Gun Play at Cross Creek (9 page)

Chapter 16

MONDAYS WERE ALWAYS
busy at Lyle Henessey's store. People took Sundays off. Part of the time they spent in church. The rest of it, they spent realizing what they were short on or just plain out of. Everybody had the same idea. Get there early to get the best pick. And when the Monday in question was the first Monday of the month, the rush paled only in comparison to 'forty-nine.

Moving freight across half a continent tended to brutalize it just a little. Nails got a little rusty. Soap turned a bit rancid. The knives got dull and the bullets tended to run a yard or two short or high and to the left. Nothing, it seemed, was as hardy as the people themselves. And when you had one store to shop in, you damn sure wanted to get the pick of a decidedly uncertain litter.

By ten o'clock, Henessey was breathing heavily, as much draped across his counter as leaning on it. Morgan was younger, but he was less experienced. It was doubly hard on him, and left him little more than a limp copy of his employer. The pace started to slacken around eleven, and at eleven-thirty, Henessey felt reasonably sure of a lull to wander off for a beer and fresh rainbow trout at The Hangin' Tree Hotel's restaurant.

As he walked out the door, he told Morgan he'd be back by twelve-thirty, when it would be his turn for lunch. It sounded more like wishful thinking than a promise he had any chance of keeping. As the customer traffic diminished still further, Morgan was starting to pace himself, saving what little energy he had left to chew his noon meal.

It was ten after twelve before the store was devoid of customers for the first time since Henessey had turned the key in the lock at seven o'clock.

Morgan dropped into a rough chair crudely fashioned from a nail keg and four two-by-fours. It wasn't comfortable, but it held him up and for that he was as grateful as he had the energy to be.

His eyes were starting to droop. He felt like he hadn't slept in a week. Most people bought in bulk, and that meant hefting most things by the sack or the barrel. He was only dimly aware that the tinkling bell was someone opening the door. He felt a little puff of hot air blowing in from the street. He knew he should open his eyes, but he was too damned tired to care.

He thought it might be Lyle, and started to open his eyes, or at least struggle to keep them from slamming shut like a pair of matching mausoleums. He felt a hand on his shoulder then, and turned his head in slow motion.

It wasn't Lyle. It was Tom.

“Dad,” he said. The word sounded strange on his lips, and it was plain that he was just as aware of the novelty as Morgan was.

Bolting upright, Morgan rubbed his tired eyes. “Tom, what are you doing here?”

Tom popped a folded piece of paper from his shirt pocket. Morgan looked at him more closely, forcing his eyes artificially wide, trying to look alert and in command. He noticed the sweat stains down the center of Tom's shirt, the dark semicircles under each arm. “Hot out there,” he said.

Tom nodded, then flicked the paper with a thumbnail. “Supply day,” he said.

“How come so late? Most of the people around here seem to get up in time to watch creation.”

“Yeah, well, it's a small place, but the workload isn't. I had a few things to do. Mom wanted to come herself, but I thought I ought to.”

“You didn't tell her about what happened yesterday, did you?”

“No. I had to tell her why you needed the spare saddle, so I made something up. I think she bought it, but I'm not sure.”

“What'd you tell her? I don't want to give it away, in case the subject comes up.”

“Told her a stirrup broke.”

“She didn't ask how come I couldn't ride with just one?”

“Didn't give her a chance to.”

“Well, listen, don't go getting any fool notions, now. We don't know what happened, not really. Not either one of us.”

“You don't, maybe, but I got a pretty good idea.”

“Yeah, how's that?”

“I went to school with Deak Slayton's brother Tyler. Seems like if you put two and two together, you come up with Kinkaid. I do, anyhow.”

Morgan nodded. “Me too, but I don't think I can do anything with it. Or about it.”

“I know.” Tom fell silent. He stared at the shopping list, looked around the store for a couple of small items, and, when he spotted them, brought them back to the counter. There was something on his mind, but Morgan was going to stand back and let him get to it in his own way. When he was ready. There was no percentage in pressing too hard. It seemed like the less pressure Morgan brought to bear, the better his results were likely to be.

When it was no longer possible to delay, Tom sat down on the counter, kicking his boots against the front panel like an anxious four-year-old. The drumming sound of his heels on the hollow front was the only sound in the store for a long moment. “See,” Tom finally said.

Morgan waited.

When Tom didn't go any further, he asked, “See what?”

“I been thinking.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I wasn't exactly fair to you when you first got here. I . . .”

“Don't worry about it, Tom. It's not . . .”

“No, let me finish. I messed it up and I got to set it right. The best way I know how.” He looked at his father through hooded eyes. “We got a lot of catching up to do, just like you said. I almost didn't give you the chance, but that's all finished with. I don't want to see anything get in the way, now. Or anybody.”

“Son, there's nothing you can do about it.”

“There should be.”

