Algis Budrys: Some Will Not Die

“I guess not.”

“Yeah.”

“What ever happened to your father, anyway?” Jeff asked. He didn’t like the way the conversation was going.

Pete smiled softly. “I don’t know. I guess I was about ten or twelve when Ryder’s bunch came through here, heading for Texas. My mother had just died, and my older brother, Jim, was big enough to run our place with my help. Pop was a rotten farmer anyway, so he talked it over with us, and when Ryder’s bunch pulled out, he packed up all the blank paper he could carry and went off with them. I sort of wanted to tag along, but Pop stepped on that idea hard. He was right, I guess. Ryder wasn’t doing any fighting he could avoid, but it was still a hard life.

“Worked out best in the end, too, when Jim got killed by one of you boys. If I’d of gone, there wouldn’t have been anybody left to work the place.”

“What difference would that make, if you weren’t here to see it?”

Drumm shrugged uncertainly. “I know. But I’m here. It just—I don’t know, it just feels that way.”

Jeff tried to imagine that trait of character that would make a man think in those terms about a tract of land much like any other tract, anywhere. But he had to give up on that.

Bit by bit, he told Drumm the story of what his life had been like, beginning with his father’s death and carefully ending with Alister’s marriage to Barbara, and his departure from home. He had to watch himself to make sure he didn’t let his real name slip, but otherwise he was able to let the story run almost automatically.

For some reason, a comment that Pete made on Cot’s death stayed with him. He found himself thinking about it at unexpected times and places.

“I’m sorry he died,” Pete said, “because I’m sorry for anybody who dies. But I’m glad for his sake he did. A man shouldn’t outlive his times.” He looked up and speared Jeff with his glance. “Once he’s decided for certain on what his times really are.”

Jeff couldn’t seem to shake the words loose.

When he’d been there a year, his patient plan reached its first goal. He had kept up his duties faithfully, and had stayed away from the telephone wire crew, talking to them only when he encountered them by accident, and not trying to send out any messages or ask for help of any kind. It would have been a futile move in any case, for his kind of man had no friends, and no hope of help, but, more important, he had known the townspeople were watching.

They gave him credit on a small plot of land, and he found time enough during the day to work it. He had to be awake most of the night, but he worked his land as hard as anyone worked theirs, while Pat showed him how. His face pinched while his shoulders broadened, and the thin layer of winter fat ran off him in muddy streams of perspiration. When he caught a raider stealing his young corn, he shot him through the elbow of his gun-arm.

That complete unpremeditated move tipped the scales in his favor, he realized later. The one man who still rode out with him was confidently careless about enforcing the original rules, and if he hadn’t wanted Pat so much by then, he could have shot him and left any time he chose. He debated it briefly, but realized that Pat would never go with him on that basis, and stuck to his original plan.

Wait a year, he told himself. In a year, they’d practically let him carry the town out on his back.

That fall, he started building his house. Left to himself, he might have thrown up a one-room shack of some kind, but he had enough offers of help to make a bigger project possible. Moreover, if he built a place large enough for a family, there was something as good as a display poster to advertise his intention of settling down. He realized how right he’d been when he caught Pat’s mother and father looking at the two of them over the dinner table and exchanging sly glances.

It seemed to help in his long campaign to wear Pat down, too.

And finally, when the next spring came, he knew it was time. He slept in the house alone, riding in and out of town with his rifle in his saddle boot any time he chose. He called everybody in the town by their first names, and he seldom had to eat his own cooking. The people of Kalletsburg had forgotten he was a raider, an outlaw.

Even Pete Drumm had forgotten, for he was as sour toward him as he would have been toward any other equal who was winning the contest over Pat.

Only me, he thought. I haven’t forgotten.

He waited until the moon died, and picked a night when it was cloudy enough to rain, piling packs on one of his two horses and working on his rifle until even its slowly deteriorating barrel shone without a trace of pitting. Then he waited patiently, until he was sure Pat’s parents would be asleep. He sat in his darkened house and counted slow time. Finally, he moved.

He walked his horses quietly to a stand of cottonwood near the Bartons’ house and hitched them there, moving the rest of the way on foot. Without a trace of having lost his old skill, he went into the shed and saddled Pat’s horse, and then circled the house.

And he came, inevitably, to the dining room window, which was still the easiest. Well, he thought, it’s a full circle.

Grinning with cold mirth, he slid through the loose window and stood once more in the Bartons’s dining room at night.

He fumed inwardly in response to a by now automatic reflex. He’d told Arnold a dozen times if he’d told him once to fix that window. But the old man just smiled and insisted that Jeff was all the protection he needed.

He shook his head angrily. Well, this’d teach him.

“Look boy,” Pat said from the darkness, “the only bathroom in this house is still next to the dining room. Can’t you learn?”

He sagged against the wall.

Pat came over to him and took his hand. “You must want something awful bad to keep sneaking in here. I hope it’s me.”

“I—” And all of a sudden, he couldn’t say it. He felt foolish, caught here, and somehow awkward, and completely ridiculous.

“I—” he began again, and felt something break open inside him. “Damn it,” he said bewilderedly, “I was going to ask you to take off with me. But I can’t do it! I can’t leave this goddamn town!”

Pat reached out and held him, her hand tousling his hair fondly. “You damn fool,” she said, “of course you can’t! You’re civilized.”

And this happened in the north:

Joe Custis stepped out of the dead commander’s hut into the flickering shadows from the cookfires. There was a rifleman posted about ten yards away, and Custis looked at him thoughtfully. Then he called, in a voice pitched to reach the man and no farther. “Hey—the boss wants some light in here!”

The man grunted and went to one of the near fires for a sliver of burning wood. He carried it back, shelding it carefully with his hands. “First no lights, and now lights,” he grumbled as he stepped through the doorway. He reached up to a shelf where an oil lamp was sitting, and stopped dead as he dimly saw Henley on the floor and the commander lying across the desk. “Now, who the hell’d be dumb enough to kill the commander right in camp…”

Custis whipped the flat of his hand across the side of the man’s neck. He caught the burning light carefully, crushed it out on the floor. Then he stepped outside again, gently closing the door behind him. He walked slowly away until he was fifty feet away from the huts, in the shadows, and then he turned toward the fire where he had seen Jody working. He had the knife in his belt under his shirt, and as he walked he rolled up his bloody sleeves. His skin gathered itself into gooseflesh under the night wind’s chill.