Shotgun Charlie Read online

  The claim hadn’t shocked him. If he’d thought about it he would have guessed she would come around to arrive at that discovery sooner or later. In her eyes, everything in life was Charlie’s fault. Well, not everything. Only the bad things. He’d never in his life been responsible for anything good that had happened.

  And so, all those years later, after leaving the little farm and its two sad graves, Charlie Chilton had roamed, not expecting much from himself, not knowing much more than the dulling, ceaseless ache of farm labor, plodding along beside Teacup until her own demise, quietly in the night, along a burbling valley brook a good many thousand miles, territories, and states to the west of where he’d grown up.

  When light finally had come that morning, he somehow knew what he’d find before he rose, his thin blanket dropping to the hard earth on which he’d slept. Teacup was gone, laid out cold and quiet beneath the big tree. He reckoned when he awoke in the night that he should have gone to her, but what could a fellow like him do to stop the final claim that old age makes?

  He wept long and openly over that mule’s passing more so than he did over his gran’s. He’d never ridden the mule in all those years he’d known her, never even thought of doing so. She was a companion, had always been so, not a critter to carry him.

  He’d been doing a poor job at prospecting for gold, but he had acquired a pick, a shovel, and a pan. And with the pick and shovel he’d done his level best to bury the old, uncomplaining girl. It had taken him all day to make a dent in the hard root-knotted ground deep enough to roll her into—with much grunting and levering with a stout length of log.

  When he was finished, he caught his breath, said a few words over her, then with as much dignity as he could offer old Teacup, covered her with dirt and topped that with rocks, a good many of them as big as or bigger than his head. Soon the jumble was a sizable cairn that he felt certain would keep critters from disrupting Teacup’s resting place.

  Charlie felt a twinge of guilt over the big mounded pile, knew her body could feed plenty of critters looking for a toothsome treat, but he twinged even more inside when he thought of his old friend’s body savaged by wolves or bears or lions. He wasn’t even sure what territory or state he was in, not sure if any or all of those beasts lived there, but that didn’t matter. To him, they were all possibilities that didn’t sit well in his mind and left him feeling uneasy.

  “Let them find their own food,” he wheezed as he rolled another boulder on top of the pile, for good measure.

  By the time he was finished, he was exhausted, his hands were bloodied, and one of his thumbnails had been half pulled off when he jammed it too hard between two rocks, scrabbling to find purchase.

  Cradling his wounded, throbbing hands in his lap, Charlie Chilton dozed off, dropping like one of those same stones deep into a pit of dark slumber, snoring like a bull grizz. When he finally awoke, it was to find himself wet through.

  It was nearly dark and had apparently been raining for some time. It continued drizzling a solid, sluicing rhythm the rest of that day, on through the night, and for three days following. It soaked him and his meager belongings straight through. He was numb and cold and blue-lipped. It wasn’t until early the next morning that it occurred to him that something wasn’t right. He felt odd, sort of numb all over.

  When the shivers began, trembling his substantial frame as if someone were shaking him from behind, he knew it was a sickness. He’d always been in good health, something he valued because his gran had frequently terrified him with sob-filled tales of how his father had died.

  “Worked himself to death,” she’d howled. “And with no never mind paid to how his poor mother would fare in the world. I swear he wanted to kill himself. As soon as he come down with those chills and fevers, I knew he was a goner. I swear he done it to spite me. Then he stuck me with you!” She’d jam a little bony finger hard into his arm or chest or cheek and growl another few minutes. She’d tell him that as sure as she was a saint to put up with such cruelty, Charlie would end up like his father and leave her alone in the cold, cruel world.

  And now here I am, he thought. Riddled with a sickness that like as not killed my daddy, and me without a soul around to help keep me alive.

  It was this long, tight line of thinking that plagued Charlie enough that, despite the racking dry coughs that had begun to shake him alternately with the sudden shivers, he managed to gain his feet and try to kindle a fire.

