Death Ground Page 4

  “What bank money?” Thomas Bruckner said.

  “He knows, Thomas, he knows.” Guild jabbed James Bruckner’s face with the 10-gauge right where the burned area was. James Bruckner sounded ready to cry.

  “You were all in it together. You and this Kriker and Rig and Tolliver,” Guild said. “No easier trick than to have the law provide the lookout while the robbers empty out the bank.”

  “You’d really shoot him, Guild?” Thomas Bruckner said.

  Guild pulled back the hammer. “You want to try me?”

  “So what’re you proposin’?”

  “First your weapons get thrown and then I want you to get down.”

  “I don’t think he’s foolin’, Thomas,” James Bruckner said. His face was lost in the shadows beneath his hat rim, but you could hear his tears.

  “You sumbitch,” Thomas Bruckner said. “I knew you was trash. I knew it.”

  He threw down his rifle.

  Guild said, “Now the guns and the knife.”

  “You sumbitch.”

  Then came the handguns and the knife.

  Guild prodded James Bruckner with the double 10-gauge.

  “Now you do the same.”

  “You’re goin’ to get it, James,” Thomas Bruckner said, obviously needing to threaten somebody, and with Guild holding the gun there was no point in threatening him. “Just the way I used to give it to you in the barn when Pa was out in the fields. Just that way, James.”

  James threw down his weapons. They made a chinking sound against the volcanic rock.

  Guild took the rope from his saddle and swung it over to James. “Now get down real easy and go over and tie your brother to that pine down the hill there.”

  James Bruckner said, “He’ll kill me if I do, mister.”

  “I’ll kill you if you don’t.”

  “Oh, Jesus, mister, you’re puttin’ me in a real pickle.”

  Guild prodded him with the gun again. “You walk down that hill and tie him up or I’ll shoot you right here.”

  “He’s just talkin’, James. You don’t listen to him.”

  “He shot a little girl, Thomas. Nobody who shoots a little girl is just talkin’.”

  Apparently Thomas now saw the inevitable. “This all over, James, you’re gonna get it real good. Real, real good.”

  “Ain’t my fault, Thomas. Ain’t my fault.”

  Guild was tired of the talk. He walked the Appaloosa over to where Thomas Bruckner had dismounted. Guild slugged the man once, hard in the mouth.

  “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ!” Thomas Bruckner cried into the wind. He was holding a handful of thick blood. His own.

  So his brother took him downhill and lashed him to the pine that grew on a slant on the snowy slope.

  Guild dropped off the Appaloosa to check James Bruckner’s handiwork. The man had done a good job.

  Guild took a rope from Thomas Bruckner’s grulla and then tied up James on the other side of the same tree.

  “You sumbitch,” Thomas Bruckner said. “You sumbitch.”

  Guild rode into the settlement fifteen minutes later, coming down a grassy hill sleek with snow. Cinders from log fires cracked against the black night sky. The air was pleasantly smoky. Through pieces of burlap in windows you could see the reddish glow of fires and hear the soft crying of infants.

  Guild, his double 10-gauge cradled in his right arm, dismounted.

  In the center cabin, a door opened and a man in long black garb stood there. A priest.

  He came forward into the gloom, his breath frosty, his left hand wrapped around a tin coffee cup.

  “Good evening, sir,” the priest said in a formal way.

  “Good evening, Father.”

  “You wish a place to sleep tonight?”

  “No,” Guild said. “I’m looking for a certain man.”

  “Who would that be?”

  “A man named Kriker.”

  “Kriker, I see.”

  “He’s here, then?”

  “No, I’m afraid he’s gone.”

  “I didn’t know priest told lies.”

  The priest paused, looked around. “You’re with the sheriff?”

  “No.”

  The priest stared at him a long moment. A collie dog came up. He was covered with snow. He was panting. He looked like he was enjoying himself.

  “You’re a bounty man.”

  “Yes,” Guild said.

  “That is a shameful occupation.”

