Appaloosa

 
 2
"They’re living off us like coyotes live off a buffalo carcass, you know?”
“Everything eats meat likes a dead buffalo,” Cole said.
We sat at a round table in the saloon at the Boston House Hotel in Appaloosa. Cole sat back, out of the light a little, his face shadowed.
“They buy supplies in Olson’s store and don’t pay for them. They take whatever women they feel like. They use horses from the livery and don’t bring them back. They eat a meal, drink a bottle of whiskey, whatever, and leave without paying.”
The speaker was a white-haired man with bright blue eyes. His name was Abner Raines.
“You in charge?” Cole said, “Three of us,” Raines said, “Board of Aldermen.”
He nodded at the two men with him. “I own this place. Olson runs the store and the livery stable. Earl here owns a couple of saloons.”
Phil Olson was much younger than Raines, and portly, with smooth, pink skin and blond hair. Earl May was bald and heavyset and wore glasses.
“And we got no law officers,” Raines said. “Marshal’s dead with one of the deputies. The other ones run off.”
“These people cattlemen?” I said. “Don’t seem like good cattle country.”
“It ain’t,” Raines said. “Most of the money in Appaloosa comes from the copper mine.”
“So what do they do?” I said.
“Bragg’s got some water up around his place, but they ain’t raising many cows. Mostly they steal them. And pretty much everything else.”
“How many hands,” Cole said.
“With Bragg? Fifteen, maybe twenty.”
“Gun hands?”
“They all carry guns,” May said.
“They any good with them?” Cole said. “Anybody can carry them.”
“Good enough for us,” Raines said. “We’re all miners and shopkeepers.”
“And we’re not,” Cole said.
“That’s for certain sure,” Olson said. “I heard after you and Hitch came in and sat on Gin Springs one summer, babies could play in the streets.”
“That’s why we sent for you,” Raines said. “We’re ready to pay your price.”
Cole looked at me.
“You game?” he said.
I shrugged.
“It’s what we do,” I said.
A smile like the flash of a spark spread across Cole’s face.
“It is,” he said, “ain’t it.”
The smile went as fast as it had come, and Cole turned his somber, shadowy face to the three aldermen.
“Money’s all right,” Cole said.
“Then you’ll do it?”
“Sure.”
The dining room smelled of cooking and tobacco and the lamp oil that kept it bright. The room was nearly full of men. The sound of cutlery and men’s voices sounded civilized and normal.
“What do we have to do?” May asked.
“Tell him, Hitch.”
“Who makes the laws in this town?” I said.
“The laws?” Raines said. “I guess we do: me and Earl and, ah, Phil. There’s a town meeting twice a year. But between times, we do it.”
“Cole and me’ll do the gun work,” I said. “But we’re going to button the town up like a nun’s corset. And we need you to make laws, so we can enforce them.”
“We got laws,” Raines said.
“You’re gonna have more. We need a lot of laws to make it all legal.”
“Well, sure, I mean, you tell us what you need,” Raines said, “and if it seems reasonable, we’ll put them right in the bylaws.”
Cole said, “No.”
“No what?” Raines said.
“No,” Cole said. “You do what we say or we move on. You solve your problem some other way.”
“Christ,” May said. “That would mean you was running the town.”
“It would,” Cole said.
“We can’t have that,” May said.
Cole didn’t say anything.
“I mean, you’re asking us, so to speak,” Raines said, “to turn the town over to you.”
Cole didn’t say anything.
“Far as I can see,” I said, “you’re gonna turn it over anyway. Us or Bragg.”
“But what if you ask for laws that we think are wrong?” May said.
Cole was entirely still.
Then he said, “We’ll give you a list.”
“A list.”
“A list of rules,” Cole said. “You agree, we have a deal. You don’t, we ride on.”
They all thought about it. The door in the hotel lobby opened, and it stirred the air in the dining room. The lamp flames moved in the stir, making the shadows shift in the room. The door closed. The flames steadied. The shadows quieted.
“Sounds fair,” Raines said after a while, as if he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“We’ll bring you the list in the morning,” Cole said.
“I’ll be here,” Raines said.
 
 3
We’d had a list of rules printed up five towns ago, and in the morning, Cole took them down to the hotel and gave them to Raines in his office. The laws were Draconian. The paper had a lot of aforesaids and wherebys in it, but, if you prune the thing to its essence, what it said was that what Cole said was law. Raines frowned as he read it and moistened his lips. Then he read it again. He looked at Cole. Then he looked at the paper again. The door of Raines’s office opened suddenly and a round-faced little waitress came in. Her face was flushed.
“Mr. Raines,” she said.
Her voice sounded foreign. Swedish maybe. She seemed short of breath.
“Not now, Tilda,” Raines said.
“Trouble in the bar, Mr. Raines.”
“Can’t Willis handle it?”
“It’s Mr. Bragg’s men.”
“Jesus God,” Raines said.
He looked at us.
“Space for your signature down there at the bottom,” Cole said. “On the right.”
Raines looked at us and at the paper. Cole never moved.
“There’s four of them,” Tilda said. “They have guns.”
Raines’s mouth trembled very slightly, and I thought he was going to say something. But instead, he clamped his jaw, took out a pen, and signed the sheet. Cole picked it up, looked at the signature, waved it a minute to dry the ink, then folded it and put it inside his shirt. With no change of expression, he nodded toward the door and I went out. The bar was to the right of the lobby. You could enter it from the lobby, but most people went in through the street entrance on the opposite side. It was the kind of thing I’d learned to notice without even thinking about it. Always know where you are, Cole used to say.
I went straight through the lobby to the street, and turned right and walked to the corner and went in through the swinging mahogany doors of the saloon. The late-afternoon sun, slanting through the doorway, made the smoky air look sort of blue. I let the doors swing shut behind me and moved to the left of the door while my eyes adjusted.
The center of the room had cleared, tables had been pushed aside, and most of the people in the saloon were standing against the walls. Four men, all wearing guns, were drinking whiskey at the bar. Behind the bar, the strapping, red-faced bartender stood stiffly, not looking at anything. There was a big, brass spittoon in the center of the cleared space, and two of the men at the bar were trying to piss in it from that distance. Neither was having much success. Cole came into the saloon through the lobby door, and watched for a moment.
“Button them up,” he said in his light, clear voice.
One of the men faltered in his stream and looked at Cole.
“Who the fuck are you?” he said.
“Virgil Cole.”
“Virgil Cole? No shit? Hey, Chalk,” he said to his partner in piss. “Virgil Cole wants us to stop.”
Chalk turned toward Virgil, his equipment still fully exposed, like his partner’s.
“Step a little closer, Virgil Cole,” he said. “And I’ll piss in your pocket.”
Chalk was a skinny guy with a hard little potbelly that pushed out over his gun belt. He had a meager, shabby beard, and it looked, from where I stood, like he needed to trim his fingernails. His pal was tall and thick and had long hair like Bill Hickok, except Hickok’s was clean.