Dark Trail (8 page)

“What makes you think she'll come back to you even if you do kill him?”

Rittenauer grimaced. ‘Ten thousand dollars, Guild. That's what'll make her come back.”

“And you'd want her back knowing that?”

“Hollister here was right, Guild. Maybe you should have been a preacher. Anyway, why the hell do you want to save his neck? You should be hoping I put two good bullets in his chest.”

“You don't understand Guild here, Ben,” Hollister said, “He's the noble sort. He's trying to do something nice for his ex-wife.” He smiled. ‘The one Frank Evans took from him.”

The waitress came to fill their cups again. Guild left.

* * *

The word had spread quickly and widely. Guild stopped into another restaurant down the street for a cup of coffee and a cigarette; and he heard four men at the counter discussing the impending gunfight. They sounded like children—eager, naive, bloodthirsty. In their minds neither Evans nor Rittenauer were human beings—they were some kind of mythical beings who did not have fears or hopes or come down with whooping cough or feel good on sunny days. They were just “gunfighters,” players in a play, and they did not have families who would mourn the loser or doll-like women who would exploit the winner. All the talk disgusted Guild. These men would never have nerve enough to get into a gunfight themselves, but they were eager enough to let someone else do it in their stead.

Guild left a nickel for his coffee and wandered back out into the street.

The sheriff, whose name was Carter, had a noble face. With his ringlets of gray hair, his Roman senator profile, and his deep, thunderous speaking voice, it was easy to see why he was serving his sixth term as the county's leading lawman. The only troubling aspect of Carter's whole show was his gaze. There was no mercy in his eyes, nor amusement. Maybe his job had made him this way, or maybe he'd always been this way and took the job because it encouraged his particular kind of coldness.

“Yes, I've heard about the gunfight, Guild.” Carter shrugged. “I'm afraid I can't get excited about it.”

“The state legislature passed two bills about gunfighting last year.”

“That they did.” The two men sat in a small office with a large window and a nice big mahogany rolltop desk. Carter had set his big fine-tooled cowboy boots on the open desk. He sipped coffee after giving Guild his coffee.

“So what they're doing is illegal.”

“I've got three deputies.”

“All right. You've got three deputies.”

“If I was to post them out at the Adair ranch, what the hell would I do about the rest of the county?”

“You don't need to post them. Just go to Adair now and tell him what you've heard and make clear that you plan to press charges if the gunfight takes place.”

Carter laughed. “Yeah, and I'm sure old Tom would pay a lot of attention to me.” Carter downed some more coffee. “He'd just smile and say Aw, hell, Carter, don't you have anything better to do than pick on rich old boys like myself?' ” Carter shook his head. “It'd be good for my ego and my reputation to interfere with the gunfight—show people I can stand up to Tom Adair, after all—but to tell you the truth, no matter what I do, that gunfight is going to take place. At least if that's what Tom Adair wants. And there's nothing you can do or I can do to stop it.”

“Evans is going to get killed.”

“You won't find me shedding any tears over a gunny, I'm afraid.”

Guild drained his coffee. “The only thing I can do is convince Evans he's going to get killed.”

“Ten thousand dollars will make a man awful foolish and Adair knows it.” He offered Guild a look at his Roman profile. He looked just the way he did on his RE-ELECT SHERIFF CARTER posters out in the front office, hammy as a Chautauqua Shakespearean. “Awful foolish.”

Guild stood up. Carter wasn't a bad man or even a lazy one. Just realistic. There was little the law—any sort of law—could do to a man like Tom Adair.

Carter put out his hand and Guild shook it. “I'd like to see Tom Adair get his ass kicked around the block, Guild. If you can manage to pull it off, there'll be a special place in heaven for you.”

Guild smiled. “I'm not sure heaven is the direction I'm headed, Sheriff.”

Carter laughed. “We're probably headed in pretty much the same direction, Guild. Good luck with everything.”

Sarah was sitting in a restaurant, sipping her morning coffee, when she heard the news about the gunfight.

A feeling of sickness spread from her stomach up to her chest and then down through her arms. The pace of her breathing increased, and she knew that soon she'd have a headache. She had felt this way the morning she'd heard that a plow horse had killed her youngest brother. This was a place beyond words or tears.

She realized now that she had always believed that Frank would come back to her, just as he'd always done before. He got tired of them, these women; or they got tired of him. He was winsome and darling, but nobody could be winsome or darling for long. They always found some subtle way of ending the relationship that allowed Frank to keep his considerable vanity and pride. And then he'd be back, full of hot promises and iron resolve. For a time she'd give him no solace, but then always, always she'd take him to her—as much his mother as his lover it sometimes seemed—and he would tell her all his fears and would love him all the more for these moments of honesty, the few moments when Frank faced the facts about himself, that he was getting older, that he was losing his skills as a gunfighter, and that much of the time he was frightened that somebody from his past, some punk who'd finally gotten good enough, would reappear and kill him. And they would lie in the darkness then and she would soothe him and then they would make soft, gentle love. He would whisper forgive me, forgive me and she would forgive him and forgive herself, too, for being so foolish where he was concerned, for without him she had no life. No life at all.

“Little more coffee?” the waitress asked, tilting her tin pot to Sarah's cup.

“No, thanks.”

The waitress watched her carefully. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“You look flushed. Like you might be feeling faint.”

