These Violent Times Read online

  Avery snorted. “You’re just too modest. Wasn’t it Doc Holliday who claimed, ’I’ve had credit for more killings than I ever dreamt of’? Those imaginings are who you are now.”

  He thought, then, of other wisdom. Not the Chinaman. The Cheyenne. One in particular, a friend of his named White Fox. Aenohe Nestoohe—Howling Hawk. Bishop actually was two people, she had said. His man-self and his winged-self. When he assumed the stance, by the campfire, no one doubted that he was soaring on the night winds. There was a tragic irony in the fact that Avery might be right. That every man was two men. The real and the shadow.

  Avery held out the two glasses. Bishop shook his head once. Avery set one down, raised one. “To the penny-dreadful creation, risen from the grave, and standing before me! Salut!”

  Bishop was now at the other end of the bar, grabbing a dusty bottle of Rip Van Winkle, holding the neck like he was strangling it. His other self was. His self that the Chinaman warned about. His memory skidded back, like it was on ice, right to the day . . . the moment the men invaded Bishop’s home and demanded to know where he hid the gold he stole with his brother, Devlin. Bishop had no idea.

  “The last time I saw my brother was the day before he was hung,” the medic and former lieutenant had protested. “He wrote a letter of regret to our dead parents, and that was it!”

  He said it calmly, then loudly. It didn’t matter. The men were tone deaf. The leader of the gang, Major “Bloody” Beaudine, had been Dev’s cell mate and didn’t believe that. He didn’t believe that John Bishop had nothing to do with the robbery. The wife and son of Dr. John Bishop died that day. He lost an arm that day. His soul, too, died that day. But not his body. A beautiful Cheyenne named White Fox found him and brought him to her blacksmith husband. She nursed him to health, and her husband, who had a curious sense of inventiveness, made a special shotgun rig that fitted where his left arm used to be. He designed a strap across the shoulder to fire it. And then—

  “Risen from the grave,” Bishop said thoughtfully.

  “That’s right,” Avery said, still holding the glass. “The two of us.”

  “How long have we known each other, Avery?”

  “From my rebirth to now,” Avery said, raising his glass even higher to toast the deed as well as the man. “When my mine caved in—our town’s last mine—you performed surgery right in this very room. Traveled fifty miles to get both your hands bloody. Saved my life. Why?”

  “Just makin’ sure you remember real history, is all.”

  “Like you do?” Avery questioned. He was always probing. Bishop was always reticent. “Oh, I know our history.”

  Bishop shook the memories from his head by taking a long, hard pull from the bottle. Shook it back with a loud, hissing “Ahhhh.”

  “But I’m not recalling you as a bourbon drinker.” Avery chuckled at this, finally easy-sipping his green.

  “Got an itching for Chinaman corn, and this is as close as I can get.”

  Avery seemed puzzled but let it go. His eyes drifted from Bishop to another time. His expression grew reflective. “You saved me, you saved some miners, but you and me and them couldn’t save this town.”

  “I’m a medic, not a miracle worker.”

  “But I was supposed to be,” Avery said. It was a moment of rare honesty. “Do you recall that I’m the mayor?”

  “The bullshit sheriff too,” Bishop added, mock-saluting him with the bottle.

  “Not bullshit,” Avery protested vaguely.

  “You grabbed the reins of as many official horses as you could get to control as many avenues of profit as you could handle,” Bishop replied. That was partly the scotch.

  “It was not for me,” Avery said.

  Bishop gave him a look.

  “Well, not all,” Avery admitted. “I wanted to do what I could do to save all of this. I am it, it is me; without each other we are nothing.”

  “The real man and the shadow man,” Bishop snorted.

  “Shadow?” Avery flipped a lapel, revealing a tarnished star with bent corners. He tapped it with the side of his thumbnail. “Not shadow. Silver. Maybe all that’s left in Good Fortune. Since the silver played out, we’ve only twenty people living here. Twenty people. Mild case of influenza could kill this town. Good Fortune’s a near-corpse, and I’m the one combing its hair before the funeral. We’re famous for two things: being the worst silver strike in the state, and you riding through every year.”

  Bishop had a second swallow of bourbon in his throat. “You really do that badge proud.”