  “Where’s Kriker?”

  “He’s not as bad as you may have heard.”

  “Some men were killed. He may have had something to do with it.”

  The priest frowned.

  Guild lifted the double 10-gauge. “I want to speak with him, Father. Now.”

  Even from here, even from behind, Guild could hear the safety clicking off the rifle.

  “You want to talk, bounty man? You got your chance.”

  Given the size and the wildness of the man who appeared in the center of the circle of cabins, Guild knew he was finally seeing Harry Kriker.

  Bu apparently Kriker changed his mind, because just as Guild began to speak, Kriker brought his fist down hard on the back of Guild’s head.

  Guild was unconscious instantly, the collie dog mewling as Guild’s face slammed to the ground and was partially buried in deep snow.

  Chapter Nine

  Thomas William Bruckner had been raised, along with six brothers and seven sisters, in a large soddie in the southernmost tip of the Territory, down where days were generally longer by forty-five minutes and temperatures generally warmer by ten degrees. He was the second brother in line and at once the wiliest. Even his older brother, Earle, had had the good sense to fear him. After age six, when Thomas had locked Earle in the barn with a boar widely known to have eaten at least ten piglets right down to the bone—and Thomas had sat on the roof watching Earle trying to get out of the barn as the boar continually charged at him—Earle had not only stayed out of Thomas’s way but had deferred to him in any matter in which Thomas demanded deference.

  About his sisters, he did not think much at all, good or bad, except to note that three of them had very large breasts and three of them had virtually no breasts at all, and the ones with breasts he occasionally tried to spy on when they took baths in the tin tub on nights before wagon rides to church. Of the six Bruckner brothers, only two had any interest in getting off the farm, the others being perfectly content (as were Pa and Ma) to stay here and farm land that yielded twenty-five cents a bushel for wheat (and half the time you had to take your share in trade). The highlight of the whole year, it seemed, was the agricultural society meeting, where you got to see such exciting things as a squash that weighed 148 pounds and “really took the rags off the bush” (as Pa always liked to say) and where prizes were awarded in categories as diverse as Three-year-old Steers and Oxens and Best Buggy and Best Pleasure Carriage and Best Double and Single Plow. For the women there was Best Shawl and Best Woolen Sheets and Best Roll Stair Carpeting and Best Woolen Knit Socks. None of this was the least tolerable for a boy who read, with difficulty (having gone only through the fourth grade), exciting newspaper accounts of what life on the frontier was like back in the raw and early fifties.

  It was, surprisingly, his second youngest brother, James, who joined him in long and fantastic talks out in the woods, where they put prairie grass in corncob pipes and smoked till their throats were raw and dreamed aloud of what life in frontier towns would be like. Surprisingly for two reasons. One, James was the slightest in size and ambition. Pa always said, “He’s more comfortable doin’ the woman’s work,” and so, in fact, he’d been. And surprisingly for a second reason, too—because even though Thomas had only been playing the day he’d thrown kerosene on James and then tossed a wooden match at the soaked ground around James just to scare him, he was amazed, given the ugliness of James’s face, that James would have much to do with him.

  But somehow James let Thomas becom
e his boss, Thomas sensing that James did not know how to become as manly as his other brothers, and also sensing that James expected Thomas to teach him. So Thomas taught him to wrestle and shoot game and use a slingshot and make sly little jokes with the Indians who they’d see in the tiny four-buggy village where Pa sent them for certain store-bought provisions from time to time.

  Then one April night, the air sweet with spring and prairie grasses already long and the moon bright as madness itself, Thomas, who was then sixteen, and James, who was then twelve, left the farm with such belongings as they could rightfully claim (though technically the hunting rifle belonged to the oldest brother, Earle) and set out to find that type of excitement peculiar to the Territory in those days.

