Graves' Retreat Read online

  Ed Gorman

  Graves’ Retreat

  ***

  TROUBLE IN STORE…

  Cedar Rapids in 1884 was a place where Les Graves had a chance to finally earn the respectability he always wanted and to marry the woman he loved. Then his brother T. Z. came into town, bringing with him trouble with a capital T. It seemed that T. Z. and his friend Neely had big plans for the local bank where Graves happened to work. And they were counting on Graves' help to pull off the heist. All Graves got in return for his loyalty was a hard cot in a drafty cell- until a rivalry between two local sheriffs gave him one shot at freedom. But before Graves could return to his peaceful life and the pursuit of the woman of his dreams, there were a few more twists in the trail… with trouble around each bend…

  Genre: hard-boiled/western.

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  Scaning & primary formating: pagesofdeath.

  Secondary formating & proofing: pua.

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Cedar Rapids has been blessed with many fine historians whose works I’ve drawn upon as background. Here I would like to acknowledge my debt to:

  Ralph Clements, Tales of the Town (Stamats Publishing, 1967),

  Ernie Danek, Tall Corn and High Technology (Windsor Publications, 1980),

  Harold F. Ewoldt and his many fine historical pieces in the Cedar Rapids Gazette,

  Janette Stevenson Murray and Frederick Gray Murrary, The Story of Cedar Rapids (Stratford House, 1950),

  The Cedar Rapids Gazette archives and Dale Kueter’s piece on the Fourth in particular.

  Not least I would like to thank my editor, Gerald Gladney, for his belief in this project.

  While most of the history contained herein is accurate, certain liberties have been taken for dramatic purposes.

  -Ed Gorman

  CHAPTER ONE

  On the morning of April 26, 1884, in Piedmont, Missouri, a Roman Catholic priest with a curiously angry blue gaze stood on the depot platform as the baggagemaster began loading up the train car for the trip west.

  The priest stood next to a steamer trunk that was tall enough to touch his elbow. It was metal and black and battered and when the baggagemaster got a dolly under it, he glanced up at the priest and said, “You pack your parish in here, Father?” Obviously, he hoped the cleric would find humor in his remark.

  The priest smiled. All except for his blue eyes. “I’m going to an Indian reservation in Iowa. I plan to be there several years. Everything I own is in that trunk.”

  The baggagemaster laughed. “The way this trunk handles, Father, you could be on that reservation for several decades, let alone years.” The priest wore thick, steel-rimmed eyeglasses. He brushed some dandruff from the shoulder of his black cassock and said, “God will bless you for helping me.”

  With that, the priest strode down the platform, carrying a somber gray carpetbag, to the six passenger cars. On his way he passed a typical assortment of depot people-society ladies in big, flowered hats (though it was only April, the temperature had already hit 62, and apple blossoms kissed the breeze); businessmen glancing importantly at their pocket watches as if the universe ran on their time schedules; and various Indians, Mexicans and melting pot immigrants who looked dirty, sullen and always at least a little bit frightened. Flowered hats and pocket watches pulled out like weapons could be imposing if you were only three months away from Poland and spoke scarce English.

  The priest handed the conductor his ticket, then boarded one of the cars.

  Aboard, he found a window seat. The priest watched the scenery roll by, rivers becoming plains and plains becoming hills and hills becoming forests and forests becoming farms with black-and-white dairy cows looking snug as they lay lazy on green grass on the shade side of oaks and elms, or next to the gaunt shapes of Halladay Standard windmills. (The priest had even thought to himself occasionally how nice it would be to be a cow: no human grief to make you weary, and no fear of death because death itself was not a concept to you).

  The priest settled immediately and irresistibly into staring out at the countryside. The anger had not left his blue gaze.

  ***

  Morning became afternoon. At one point he saw a ragged group of Indians walking parallel to the tracks. Presumably they were headed to a reservation. The Indian wars were coming to an end. The slaughter was such that white men were being paid two dollars for each Indian corpse they buried. But not just white men. The whites were no more innately evil than Indians, some of whom hunted and killed their own kind for the same amount of money.

  Afternoon became night. From his carpetbag the priest took a slice of chicken, and a bottle of water. He ate quickly and without pleasure.

  He watched moon-up as the silver ball was first only a vague circle against the red-streaked dusk sky but then became more and more vivid. He had reverence for the moon-he had read somewhere how the Aztecs used to stand naked on nights of full moon and let its rays fill them and give them courage for their bloody duties-and the image had never left him.

  He opened the window. The train was passing a half-mile stretch of forest. A piney perfume almost made the priest swoon. He closed his eyes and dozed until a conductor came up and announced, “Next stop Grinnell! Next stop Grinnell!”

  ***

  Then the priest came fully awake and sat up straight.

  The time was here.

  At last.

  The time he always feared.

  The time he always returned to again and again.

  The stop at Grinnell was scheduled to be fifteen minutes but in fact it took nearly half an hour.

