Death Ground Page 2

  She began sobbing then, and he just stood there and listened to her. She swore and she prayed and then she did them both again.

  Finally he went over through the cinnamon-smelling air in the butter-gold light of the little room and sat on the bed. This time the springs did squeak and he put his big arm around her and sort of tucked her inside him, and then, as he knew she would, she just cried all the more.

  They sat there for a very long time like this beneath the cheap print of a very sad Jesus. Knowing what Jesus knew, Guild had good reason to be sad.

  “He nearly died soon as they took him from my womb.” She looked over at him. “His lungs, the doc said. Never did have good lungs.”

  Guild nodded.

  This was half an hour later.

  She had insisted on fixing them tea. It was cinnamon tea. The wind rattled the windows.

  She said, “You hear him cough?”

  “Yes.”

  “Never did have good lungs.”

  She was crazed, repeating herself. The least he could do was sit there and listen and drink her cinnamon tea.

  “He wanted to be a sheriff.”

  “That’s what he told me.”

  “Wouldn’t have made a good one, though. Too skittish.”

  “Oh.”

  “Our whole family’s skittish.”

  Guild didn’t know what to say. He felt unable to move, unable to speak. He just sat there. There were three of them in the room. Her and Guild and the dead son, Kenny.

  “His pa was skittish, too. Died in the mines, his pa did.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Kenny was all I had.” She started crying again. “He never should have started hanging around that Bruckner.”

  “Bruckner?”

  “One of the sheriff’s deputies. He was always doin’ little favors for Bruckner and his brother James, and they was always fillin’ his head with the idea that he was gonna be a deputy someday.” She looked at him and her grief made him glance away, ashamed. “You filled his head, too.”

  “He came to me, ma’am.”

  “But you should’ve known better.”

  He sighed. “Now that I think about it, yes, I think I should have.”

  “They offered him twenty-seven cents an hour to work over to the wagonworks, and he turned it down just so’s he could be a bodyguard to that Rig fella. Rig wasn’t no good.”

  Guild was surprised by the familiarity in her voice. “You knew Rig?”

  “Sure. He come here several times.”

  “Rig came here? When?”

  “About a month and a half ago.”

  When Guild hired him, Kenny Tolliver had been careful to pretend that he didn’t know Rig at all. Guild said, “So they knew each other pretty well?”

  “Kenny, he came home drunk several nights and said he’d been with them.”

  “Them?”

  “Sure. Rig and Bruckner and James.”

  “The deputies and Rig knew each other?”

  “Sure.” She looked at him more carefully now.

  “Something wrong?”

  “Don’t know yet, I guess.”

  She said, “You work six months at the wagonworks, they give you a raise.”

  “It sounds like a decent job.”

  “I know a fellow making thirty-nine cents an hour there. Been there fourteen years.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Tolliver.” Then: “He never mention a man named Kriker?”

  “Kriker? No, not that I recollect.”

  He stood up. He made a very elaborate thing out of putting his hat on and fixing it just so on his head. She sat once more in the buttery light with her old body and young eyes and watched him.

  “You never should have hired him,” she said.

  She was crying once more.

  “No,” he said. “No, Mrs. Tolliver, I shouldn’t have.”

  Chapter Four

  He got up at 4:00 A.M. Even then, he had to hurry. There was a lot to do.

  He went down the rooming house hallway to the pump and filled his pitcher and then went back to the commode basin and washed himself very well. It might be days before he got a chance to clean himself this well again. He even washed behind his ears the way his older sister had always told him to. She was dead now from consumption, and so the memory was bittersweet.

  In his saddlebags he’d been carrying a brand-new red union suit from Sears he hadn’t gotten around to wearing. He put the long johns on this morning and then his regular clothes and then he gathered up everything, including the rifle he intended to trade and his .44 and his sheepskin.

  Dawn was a pinkish streak behind the peaks and turrets of the town’s fancier houses. The wagon tracks in the streets were frozen solid. Guild’s breath was a pure white plume. His nose was cold and he was glad he’d used the hemmorhoid salve a doc had given him. Chill temperatures and saddle leather got tough on you.

  The first stop was a Catholic church. A plump priest was saying an early mass for immigrant women and a few male workers. The church was crude, wood instead of the marble you saw in the big Territory towns, but the stations of the cross had been rendered in Indian art, probably Sioux, and were interesting to look at. The smell of incense was very sweet and he enjoyed hearing the small choir chant in Latin. Even though he had no idea what the words meant, they carried dignity and reassurance.

  He sat in the last pew, in the shadows, and he did not kneel when the rest of them knelt, and he did not rise for communion when the rest of them rose. He kept staring at the stations of the cross. In them Christ had slightly Indian features.

  Then mass ended and he got up and walked up the center aisle to the altar and called out for the priest, who was skinny and bald and had a wart on his cheek. The two Indian altar boys watched Guild curiously. To the priest, Guild said, “I would like you to hear my confession, Father.” The priest nodded and waved the two altar boys away.

  The priest looked around and said, “The church is empty. We can do it right here.”

  “That would be fine.”

  “You look troubled.”

  “I am troubled.”

