Salomon 2, Page 2

  “What for?”

  “Because whosever they are left them out here to take.”

  Salomon stepped past the man.

  “No, wait, she’ll kick you flat.”

  He swung a leg over and sat his pony. The man straightened his crouch.

  “What’s in those pouches?”

  “Gold.”

  “Horseshit.”

  He put his thumb up. “About that big each.”

  Salomon clicked to his pony and left the man standing there flatfooted with his legs apart. He took a room for the night and paid with his last paper money. The clerk gave him back a handful of coins. He pulled the sheets off the bed and slept in the corner facing the door with his pistolas crossed over his chest like a man buried with heirlooms.

  He could hear the shouts and laughs from the street, and he could hear the movement in adjoining rooms. He lay in the dark corner watching the door and the light beneath it which stretched across his floorboards from door to foot and seemed to flutter with movement outside every time he blinked. It was a world he was alone in now, huddled away from in as far a corner as he could find. He began to cry.

  The next day he spilled his final handful of coins out on the bar and drank until he fell off his stool to the feet of the night crowd and the soft light of lamps. He could not find his stool with a reaching hand, and the barman called out and two men carried Salomon out the door by grasps of his shirt and pants and set him against the wall outside where he stared into the street and watched anyone who passed by, his head against the wall and mouth hanging open.

  Three dogs paced in front of him for a time, and became one as they came near and stretched to lick his splayed feet. He pointed a finger and told the dog to get along. It was a matted little beast faded to gray. Salomon shook his belt cord at it. Get along. The dog sat and they stared at each other. When Salomon opened his eyes later the dog was resting its head on crossed paws.

  “Hey.”

  The dog lifted and cocked its head, but it quickly turned its attention to the street, to some unseen disruption. It stood and held itself rigid for a moment before trotting off the opposite way. Salomon called after it. The dog paused once with a backward look and went on around a corner at a run.

  He woke again hours later by a nudge to his ribs. The barman told him to get out of the doorway. He dragged himself into the street and lay motionless as people stepped over him or crouched near him and covered his face with their hats as they searched his pockets. The world came to him in blurred glimpses, cracked eyes fighting to open, momentary consciousness. He saw his pony walking through the streets, peeking in windows and moving on. Salomon lifted his head and watched. He crawled to the trough and stood on his knees, neck and neck with a horse left behind, and dropped his head. Coughing, he fell back and lay sprawled at the horse’s hoofs for a time before he dragged himself to a wall and sat half-shadowed, the bar lights slanting across his legs. The slants went out one by one and left him in the dark.

  When he woke again a man was scooping him up under the arms.

  “Here. Get your ass up.”

  “Who are you?”

  “It’s embarrassing. You had too much to drink.”

  “I didn’t have enough.”

  “If you’re trying to kill yourself, you’d do better with a bullet to the brain.”

  Salomon stood unsteady and took a step. “It’s an accident this way.”

  The man nodded. “Oh sure. You think God is a fool? Hey. You going to fall again or what?”

  “No. I’ll just hold onto the wall here.”

  The man stood widelegged with the lights behind him, sprags of white hair curling out over his ears. “You going to hold it all night?”

  “I might.”

  “You want a place to sleep or not?”

  Salomon leaned with one hand on the wall. “Yes.”

  “Come on then.”

  They started off, but Salomon stopped and pointed. “That’s my horse.”

  “What? That one? The indian pony? I’ve been trying to get a hold of it all night. It won’t let me get near.”

  Salomon whistled and the pony came trotting. The rifle still slung at the pony’s flank, along with the pouches and waterbag. Salomon put a hand in the pouch and fingered around. He closed the flap.

  “What’s funny?” the man said.

  “Nothing. A town made by thieves and a man can’t get robbed.”

  “I told you, nobody can get near that animal.” The man blinked and spat. “Come on.”

  “Where are my pistolas?”

  The man turned. “You mean those at your waist?”

