“But why in hell didn’t you take care of it before now, you dumb shit?” Jack shouted. “You’ve had as much time as the rest of us.”
“All right,” I said. “It’s no big deal. So he forgot. Let’s not make a federal case out of it.”
“Dan’s right,” Sloane said. “You guys are touchy as hell tonight. If we start off this way, the whole thing’s gonna be a bust.” He could feel it, too.
“Let’s get on with this,” Stan said. “I’ve got to get home before too late.”
“Keepin’ tabs on that high-class wife of yours, huh?” Lou snickered.
“I don’t really see where that’s any of your business,” Stan said with surprising heat. I guess that McKlearey had been at him before Jack and I got there.
“McKlearey,” I said, trying to keep my cool and keep the whole thing from blowing up, “you’re about half in the bag. You’d be way out in front to back off a little, don’t you think?”
“You countin’ my fuckin’ drinks?” he demanded. “First your shithead brother, and now you, huh? Well, I can get my own fuckin’ license, and I sure as hell don’t need nobody to count my fuckin’ drinks for me.”
“That’s enough,” Sloane said sharply, and he wasn’t smiling. “You guys all got your rifles with you?”
We hauled out the hardware. Sloane had the .270 he’d tried to sell me, Stan had the Remington, Jack had that Mauser, Lou had a converted Springfield, and I had the gun I’d been working on. All the rifles had scopes.
“Two boxes of ammunition?” Sloane asked. We each piled up the boxes beside our rifles.
“Hunting knives?”
We waved our cutlery at him.
“I guess that’s about it then.”
“Say,” Jack said, “how about the handguns?”
“God damn”—Sloane giggled—“I almost forgot. I’ve got them in the closet. Let’s see. Dan, you and Stan each have your own, don’t you?”
Stan nodded. “I have,” he said quietly. He reached into one end of his rolled sleeping bag and after some effort took out a snub-nosed revolver. He fished in again and came out with a belt holster and a box of shells. Somehow the gun seemed completely out of character. I could see Stan with a target pistol maybe, but not a people-eater like that. And he handled it like he knew what he was doing.
“Christ,” I said, “that’s an ugly-looking little bastard.”
“We had a burglar scare last year,” he said, seeming a little embarrassed.
“What the hell can you hit with that fuckin’ little popgun?” Lou sneered.
“It’s a .38 special,” Stan said levelly. “That’s hardly a popgun. And I’ve had it out to the range a few times, and I can hit what I shoot at.” He gave Lou a hard look that was even more out of character.
Lou grunted, but he looked at Stan with an odd expression. Maybe the son of a bitch was thinking about how close he’d come to getting a gutful of soft lead bullets for playing silly games with Monica. I hoped he’d get a few nervous minutes out of it.
“You got yours, haven’t you, Dan?” Sloane asked.
I nodded. I’d rolled up the gun belt, holster, and pistol and brought them over in a paper sack. I pulled the rig out and laid it across the sleeping bag. The curve of the butt and the flare of the hammer protruding from the black leather holster looked a little dramatic, but what the hell?
“Jesus,” Sloane said, almost reverently, “look at that big bastard.”
Nothing would do but to pass the guns around and let everybody fondle them.
“You got ours here, Cal?” Jack asked. He sure seemed jumpy about it—like he wasn’t going to relax until he got his hands on that pistol.
Sloane got up and went out of the room for a minute. He came back with three belts and holsters. The .357 Ruger of his was almost a carbon copy of my old .45, a little heavier in the frame maybe. His holster and belt were fancier, but the leather was new and squeaked a lot. McKlearey’s .38 M & P had a fairly conventional police holster and belt, but Jack’s .45 auto was in a real odd lash-up. It looked like somebody had rigged up a quick-draw outfit for that pig. I don’t know how anyone could figure to get an Army .45 into operation in under five minutes, but there it was.
We sat around in a circle, passing the guns back and forth. My .30-06 got a lot of attention. Sloane particularly seemed quite taken with it.
“I’ll give you a hundred and a half for it,” he said suddenly.