“You're right. There should be, but there isn't. See, ordinarily, when something like this happens, you can go one of two ways. You can go to your gun and handle it yourself, or you can go to the law, which anyway is almost the same thing, because the law isn't really much more than a better gun than you can shoot yourself. But where do you go when the law is the problem, rather than the solution?”

“It isn't fair, though.”

“Life isn't fair. Wait a minute, I take that back. That's too damn easy. Sometimes we make it impossible for life to be fair. The things we do, they ripple, and you can't control that. You throw a rock in the water, there's gonna be some ripples. You throw two or three or four in, all those ripples interfere with one another, they connect up in funny ways, they change each other, and those changes change things somewhere when they collide. What I did, Tom, and there's no two ways about it, I threw a whole damn pocketful of rocks into the pond. All I can do now is wait until the water settles down again.”

“But that was so long ago.”

“Sure, it was a long time ago. But that doesn't make any difference. All those ripples are still out there spreading further and further. I can't even see 'em anymore. But I know they're there. And I know that Brett Kinkaid is just one of 'em. And maybe not the worst. The thing that sticks in my craw is that that's all he is, a goddamned ripple. And I made it myself. I made Brett Kinkaid. It's my fault, no two ways about it.”

“Still . . .”

The bell tinkled again before Tom could finish his objection. Morgan looked up, but he didn't really have to. He knew who it would be.

He wasn't wrong.

“How's the storekeeper today,” Kinkaid asked. He laughed, a phlegmy sound more like something was caught in his throat than an expression of amusement. “You gonna lose your hand and your eye, you keep pushing pins and flour, Morgan. That's no way for a man like you to earn a living.”

“It'll do,” Atwater said.

“Oh, Morgan,
Morgan
, you're selling yourself short, that's what you're selling. What's the matter with you, lost your nerve?”

Morgan took a deep breath. “You need something, Marshal?”

“Surely do, Morgan. I surely do. Need me some more of them Remington Arms .45s. Hope you got some in stock. See, I been practicing a whole lot. My hand's got blisters on it, I been practicing so much.”

“Maybe you ought to find some other way to enforce the law, Mr. Kinkaid.”

“Now, see, that's where you're wrong, Morgan. There is no other way to enforce the law. Cowpokes and hard cases, they don't understand no other way. You ought to know that. Or has it been so long that you can't even remember what it was like?”

“I remember.”

“Do you, now? Do you remember that last few seconds, just before you draw your gun? Remember that funny feeling on the back of your neck? Hell, I can feel the hair on my arms rise up. Almost like I could count 'em. I hear my heart beating in my ears. Ba-boom. Ba-boom. And you notice things about the other guy, too. You see his eyes get real wide. Sometimes, an eye jumps a little, a little throbbing thing is there in one cheek, like a chick peckin' at a shell, maybe. But I see it all real plain.”

“You're welcome to see whatever the hell you want.” Morgan slapped a box of shells on the counter. “Dollar fifteen,” he said.

“Can I run a tab, Morgan? Seems like I use so many of these things, I just might be keepin' Henessey afloat.” He picked up the box of bullets and hefted it, like a man appraising a large jewel he suspects might be flawed in some way, but which is so large he can't refuse to admire it.

“You'll have to talk to Mr. Henessey about that.”

“What if I just stick this here box in my pocket and walk out? What would you do then, Morgan? Call the marshal?” He laughed that same strangled laugh.

“I guess Mr. Henessey would have your pay attached.”

“Would he do that to me?”

It was Morgan's turn to laugh. “I can't think of any reason why not, Mr. Kinkaid. Deadbeats generally get what's coming to them. Even in Cross Creek.”

“Oh, yes, Morgan. All sorts of folks get what's, coming to them. Especially in Cross Creek. You can bank on that.” He fished the money out of his pocket and slapped it on the counter. “You surely can.”

He finally turned to Tom. “This must be your boy,” he said. “He kinda favors you.”

Morgan didn't respond, and Tom stared blankly at the marshal, his face flat as a shovel, and just as steely.

“Nice family you got, Morgan. Pretty little lady, the missus is. You tell her I said hello again, would you?”

“I don't think so.”

“Just being friendly, is all. A man's got to be friendly with his neighbors. Especially when he knows he gonna be seein' a lot of them.”

“You finished, or can I get you something else, Kinkaid?”

“Finished? Why, no, Morgan, I'm not. Hardly begun, to tell the truth.” He tucked the box of ammunition in his pocket, then tapped it through the cloth. “Don't run out of these, now.” He nodded at Tom, flipped Morgan that same snotty salute, and walked out.

Tom stared at his father, but he didn't know what to say.

“Forget it, Tom,” Morgan said. “He's all smoke.”

“Gunsmoke, maybe.”

