Outlaw in Paradise

  "What the hell are you doing? What is wrong with you? Are you out of your mind?" The questions were rhetorical, because each time he tried to answer she cut him off after half a syllable. 'Give me that," she snapped at Ham, snatching the Colt out of his hand. Her anger doubled, tripled, kept multiplying as she stared in disbelief at the revolver—which began to look wicked and deadly, practically obscene on top of her soft pink palm. Jesse reached for it, but she jerked away and clapped it down on the tabletop instead, as if the possibility of actual physical contact with him was too disgusting to risk. "What the hell were you thinking of?"

  "He's seven years old!"

  "He—"

  "What kind of man gives a gun to a child?"

  "It's not—"

  "Shame on you. Shame!"

  Jesse hung his head. "It's not loaded," he muttered in defense.

  "Not loaded?" She stopped short of screeching, but he flinched anyway. "Come on, Ham."

  "But, Miz Cady—"

  "Miss Cady, nothing." She took hold of his elbow and yanked. She had parting words for Jesse. "You give this child a gun again, Mr. Gault, and you'll have me to deal with. I will not tolerate it." With a furious twirl of skirts, she was gone.

  He stared down the smattering of diners who dared look back and forth between him and the door she'd just flounced through. Damn her and the horse she rode in on. How was he ever going to live this down? He reached automatically for a black cigarette and stuck it in the side of his mouth. Lit it in one try. Blew badass smoke at the ceiling. Hoped nobody noticed his hands were shaking.

  Four

  "Evenin', Cady. Say, ain't you best hurry up? Gettin' on for five, y'know."

  Cady shook the hair out of her face and nodded to Levi in the bar mirror she was polishing. "I know, I'm hurrying." Right now the saloon was sparsely populated, only Jersey Stan and a couple of hands from the Sullivan ranch. But in half an hour the Saturday night crowd would start trickling in, and Cady tried never to let those relatively big spenders see her in occupations like mirror polishing. Or table cleaning or window washing. It would spoil the illusion. In public, at least, she tried to live up to her customers' fantasies, and as far as she could tell, their fantasies of her ranged all over from mother to sweetheart to priest, not to mention madam and cardsharp. But not domestic servant.

  She gave a few swipes to the bottles of booze lined up on tiers in front of the mirror, then started on the bar.

  "Here, I'll do that," Levi protested, trying to tie on his apron with one hand and snatch the rag from her with his other.

  "No, it's okay. See that box behind the door? Came in the mail today. I think it's the new glasses, so you be unpacking them while I finish here."

  She waited until he dragged the box behind the bar, slit it open, and began to unwrap the glasses inside before saying, "Levi, I don't want to worry you, and I'm sure there really isn't anything to worry about, but I think you should know. I saw Ham today with that gunfighter. In Swensen's. They were sitting in a back booth together like trail buddies, having a high old time."

  Crouched down behind the box, Levi glanced back at her and said, "Hmpf."

  "And, Levi?"

  "Ma'am?"

  "Mr. Gault was showing Ham his gun. His gun," she repeated when he only hmpfed again.

  "Mm mm mm. That boy," he said, shaking his head. "I'll swan."

  Cady put her hands on her hips, nonplussed. "I thought you'd be mad as hell. Goodness, Levi, don't you even care that Ham's hanging around with a hired killer?"

  "Well, if that's what he be."

  "What?"

  He stood up, six feet three inches of lanky bones and beautiful brown skin. "And I spec' that's what he be, 'cause that's what everybody say. I saw him with Ham last night, though, and I couldn't see no meanness in him. Maybe he a killer, but I b'lieve he got a sof' spot for chirn."

  "Well, but—even so, even if he does—is that the point?"

  "What the point?"

  "Maybe he dotes on children, but still— Maybe Jesse James was the world's best father, but would you have wanted him raising Ham?"

  Levi chuckled.

  She shook her head, bewildered. "I'm telling you, Levi, there was Ham at Swensen's restaurant, taking pot shots at the wall!"

  "What?"

  "Pretending, I mean."

  "Oh, pretending."

  "Playing with that man's six-shooter like it was a toy."

  "I don't like that."

  "No. I grabbed him and got him right out of there. And I'd've smacked his skinny behind, but I figured you'd want to do that yourself."

