The Long High Noon Read online

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  To the memory of Jory Sherman; a force of nature, now inexplicably stilled

  Love is a kind of warfare.

  —OVID

  ONE

  You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.

  No one but Randy Locke and Frank Farmer knew just what it was that had blackened the blood between them, but it didn’t lose its kick with time.

  That it had to do with a woman suggested itself right away, and when fifteen years after their first run-in Abraham Cripplehorn christened her Mississippi Belle, the legend was complete. The fact that the writer/promoter had named her after the boat he kept in Gulfport was universally overlooked: Romance is everyone’s weakness.

  Money was the inevitable second suggestion; but ranch hands didn’t covet it, only the fun that comes with it, and the effects didn’t last long enough to justify violence.

  If either remembered the actual cause, it rode drag behind the standing strategy, which was to annihilate the other man whenever the pair wandered onto the same plot of real property. It was the one fixed thing in a changing West, and it was in place so long, and was so thoroughly a part of their alchemical makeup, I really think they got so they could smell each other across a slaughteryard.

  Most likely whatever set them on the prod happened when both were working for the old Circle X in south Texas just after the end of the Rebellion, potting and being potted at by Don Alvarado’s vaqueros across the border over cattle of indistinct claim. Randy and Frank were a close match with pistols, although Frank had the edge with a carbine after years of sniping Confederates from trees. He saw it as a point of honor not to use that advantage over Randy, because he didn’t want suspicions of imparity to take the shine off dancing a jig on his enemy’s grave.

  Physically, the two were indistinguishable from the lot that flocked to the big ranches looking for work in those heady early years of the North American cattle trade. Randy was short and thick, and had the distracting habit of blinking constantly, his eyes being sensitive to sun and dust, which were the principal exports of the desert Southwest after stringy beef and chili peppers that burned like fire ants going down and like molten iron coming out. He favored Mexican sombreros with umbrella brims to cut some of the glare, and which some of his less-sensitive colleagues said made him resemble a roofing nail. Randy is generally reckoned to have been about twenty-two at the time of that first confrontation. Frank was lean, looked taller than he was because of his long legs, but when he sat a horse his hat came level with Randy’s when he rode alongside. Both men sported whiskers, Randy’s on the slovenly side, Frank’s trimmed into neat imperials whenever a barber was handy. The entry of his birth in the family Bible in Pennsylvania put him at twenty-four in that year of 1868. He was tidy in his dress and grooming, whether he was wearing wool worsted or faded dungarees. His fellow hands said he could roll in cowflop on Saturday afternoon and take a duchess to a dance Saturday night. They called him Lord Percival when he was out of earshot: He was too good with a long gun, and his fists when it wasn’t inside reach, to chance it otherwise. He told Shuck Ballard he spent half his wages on boots and tailoring.

  “What about the other half?” Shuck asked.

  “Frittered away on fool things.”

  Curiously, Randy, round-faced and not given overmuch to hygiene, seldom wanted for female company of his own. It wasn’t unusual for him to enter a saloon with one on his arm, and sometimes both.

  “I treat ’em like ladies, that’s the secret,” he said. “I always take off my socks. Sometimes they don’t even charge.”

  When that got back to Frank, he curled his lip. “That little stump’d have to pay a sheep.”

  The first time they turned their pistols away from Mexicans and on each other was in the Bluebottle Saloon in El Paso, from either end of the fifty-foot bar the owner touted as the longest west of St. Louis. Both missed, being of an alcoholic temperament at the time, but stout Randy corrected that the next morning when he rousted lanky Frank out of a tub of bathwater in the Cathay Gardens on Mesa Street and broke one of his short ribs with a .44 slug when Frank lunged for his Colt in its holster hanging on the back of a chair.

  He recovered, of course, or our story would end here, and he went looking for Randy, who’d been turned out of the outfit for shorthanding it just before the drive to Kansas, when every man jack was worth twice the price of his string. (The Circle X foreman, George Purdy, was infamous for solutions that doubled the original problems. He wound up a state senator in Indiana.) Frank caught up with Randy in a stiff Wyoming winter in the middle of wolfing season and shot his horse out from under him—a result of windage, which is easier to miscalculate when you’re using a short gun at a distance. The horse rolled over on Randy, dumping fifty dollars in bounty pelts lashed behind the cantle and shattering his leg.

  This a little more than evened the account, because while Frank’s wound had healed, leaving him with nothing worse than a throbbing misery when it snowed or rained, Randy’s injury left him with a limp and not much prospect of ranch employment unless he put in for cook, and prolonged exposure to greasy fumes gave him the Tucson Two-Step, and an unfortunate nickname among the hands. He reckoned that as one more charge against Frank’s side of the ledger.

  As it happened, though, Randy’s fortunes improved as a direct result.