  The priest in his silk vestments pointed to a corner over by the votive candles. There were two chairs there. The priest said, “Why don’t we sit down?”

  “I’ve never made a confession sitting down.”

  The priest smiled. “Tradition isn’t everything.”

  So they went over and sat down and Guild said, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been three months since my last confession.”

  “All right, my son. What weighs on you?”

  “A little girl,” Guild said. Ordinarily he followed the usual form for making a confession, starting with the lesser sins first and leading up to the more important ones. But he decided that since they had already broken formality by sitting down, he might as well break formality by talking only about one thing. “I killed a little girl.”

  The priest had to pretend not to be shocked, but of course he was shocked. You could not hear about killing little girls and not be shocked.

  “You did this on purpose?”

  “No.”

  The priest looked enormously relieved. “Then why do you confess it?”

  So Guild told him, as Guild always did whenever the dreams of the little girl got particularly bad again, as they had been lately. Guild was not even Catholic. It was simply that confession, unlike whiskey, seemed to help the dreams. At least temporarily.

  The second stop was at the livery stable. The liveryman had furry white muttonchops and wore a Prince Albert suit and a homburg. He obviously wanted to be seen as a prosperous merchant. The right hand he put forth for Guild to shake sparkled with diamonds. He had a Negro to do the real work, cleaning up the manure, grooming the animals, gentling them out back in a rope corral.

  What lay ahead required a better animal than the grulla he’d come into town on.

  The liveryman showed him several animals. When Guild saw the
shave-tailed Appaloosa, he thought about the time he’d served a three-day sentence for assault and battery. He’d seen a drunken wrangler showing off for friends by trying to break a particularly troublesome stallion. Finally the wrangler got so humiliated that he took out a knife and slashed the stallion’s throat. Guild had gone over and kicked in three of the man’s ribs and broken his nose. He had one of those tempers.

  He looked at the Appaloosa and said, “How much?”

  “Too cold to dicker,” the liveryman said, patting his hands together.

  They made a deal.

  By now the town of false fronts and two-story brick buildings was well awake. The sky was low and gray and wintry. The trees were naked and the grass was brown and you could smell serious snow coming. In the distance the mountains showed snow on their caps. Below this were the sand hills where the man named Kriker resided. Guild ate three eggs and sausage and slice browns in a restaurant filled with angry talk about the Territory’s latest political crisis—the notion that the Territory could force your child to go to school for five years, whether you needed that child as a farmhand or not. At least in this restaurant, the idea was not a popular one.

  The woman at the general store was fifty but very attractive in a gingham dress and spectacles with gold rims. She put Guild in mind of women who made good cherry pies and knew when, as lovers, to be ferocious and when, the night suddenly oppressive with a man’s memories, to be gentle.

  But there were other things to be done than spark a lady, and Guild wasn’t all that comfortable in the sparking department anyway.

  She showed him ten weapons and he held them all and sighted them and held them some more. Finally he asked her how much she’d give him in trade for the Remington and so they concluded their deal.

  He walked out of there with a double 10-gauge.

  Now he was ready. He had thought about how Rig had been killed, and he had thought about how young Kenny Tolliver had been killed, and he had thought about how they’d both known the deputies, and he had thought about how the bank had been held up, and he had thought about the man named Kriker.

  None of it seemed to make sense, of course, but then when he thought about it, it all made a great deal of sense.

  He figured he owed Rig a death. Maybe he even owed the Tolliver kid a death, and so he hefted his new-bought double 10-gauge.

  Chapter Five

  The first deputy, Thomas Bruckner, turned out to be a tall man in a beaver coat and a fedora and a brilliant blue glass eye, the other one being all right. He also had a gold tooth and an almost constant grin short on mirth and long on malice. When Guild walked into Sheriff Decker’s office, Thomas Bruckner looked at his partner, his brother James Bruckner, and winked.

  Guild recognized the wink.

  He had seen it many times over the past four years, ever since the trial.

  It meant that the man winking and the other man grinning in response knew all about Guild.

  Or thought they did, anyway.

  James was an awkward man in a greasy duster and several layers of clothes beneath. His knuckles had been busted so many times they sat on his hands like ornaments. But that wasn’t what you really noticed about James Bruckner. No, what you really noticed was how the left side of his face had an unnatural, leathery look, the result of burns that must have occurred in childhood. The stretched texture of the skin looked as if the scars did not quite want to cover the man’s face.

  Sheriff Decker and the kid deputy Forbes were behind Decker’s desk, going over papers.

  Guild said, “I’m going with these two for Kriker.”

  The grins faded fast and Decker’s head came up.

  “Morning, Mr. Guild.” He had changed suits. He wore a western-cut number this morning, but it was tweed and it was immaculate and he still looked more merchant than lawman. He looked neither distressed nor surprised, though certainly the Bruckners did. “What changed your mind?”

  Guild decided to make things simple. No reasons to share his suspicions. He said, “You said there was a thousand-dollar reward for return of the money.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Well, that’s why I’m going.”