Chapter 17

“I'LL BE BACK
in a while, Dad.” He walked across the street and Morgan watched him go. Each time he lost sight of Tom, it was like losing him all over again. He was sensitive, maybe too sensitive, to how much of his life had been spent without the boy and, worse, how much of the boy's life had been spent without him.

To himself, he whispered, “I've got to stop thinking of him as a boy. Katie was right. He's all grown up. He can't ever really be my son, but I hope he can become my friend.”

When Tom stepped through the door of the dry goods shop across the street, it was as if he had turned a page in a book. One chapter had ended and the next had not yet begun. He stared after the dim, open space where Tom had been a few seconds before. He couldn't decide whether he was looking at a new void in his life or the return of that emptiness that had been there for so long. He rubbed his lips with one hand, then turned back to his work.

Packing Tom's order, he kept thinking about Brett Kinkaid. He had to find some way to close that particular book altogether. He didn't want to run, had done enough running, really. He knew that what he had been running from was not so much his past as it was himself. No way in hell he could outrun that particular fury. What he had to do was to become someone else entirely, change himself so completely that he would seem to be someone else not only to others but to the man who stared into his shaving mirror every morning.

A tall order.

In the back room, a sack of beans draped over his shoulder, Morgan was clinging to a ladder when he heard the first scream. A piercing shriek, it sounded more like a bird cry than a human voice, a screaming eagle, or an angry hawk. He shrugged it off, even when a deeper voice responded. Neither was intelligible, and he was getting curious. By the time he reached the floor, a full-blown argument was in progress. A man and a woman venting some inexpressible spleen, maybe the ultimate war between the genders.

Probably sex somewhere in the bottom of that barrel, he thought, as he dropped the beans on a sack of flour. The bottom sack cushioned the blow and spewed a great cloud of powdery dust. Morgan coughed, and clapped his hands free of the flour residue as he walked to the door.

Already he could see a crowd gathering in the street. The men were laughing, the women talking among themselves and pretending not to look. When he reached the doorway, he saw the antagonists. A woman in a slip and bare feet stood on the open second-floor porch of The Hangin' Tree Hotel. My hotel, he thought. She was gesticulating at a cowhand in the street, who kept shaking his head, pointing and shouting something in no language Morgan had ever heard. But he understood it, all the same.

People were beginning to treat the argument like a theatrical performance, even clapping after a particularly histrionic exchange. As near as anyone could make out, the woman, whose name apparently was Marlene, felt she was entitled to compensation for certain services of an intimate nature she had rendered to the cowhand. For his part, the cowhand, a man known only as McKay, refused to pay on the grounds of incompetence in the delivery of said services.

As the nature of the dispute became more widely appreciated, the men laughed louder, and the women started to drift away. The latter talked among themselves, raising their own voices to drown out the argument.

Morgan leaned against the roof column to the left of the door. He spotted Henessey in the crowd, who saw him and waved, a grin splitting his face into unequal portions from ear to ear. He gestured for Morgan to join him, but Morgan refused.

He was getting ready to go on back inside when he spotted Brett Kinkaid leaning out of the marshal's office door.

Morgan cupped his hands and shouted, “Lyle, shut him up, quick.”

Henessey turned. It was obvious he hadn't understood and Morgan started off the porch, pointing down the street toward Kinkaid, who was outside now, standing with hands on hips and shaking his head.

Henessey got the point at once, and bullied his way through the crowd. Draping an arm around McKay, he tried to drag the cowboy away, but it only seemed to heighten the intensity of his passion. McKay broke free, turned long enough to plant a stiff arm, with open palm, in the middle of Lyle's chest and shove him away. The crowd parted like waves around the prow of a ship, then closed again as Lyle stumbled and fell at the rear of the throng.

Morgan stepped off the boardwalk as Kinkaid started up the street. Henessey was struggling back through the crowd again, but no one but Morgan and Lyle seemed to realize what was about to happen, what would certainly happen unless someone could shut McKay up and get him off the street. Even then, Morgan knew, it might be difficult to convince Kinkaid to let it alone. But if McKay was still shouting when the marshal reached him, it would be altogether impossible.

Henessey managed to break through the front edge of the milling circle. Morgan was at the back of the crowd now. Lyle snaked a thick arm around McKay's neck and yanked him backward. The cowboy turned again and caught Henessey on the jaw with an uppercut that staggered the older man and sent him reeling. Marlene shrieked even louder, whether for Henessey to mind his own business or for McKay to leave the storekeeper alone wasn't clear.

The words “leave him alone” hung in the air, but no one except Marlene seemed to know to whom they referred and to whom they had been addressed. McKay didn't care. Glad to have an adversary he could deal with on more familiar and more direct terms, he swung at Henessey again. He bore in with his arms flailing, but he was three sheets to the wind and the punches sailed harmlessly wide as Henessey charged forward with his head lowered.

