Ed Gorman - Showdown

"I just wanted to see him again before I passed." Then: "You been a good friend, Midnight."

The sleek, shiny, somehow supernatural bird made a sound in its own throat. A deep rumbling kind of music that was sustained for several seconds. A music dark as its feathers.

The old man said, "They said they was gonna try and make a train tomorrow morning. Junction Gap. You get 'em for me, will ya? Now Midnight's gonna be all alone."

They buried him out back.

Midnight seemed to understand what was going on.

In the moonlight, he sat sentrylike, upon the fresh earth that Prine and Neville had turned over. The raven raised its regal head once to look at the moon. The dark music sounded again in chest and throat. But this time it expelled the sound, letting it echo off the ragged rock hills and work its trembling, oddly frightening way through the night. Other animals responded in the far-flung darkness and made their own sounds. Even the horses Lattimore had loaned them joined in.

Prine said some prayers for the old man, the prayers of his childhood. He didn't say them often, so many of the words were wrong. He wasn't even sure there was a God, at least not a God as Sunday school teachers espoused anyway. But he did believe in some kind of universal spirit that was the cement of not only this planet but the entire cosmos. He was appealing to that spirit now to take the old man to a good and true place.

Ten minutes after burying the old man, they were on their way again. Now they knew where Tolan and Rooney were headed. They planned to meet the two at the Junction Gap train depot.

Chapter Eighteen

Karl Tolan had never forgotten how his three-year-old sister Daisy died. He still had nightmares about it. He was seven at the time.

He'd been playing behind the crude slab cabin his father had built when he heard a cry unlike any he'd ever heard Daisy make before.

She was off playing on the edge of their property. She liked to pick "pretty flowers," as she often tried to say. What she picked was dandelions.

Karl's mother was inside making bread, his father off trapping.

The cry.

His body wanted to do two things at once—freeze in place and run. He was afraid to find out what had happened to his sister.

He forced himself to go to her.

Her tiny hands were raised almost in prayer to the sky, blood running from them as blood ran in gouts from her mouth.

He knelt next to her, the cry scaring him as nothing ever had, screaming "What's wrong, Daisy? What's wrong, Daisy!" until his mother pushed him out of the way and put her fingers in Daisy's mouth. Daisy cried louder and louder; not even her mother's fingers could halt the plea.

His mother pulled pieces of glass from Daisy's mouth. Karl had a hard time recognizing what they were at first, they were so bloody. But then he recognized where they had come from. He'd broken a bottle yesterday while he was playing games by himself. He swore to pick up the glass when he was finished playing. Otherwise his father would take a strap to him.

But he'd forgotten somehow. And now Daisy, who had apparently mistaken the broken glass for pieces of candy, had started stuffing the glass into her mouth, not only cutting herself but swallowing some of the tinier pieces.

Daisy lived less than ten hours. The way his folks glared at him, he didn't have to ask if they blamed him. Of course they did.

They buried her on a hill where the winds were like cool magic in the spring months and where the surrounding trees took fire in the autumn.

Less than a day after they buried her, some coyotes dug her up and ate most of her. His father killed them, but by then it was too late.

His mother never recovered. Two years later, she smashed a bottle one night when his father was on one of his trapping trips. Karl was so sound a sleeper, he didn't hear the breaking bottle or the rest of it. She hadn't screamed, made a fuss. Which had been very much like her.

She hadn't wanted to take any chances. She slashed both her throat and her wrists. By morning, when he woke up and found her on the far side of the cabin in her bed, her skin was blue-gray in color. He had never seen her eyes so sad. Not scared. Just plain old sad. He'd done it, he knew. When he'd helped kill his little sister, he'd helped kill his mother, too.

After his father got back and they buried her, he got out his long piece of leather and went to work on Karl. He drew blood. He slashed his buttocks to the point where Karl's legs were numb, not just his buttocks. Finally, Karl fell to the floor, sobbing, pleading for his father to stop.

A few minutes later, he heard the father outside. There was just the one shot. Karl knew immediately what it was. He'd have a lot of work to do, burying the two of them. He wanted good, deep graves.

He worked a full day and a half on those graves and he was proud of them. He shot and killed six coyotes in the process. For headstones he took large round rocks that sparkled like fool's gold and drew their names in heavy pencil.

He knew the coyotes would get them, but by then he'd be gone—and damned if he wasn't. Just going on eleven, he packed everything he owned and jammed it all into his father's carpetbag and then headed off to Dexter, the small town to the north. He'd already pretty much forgotten about his folks. They'd never especially liked him and he'd never especially liked them.

Who he couldn't forget was Daisy. Poor little Daisy.

Big for his age, and already with a frightening temper—it not only frightened other people, it also frightened him—he set off west.

Three weeks shy of his fifteenth birthday, he met Rooney in a most unusual way. He was standing on a street corner in Denver and happened to see Rooney, a red-haired runt, snatch a bag of groceries from an old woman. Rooney took off with the groceries. A cop just happened along. One of those coincidences that happen in real life but that you could never get away with in books or on the stage. The cop started chasing him and was closing on him.

Until Karl offered his services by innocently stepping into the cop's path and nearly knocking the man down. The thief got away. What Karl got was screamed at by the bully-faced copper.

Three blocks away, Rooney fell into step with him and said, "You could come in handy, kid."

The "kid" thing amused Karl. Rooney looked several years younger than he did.

From then on, the two became friends of a sort, even though Karl didn't especially like Rooney or trust him or have any respect for him. Friends—even though Rooney thought Karl was stupid, sneaky, and too often reluctant to do what Rooney told him to—friends of a sort.

All these years later, in a saloon in Junction Gap, waiting for a train that was still several hours away, talking to the man he didn't like, trust, or have any respect for, Karl Tolan said, "You think they figured out we paid off Valdez to give us the key?"

"Not all men are stupid, Karl."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning that not all men are stupid."

"Meaning me."

"Uh-oh, Karl's having his monthly visitor again."

"I hate when you say that."

"Yeah, well, there are a few things I don't like to hear you say, either."

"Yeah? Like what?"

"I don't want to argue, Karl."

"Just gimme one example."

Rooney sighed. "You'll just get pissed the way you always do when I offer constructive criticism."

"C'mon, just one example."

"You never fucking take a bath."

"Oh, yeah? I took a bath last week."

"That's just my point, Karl. You need to take a bath more often than once a week."

"What, so I can look like some dude the way you do?"

"See what I mean? I offer you constructive criticism—and at your request, mind you—and you go and get pissy on me."