  The man owned the stables, thirty stalls and a corral in the back stomping with horses most likely stolen. Salomon curled up in an empty stall with his pony standing over him. Throughout the night he heard a child crying nearby. He got up and found it was a goat in the last stall. In the morning he pitched hay and shoveled the stalls and watered the horses. The man came in at sunrise and found the morning’s work done. He stood at the stable doors and looked in at Salomon squinting back against the light.

  “What’s a guy like you doing in this town?”

  Salomon shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “You’re no more a drinker or gambler than I am. Sure as hell aren’t a thief. I expected to come in here this morning and find a few things missing.”

  “Well.” He put his hand up to the sun. “What are you doing in this town then?”

  “Thieves and wanted men, right?” He touched his chest with his thumb. “Wanted.”

  “What for?”

  “An accident. And there’s a living to be made here that I can’t make anywhere else. Men come here with money in their pockets. There’s no man in the world as generous as a man who carries another man’s money.”

  “Hey.”

  “What?”

  “Who rode that goat in?”

  The man looked at him. “Rode him? What do you – who was riding that goat?”

  “I mean, you have a goat back there.”

  “Yes, that’s my Catalina. She is a resident here. No better cure for alcohol than goat’s milk.”

  “What?”

  “Goat’s milk. You must have had some?”

  Salomon shook his head, smiling. “No.”

  Every morning the stable owner spoke from the bible before the sun came up. Salomon listened and made the sign of the cross. He spent the days in the stables, walking back and forth with his pistolas in his belt while the man led new horses in and old horses out, and rough-looking badmen paid him at the doors.

  “Here. I found this for you.”

  The man tossed a tangle of leather straps. Salomon held it up.

  “It’s a double holster. Go on and look. I cannot have you guarding my stables with your guns in your pants like a child. That thing makes you look like you know what you’re doing too. There’s not a man around who will steal from a man with pistolas strapped around his chest. Put it on.”

  Day in and out Salomon saddled and stripped horses, fed and watered them. He sat in front of the last stall and fed the goat from his hands and spoke to the animal. He glanced left and right and climbed into the stall with the little goat. Moments later he came out doubled-over, spewing a mouthful of milk.

  Every night he watched from the stables as different men walked the streets. He soon took to sitting out back on the top rung of the corral where he could talk to the horses and ask them what sort of men they carried, and why did they not buck them and run the first chance they had.

  Early one morning Salomon saddled a gray roan from the corral and led him to the front where a young man with sparse hairs on his lip stood waiting beneath a huge sombrero. The young bandit carried a curved dagger and a pistola with a barrel that stuck down to his knee. An intricate design had been carved it in long ago and the hammer seemed painted on by a fine silver brush. Salomon pointed.

  “What sort of piece is that?”

  The
bandit looked at his gun and back up. He did not speak.

  “I’ve never seen one like it, I mean.”

  The bandit took the reins and mounted his roan. “How much?”

  Salomon told him how much and the bandit paid. He tilted the pistola as one does to check a pocketwatch. The polished metal caught the sun.

  “It was given to me by my grandfather who took it from a buccaneer.”

  “A buccaneer?”

  The bandit shrugged. “That’s what he told me. More men have died by this pistola than any other in California.”

  Salomon stood there looking up at him. “How old are you?”

  The bandit gave Salomon a crooked smile. “How old are you?”

  He kicked his roan and rode out in a rising path of dust. Salomon watched as the bandit disappeared in the sun. Turning, he saw the man with the eyepatch loitering in the shade across the street, pacing, watching him with a lifeless face held low, an eye of coal. Salomon waved and the man stopped and brought his stalking head up. He walked off.

