The Crack in the Lens (10 page)

Or, We Are the Guests of Honor at a Necktie Party

The fellow with the scattergun did all the talking in his low, rough rumble.

“Gun belts. Off. Slow.”

“Hands behind your backs.”

“Over there.”

His two compadres, meanwhile, threw our Colts in the brush and tied our hands together and led our horses beneath a big oak tree without so much as a jingle of spurs, let alone a word. So it was the froggy-talking man I tried reasoning with.

Alright.
Pleading
with.

“Just hold on, would ya? If you got a beef, lay it out plain. We can talk it through. Whadaya say, huh?”

I tried to meet the man’s gaze, make contact with something behind his ghostly-gray mask, but I couldn’t even see his eyes at all—just a pair of ragged holes as black as tar.

His body was mostly hidden, as well. All three men wore oversized slickers buttoned to the neck with the collars turned up. Which left nothing to judge them by other than general size. Yet though they differed slightly in build, none was excessively tall or short or broad or lean. They weren’t excessively anything, really, except unfriendly. Unfriendly and quiet.

Froggy just sat in his saddle, shotgun in his left hand, reins in his right, ignoring my chatter. So I stopped wasting my breath on him. I had so little left to spare.

“I’m sure you’re a decent feller,” I said to the man holding our horses. “You don’t wanna be party to nothing like this. It ain’t right, and you know it. Why don’t you say so to your friends?”

He chose not to. He chose, in fact, to go on saying nothing at all.

I can’t say I was surprised. I didn’t really entertain the delusion that I could talk my way out of what was coming. I was just angling for a stay of sentence. A minute’s conversation might be enough.

I’d managed to keep my wrists a couple inches apart as they were cinched together, so there was a little play in the loops—literal wriggle room. And wriggling I was, too, groping for loose ends, hoping I could snake my hands free in time to…something.

The third masked man had moved off somewhere behind us, and I twisted in my saddle, thinking to aim some wheedling his way while keeping my fumbling fingers from his line of sight.

When I saw him again, he was back on horseback, riding up close—the better to toss knotted ropes over the branch above us.

“Oh, no you don’t!” I cried out as the man whipped off my hat and slipped on the noose. “Don’t you do it!”

“It’s alright, Brother,” Gustav said, his voice flat but steady. Tense but calm. Or maybe just resigned.

“These bastards are fixin’ to hang us!”

Old Red lost his lid and gained a loop of rope as I just had.

“It’s alright,” he said.

I was in no frame of mind to debate his definition of “alright.” I was clawing at the rope holding my hands now, not even worried that one of the masked men might notice. What would they do? Shoot me before they hung me?

“Ain’t you got the balls for a fair fight?” I spat at the fellow holding our bridles. I was tempted to kick at his cloth-covered face but thought better of it lest he let loose and set us to swinging early.

I turned to face the shotgun man again, coarse hemp scraping at my Adam’s apple. “Yellow son of a bitch! Why don’t you take off that mask and face us like a man!”

The black holes of his hood stayed pointed at my brother. “You shouldn’t have come back,” he croaked.

My hands moved a little further apart. A loop was finally working loose. A few more seconds and—

The man who’d noosed us unholstered his six-gun.

The bridle man let go and scurried aside.

“No, goddamn y—!”

They didn’t even let me finish.

The shotgun man gave a nod and his chum with the gun pulled the trigger and everything exploded.

I can’t even recall hearing the shot at all. I remember only the jerk of sudden motion as my pony bolted and the grunt-shriek-squeal that popped up from my gut. After that, all was blackness.

For about three seconds.

Because I’d closed my eyes.

I opened them again when the up-down jostle of a galloping mount beneath my butt made it clear there was actually something still to see. This is what I quickly discovered: Either the Afterlife looks remarkably like the Texas Hill Country at night from atop a runaway horse, or I was still in the Duringlife…for the moment, at least.

A sudden tug on my neck nearly yanked me back out of the saddle. It didn’t last, though, and I straightened up again, my throat burning. But I knew another such tug—perhaps a stronger, longer one—was sure to come along quick, for my noose was dragging along loose behind my spooked pony. All it had to do was tangle in the hooves or catch in some brush and my neck would be just as broke as if I’d dropped from the gallows.

“Whoa. Whoa!
Whoa
, dammit!” I roared, and I leaned back in the saddle as far as I dared.

