Shotgun (25 page)

“I split his melon good with a piece of pine. You know the one, with the made-special curved handle.”

Eli Greene nodded and made a sound in his throat that Clyde Crutcher took as agreement, as he always did. Light danced on the blade in Eli's hand as he brought it in close, skating the sandpaper on the back of Crutcher's neck, and gathering a row of gray wiry hair against the sharp edge.

Crutcher dropped his too-wide chin with, “The crazy sum'bitch had one eye and a pair o' Colts! I clubbed him, and them pistols went flyin'. Had him kissin' the floor before the bar knew a damn thing had happened. Hell, folks'll be buyin' me drinks for the next six months for savin' 'em.”

Eli made a gesture toward the holster snug under Crutcher's arm, then wiped lather from the razor. “Why didn't you just use your gun?”

Crutcher coughed and his voice dropped, “Well, I thought better of it. You've gotta know when to pull a gun. And believe me, I know. There's even talk about takin' my picture and namin' me ‘Stick Man of the Year.' So do a good job.”

“I didn't know they had a ‘Stick Man of the Year.' That's quite an honor.”

“Well, you'll never get it.”

Eli angled Crutcher's head with the two fingers that remained on his right hand, while making a sweeping motion with the razor in his left, “Probably not. But you best not tell a tale and get a shave at the same time. I might start laughing and that's how you lose an ear.”

“You sayin' I'm lyin'?”

“Oh, no sir.”

“Scarecrow like you ought to keep his thoughts to his self, 'cause I can always take my business across the street. And that's after I show ya what for. I've got a reputation.”

“I heard that,” Eli said as he dropped the razor in a pan of hot water scented with rose oil and picked up a pair of shears. The words kept tumbling out of Crutcher's mouth but the barber wasn't there anymore. He was fourteen years old and running along the ragged edge of the Mississippi at midnight, praying to reach the Canal Street ferry landing.

 

 

Eli's matchstick legs were trying hard, and his chest was burning, when the bottle of Wolfe's Schnapps hit him between the shoulders. The glass heel split with a shriek, and the shards tore into his collarbone. Red bloomed across Eli's shirt as he tangled in an old shrimp net and fell face first into the muddy black sand. The impact was soft; a wet cushion that felt cool and soothing for the few heartbeats before the huge man with the knife caught up to him.

“You shouldn't have made me run like that, Jew-boy !”

Eli stayed perfectly still, his face half buried. He held his breath as a fleshy paw grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and rag-dolled him to his feet. The man held Eli just under the jaw, suspending him six inches off the ground using only one hand. In the other, he had a knife that was all blade—a sharpened spike with a small wrapping of leather on one end. Eli twisted, his feet kicking at nothing, as the man's fingers tightened on his windpipe.

The boy gasped and the man snorted. “Chokin'? Now you know how I feel every damn day.”

The summer moon shadowed the man's face, but Eli could see his eyes. The pupils had swallowed the iris, and the lids seemed pinned open. All Eli had done was introduce himself to a stranger, but it was enough. The man said, “There's an order about Jews, and General Grant signed it! You're supposed to be gone! This was my ferry. I get fired for a couple of drinks and now your—papa—is runnin' it?”

The voice cradled Grant's name, and spit out “papa” like an obscenity. Eli knew about the General's infamous “Order 11” to expel “Israelites” from the agricultural states so they couldn't deal in cotton. There had been an editorial in the
New York Herald
, and with Eli's help, his father read it out loud twice, shaking his head at Grant's excuses and thanking Lincoln for repealing the “error in judgment.” Mr. Greene tore the article from the paper and periodically he would show it to his son to remind him to “take care, and don't be obvious. That's how you get by in this world.”

The massive hand squeezed tighter, and the boy could taste the corrupted air trapped in his lungs. Consciousness was just a hazy awareness for Eli, his eyes rolling back white and red, as the man whispered, “I've been dyin' for years. I've got no money, and your family's eating regular? Stinkin' bullshit.”

