Sliphammer (14 page)

“I was always there but you never paid any attention to me. You weren't interested in me—hell, why should you be? I was a young girl. My father's not much older than you. You were out of my reach, Jerr, and I had to grab what I could get, and the closest thing to you was Rafe, and oh Jesus God I wish I could apologize to him.” She sank down on her knees with one arm across the iron foot of the bedstead.

He was developing a thudding headache that made it hard to think clearly. He had the taste of bile in his throat. He got up, swayed dizzily for a moment, said, “Be back,” and went down the corridor to the front desk. He asked the clerk for Seidlitz powders, got them and a filthy tumbler, and went back to the room to mix the compound. Caroline was sitting on the corner chair chewing her knuckle. He drank the bitter mixture and stood with his eyes closed until it went down into his belly and he felt it churning at work; he poured water into the commode basin and scrubbed his face.

When he toweled the water out of his eyes and looked at her, she was sitting up straight and there was fire in her eyes. She said, “All right, confession hour's over, Jerr. We both made mistakes and Rafe suffered for them but we won't be doing him or ourselves any good going on like this.”

“What do you suggest?” he said angrily. “A celebration?”

“No. But neither one of us is built to spend the rest of our lives wearing sackcloth and ashes over this.”

“You put him out of your mind just like that?” he said, incredulous. “He's not even buried yet!”

“Women are tough,” she said. “My mother died when I was three. My father has outlived three wives. No, I haven't put Rafe out of my mind. I probably never will. But we've got to—”

“Shut up,” he grated. “Shut up and get out. You make me sick.”

“How long do you intend to grieve? Are you going to brood over this the rest of your life?”

“That's my business,” he snapped childishly.

She stood up. “All right, Jerr, you've had a rough time, that's too bad. We've all had a rough time. But you're standing on your own feet—you're better off than you think you are. You're not beaten—not unless you give up. Right now I think you're trying to give up. Hell, be a man, Jerr.”

“Just who the hell do you think you're talking to? Don't crap all over me, Caroline, I don't like being crapped on—I'm tired of it.”

“Sure. You're burying yourself in self-pity. All right, have it your own way. But you're sober enough now to listen to this. While you were out wherever you were, getting your guts pickled in rotgut whisky, that telegram you've been waiting for came.”

He stood bolt still and stared at her, the towel forgotten in his hands. He shook his head slowly in disbelief. “What telegram? What'd it say?”

“I don't know what it said. It wasn't delivered to me, or anybody else, because you couldn't be found. But the Western Union boy spent three hours combing the town looking for you, and by the time he gave it up, everybody in town knew your message had arrived.”

Tree had tossed the towel aside and was headed for the door, reaching for his hat. Caroline said, “Never mind that. The office is closed, the telegrapher's gone to bed and I have no idea where he lives. He said he'd have the message at the office for you when they open at eight in the morning. If Wyatt Earp can wait that long, you can too. And please don't be forgetting, Rafe's funeral is at nine.”

When he flung his hat away and stood with his back to her, grinding fist into palm, she said softly, “Jerr, you don't even know what it says. Maybe it says the job's off, the Governor refused to extradite them.”

And maybe it said to arrest the Earp brothers.

Ten

Only a handful stood on the hillside. A cold wind came down off the mountains, roughing up the aspen leaves, brushing the faces of Tree and Caroline, Sheriff McKesson, the circuit preacher, the undertaker and his two helpers, and three unshaven pilgrims drawn to the funeral by morbid curiosity. The preacher's talk was flat, matter-of-fact, nothing beyond the words from the Book, for he had never met the deceased or even heard of Rafe Tree. When he finished his brief eulogy, Caroline sprinkled dirt on the simple pine casket and stood peering through her veil while the box was lowered by rope into the fresh grave.

The gravediggers stepped forward with their shovels. The preacher turned away, spoke softly to Caroline, shook Tree's hand, nodded to the sheriff, and walked away down the hill toward town in the company of the undertaker.