  But the relentless sheets of cold gray rain were more than he could battle. In the end, he managed little more than a cold, wet camp right beside the stone cairn he’d constructed for his dead friend. He stayed there for the better part of a week. Each day that passed felt worse than the one before.

  After a number of days, he tried once more to stand, to make a fire, to get a drink, to do anything that felt normal. But none of anything felt normal anymore. All he ended up mustering out of himself were a few tired sighs, grunts, and wheezes. Finally he gave up and leaned back against the rock pile again.

  “I expect I am to die right here and it probably won’t take all that long either.” He wasn’t sure if he spoke that or whispered it or imagined it. But that, along with a familiar image of what he always imagined his dead father had looked like, came to him then. It was a smiling face, much like his own, but more handsome, less thick-cheeked, and with a kindly glow.

  But that was soon slapped down by the hovering, scowling face of his gran, waiting for what she’d predicted would always happen. He’d end up proving her right. That tag end of a thought burrowed into his mind and left him slipping into another layer of sickness, angry and saddened.

  Chapter 3

  “You see what I see, boys?”

  Charlie heard the voice before he saw whoever it was it had come from.

  “No? How can you say no, Simp? You got collard greens for brains? Oh, that’s right, I expect you do!”

  The burst of jagged laughter that followed the odd remarks succeeded in pulling Charlie’s eyes open. He jerked back with a start and whapped his head on a rock. The pain of it, hot and throbbing, helped him focus his eyes as he reached up without thinking. The laughter that his painful action conjured swiveled his head and locked his eyes on what he hoped weren’t what passed for angels in heaven.

  There before Charlie stood a group of four or five men, all on horseback, ringed before him. Back behind the men stood what looked to be a couple of pack animals, laden with crates and sacks, all lashed down with crisscrossed, well-used hemp rope.

  Charlie’s first thought was surprise that he hadn’t heard all those men and horses coming along the path. As far as he could tell, the men, plus the pack animals, were for real and true. They looked alive enough. In fact, they looked like dozens of other hard men he’d seen over the years, always on the scout for trouble. Early in his days on the road, he’d seen a number of such men, men who treated him like an easy payday.

  They’d robbed him of what little he had, or at least they had tried to. He’d always been much larger than others his age, so when Charlie grew angry, he had come to learn that others, even seemingly robust, frightening men, men whom he would consider fleeing from, all backed away from him. Fear glinted in their eyes, a look that told him they knew they had made a drastic mistake in picking on this lone traveler.

  So when this haggard group of five men woke him, Charlie knew, by the way they were looking at him, that he was about to be robbed. The group of men broke, two walking their horses to one side of him, two to the other, one remaining in the center. Those to the sides slowly circled him, not taking much effort to hide the fact that they were working to get behind him.

  He tried to muster up a big voice to bellow at them. He wanted to tell them they’d better look out because he was fast on his feet and twice as mean as a riled-up rattler.

  He tried to let his shout rage at them, but all that came out was a big, h
acking cough that doubled him over as he tried to stand, sending him flopping backward on the rock pile again.

  When he came to, the same men were standing around him, and the older one who’d done the speaking earlier was bent over him. Other than the surprising kindness of the man’s eyes, it looked as if he was about to finish the job that Mother Nature hadn’t quite completed. The old man was missing half of his choppers so that he was gap-toothed. He sported a patchy, dull gray beard that might have had food stuck in it, and topping his lined, pocked face was a dented bowler hat, a bent silk flower, missing petals, drooping from the tatty band.

  “Why, boy, you look plumb awful. You tangle with a she-lion or a boar grizz?”

  “No . . . no, sir,” Charlie responded before he had time to think, and there it was, his tongue running across the forest floor.

  “You hear that, boys? This big young’un here has already shown a heap more sense than the rest of you put together. He knows a sir when he meets one.”

  The mumbles and rolled eyes from the other men told Charlie they paid the man’s comment little heed. Charlie refocused as the old man bent closer. It was then that he also noticed the big skinning knife wagging from the gent’s left hand.