A good cutting horse, accustomed to the feel of cowhands working rope up top, would’ve known just what do to, but a rented-out nag from some livery wouldn’t have the saddle sense God gave a groundhog. Certainly mine, with her reins hanging loose and a gunshot still ringing in her ears, had no intention of slowing down, even if she was charging down a narrow trail in the dead of night.

My hands were flopping like fish now, struggling to work free of the rope around my wrists. The knot was more slack than ever, with maybe six inches of play between my hands. For all I knew, a pull the wrong way would just cinch it up tight again, yet I had no choice but to try.

Then the fingers of my left hand brushed over something stubby flapping loose, and after a few frenzied fumblings I managed to clamp onto it.

I’d found one of the loose ends of the rope. If I worked back, fingers crawling along the hemp like a spider, I could latch on to the knot itself. Assuming I recognized the hitch—and if there’s one thing a cowboy knows, it’s knots—I could untie it in no time.

Which was exactly what I had. My pony was skirting the tree line, and perhaps thirty feet ahead I spied a long, thick shape stretching out over the trail. If I didn’t duck quick, I’d be brained on a branch as big as the one I’d almost been hung from.

I tilted forward and tucked myself down.

Then a strange thought occurred to me. I can only convey it to you now as “A wwwww, fudge
this
,” though it wasn’t words so much as a simple (and some might say simple-minded) impulse.

I straightened my back and pushed down on the stirrups, lifting myself as high out of the saddle as I could.

Now, I’m sure there are more painful ways to dismount a horse than a branch across the chest. Being shot from the saddle by a harpoon might sting a mite more. Maybe. Believe it or not, though, there are advantages to being chopped down by a tree.

For one thing, I was removed from my pony’s back quickly and cleanly, without a broken neck or (should I have tried hurling myself from the saddle trussed as I was) crushed legs.

For another thing…well…

Anyway, it didn’t kill me.

For the briefest of moments, I dangled limply over the branch like a damp sheet on the line. Slowly, I came sliding off, the rough bark scratching and gouging what of my chest it hadn’t pulverized. Then I dropped to the rocky ground, landing on my tailbone.

I didn’t even have the wind left in my lungs to yelp. I just sort of puddled there on the trail, collapsing in a panting heap as my horse’s hoofbeats faded into the distance. It would’ve been a welcome luxury to pass out, and I think my brain was flirting with the notion when a single, searing thought burned through my pain and snapped my eyes open wide.

“Gustav!”

I squirmed and cursed until I was up on my knees, then whipped around to peer back at the big oak that was now a hundred feet behind me. I expected to see a slender figure swaying there, limp, broken, alone. A sob was already welling up in my chest when I spotted my brother.

The sob turned into a laugh that sliced through my bruised chest like a Bowie knife. Not that I minded.

Old Red was riding toward me—his hands, untied, on the reins. There was no rope around his neck.

When he was close enough, he slid from the saddle and stomped up, shaking his head. He squatted down to give me a fast, fuming once-over.

“Christ, Brother,” he sighed once he was satisfied my head wasn’t about to fall off. “I
told
you it was gonna be alright.”

Or, Old Red Yanks the Mask off One of Our Attackers

My throat was rubbed raw and my butt was bruised black. Yet when it comes to pains in the neck
or
ass, nothing can top my brother.

“You couldn’t undo this yourself?” he griped as he freed my hands with one ungentle jerk of the rope.

I pulled the noose over my head and threw it into the bushes beside the trail.

“I was gettin’ it loose. Another minute and—”

“Another minute? It was a granny knot, ya idjit! You were supposed to untie it in five
seconds
.”

“What are you talkin’ about?”

Old Red turned and headed for his horse.

“‘The grand thing is to be able to reason backward,’” he said, quoting Guess Who for the first time in ages. “Thinkin’ ass-backwards is more your line than reasonin’ backward, but maybe that’s close enough. See if you can work it out before I get back.”

“Where the hell you goin’?”

“Great day in the morning,” Gustav groaned as he hoisted himself up into the saddle. “You’d have thought the man had landed on his head.”

He went galloping off into the darkness.

When he rode back a minute later, at least one of the puzzles he’d left me with solved itself: He was leading my runaway pony by the reins.

As for the the Mystery of the Sloppy-Ass Knots, it still had me mystified—though, in my defense, I’ll say that the Mystery of Standing Up Without Fainting was still proving quite a challenge, too.

“So?” Gustav said, tossing me my reins.

I shrugged—and nearly passed out from the pain that went shooting down my backside.