  Levi said, "Well," noncommittally, and went back to stacking glasses.

  Cady shook her head some more. She couldn't get over his attitude. Levi was the kindest, most loving father she'd ever known, but he was strict, too. Strict and principled and upright: Ham might sweep up and do chores in a saloon, but if Levi ever caught him saying curse words or spitting or acting like a ruffian in any way, his punishments were quick and predictable. So why wasn't he more irate about his son's friendship with an out-and-out gunman? It didn't make any sense to her.

  "The Five K-Khan— What is this, Levi? The Five Khandha of Bud—Budd—" Glendoline gave up and put the book back on the bar. "What is that, Greek?"

  "You're late," Cady said automatically, as she did every day when Glen decided to mosey in to work. She picked up Levi's book, but had no better luck than Glen at pronouncing the title. The Five Khandha of Buddha. She looked up at him questioningly.

  "No, it ain't Greek," he said with dignity. "It's about Buddha."

  "What's Buddha? Ohhh," Glendoline said wisely, wriggling her blond eyebrows. "Oh, I know. Buddha's a religion, and it just happens to be the religion of a certain Chinese lady who lives on Noble Fir Street. Over her daddy's laundry," she threw in, in case anybody wasn't sure which Chinese lady she was referring to.

  Levi plucked the book out of Cady's hand and stuck it under the bar, not looking at either woman. He didn't like to be teased, especially about Lia Chang, so Cady quit grinning at him, at the same time she slipped Glen a good-natured wink.

  But then she remembered she was mad at Glen. "I noticed you had a pretty good time last night," she said sourly. "What with one thing and another."

  "I did," Glen assured her, patting her ringlets, "why, I surely did. Last night was just plain fun. I swear—"

  "Glendoline."

  "What? Oh." Comprehension dawned. "You're mad because I sat on Sam Blankenship's lap."

  "I didn't even see that." Although it didn't surprise her.

  "No?" She put her finger on her cheek, which meant she was thinking hard. "What else did I do?"

  Cady could've ticked them off on her fingers: you came in late, you got drunk on the job again, and you left early and went home with Gunther Dewhurt. "I'm talking about you and that gunfighter."

  "Mr. Gault? Mmmm," Glen hummed, like a cat purring. "He's dreamy, isn't he?"

  "Dreamy? Well, I guess so, if you like hired killers. Glen, when are you going to get some sense? Why in the world... oh, hell. Never mind, it's none of my business."

  "That's right," Glen agreed tartly. "I know what you're thinking," she mumbled after a snippy little pause, facing the bar mirror to stuff cotton down the bust of her yellow satin dress. "You think I do it on purpose. Go after rotten men and let 'em treat me bad. Well, don't you?"

  Cady shrugged. But she thought of the day, eight months ago, when Glendoline first showed up at the Rogue looking for work. She had a split lip and a black eye, and that was only what showed. People were shocked, but not really surprised; most had a suspicion about how Merle Wylie treated women, and Glendoline had worked in his saloon for almost a year—long enough to become a lot more than one of his bar girls. What had surprised everyone was that she'd finally gotten up the gumption to leave him.

  "We've had this conversation before," Cady said. "You do what you want on your own time, I won't say a word. But here in my saloon, you go by
my rules."

  "But I do!" Nobody could do wide-eyed innocence like blond-haired, blue-eyed Glen. No wonder the sheriff was in love with her.

  Which reminded Cady. "You weren't very nice to Tom last night, either."

  "I don't know what you're talking about." She finished padding her bodice and looked around for something to drink. "Anyway, I'm as nice to old Lily Leaver as he deserves."

  "Why do you call him that when you know he hates it?"

  "Huh? I think it's cute."

  "Cute. You—" She sighed. They'd gotten off the track. Cady and Glendoline were about the same age, but as far as men went, Glen had eons more experience. So what was it about her that always made Cady feel old, practically grandmotherly? Once she'd put that question to Levi, and he'd answered in two words: "She's stupid." Cady didn't believe she was, though, not really; Glen just didn't think.

  "We were talking about Gault," she reminded them both. "It's looking like he might stick around for a while."

  "You think so?" She pinched her cheeks, studying her face in the mirror.

