14
So, two cells down from Orville DuChien, Cabe was deposited like so much refuse. He was given an army blanket, a piss pot, a jug of water, and told not to dirty the straw if he could help it. He said he’d do his best.
Wilcox told him he was honestly sorry about having to lock him up, but the sheriff had set down specific rules concerning such things. A man was gunned down or knifed, his assailant had to be locked up until the facts were sorted out. No exceptions.
So Cabe was a prisoner.
He was not truly angry about it, knew and knew damn well it was his own fault, dancing with that inbred shithound Clay…least he was the one locked-up and not toes-up in the mortuary. That was something. His cell was big enough for a cot and a little slip of floor upon which to pace. To either side were the bars separating his from the other holding cells. He tried pacing for a bit, but his head was pounding from the cheap whiskey and excitement. He sat down then, massaging his temples.
He remembered then the farm back in Yell County, up in the foothills of the Ouachitas. It wasn’t much of a place-just a plot of land with some hogs and chicken, corn and barley. Cabe’s old man rented it from some rich bastard name of Connelly from Little Rock who owned just about everything and everyone in the county. It was but one miserable step up from being a sharecropper. Connelly’s monthly rent was so high, that even when things went good-which was seldom-the elder Cabe barely had enough to feed his family.
Tyler lost two sisters to a diphtheria outbreak. His old man had a fatal heart attack in the fields one afternoon. And his mother had a stroke and died while Tyler was off fighting the War Between the States. The land and Connelly’s greed had wiped out his kin. The Yankees had burned and looted Connelly into the poorhouse during the war. And that was the only time Tyler Cabe ever cheered for the North.
But thinking of the farm…he could see his old man sitting on a willow stump one morning, dirty and sweaty and beaten from trying to wring a living from the thin soil. “Tyler,” he said. “Yer my only boy. Ye ain’t the smartest I’ve ever done seen, but damn if ye ain’t the most determined. I figure ye’ll do okay. At least, I shore hope so. But whatever ye do…don’t ever let another man own ye…”
And Tyler Cabe never had and never would.
He figured if he had nothing else, he always had his self-respect.
Wilcox let him keep his Bull Durham, papers, and matches, so he rolled himself a cigarette and felt sorry for himself.
Damn, he thought, old Crazy Jack was going to love this one.
Locked-up, eh, Cabe? Killed a man, did you? Still the same hotheaded old Southern boy you was back when, ain’t you? Figured it would come to this, boy. You ain’t got the brains God gave a piss-drunk rooster.
Damn.
Water was dripping down on him, just a few droplets, but he figured he’d be soaked by morning. Soaked and freezing and didn’t he just have that coming?
“ Cot’s not bolted down,” a voice from the next cell said. “Slide it over to the other wall or your blanket’ll be frozen stiff come morning.”
Cabe struck another match, held it up to the bars off to his left. He saw an old Indian sitting cross-legged on his own cot. He was dressed in a blanket coat and campaign hat, his hair long and steel-gray. His eyes were black dots set in a worn face with more wrinkles in it than an unmade bed.
“ Just a suggestion,” the Indian said. “I’m good with suggestions, but not much with following them.”
Cabe smiled despite the pounding in his head. “Name’s Tyler Cabe…you?”
In the gray darkness, Cabe saw that the old man just stared dead forward like he was seeing something no one else could. “You want my injun name or my white name?”
“ Injun name would be fine.”
The old man adjusted his hat. “No, you couldn’t pronounce it and I can’t remember it. In white tongue it meant “One Who Waits”. Something like that, I recall.”
“ And what is it you’re waiting for?”
“ Don’t know rightly. Figure I’ll stay around until it comes to me.”
“ Just keep waiting, eh?” Cabe said.
The Indian shrugged. “Surely. I’m always waiting for something. When I was a free-running injun, I suppose I was waiting for the U.S. Government to take my land away. When they did that I used to wait on the reservation for my beef ration, my flour and corn. Never came too much, but I always waited for it. Now I wait here in Whisper Lake. But if I wait in any one place too long…some white-eye feels the need to kick me around. But that’s life as an injun: You wait long enough, something always happens.”
Cabe didn’t know what to make of all that. The old man seemed to be joking and to be dead serious at the same time. But Cabe knew from the Cherokees back home that they were not like white men and you could not read them as such.
“ What’s your white name?”
“ Charles Graybrow,” he said. “Graybrow…that’s injun, too. Means man with gray brow.”
“ Really? I’d have never figured it.”
“ Learn something every day, Tyler Cabe.”
Cabe rubbed his temples again. Christ, it was a doozy, that headache. Older he got, harder the liquor was on him. And Graybrow wasn’t helping none…Cabe got the impression that he was being insulted and befriended at the same time.
“ Here,” Graybrow said. “This’ll help your head.”
Cabe lifted his hand and a small leather pouch was passed to him. The Indian’s fingers felt very rough like untreated hide.
“ What is it?”
“ Injun head-magic,” Graybrow said. “Though some whites just call it headache powder.”
Cabe washed it down with water, splashed some more water in his face. He passed the pouch back through the bars.
“ Why were you locked-up, Tyler Cabe?”
Cabe grunted. “For being a damn fool, I suppose. I stopped by the Cider House for a drink. Next thing I know, I killed a man. Shot him. Virgil Clay was his name, they tell me. Hell, one less speck of trash in the world.”
“ Virgil Clay?” Graybrow clucked his tongue. “That’s bad medicine there, I tell you. Oh…when an injun says ‘bad medicine’ it means the shit’s about to fly and you’re gonna catch some.”
“ Don’t say?”
“ Yep.”
Graybrow told him that the Clay’s were an ornery mountain clan from back east in West Virginia. Something happened to them during the Civil War and they pretty much had to leave their beloved hill country or face prosecution. Graybrow couldn’t be sure, but he thought he’d heard something to the effect that the clan had been doing more than a little murdering and horse-thieving and most of the county had hounded them out. They’d ended up in Utah Territory, attracted maybe by the mountains. Most of the clan was gone now. As far as Graybrow knew, only a few of ‘em lived up in the high country and they didn’t cotton to strangers poking about…as more than one miner or trapper had learned the hard way.
Cabe asked about Virgil.
Trash, Graybrow told him, just like you said. A speck of trash in a big smelly heap called Whisper Lake. He thought of himself as the fastest gun since Wild Bill, but to call him a shootist would be giving him far too much credit. Shit, Graybrow said, calling him a man was giving that animal too much credit. Virgil was strictly a bottom- feeder, a product of a demented backwoods clan that bottle-fed their young on violence, hate, and intolerance. You wanted to call Virgil Clay something, “murderer” was always a good tag. Maybe sidewinder or weasel was applicable. Bottom line here, Graybrow pointed out, was that Virgil Clay was an ornery, dirt-mean life-taker with all the morals and sense of fair play as a leg-chomping river gator.
“ Man like that? I tell you what, Tyler Cabe, you don’t hang him; you hang his mother for pumping out that
