A Cold Place In Hell Read online

  “Sorry.”

  “And I asked you a question. What can I do around here if I can’t sit a horse anymore?”

  “I didn’t answer the question, Billy, and that ought to be answer enough.”

  Don’t know how long we just stayed there like that, Billy with an arm covering his eyes, me standing there next to him, not having anything to say that wouldn’t hurt him more, and him having been hurt already more than a man ought to be at his age. Both of us might still be just like that till even now if we both hadn’t heard that piping little ocarina bird singing its way to us from outside the barn.

  If it was an ocarina, and it was, that meant Pearline had sent little Nicholas over to check up on Billy. Nicholas was the little colored boy Honey kept around to sweep out behind the bar and run the towels upstairs. And times when Yancy had to leave off the piano to go and use the outback privy, she’d let Nicholas sit on top the piano and play his ocarina, which didn’t fill up the room like Yancy’s piano, but it filled in the times when there wasn’t anyone talking, and places like Honey’s don’t thrive when there’s bunches of silence. Smoke and whiskey, cackling laughter coupled with stroke ’n’ poke, that’s what Honey’s was made of. And Nicholas had a sunshine of a smile and the doves all liked him and looked after him, pushing him off to one side when too much bourbon turned the bulls into bullies and cheroot smoke and gun smoke started to dance together. Nicholas had a roof. Nicholas had food. There’s worse ways to stay on top of the grass.

  “Hey, Billy Piper.” Nicholas poked his head around the corner of the door. The ocarina was in one hand. In the other was a take-along can from Rooney’s. “Pearline sent me to Mr. Rooney’s for you. I got biscuits and blond gravy here.”

  “Sounds good, Nicholas. Come ahead.” Billy moved up on one elbow. It was more movement than I’d seen out of him since it all happened.

  That gravy smell reached me and Billy about five seconds before Nicholas actually got to us. Damned fine smell. First time I saw Billy smile since it happened, too. Would done Pearline a world of good to see that smile.

  “You want a plate of this, Nicholas?”

  “No, sir. Pearline sent it over for you.”

  “And you plan on telling her if you had a helpin’?”

  Nicholas allowed that a little thought. He looked at Billy. Big round eyes, puppy eyes. “Reckon not.”

  They only had two plates with the take-along tin, so that gave me a chance to act generous and excuse me, head over to Rooney’s for my own order of biscuits, with the chance of adding a glass of beer in there to make it the perfect breakfast I was hoping for. Billy understood, and I said I’d be back before a little bit and headed on out the door. There wasn’t any talk behind me when I left, just the two of them blowin’ the hot off and slurping it down as fast as they were able. Pair of raccoons woulda had more manners.

  My foot just hit the bottom steps of Rooney’s porch when Mr. Starett called out to me. He was at his table at the big bay window, which was open, just finishing off his plate of steak and onions. “Wilbur! You comin’ on in here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Be quick about it. I’ll buy.”

  That last part always makes me quick and so I was. When I pushed in through the door, I could hear Nicholas and his sweet potato piping in some little melody. Didn’t recognize the tune, so maybe it was one of the kind he made up himself and played for Billy and Pearline on the airing deck at Honey’s. Hoped so. That’d help Billy’s mood some. I’d never seen Mr. Starett take a sip of anything that wasn’t water or coffee, so I didn’t order any beer with my biscuits. No point in having him think he had a barleycorn buzzard on his spread.

  “You see Billy?”

  “Just come from there.”

  “How bad’s the hurt?”

  “The leg-hurt, or the other?”

  “Both.”

  “The leg-hurt throbs, he says. He can’t talk much about the other.”

  Mr. Starett tossed his napkin down on the table, looked out the window to the street. Across the way, ol’ Ganeel was sweeping out the boardwalk in front of the store. The morning sun come in low, shooting through the balloon of dust, turning it golden, cauliflower you could see through. “What the dickens are we going to do with Billy, Wilbur?”

  The “we” part let me know I just got a new job.