  The priest stood on the platform, enjoying the smell of new grass from the nearby prairie, and the sight of fireflies flickering in the darkness.

  Then he was back on the train and he could feel the rail joints below him ticking off the miles of the train’s inevitable progress.

  It was when the next stop was announced that the priest began to perspire unduly.

  By the time the train pulled into the small Iowa town, the priest was soaked.

  Quickly, he yanked his carpetbag from the seat next to him and hurried out of the car.

  “Good night, Father,” the conductor said.

  The priest gulped, seeming unable to find his voice. “Good night.”

  The priest went down the platform to the baggage car. The night smelled of train oil and grease and coal.

  This was the part that needed to go precisely.

  In fact, T.Z. should already be standing on the platform by now, and they should be leaving.

  But T.Z. was nowhere in sight.

  The stooped man from the depot here banged on the baggage car. “Hey, open up in there!”

  All the priest could do was watch, his heart wanting to tear through his chest.

  “Hey!” the depot man yelled again, banging once more. To a passenger, he said, “Some of these young bucks, they bring along a little whiskey with ’em sometimes and fall asleep.”

  But the priest knew better than that.

  The priest knew that something was wrong.

  He moved quickly, getting back on board, rushing down the corridor so he could come to the baggage car from an angle the baggagemaster could not see.

  He pushed down the narrow corridor till he came to the door of the baggage car.

  Unlike the depot man, when the priest knocked, it was discreet. And furtive.

  “T.Z.? T.Z.? Open up in there!” the priest said, knowing he could afford little more than a whisper.

  But there was no response.

  By now the depot man was banging again. And hollering.

  The priest knew that he had only seconds, if that.

  “T.Z.! T.Z.!”

  The door opened and the
re stood T.Z.

  The steamer trunk he’d been inside was wide apart and empty. That was the first fact that imposed itself on the priest’s mind. The second was that the blue and white bandanna was on the floor. T.Z.’s face was open for anyone to see. The agreement was that T.Z. would always wear his mask, just as the priest would always wear eyeglasses (the Roman collar was a disguise; people noticed little else). They had perpetrated nineteen robberies and never once before had their faces been seen.

  In one hand T.Z. held a black satchel. In the other he held his arm. He had been stabbed. In the flickering shadows of the kerosene lamp, his shirt sleeve was a dark red color.

  Then the priest looked beyond T.Z. to the guard who rode in the baggage car. Somehow T.Z., despite the fact that he’d been stabbed, had managed to bind and gag the man.

  The priest said, “He’s seen us, T.Z. He’s seen us. He can identity us.”

  “What are we going to do?” T.Z. said hysterically.

  From outside the banging continued.

  “We have to stay calm, T.Z. Calm.” From the hard anger in his eyes, it was hard to say whom the priest hated more, the baggageman or his partner.

  “I don’t want a price on my head.”

  “Neither do I, T.Z.”

  “But he’s seen us!”

  The priest smiled. “No, T.Z., he’s seen you."

  The priest looked around at the car. At first he saw nothing that would help him. Then he found the crowbar. He went over and picked it up. He liked the feel of the cold and unforgiving steel.

  He struck the man once across to stop of the skull and then across the temple. The man was dead.

  The depot man was now yelling for help.

  All the priest and T.Z. had time to do was escape out the other side of the train and run down the tracks into the maze of boxcars.

  As he ran, T.Z. sobbed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It was not an easy game to play because the rules kept changing. It was those goddamn Easterners. If they weren’t monopolizing industries, then they were altering the rules of Iowa’s favorite pastime.

  Four years ago for example, in 1880, you needed to get eight balls for a base on balls and the distance from the mound to home plate was forty-five feet and only sissies needed to wear straps of leather let alone gloves to catch fly balls.

  But forty-eight calendar months later everything had changed completely. Now you only needed six balls for a walk and the mound was fifty feet away, and be damned if everybody wasn’t wearing actual baseball mitts. About the only thing that hadn’t changed was the fact that there was only one umpire-and there was even talk of changing that.

  The team on the field at the moment, the Cedar Rapids municipal team it was, abided by these and all the other rules in hopes that they would someday be even a whisper as good as an Iowa farm boy every one of them idolized and envied, Captain Adrian Constantine Anson (“Cap” to his fans), a strapping blond legend who played for the Chicago White Stockings and who earned the unheard-of salary of $8,000 per annum and who was sure to play in the something called the First World Series at the end of this coming season.

  It was five-thirty in the afternoon. Late June. There was a sweet-scented breeze thanks to the apple blossom trees in the city park behind the baseball stadium, which consisted of three sections of bleachers angled to resemble a triangle, so that from the center section home plate and the rest of the field extended. Nearby you could hear the water going over the dam on the First Avenue bridge, and smell the summer fish. Teh degrees hotter, the smell would have been unpleasant. But now it seemed a perfect complement to the apple blossoms.

  The team at bat wore gray uniforms. New gray uniforms. There had been a fund drive this spring. The men lived up to their uniforms, too. They were all clean-shaven except for the fancy mustaches they sported & la baseball players back East. This was the second team and this game was only a scrimmage, which explained why the bleachers were barely one-third filled.