  That night the horses stamped in their stalls. In the darkness Salomon moved his eyes slowly across the ceiling. He rolled from his stall with pistolas up and stood with his back to the stable doors. The doors slid open and a wedge of moonlight fell on the straw and dirt. A face appeared through the door crack and Salomon jammed his gunbarrel in it. The man fell back in a scream as Salomon forced the door open and stepped out to stand over him. The man was cursing on his back, curled with his hands on his nose. He took his hands away to curse through blood and tears, but his eyes moved past Salomon, nothing more than a spasm caught by the moon, and Salomon’s night went blurred.

  He fell forward and the ground came up to meet him. He saw himself fall from a distance, as if he had been knocked from his body to turn and watch. His body fell stiff and he rolled to his back. A face came over him. The eyepatch man. Yeah, that’s him. There’s your Salomon Pico. One of the men handed him a payment, which he held close to his eye for inspection before running off. Salomon went in and out. Random voices carried on around him, snippets of whispers going clear then hardly audible, like a voice in a bucket. Take his horse. The indian pony there. I don’t know.

  When he came to, his head throbbed and sweated under a thin hood and he was atop his plodding pony with his hands tied. Sunlight came through the weaved fabric hood, a linen or some shirt tied around his head by the sleeves, stuck red to his head at the crown. His kidnappers rode beside him and ahead in argument. He could see their shapes through the worn fabric, three of them.

  “Alls I’m saying is I’m the one with the busted nose. If there’s any bonus involved, we should consider that a part of it.”

  “Three ways even.”

  “Hell. If it was your nose, you’d feel different.”

  “Three ways even. Cut and dried, period.”

  “Hell.”

  “Hey. He’s moving.”

  A groan had escaped Salomon. He could not feel his tongue.

  “Hold up. Give him some water. Go on, give it.”

  “Should be some extra pay on account of my nose is turned sideways. Look at it.”

  “Give him a drink.”

  “I am. Hell. Can’t even breathe without my mouth open. How am I to get it fixed without – hell.”

  Salomon sputtered and choked. The man holding the bladder laughed.

  “Would you take that thing off his head first, goddamnit.”

  A pair of hands yanked at the tied sleeves and pulled the fabric up, propping it on Salomon’s forehead, covering his eyes partway. When he tilted his head back for the drink he tried to see their faces but was blinded by the sun.

  They rode on through the night, stopping to camp by the trickle of a creek. Salomon slept on cool grass, his hands and feet tied and the shirt taken off his face. His eyes soon adjusted to the night. The men lay sleeping not far from where he lay. He spent all night inching away with his chin in the dirt. In the morning the men’s voices could still be heard and one of them pointed to where Salomon lay facedown in his escape. They had breakfast and broke camp and put Salomon on his horse on their way out.

  The next day they came upon San Luis Obispo where they rode through the noise of a tent village overcrowded and expanding, and the three bounty hunters prodded their capture to stand before the appointed lawman among the miners, whose office was a white tent. They removed the hood and Salomon blinked, his hair disheveled and matted at the back. Dried blood flaked off his hair and neck.

  Two men in uniform sat at a makeshift table. One of them pushed a chair back and approached. He put his face close.

  “Who’s this?”

  “This is Salomon Pico.” The lead bounty hunter handed a paper. The sheriff rolled it open and the hunter spoke the memorized lines with a smile. “Wanted by the American government for the unprovoked murder of Virgil and George Blitters, Americans, and for the menacing and attempted murder of one Harold McCarthy, a doctor of medicine in good standing.”

  The lawman stood staring for a moment, then spoke over his shoulder to the deputy.

  “Is Doc McCarthy around?”

  “Yes he is.” The deputy stood and left the tent.

  The lawman took another long look at the murderer and twitched his mustache before he spread the paper again.

  “It is a bad drawing.”

  “It is him. We had his identity confirmed.”

  The lawman spoke as he fiddled with a lockbox.

  “Thank you, gentlemen. I hope this killer didn’t give you trouble along the way.”

  “He broke my nose.”