  Mr. Starett went on, still looking out onto the street. “I talked to Omar last night. He sent a wire to the Army surgeon at Fort Laramie. Surgeon said he’d try to get out this way next week or the week after, but he told Omar that if Omar was talking true about what Billy’s leg looked like when we cut away the pants, that the surgeon’s first thought woulda been to lop the damned thing off above the knee.”

  “Lord God. That’d kill Billy, Mr. Starett.”

  Starett nodded. “If the loppin’ off didn’t kill him, the sight of him being one boot too many might have done the trick once he woke up. Omar says Billy’s never goin’ to walk right. He’s going to look like a top just running out of spin.” He rubbed his face. Early in the day, but Mr. Starett was a weary, weary man. “How old’s Billy, Wilbur?”

  “Seventeen. Eighteen. Something like.”

  “Sonofabitch.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tolliver arrived with my biscuits and gravy, but I wasn’t hungry anymore. The beer would have helped some.

  The next four weeks was like reading a book that had the same thing written on every page. Omar and me would wrap the leg all over again, tighter if we could, and take off the dried-up clay and repack with new. Billy did what he could to stay quiet and not yell out, and was more times than not able to do it, though he sweated through his shirt most every time we went through it. The surgeon from Fort Laramie got there after a couple of weeks, and gave us a schedule about when we should start trying to get Billy up on his feet and get him to walking as best as he was going to be able to do that. He was pleased about Billy’s leg and toes staying pink, and got us to arrange for Pearline to come over twice a week and squeeze up and down on Billy’s leg. Called it some kind of massage, and I could pretty much see the kind of massage Billy thought he was getting.

  “I ain’t been with Pearline in more’n a month, Wilbur. And she starts squeezing on me like the Laramie major says and I get breathing deep, but I know I can’t do anything with Pearline while my leg’s like this on account of my not being able to move around like a man wants to move around when he gets rooster-y.”

  “Maybe there’s another way.”

  “Another way to what?”

  “Maybe you don’t have to be in the saddle, Billy. Maybe there’s a way for you to be the horse.” The look he gave me was the kind of look you see on a dog’s face when someone gives it an order in a language it never heard before. It wants like everything to obey; it just don’t know how. “You think Pearline knows about this rooster-y thing goin’ on?”

  “Wilbur, the person we are discussing is my Pearline, who earns daily bread at Honey’s house. Of course she knows.”

  “You talked with her about it?”

  Billy shook his head, little-kid-like. “A man doesn’t talk about rooster-y matters, Wilbur.”

  “She might know a way to help.”

  “You think?”

  “More like, I wonder. More like, she can’t know how to help if she doesn’t know you need help.”

  “She knows. I told you that. She knows.” He got himself a little feather of a smile. “I’m the only one she lets kiss her on the mouth. I ever tell you that?”

  “No, but I sort of puzzled that out on my own.”

  “I’m the only one she lets kiss her on the mouth,” he said again. “All the boots get parked under that bed, I’m the only one.”

  “You’re a lucky man.”

  He looked down to his clayed-over leg. Didn’t say anything. But looked. Looked hard.

  “Shame you won’t ever be able to put your own boots under there ever again,” I said.

  His
look stayed hard, but now it was on me, not the crooked leg. “Talk it plain, Wilbur.”

  “Pearline’s room is up on the second floor. Man can’t get himself to the second floor if a man won’t get himself up and walking.”

  “You think I’m ready?”

  “I don’t think anybody knows, not me, not you, till we shove a crutch up under the arm on your rank side and see just what Black Iodine left you to work with.”

  “Don’t seem like he left much.”

  “No, not much at all seems like.”

  Billy tossed back the flannel cover and looked at his legs. He lifted the bad one an inch or two, then let it lower on back. “My one leg’s skinnier than the other, all leathery-like.”

  “I see it.”

  “Bird’s wing, more than a leg.”

  “I see it.”

  Kept on looking at the leg for a long time, then finally cocked his head up and put his eye on me again. “Wilbur, tell me this. When you expect to get started on that crutch?”

