Richard Deming - Gallows in My Garden

“Maybe if we asked someone, we could find a better road,” I suggested.

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” the tall gunman told me tolerantly. “Six days a week tractor lugs grind this road to powder. But on Sunday there’s nobody closer than seven miles.”

Apparently deciding the other car had definitely gone on, Harry shifted into low and moved ahead. Our road was little more than a dirt trail, with underbrush crowding it so closely we scratched against it on both sides in the narrower spots. The July drought had parched the road surface, after which it had been pulverized by tractors to an ankle-deep layer of dust. Even though we proceeded at a moderate speed because of holes and bumps hiding under the dust, we left behind us a billowing, impenetrable screen.

For about a mile we wound through heavily under-brushed wasteland and timbered area until we came to a circular widening large enough for the car to turn around. Harry swung its nose back in the same direction from which we had come and stopped.

It was like stopping in a dense fog at night. An opaque brown blanket pressed against the car windows, blotting out the sunlight. For nearly a minute we sat quietly waiting for the dust cloud to settle, which it did gradually until it became a thin haze. Now we could see the underbrush each side of the road, but straight ahead suspended dust still formed a blank wall.

“Want to tell what you did with the kid?” asked the tall gunman.

“I told you,” I said.

“All right,” he said evenly. “Get out, then.”

I managed to get a mocking smile on my face as I climbed out of the car. But the next time you admire a movie hero facing death with a mocking smile, don’t believe his expression. Inside he is just as scared as you get when a truck nearly runs over you, and if anyone said, “Boo!” to him, his hair would turn white. We were all three sweating profusely, but I imagine Harry and the English lord were sweating warm salt water. The stuff running down my face and inside my clothes felt like melted ice.

Two feet from the car was a hard-packed ridge of dirt along the edge of the road, where the tractors’ lugs had not ground the surface to powder. For some reason I carefully stepped across to this so as not to sink up to my ankles in dust, as if it made any difference whether or not a corpse had dirty shoes.

Before the tall man followed me, Harry swung open the right front door, drew his heavy automatic, and centered it on my chest. The English lord stepped across as carefully as I had, but with his white suit and white shoes he had more reason. As soon as he had satisfied himself that he was practically unsoiled, he took over the job of covering me while his companion joined us.

A pale cloud of dust still hovered around us, not enough to obscure vision, but enough to tickle your nostrils. Along the route we had come it seemed to grow thicker, probably merely because we were looking through more of it and its density accumulated, rather than because it actually was thicker. Thirty yards away it was like looking at a blank wall.

Harry said, “It’s my turn, ain’t it?” and cocked his automatic.

The other man raised one eyebrow. “This guy is mine, chum. That’s the agreement — in special cases you can go out of turn.”

“So what’s special?”

“The guy slugged me, didn’t he?”

“Don’t let him push you around, Harry,” I said brightly, in a voice that quavered only slightly. “First thing you know he’ll be making all the big kills and all you’ll get is the kids and old ladies.”

“Shut up!” Harry said, his eyes cold and his heavy automatic beginning to swing upward.

I started to hunch my left shoulder with the intention of swinging, not that I had the faintest hope my fist could beat his bullet, but on the theory that almost any action is less stupid than simply standing still when someone wants to shoot you. Then the sudden sound of a motor froze all three of us.

“Hold it!” the tall man snapped at Harry.

He turned to face the thinning wall of dust, beyond which the sound of a powerful car roared nearer and nearer. But the squat man’s eyes never left my face.

A car shot from the haze, I caught a flash of yellow and then it was past, leaving us engulfed in a blanket of dust. For a moment visibility sank to five feet, but it was still enough for Harry to keep me safely covered, and I knew at the slightest move he would press the trigger.

Brakes screeched as the other car stopped just beyond us. Then as the taller gunman worriedly tried to squint through the dust, another sound broke through the opaque curtain.

“Motorcycle,” said Harry, both his gun and his eyes still aimed unwaveringly at me.

After the first moment of the other car’s passage, the dust settled sufficiently to allow about a ten-yard area of visibility. Suddenly through the haze appeared the most welcome sight I have ever seen — a state trooper on a motorcycle, riding slowly through the fog of dust with one foot trailing.

The tall man’s hammerless revolver barked once. The slug caught the trooper in the shoulder, spinning him backward clear of the slowly moving machine, which crashed on its side in a shower of dust.

At the same moment a pistol barked from the other direction, and a bullet whispered past my forehead so close it actually singed one eyebrow. Harry’s gun swung from me toward this new offense and chattered off three shots as rapidly as a machine-gun burst. Before the third shot sounded I was diving headlong past the radiator, and as both Harry and his pal began to fire furiously at their flank attacker, I skittered on hands and knees toward the prone cop, raising my own personal dust screen as I went, and nearly choking to death in it.

The cop was still alive, for he groaned just as I reached him. Jerking open the flap of his holster, I swung out his service revolver and spun toward the car, drawing back the hammer as I arched the gun. It was lucky I managed this operation all in one motion, for dimly through the haze I made out Harry standing by the open car door on the driver’s side, his automatic centered between my eyes.

Our guns sounded together, but mine must have been the shade of a second before his, for the bullet whistled over my head. Mine caught his upper right arm, spinning him around so that he half tell and half climbed into the car. The engine was still idling, and even with a useless arm he managed somehow to start it jerkily forward.

The English lord, in the seat beside him, was trying to get a shot past the driver and through the window, which was impossible unless he sent it first through Harry’s head. I got a bead on Harry’s face, and it would have been like shooting a sitting bird if I had not suddenly had to fall flat in self-defense when bullets from the flank assailant began to whiz all sides of me.

The sedan picked up speed with a roar of power and surged drunkenly down the road while I was still groveling. The sudden departure left the scene again shrouded in dust.

In an invitingly sweet voice I called, “Gre-ene!”

“Yeah, Sarge,” he answered cautiously. “You all right?”

I got to my feet. “Just dandy. Come here a minute.”

His dim shape materialized from the dust cloud, and he approached with a delighted grin on his face. He stopped three feet away.

“Come a little closer,” I said.

Looking puzzled, he took one more step toward me.

I haven’t timed a left hook so beautifully since my last professional fight. He sat in the dust for a full minute shaking his head back and forth. But when he finally got to his feet again, he didn’t swing back. He merely refused to speak to me.

By the time we got the motor cop to the university hospital, which was the nearest one, he was in shock from a shattered shoulder. We must have looked like two black-faced comedians carrying a third. Since Greene had stayed on his feet in the ankle-deep dust except for momentarily assuming a sitting position, he was covered only by a light film. But I had literally wallowed in the stuff. It was in my shoes, down my back, in my hair, and even in my pockets. On top of that, the temperature still hovered around ninety, and perspiration had converted a good portion of the brown dust to black mud. Once as a kid I fell head first into a barrel of oil, but aside from that experience I have never been dirtier in my life.