Sheriff McKesson put his hat on—he seldom wore a hat but today he had, evidently, chosen deliberately to bring one so that he could make a point of removing it, his way of paying his respects to the deceased. Now, setting the hat firmly on his face so that the brim made a straight line across his brow, he walked ten paces downhill and stood waiting with calm patience.

Caroline seemed reluctant to move. Perhaps it was the three morbid pilgrims who refused to budge; probably they intended to stand there staring until the last shovelful of earth was in place. Tree left her standing there and walked off a little piece. He put on his hat and reached inside his coat to take out the folded telegram; he read it over for the tenth time and lifted his eyes to stare toward the rooftops of town.

McKesson walked over to him and spoke in a voice calculated to reach no farther than Tree's ears: “Everybody in town knows what that says by now but I'd like to see it officially, if you don't mind.”

“I don't mind.” Tree handed it to him. “It says the Governor's gone to Kansas on business and in his absence the Lieutenant Governor has tentatively authorized the extradition of Wyatt Earp and Warren Earp. I'm to arrest them and take them in custody to Denver.”

McKesson watched him while he spoke; then merely glanced at the telegram, nodded, and handed it back. Tree put it in his pocket.

McKesson said, “Of course, you could just walk into the Inter Ocean and tell them they're under arrest. You could do that. If you want to commit suicide. Or get laughed at. Yes, now, think of that for a minute—what happens if you go in to arrest them and they just laugh at you? What do you do? Start filling the air with bullets? You wouldn't get a gun out of the holster before you be whipsawed by eight different guns from eight different directions. They've got that whole street covered like an infantry battalion holding a strategic strong point.”

Tree murmured, “What are you trying to say to me, Sheriff?”

“I can feel it, Deputy—you're like a keg full of blasting powder, ready to explode. There's a lot of hate and anger in every word you've said this morning, no matter what you happened to be talking about at the moment. When I said it was a nice day you said yes it was and you made it sound as if what you really meant was you wanted to break every bone in my body. The size of your hate makes this valley crowded today, Deputy.”

“Maybe. Or maybe you're reading the signs wrong. Maybe I'm just feeling frustrated and I just want to hit out at anything within reach.”

McKesson shook his head and glanced upslope at Caroline. Tree, thinking about Rafe, kept having other things intrude on him. The telegram had hit him' like a physical blow. It made him feel like a small boy who'd made great threats against an imagined enemy giant—a small boy who'd made vast make-believe plans with the unbridled grim boldness of fantasy, only to discover with sickening helplessness that he had actually taken the step—actually moved from make-believe destructions into an impossible reality. Absurdly, he remembered how he had used to make believe, when he was a little kid, when they had locked him in the loft for some transgression or other.
Was it too late to turn back? Was it done? What the hell am I doing here?

Uphill, Caroline came away from the grave, her face hidden by the borrowed veil. Tree stepped off to meet her, saying over his shoulder, “I'll be seeing you sometime, Sheriff.”

“I'll count the hours,” McKesson said with dismal humor, and went away down the long slope to town.

Tree glanced across the bleak anonymous grove of grave markers and brought his attention to rest on Caroline. Her body, clothed in severe black, seemed rigid with ill-controlled wrath.

She didn't speak right away. They walked downhill together, not touching each other, and behind him Tree could hear the scrape and chink of the gravediggers' shovels. Only when they were beyond the carry of that sound did Caroline stir from silence. She removed the veiled hat and held it at her side as she walked. Her eyes were sleepless-raw, but they burned with fevered brilliance.

She said in a hoarse voice that seemed drugged, “Well, Jerr?”

He only shook his head, and after a single frown at him she kept her peace. They walked together into town and Tree led her to a point a block from the Inter Ocean, where they stood and looked at the place; and he thought with sour irony that just thirty-six hours ago he had walked into that place and had a drink with Wyatt Earp, and they had laughed together over a coarse joke of Wayde Cardiff's. Just thirty-six hours, and now he could no more walk peaceably into that place than fly to the moon. It had turned into a fortress and the drawbridge was up against him.