  Charlie tried to back away from him, succeeded only in worming up tighter to the rock pile. The effort tuckered him out and he sagged back again, working to breathe. There was a rank, unwashed sort of smell too that seemed to come from the old man. At least he only noticed it when the old man and the others had come around.

  “Steady, boy. Steady. I ain’t gonna harm you. You’re all tangled in them clothes and blankets of your’n. Knotted tighter than a hatband on a banker’s head. You must have done some thrashing in your deliriums. I’m aiming only to cut them loose from you a bit so you can gain your legs. Though from the looks of you I’d say you’re a fair piece from standing.”

  His face pulled away from Charlie and he heard him speak again. Charlie worked to pull in a breath. For some reason he was finding it hard as stone to draw a decent breath.

  “Boys! Two of you get over here and lend a hand, drag this fella off of them rocks and lay him out over yonder, well away from this rock pile. Dutchy and Simp, you two mush-heads build a fire back a ways from where he had one. Too close to whatever it is he’s got hidden under them rocks.”

  Charlie had trouble following what the old man was saying, but if he heard him right, someone wasn’t walking well and someone else was going to carry whoever it was. . . . He refocused on the old man. It startled him to see the face reappear, closer than before. Again, he was struck by the eyes set in such a craggy face. They seemed kindly. Something about them told Charlie here was a decent sort of fellow. Not at all what he’d looked at first to be.

  “Boy, you hear me? Nod or say something if you can.”

  Charlie fought for another breath. Then it occurred to him that the old man might be talking to him. Maybe he should say something, just the same. Just in case. He nodded, then said, “I . . . hear . . . you.”

  The old man nodded again and smiled, his face inches from Charlie’s. “Don’t you worry. Ol’ Pap Morton’ll take care of you, see you right.”

  “What for?” said a voice close by.

  Without a pause in speaking, the old man narrowed his eyes and in a grim, tighter voice said, “You get that fire blazing yet, Dutchy? Course not, you’re an idiot. Numb as a . . .”

  Charlie’s world pinched out with the sound of an old man’s reedy voice berating someone for something. For what, he didn’t know, didn’t care. All he knew was that he was probably dead or nearly so. Couldn’t even recall how he got to this sorry state . . . about to be robbed or worse by strange, hard, dangerous men bent on doing him harm. Probably leaving him for dead—ha, that’d be a laugh, a joke on them, as he was about there anyway.

  Chapter 4

  “What I’m trying to tell you, if you’d let me get a word in edgewise . . .” Grady Haskell poked the long barrel of his Colt straight into the fleshy tip of the man’s long nose. He pushed it, held it there for a moment, then pulled it away and looked close before smiling, then laughing. The barrel’s snout left a pucker, a dimple at the end of the long nose. But the man didn’t respond, didn’t jerk away because he was dead. His only reaction was a flopped head that revealed a ragged neck gash that welled blood anew. The wound was not an hour old.

  “You, sir, are a plumb lousy conversationalist. Anybody ever tell you that?” Grady leaned in close again, as if waiting for a response. “Hmm?”

  Getting no response, he howled again, upended a hazel-colored bottle, and bubbled back a few swallows. A thin stream of the burning rye whiskey dribbling out the corner of his stubbled mouth. “Time to get me a Chinese girl, a long, hot bath, and a cee-gar. Maybe even a steak and an Irish apple or two.” He belched and looked around him at the strange room. It should be strange to me, he thought. I have never before been here. And once I do what I need to here, I will take my leave and call it a day.

  He fell asleep for a short time, awoke with a start, determined to kill whoever or whatever it was that had interrupted his earned slumber. He saw no one but the dead man, still slumped as he had been in sleep when Grady had come up behind him and sawed deeply into his bulging neck.

