Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

“I am notifying Sam Frank Tolen here and now, with his brother Mike and this Cox boy as my witnesses, that E. J. Watson did not kill John Russ. The next time you contradict that statement or cast doubt on it, you will be calling me a liar. You can try that now”-here I shifted in the saddle, getting set-“or you can say it behind my back. Either way, you won’t survive it.”

Hearing that kind of dangerous talk, the Cox boy grinned a hungry grin that drew his ears back tight to his head like some sleek water animal. Though I hid my mirth by coughing hard into my kerchief, I was grinning, too. It was just plain fun to talk Wild West to Sam Frank Tolen.

Sam would never have a better chance to avenge his daddy for that long-ago day when I faced down Woodson Tolen. Because of my problems with the law, I would have to give him the first shot so I could claim self-defense. Also he had two against one: though Mike was not so willing, he was ready. Also, it would gall Sam something fierce to back down in front of his younger brother and the Cox boy. But Sam had seen me shoot too many times and so he simply belched, loud and contemptuous, as Leslie Cox laughed aimlessly out of sheer eagerness. Mike did not laugh, not knowing what I might do.

I told Sam I would challenge him to shoot it out on the field of honor except for the fact that no Tolen had ever known what honor meant. Both brothers jeered at this and they were right, it was just bluster. Aunt Tabitha’s tremulous support from on high gave them their excuse to groan, disgusted, and return inside. I left there as frustrated as I had come.

Leslie Cox was the star pitcher on Sam’s baseball team. Like the plantation and the post office and the mud-rut lane that ran north and south along the railroad track, the team was named after its owner-manager, though Sam could hardly throw a ball let alone catch one. The team was mostly young Kinards and Burdetts, but Les Cox was the star, and because Sam spoiled him, he often hung around Sam’s fancy house. Les Cox was a big strong boy who much enjoyed using his fastball to scare and humiliate opposing batters, and, as a rule, my nephews told me, he took what he wanted whether it belonged to him or not. At fifteen, he already had chin stubble and a gruff voice and was solid and hard-muscled as a man. He was handsome, too, so the girls said, despite those ears, which were too small and too tight to his head. He had his mama’s stone-green eyes and dark hair like his pa, with that same horse hank of hair across his brow. On his left cheekbone was a crescent scar left by the hind hoof of a mule that had blanked him out for close to forty hours, scared his folks half to death. Broke the cheekbone and offset it, giving his mouth a little twist, and on that side the eyelid sagged in a kind of squint. Might have shifted his brain, too, to judge from his behavior. Leslie remained childish in some ways. Wore a toy pistol on a holster belt up till age fourteen and never learned to handle himself when things went wrong.

One day another boy cut himself in a bad fall in the schoolyard and screamed to see so much of his own blood. Leslie ran over not to help but to rage at him to shut his mouth or he would beat him up. He did it, too. A dog will attack another dog that’s hurt and yelping but among our human kind it’s not so common. Even his own folks were troubled at the time.

Lately my niece May Collins had imagined herself in love with Les. She saw the trouble he got into at the school as something dangerous and romantic, but none of the kids liked him except May and her young friends. He was often a truant and was always picking fights, pushing the smaller boys, even grabbing their food: he was quick to anger and quicker to attack any boy who dared protest. Because he was utterly indifferent to book learning, he was sent back to repeat his grade, at which point, contemptuous of teachers and pupils alike, he gave up his education for good before anyone found out if he was bright or stupid.

Because I was good friends with his daddy, Les liked to boast of his acquaintance with “Desperader Watson,” and with his education at an end, he started showing up over at my place, asking questions about the Wild West and Belle Starr. Being all read up on the Belle Starr story, he informed me that it was those small footprints that got me into trouble in Oklahoma; he had learned from a dime novel that Jesse James had a small boot size like mine, and because Jesse was Belle Starr’s jealous boyfriend, Leslie said, he might have “slew her” rather than see her go to Edgar Watson. Something like that.

Also, said Les, Belle was shot in the back. It was common knowledge that E. J. Watson would never shoot anybody in the back. “No matter what, my daddy says, the Ed Watson I know would look a man straight in the eye.”

I looked Les straight in the eye just to oblige him.

Les asked if I’d known Jesse James and I said I sure had. I told him Ol’ Jess was mostly talk, it was Frank James I could always count on in tough situations. “Tough situations?” Leslie whispered, those green wildwood eyes of his just smoldering. He positively salivated when I gave him a hard squint and an ironic little smile-the frontier code. He went off practicing his own squint and later on some enigmatic silence. For a while, his folks could hardly get their oldest boy to speak a word.

Sam hated it that his young star admired Edgar Watson. He heeded my warning and shut up about John Russ but he fed Leslie all those Carolina tales he’d got from Herlongs, not knowing they just made this boy admire me all the more, and Leslie, with his gut instinct for stirring up trouble, passed Sam’s slanders right along to me. Pretty sure he’d race right back to Sam with my response, I boasted about how I’d run that yeller-bellied Woodson Tolen right out of the field when I was Les’s age. While I was at it, I confided how I’d dealt with the Queen of the Outlaws and her pack of half-breed Injuns back in Oklahoma and how I took care of a bad actor named Quinn Bass at Arcadia-in short, what you might call the varnished truth.

Sure enough, that Saturday after the ball game, Les drank whiskey with Sam Tolen, told him all about my dangerous adventures. Tolen hollered, “You want to see somethin?” That same evening Sam rode him over to the sawmill at Columbia City, cornered two blacks who had sassed him. Sam had been brooding about those sassy niggers every time he drank, aimed to sting ’em up with a dose of bird shot, teach ’em a lesson.

The lesson Sam Tolen taught ’em was the following: he blasted ’em clean off their mule after halting ’em on the road, waving his shotgun. Being drunk as usual, he had his loads mixed up, used buckshot instead of bird shot, and because his aim was so poor, he shot way too high when the gun kicked, hit ’em in the head instead of the legs. What with all the blood and screeching, Sam’s nerves gave way, so he yelled at Les to jump down off his mule and finish those boys off before their nigger racket brought the whole countryside down on top of them.

“I ain’t never took a life before! Made me feel funny!” Les was overexcited, scared, but also thrilled. “Reason I’m tellin you, Mister Ed, you had experience of killin, but don’t go tellin nobody I done that. Mister Sam is claimin now how all he aimed to do was sting ’em up a little, and what that Cox boy done to ’em after was his own idea.”

Both of them were shooting off their mouths and there was talk. Leslie’s account fit what I had heard so I didn’t doubt that it was mostly true. What troubled me was the way Les told it-the way he tasted every word, licked at it, even-and that bad grin on that arrogant face that hardly grinned from one week to the next. He came over to my house not because he was upset by senseless killings but to brag to Desperado Watson.