Eli felt the hot breath of the words as his mind started to blank, and his body went limp. The man smiled and his grip relaxed. A roaring scream erupted from Eli as he jerked his knees up, and then pounded his foot into his attacker's chest with all of his strength, knocking him backwards. The sand bogged the drunk's feet and he tumbled, the homemade knife dropping from his hand.

Eli landed hard against a barnacled anchor chain that dug into his side. He couldn't catch his breath and spots floated before his eyes like red fireflies, but his body moved quickly. There was no thinking, just instinct. He grabbed the spike and spun around, letting it fly from his slender fingers in a natural and perfect motion as if the blade had been shot from a Navajo bow.

The weapon hit its target between the second and third ribs on the left, and buried itself to the leather. The man struggled to one knee, then collapsed, blood gurgling around the wound. He shivered, whispered something, and then all rage was gone.

Eli froze, waiting for the thunder in his ears to stop. Slowly, he bent over the man and pulled out the blade. It fit naturally in his palm and felt good, as if it was a part of his body, but the rush of new feeling gut-scared him. He dunked the weapon in the water, washed away the blood, and then placed it next to the dead man's hand.

Eli looked from one end of the landing to the other, expecting an angry crowd or a blue-frocked Parrish Policeman coming for him. But the shore was empty, because screams along the New Orleans waterfront meant nothing. There was only the sound of the river, calm and running forever.

Eli's lungs filled again and he settled by a broken piling, the drunkard lying quietly at the river's edge, the water swirling pink around his face. Eli tried not to stare at his attacker, but he couldn't help it. This was the first dead man he had ever seen, and he was the one who had taken his life. The thought was too much; Eli didn't want to talk to his papa or God, Eli just wanted to ride to the end of the world.

The night broke apart and Eli hid behind the remains of an old pier that had been shattered by Union cannon fire. At first light, he watched his father walk a team of mules and a lumber cart onto the ferry while teamsters, sharing biscuits and coffee, boarded behind him and settled against a wooden railing. The teamsters were a strapping pair and Mr. Greene was stoop-shouldered, but he secured the load without their help then asked for their money as if he were apologizing. Mr. Greene called out over the morning din of Canal Street, “Son! We've got customers!”

Eli ducked down, waiting for the cast-off bell. Mr. Greene spotted his son's bay hitched by the fire station and shouted his name again, clanging the rusty signal three times. The ferry broke for the opposite landing, Mr. Greene pulling the guidelines, as Eli took a few fast steps from the pilings and stopped, his eyes fixed on the corpse. The man's threatening hands looked like shapeless bags, and purple blotches were surfacing under the skin turning his face into a clownish mask.

“You're dead,” Eli finally said aloud so he'd believe it. “You're dead and I'm alive,” he repeated as instinct took over again. He grabbed the knife, struggled to put on the man's wet jacket, and then ran like hell.

Mr. Greene wasn't looking back at Canal Street when Eli swung onto his bay, weighed down by a dead man's coat with a knife in the pocket. Eli didn't have a gun, canteen, or bedroll as he spurred his horse toward Faubourg Marigny. Behind him, he could hear the fading shouts of his father and the laughter of the others as they spotted a “dead 'un!” lying in the mud.

 

 

Crutcher sneezed, then locked back his lips with his thumbs, trying to force a smile from his crooked teeth. “I've got to look damn good. When folks come into the place, they're gonna wanna shake my hand.”

Eli trimmed an eyebrow that was curling wild. “I wouldn't smile too much, Mr. Crutcher. You're a serious man and people want to know you mean business.”

“You're a barber and you only got seven fingers! Who takes you serious?”

Eli steadied the tip of the scissors next to Crutcher's eye and snipped a few stragglers. “You've been coming in since I opened.”

“I come in because you got the two-bit shave and haircut.”

“There are other shops, but I'm a good barber. Just like you're very good at what you do.”

Adding the compliment is something Papa would have done, Eli thought. He trimmed the back of Crutcher's neck and glimpsed himself in the long, gilt-edged mirror he had brought in from San Francisco. He'd inherited his father's widow's peak and adopted his moustache, but now he thought he saw a familiar servitude in his shoulders and manner. His expression darkened and his eyes knit together. The transformation wasn't sudden, but this was the moment it hit him. He stopped cutting.

