Ghost Towns Read online

  Rode off to Fort Union, and stayed there till the melt, but I couldn’t leave the rest of Mr. Kennedy in that pond yonder. I mean, we was pards. So I rode back, got the rest of those shoe boxes up from the depths, and the bones had bleached mighty good. But I couldn’t stay in these mountains. Nothin’ left ’round E-Town no how.

  Went south I did. Oh, I tried doctorin’ some, after I got Mr. Kennedy’s bones assembled proper. He made a right pretty skeleton, but nobody would let me doctor on ’em. Not in Santa Fe. Not Cerrillos. Not Golden.

  I drifted down to Socorro for a spell, and that’s where I joined up with this fellow named Sherman. I partnered with him in the Doc Sherman’s Nostrum Remedium Elixir & Magical Medicine Show. Mr. Kennedy was a big part of that show, his bones so white and perfect, and that skull…well, I had done a mighty good job with my dissection. I think it was Mr. Kennedy that kept us in business more than Doc Sherman’s Hadacol, which wouldn’t cure much of nothin’ but would sure give you a headache and was one mean preservative. As Doc Sherman found out.

  It was down in La Mesilla when he drunk two bottles of his liniment, and his belly got to hurtin’ so much it must have burst. Me and Mr. Kennedy buried him on the banks of the Rio Grande—he wouldn’t have made no top cadaver, old as he was, and, well, my days of providin’ specimens had ended. Mr. Kennedy, he seen to that. So me and Mr. Kennedy rode out the next morn.

  Durin’ the years I kept with that medicine show, I never bothered changin’ the name. Folks started callin’ me Doc Sherman, and I let ’em. Hell, it felt mighty good to be called a doctor. But always, Mr. Kennedy and me was even partners. Never forgot that. Like that time in Hillsboro. ’Em miners got riled up that our Nostrum Remedium Elixir was just snake oil and had got some washerwoman real sick. So they covered me with tar and feathers and sent me down the mountain, after they’d burned my wagon and put Mr. Kennedy in Black Range Saloon.

  But I come back to fetch my pard.

  They was pourin’ him a drink, just tossin’ good whiskey, or as good as a body could get in a bucket of blood like the Black Range, down Mr. Kennedy’s throat. Laughin’. Laughin’ at Mr. Kennedy. And laughin’ at what they had done to me.

  Down in Hillsboro, I bet they still talk about that fight. I picked up two pick handles, and I must have busted a dozen or more skulls. Knowed I broke the bartender’s neck when I slammed him, but it was only after I’d kilt him that Mr. Kennedy told me to look at him real good, and I did. It was Russ, the old Senate Saloon barkeep from E-Town.

  Well, my killin’ Russ had put the fear of the Lord in the rest of ’em Hillsboro miners, and I told ’em that they wasn’t to bother Mr. Kennedy, that he only drunk with his pards, and if they ever laid a hand on him again, I’d kill ’em all.

  Stole a buckboard, I did, and me and Mr. Kennedy left that town.

  Hard times come after that. I didn’t have no Hadacol to sell, no wagon after I traded the buckboard in Chloride for a couple of mules. Which is what me and Mr. Kennedy rode when we left New Mexico Territory. Went down to Texas. That’s where Mr. Kennedy said he wanted to go.

  Me and Mr. Kennedy was enjoyin’ a rye at this little store in Pope’s Wells. And who should walk in but Clay Allison hisself.

  “My God,” he says when he recognized me. “Moses? Moses Logan?”

  “In the flesh,” I said, and held out my hand. Clay just stared. He wasn’t a man to lose his speech, but he couldn’t say nothin’ to me. Wasn’t even lookin’ at me now, just starin’ at Mr. Kennedy. That had to be ’87, and Clay Allison wasn’t the wild gunman he had been all ’em years earlier up in E-Town. Clay had gotten hisself hitched to a gal named Dora, and now he was runnin’ a ranch and raisin’ a little girl, with another child on the way.

  “You remember Mr. Kennedy, Clay,” I tells him. “Charles Kennedy. Used to run a inn in E-Town on the road to Taos.”

  “I…”

  It was Clay, sober I reckon, who started talkin’ to me, tellin’ me that, well, maybe I should bury Mr. Kennedy. He was the first one to say maybe Mr. Kennedy wanted to be buried.