  The buffalo harvest was coming to its summit, with the Industrial Revolution going full tilt back East and in perpetual need of leather to make the belts to drive the gears of its manufactories, lap robes selling like tortillas among the carriage trade, and the army offering to redeem empty cartridge shells for cash in order to offset hunting expenses and encourage the starvation of the pestiferous Indian. If the winter was long enough and the thermometer stuck on zero, the big shaggies grew coats that dragged the ground and made an enterprising man’s fortune in a season.

  Randy oiled his good Ballard rifle, bought an elmwood wagon and four months’ worth of tinned sardines and peaches, and set off for the prairie with an experienced skinner and a half-breed guide. They prospered. Notwithstanding the inconvenience of a three-month head cold and one frostbitten cheek that never did heal completely, Randy’s share when they sold their first load of hides came to more than he’d seen roping and branding semi-tame bovines the previous four years.

  The breed guide, who for unexplained reasons went by the name of Prince Robert, asked him how he intended to invest his share.

  “Now I know how to hunt buffler, I’m fixing to spend every last dime tracking down Frank Farmer, putting a slug in his brain pan, and curing his hide in the hottest sun I can find this side of Pharaoh—and the other
side, too, comes to that.”

  Prince Robert didn’t pursue the point. He’d spent months of nights hearing his charge muttering Frank’s name in his sleep, modifying it in terms that would shame a Virginia City bullwhacker. In the language of his Pawnee father, the guide referred to him in his thoughts as Snake-Who-Drinks-His-Own-Venom. He got his fill of it after one season, turned down the offer of another at twice the percentage, and signed on with the Seventh Cavalry, with whom he spilled out his life’s blood on the field the Sioux and Cheyenne called the Greasy Grass; no doubt thanking the Man Above with his last breath he didn’t have to listen to Randy Locke consigning Frank Farmer to Hell Everlasting any more.

  Needless to say, Randy’s happier financial condition hadn’t made him grateful to his nemesis. He knew that game leg was not the result of an altruistic act. If anything, prosperity gave him the luxury of turning his attention from the humdrum concern of survival to refining the details of his vengeance. Over open fires he chewed on buffalo tongue, pretending it was Frank’s liver, and whenever he rode into a town to pick up supplies and provisions, he circulated a description of the man he hated among all the locals.

  They weren’t much help, being locals and not inclined to travel and gather news in those brief few years when railroad construction was progressing at a crawl against natural obstructions and hostile tribes determined to eject the white man from their ancestral hunting grounds. If anything, his zeal for information made some of them suspect him of being a bounty-killer, one of those flightless raptors the war had spewed out into the frontier, or worse, a lawman, and the rare drifter who might have been persuaded to part with a valuable morsel of intelligence took it on the scout because there was paper out on him offering a reward over some little misunderstanding in some other territory. The winter went by with no response to Randy’s queries beyond blank faces and shrugs and the occasional fast exit aboard a lathered mount.

  This made him poor company even among the women, who had reason enough to hate their own and sense enough to chalk it up to circumstances beyond their control. There followed a long dry spell between feminine comforts.

  Frank meanwhile was working for the Kansas Pacific Railroad, grading track and keeping his Winchester handy to pick off Sioux raiding parties through that same buffalo country. It’s quite possible that he and Randy spied each other at a distance without realizing it; since the great brutes had grown too wary of man to venture within a thousand yards of a rowdy construction gang, the man who hunted them altered his course wide upon spotting one at work.

  True, there were times when these men paused in the midst of reloading or spitting out coffee grounds, turned their faces to the wind, listening—sniffing?—for something familiar and despised, then shook their heads and returned to the necessity of the moment; both were still too new to the sensation of blind hatred to trust their instincts completely. And so once again their reunion depended upon fate.

  TWO

  Should auld acquaintance be forgot?

  At this point you may be wondering who I am.

  It’s my fault, for slipping into first-person a while back, violating every journalist’s rule about not making yourself a part of the story; but try as I will I can’t figure a way to strike out the reference.

  Well, we know what’s the oldest profession, but storytelling surely comes next. The guy had to tell someone, and he wasn’t about to tell it as if it happened to someone else.

  I’m a writer, or I’ve tried to be. I joined the Circle X a few months after Randy Locke and Frank Farmer pulled out, leaving behind their legend. I was just off two semesters with the Columbia School of Creative Writing, and eager to glean firsthand experience to fuel my work; but my superabundant vocabulary made me a suspicious character in the bunkhouse, and my time there ruined my grammar for anything but sensational fiction. My bedroom is papered with rejections from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and The New England Journal, among a dozen others, and sometime or other it dawned on me that I wasn’t the next Mark Twain. I labored with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, grinding out fanciful tales of William F. Cody’s adventures under the house names of Prentiss Ingraham and Ned Buntline for the gift shop, and a generation later scenarios for Thomas Ince and—for six delirious days—D.W. Griffith.