  What they found was exactly the opposite, of course. In town after town they worked in restaurants washing dishes or in livery stables with coloreds hauling manure or on farm crews for ten cents a day cutting grain with a cradle and binding it with a band of straw (a feat nobody today knew how to accomplish). Many times as they lay on hard cold ground, the stars chill and distant as their old dreams, James, now fourteen, would cry from loneliness and confusion or some pain a towny had put on him that day for the ugliness of his burned face; and even Thomas, remote and angry as he usually was, felt like crying, too, for what they’d found in the frontier towns were boys like themselves, long on dreams and short on money, comprising a kind of underclass of little more stature than Indians or runaway slaves, sleeping in lofts and alleys and tarp-covered wagons, and always waiting to be run in by bored or mendacious police officers.

  Then Thomas William Bruckner shot and killed his first man and everything changed abruptly and much for the better.

  It happened up near the Montana border, and actually it happened by mistake. The Bruckner brothers were in a tavern where men fought as much for pleasure as passion and where every sort of illegal dead—from theft to murder—could be planned and a man found to carry out the plan. Thomas William Bruckner was now twenty. He had lost, in the past year, three teeth in four fistfights, a cache of fifty-seven dollars he’d managed to save from farm work, and his virginity. This had happened in a fancy house, and of course he’d gotten the clap and it had all ended in about fifteen excited seconds anyway. She’d looked relieved. An easy fifty cents for fifteen seconds.

  Anyway. The tavern.

  A man, quite large and quite drunk, had accosted another man, making delirious accusations about the other’s advances toward his wife.

  The larger man, even though he did not need any help in defeating the smaller one, began to take out a pistol, his certain intent to kill the smaller man.

  It was at this moment that Thomas William Bruckner, standing down the bar, tried to get out of the way of the gunfire, and in so doing instinctively drew his own Peacemaker. And then he tripped. The floor was crude pine and the ten-penny nails had not been nailed flat and the toe of his boot had caught the nub of a nail and—

  —and his Peacemaker fired and he shot exactly in the heart the large man who had been about to shoot exactly in the heart the smaller man and—

  —and it turned out that the smaller man was a good friend of the man who virtually ran the town—or anyway ran those things in the town that mattered, which was to say the women and the liquor and the labor force.

  And so it was that the Bruckner brothers learned what the frontier was all about. Not heroic or legendary gun battles. Not the beauty of the sprawling Territory. Not the sense of holding your own destiny in your own hands. Control: that’s what the frontier was really all about.

  So the Bruckners went to work for the man who controlled the town, and then they moved on to another, larger town where another, more powerful man decided what went on and what didn’t go on, and they worked for him, doing jobs large and small, including occasionally killings.

  Thomas became particularly good at running a shakedown business—offering protection from the law to people who ran whorehouses and saloons, and that was easy enough to do because the first person you always paid off in any town was the lawman.

  This was all ten years earlier. There had been a marriage that ended—or so Thomas said—when the woman had fallen down the stairs the night before. (James knew better than to talk about what he’d seen.) There had been some arson in Chicago in which forty Chinese had died and a man named Fitzsimmons got the block he’d been after at the price he’d been waiting to pay. The brothers had hated Chicago, having, like most Territory people, an equal aversion to slavery and to black people. Finally there had been innumerable jobs for innumerable lawmen in innumerable small towns where whores were sold on the hoof and almost any kind of violence could be disguised as accidental.

  James himself had killed only once. Thomas had gutshot a saloon owner who’d refused to pay protection. As the man was gagging and puking his last, Thomas, quite calmly, had handed James the rifle and said, “You need the experience, brother. Now you go on and do it, hear me?” James shook his head and backed away and refused to do it. And he would have kept on refusing, only the man was in such misery—this is what he told Thomas later—that he reckoned he was doing him a favor, so he took the rifle and cocked it and shot the man twice in the face, exploding his brain, and then he was just one more dead animal and there was no more pain for him.

  These were the Bruckner brothers, the two lashed now to the pine tree on the downslope in the hammered-silver moonlight and the white whipping snow.