  The lawman glanced back, then turned to the lockbox again and counted the reward. They tied Salomon to a chair with the official black hood over his head and waited for Doctor Harold McCarthy to arrive. When he did, Salomon blinked and looked up. The doctor did not hesitate.

  “Yes, that’s the son of a bitch.”

  The lawman immediately put the hood back over. The bounty hunters counted and split the reward in three. The man with the broken nose was about to speak but he did not.

  “Well, wait,” the lawman said. The bounty hunters turned at the tent flap. “Won’t you stick around for the hanging?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  The lawman dragged Salomon tied in the chair through the camp with tcantinahe back legs digging tracks in the mud. Men and women watched as the criminal went by, and children followed, throwing stones and mud until the lawman dropped the chair and chased them away before picking him up again and continuing to a small isolated tent where he propped the chair up in the center. He crouched in front of Salomon and lifted the hood, the pale tent fabric filling with breeze around them.

  “You kill an American and you hang, Mexican.”

  Salomon did not speak. The lawman stood.

  “You don’t say much, do you?”

  “They stole from me.”

  “You do speak English.”

  “They stole from me and they killed my wife and son. All of you did.”

  “That’s not the way I heard it. That’s not the way Doc McCarthy says it.”

  “He says it wrong.”

  “He tried to save your wife. Rode all the way in a little buggy to do it.”

  “Yes, he did. And I paid him.”

  “You tried to shoot him.”

  “I did not.”

  “He says after you killed the Blitters brothers, you pointed your pistols at him and pulled the triggers. You tried to shoot him.”

  “With spent powder.”

  “Misfire, he says.”

  Salomon did not answer.

  “You’d have shot him the way you shot them miners. You’d have blown doc’s head clean off given the chance.”

  “That is a lie. The powder was spent. The gun was not loaded. They pulled their guns on me. They stole from me.”

  “Stole what?”

  After a pause, Salomon spoke. “My wife and son. My cattle. My land. What else does a man have to lose
?”

  “A chicken.”

  Salomon held silent. The lawman stood for a moment, then put the hood back over and left. The camp went on in the distance. People went by, pausing every so often to stand and stare at the small tent set aside and filled every so often with thieves and murderers. Each time a sunset behind the tent showed the seated silhouette of a prisoner, small smiles appeared in the corners of their lips and whispers spread about the camp. The next day there would be a hanging.

  The noises of movement withered away and lights went out. Salomon squirmed and kicked, bouncing in the chair until it fell over and he lay with his face in the grass. He had fallen asleep that way when the tent flap opened and closed. Salomon brought his head up. A shuffling moved in and a muffled voice fell to the ground beside him, a voice that could manage nothing more than a strained mumble, like a child screaming into a pillow. Another voice whispered from above for this muffled screamer to shut up. Salomon was pulled upright in the chair and his hood was ripped off. The hands went to work on the ropes while the gagged someone still made noise on the ground. Salomon held his eyes wide, but the darkness still shrouded his vision. A hand gripped his shoulder.

  “Good to see you, my friend.”

  It was a voice he knew. A voice now weathered and big. It was his friend and protector from childhood, a man given to violence even as a boy. A man who could not have avoided a life of viciousness even if he’d taken a vow of priesthood. A man Salomon had last seen riding blood red out of town.

  In a camp made of tents and no foundation, as if it could dry up and leave in a day, the gallows were made to last. A hanging crossbeam and a platform made to drop three ropes at a time. A small crowd had gathered around with upturned faces. The deputy led a hooded prisoner with tied arms. He shuffled on tied feet, his cuffed hands tied down, his head jerking back and forth and shouting into an unseen gag. The prisoner fell at the foot of the scaffold stairs and writhed in the dirt. The deputy dragged the prisoner up the stairs and stood him on the platform. The lawman looked up from his pocketwatch to the deputy, and the deputy nodded. They fitted the noose around the criminal’s bobbing neck and put him screaming into position. The deputy struck him in the head and the screaming became sobs.