Territory (13 page)

If the twisted wire was what Lung said it was—”Who was it meant for?”

“It was not meant for you?”

“It couldn’t have been.”

“The blisters suggest otherwise.”

The silver had shone in the slanting morning sun, sparkled like moving water. He hadn’t been able to look away, couldn’t resist reaching for it. It had done everything but call his name.

Lung asked, “Where did you get it?”

“From a dead man’s hand.” He thought of King’s arm in his own familiar coat sleeve, flecked with tiny powder burns from the firecrackers. There’d been some blood on the cloth, but not much. The arm had been severed after King died. His breakfast sat a little less easy.

He looked up to find Lung staring. “You do not, as the barbarian saying goes, do a thing by half. Was this the man whose death you fear you caused?”

Jesse nodded.

“What was the dead man to you?”

Jesse told Lung the whole tale of assisting in a jail break. He didn’t mention Mrs. Benjamin’s name.

“You knew the man was rightfully imprisoned, yet you helped him escape?”

“It seemed like the thing to do.” It had, too. And not just because Mrs. Benjamin had looked so desperate.

Lung shook his head. “You said a similar thing, I recall, about hiring the opera singer in San Francisco.”

“I said it about a lot of things then. This was different.”

When Jesse reached the part about giving his coat and spectacles to King, Lung’s eyes widened, and he leaned forward.

“Tell me everything about the clothing.”

Jesse had a sudden sinking feeling. “On my way to get the horse, I got my old coat out of the rubbish bin behind the tailor’s where I’d tossed it. I thought it might come in handy. Then when I helped King into it—”

“You put it on him with your own hands?”

“His were shaking too much. When I got it on him, I thought of the spectacles, that they were the last thing anyone would expect to see on King’s face.”

“So you took them out of your pocket—”

“No, I took them off my nose.”

Lung squeezed his eyes shut, as if absorbing bad news. “And as you did, you said … ?”

“Good God, I don’t remember. Something like, ‘Nobody will recognize you in these.’ ”

Lung covered his face and made a very odd noise, somewhere between a snort and a wail. “Of course. A strong, decisive pronouncement. And as you carried out these actions, you felt a peculiar sensation, like mild drunkenness.”

Yes; just what he always felt when he was doing something stupid and reckless. Perhaps a little more so, this time. “I think I was humming ‘The Minstrel Boy.’ ”

Lung looked down at the thing on the table, and a muscle sprang into relief in his jaw. “When next you feel that way, stop what you are doing, go back to your lodging, and lie down until it goes away. Any other course of action may shorten your life dramatically.”

“Never mind my life. Did I help shorten Luther King’s?”

“Have you never before shortened a man’s life?” Lung asked.

“As far as I know, nobody ever died because I was stupid and careless. If that’s changed, I want to know.”

Lung folded the handkerchief around the twisted silver and handed it to Jesse. “This does not name its maker. Happily, your work is also mute. Indeed, if you blunder about in this fashion, your new enemy will not believe you a threat even if he learns it beyond all denial.”

“Lung, what did I do?”

Lung smiled sweetly. “Science.”

Jesse squinted at the front of the Oriental Saloon. It was before noon, and Sunday, but he didn’t think that mattered in Tombstone.

He pushed through the doors into the comparative dark of the room. He missed his spectacles. He blinked and thought he saw, inside his eyelids, twisted gold frames and shattered lenses in the dust. He shook his head, and shook away the fancy.

The saloon seemed to grow out of the gloom: the mirrors and colored glass and shining carved wood of the backbar, the glittering ranks of many-colored liqueurs, the sheen of the bar top under the chandeliers. Under his feet, the carpet sprouted color and pattern. Around him the wallpaper bloomed.

The bartender nodded when he saw him. Maybe the bartender was remembering that the last time Jesse had been there he hadn’t made trouble.

But he had made trouble. He hadn’t made it in the saloon, but it had certainly found its way there, to bleed on the furniture.