  “But we’s partners,” I told him. “Me and Mr. Kennedy are pards. You ought to know that.”

  So Clay done somethin’ he shouldn’t have done. Gnawed at him, it did, seein’ Mr. Kennedy like that. Clay said he was goin’ to fetch us a bottle, but instead he buffaloed me from behind with his Colt, and he took Mr. Kennedy, just loaded him on the back of his buckboard, and rode off for Pecos. The barkeep said Clay told him he would see that Mr. Kennedy got buried.

  Turned out it was the other way ’round.

  They found Clay’s body a few miles from Pecos. He had fallen off a wagon, and the wheel had run over him, breakin’ his neck. Fallen, they say, but I reckon I knowed what really happened. It was Mr. Kennedy. He pushed him.

  Mr. Kennedy told me, you see. Durin’ the funeral. We both attended, ’long with Dora, Clay’s widow, and the little girl of theirs, and some of Clay’s brothers and a bunch of ranch hands. You should have seen how ’em mourners looked at me and Mr. Kennedy.

  That’s when it struck me that Mr. Kennedy had cursed his Navajo wife, and I’d kilt her. And he’d cursed E-Town, and she was dead too. So was Russ, his neck broken over in Hillsboro. Now Clay Allison was dead. So I shot Mr. Kennedy a stare and asked him, “You don’t plan on murderin’ me, do you, pard?”

  He just grinned.

  All this time, I’m still havin’ that dream. The dream of trees. After Clay’s death, Mr. Kennedy and I rode back to New Mexico, and that’s where we run into Zeke McMasters. Wasn’t lookin’ for him. Fact was, by then, I was a mite ready to dissolve my partnership with Mr. Kennedy. Didn’t trust him no more. Thought maybe he was plannin’ to do me in like he’d kilt all those wayfarers. And Clay Allison.

  He kilt Zeke too.

  Zeke was tryin’ to find paydirt up ’round Grafton, but all he found was his tombstone. I’d heard he had a claim, and Mr. Kennedy told me he wanted to see ol’ Zeke, so we rode out. Yeah, I knowed what he planned to do. Knowed he was gonna kill ol’ Zeke. But I didn’t know how.

  When Zeke seen Mr. Kennedy, he run into that hole in the ground. Timbers wasn’t sturdy, I guess. And his screamin’ didn’t help none. The dust come pourin’ out of that cave like smoke. Mr. Kennedy laughed, and we just rode out of those hills.

  A few nights later, me and Mr. Kennedy got to talkin’, and it was then that I figured maybe Clay Allison was right. Maybe it was time to bury Mr. Kennedy proper. Mr. Kennedy, he said, yep, it was time. He’d done just about all he had to do. So we come up here, back to E-Town after all those years.

  This is the damnedest thing, though. All these years I spent diggin’ up bodies for Professor Sawyer, and you damn-fool sons of bitches plan to hang me for buryin’ a body. Buryin’ Mr. Kennedy. My pard.

  That’s my story. What’s it a man’s supposed to say? Amen.

  Well—

  Get your filthy hands off me! I ain’t done talkin’. Get that rope off. You stupid Mexican sons of bitches! Stop laughin’ at me. Why…

  Oh, hell, it ain’t you greasers laughin’. It’s Mr. Kennedy. Shut up. I tell you, shut up. I thought we was pards! You’re dead, like this damned town. You ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of bones.

  You…

  God. I can’t believe it. All these years, all those dreams, all that time seein’ those pine trees swayin’ in the wind and wonderin’ where they could be and what it all meant. And now I see ’em.

  See ’em I do. See ’em clear. And hear Mr. Kennedy, my double-crossin’ pard, hear him laughin’.

  Gunfight at Los Muretos

  Bill Brooks

  Ten years in prison breaks a man.

  It broke him.

  Youthful indiscretions had landed him with the wrong bunch. Now he was a free man again—had a new wife and three kids. Had found the Lord and Jesus and preached off a stump for a full year, winter, summer, wind, rain, and snow. Folks started coming round listening to him preach. Fire and brimstone, t
he wages of sin, Glory Hallelujah.

