Tintype Dream, Chapter Nine
Layin' Low
Wherein… The Crew stands down. Perry Owens has gotten to thinkin. Bloodgrass Twice Life remembers that one time.
The Crew pushed the herd beyond Red Rock Tank, the last corral, camped and picked up their money. Then rode forty miles back to Holbrook Cottage by sunset. The Cottage sat a ways back off the road some, east of Holbrook. It was plain, unremarkable, the kind of building nobody looked at twice. They spread out through the two front rooms, laid back everywhere with boots off, hats down, somebody’s coffee always on the stove. Boss took the chair by the window, his back habitually to the wall, old habit, another thing that kept him breathing longer than most. He didn’t sleep, just watched the road through a gap in the curtain, turnin’ over the last two days in his mind. A man workin’ a splinter. Buck Roy sat apart from the rest, nursing his jaw, saying next to nothin. Boss also watched him a while. “You keep settin’ there mopin, you’re gonna curdle the milk,” said Boss.
Bloodgrass Twice Life took a room over the mercantile. Two streets over, cheap and plain. One window happened to look down the road, square at The Cottage’s front door. The window was unexpected. He’d simply asked for a room but got just what he needed. This kind of thing happened often enough to think about. Once he crossed The Veil and returned, things just… worked out better. He sat with his boots up on the sill, watchin’ smoke rise from The Cottage Chimney. Waiting was most of the work, really always had been. He reached for tobacco and found his pocket empty. Took him a while to remember he left it on the trail. He hadn’t expected to miss it. A touch of the jitters there. Sitting here, counting the cottage’s comings and goings, he found his instincts running a half-beat slow. Like limpin’ when you’re trying to run. Much of a Tracker’s life was about timing. Losing that watch cost him more than he wanted to say, sittin’ alone in a rented room. He kept watching anyway. This work didn’t wait on a man’s confidence.
Perry Owens and Pearl turned the buckboard south. Taking the shortcut back toward St Johns, they left behind the herd, and the men who stole it. “You didn’t want to do anything about that,” Pearl said. Owens kept his eyes on the road, hat brim low in the afternoon sun. “Man goes lookin’ for every fight offered, he don’t live long enough to pick one that matters.” “And which one’s that?” Owens didn’t answer right off. “Big man back in Concho. Watt Pruitt tole me. Rode in on a tobiano. Sportin’ a hat like a train jockey lost a bet. Somethin’ wasn’t right, there. Seen him myself in St Johns. Like lookin’ at a man beside a grave, not sure which one you was talkin’ to.” Pearl let the rifle settle a little and didn’t press further. Some things a man needed room to keep workin, and the road back to Concho gave him all the room he needed.
Billy the Ballerina had been making a nuisance of herself for most of an hour. She had her boots off, sitting backward in a chair by the stove. One knee was hooked over the back, blonde hair tied up loose. First, she sat on the floor. Then the table. Then the windowsill. She stood for no reason, stretched long and put both hands against the ceiling. Buck Roy watched her with increasing irritation. Now she was balancing a coffee cup on the toe of one bare foot. “That’s gonna fall.” Billy looked at Buck Roy. “No, it ain’t.” “Surely it is.” “Wanta bet?” Buck Roy shifted his jaw. Billy grinned. “Careful,” she said. “You ain’t in shape to lose again.” Buck Roy gave her a look. She wiggled her toes. The cup started to spin. Boss didn’t turn from the window. “Put your boot on.” Never looked. Billy lowered the cup into her hand. “Why?” “Said so.” Billy looked around the cottage and slipped her foot into one boot without using her hands, hooked the heel with her toes, and pulled it on. She pulled on the second boot and stood up. Boss finally looked over. “Sit down.” Billy smiled. “You worried Ima wear the carpet out again?” She crossed the room, stopped at the table, and picked up a playing card somebody had left there. She flicked it at the table, landing flat. Billy looked pleased. She flicked another. The second card struck the first and knocked both onto the floor. Buck Roy looked annoyed. “Quit that.” Billy smiled wider. Boss shook his head and turned back to the road. Billy wandered over to the window behind him, looked out through the other side of the curtain, then immediately ducked. “Man coming.” That shut the room up for a while. Billy wandered back to the stove and poured herself another coffee. She took a drink, grimaced, and poured a little water into it. Boss watched the road. The cottage went quiet again.
