The Long High Noon (2 page)

 

TWO

Should auld acquaintance be forgot?

At this point you may be wondering who I am.

It's my fault, for slipping into first-person a while back, violating every journalist's rule about not making yourself a part of the story; but try as I will I can't figure a way to strike out the reference.

Well, we know what's the oldest profession, but storytelling surely comes next. The guy had to tell
some
one, and he wasn't about to tell it as if it happened to someone else.

I'm a writer, or I've tried to be. I joined the Circle X a few months after Randy Locke and Frank Farmer pulled out, leaving behind their legend. I was just off two semesters with the Columbia School of Creative Writing, and eager to glean firsthand experience to fuel my work; but my superabundant vocabulary made me a suspicious character in the bunkhouse, and my time there ruined my grammar for anything but sensational fiction. My bedroom is papered with rejections from
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper
and
The New England Journal,
among a dozen others, and sometime or other it dawned on me that I wasn't the next Mark Twain. I labored with Buffalo Bill's Wild West, grinding out fanciful tales of William F. Cody's adventures under the house names of Prentiss Ingraham and Ned Buntline for the gift shop, and a generation later scenarios for Thomas Ince and—for six delirious days—D.W. Griffith.

In between I waited tables in railroad hotels, tended bar in Denver and Las Vegas, New Mexico, battled bedbugs the size of lobsters in the county jail in Nebraska City, and sweated out six months in a laundry in San Francisco—cheek-by-jowl with the great Jack London, although I didn't find that out until much later, when Jack was too famous for me to approach with a humble request for a reference—and in all that time I could count the number of times I actually laid eyes on Randy Locke and Frank Farmer on the toes of Long John Silver's foot. Well, that's more than anyone else you could name. I guess you could call me a pilot fish, sucking the saltwater sweat off a couple of sharks who are all but forgotten in the great current of history's ever-rolling ocean.

My name? Forget it. You would anyway, five minutes after I told it. But I can make one unique claim: I'm the only soul living who can tell you anything you want to know about the longest gunfight in the history of the American West.

Not that you'd want to hear it. Their names don't resound with the thunder of a Wild Bill Hickok or a Wyatt Earp or even a Neanderthal like Clay Allison, who had the good grace to end his murderous bullying ways under the wheels of his own wagon when he was too drunk to hold his seat at the reins. As a result, my name wouldn't ring any farther than a lead nickel bouncing across shifting sand.

But I was there, and where were you?

*   *   *

When the K.P.R. spur reached Abilene, Frank put in for provisions—not before stopping in the establishment of a German tailor to order a Prince Albert coat, three linen shirts, and two pairs of striped trousers—and was emerging from the mercantile with a double armload of bacon, coffee, and one hundred rounds of ammunition, when he heard a familiar voice.

“Farmer! Palm your piece!”

Randy was smoking a cigar he'd just purchased from the profit of his latest delivery of hides. It was smoldering in the corner of his mouth when he dropped his hand to leather. Frank let go of his packages, meat, beans, and ordnance spilling into the gutter, and went for his hardware. Both men drew simultaneously; their reports sounded as one.

Frank's slug grazed Randy's collarbone, missing the big artery on the side of his neck by a quarter inch, and exiting out the back, taking along a measure of flesh and muscle. Randy's aim was higher still in his haste, and sliced off the top of Frank's left ear.

Both men required medical attention, but because Randy's condition was more serious he was still recovering on a cot in the room behind the doctor's office, a place of yellow oak, square bottles of laudanum and horse liniment on shelves, with a reek of alcohol as solid as any of the furnishings, when he opened his eyes to see what appeared to be a two-headed demon coming through the door with a pistol.

This doctor was a great proponent of preventing infection by enveloping fresh wounds in yards of gauze and white cotton; a toe severed in a wood-cutting accident was good for a rod, and the victim of a serious miscalculation by a barber had tottered out of the office looking like a giraffe with a cut throat. Another inch or two of wrap and Frank Farmer wouldn't have gotten his injured ear through the doorway.