  She was a good woman, Anne Pryce. Her kids were good too. Treated them like his own and he loved them greatly.

  The community got together and built him a small church. Put up the frame in one day. Started on a Wednesday and the whole thing was up and ready for a full-out sermon by that Sunday.

  He could smell the fresh pine sap warmed by the sun. Looked out at the faces upturned and thought: What’d I do to deserve all this?

  He worked hard trying to raise enough vegetables to feed them all—a hog to be butchered in the early winter. Between these and scant donations they got by. Preaching wasn’t fast money, it wasn’t even slow money. You didn’t have to take money from people—whatever came, they readily gave. And if they didn’t give money, sometimes they gave a chicken or vegetables and once a shoat hog. It was a different life than the one he’d led and he liked it better this way than the old way. Getting by on little and have around you those who loved you, those you could trust was a sight better than having a lot and not being able to trust anybody, worried about getting shot in the back by a man who called himself “friend.”

  That’s all he needed, was to stand it, figuring it would sooner or later come to better times financially if he could just hang on long enough, get through enough winters. Anne took in laundry, the kids helped best they could. Three years as a free man came and went. He thought sure he’d die old in his bed now he got beyond the early years of wildness and settled down. Thought maybe he’d die in the rocking chair reading the Good Book, Anne there by his side, the kids, singing him to his heavenly home with sweet hymns.

  He thanked God for his good fortune of finding her and them, for finding the path of the straight and narrow life. This new life helped him forget about those long lonely days looking through iron bars at freedom.

  They’d broke him good.

  Then the third winter came and brought sickness with it. The littlest girl was the first taken. Little Alice they all called her; little and sweet she was too.

  He led the prayer over her grave, felt soul’s grief sliding down his cheeks. Her little face like a doll’s wearing a tatted bonnet. In less than a month the same sickness took the two boys—Ike and Jack—and it seemed like to him he’d suddenly and somehow been handed the life of Job.

  “Please, no more,” he prayed aloud, down on his knees in that small church they’d built him. Folks stopped coming around, afraid the sickness was still there in the walls, the floor, and all around. Feared God had for some reason saw fit to curse the place, the man, his family, even though they couldn’t name a reason why He should. He couldn’t blame them for not coming, for being afraid. They were folks who believed in unseen powers, and left all reasoning to God. He was having trouble holding on to his own belief, for what God would ring down such hardship? He told himself and her, they’d be no different if the shoe was on the other foot.

  “You’re wrong,” she said.

  It came down to just him and her, and still she believed in him, but he knew she was all wrung out with sorrow. Every day he had to look into those sad, hollow eyes and try and lift up her spirits when he could barely lift up his own.

  “I ain’t strong as you might think,” he said to God.

  She got so she wouldn’t eat and went about calling the names of her dead children as she stalked the night, the empty rooms. Word got around she’d lost her mind and it scared folks even more. They stopped coming to the house, as well as the church. They stopped bringing by pies and chickens and a little something from the garden. Superstition is a powerful thing that spreads like its own sort of disease and sickness and infects everyone.

  “All those years I was locked up,” he said to the God he could neither see, nor who spoke back to him, “it’s as if that wasn’t enough punishment for the wrong things I done. Why this? Why them kids, those innocents? And why her, now, after all she’s already suffered? Better me than them. Kill me, crush me, break me upon your wheel and let her be. Have them put me back in prison. Anything but doing it this a way.”

  But the God he sought remained silent in the silent heavens. The winter bore on long and harsh as he’d ever seen a winter. Its weight of snow was like a white mountain. Its sharp winds were like knives. Its cold was like iron you couldn’t break.

  He found her on just such a brittle cold morning. She had tied the bucket rope they used to lower into the well around her neck. She must have tied it sitting on the rock edge then slid off into the black hole. He went out looking for her and the taut rope drew his eye first—a pair of small shoes empty in the snow beside the well.

  Prison had broken him but this broke him worse than prison ever could.

  He did not know if he could survive after finding her like he did. He hauled her small, frail body up from the well. He carried her into the house blinded by his own tears. He no longer had any purpose he could see. And, as if all that weren’t enough, someone came in the night and burned the church to the ground after word got out Anne had killed herself in that terrible way. He figured rightly enough that those who had built it felt it their rightful duty to destroy it, and thereby destroy whatever curse had befallen the place and the man who stood in its pulpit—the man who had now lost his entire family through unexplainable tragedy. Surely there must be some reason behind all the terribleness!