The waitress was gray-haired and maternal; Sarah appreciated her concern. “I'm fine, really.”

“Whatever it is, I'm sure it'll work out.”

Sarah smiled, knowing that tears stood in her eyes. “I sure hope it will, anyway.”

She had no idea where to go, what to do, who to see. So she just walked, the way she always did in the first days of being left by Frank.

She went everywhere and nowhere, saw everything and nothing. An image of pink summer flowers and the scent of apple blossoms; a man shoveling fly-buzzed manure out of the livery; a young girl in a fluttery white dress leading a group of smaller children in ring-around-the-rosy; the chug and chuff of a steam engine as it gained purpose and power and headed east down tracks shining with sunlight. A plump priest in black cassock stood on the steps of his stone parish; on impulse—she was, after all, a Presbyterian—she went over and touched the hands he had folded on the rim of his girth. “Pray for me, Father,” she said, but was gone before he could respond.

When she got back to her hotel, she saw Guild sitting in a leather chair in the lobby. He was smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper. She hated to think it, but he looked old and sad in the way of the other old men who sat idly in the lobby.

He saw her over the top of his paper. He folded the paper neatly, put it down, and came over to her.

“Why don't we go for a walk?”

“Leo, I've been walking for the last hour. I'm tired of walking.”

“Go out on the sidewalk, anyway. It's too quiet in here to talk.”

As it was. All the old men were straining forward to hear what they were about to say.

She sighed. When Leo wanted you to do something, you usually did it.

She went out into the sunlight and stood on the sidewalk. People flowed by and jostled her. The air smelled of sunlight. She'd always thought that peculiar, that sunlight should have a scent.

Leo studied her with his blue, blue eyes and said, “I'm on my way over to the depot to buy you a ticket.”

“What?”

“Just what I said. And I don't want no goddamned argument about it, do you understand?”

“But Leo—”

“You know what he's gone and done, with the gunfight and all, and you know what the result is going to be. I don't want you around for it. You've had heartbreak enough with that tinhorn son of a bitch.”

As she was often mother to Frank, so had Leo often been father to her. He was father now. Touched, she reached out a soft hand to his cheek. “I talked with Ben Rittenauer last night,” she said.

“Oh?”

“He seems like a reasonable man.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning I think I can talk him out of it.”

“I don't think you know how much he hates Frank. Rittenauer has his pride like everybody else. And he's awful happy about that ten-thousand-dollar paycheck.”

She smiled. “I still think I can talk him out of it, Leo.”

“C'mon,” he said, and took her by the elbow. He'd never been rough before. He was rough now.

“No, Leo, I don't want to go get a train ticket.”

“Right now I don't give a damn what you want.”

“No,” she said.

He redoubled his grip on her elbow and tried tugging her in the direction of the depot.

People were gawking at them. How people loved the grief of strangers.

“No,” she said again.

And then, with her free hand, she slapped him.

She knew instantly what she'd done. She had slapped not Leo, but Frank; all the years of loss and fear and shame, all those years boiling up suddenly and erupting as a slap on Leo's face.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

She saw that he did not understand, that he was hurt and angry now. “Leo, I know you were only trying to help but—”

And then he was gone, the crowd claiming him. She couldn't even see his white hair now.

“Leo,” she said to herself, realizing that she might have lost her last and best friend. “Leo.”

She went upstairs and laid down, trying to sleep, but it didn't work. She went over to the window and looked out. She wanted suddenly to be out of this town. Forever. Maybe Leo was right, after all. Maybe the best thing was to get on a train and say goodbye to everything. For a long, bright moment she was filled with ridiculous joy. That was it. She'd leave town and start life afresh, make new friends, be her old happy self again, the self she'd been before Frank, before Leo even. The girl in her was what she'd lost somewhere, and it was the girl in her she wanted to find again.

But it ended, the hope, and she became aware of her fluttering heartbeat and the sticky anxious sweat on her arms, the dry panic in her throat. Frank. She could never leave him. Suddenly she had purpose again. She had to go see Ben Rittenauer before it was too late.

She came, as he knew she'd come, just as she had the other times she'd left him.

There always came the day when her knuckles would rap softly on the door, and she would say, in as sweet and soft a voice as she could possibly summon, “Ben. Ben, it's me.”

And being the fool he was, Ben Rittenauer always opened the door to her.

As he did now.

“Hello, Ben.”

“Hello.”

“You're surprised to see me.”

“No, no, I'm not, Beth.”

She smiled. “Then at least glad to see me?”

“I'm not sure yet.”

She gave him her little girl look. She was a past master at that little girl look. “It's awfully dark out here in this hallway.”

“You'll survive.”

“You won't let me in?”

“They don't like it when men have ladies in their rooms here.”

“That never stopped you before.”

“You never left me for Frank Evans before.”

“People make mistakes.”

“You've made more than your share.”

“What if I say I'm sorry?”

He sighed. “Spare me that, anyway.”

Her gaze got tougher. She hated it when her wiles didn't work. That's what she was all about, her wiles. “It is sort of ungallant for you to leave me out in the hall.”

“I suppose it is,” he said. And he walked into the room, letting her follow him in and close the door herself.

He stood for a moment in the middle of a long bar of dusty sunlight, then turned around. “You look good, I'll say that for you.”

“You look good, too.”