It was going to be a long night.

“What does it tell you,” Old Red said, “that our nooses weren’t actually hitched to anything and our hands were tied with knots a five-year-old should’ve been able to untangle?”

“Can’t you just tell me?”

Old Red spun his hands in the air instead, coaxing me to trot out a deduction.

“Alright,” I sighed. “They never meant to kill us. It was just another warning.”

Gustav nodded. “Yeah? And?”

“And…I feel extremely warned.”

Old Red rolled his eyes. “Didn’t you even ask yourself why they was wearin’ masks?”

“I just assumed they
didn’t want us to know who they were
.”

“And why should they care if we did?”

“Cuz otherwise we’d…oh. Right.”

The answer had been staring me in the face. Literally.

My brother knew our “lynching” was phony from the get-go—because there’s no need to hide your identity from a man you’re about to kill.

“Brilliant deducifyin’,” I said, putting on a look of misty-eyed admiration. “Why any man with a mind like yours would for a moment entertain the notion of herding goats is beyond—”

“Feh,” Old Red spat, and he wheeled his mount and set off up the trail without another word. Assuming “feh” even counts as one in the first place.

He was headed north. Toward town.

Extremely warned or not, he wasn’t turning back.

Nor was I—though I gave myself another moment to recover before forging on. The way my keister throbbed, stretching out on a featherbed would’ve been purest agony. A saddle might as well have been the rack. Still, I managed to get astraddle of it somehow.

When I caught up to Gustav, he was crawling around nose to the ground beneath the hanging tree. Our little Vigilance Committee was long gone.

“Too dark to read sign,” Old Red said. “Found this, though.”

He tossed me my Stetson. His was already back atop his head.

“Nice to have my hat back,” I said, “but I’d rather it was my Colt.”

“No such luck.” Gustav stood and got atop his horse again. “They threw ’em so far into the brush we couldn’t find ’em in broad daylight.”

“Which means we gotta ride the rest of the way unheeled.”

“Unless you tucked a couple spare six-guns in your socks.”

I slumped in my saddle—then sat up ramrod straight as another bolt of pain raced along my tailbone.

“So,” I grated out, “you got any notion who them fellers was?”

“Oh, I got more than a notion.”

“You mean you know?”

“Well…‘know’ is a mighty strong word.”

Then, as he so often will, my brother ended the conversation by simply moving off with no apparent worry in the world about my following.

“You know,” I called after him, “‘jackass’ is a mighty strong word, too, but I ain’t afraid to use it.”

Old Red shushed me and kept going.

I shushed and followed.

Risky as it was leaving the trail at night, it would have been riskier sticking to it, given our popularity thereabouts. So before long, we were groping our way through the bramble, headed for the river. We had to lead our horses on foot, it was so dark, and that, combined with the water’s serpentine slithering through the hills, added hours to our journey north. By the time we rode into town, branch-scraped and chigger-chewed, I was so achy-tired only the pain in my posterior kept me from nodding off on the hoof.

Before we could collapse into our saggy hotel bed, though, we had to return our rented mounts. It took some pounding on the stable doors, but eventually the liveryman opened up.

“Who the hell…?” he muttered as he leaned out, lantern in hand. He was half-dressed and half-asleep, and his hair was standing up so straight it could have been a gray crown. When his droopy eyes found their focus, they widened in surprise. “Oh. You. You’re late. That’ll be extry.”

Once the horses were in the livery and the “extry” in the man’s pocket, I started shuffling off for the Star. Gustav lingered, though.

“Tell me,” he said, “anybody come ’round askin’ about us today? Wonderin’ where we was goin’? When we might be back?”

The liveryman rubbed his stubble-covered chin and tried to look thoughtful—which was enough right there to slap the BS brand on whatever he was about to say.

“No, sir. Not that I recollect.”

“Not that you recollect. Right,” my brother said. “Would there be another livery in town these days?”

“Sure. Some Polack opened a place over on Fountain Street a couple years back.”

“Good,” Old Red said. “We’ll be takin’ all our business to him from now on…ya damned snake.”

The liveryman looked like he was about to protest, then changed his mind and flashed us an evil, yellow-fanged grin. “Hey, it’s no skin off my nose—I figured I’d never see you two again anyhow. I’m just glad I got my horses back!”

“Why, you nasty old backstabber—”

I took a step toward the man, right fist readied for a roundhouse, but he was already on the move, hopping backward and slamming the doors in my face. On the other side of the thick wood, I could hear him dropping the bar in place with a phlegmy cackle.

