Paradise Sky

“Go on, then,” I yelled loud as I could. “And we’ll leave you be!”

“All right, then,” said the voice. They turned their mounts and rode back into town, a clutter of riffraff walking after them, lightning flashing fast and furious, thunder echoing, rain coming down in cold, dark sheets.

What we did was we skedaddled.

Me and Cullen cut Cramp down and put him in the back of the wagon with the women. It wasn’t a thing they liked, and they let us know in a burst of China talk, except for the ugly one, who said, “Why not leave him?”

“Say what, now?” Cullen said.

“Why not leave him here?” she said.

“We got that,” I said. “But you speak English?”

“We all do,” she said.

“You speak it so it makes sense.”

“I have had more experience.”

“So why didn’t you say something before?” I asked.

“I was waiting to see how things were,” she said. “I learned to speak English in missionary school and to be quiet in any language. Missionaries liked to take a stick to you if you talked in a way they didn’t like. I think they just liked to paddle little girls.”

“Well, here’s how things are,” I said. “I was going to leave old Cramp back there, but now that we got him, we’re going to get out of here fast as we can, cause they are a pack of liars and will most likely be on us by daybreak.”

And that’s what we did. Cullen took the old, broken-down horse Cramp had been tied to, and Peg Leg, as I had come to know her, took the wagon lines and drove it on down the creek until there was a break in the trees and a gradual slope where she could drive it up and onto the prairie. The rain was still coming down; it had knocked our hats near flat on top and bent the brims down. The women didn’t have hats, but they had produced umbrellas I didn’t know they had. One of the women sat up by Peg Leg and held the umbrella over her head and her own while Peg Leg drove the wagon. The others protected themselves, scrunching under their umbrellas as best they could.

We rode across the prairie into wet darkness. A streak of lightning ripped the sky so wide and white I went blind for a moment. The lightning struck the ground, and there was a flare of fire from some mesquite bushes out there, then the fire and bushes smoked white from the rain. It made me more than a little nervous to be out there in the naked world with all that lightning and us its only targets.

Only good thing I can say about that night was the rain took some of the stink off Cramp’s body, which was starting to swell in places and fall into itself in others.

Right before the night ended, the rain stopped and the sunlight edged up like a busted apple. As the day seeped in I saw three men riding at us. They was coming slow but steady. Cullen was riding beside me on that skin-and-bones horse we had taken, and I said, “They have sent three riders.”

“I can see that. Seems stupid of them, considering what you did to all them men back there. I ain’t never seen anything like that, Nat. I just thought you was a badass in the Apache fight, but you done come into your own.”

“Think I just surprised them, but I bet these three ain’t cowards like them was, all except that Chinaman. He was a game rooster.”

“Hired killers?”

“Most likely,” I said.

“We going to stand and fight?”

While I was figuring on that, one of the men raised a white flag tied to his rifle and rode a piece toward us. He was a fat man with a big head and a little derby hat and a red kerchief around his neck. He was wearing a greasy buckskin shirt and black-and-yellow-checked pants.

He stopped when he was within earshot, said, “Can I have a palaver with you?”

I cupped my hands over my mouth and called out to him because I wanted them other two to hear me, see that I was making the rules here. “Drop that rifle and ride forward some more, and keep your hand away from your pistol.”

He dropped the rifle and the flag on the ground and come on toward us. I told Cullen to stick and rode out to meet him. When we was about ten feet apart, I reined my horse in, said, “This will do.”

“We been sent to hunt you down and kill you,” he said.

“We’ll see how that works out for you.”

“We don’t want to do that,” he said.

“No?”

“No, cause we think it might not turn out as well as we’d like. We seen all them you killed by your lonesome, and we figure you to be a fair hand with a gun. What we was wondering is, could we just say we killed you and you not come back anymore?”

“I’ll deny such a thing for the obvious reason. I’m alive.”

“So we got to shoot it out?”

“Why don’t you say you couldn’t find us? That gets you off the hook.”

“We was paid twenty dollars apiece to kill all of you,” he said.

“That’s a lot of work for twenty dollars apiece, considering you might not be going home again.”

“But they did pay us twenty dollars,” he said. “You know how it is, honest day for an honest dollar.”

“And you know how it is with being dead,” I said. “Ain’t none of them dead folk make it home for supper.”

He studied on that a moment and gently reached for his derby as if to take it off.

As his fingers touched the brim, I said, “If there is a gun in that derby, you’ll be dead before you get it off your head.”

“All right, then,” he said, and left it on.

“My name is Nat Love,” I said, “and it would do you best not to lie about killing us. The lie about not finding us I can live with. My pride doesn’t care for the other.”

I know how that sounds. Small of me, but I felt exactly that way.

“Ah, hell,” he said. “We’ll just say you all got away.”

“Good. I see you or them other two again, I’ll kill the lot of you.”

“They’re go

“You are, aren’t you?”

That didn’t set right with him, but he considered on things, probably recollected on the stories about how I had killed all them men with my revolvers, which as I have said was mostly because they didn’t know what in hell they was doing. To be honest, I think some of them might have shot their own comrades trying to kill us, so it’s possible I’ve given myself a shade more credit than I deserve.

He licked his lips, nodded. “Guess we’re settled, then,” he said, rode back to where he dropped his Winchester, got down out of the saddle, slowly picked it up, and remounted. I watched him carefully, having pulled my own rifle from its boot and laid it across my saddle. The man rode back to join the others. I rode back to the wagon, pulled up next to Cullen.

“You think he’ll say we run off?” Cullen said, having heard our conversation.

“He’ll say he killed us all, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for him by agreeing. I have come to the end of catering to white folks.”

“I don’t really care so much one way or the other,” Cullen said.

We watched them ride well out of sight, then we turned and headed on toward the northeast.

13

After a couple of days I come to think we wasn’t being followed and they had gone back to Ransack to tell whatever lie soothed them. We was moving toward the Texas Panhandle, and there ain’t no more desolate stretch of empty land than that. Coming from East Texas, I thought West Texas was bleak, but that northern part was sad on the eye and the mind; it wouldn’t surprise me that anyone that lived out that way did so because their horse died there or their wagon broke down. I couldn’t see no other reason for wanting to be there on purpose.

We got in a rhythm of traveling by night, sleeping in the day. Those China girls turned out to be right friendly, which was good, because the nights could be brisk. I found out the one with the wooden leg was called Wing Ding, Ling Ding, or some such, though as soon as I thought I was getting a handle on her name she’d laugh and correct me. In the bedroll she was prone to stretching a man’s back to the breaking point and leaving splinters on one outside thigh; she really needed to sand that thing down. The ugly one turned out to be a real pistol. After a few nights of us taking turns and doing our pleasure with them all, we spaced ourselves better, due to weakness setting in.