  “I’m gonna put that gun as far up his ass as it’ll go,” Thomas Bruckner said, making obvious reference to Guild. “Then I’m just gonna keep loadin’ and reloadin’ till my arms get tired.”

  The wind took his voice and made it vanish down the piny slope of volcanic rock.

  Chapter Ten

  He was in a cabin in a straight-backed chair, and Kriker stood over him with a gun. The cabin smelled of cooked meat and illness. In a corner on the cot, in shadows cast by a kerosene lamp, lay a little girl beneath several layers of buffalo hides. You could see by the way she sweated and by the flat white of her skin and by the fever blisters on her tiny gentle mouth that she was very very ill.

  Kriker slapped Guild once clean and hard across the side of the face. Guild started to get up out of the chair—anger over being slapped hurting his pride—but then through the door the priest came and he looked at both of them and said, “Kriker. You said there would be no violence.”

  Kriker set his Sharps down and said, “I want to know why he’s here.”

  “You know why. He’s a bounty man.” The priest nodded to Guild, and said to Kriker, “You should take that as a sign. You should take your money and leave. With winter coming they won’t find you in Canada.”

  “I won’t leave without her.”

  “She can’t travel,” the priest said.

  Guild sensed how softly the priest spoke when the subject of the girl came up. Obviously he was afraid of infuriating Kriker.

  “Where’s the granny woman?” Kriker demanded.

  “The granny woman can’t help.”

  “She knows the secrets.”

  “There are no secrets, Kriker. Except for a medical doctor.”

  “No!” Kriker said, leaning toward the priest.

  As Guild watched them talk, he noticed that the priest was missing the final two fingers on his right hand. When he gestured with the hand, the movement gave the man an odd vulnerability. But beyond that, something else troubled Guild. He knew there was some significance to the missing fingers but he did not know what. Something he was failing to remember…

  Guild said, “I’ve got the Bruckner brothers tied to a tree.”

  Kriker turned back to him. “The Bruckner brothers?”

  Guild nodded. “I’d like to get up, Kriker. I’ve got a bad headache from where you hit me. I’d like to get up and have some coffee and walk around.”

  “I want you to tell me about the Bruckner brothers. What the hell are you doing with them?”

  Guil
d looked to the priest, who said, “Let him have some coffee and walk around. You have the gun, Kriker. He’s unarmed.”

  Kriker glared at Guild, but then he nodded approval.

  The priest got Guild some coffee and poured it into a chipped china cup that he handled with some reverence—people this poor in the Territory valued beyond reason chipped castoffs from the rich that they bought in second-hand stores where they stood in line with handcuffs of pennies to buy bitter bits of real civilization. While the priest was busy with Guild, Kriker went over and knelt by the girl.

  She moaned and Guild saw Kriker jerk back as if he’d been shot. In that simple movement Guild sensed how much the mountain man loved the little girl.

  Kriker took a pitcher of water from the nightstand and filled a glass and then raised the girl’s head and gave her a drink.

  Guild saw tears shine in Kriker’s eyes.

  Guild looked back at the priest. “She been throwing up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Drinking a lot of water?”

  The priest nodded.

  “Bad intestinal cramps?”

  “Yes, Mr. Guild. Why?”

  Guild’s face grew tight in the soft lamplight. He did not want to say the word. He did not want to see the pain on Kriker’s face.

  In a whisper, Guild said, “You know what’s going on here, Father.”

  “Yes.”

  “But he doesn’t, apparently.”

  “No.”

  Kriker was talking to the girl.

  Guild said, “You need to get a doctor out here right away.”

  “I know.”

  Kriker got up, came over. “She seems to be doing better.”

  He wanted them to agree.

  The priest said, “Maybe that’s so, Kriker.”

  “We’ll bundle her up. I can take her with me tonight.”

  Guild said, “She can’t travel, Kriker.”

  “What the hell you talking about?

  “She’s got cholera.”

  There was no other way around it now. He had to look away from Kriker.