Randy, fogged up as he was with tincture of opium, had sense enough to know that devil or mortal enemy, the intruder was cause for swift action. He rolled off the edge of the cot an instant before his pillow exploded. With the air filled with feathers, disinfectant, and the stink of spent powder, he managed to grasp the lip of his white-enamel chamber pot and skim it in the general direction of his assailant.

He was lucky in the trajectory. Frank yelped.

The cry woke the doctor, an addict to his own painkillers who had passed out in his horsehair leather desk chair from the effects of self-treatment. He lurched to his feet and after some groping found the door to the back room, then managed to manhandle Frank back into the office. This and the action of disarming him took place somewhat more easily than it might have under most circumstances, because the chamber pot had struck Frank's mangled ear as surely as if it had been aimed with precision rather than hurled in blind panic. The fiery pain distracted him, making him easier to manipulate.

A summons to the law in the persons of a marshal freshly retired from buffalo skinning and two deputies who'd served with the Army of the Potomac deposited Frank in jail. There inside bars made from flat steel strips held fast by rivets, the doctor opened his bag and amputated the rest of the ear with one snip of his scissors, the heavy projectile having nearly finished the job.

Frank, remember, was vain of his appearance. He kept his teeth clean with baking powder when he could get it, yellow soap when powder was unavailable, and took a bath every other week when he was in town. When the flesh healed, he borrowed the use of a catalogue belonging to the doctor and ordered a prosthesis from a medical supply firm in San Francisco. It arrived three weeks later, a shell-shaped object molded from pink gutta-percha in a small box with the firm's name stamped on it in gold with instructions for its care and application. These required fixing it in place with a daily dosage of sealing wax, which had a demoralizing habit of softening and letting go in the heat, usually at inopportune times. He fell to keeping it in his pocket when he wasn't in civilization or among strangers. The inconvenience and its humiliating nature put Randy's account deep in the red, to Frank's estimation.

“An eye for an ear,” he told the man in the cell adjoining his.

“That ain't exactly what the Book says,” replied the other, who was in for lascivious conduct in broad daylight with a Rumanian woman.

“Randy Locke ain't exactly in the Book.”

But payment was delayed.

By the time Frank was released from jail, Randy had returned to the buffalo hunt, conscious of the fact that his shooting arm needed time to recover before he took on anyone more challenging than a dumb brute. He was off to Nebraska, with a new skinner who wasn't nearly as stimulating company as the old, but the other man had found work with another outfit while Randy was down. This time Randy didn't hire a guide, the plains all being pretty much alike, down to the yellow-ocher grass and the same clapboard saloon, livery, and mercantile everywhere there was water enough to breed mosquitoes. He carried neither maps nor a compass. A man who couldn't identify the North Star when he saw it might as well wear a stiff collar and live in town.

Frank's fine for disturbing the public peace emptied his poke, so he rode back to the railhead to shoot Indians and grade track. The first gandy dancer who kidded him about getting his ear bit off by a Texas Street whore got a slug in his foot for his joke; the foreman who bound the wound, a former medical orderly with the Fifth Mississippi Volunteers, told him he was fortunate that Frank was saving his homicidal impulses for Randy Locke. Their relationship, with some healthy encouragement from bored newspaper publishers, was by this time entering the country of frontier legend.

The buffalo meanwhile were entering the country of the extinct.

The bottom didn't fall out of the market so much as it fell out from under the buffalo. Where the great herds had darkened the plains only a few years before, spilling over the nearest rise like thunderclouds rolling down from the Divide, little now remained but scattered bones. Soon even they were gone, scoured by pickers to sell by the ton to manufacturers to pulverize and run sugar through to remove impurities and to press and bake into fine china. Few easterners realized they owed their sweet pies and Christmas table dressings to a tick-ridden beast. Overnight, it seemed, the stacks of stiff green hides vanished from pole barns put up by buyers, and the buyers themselves disappeared into other enterprises, usually on one or the other coast by way of the new Transcontinental Railroad.

Randy drank up half his profits in a succession of establishments given to that practice, gambled the other half away on games of chance, and took his meals and shelter serving time in various jails for drunk and disorderly. One early morning he woke up in an alley in Omaha with his boots missing, his pockets turned inside out, and a hangover the size of Texas.

