrong and aggressive—now and then that's not such a bad thing. You know he is always trying to make the world better instead of worse, and that's a rare virtue now-a-days. I reckon it may be a failing in him that he sees everything and has an opinion on everything and he is not remarkably cautious about expressing said opinion, but he wants instantly to set everything to rights, and maybe he never will grow up if by that you mean learning that things are not fair, but he has got more heart and more will power than—”

“Will power, is it? Or rabid lunacy?” Pack was impatient. “What about his own tragedies, then? What's fair about the deaths of his mother and his wife?”

“He's put those behind him. He pretends they never happened.”

“Now, how in hell can he do that?”

“It takes strength,” Sewall said. He looked at Pack. “I don't guess I understand you, Mr. Packard. Seems to me you would have to hate Mr. Roosevelt a whole lot to keep from loving him.”

Somewhat drunk, Pack looked up across the river in time to see the light wink out in Madame's bedroom window. He had found out that when Madame la Marquise prepared for bed, two of her maids helped her dress for the night and got out the two large hairbrushes from her silver-decorated toilet set. One maid would take the left-handed brush, the other the right-handed brush, and they would work on Madame's long auburn-red hair. The loose hair was kept in a brown sack and when the sack was half full the hair would be removed from it and braided into plaits so that Madame could wear it as part of one elaborate hairdo or another; it always matched perfectly because, of course, it was her own hair. After brushing her out, the two maids would prop several pillows behind her so that Medora could sleep sitting up in the French canopied bed. Her parents believed that sleeping in a fully recumbent position could cause the lungs to collapse.

Pack sighed. She certainly added more than a touch of charm to the Bad Lands.

*    *    *

In the dream Pack was climbing a dirt trail along a cliffside. It became ever narrower. He knew he'd walked it before but this time he couldn't: fear wouldn't let him. Someone was shooting at him from a distance; he could hear the popping of gunfire. He got down and crawled, belly flat. He still couldn't make it to the top. He began to try to inch backwards, but the trail started to crumble. He called for help but no one came.

Startled, Pack came awake from the rubbish and rubble of his dreams.

He sat up and made himself smile by remembering last Saturday's baseball game. They had soundly thrashed Joe Ferris's boys. What a game it had been.

Recalling it, inning by inning, helped keep his mind off the death he had seen before his eyes—that of the man called Calamity—and those he hadn't seen: Pierce Bolan's and Modesty Carter's and another thirty or so, most of whose names he had known, some of whose faces he had known, a few of whom had shared drinks and conversation with him.

He made his way outdoors on this morning of July fifth. Drunks lay around in crowds. Sewall came tramping out of Joe's store and climbed across a pair of fallen bodies and harrumphed. “Look at them. Like poisoned flies, dropped wherever the paralysis took them. Your Western whiskey's worse than gunfire. Why, this whole misbegotten town could be taken today by three sober men.”

Pack moved on quickly without giving Sewall time to trot out his dubious opinions about the cattle business.

Outside Bob Roberts's saloon Frank O'Donnell stood squinting, evidently sober. He and Finnegan and that lot hadn't been doing much drinking of late, Pack had noticed. Possibly they were afraid a crowd of Stranglers might come upon them when they were drunk.

O'Donnell's shirt, half undone in the heat, showed the weathered bronze of his chest. He was tossing a nickel until he missed his catch. The coin fell into the dust of the street, sinking and disappearing as if into murky water. O'Donnell's pitted face was still, a study in stoicism.

Beneath the bluff along the river Pack heard the boom of grouse cocks and the merry warbling gossip of snow buntings. He needed to be away from the smell of town; he walked across the railroad bridge to the left bank and climbed the slope below the château and came upon two bonneted maids pushing the babies around in their landau-hooded prams. On the hillside nearby the lady Medora was painting, working under a parasol umbrella whose long pointed stake was jammed into the earth beside her. At that moment, apparently unaware of Pack's presence between junipers, Theodore Roosevelt came up, riding the blasted horse Manitou about which he never stopped boasting, and addressed himself to the nearer of the maids: “Be so kind as to commend me to your mistress.”

Pack listened dispiritedly to the loud racket of grasshoppers. It was a terrible time for black flies and mosquitoes and midges. He watched the maid speak to Lady Medora; her mistress looked up with a smile. As the horseman approached she watched him with what appeared to Pack to be a slanting vitality that could not help but incite him.

“Well, madame, by George I am dee-lighted to be at your service.”

The astonishing hubris of the cad!

She rose to meet him, her clothes rustling, and as Pack watched the dazzlement he felt ruddy blood rise in his cheeks.

He knew he should step forward and announce himself.

She wore a trim burgundy habit and a jaunty eagle feather in her hat. He wanted to kiss her eyelids.

There was a melody always in her; it was softly in her voice when she spoke to Roosevelt. “How good to see you. Do you mind the heat awfully?”

It was abundantly clear they were absorbed in each other, so much so that Pack felt forcefully excluded. He turned and walked away.

At the bridge Joe Ferris stood with Huidekoper. They were looking uphill past Pack. Joe was saying, “—the Markee's pampered pathetic concubine.”

Huidekoper replied, “The way you talk, you'd think the poor woman were a Temptation—part of the arsenal of evil with which the satanic De Morès is attempting to subvert and corrupt the good Roosevelt. Why Joe, you're even more suspicious than I am!” He looked up. “Morning, Arthur.”