“Have you never before shortened a man’s life?”
In fear, in anger, he’d shot at people who shot at him. He’d hit some of them. He might have killed them. How was that different from what he’d done to Luther King?

There was a man at the bar, a miner from his canvas trousers and heavy boots, and two town men at a table by the front window, reading the Tucson papers and smoking cigars. No sign of the dentist, Holliday. But it might be either too early or—based on when he’d met him—not early enough.

“Porter, please,” Jesse said to the bartender; then, consulting his nerves and the recollection of what he needed to do, added, “and a Jameson’s whiskey.”

The braided wire was a weight in his pocket. He heard Lung again:
“You must get rid of that. The one who made it can feel it if it is near.”

“I’ll throw it away.”

“Certainly—that worked so well with your coat. No, it must change owners. You cannot even give it away.”

The bartender slid the two glasses across the polished wood. Jesse paid him, downed the whiskey, and sighed.

The bartender said, “Makes you glad to be alive, don’t it?”

It was true: Luther King wasn’t going to feel that burn in his throat ever again. Jesse nodded.

If the token could draw its maker to Jesse (he couldn’t quite give up that
if
), then he could keep it, and whoever had delivered King’s severed arm like a telegram would come to him.

Lung’s reaction to that hadn’t been good.
“What then? Do you hope he will introduce himself and politely offer to fight?”

Jesse drank off half the beer. “Where’s the best place to find a game this time of day?”

“Faro?”

“Poker would suit me better.”

“Then you’re a lucky man.” The bartender called toward the back of the room, “Say, Ringo! Got a chair for this fellow?”

Jesse craned his neck. Sure enough, in a back corner there were three men at a table, with money laid out on the green baize and drinks at their elbows.

The man holding the deck looked tall, even slumped in his chair, and coyote-thin. “Anyone I know?” the man asked without looking up.

“Are you?” the bartender asked Jesse.

“I don’t think so.”

“Complete stranger,” the bartender called to the cardplayers, as if they hadn’t heard the whole exchange.

“Let’s have him, then,” said the dealer. “Three-handed poker’s a tedious business.”

“Hey!” said the player to the dealer’s left, a big man with sandy curls and a wedge of white grin.

“I was quoting you, Bill,” the dealer observed, his eyebrows lifting.

“Did I say ‘tedious’? Hell, I must be getting smarter in my old age.”

Jesse wished he’d come with simpler motives. In this company he thought he might rather play poker than the fool.

He pulled an empty chair away from another table and waited to see where the players would open a space.

The big man, smiling still, scooted sideways and cleared the spot to the left of the dealer. He and the other two players would get to see what Jesse did with his cards before they played their own. Fair enough, and it might save him a little trouble.

Jesse slid the chair in and sat. The third player, directly across the table, frowned at Jesse. He had the slicked-down hair and fresh shave of a man who’d come from church or the barber. His coat was open over a dark brown bird’s-eye waistcoat and a red neckerchief. By the money on the table, he was losing.

Jesse smiled at him. He couldn’t help it. This was something he understood.

The dealer stared at the smoke-darkened ceiling as if the news were printed on it, and none of it good. “Five-card draw, nothing wild, nothing fancy. That suit you?”

“I’m not fussy of a Sunday morning,” said Jesse.

The dealer looked at him for the first time. His eyes were a cold, pale gray. ‘ “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.’ I’m John Ringo. The grinning idiot next to you—”

“Curly Bill Brocius,” said the grinner, who did not look idiotic at all. He stuck out a vast hand. Jesse took it and had the bones of his palm painfully compressed.

“Frank McLaury,” said the man across the table, reluctantly.

“Honored. Jesse Fox.” Jesse gave a general nod all around. “What are you playing for?”

Ringo replied, “Friendly poker. Dollar-five dollar, dollar ante to make it interesting.”

“Friendly poker,” in just that kind of drawl, always meant, “We’re playing high.”

Ringo set the deck down on his right. McLaury cut the cards. All that time, Ringo’s eyes never left Jesse’s face.