“Never too late to make a fresh start,” he said, fumbling for his watch and finding the silver chain snapped in half and the timepiece gone.

But the ranches he applied to all had cooks they were satisfied with, and the work he picked up loading grainsacks into wagons and swamping vomit and sawdust off saloon floors staled after a week or so. For a time he panhandled for money for drinks, food, and lodging, in that order, but after a couple of months his clothes looked like livery rubdown rags held together by rotten thread, dirt crusted his face and hands, and he stank like spoiled potatoes. There were no women in his life to bail him out when he was pressed into a work gang for vagrancy, shoveling horseshit out of a stable in which the county sheriff had a half-interest and cutting the throats of steers for a butcher whose brother-in-law sat on the bench of the circuit court. It was a lot of sweat and time, and none of it brought him an inch closer to Frank Farmer and the end of their transactions. He reckoned at that point he'd hit stony bottom.

*   *   *

Frank wasn't finding life any easier.

After the buffalo ran out, the Indians returned to reservations to subsist on government rations, when they weren't being embezzled by unscrupulous traders and Indian agents from Washington. The raids on survey parties and track-layers fell off, and with it the demand for sharpshooters to defend against them, particularly with the army taking up the slack, rounding up strays from the reservations and providing the same protection on the taxpayers' ticket that Frank had supplied for wages. The Great Undertaking having been completed at Promontory Point, the railroads laid off men in hordes, including part-time graders like Frank.

When he was offered work by the Santa Fe line as a common guard, dozing in some stuffy strong-car hoping for an assault by a gang of highwaymen just to break up the monotony, he demanded the time he had coming and rode to the nearest poker game. In a mining camp in Colorado he shot and killed a man over one pat hand too many and barely escaped a lynch mob when the deputy who'd arrested him, a naïve New Hampshire native lured West by dime novels, changed clothes with him and took his place in the cell while Frank left by a back door. (The mob, which had come there to lynch
some
one, strung up the deputy.)

Frank got away on a wind-broken bay he'd managed to steal from a corral, without a firearm or a cartwheel dollar to his name, just the clothes on his back and his Saturday-night ear in his pocket. He camped out under the stars, avoiding towns where the Thunder Creek Committee of Public Vigilance might have shinplasters out on him offering a reward for his hide, and stoned jackrabbits to survive.

His skill with a piece of shale did not measure up to his marksmanship with a carbine. In the wee hours of a frosty Colorado morning he started awake, convinced Randy Locke was standing over him aiming his Colt between his eyes, and in his panic kicked dust at a scrubby jack pine. When he recovered his senses he knew the vision for a hallucination caused by hunger, aided by a dose of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Wasting away, his belt buckle scraping a gall in his spine, burning hot when his teeth weren't chattering, skin bleeding where he'd scratched it raw, didn't distress him so much as the prospect of squandering his last hours fighting ghosts instead of Randy.

He calculated he was as low as low got.

Then God opened a window.

 

THREE

A houseguest should never arrive empty-handed, nor should a host point out the fact.

Two windows, actually.

Frank's sabbatical in the wilderness turned out to be a stroke of luck. A team of young prospectors found him close to death and brought him to their camp, where the old witch woman who ran the laundry nursed him back to strength with some remedies she'd learned in Albania. During his recuperation she told him, in broken English, of a drifter she'd treated for a fractured skull that had remained undiagnosed since he left Utah Territory weeks earlier. It seemed it had been laid open by a wolfer named Locke with a bottle in Salt Lake City over some difference of opinion the patient couldn't remember. The description he'd given her matched Randy.

The old woman let Frank repay his debt working the washboard, and when he was well enough to travel gave him a bear's-claw necklace she'd made as a hex against bad luck. From there, walking and accepting rides from passersby, he went to Pueblo, where he traded the necklace to a greenhorn for a toothless roan, which got him as far as Grand Junction before it keeled over and died. He stock-clerked in a general merchandise store for a month, bought a decent mount and a Remington revolver with a cracked grip but not too much play in the action, and lit a shuck for Mormon country.