THE CROSSINGS
by Jack Ketchum
First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital
Copyright 2011 by Dallas Mayr
Cover Design by David Dodd
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Background from the Wikimedia Public Domain Archive
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ALSO FROM JACK KETCHUM & CROSSROAD PRESS:
NOVELS:
Ladies' Night
The Woman
Stranglehold
COLLECTIONS:
Sleep Disorder – with Edward Lee
ESSAYS / BIOGRAPHY:
Book of Souls
"Mommas, don't let your babies
grow up to be cowboys..."
—Ed and Patsy Bruce
ONE
Here is what she told Hart and Mother and me about how it began.
She said it was the noise.
Said that the chickens were so loud clamoring for their morning meal that Elena never heard the horses' hooves over the din inside the barn.
She had always hated chickens and now she had them to thank for all the rest of it.
Sleepy-eyed this morning like any other she had watched them swarm across the floor of the barn and tossed the feed from the bucket out the door to lure them outside and watched them flow like lava into the yard and thought as she sometimes did that they were more akin to ants than anything else she had observed in nature or perhaps like darting schools of fish feeding in the river. Though no ant or minnow would ever stink as they did. That they depended upon her amazed her in some way. They were quick and moved with violence and their eyes were cold. How and why creatures this fierce had come to the reduced state of pensioners disgusted her.
She by then had called out twice for her sister Celine to come gather the eggs but Celine was young and lazy mornings and she had to call again before she saw the door flung open and her sister appear in the doorway, pretty and half-asleep and petulant looking so that despite her annoyance Elena had to smile. The door slammed shut and she watched her father behind the cloudy window pulling up his suspenders, glancing at them and turning away.
She passed her sister wordlessly in the yard and as Celine disappeared into the barn spread the last of her feed in a series of wide arcs from the heavy old bucket and then headed for the house and that was when she saw them riding toward her just outside the yard.
Four men. The horses young and strong.
Three of the men Mexican. The fourth Anglo. All of them filthy with the dust and sweat of travel. Armed with rifles, pistols. Bandoliers slung across their chests.
Warriors, she thought.
Their presence frightened and angered her. The huge bald Anglo especially who watched her deliberately with grey eyes unwavering as he rode through the sea of chickens scattering them beneath his horse's hooves until he was close enough so that she could see the livid scar, the letter D branded across his cheek from jaw to cheekbone and back again.
To hell with you, she thought and returned his gaze. We have had enough of war.
She heard the Mexicans laugh as they giddied their horses into the yard maddening the chickens and perhaps the horses too unused to so many small creatures darting under and away beneath their feet so that they bucked and whinnied. She heard the slide of rifle out of scabbard and saw the tall thin one with the Indio blood like her dead mother's blood raise his carbine and fire into the hardpack and saw dirt fly and the man fire again and this time where once there was a chicken there was now only some headless wingless carcass clawing toward its end.
It happened very fast then.
Except for the Anglo who remained calm and still all of them began firing riding into the chickens shouting comida! comida! yet creating more confusion than damage to the birds. She saw Celine peer out from the barn at the gunfire and dart back in again but not before the fat one she would later know as Fredo noticed her and rode inside. She glanced at the window and saw her father and watched him turn away and knew he had gone for his rifle.
When the fat one rode out of the barn he had Celine up astride the saddlehorn in front of him squirming and kicking and trying to scratch. The man was laughing. So were his friends. Even the Anglo was smiling. She took three steps forward and swung the heavy wooden bucket at the back of the fat man's head and heard a sound like a stone dropped into a deep dry well and felt the impact all the way up to her shoulder and with great satisfaction saw blood fly.
The man howled and dropped her sister to the ground and only a lunge for his saddlehorn prevented him from falling but she said it was exactly then that her father appeared in the doorway and the Anglo drew and fired four times in rapid succession. Her father fell back through the doorway with a bullet in his forehead and his blood arced high across the old wooden lintel.
She didn't tell us what she felt just then and we didn't ask. There hardly seemed any need. It was the night before we crossed the Colorado and her face glowing in the light from the campfire had the look of something ancient wrought from carved and polished stone. We ate beans and salt beef and bread and rattlesnake and it was the first she'd really talked to us and even Mother was mostly silent for a change.
She said she asked the Anglo his name and he told her. She said, "Take your chickens and go, Paddy Ryan." And he said, "Thanks, we will."
They got down off their horses and that was when they had them first, right there among the chickens in the yard.
TWO
John Charles Hart and I met in 1848, the year the Mexican war ended, in what later would be called Arizona, in a grown-overnight booming little town called Gable's Ferry just across the Colorado River from the California gold fields north and Mexico to the south. I was drunk and barely twenty-one and Hart was playing cards with two other men in the Little Fanny Saloon. I'd seen him in there nearly every night but we'd never spoken a word to one another.