  "Yeah, and I don't think you should be cozying up to him. You know what I'm talking about," she said when Glen opened her mouth to utter some wounded protest. "He's dangerous—you only have to look at him to see that. So leave him be, Glen." Don't take him home with you, she meant, but she didn't say. It wasn't necessary; they really had had this conversation before.

  "I saw you talking to him, too."

  "That's beside the point. Shoot, here comes Curly Boggs and all those Witter ranch boys. You take care of them while I get dressed." She untied her apron and threw it on a shelf under the bar.

  "I saw you smile at him," Glen called after her. "You even laughed at something he said. I heard you!"

  Cady flapped her hand and kept going. "Owner's prerogative," she threw back. It would've made a better exit line if she'd thought Glen had the slightest idea what "prerogative" meant.

  In her room, she took a long time deciding what to wear. That wasn't like her; she had eight or nine "saloon dresses," as she thought of them, all in different colors, and normally she just pulled out the one she hadn't worn in the longest time. Now she stared and stared, plucking at a gaudy feathered shoulder or a jet-beaded bodice, dissatisfied. Why all this girlish indecision? She knew, but she didn't care to think about it. She reminded herself too much of Glen.

  Finally she yanked out her dark green taffeta and threw it across the bed. She found the green high-heeled shoes she wore with it, and the little fake-emerald tiara thing she sometimes stuck in her hair— men were crazy for jewelry, the flashier the better. She hadn't had time to wash her black fishnet stockings, so she'd have to wear a pair of flesh-colored ones, she guessed, even though they wouldn't be as good with the green dress, which had black lacings across the bosom. The green bracelet that looked like jade, the jet earbobs, her little onyx pinkie ring... Was that enough? What about the pale green cameo on a black ribbon around her neck? No, she decided; no. Even if you did deal blackjack in a small-town saloon, it didn't mean you had to decorate every appendage you had with jewelry. Enough was eventually enough.

  She undressed behind her screen and put her robe on over her underwear. She had a little time left; she'd bathed earlier, and she'd gotten dressing down to ten minutes flat—which was pretty darn good considering she had no maid. "You move your big fat butt," she said to Boo, who hadn't opened his eyes or even twitched his tail since she'd come into the room. She put her hand on the back of his head— and the cat jumped and squalled as if she'd electrocuted him. "Excuse me," she said to his arched, resentful back. "Terribly sorry, no offense. But it is my chair." He let her pick him up, all fifteen pounds of him, and settle him on her lap, whereupon he yawned, purred, and fell back into a coma.

  "Some pet you turned out to be." She ran a finger around his ear, halfheartedly trying to tickle him into wakefulness. He'd appeared on her doorstep last winter, scrawny and scabby, fresh from a fight he'd obviously lost. She'd liked nursing him back to health, and especially his heavy, earnest devotion afterward, when he'd lumbered after her everywhere, a black, constant, overweight shadow. But she'd succeeded too well, because now all he did was sleep in her chair, or in her lap on the rare occasions when he relinquished the chair. "Boo, you are a deep disappointment," she murmured, coaxing a soft purr out of him before he went back to snoring.

  She let her head fall against the high back of the padded rocker, closing her eyes, smiling a little. This was nice. In an hour the noise from the saloon would be deafening, but this time of the day it was still nice. Sundays were the best, though. The Rogue closed down for the Sabbath (unlike Wylie's bar, which stayed open all day every day, even Christmas). Sunday mornings she took care of any leftover bookkeeping matters and saw to any emergencies from the night before—broken chairs, shattered mirrors, and the like—and usually by three or so in the afternoon she was free. She didn't go out, didn't ride over to the old River Farm and wander around the orchard—that was strictly a Friday afternoon pleasure. On Sundays she stayed in her room and listened to the quiet. Sat in this chair, propped her feet on her crocheted footrest, lit the tasseled lamp on her piecrust table. Put on her mail-order spectacles and opened a book. Or wrote a letter to the only friend she still kept up with from Portland. Or read the Paradise Reverberator she'd saved from Friday, for the local gossip and the smattering of "world news." "Ahhh," she would say from time to time to Boo. "This is the life."