  The room smelled of coffee and cigar smoke. Outside in the hall ragged prisoners were being pushed out of the door on the way to court appearances at the county courthouse down the street. One of them glanced in at the men in the office and gathered a great wad of white spit and sent it flying into the room.

  Thomas Bruckner lifted his Sharps and pointed it at the man. “Give me a double eagle if I can hit him in the balls?”

  James laughed.

  A deputy pushed the prisoner out of the way.

  Then the Bruckners turned back to Decker.

  Thomas Bruckner said, “Won’t ride with him, Sheriff.”

  This time Decker did look surprised. “Why not? Said you wouldn’t mind an extra man.”

  “You know what you found out over the telegraph,” Thomas said, “ ‘bout the little girl and all.”

  “He was acquitted,” Decker said.

  “Still and all,” Thomas said.

  Guild said, “Makes no never-mind to me, Sheriff. If they want an extra man, I’ll go along with them. If not, I’ll find this Kriker on my own.”

  Thomas grinned his hateful grin. “Bounty man. Lots of confidence. You ever been in the sand hills in this weather, bounty man?”

  “So happens I have.”

  Thomas said, “You ever stalked a man so crazy even the goddamn Indians are scared of him?”

  Guild nodded to Decker. “I’ll be going now, Sheriff. Just thought you’d like to know my intentions.”

  The Bruckners glanced at each other and then Thomas said to Guild, “Thought you were goin’ with us.”

  “Thought you didn’t ride with a man like me.”

  Another glance. Guild could guess what they were thinking: He would be easier to control if he were with them.

  “You’re all right,” Thomas said. “Just kind of testin’ your mettle a little.”

  Guild said, “I wouldn’t do that real often if I were you.”

  Thomas laughed. “You got a lot of pride for a bounty man. Especially for a bounty man who killed a little girl.”

  James said, touching his burned skin, “Ease off on him, Thomas. Ease off on him.”

  For a moment Guild and James stared at each other. They had something in common—James, his burned face; Guild, the dead girl. It made them outcasts; it made them prey.

  Thomas glared at his brother and then yanked on his sleeve. “Come on, we’ll go get ready so we can meet the bounty man here in half an hour.”

  He tilted his hat to the Sheriff and then jerked his brother through the door. Obviously he didn’t like the idea of his brother telling him to “ease off” anybody.

  When the Bruckners went to get ready, Guild said to Decker, “Strange company for a man like you.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I doubt they went up to Yankton and took one of those courses on law.”

  Deputy Forbes smiled his kid smile. Obviously he had gone to Yankton.

  Decker pushed a tin cup of coffee Guild’s way, stuck a pipe in his mouth, and said, “Territory’s changing, but it hasn’t changed completely yet. We’ve got telegraph and a few telephones and transcontinental railroads, but we still have need of men like the Bruckners.”

  “You trust them?”

  Decker’s smile, so friendly, was quick. “About as much as I trust you, Mr. Guild. About as much as I trust you.”

  Chapter Six

  Kriker pushed back the burlap curtain and came into the small room inside the soddie that was veined with buffalo grass thick as a man’s arm and that generally stayed cool in summer and warm in winter. At noon on the overcast day, the shadows were deep and the moisture-swollen walls cold to touch.

  The girl lay on a cot beneath a pile of buffalo hides lively with ticks and other vermin. The girl was eight or nine; Kriker had never been
sure. Even from here he could see that she was not better. She was worse.

  Kneeling next to her was a raw, angular old woman dressed in a manlike getup of different kinds of hide that she’d cured herself and wore year round. Even by standards of this settlement, the old woman smelled, and even the men who worked the kill told jokes about her.

  She raised her gray head to Kriker. She was angry. “You got to give it time to work.”

  Kriker was a chunky man but not fat. He shaved no oftener than every few weeks and wore a buckskin jacket and a buckskin hat. He carried two .44s stuck into a wide belt and a knife with which he’d cut out the innards of squirrels for dinner. Of course he cut other things with it, too. He said he was in his fortieth summer but no one, especially Kriker, could be sure of this.

  He was known throughout the Territory as a man who had robbed banks, trains, and wealthy homes, and who had shot, stabbed, and drowned any number of people who he felt were in need of such fates. He was known in the settlement as the man who’d bitten off the Mountie’s nose, this being up near the territorial border where a young and overzealous Mountie had tried to arrest Kriker for something he hadn’t done. Kriker calmly presented his side of the case, but still the mountie wanted to take him in. Kriker threw the man to the ground and there ensued a terrible wrestling match, the Mountie having won his post wrestling title many times, and finally Kriker resorted to something he’d heard mountain men talk about but had never seen done. He clamped his teeth on to the Mountie’s nose and bit down hard as he could. It was no easy task to tear off a man’s nose. But that afternoon Harry Kriker did exactly that. After three minutes or so, all that was left of the Mountie’s nose was a red, running hole. Kriker returned to the encampment. Three other encampment men had been with him. They never tired telling the story, and encampment people never tired of hearing it.

  But that sort of frivolity was long past Kriker now as he stood staring down at the frail blond girl with the sweaty face and death-shut eyes.

  Kriker moved closer to the girl. Looked at her carefully.