“Come on, Cal,” I said. “You can get a brand-new gun, scope and all, for that. You couldn’t get more than a hundred and a quarter for that piece of mine, even if you were selling it to a halfwit.”
“I don’t want to sell it,” he said. “I just like the gun.” He swung the piece to his shoulder a couple more times. “Damn, that’s a sweet gun,” he said.
Stan took the gun from him. “You did a nice job, Dan,” he said.
“Poor Calvin figures he got royally screwed on that deal,” Jack said, laughing.
“No,” Sloane said, “it was my business to look at the merchandise before I set the price. I screwed myself, so I’ve got no bitch coming.”
Lou went out and got another beer.
Jack held up his rifle. “This thing’s a pig, but it shoots where you aim it, so what the hell?”
“That’s all that counts,” Stan said.
McKlearey came back.
“We’re all pretty well set up,” I said. “I was about half afraid somebody’d show up with a .30-30. That beast’s got the ballistic pattern of a tossed brick. About all it’s good for is heavy brush. Out past a hundred yards, you might as well throw rocks.”
“And we’re not likely to be in brush,” Jack said. “You get up around the timberline and it opens up to where you’re gettin’ two- and three-hundred-yard shots.”
“Miller says we’ll be camping just below the timberline,” Sloane said, “and we’ll be riding on up to where we’ll hunt, so it’ll likely be pretty soon.”
“Good deal,” Lou grunted. “I’ve about had a gutful of fuckin’ jungle.”
“Air gets pretty skimpy up there, doesn’t it?” Jack asked.
“At six to eight thousand feet?” Sloane giggled. “You damn betcha. Some of you flatlanders’ll probably turn pretty blue for the first couple days.”
We carried the gear into Sloane’s utility room and piled it all in a corner and then went back into the breakfast room just off the kitchen. Sloane opened another round of beers, and we sat looking at a map, tracing out our route.
“We’ll go on up to Everett and then across Stevens Pass,” Sloane said. “Then, just this side of Wenatchee, we’ll swing north on up past Lake Chelan and up into the Methow Valley to Twisp.”
“I thought that was Mee-thow,” Lou said.
“No,” Sloane answered. “Miller calls it Met-how.”
Lou shrugged.
“Anyhow,” Cal went on, “if we leave here at midnight, we ought to be able to get over there by eight thirty or nine. Some of those roads ain’t too pure, so we’ll have to take it easy.”
“We’ll be leaving for camp as soon as we get to Miller’s?” Stan asked.
“Right. He said he’d feed us breakfast and then we’d hit the trail.”
“Gonna be a little thin on sleep,” I said.
“I’m gonna sack out for a few hours after work,” Jack said.
“Probably wouldn’t be a bad idea for all of us,” Sloane agreed.
We had a few more beers and began to feel pretty good. The grouchy snapping at each other eased off. It even seemed like the hunt might turn out OK after all. We sat in the brightly lighted kitchen in a clutter of beer cans and maps with a fog of cigarette smoke around us and talked about it.
“Hey, Danny,” Lou said suddenly, “you pretty fast with that old .45?”
“Oh, I played with it some when I first got it,” I said. “I guess everybody wants to be Wyatt Earp once in his life.”
“How fast are you?” he insisted.
“God, Lou, I don’t know. I never had any way to time it. I could beat that guy on Gunsmoke—Matt Dillon—you know how he used to draw at the start of the program? I’d let him reach first, and then I’d beat him.”
“Pretty fast,” he said, “pretty fast. Let’s see you draw.” He wasn’t going to let it go.
“Aw, hell, Lou, I haven’t handled that thing for two years. I probably couldn’t even find the gun butt.”
“Go ahead, Dan,” Jack said. “Show us how it’s done. You a gun-fanner?”
I shook my head. “I tried fanning just once—out at the range—and I splattered lead all over the country. That might be all right across a card table, but at any kind of range, forget it.”
“Let’s see you draw,” Lou said again, prodding me with his elbow. Once again it was a little harder than necessary.
“Sure, Dan,” Sloane said, “let’s see the old pro in action.”