  In between I waited tables in railroad hotels, tended bar in Denver and Las Vegas, New Mexico, battled bedbugs the size of lobsters in the county jail in Nebraska City, and sweated out six months in a laundry in San Francisco—cheek-by-jowl with the great Jack London, although I didn’t find that out until much later, when Jack was too famous for me to approach with a humble request for a reference—and in all that time I could count the number of times I actually laid eyes on Randy Locke and Frank Farmer on the toes of Long John Silver’s foot. Well, that’s more than anyone else you could name. I guess you could call me a pilot fish, sucking the saltwater sweat off a couple of sharks who are all but forgotten in the great current of history’s ever-rolling ocean.

  My name? Forget it. You would anyway, five minutes after I told it. But I can make one unique claim: I’m the only soul living who can tell you anything you want to know about the longest gunfight in the history of the American West.

  Not that you’d want to hear it. Their names don’t resound with the thunder of a Wild Bill Hickok or a Wyatt Earp or even a Neanderthal like Clay Allison, who had the good grace to end his murderous bullying ways under the wheels of his own wagon when he was too drunk to hold his seat at the reins. As a result, my name wouldn’t ring any farther than a lead nickel bouncing across shifting sand.

  But I was there, and where were you?

  * * *

  When the K.P.R. spur reached Abilene, Frank put in for provisions—not before stopping in the establishment of a German tailor to order a Prince Albert coat, three linen shirts, and two pairs of striped trousers—and was emerging from the mercantile with a double armload of bacon, coffee, and one hundred rounds of ammunition, when he heard a familiar voice.

  “Farmer! Palm your piece!”

  Randy was smoking a cigar he’d just purchased from the profit of his latest delivery of hides. It was smoldering in the corner of his mouth when he dropped his hand to leather. Frank let go of his packages, meat, beans, and ordnance spilling into the gutter, and went for his hardware. Both men drew simultaneously; their reports sounded as one.

  Frank’s slug grazed Randy’s collarbone, missing the big artery on the side of his neck by a quarter inch, and exiting out the back, taking along a measure of flesh and muscle. Randy’s aim was higher still in his haste, and sliced off the top of Frank’s left ear.

  Both men required medical attention, but because Randy’s condition was more serious he was still recovering on a cot in the room behind the doctor’s office, a place of yellow oak, square bottles of laudanum and horse liniment on shelves, with a reek of alcohol as solid as any of the furnishings, when he opened his eyes to see what appeared to be a two-headed demon coming through the door with a pistol.

  This doctor was a great proponent of preventing infection by enveloping fresh wounds in yards of gauze and white cotton; a toe severed in a wood-cutting accident was good for a rod, and the victim of a serious miscalculation by a barber had tottered out of the office looking like a giraffe with a cut throat. Another inch or two of wrap and Frank Farmer wouldn’t have gotten his injured ear through the doorway.

  Randy, fogged up as he was with tincture of opium, had sense enough to know that devil or mortal enemy, the intruder was cause for swift action. He rolled off the edge of the cot an instant before his pillow exploded. With the air filled with feathers, disinfectant, and the stink of spent powder, he managed to grasp the lip of his white-enamel chamber pot and skim it in the general direction of his assailant.

  He was lucky in the trajectory. Frank yelped.

  The cry woke the doctor, an addict to his own painkillers who had passed out in his horsehair leather desk chair from the effects of self-treatment. He lur
ched to his feet and after some groping found the door to the back room, then managed to manhandle Frank back into the office. This and the action of disarming him took place somewhat more easily than it might have under most circumstances, because the chamber pot had struck Frank’s mangled ear as surely as if it had been aimed with precision rather than hurled in blind panic. The fiery pain distracted him, making him easier to manipulate.

  A summons to the law in the persons of a marshal freshly retired from buffalo skinning and two deputies who’d served with the Army of the Potomac deposited Frank in jail. There inside bars made from flat steel strips held fast by rivets, the doctor opened his bag and amputated the rest of the ear with one snip of his scissors, the heavy projectile having nearly finished the job.

  Frank, remember, was vain of his appearance. He kept his teeth clean with baking powder when he could get it, yellow soap when powder was unavailable, and took a bath every other week when he was in town. When the flesh healed, he borrowed the use of a catalogue belonging to the doctor and ordered a prosthesis from a medical supply firm in San Francisco. It arrived three weeks later, a shell-shaped object molded from pink gutta-percha in a small box with the firm’s name stamped on it in gold with instructions for its care and application. These required fixing it in place with a daily dosage of sealing wax, which had a demoralizing habit of softening and letting go in the heat, usually at inopportune times. He fell to keeping it in his pocket when he wasn’t in civilization or among strangers. The inconvenience and its humiliating nature put Randy’s account deep in the red, to Frank’s estimation.

  “An eye for an ear,” he told the man in the cell adjoining his.

  “That ain’t exactly what the Book says,” replied the other, who was in for lascivious conduct in broad daylight with a Rumanian woman.