  The team on the field wore white. This was the first team, as could be deduced from the way those in the bleachers watched, fascinated, as the pitcher on the mound went into his windup.

  The pitcher’s name was Graves, Les Graves. A slender man with brown hair that was starting to recede, and blue eyes that were never quite without a hint of sadness, Graves looked a bit older than his twenty-six years until the very moment of the windup, when he looked no more than eighteen. Local sportswriters said Graves had “the fastest throwing arm outside of Sterling itself.” (Sterling, Illinois, had an Irishman who could throw a ball faster than most people could spit on the sidewalk.)

  Graves released the ball.

  The umpire seemed to cry “Strike!” even before the whirling white globe reached the plate.

  And there was no doubt about the trueness of the pitch. It hurtled across the home base, little more than a white blur that dipped deviously right at the befuddled batter’s knees.

  “Go to it, Les!” shouted the people in the stands.

  No other player on the team inspired the whistles, shouts and stamping feet Les Graves did.

  “One more’n the game’s over!” yelled several other people.

  “Strike him out real good!”

  “Give ’em your Jean Laffite!”

  The “Jean Laffite” was so named by a sportswriter because he claimed that it had the “destructive force of a cannon ball hurled from the grand Frenchman’s warship.”

  So Les gave ’em “Jean” and “Jean” caused the batter to jerk back several full inches from the plate as the umpire once again called “Strike!”

  The game was over.

  The team manager, a chunky bald fireman named Harding, came up and threw his arm around Les. “You keep it up, Les, you’ll be playing for the New York Mets.” That was the team everybody was betting on to be the best in the National League. Then he said, “Hell’s bells, you get any better, Sterling’s going to have to play us.”

  Les just smiled.

  ***

  By sunset half an hour later, the stadium was empty. For most folks this was suppertime and mothers and wives did not abide men or boys who missed supper.

  Les Graves sat in the bleachers alone. There was a tune he liked. A sad tune. He hummed it to himself.

  He had a habit of throwing the ball up into the air at such an angle that he had to reach way out to grab it. He felt this helped improve him as a defensive player. He needed to have some additional skill other than his pitching because he was a terrible batter.

  But he paid no attention to his little game now, doing it all unconsciously. His blue eyes watched the road that ran in back of the stadium.

  The road where Susan said she’d be.

  The road where, now, Susan was nowhere to be found.

  He threw the ball up a few more minutes, stopping when he missed one and it cracked hard against his knee.

  Then he climbed to the top bleacher where he had a pretty good look at the city, a place the mayor called, with monotonous determination, “the Chicago of Iowa.” But it was a quickly growing town, no doubt about it, eighteen thousand inhabitants, the service of many different railroads, more than sixty electric lights (mostly used in hotels and businesses) and a telephone company with at least two hundred and fifty connections in the city, and connections with seventy-five cities and towns outside.

  There was no doubt about it. Cedar Rapids was a good place to live. Clean, progressive, honest in its government.

  His time here had been the happiest in his life until he met Susan Edmonds, daughter of the man for whom he worked. He’d had another girl here, May, but when he’d met Susan- But he sensed their relationship was at its end. A part of him just wanted her to pronounce the funeral words and get it over with. She was a banker’s daughter and way out of his class-

  His eyes searched every access to the stadium for sight of her.

  But his heart told him a truth his eyes did not need to confirm. She would miss their meeting (
he’d written her a letter yesterday, asking her to come here now) because she was afraid to say what she really wanted to say-

  To let him explain why he’d become so angry Sunday night and said the things he had.

  He stood there in his white uniform till stars began to appear in the bluish haze of night sky. Dogs lonely as he bayed at the silver disc of moon. Down on First Street he could hear the player pianos and the roar of beery laughter.

  He was just turning to go-wanting a beer now, wanting at least loud if not decent companionship-when below the bleachers he heard the clopping of a single horse and saw the shape of her carriage.

  He felt exultant that she was here and terrified she’d only come to say good-bye.

  “You got my letter?”

  He could scarcely see her. Hovering in the back of her small carriage.

  Hiding, really.

  He decided not to pester her. Afraid she might bolt and run like a frightened doe.

  “I’m glad to see you, Susan.”

  Still, she said nothing.

  He just sensed her staring at him.

  He said, “I struck out eleven batters tonight.”

  She said, “I need a little more time to think, Les. To know my feelings.”

  “All right.”

  “I’m trying to do what’s best for both of us.”

  “I know.”

  She said, “I saw May today.”

  "Oh?”

  “And she looked lovely. Really lovely.”

  “May is lovely. That doesn’t mean I care about her.”

  She leaned forward and touched his hand gently and said, “Good night, Les.”

  “Good night.”

  He watched her carriage recede into the gloom, the lonely sound of the single horse filling the night.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Morning, Les.”

  “Morning, George.”

  “Beautiful day.”