“That’ll be fine,” Jesse said. With those stakes, he’d be cleaned out in no time.

“What am I supposed to do with the damned thing? No one will buy it from me.”

“You were clever enough to earn the problem. Solve it as you please. But that object must be disposed of in an exchange of real value.”

Jesse took a silver dollar from his pocket and laid it on the table with a click.

“Now you’re talking,” Brocius said, and anted. McLaury pushed a dollar in, and Ringo flipped in his, making it ring off the rest.

“Pot’s right,” said Ringo. He gazed off again into some invisible bleak landscape. He flicked cards to Jesse, Brocius, McLaury, and himself, without so much as sitting up in his chair. Jesse watched his hands: callused, brown, the fingernails short and clean. They never paused or fumbled.

Jesse looked at his cards. Only habit kept him from wincing. Two queens, an ace. The other two cards, a deuce and a ten, were rags. But it was a pretty hand, a hand with money in it. If he were playing poker, he’d have a choice: draw two cards in the hope of catching a second ace, or discard the ace as well, to make it look as if the two cards he kept were paltry.

If he were playing poker. But he was playing the fool instead. He pushed another two dollars into the pot.

Brocius sighed like a melodrama heroine and shoved his cards into the middle of the table. “Drop like a dead dog in the God-damn road,” he declared.

McLaury snorted. “I’ll see you and raise three.” He threw five dollars in the pot with a curl of his lip, as if the play were beneath him.

Jesse began to pick apart the meaning of McLaury’s three-dollar raise, then remembered it didn’t make a bit of difference. No, it made a difference; he didn’t want his opponents to bluff him into winning. He was playing mirror-poker, playing for the low hand while everyone else at the table played for high. It made him feel a little dizzy.

“I’ll follow you there,” Ringo declared, and added his bet to the pot.

“So will I.” Jesse slid three more dollars across the table. Then, with a feeling not unlike walking off a cliff, he pulled the two queens and the ace and dropped them facedown on top of Brocius’s castoffs in the deadwood. It was the worst thing he’d ever done at a poker table. “I’ll take three.”

“One to spin, one to measure, and one,” Ringo said as he snapped cards off the deck to land in front of Jesse, “to cut the string.”

The jobs of the three Fates. Jesse looked up at Ringo, but the man’s attention was on McLaury.

McLaury asked for two cards, and Ringo dealt himself three new ones. Jesse looked at his fresh hand.

He’d kept the deuce and the ten. Now he held the deuce, and another deuce, and three tens. The god of card-playing was an angry god: if Jesse chose to blaspheme, it was going to hurt while he did it.

“I’m out of this one,” he said. The words half choked him. He pushed his full house into the deadwood and waited for lightning to smash through the ceiling and strike him dead.

McLaury bet five dollars on his hand. Ringo nodded and said, “Nice round number. I’ll see that.” Jesse saw the skin around McLaury’s eyes pinch.
Silly proud bastard.
Draw poker was a bluffer’s game, but that didn’t mean it was more manly to bluff than to fold.

When the time came to show ‘em, McLaury had a pair of eights, and no better help than a nine of diamonds. Ringo laid down three threes almost apologetically and swept up the pot.

“Care to deal the next one?” Ringo asked Jesse. “If Frank and Bill don’t mind.” He lifted his eyebrows at the rest of the table.

“Fine with me.” McLaury shrugged, quick and precise. “Let’s get on with it.”

“My God, yes,” Brocius said. “Deal me better ones than Johnny has. I need a drink, though. I’m dry as a granny’s cunt.”

“Bill,” said Ringo. That was all he said, but Brocius looked sideways, like a horse at a snake, and pressed his lips closed.

Ringo lifted his head as if he barely had strength for it. “Frank!”

“What?” said McLaury as the bartender turned their way.

Ringo sighed. “Not you, damn it. Frank Leslie, at the bar. Another round, Frank.”

Jesse shuffled the deck and tried to look awkward. The blisters helped. Still, he hoped no one was watching; though couldn’t a fellow shuffle well and play badly?