Crutcher adjusted himself in the leather chair and gave his bib a snap, sending clumps of hair to the floor. “Yeah, I'm good. And I'm a real part of this town 'cause I was born right here in Prescott, not two blocks from the Palace Hotel. You'll always be an outsider. That's just the way it is.”

“But you're a man of the world, too.” Eli began snipping again.

“I've knocked around some. There's parts of the country where folks are afraid to say my name out loud.”

“Because you were, well, a gunfighter.”

Crutcher cranked his neck around, “That's right. I lived on the other side of the law and I built me a rep. That's how come I got the job keepin' the peace in the saloon, but I don't make it no secret. If folks are scared, then they behave. Nobody trifles with me.”

“There was the gentleman with one eye.”

“He made a damn mistake, didn't he?”

Eli nodded again. “Oh, I didn't mean any offense. And I know your deadly reputation because you told me all about it the first time you came in for the two-bit.”

“So you'd know not to trifle with me! Why don't you tell me somethin' for a change? Hell, nobody knows nothin' about you.”

Eli straightened Crutcher's tie with the thumb and index finger on his right hand. The stick man winced at the lump of congealed flesh that had grown over the open wound left by the missing three fingers. “I tried to get a job as a barber at the Palace, but the manager said my hand would make the guests a little squeamish.”

“You just come out of nowhere, lookin' for work? You shoulda written a letter first.”

“Except I'm right-handed. After my accident, I taught myself to cut hair with my left, but my handwriting's just chicken scratch.”

Crutcher leaned back with his eyes closed, “You're doin' all right for a cripple.”

Eli poured hot water on a towel, and rung it out, his mind full of the sweet time before he killed his second man.

 

 

Eli didn't know if he was wanted for murder, so he stayed off the main roads and stuck close to the river, following it into Arkansas. He thought he could lose himself in Helena with a new name, and make enough of a stake to get himself to Utah or Arizona. That was the plan as he sat by a low fire in the evenings, a dead man's coat around his shoulders, and practicing with his homemade knife.

The weapon was never out of his hands, flicking it from his hip or throwing it under-handed, depending on where he needed the blade to go. Bringing his arm down from the shoulder was the surest throw, and he hit his target dead-on every time so he could eat. When Eli rode into Helena, it was with empty pockets and a sack of rabbit pelts.

He got a job in a whorehouse as a bar wipe, and he was washing glasses when a mule skinner, who couldn't afford any of the better girls, decided he didn't like Eli's “half-nigger” face. The old boy wrapped his arms around a five-dollar whore and started to pull her upstairs when the spike flew from Eli's hand and tore through his windpipe.

Eli didn't remember throwing the knife, and thought he'd woken from a deep sleep when he found himself in the back of a wagon, huddled under a canvas tarp, as the five-dollar girl snuck him out of town. A reporter wrote a no-fact version of the killing and dubbed Eli The Bayonet Kid, and that's what he was called from then on, no matter what his age. Loudmouths and nervous punks challenged him, and they found out that he was faster with a knife than they were with a gun.

Eli read about himself in the paper, and prayed his papa hadn't seen the articles and torn them out. Small, mail-hack jobs paid his way as he headed west, and he was wanted in two states when he rode into the foothills of the Colorado Rockies and met up with Fancy Jess Archer. Jess was the man who blew his hand to pieces.

 

 

“This ain't my day off.” Crutcher's voice slapped Eli's ears as he pulled the towel off of his mashed-apple face. “I got things to do, even if you ain't.”

Crutcher held his palms out and Eli slathered them with Bay Rum. Crutcher tapped his face lightly, rising on his toes as he did it.

Eli grinned, “Sorry, Mr. Crutcher. I didn't mean to talk you to death.”

“Hell, you haven't said a damn word for ten minutes. You ain't much otherwise, but you do got a way with soap and razor.”