  Every great once in a while she'd wonder if she was happy or not, considering that the finest hours in her week were the ones she spent alone in a rocking chair with a cat on her lap. But usually the question didn't trouble her; she was either too busy or too tired, or enjoying too much the respite from business and tiredness, to think about it. And whenever she was seriously blue, which luckily wasn't often, she had a saying that always put whatever was getting her down in the right perspective: It beats canning salmon.

  Sometimes on her Sunday afternoons she didn't do anything at all, just sat here and gazed around the room. Even after two years, the fact that she owned it and everything in it still amazed her. That was her brass bed and blue-flowered quilt, for example; her two pillows with embroidered sayings on the pillow slips. She owned this old wooden rocker. She owned that Wellington phonograph and the four opera discs she'd played so often they barely sounded like music anymore. This was her window, overlooking the live oak in her postage stamp-size backyard, and her very own cedar-shingled outhouse.

  Not that she'd done much to earn them. (She certainly hadn't done what most people thought she'd done to earn them.) She'd been nice to a dying old man, that was all. As a result, she now owned everything he'd owned. Last week she'd passed by two ladies staring in the window of Jurgen's Retail-Wholesale Furniture Co., and overheard one of them say to the other, "That sofa's all right, but if s not really to my taste." She'd thought about that all day, and on and off since then, fascinated by the brand-new idea of "taste." Imagine picking out something like a sofa—or a bed, or a rocking chair—according to whether or not it suited your taste. How did you know what your taste was? She'd been studying her room, or rather Gus Shlegel's room, in a different light ever since, realizing how masculine it was, and the little ways in which it didn't really suit her. The lady's remark hadn't ruined her pleasure in the room, not at all. But it had set her to thinking.

  She jumped when a hard knock sounded at the back door. "Ow." Boo, startled too, dug his claws into her thigh before jumping out of her lap. "Ow. Damn it, Boo." She retied her dressing-gown sash and went to the door. "Who is it?" No answer. "Ham, is that you?" She opened the door a crack to peer out. "Ham? Are you—"

  "Why, if it ain't Miz Cady." Warren Turley leered at her, at the same time he shoved the door open before she could get her foot in front of it.

  "Hey!"

  "Hey? That how you greet old friends? Me and Clyde just came by to pay our respects." She stood in his way, but he muscled past her, jostling her aside,
grinning the whole time, and sure enough, Clyde Gates was right behind him.

  "You two can just march yourselves right out of here. What do you think you're doing? You want a drink, you go around to the front like everybody else. Listen here, Turley—"

  "Now, now, Cady, simmer down, we just wanna talk to you. Ain't she looking pretty today, Clyde? And looky here—this what you're wearing tonight? That is one fine—"

  "Get your paws off that." She shoved him away from the bed with her hip, slapping at his hands on her taffeta dress. "Wylie sent you, didn't he?" She kept trying to herd him back toward the open door. It wasn't easy without touching him. She was more mad than scared, but something told her it would be dangerous to touch him.

  "Mr. Wylie gave us a message for you, yeah," Clyde said. He was a big, tall, dumb-looking cowboy from someplace like Texas or Oklahoma; she liked him a little better than Warren Turley, which was to say she didn't hate him like the bubonic plague. He worked for Wylie, though, same as Turley, so in no way was he welcome in her bedroom.

  "I'm telling you both to clear out right now."

  "Or you'll what? Plug us with your peashooter? Where's it at, anyway?" A light came into Turley's squinty little eyes. He had a mean smile to begin with; it got downright diabolical when he started walking toward her. How had Clyde gotten around behind her? "You wearing that peashooter now, Miz Cady?" said Turley, pointy nose twitching. "Let's see if you got it on now."

  Cady knew a lot of curse words. She only got a few out before Clyde clapped his hand over her mouth and Turley grabbed her, grinning like the very devil.

  ****

  "Keep your shirt on," the black-skinned bartender, whose name was Levi, muttered under his breath to the cowboy at the end of the bar, who kept yelling at him to hurry it up, step on it, get a move on. "Impatience," Jesse could have sworn he added while he poured out a glass of beer, "shows up the ego. Patience counteracts egocentricity, because everything is impermanent and substanceless."

  "Huh?" said Jesse when Levi moved back over to his side of the bar. "Say what?"