I battered the door with kicks and cusses, but my brother just turned and walked away.

“Where you goin’?” I said. “This SOB knows who jumped us. Shouldn’t we get in there and beat it out of him?”

“I never knew a liveryman who didn’t keep a hogleg handy,” Gustav said without slowing down.

By the time he reached the first corner, I was at his side.

When we got to the Star, Old Red steered us to the alley that ran along and behind the hotel. At first, I assumed this was just more precautionary creeping, but the way my brother froze when we got around back reminded me where we were.

Here Gertrude “Adeline” Eichelberger had been butchered five years before.

There wasn’t much to see there in the dark. An ash heap, a rotting mattress, a back door for deliveries (and sneaking in floozies). Directly behind the hotel was an empty lot overgrown with weeds, while the backs of other businesses stretched off to the north, east, and west in a T.

It was the Star’s back wall Gustav stood and stared at. If there were still any stains there after all this time, I couldn’t see them.

A beam of orange light cut through the alleyway into the little field behind us. Dawn was coming on. Old Red turned toward the light…then stopped again.

He was facing one of the other buildings now—its fresh-painted, neatly swept back landing was maybe fifty feet away. There were other, nearly identical posterns to either side of it, yet this one alone held my brother mesmerized.

“What are you lookin’ at?” I asked.

“These days? I wouldn’t know,” my brother said, “but it used to be a barbershop.”

It took a moment for that to sink in. When it did, though, it sank good and deep, and it hit bottom hard.

“Are you sayin’—?”

Gustav nodded. “That’s what I’m sayin’.”

“Well, my oh my.”

Before Milford Bales became town marshal, he’d been a barber—and the back door of his old shop wasn’t thirty steps from the very spot Adeline had died.

I’d just passed the night without a wink of sleep, yet for the first time in hours I felt truly awake.

“Did Bales know Adeline?” I asked.

“Not that I ever heard.”

“He have any truck with crib gals?”

“If he did, he kept it quiet.”

“Well, he’d have to, wouldn’t he? Respectable feller like him. You don’t get to be postmaster or town marshal without puttin’ up a few false fronts.”

“Or puttin’ on a few masks,” Gustav said, and he gave me what some writers like to call “a significant look.” Which is to say he stared into my eyes long and hard, as if trying to push a thought into my head through sheer force of will.

Funny thing, too. It worked.

“Say,” I said. “That feller with the shotgun and the deep voice…”

A word popped into my mouth I hadn’t been expecting, and I paused a moment to sample the taste of it. It tasted real, true, right. So I started again.

“That feller with the shotgun and the
phony
voice. He held his reins here, didn’t he?”

I held up my right hand.

“And his scattergun here.”

I held up my left.

“He sure did,” my brother said. “A southpaw, I’d bet.”

I thought back on the hand I’d seen all atremble as it hovered next to a holster the day before.

A
left
hand.

“Them fellers found us by askin’ someone in town,” I said. “Which means it probably wasn’t anyone off the Lucky Seven. They already knew we’d be passin’ thataway.”

“That’s right—and didn’t you hear? When the two of ’em was on foot gettin’ the nooses on us?”

I tilted my head and closed my eyes, as if whatever sound my brother was speaking of might yet be echoing around for me to hear. After a few seconds, I gave up.

“I didn’t hear nothing.”

“Exactly,” Gustav said. “
No spurs
. The rope was stiff, too. New bought. Never used. Them slickers didn’t have a spot on ’em, neither.”

I nodded. I hadn’t seen it till just then, but there’d been clues scattered around like Hansel and Gretel’s trail of bread crumbs, and they led to one and only one conclusion.

We’d been ambushed by townsmen. Not just that—one towns-
man
in particular.

“Looks like your pal Bales went to an awful lotta trouble to put a scare in us tonight,” I said. “Makes me wonder why he’d bother.”

“Makes me wonder, too. A lot.”

Old Red turned toward the Star again. The morning light had spread now, and with it more detail emerged from the shadows.

Warps in the wood. Chips in the paint. No old bloodstains yet, but maybe that was just a matter of time as the darkness lifted.

“Like I said a while back—‘know’ is a mighty big word to bandy about,” Gustav said. “But ‘think’? ‘Suspect’?”

My brother gave one quick, firm nod, like a straw boss giving his approval to a new-built corral.

“Those’ll do just fine.”