Red Grass River

only short pants and digging with spoons and tin bowls and their faces and limbs smeared with mud. For a moment they sat gaping at the woman who stepped out of the car and smiled broadly and opened her arms wide to them. John Ashley slouched behind the wheel and rolled a cigarette. As the woman stepped toward them the children scrambled to their feet and ran around the side of the house, the boy yelling “Pa! Pa!” and the girl at his heels glancing back fearfully over her shoulder.

“No!” the woman called. “You get back here, Billy! I’m your mother, dammit!”

John Ashley lit his cigarette and reflected that unrequited affection was for certain sure one of life’s most melancholy circumstances. As the woman started after the kids, a man appeared from around the other corner of the house and she looked over and saw him and stopped as short as if she’d hit the end of a leash. The man was very large and his sleeves were rolled and his arms were blood to the elbow. He held a skinning knife in one hand and a raw length of indigo snakeskin in the other.

John Ashley came upright in the car seat. The man looked unhappy to see this woman who was yet his wife. He tossed the snakeskin onto the porch and wiped the knife on his pant leg and slipped it into a belt sheath. He glanced at John Ashley in the roadster and then shambled over to the woman and stood before her with his hands on his hips and said something to her that John Ashley couldn’t make out.

He reached under the seat and withdrew the .44 Colt and checked the loads and slipped the pistol into his waistband at the small of his back. He got out of the car and closed the door and stood leaning against it with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops. The man looked at him again and then said to the woman, “I done tole you and tole you—they stayin with me. Hell, girl, you dont really want them except I do.”

“They’re my children too, Eat,” she said, her voice strained.

The man turned to the front door and called, “Billy! Rayette! Come on out here.”

The two kids came in view behind the screen door and hesitated, and then the boy pushed it open and he and his sister stepped out on the porch. “You kids,” the man said, “your momma’s still wanting you to go with her. Either of you changed you mind and wanna go, you can. Do you? Either you?”

Both kids shook their heads and the man said, “You gotta says yes you do or no you dont. Say it so she can hear.”

“No,” the boy said, glowering at his mother. He looked at his sister and nudged her and she said, “I dont wanna go with her.”

“All right,” the man said. “Get back inside.” The kids disappeared into the interior darkness. The man looked at the woman and turned up his palms. “I guess it aint nothin else to say, is there? Why dont you just quit all this anymore and go on and leave us be?”

“I want them kids, Eat.” Her voice was drawn to an edge. She smacked her fists on her thighs. She turned now to John Ashley who thought she looked becrazed. He was suddenly sorry he’d come out here, but there was nothing to do now but see the thing through. He stepped forward and said, “Look here Mister Tillman, everybody knows kids ought be with their momma. It’s the most natural—”

“Who the hell are you?” Eat Tillman asked, his voice utterly absent the placatory tone he’d used with his wife.

“I’m a friend of Laura’s come to help her take her children home.”

“They are home, hoss, not that it’s any your business.”

“I aint leave without them kids, Eat,” Laura said. “Not this time.”

“You sure’s hell not leavin with em,” Tillman said, looking from John Ashley to her and back to Ashley.

“You talk like some kinda hardcase,” John Ashley said. “You a hardcase, mister?” He noted now how very large Eat Tillman’s hands were, noted their scars and sizable knuckles.

“I’m all I need to be to deal with you.”

“You fixin to deal with me with that skinner?” John Ashley said, gesturing at the knife Tillman wore on his belt.

They were slowly sidestepping further out into the yard where they would have more room. Tillman withdrew the knife and half-turned and threw it end over end to impale quivering into the porch pole opposite the one with the rattlerskin.

“I don’t need no weapon,” Tillman said. “Not for you.”

John Ashley reached around behind him and brought out the Colt. Tillman’s eyes narrowed and his mouth went tight and he nodded as though confirming his own suspicions that this stranger was not a man to be trusted. For an instant John Ashley considered holding him at gunpoint while the woman snatched up the kids. How much easier it would be that way. Then he turned and held the pistol out to Laura and said, “Hold this. That’s all you do with it, hear? Just hold it.” Then he took the glass eye out of its socket and handed it to her too. “And this while you at it.” For a moment she stared at the eye in her palm like it was some object of rare imagination, and then smiled at him and put it in her overalls pocket.

He turned to Eat Tillman and said, “Winner says who gets the kids.”

Tillman was gaping at the empty eyesocket in John Ashley’s head. “I dont know I can fight a man got but one eye,” he said. “Dont seem fittin.”

“How fittin’s it gonna seem to you when that one-eyed man stomps your sorry ass whether you fight back or not?” John Ashley said.

Tillman shook his head resignedly. “All right, mister, suit yourself,” he said. He started to take off his shirt and John Ashley hooked him hard to the belly and crossed him to the jaw. The man staggered back a few steps but his eyes held their focus. His thick belly was firm as a shipping-sack of sugar and his jaw stung John Ashley’s hand. Well hell, John Ashley thought. And knew he was in for some pain.

Fifteen minutes later his fact felt overlarge and numb and his vision was blurred and every huffing breath ached in his ribs. He had thrown up his breakfast and had to spit blood constantly to keep from choking on it. Now Eat Tillman hit him in the face again and again he fell down. He saw the blue sky whirl and he rolled over and pushed up on hands and knees and rested a moment. He tasted mud and blood. The first time Tillman put him down, the man had kicked him even as he tried to get up and Laura had cursed her husband and shrieked for him to fight fair goddammit. John Ashley had told her to shut up. But Tillman had not kicked him again.

John Ashley stood up and swayed and wiped blood from his good eye. Tillman waited with fists ready, showing one swollen eye and bloated lips and an ear outsized and purple. But he could still see clearly and looked hale in contrast to John Ashley. He moved with the quickness of a truly dangerous big man.

John Ashley charged with his head down and grabbed him about the waist and tried to pull him off his feet, hoping to straddle him, pin his arms with his knees and then punch him until he couldnt punch anymore. But Tillman stood fast and hooked him hard with left and right to the ribs and kidneys and then braced himself and brought his knee up hard and John Ashley went sprawling.

He got to hands and knees and then set one foot on the ground and rested with an arm on the raised knee. And now heard Laura crying and wanted to tell her to stop it but the effort of speech was too great to muster. He tried to stand and his head spun and he fell over on his side. And then hacking and gasping began the struggle to rise again.

A gunshot shook the air and John Ashley flinched on all fours and looked up to see Laura with her arms stretched in front of her and holding the revolver in both hands and pointed at Eat Tillman. She was crying and Eat Tillman’s hands hung at his sides and he was staring at her and looking very tired. “I’ll put the next one in your teeth.” she told him. She snuffled hard.

“You gone have to shoot me you want them kids,” Eat Tillman said in a voice now deeply nasal.

“Just dont you hit him anymore,” she said. She looked at John Ashley and said, “Get on up and kick him in the balls if you want.”

John Ashley spat blood and sat back up his heels with his hands on his thighs. He slowly shook his head. He could not stand by himself, never mind kick anyone. She sidled over to him and held a hand to him. “Come on, baby,” she said.

John Ashley took her hand and she helped him to his feet. With an arm about each other they shuffled to the car and she helped him get in on the passenger side. Then she went around and got in behind the wheel and kept the pistol on Eat as she held out the crank to him and told him to turn the motor. He did it and the engine fired up and he handed the crank back to her and stepped away from the car.

John Ashley said, “I dont think it’s anymore need of that gun, do you?” but so battered was his mouth that