Caroline said, “Jerr, do people always have to be scared?”

He had no answer for that; what he said was, “If that warrant was for Cooley—”

“How would that make any difference?”

“I've got a reason to want Cooley.”

She stepped in front of him to face him. “You're wrong, then. If Cooley's guilty so is Wyatt Earp.”

“It wasn't Earp that shot Rafe.”

“Earp could have prevented it. It amounts to the same thing, Jerr—don't you see that?”

“I don't think he had time to stop it.”

“He had plenty of time,” she said viciously. “He could have—if he'd
cared.
”

“No. You're letting your temper get in the way of your sense.”

“Am I,” she said without inflection. She threw her head back to look him in the eye. “I'll prove it to you. Will you come with me and listen to a man?”

“What man?”

“You'll see when we get there.”

“Where?”

“Just come,” she said, and walked off. A few paces away she stopped to look back and see if he was coming. He broke loose, shaking his head, and went with her. She turned the corner and headed in the direction of Poverty Row.

On the way she said, “You still don't want to arrest Wyatt Earp, and it's not because you're scared—”

“I'm not?”

“You are, but that's not what's making you hesitate. It's that you don't really think Wyatt Earp deserves to be arrested. You're not sure where justice, is. You think Wyatt Earp's a big wonderful man, you still believe all that dime novel junk—you think he's the man of the legend.”

“You put it a bit strong. He's a human being. But there's a good chance if I arrest him he'll get railroaded.”

“Only an innocent man can be railroaded,” Caroline said. They crossed a dust-caked intersection. Several blocks ahead he could see, over the low rooftops, the railroad trestle which was Poverty Row's landmark.

She stopped in front of a boarding house and nodded. Tree held the door for her and they went inside. She seemed to know exactly where she was going; she went through the narrow foyer and turned up the stairs without glancing into the parlor whose door stood open across the hall. She said over her shoulder, “I was here last night,” and went right up. He followed her to the head of the stairs, where she turned left down a hallway lit only by the weak daylight that filtered through a small window set in the fire door at the far end. A little way along, she stopped at a door and lifted her small fist, whereupon a door behind her opened, across the hall, and a stout woman in a soiled apron appeared.

Caroline said, “How are they?”

“They all right.”

“Is Mr. Sparrow in here?”

“I reckon. You knock and you'll find out.”

Coming up, Tree could see past the stout woman into the room behind her. There were two cots, both occupied by men in bandages—one on the leg, the other across his shoulder: probably the two miners who'd been shot by Earp's people in the street fight.

Caroline was knocking at the opposite door. Little Floyd Sparrow answered it. The stout woman went back into the sickroom and closed the door. Sparrow gave Caroline his nervous glance and acknowledged Tree with a brief look of smouldering preoccupation.

Caroline said, without warmth, “I want you to tell him what you told me last night.”

Sparrow stepped back to let them in. His mouth was turned town in a scornful expression which seemed to have been shaped by a long, intimate acquaintance with life's dour iniquities. Instead of making an immediate reply, he walked across the room and sat down on the sill of the filthy window, hipshot, swinging his free leg loosely. Caroline walked in and stood beside a writing desk, the entire surface of which was mounted high with disordered piles of books and pamphlets—atheist tracts, radical labor monographs, and, curiously, a copy of the Book of Mormon.

Tree propped his shoulder in the doorway, admitting to himself that he had let Caroline lead him here by the nose only because it afforded him a cheap excuse to postpone making the inevitable decision and doing what had to be done. He tried to put some show of interest on his face.

Sparrow gave him a twisted glance and said, “She tell you what I told her?”

“No.”

“Are you interested?”

“Why should I be?”

“Because it's about your brother—how he died.” Sparrow's city-bred voice was high-pitched, abrasive. “I was there, you weren't.”

“Sure. Does that guarantee your word's gospel?”

“Why? Because you expect me to make up a lie that will put the Earp gang in a bad light?”