Bloodgrass hit the Holbrook rumor circuit. Word came in low and quick through the usual channels. Livery boy, barkeep, invisible network, moving information through a frontier town fast as any telegraph. A right-sized crew was holed up in the old cottage east of town, no herd whatsoever, but resting up. Bloodgrass felt it in his gut before the word even reached him. The same instinct that kept him alive a long time now told him the waitin’ was done. The movin’ was about to start. But the day was warm, and vengeance tires a man…
He remembered a time... Bloodgrass Twice Life rode twenty minutes behind the herd. Close enough to smell the dust they were throwin, far enough back that Boss’s Crew never once seen ‘im over their backs. Men moving three hundred head of another man’s beef through Canyon Diablo were careful of the back trail. They were watching the grade, the wash-outs, the places where a spooked cow could take half the herd down into the rocks. Twice Life had learned about dishonest cattlemen a long time ago: a man in the middle of stealing somethin’ was the easiest man in the territory to follow. The tracks ran straight for the unfinished bridge, then the herd swung wide around it, the drovers pushing the beef around the pilings where they met the floor of the canyon, open flat ground. A busy railroad crew might get a clean look at three hundred head that didn’t belong to anybody. But what’s new? The bridge crew’s crane sat still, rusting orange against the canyon wall, Sunday-quiet on a Tuesday. The railroad men were caught up at their work, and off work waiting on parts. Boss Hartley’s cattle passed under the end of the bridge, down in the Canyon. Real quiet-like. The east end of the unfinished span dropped into a fold of rock the sun never quite reached, not at any hour, not in any season. Just a blind seam in the canyon wall, where the light bent wrong and the temperature dropped, like stepping from summer into the icehouse cellar. He’d felt ground like this before. The rim above Bear Scar Rock felt the same way, thin and hollow. Wedged into a cleft in the rock was a man’s conductor watch, hand made, Black Forest, huge, heavy, gold. Still running, and on time. Twice Life crouched beside it a long moment without touching it. It wasn’t ticking. But wasn’t silent, either. He could feel it, a pressure behind his back teeth, same low hum a Resurrection Page gave when the Medicine Wagon rolled too close. He picked it up by the chain. The hands spun once, backward, fast enough to blur, and stopped dead on a time that meant nothing to him. Beautiful, yet buried here in a fold of the canyon that never saw daylight. Constant liminal space at the bottom of Canyon Diablo. Twice Life closed his fist around it and went back to his horse. The herd’s dust was still hanging low over the north, twenty minutes and closing. But whatever this thing was, it had nothing to do with Boss Hartley. Only a cleft in the rock, one that happened to sit alongside the crooked, sneaking way three hundred stolen head traveled unseen. He continued north.
Across the Painted Desert in the Little Colorado grasslands, Lynch’s boot warmed low and steady, but quieter now, and the page itself was pressing and flexing to the pull, the same as Lynch. He felt the pull sharpen once more, sudden and certain. The rim let go of them a little after full dark, the last mile of switchback dropping the whole convoy near a thousand feet off the mesa in country too steep and tiring to argue with, until Burnham finally opened below. Lantern light spread thinly across the fairgrounds from wagon to wagon, wood smoke lying low in tbe cold. Twenty-some miles since sunup, most of it was nervous downgrade, and every animal in the outfit showed it. “They’re close,” Lynch said. “Closer than close,” Med agreed, already turning Traveller’s team toward Burnham and the fairgrounds beyond, where those things that waited in the past were all, by Med’s reckoning, about to come due soon.