Were it not for the gold at Sutter's Mill that January neither the Little Fanny nor the town for that matter would have had reason to exist. It certainly wasn't Mexico that drew the bulk of those pilgrims. But there was a narrows in the river there that made it a natural place for a ferry so an old roughneck named Gable had built one and manned it with his shotgun and a pair of well-trained dogs. Just a primitive barge-and-cable affair that you knew the river would swallow whole come flood time but for now it did what it was supposed to do and word had got around.
I'd been there pretty nearly from its inception. I'd seen barrels of whiskey and billiard tables come in and fancy wear and ready-made clothing, card sharks and whores and trappers and tradesmen and miners pouring through each day. Within a month or so we had a makeshift saloon and whorehouse, a dry goods store and another saloon, a stable and a grocery. Everything in fact except a church, a schoolhouse and a jail.
Though most would maintain that only the last was
needed.
Prices had gone mad. Across the river inexperienced miners were pulling a hundred twenty-five dollars a day and everyone knew it. At Gable's Ferry you could pitch a tent, set some cots inside and charge a dollar a night lodging and plenty of men were willing to pay it. Old rusty mess-pork left over from the war and dried-out worm-eaten apples could fetch as much as seventy-five cents a pound. Over at Reardon's Dry Goods Store a good canteen would cost you ten dollars silver. By contrast a whore at the Little Fanny went for a dollar.
I didn't know what in hell I was doing there.
I was making decent money with my dispatches on the reconstruction and the occasional gold-dust yarn to the New York Sun but it wasn't the steady income I'd had during the War — when the byline Marion Bell appeared in the paper on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. The money from my father's estate in Massachusetts was not going to last forever. At Gable's Ferry prices I was drinking that up at an alarming rate. Trying to forget what I'd seen in Mexico City more than anything else I imagine.
My paper awhile back had run a cartoon of General Winfield Old Fuss 'n Feathers Scott in full ceremonial uniform holding a sword above his head and perched atop a pile of human skulls. That about said it all.
Playing five-card draw that night were Hart, an old German miner named Heilberger and George Donaldson. I barely knew Heilberger but rumor had it that Donaldson was a horse-thief and a card-cheat and the night would bear out at least the last of these rumors.
I was sitting behind Hart slightly off to the right so I could see his cards but he didn't seem to mind. In his left hand he held a short leather thong with one die studding either end and these dice he would pass through his fingers knuckle to knuckle and over and under one another in a smooth fluid motion the trick to which I could not immediately fathom. It may be that whiskey had something to do with this. I was on my fifth and what I thought might be my last glass of the evening but I wasn't making any promises to myself either.
The bet was to Heilberger but he folded so that left Hart and Donaldson.
I don't know how much was on the table but it was a lot. The Little Fanny was crowded that night with Irish and German miners mostly plus the local entrepreneur here and there and the whores of course and when Donaldson bet, thirty one of the miners whistled low, but loud enough so that you could hear it over Sam Perkins' drunken fiddle-playing.
While Hart was thinking it over Donaldson rolled himself a cigarette and drew the sack shut with the string held between his teeth and when he raised the match there it was, a jack of diamonds staring out at us between his ratty shirt and wool jacket. I saw it and Hart saw it and probably so did Heilberger. I guess that like me Hart simply couldn't believe what he was seeing.
"Jesus and Mary on a broomstick," he said. "You could at least be a little careful, couldn't you?"
He didn't seem angry, only more or less annoyed with Donaldson, but he drew his gun out nevertheless — some huge grey antique of god knows what vintage — and set it on the table and when Donaldson saw this monstrosity pointed in his direction he began fumbling for his own gun and Hart said don't do that which stopped him for a moment but then he went back to fumbling again, just some fool in a panic and Hart said dammit, George, don't do that now but by then Donaldson had his own gun out so Hart had no choice but to pull the trigger.
You expected a lot from a gun that big and people were already moving away from behind Donaldson but all we heard was a click.
"Aw shit," said Hart, "that goddamn firing pin."
And Donaldson's face went from white to smiling. It was not a nice smile and it was certainly my turn to move away out of the line of fire but damned if I could. I sat frozen in my chair watching Hart roll the dice between his fingers and over and under his knuckles like he was still considering his card-hand and nothing more and Donaldson fired. And for a split second nothing happened then either.
Then the thing exploded on him. Threw him over and off his chair.
So that he lay writhing and groaning on the rough plank floor with his shirt on fire and a badly scorched face and gunhand until Jess Ake, the barman, threw a bucket of water on him.
That was the gunfight at the Little Fanny Saloon.