Now don’t ask me, for Chrissake, why I gave in. I don’t know why. The whole idea of having pistols along had spooked me right from the start, and the more that things had built up between these guys, the less I liked it. In the second place, I don’t like to see a bunch of guys messing around with guns. It’s too easy for somebody to get hurt. What makes it even worse is that this quick-draw shit starts too many people’s minds working in the wrong direction. All things considered, the whole damned business may just have been one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done in my life. I suppose when you get right down to it, it was because that goddamn McKlearey rubbed me the wrong way. He acted like he didn’t believe I knew how to handle the damned gun. The fact that I didn’t like McKlearey was pushing me into a whole lot of decisions lately, it occurred to me.
Anyway, I got up and went back into the utility room and got my gun belt. I pulled the wide belt around my waist and buckled it. I was a notch bigger around the belly than I’d been before I went in the Army. Too much beer. I tied the rawhide thong at the bottom of the holster around my thigh and checked the position of the holster. I made a couple of quick passes to be sure I could still find the hammer with my thumb. It seemed to be where I’d left it. I took the gun out of the holster and went back out to the kitchen.
“Hey,” Jack said, “there’s the gunfighter. God damn, that gun belt sure looks evil strapped on like that.” Jack was getting a little high again.
“If you start with the gun already out of the holster,” Lou said, “I can see how you could beat Matt Dillon.”
“You want to take a chance on my having forgotten to unload this thing?” I asked him flatly.
“God, no,” Sloane yelped. “For Chrissake don’t shoot out my French doors.”
I opened the loading gate, slipped the hammer and rolled the cylinder along my arm at eye level, checking it carefully. I figured I might as well give them the whole show. I snapped the gate shut and spun the gun experimentally a couple times to get the feel of the weight again. Frankly, I felt a little silly.
“Fancy,” Sloane said.
“Just limbering up,” I told him.
“Let’s see how it’s done,” Lou insisted.
I slipped the pistol into the holster and positioned my hand on the belt buckle.
“Draw!” Lou barked suddenly.
As luck would have it, I was ready, and I found the hammer with my thumb on the first grab. The gun cleared smoothly, and I snapped it about waist high and a little out. It was a fair draw.
“Jesus!” Sloane said blinking.
“God damn!” Jack said. “Just like a strikin’ snake.” He was getting a kick out of it.
“Lucky,” I said.
Even Lou looked impressed. Stan grinned. He’d seen this before. God knows how many hours he’d watched me practice when we’d been roommates.
“Do that again,” Jack demanded.
“Why don’t I quit while I’m ahead,” I said. “Next time I might not even be able to find the damn thing.”
“No,” he insisted, “I mean do it slow, so we can see how it’s done.”
I holstered. “Look,” I said. “You spread out your hand and come back, see? You catch the curve of the hammer on the neck of your thumb, like this. As soon as you hit it, you close in your hand—you cock the gun and grab onto the butt at the same time. Then you pull up and out, putting your trigger finger inside the guard as the gun comes out. You’re ready to shoot when it comes up on line. The idea is to make it all one motion.” Silly as it sounds, I was getting a kick out of it. The sullen scowl on McKlearey’s face made it all worthwhile.
“You did all that just now?” Jack said incredulously. “Shit, if a man was to blink, he’d miss the whole thing.”
“It took a few hours to get it down pat,” I said, doing the tie-down. I’d grabbed a little hard, and my thumb was stinging like hell. I could feel it clear to the elbow. I’d done it OK though, so I figured it was a good time to quit. No point in making a complete ass of myself.
“Here,” Sloane said, getting up, “give me some lessons.” He went into the utility room and came out with the Ruger and the new belt and holster. He cinched the belt around his middle.
“Lower,” I said, sitting back down.
He pushed down on the belt. “Won’t go no lower,” he complained.
“Loosen it.”
He backed it off a couple of notches. “That’s the last hole,” he said.
“It’ll do.”
“He looks like a sack of potatoes tied in the middle.” Jack laughed.