McKay tripped and fell and Henessey, too much a gentleman to press his advantage, stood circling until a boot caught him in the groin and he doubled over and fell to his knees, vomiting all over McKay's legs.

Morgan broke through the crowd and hauled Henessey out of reach of another kick. He had his back to the cowboy when something caught him on the side of the head. He went down hard, and realized McKay had cracked him with his pistol barrel. Morgan lay there staring up at the blue sky, his head spinning. He was aware of a warm trickle down the side of his head, the sticky moisture puddling in his right ear.

Then everything went black.

Kinkaid was at the back of the crowd now, and the men started to back away as he shoved on through. McKay, still blissfully unaware of the marshal's arrival, and geared up enough that he might not have cared if he had known, tucked his gun away and turned back to his original adversary. Marlene had a better vantage point, and she stood with her knuckles crammed between her painted lips.

It finally dawned on McKay that something was wrong. He whirled in a circle once, then again before his eyes lit on Kinkaid. He was drunk, but not so drunk he couldn't realize he had dug himself a very deep hole. The marshal walked past the cowboy and stood under the porch of the hotel. He pointed at Marlene and told her to go inside.

Tom Atwater was stepping out of the dry goods store next door to the hotel as Kinkaid pulled his shiny silk jacket back off his hip. He saw Morgan on the ground, Henessey bent over him, and Kinkaid walking toward McKay. The cowboy unbuckled his gunbelt and let it fall as Kinkaid took another step and then another.

“You going to regret that, boy,” the marshal said.

“I don't want no trouble, Marshal,” McKay said. He dropped his gun in the dirt, then backed away, holding his arms out as if to ward off the menace approaching him.

“Too late for that, boy. Trouble already arrived. You're lookin' at him.”

“Leave him alone, Kinkaid,” Henessey shouted. “He dropped his gun. Just lock him up until he's sober.”

“Henessey, you are fat and you are an old man. I don't need any advice from a shopkeeper,” he said. Then turning to McKay, “Pick it up, boy.”

“No, sir.”

“Pick it up. You brought it to town, use the damn thing.”

“No, sir, I won't do that.”

“You might as well, boy.”

McKay hesitated. He started to bend.

“Don't do it!” Henessey shouted. “He'll kill you.”

McKay looked at him. His light blue eyes looked like two huge cornflowers. They bugged out of his face, and beads of sweat coalesced on his forehead and ran down into them. He blinked, trying to unblur his vision as he stared at Henessey, then at the gun and finally at Marshal Kinkaid.

“Pick it up!”

McKay licked his lips and started to bend again.

Tom saw the movement and he saw Kinkaid's fingers uncurl. He launched himself through the air as McKay backed up a step and Kinkaid lowered his hand toward the Colt on his hip. Tom hit him just above the kidneys, driving a shoulder in hard and sending Kinkaid sprawling.

The marshal cursed as he sprawled in the dust. He sat up as Tom got to his feet. He looked up at the young man and his lips curled back in a smile. “Well, well, well,” he said. “Son, you have just bought yourself a world of trouble.”

Kinkaid climbed to his feet and brushed the yellow dust from his jacket. “Looks like you're gonna get to see the inside of our little jail, Atwater.”

Morgan groaned and tried to sit up. Henessey was bent over him trying to wake him up, but Morgan was only dimly aware of what was going on. He shook his head and braced himself on Henessey's shoulder. But his head was spinning and he fell back in the dirt as Kinkaid pulled his gun.

Henessey heard the scrape of metal on leather and leaped to his feet. He grabbed Kinkaid by the arm and said, “Leave him be, Kinkaid. All he did was stop you from killing an unarmed man. You may be the law in Cross Creek, but that ain't a crime, and you ain't gonna
be
the law much longer.”

Kinkaid smiled. “You got to work that out with Tate Crimmins, Lyle. You know that,” he said. Gesturing with his gun, he directed Tom to walk to his office.

“You hurt that boy and I'll see you pay for it, Kinkaid.”

The marshal didn't even bother to glance over his shoulder.

Henessey worked feverishly to rouse Morgan, and when he couldn't, grabbed a couple of men and brought him into the store. He moistened a towel in the horse trough in the alley beside his store and after a few minutes, Morgan regained consciousness.

He was only vaguely aware of where he was, but he knew by the look on Henessey's face that something was wrong. As his head cleared, he remembered seeing Tom step out of the doorway of the dry goods shop, and he remembered seeing Kinkaid push through the crowd.

“Dammit, Morgan, wake up.” Henessey screamed it at him, and he jerked his head away, aggravating the already severe headache that threatened to split his skull in two.

“Kinkaid's got Tom,” he said. “We got to go get him out of jail.”

“Help me up, Lyle, dammit. Help me up.” Morgan got to his feet and went down on one knee almost immediately.

“You come as soon as you can. I got to get down there,” Henessey said.