Bloodgrass twitched. Then he jerked awake, the memory he’d just dreamt swinging fresh in his head…a willow bud dancing in the sun. He felt it before he knew. Yep. Through the binoculars, he watched Buck Roy step onto the cottage porch alone, restless, working his jaw, same as he’d been doing since Concho. Pacing a slow circle in the dirt, a man who couldn’t sit still with his own thoughts. But: alone. That was the single word Bloodgrass had been waitin’ on. His boot heels came off the window sill, as he checked his guns. But, he wouldn’t need ‘em much if this went the way he intended. He headed for the stairs.
Jericho and Nineveh came down off the last switchback blowing hard through their noses. Traveller’s brake blocks were smoking some, and it took Med the better part of twenty minutes just walking the Percherons cool before they could stand easy. By the time the big coach was squared away at the north end of the fairground, the convoy had caught up and was settling in, each rig finding its own corner. Herbert and Mildred’s curtained buckboard came in last and slowest, Sturdy Boy’s steady Morgan never once breaking pace even on the switchbacks, and Herbert staked him close to the wagon tongue before he’d so much as loosened his own collar. Jeb stood tethered loose to Traveller’s side rail, close enough to lip at the oats box, and dozed there with one hind foot cocked the way he always did once the work was done. Fires came up quick after that, three or four of them scattered across the fairground darkness, the kind of quiet, competent camp-making that a dozen years on the road teaches a body without anyone needing to be told twice.
Maddie’s leather-bodied coupe rolled in to join them, her matched Tennessee Walkers fresh enough to sidestep and toss their heads at the lantern light, twenty miles being nothing much to a pair of horses bred for exactly this kind of ground-eating trot. Med had a coffee going and a second one waiting by the time Maddie walked over from her coupe, notebook still in hand, hat pushed back, looking like a woman who’d gotten exactly what she came for and wasn’t sure yet whether that was good news or bad. “Donal,” she said, settling onto the tailgate across from him without waiting to be asked. “You got a minute before you sleep, or you already halfway there?” “For you, Maddie Covington, I got two.” Donal poured her a coffee she hadn’t asked for and set it in her hand anyway. She flipped the notebook open one-handed. “Spent the afternoon out at the Traders’ practice grounds. Talked my way past their manager easy enough — man loves seein’ his club’s name in the paper more’n he loves winnin’, which tells you somethin’ right there. But it’s not their pitching that’s got me worried for you boys. It’s their new shortstop.” “New shortstop.” Donal said it flat, the way a man says a phrase he knows he don’t like. “Fella callin’ himself Craig Jones. Come up from some Plains league nobody around here’s ever heard of, and I mean nobody — I wired two papers in Kansas tryin’ to run down where exactly, and neither one’s got a lick of record on him.” Maddie flipped a page. “Batting four-twenty on the season. Four-twenty, Donal. I watched him take infield practice for twenty minutes and I never once saw him miss a hop, clean or bad.” Donal’s face did something complicated in the firelight — not quite worry, not quite the easy dismissal he usually wore. “Four-twenty’s a number a body makes up to sell newspapers.” “I asked him myself.” She held up the notebook like it was evidence in a trial. “Got maybe six words out of him before his manager hustled him off to shake somebody’s hand for a photograph. Quiet fella. Watchful. The kind that answers a question by lookin’ at you a beat too long before he says anything, like he’s decidin’ how much of the truth you’ve earned.” She shrugged. “Struck me as a man who’s used to bein’ underestimated and doesn’t mind it one bit.” “And Svensen?” “Didn’t get a word out of him. Just like you told him. Good Man. But I’ll tell you this much — every man on that Traders bench went quiet when Jones stepped into the box, like they already know what happens when a pitcher makes a mistake.” Maddie closed the notebook. “You’ve built this club around Svensen’s arm and a defense tight enough to strangle a man slow. That’s a fine plan against ordinary hitters. I don’t know yet what it looks like against a man who doesn’t miss.” Donal was quiet a moment, turning his tin cup slow between his palms. “Well,” he said finally, mustering something like his usual lightness and not quite getting all the way there. “Sunday’ll tell us soon enough what kind of man he is.” “Sunday,” Maddie agreed, and didn’t sound any more certain. Behind them, the old parchment page in Lynch’s boot gave off the faintest hum.
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