  He’d awakened in the night to a dream of flames that seemed like hell had surrounded him, saw the fiery yellow tongues licking at the black night. He heard the window glass shatter, heard the crack of timber, its sap popping. He saw first the roof cave in, then frame walls collapse in on themselves as the church came tumbling down. He did not bother to get out of bed.

  In the morning, he walked among the charred and blackened dreck poking through a fresh snow. Strangely enough he found his Bible, the pages curled and brittle so that when he picked it up the words of God sifted through his fingers like tiny dead black birds.

  “That’s it,” he said to no one. “It’s finished.” And immediately felt crucified but not redeemed.

  Took a trip to town and bought all the whiskey he could afford and drove back again to the small clapboard house, wondering if they’d take it in their head to burn it down too, maybe with him in it. The cold wind reddened his face and chafed his hands while the whiskey fortified his innards and stole his senses. He wandered drunkenly among the unmarked graves of his wife and children—the sunken places sagging with snow—and sat cross-legged and talked to them.

  He figured just to lie there next to them and drink himself to death. He had heard that death by freezing wasn’t such a bad way to go. Heard it was just like going to sleep.

  U.S. Marshal Tolvert found him before he had a chance to fully expire and put him into the back of his spring wagon, then wrapped heavy wool blankets around him and took him into town thinking he could well have hauled in a corpse by the time he got there. He had hauled in plenty of other corpses and this would just be one more.

  The town’s physician did not believe in such things as spirits or vengeful gods or curses, but believed in science and medicine and with these revived Wes Bell to working order by means of hot compresses, rubbing his limbs with pure wood alcohol and submerging him in a copper tub of brutal hot water and Epsom salts.

  “It’s a wonder you didn’t lose your parts,” the marshal said afterward. “I’ve seen men with their fingers and toes froze off. Even saw one feller had his nose froze off and another with both ears turned black.”

  “You’ve wasted your time saving me,” he said. “I don’t appreciate your interference.”

  “Duly noted,” the marshal said. “But you wouldn’t be the first I hauled in half dead, nor the first I hauled in fully so. As an official of the law it is my duty to save those I can and kill those that need killing.”

  The next day the marshal came again, dressed in his big bear coat and sugarloaf hat and said, “Well, since you ain’t going to die this time around, how’d you like to do a decent deed an
d make some money doing it?”

  “I don’t give a damn about money or doing any more decent deeds,” he said.

  The marshal winced at such talk.

  “I thought you was a preacher.”

  “I was a lot of things I ain’t no more.”

  The marshal had eyes as colorless as creek water that danced under shaggy red brows that matched his shaggy red moustaches. “From what I understand you are a man who has fallen on hard times. Now tell me this, what does a man who has fallen on such hard times and without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of plan on doing next?”

  “I’ll tell you what such a man plans: he plans to join his wife and children.”

  “Well, sooner or later you will get your wish—that is a natural fact. But for now, maybe you’d be interested in a little job I’m offering.”

  “You must spend all your time in opium dens.”

  This brought a chuckle from the marshal.

  “I’m an excellent reader of a man’s character,” he said. “I’ve had to deal with woebegone folks and fools and killers all my professional life—I’d judge you to be somewhere in the middle of that bunch.

  “I don’t believe you want to die while still an able-bodied man with plenty of good years ahead of you yet. Why, you can’t be more than forty. Look here, I’m proposing to offer you a fresh start. Who can say what awaits us, or why God intends us to be here on this earth—what our purpose is?”

  “Believe what you want, lawman. But me personal, I’m done believing. I’m quitting the game.”

  The marshal slipped a fine Colt Peacemaker with stag horn grips from his holster and handed it over butt first.

  “She’s loaded,” he said. “If you aim to finish yourself, might as well do it right this time. But before you pull the trigger let me stand back out of the way because I don’t feature having your blood and brains splattered all over this nice coat of mine.”

  And the marshal stood away from the sickbed there in the physician’s fine old house with its gingerbread scroll work and tall windows and fancy shake roof and flocked wallpaper.