  Avery said, “You know, I feel I do. I’m what you’d call the soul of what’s left. The heart. I just keep beating.”

  “And welcoming every new arrival,” Bishop observed.

  “Damn right, sir. Your exploits have always meant visits by newspapermen, curiosity seekers—”

  “Bounty hunters?”

  Avery made a face. “I look at them as guests. They all pay to stay, question me about our long and close friendship, take in my artistic tribute to you.” He swept a hand across the clippings behind him. It was the gesture of a carny barker. This man had more shadow selves than the Hydra had snapping heads. “It’s my civic duty to keep this enterprise going any way I can.”

  Bishop looked to Avery. More scotch spoke. “You really think I’m going to let this paper tombstone stand?”

  “Why shouldn’t you?”

  “Because it’s not a biography. It’s not a tribute. It’s an obituary without the last line, you vulture.”

  Avery raised his hands in mock self-defense. “That’s your view. But if I may make an observation?”

  Bishop waited.

  “Your reaction’s blinding you to something greater,” Avery said. “Those magazine inventions you despise could be a stroke of fortune.”

  “For?”

  “Us both.”

  “That mine collapse damaged your head.”

  “Hear me.” Avery’s voice lifted as he downed the last bit of liquid sugar. “Say you’re here, minding your business, just wanting your precious sleep, when one of those squirrels happens by and foolishly tries to collect a reward on you.”

  Bishop understood. “So this becomes a place where I gunned a man down.”

  “I’d put up a glorious monument.” Avery was now sipping the absinthe Bishop had refused.

  “You already have,” Bishop said with a sweep of his dark eyes.

  “No, no. I said ’glorious.’ Real. Bigger. Better.”

  “And even bigger and better if I was the one got gunned down?”

  Avery’s mouth twisted. “No. Different, then. Solemner.”

  Bishop put the bottle down and then his one hand was against Avery’s windpipe, fingers digging in like he was a dinner rabbit caught in a snare.

  “I didn’t survive a war and a massacre and all hell’s else being stupid,” Bishop snarled. “I still have two eyes. Waving that lantern and umbrella out there. Who’d you tell I’d be here?”

  Avery gagged and Bishop relaxed his grip, but he didn’t release the man. He lowered his hand, tightly grabbed the lapel over the badge, and pulled him forward, hard.

  “Who?” Bishop demanded.

  “What I’ve said—told—doesn’t matter,” the mayor-sheriff-bartender gasped, quivering again like a deep dish of aspic.

  “Matters to me.”

  Both of Avery’s hands were hanging off Bishop’s one, pulling hard, as he got out: “Every damn move you make’s written about.”

  He twisted to one side, Bishop’s fingers still tight into his flesh, and reached under the bar for a folded newspaper. He slapped it in front of Bishop, trying to get him to look. To let go.

  Bishop didn’t yield. “The two coffee boilers who were lumpin’ after me? Them?”

  Avery shrugged. Bishop’s hand went back to his throat.

  “Who paid you to set this up? And how much?”

  “They didn’t have to pay me!” he managed in a croaked whisper. “No one d
id! Weeks ago, they knew you’d be here. The papers wrote all about it!”

  Avery’s face was starting to purple when Bishop let go, fingers leaving moon-shaped marks on the fat man’s throat. Stumbling back, slipping on a wet spot from the umbrella, Avery landed against the cash register and frog-gulped for air, holding on to the bar, trying to calm.

  “Drink some water,” Bishop told him.

  Avery slumped forward across the bar, on his elbows, his dignity spilled out like an upended bottle. “Is that . . . medical advice, Doctor?”

  Bishop didn’t take the bait. That was an old life, like the Chinaman had implied. Right now, though, Bishop didn’t mind being reminded. He wasn’t in a mood to forgive Beaudine or Avery or the two green rips who had been tailing him. If he had been rigged, he would have shot the paper museum in front of him all to blazes.

  The absinthe and laudanum warmed Avery in waves, as he rubbed feeling back into his triple chins. He spoke his next words softly, carefully, as though he were testing a fist-loosened tooth.

  “Everybody wants to know about that gun,” Avery said. “What kind of a twisted soul would wear such a thing? Are you more gun than human being, or is it the other way ’round?”