“Just keep mouthin’ off, Alders,” Sloane threatened, “and I’ll drill you before you can blink.” He took on a menacing stance, his hand over the gun butt.
“OK,” I said, “tie it down.”
He grunted as he bent over and lashed the thong around his leg.
“Let’s see the gun,” I said. He handed it to me and I opened the loading gate. The pale twinkle of brass stared back at me. I felt a sudden cold hand twist in the pit of my stomach. He must have reloaded it when he put it back in the utility room after we’d been looking them over out in the living room. I should have known this was a mistake. I tipped up the gun, slipped the hammer, and dropped the shells out of the cylinder onto the table, one by one, slowly. They sounded very loud as they hit the table and bounced.
“Shit, man!” Lou said in a strangled whisper.
I picked up one of the shells and looked at the base, “.357 magnum,” I observed in a voice as calm and mild as I could make it. “You could blow the refrigerator right through the wall with one of these.”
Sloane blushed, I swear he did. “I forgot,” he mumbled.
“Or you could knock McKlearey’s head halfway down to the bay—beer can and all.”
“All right, I forgot. Don’t make a federal case out of it.” Sloane was getting pissed off.
“Well, that’s lesson number one,” I said, handing him back the gun. He holstered it.
“Lesson number two. Don’t trust anybody when he says a gun is empty. Always check it yourself.” I palmed the shell I was holding.
“But I saw you unload it,” he protested.
“How many bullets on the table?”
He counted and his eyes bulged. He snatched out the gun and checked the cylinder. I dropped the last one on the table.
“Smart ass!” He snorted.
“Never hurts to be sure. Guns are made to kill with. If you’re going to play with them, you damn well better be sure they understand. A gun’s got a real limited mentality, so you’ve got to do most of the thinking.” Maybe if I could shake them up a little, they’d stop and give the whole business a little thought.
“All right, don’t rub it in. What do I do now?”
“Hold your hand about waist high and spread out your fingers.”
“You started from over here,” he objected putting his hand on his belly.
“You can get fancy once you get the hang of it,” I told him. I talked him through the draw a couple of times. Then he tried it fast and naturally he d
ropped it on his foot.
“God damn!” he bellowed, hopping around holding the foot.
“Heavy, aren’t they?” I asked him pleasantly. “And somehow they always seem to land on your foot.”
He gingerly put his weight on his foot and limped heavily around the room.
“That’s called gunfighter’s gimp,” I told the others. “Next to the Dodge City Complaint, that’s the most common ailment in the business.”
“What’s the Dodge City Complaint, for God’s sake?” Sloane demanded.
“That’s when you start practicing with a loaded gun and blow off your own kneecap.”
“Bullshit, too!” He winced. “Not this little black duck.” He started unstrapping the belt. “I’ll stick to Indian wrestling. These goddamn things are just as dangerous from the back as from the front.” That’s what I’d been trying to tell them.
“Let’s see that fuckin’ thing,” Lou demanded, getting up. He strapped it on. It hung a little low, but it looked a lot more businesslike on him than it had on Sloane. He went through it slowly a couple times and then began to pick up speed. He was pretty good and not quite as drank as I’d thought.
“Come on, Alders,” he said to Jack, “I’ll take you.” He snapped the gun at Jack’s head.
God damn it, I hate to see somebody do that!
“Come on, shithead,” Jack told him, waving his hand. “Don’t point that fuckin’ thing at me.”
“Strap on your iron, hen-shit,” Lou said.
“Give me your gun, Dan,” Jack said suddenly. He was about half-drunk, too.
I saw that there was no point in trying to talk them out of it. I stood up, stripped off the belt and handed it to Jack. He strapped it on and tied it down.
“You’ve got to give me a couple minutes to practice,” he said.
“Sure,” Lou said. “Take as long as you want.”
Jack hooked and drew a few times. He picked it up fairly fast, but I knew he was no match for McKlearey. As I watched him, I noticed for the first time how small my brother’s hands were. That .45 looked like a cannon when he pulled it.
“All right, you big-mouth son of a bitch,” he said to Lou. “Somebody call it.”
They squared off about ten feet apart.