We waved away the powder-smoke, Hart and Heilberger and I, and Hart collected his winnings off the table.
"I bet he got that gun up at Gusdorf's," he said. "That man ought to be arrested."
I was amazed at his utter calm. My own stomach was churning whiskey and bile in equal portions — and I hadn't been the fellow staring down a pistol but merely sitting behind somebody who was.
I guessed Hart to be in his late forties, early fifties, though it was hard to say and wondered not for the first time what sort of forces had shaped men like some of them you found out here.
If they weren't just plain-out demented, like E.M. "Choctau" Kelly, who was quietly carving a tombstone for Miss Nellie Russell, one of Ginny Smalls' whores over at the Fairview, then the best of them seemed to hold some mix of craziness and courage that served them as a kind of lucky charm.
I think of Old Bill Cooney, who found a black bear snuffling through his ten-dollar sack of coffee beans one morning and got so mad that he chased the bear over half a mile in his stocking feet with nothing in hand should the creature have turned on him but a bottle of lemon beer and a shaving brush.
How could Hart have guessed this outcome?
The answer was he couldn't. It was simply his nature, I suppose, to wait and see. A kind of fatalist patience and presence of mind I couldn't begin to imagine.
We watched as four of the miners took Donaldson by the arms and legs and hauled him outside to what destination I couldn't be certain. Doc Swinlon was surely drunk by this hour but we did have a dentist and a veterinarian who were somewhat less likely to be so. Hart glanced in my direction.
"You look like you're going to be sick, friend," he said.
"I think you're right," I said.
"Get you outside."
He helped me to my feet and out the door to the street with barely a second to lose.
"You shouldn't drink, Bell. You know that?"
"I know."
"Then why do you? I see you every night in there."
"I guess that means you're there pretty much every night too, doesn't it."
Only a drunk would have spoken to him like that but drunk was what I was.
"I can handle it," he said.
"You can't."
Then he shrugged. "Hell, never mind. It's none of my business. Just thought maybe you might maybe have something better to do."
"I'm no damn prospector, Hart," I said.
And there I was, speaking up to him again. I guess some part of me was offended at the criticism. I should have been amazed he even noticed me among the others let alone knew my name. Also grateful that he'd helped me out of there. I've observed that drunks don't tend toward gratitude.
"So? Neither am I," he said.
He started to walk away.
"Dammit, Hart!"
"What."
I didn't know what. I only knew I wanted to stop him. Me, Marion Bell, staggering on a still-whirling street. He looked at me like he was inspecting a mongrel dog that might or might not be useful to him.
"You got a horse, Bell?"
I rented an old bay from Swenson's livery at the going monthly rate.
"Course I do."
"You want to do something useful for a change, then?"
"I dunno. What'd you have in mind?"
"Let's get you saddled up. We can talk along the way."
Half an hour later we were passing through a campground on the southern edge of town, lanterns glowing in a few of the tents but most of them dark, someone singing a tuneless drunken version of Annie Laurie and from the same tent, a whore squealing. As yet Hart hadn't said a thing. He had the thong wrapped around his middle left finger and kept clicking the dice back and forth together and by then I'd sobered up to the extent that at some point I
was able to realize that the rhythm of the dice was the rhythm of his horse's gait.
He waited until we'd passed through the tents and then rolled and lit a cigarette and talked to me.
"You familiar with a gentleman calls himself Mother Knuckles?"
"Big fella?"
"Big? You have a gift for understatement, Bell."
"I know him."
"You ever give him a reason to dislike you any?"
"We never met."
"That's good. Because you're going to. I do a little mustanging with Mother now and then. Lots of good horses out here left over from the war which is mostly what we're after. Your real mustang's bred from the old Spanish and these belonged to us not long ago but they're still wilder than hell. Maybe if you're very nice to him he'll let you help us out some."
"I never did any mustanging."
"All you got to do is ride for now. We'll handle the rest. You can ride, can't you?"
I wasn't going to dignify that by giving it an answer. I doubt he expected me to.
"What is it you did do, Bell? If you don't mind my asking."
"I was a war correspondent for the New York Sun. Followed Win Scott's troops into Mexico City."
He nodded. I couldn't say if he was impressed by the fact that I was a writer or bored with the notion or what. "Scott," he said. "That dry tit."
And that was all I had from him until we reached the cabin.
THREE
She said that it was sunset before they'd crossed the plains and reached the river.
She'd ridden all that way with her hands tied behind her back, perched high on the saddle in front of the tall wiry Indio whose name was Gustavo and many times over the journey she felt his prick harden up against her. He had already had both her and Celine but she guessed he wanted more.
She wondered if her sister was experiencing the same in front of Fredo, the fat one with the prickly mustache.