  “And what do you tell them?”

  Avery smiled thinly. “I say, ’Thankfully, I have no idea how it feels to be a one-armed man.’ But henceforth I will add, ’I now know what it is to be choked by one.’”

  What a scum. Even that he would turn into legend, into money. Bishop remembered the first time he had encountered that manure. Bishop and White Fox had been out on the trail, glued by mutual need and attraction they tried to fight. She had left the drunken blacksmith but wasn’t needy. That was part of the draw. There was a mountain snowstorm, a hellish fight with Sergeant Bates and his renegades. Bates, a now-blind officer who blamed the medic for the loss of his sight. Bishop and White Fox battled the renegades, the rig-making corpses and history and news. The yellow press gave Bishop a new name, “Shotgun,” which he hated more than “Doctor” but in a different way. It was a devil to the dead angel he was. But Bishop really wasn’t either. He read every scrap of the trash that turned his tragedy and resurrection into money. A penny. Another penny. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Men got rich. Bishop got a reputation.

  Now he got a wall.

  Bishop resisted the urge to fling the bottle. He turned to Avery. “Keep massaging your neck.”

  “That’s, uh . . . fitting advice. Fingers fixin’ damage done by fingers.”

  “Don’t think, Avery. Doesn’t suit you.”

  There was a thick, tense moment of silence, like a fever wanting to break, as Avery collected himself. He inflated his hoggish chest. “Look, I’m just saying, you’ve got enemies, and then you’ve got the simply curious.”

  “Same goddamn thing.” Bishop’s dark eyes were now drink-assisted slits. “I’m askin’ once more, how much did this bunch pay to target me?”

  “And I say again, it’s not me laying you out for some kind of an ambush. If I was, I wouldn’t tell you anything.”

  “You didn’t,” Bishop reminded him. “I know what’s comin’.” Bishop picked up his carpetbag and put it on the bar with, “Last time. How much?”

  Avery rolled his head, getting more feeling, though his eyes remained fixed on his guest. It was his first and only show of something that approached fortitude. “Look. Every fall you make this trip. Same month, same days. I can set my watch by your actions, and so can anyone else who can read, or knows someone who does.”

  “Did they pay you in gold?”

  Avery’s shoulders slumped as that little flourish of courage evaporated. There was no sense continuing the lie. “Silver.”

  “They knew the specie of the whore,” Bishop remarked, rubbing his fingers together to indicate coins.

  “So, then. The whore asks—you want to top the offer?”

  “Nope,” Bishop said. “Just want to make a different one.” He unhooked the carpetbag latches, revealing the stock and custom triggers of the double-barrel tucked inside.

  “Oh my.” Avery peered into the bag. “So, the penny dreadfuls are accurate after all.”

  “Here’s a suspicion I haven’t told anyone,” Bishop said.

  Avery leaned forward eagerly.

  “I think the man who made this got the idea from the dreadfuls,” Bishop said. He placed a hand in the satchel. “Here’s what I want, Avery. I want you to get those boys to ride off.”

  “You think they’ll listen to me?”

  “To the carbine under the bar,” Bishop said.

  Avery shook his head. “Let me tell you something. Something from experience. Scared men come looking for a legend, they been drinking. They been drinking, they don’t hear. They don’t see too good either. They will shoot me to prove they got nerve.”

  “Your problem,” Bishop noted.

  “Maybe I get one, the other still comes up. You still got the same problem.”

  The former medic considered this. “Maybe you open the umbrella. They laugh themselves to the floor. Then you shoot.”

  “Be reasonable, sir,” Avery implored.

  Bishop closed the bag and turned toward the door.

  Avery looked around the recent arrival. “The storm’s worse. You’re not thinkin’ of going out there. Consider your horse.”

  “That’s not what I’m considerin’,” Bishop replied. “I’m on my own business, nothing to do with you, and less with anyone else. All those Jim-Bobs have to do is—nothing.”

  “Friend . . . sir . . . you know that. I know that,” Avery added agreeably. “But the nobodies always seek the somebodies, like moths to a lantern. All I can do is—well, hang the lantern where it does the most good. Make them flutter a little harder to get to it. ’Cause flutter they will.”