  Twenty years back, I was riding drag in Texas for the Rydell bunch when the horse I was on went and died, right under, just a couple little wheezing rattles; then he went down, first in front, then the rear, rolling over and over, pinning me under like you’d pin a flower on a dead man’s lapel. I shoved and wriggled and called the dumb sonofabitch a dumb sonofabitch, but it was pointless, when you take into account the dumb sonofabitch was a dead dumb sonofabitch. The herd was in front of me, the boys looking the other way, so it was a time before any of them knew I wasn’t where I was supposed to be and came on back to get me. I don’t know how long it took them to get back, but it was enough time for flies to get to the dead dumb sonofabitch holding me down there in the loam, enough time for those goddamned feathered dead-flesh-eaters to start circling high above. The time it took for the boys to get back to me didn’t seem as long to me as the time it took to get Billy Piper off the floor of Fergus Blackthorne’s barn.

  Wasn’t for want of trying on Billy’s part. There was plenty of that. But there was even more pain than there was trying, and the first time me and Omar rolled Billy up onto his feet and got him to put weight on the crunched leg, Billy didn’t make a sound, not a mumbling word, but what he did was just faint away, and would have gone all the way to the floor if Omar and I wasn’t there grabbing him hard.

  It was Omar saw the good part to it, that Billy, even when he was going out, had turned himself so he’d be falling on his back and could stick his bad leg straight out from the fall. Wouldn’t be making it any worse than it already was. We splashed some water on Billy’s face, and he opened his eyes a couple of seconds after that. He looked up at us, then over to the crutch still tight under his arm.

  “I went down?”

  “Like an old termite tree in a windstorm.”

  He nodded, took in a few deep breaths, looking up to the ceiling. He held up a hand. “Get me up. Let’s do it again.”

  “You sure?” Omar said.

  Billy fixed him hard. “Omar, I like you. You helped me when I needed more help than I ever dreamed of. I hope you live sixty, seventy, eighty, a hundred years. And if you do, I promise you, you will never ask a stupider question than the one you just asked. Now help me get my rump off this little floor and let’s get after doing it again.”

  So that’s what we did.

  Every day at sunup, once coffee got drunk and innards got emptied, Omar and me would work with Billy, shuffling him this way and that around the barn, looking like we were helping Marvin Whelper out of Rooney’s at the end of a Saturday night. By the time we finished, Billy’s shirt was black and sopping, his skin was mother-of-pearl pale, and he had knees made out of melting butter. From time to time, Nicholas would show up with a tin of foaming beer, sent there by Pearline, who wanted to know how Billy was coming along, but didn’t have the deep gut it would take to stand aside and watch him go through what he had to go through. When it was done, Nicholas would play on that sweet potato of his, and Billy would lie back and sort of shake until he either got it all in line again or actually drifted off and was asleep. And that sleeping brought around another situation that made it all upside-down cake and that was Billy was sleeping when he ought to be awake, meaning he was awake when he ought to be asleep. Him and Pearline didn’t see as much of each other on account of that, him sleeping at the only time of day when Pearline could leave Honey’s to come see him. Sometimes, I get back from lunch at Rooney’s and find Pearline just sitting there, holding his hand, patting his forehead dry. Didn’t like to see that. Reminded me too much of a lady at a grave.

  But it did seem to both me and Omar that Billy was making it better on his barn walks, even with the problems of sleeping and waking wrong. One night, after about four weeks of trundling Billy around, I woke up with a privy need and was relieved to see Billy sound asleep. I decided to give myself some more relief in the outback house and left him there on the barn floor, breathing deep, stopped just this side of a full-bore snore. I sat there in the outhouse for a time, mulling over things important to a cowboy who don’t bounce in the saddle the way he used to, who knows that Mr. Starett’s got an admirable heart, considering how he was treating Billy, but that he can’t keep that many declawed kittens in his kennel. My back hurt and my eyes were more fuzzed up than I liked to let on, and all I seemed to hear late at night was a clock ticking away, louder and louder and louder. Especially in the middle of the night sitting in an odor-rot privy. Once my business was finished, I yanked up my drawers and went back outside. You forget how good fresh air can smell until your own stink gives it a hammer hold. The sky was sprayed with stars and it looked to be a clear day to come. The moon was just a sliver, a smile of white against a black blanket. I went back inside the barn.