Pack snapped, “Gentlemen, I surely pity you, for you obviously can't tell who is subverting whom.”

They laughed at him. It was no use. Blasted by the malevolent purgatorial sun, Pack took refuge in the shade of his office and mixed a Seidlitz powder for his hangover.

On the tenth of July the thermometer in the shade of the porch of
The Bad Lands Cow Boy
registered 125 degrees and the strong hot wind seemed to be killing almost every green thing in the country. Two crows on a branch outside the
Cow Boy
shack argued with considerably less raucousness than usual. There had been no rain since April—no growing season for grass; the great range meadows were bone dry. On his rides out of town in search of news and gossip, Pack found the grass brown and wilted, the atmosphere dismal amongst the Bad Landers. Sagebrush had roots deeper than grass, so it would survive where grass would not; but even those clumps had gone a dry chalky blue color. Here and there he saw sickly green leaves on some of the willows and cottonwoods that grew where the subsoil was moist. Fall's colors had arrived three months early. Junipers had gone grey and the ash trees were moulting leaves that went burn-brown without ever turning gold; and even in the sheltered coulees the graze had nearly all been killed by the hot winds.

It was a dismal summer all around. Too hot even for baseball. The abattoir made the town virtually uninhabitable but miraculously the Marquis, harried and beset by enemies, only seemed to keep going faster and faster.

Among other things the Marquis was livid because his stagecoach line had been the victim of obvious calculated sabotage. Two months ago the Northern Pacific Railroad had designated the town of Dickinson—not Medora—as its terminus for Deadwood freight. The churlish railroad lackeys claimed that Dickinson was closer to the Black Hills and the route easier. “Lies,” the Marquis trumpeted. “The Beef Trust is undermining my business everywhere. They're behind the Dickinson coach line—my men in the East are investigating information I've received that the Chicago Jews bribed the Postmaster to award the mail contract to the Dickinson line.”

The fact remained: after only seven months of operations and a loss of a great deal of money, the Medora-Deadwood line was defunct. The stagecoaches were sold and the thirteen way-stations abandoned.

There was much speculation as to how much money the Marquis had lost.

It was a dreadful shame, Pack said to his supper companion in the cafe.

Joe Ferris gave him a wry look and a bleak shake of the head. “You poor blind idiot. The stage route sank in the gumbo slough because the Marquis is a puffed-up fool. I didn't know anybody who'd travel on those coaches. You ever poke your newspaper nose into their safety record?”

“They never had a single fatality. The Marquis is very proud of that.”

“He had plenty fatalities if you count the poor horses. He had bad roads, loads too big to carry—”

“You can't blame him for foul weather.”

“He should have taken it into account. Not to mention Jerry Paddock stole so much there wasn't enough left to provide decent service.”

“Now, where's your evidence of that?”

“Everybody knows Jerry Paddock bought disintegrating harness for the price of new, and untrained horses for the price of broke ones.”

“Now, one trouble around here,” Pack railed, “is that there are altogether too many things that ‘everybody knows'—if I were to listen to you, I'd believe Jerry Paddock shot a man for breakfast every morning.”

“If he doesn't, it's not for lack of the urge to.”

“It's fortunate for you I'm a tolerant man and I understand when you keep blaming all the problems of the world on Paddock and the Marquis. I suppose you'd like to find a way to blame this drought on them too. It's only natural, what with the suspicion that Paddock's the villain who emptied the store and drove Swede Nelson from town, you'd have a score to settle with Paddock. Now, I'm tolerant again because I know you are beholden to Theodore Roosevelt—”

Joe growled, “Be that as it may, gratitude's one thing. Right and wrong's another.”

“—and you notice I haven't badgered you too much just because you've taken to wearing that Remington revolver all the time now, even though I know what ‘everybody knows' about how you've been hiding out Dutch Reuter so you can be sure to deliver him alive to testify at the Marquis's trial. Incidentally tell me—isn't Dutch getting pretty restless, what with the legal delays persisting?”

“There'll be a trial,” Joe said. “Before the end of the year.”

“How do you know that?”

“You have my word on it.”

“Are you the one who keeps writing letters all over the place, stirring things up?”

“Me? No. I'm not much on writing letters.”

Pack said, “Then who is it? Roosevelt? Huidekoper?”

“There'll be a murder trail, that's all I can tell you.”

“Nothing will come of it. The Marquis has the Allen brothers on his side—foremost lawyers.” Pack pushed his chair back. “Where's Dutch Reuter?”

“Why? So you can publish it in the
Cow Boy
and next week we can find his carcass hanging from a cottonwood?”

Pack stood up, filled with anger. He pushed the cafe door open. The hot wind blasted in fitfully, reeking of slaughter. Joe tipped his head back and smiled beatifically. “You can put
this
in your newspaper—you can tell the Markee that he can scheme and plan all he wants, and he can send out all the Stranglers in the world, but before the end of the year he'll be on trial for murder and old Dutch Reuter will be on that witness stand to tell what really happened out on that road where Riley Luffsey was murdered.”

Seventeen

T
he months began to run together in exhaustion for Wil Dow. At the conclusion of fall round-up, with its distressingly small tally, Uncle Bill said, “I call it the abomination of desolation. It makes me pretty fierce to think of the green forest back home in Maine.”