  Bishop seemed to consider that. It was a new, reflective expression, and Avery waited, like a boy eyeing the jar of huckleberry suckers, hoping he got one because his father just spent ten dollars on feed.

  Bishop had spent too many years moving. The Civil War. The war with the renegades, with Beaudine, with the men who tried to steal John Chisum’s cattle ranch—nothing but bloody flesh created instead of healed. That was not the life he had sought. It was the one that had been thrust on him. Lucid from drink, he let himself hear what his own soul was saying. Enough.

  “I’m not spending the year being chased,” Bishop said. It was more to himself than to Avery. To the other man he said, “You try to convince them.”

  Avery deflated visibly. “And if they arrive, and if their desire for confrontation is greater than their common sense?”

  “Then try again,” Bishop said. “Christ, I don’t have much patience anymore. Especially tonight. All I want is a little peace.” He lifted his carpetbag with, “Treat them to the good whiskey . . . make them understand every action has its cost.”

  Avery said, “I’ll put forth your message. But I am not optimistic.”

  “Put it forth with some of that big ’heart’ of yours, Mr. Mayor. You’ll be doin’ everyone a favor. Them mostly, but me too.”

  Avery watched Bishop take the stairs, then said, “You’ll want the old room at the end of the hall. Sixteen steps from the landing, so you’ll hear anyone before they reach the door.”

  “You got it all worked out,” Bishop said.

  “Whether you believe it or not, I’m on your side,” Avery said.

  Bishop didn’t believe that any more than Avery himself seemed to.

  * * *

  The sleep-it-off room was narrow and crowded with emptiness. It was wrapped around a chimney giving heat that was a dry fog against the skin. Bishop sat hard on the edge of an old bunk, taking the double-barreled rig and special, high-grain shells from the carpetbag, laying them out beside him. The room was barren of drunken miners reeking of unwashed skin and clothes, snoring from the corners, or barking for a fight, and the only sound was the storm shaking the room’s one crown-glass window in its
sill.

  Bishop loaded the rig, swiveled it shut. Locked.

  He kicked the carpetbag along the floor to another bunk, then half-hid it, making sure one end stuck out from under the bed, so as to be in the light from the hall when the door opened. Just enough to be seen. Bag positioned, and cradling the rig, he fell back on the bed, its slats cracking, almost giving way, as he sank into its straw mattress like soft mud.

  This was the best vantage point of the room, and it felt good.

  Bishop dropped his head into the filthy pillow, edges spitting feathers, dust clouding up and with it the stink of every drunk who’d ever used it, but he didn’t care. The pillow promised sleep. Maybe for once, more than ten minutes’ worth. He shut his eyes in the deep darkness, listened to the rain slamming on the creaking roof, heard a rattle in a drainpipe that sounded a little like a man hanging. He hoped that exhaustion would keep him from remembering, but it never did.

  This time the image that returned, like winter, was one of Beaudine’s men. Bishop had remembered the man as being jaundiced, who had gone to see the only other physician for a hundred miles. Bishop couldn’t remember the man’s name—either man—but the doc said he’d treated the outlaw for malaria and told Bishop and White Fox where to find him. They found him. They hunted the outlaw, and when he drew, Bishop inaugurated his new rig. His tired body jerked as his sinew remembered that first release. Powerful, sending lightning through the jaundiced man’s bones from skull to heel. Fast. So fast. Before dying from a gaping, blood-pumping wound where his guts used to be, the outlaw told Bishop that Beaudine and his men were still searching for the stolen gold, which they thought had been hidden in a played-out mine in the far mountains.

  Encroaching sleep was not enough to keep Beaudine’s monstrous face from his mind. Christ, what would? What could? And Bishop’s defiant heart began to race and his good arm began to throb and his lips drew back involuntarily from his teeth, forming a snarl like some mountain cat—

  The voices came from downstairs: Avery’s and three others.

  Bishop was alert and rolled onto his arm, peered toward the door. In the next fluid movement he adjusted the shotgun to lay flush against his leg. He pulled a Cheyenne blanket, colors worn out, around his shoulders, then angled to one side, exposing his left arm amputated to the elbow, and listened to the voices. That loud burst of a bad joke, laughter, and panicked silence. Just like in the woods. His nostrils didn’t flare but they surely smelled death.