  Billy Piper wasn’t there.

  The flannel was all rumpled up, and there was a scrape of scuffle marks in the dirt beside it. Then the scuffle marks trailed off and I saw a boot print. Next to that was a long smooth place, and there was a circle-dot right next to the smooth place. Another boot print and the same things next to it, pointing off in the direction of the double door leading out to the corral. And then I knew what I was seeing. Boot print. Foot drag. Crutch dot. Boot print. Foot drag. Crutch dot. Boot print. Foot drag. Crutch dot. Billy Piper had gotten himself up and was off and moving.

  The steps and the drags was easy to see in the moonlight. They went straight across the corral to the gate and out then into the street. If he’d’a gone on the boardwalk, I wouldn’t know which way was which, but he stayed straight down the middle of the street, moving out around a couple of the muddy patches, but straight on still, past Rooney’s and the store where Willard Ganeel clerked, and it wasn’t till I saw the trail curve around the corner that it come to me and I knew where Billy was headed. He was going in the direction of Honey’s and Pearline. And just when that set in solid on me, I saw them coming out of Honey’s front door. There wasn’t a light on in Honey’s. There wasn’t a light on anywhere except from the sky, but there they were, walking out like it was Sunday after singing and they were Mr. and Mrs. Kissmyass.

  Pearline had on a white nightdress. There was a light blue shawl thing around her shoulders. They moved slow, Billy dragging the stiff leg like an anchor. She walked on the other side, holding on close to his arm. If Honey had looked out the window and seen one of her favorite girls walking out in the middle of the night, she’d a thrown a shoe and then a fit.

  I could hear Billy and Pearline talking, but their voices were low and the words were all knotted around one another. I sulked back into the shadow side of Rooney’s and tried to stay as still as I could. They wouldn’t want me to hear them and I didn’t really want to hear them, but they were still talking whispers and coming closer to me and Rooney’s, so staying in the shadows seemed like the only fair thing I could do.

  “If I can’t walk, I can’t ride, and if I—”

  “You’re walking fine.”

  “Like a possum flies.”
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br />   “It’ll get better the more you do it.”

  He stopped, shaking his head. It hadn’t been easy, this trip. He was breathing deep. “Might be, but I’ll tell you this. I’m never going to be able to cowboy no more.”

  “Mr. Starett likes you, Billy. I’ll bet he could find a way for you to work with Cookie.”

  Another head shake. Quick. No give about it. “Wilbur Moss is Cookie’s helper. I couldn’t step in to that place. Couldn’t, shouldn’t, won’t.”

  “You’ll find something.”

  Billy turned to her. He put his free hand on her cheek. “I already have,” he said. And then, just like he said was so, he gave Pearline a kiss on the mouth, there in the empty three-in-the-morning street all filled up with moonlight. Then Pearline said something soft. Billy nodded a bit, then swung around, heading back in the direction of Blackthorne’s corral and barn. Pearline stood there watching him scuffle off down the street. She lifted her hands, covering her chin and lips, just watching him. Then she turned away herself and headed back toward Honey’s. Her hands were balled up tight.

  Slow as Billy was moving, it wasn’t hard, even for a bony runt like me, to get back to the barn before him. I scuttled down Swede Alley, behind Rooney’s, then cut over and come in the barn the back way. I was just pulling up my blanket and bedroll when I heard Billy get to the front door of the barn and pull it open. I closed my eyes and rolled up tight, figuring to look asleep. Heard every step, every foot drag while he came closer. He let the crutch just fall, then teetered himself forward, breaking his fall with his hands, keeping the game leg out stiff behind him, then flipping over so he could lie down on his back. He groaned, a no-more sound, then breathed in deep through his mouth. Pretty soon, his breathing slowed up and I thought he might be at rest.