  The sight reminded Grady of his long-dead grandpappy back in the Chalahoosee Ridge, back in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, where he was raised and where his kind still dwelled. Old Pappy, he had been a mean old coon, but he was generous with his knowledge of corn whiskey making. It was a skill he had worked to teach young Grady. But he and Grady had argued time and again on one point—the old man had said that a proper moonshiner must not like his product too much. Oh, he could enjoy it once the day’s labors were through, but there was no call for taking a drink while on the job. And that was something Grady could not abide by.

  There came a day when Grady had been entrusted to the operation of the still for an afternoon while his grandfather attended to business in town. Grady decided he’d celebrate the fact that he was nearly sixteen years of age. He’d ladled a dipperful of young, raw corn squeezings. One had led to two, and when he’d been nearly through with a third, along came old Grandpappy, who’d laid down the law, clouting young Grady hard enough to set his ears to ringing. That was when it all happened, when everything in Grady’s life turned for naught. And when he made that unbreakable vow to himself never to put up with another man’s wrath again, why . . . there was no going back.

  He’d taken the beating, not saying much. But he’d managed a bottle of the prime stuff down the front of his bib overalls when he left. He’d finished that bottle off that evening and decided he’d not said nearly enough to the old man, so he headed back to ol’ Grandpappy’s place, found him asleep in his chair before the potbelly stove, head slumped to one side. He knew that whenever he talked with the old man it was never a two-way road. The old man always had to have the upper hand, always had to edge him out of the conversation altogether.

  That time he’d been determined ol’ Grandpappy would hear him out. So he’d done the best thing he knew to get the old thickhead’s attention—he grabbed up a ball-peen hammer and brought it down on the old man’s bean once, twice, three times. And maybe a few more for good measure; he never could recall the exact number.

  All this came back to Grady years later as he sat drunk, looking at a different man he’d killed, trying to hold a conversation with him, as he’d done with ol’ Grandpappy all those years before. The old man hadn’t listened, even though he didn’t talk back to him, of that he was sure. And this one was the same.

  But now, when he looked at this man, he saw ol’ Grandpappy, and though the man had been a crusty sort, he was the only one in the whole dang Haskell clan who had ever paid him any mind, shown him any sort of kindness. And now Grady found himself missing the old man, missing the ridge and those green, green mountains more than he had
in a lifetime’s worth of Sundays.

  “I tell you,” he said to the stiffening corpse, “I don’t know how to get back there, to get back home to the Chalahoosee Ridge. I’ve tried a number of times over the years, but there’s always something that needs my efforts. Something that prevents me from pointing my horse toward the southeast. . . . Hey!” Grady leaned forward, shouted again, but the dead man didn’t move.

  Grady Haskell went on like this, conversing with the man he’d so recently incapacitated, for another hour before expiring himself, a sagged mass of angry killer, in the dead man’s other chair.

  When he awoke, some hours later, dawn’s sun had begun its slow crawl skyward. Grady’s head pulsed like a hammer-struck thumb with each beat of his heart. He did his best to ignore the voice inside that told him to lay off the liquor and he might well wake up feeling better one of these days. He knew the voice was probably right, but he pushed it down, did his best to tamp it and ignore it and kill it. And the best way he knew to do that was to guzzle back a few mouthfuls of gargle.

  He leaned forward in the chair, caught sight of the man he’d sliced open, and groaned. That was something he didn’t need to see first thing in the morning, at least not before he’d taken in some hair of the dog.

  “Where is it?” His dry-blood-covered hands scrabbled on the floor by his feet. He usually had enough wits about him to cork the bottle before he dozed for the night. But his fingernails brushed glass. The bottle rolled from him and sounded lousy and hollow. Spent. He groaned again and sank back into the chair. This day had not started well and it was only going to get worse, he was sure.

  “What I need,” he said after a few silent moments with his eyes closed, “is a whole lot of money so I don’t have to worry about such foolishness.” And as he sat there, as if it were a gift, a reward for his fine new idea, his gaze fell on a half-full bottle of whiskey he’d not seen the night before. He smiled, retrieved it off the sideboard, returned to his chair, and recommenced drinking and thinking.