“No choice! Are you trying to tell me he forced Cooley to kill him when he didn’t even have a gun in his hand?”
“He was armed. He came ramming into a fight that was none of his business and it was his own stupid fault he got shot. We didn’t have time to wait to see whether he was going to start shooting at us. By God, how do I make you understand? There were guns going off!”
McKesson, at Tree’s shoulder, said in a strict voice, “Your brother was the one who had the choice to make, Deputy. He could have chosen not to come out on the street. When a man deliberately steps into the line of fire you’ve got to assume he means to take a hand in the fighting. He could hear what was happening-he wasn’t deaf, was he? — if he’d had any sense at all he’d have stuck to cover.”
Wyatt Earp said, “Just one more thing. You can come inside and try to take Cooley away from us, but I don’t recommend it. You’ll want better odds. Go home and think about it. Give yourself a chance, for the love of God.”
Abruptly, Earp backed inside and disappeared beyond the door.
McKesson reached for his arm; Tree shook him off. He stood staring at the closed door as if Earp were still there.
Finally he said in a low, throbbing voice, “What really happened here? I can’t get a straight story out of anybody.”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t here either. Don’t you believe him?”
“Why should I?”
McKesson said, “I was beginning to think you liked Earp.”
“I was beginning to think he believed in justice,” Tree answered darkly.
“How do you know he doesn’t?”
“Rafe didn’t have a gun in his hand, did he?”
“All I know is his gun was in the holster and it hadn’t been fired.”
“Yeah,” Tree said. “So.”
“So at least you’re starting to ask questions, which indicates to me that you’re no longer suffering total mental paralysis. I talked to Cooley. He said he saw the kid come barging out of the lunchroom door and he remembered all the threats the kid had been making and he didn’t have time to stop and ask his intentions. I tend to believe that. At any rate I don’t see how you could disprove it to the satisfaction of any court of law, rigged or honest, makes no difference. You’re sworn to uphold the law. All right, Cooley’s on your shit list, but don’t go after the whole Earp crowd on that account.”
Tree scraped the back of a craggy hand across his mouth. McKesson punched him lightly on the shoulder. “I rise to remark that once you’ve thought the whole thing over and had time to simmer down, you’ll chalk the whole thing up the same way you’d chalk it up if some fatal disease had killed your brother. You don’t go out to kill somebody because a brother died of smallpox-you can’t get revenge on smallpox. You can’t avenge an accident, and that’s what this was. When you spend as many years peace-officering as I have, you’ll learn things are never as simple as the old eye-for-an-eye philosophy would have it.”
“Sheriff,” Tree said, “if there’s one thing I don’t need right now it’s one of your speeches.”
“You’re wrong. I think it’s exactly what you do need. Why, I recall one time when-”
Tree turned away and left him there, trailing off. He went blindly across the street and strode through the town in a stiff, stunned way, not knowing where he was going, not caring. He didn’t even want to find a place to hole up and think; the last thing he wanted was to think. For it seemed clear that McKesson had to be right: no more chance of getting vengeance than of trying to fight a smallpox fever with a gun. He hated Cooley but even killing Cooley would solve nothing, would not be the answer. There was no answer, and it was that fact which stupefied him as if he had been clubbed. That, and the fact that he couldn’t put out of his head what Earp had said, so cruelly: J told you to hobble him. You didn’t, and he’s dead.
Hindsight, he thought, desperately grabbing at straws; it was no good. Neither killing Cooley nor blaming himself would bring Rafe back.
He just didn’t want to think about it.
He found in time that his steps had taken him into Poverty Row, the fringe of the tenderloin, inhabited by the dregs of Gunnison. Flimsy unpainted pine shacks under the plaid shadows of a railroad trestle. At midday Poverty Row was asleep. At first he saw no one; two blocks farther, he stopped to let a loose-bodied woman cross his path. She wore a shabby night-robe, nothing else; she padded across the dusty gulch in bare feet, carrying a bottle of cheap wine, and disappeared into a tumbledown crib with drawn curtains that had obviously been chopped from an army blanket. She hadn’t even glanced at him.
Beside him he saw the face of a Chinese girl pressed against a filthy window pane. He walked on, past a row of single-story cribs each of which had the occupant’s name painted on a removable shingle sign: Goldfield Nell, Bilious Billie, French Lil. Toward the foot of the street several of the girls sat spread-thighed on chairs in their open doors, which were overhung by the red railroad lanterns that had given red-light districts their name in the Kansas railhead towns ten years ago. The girls were sixteen-year-old soiled doves, painted ladies of the half-world. Black, Oriental, Mexican, Indian, European. They solicited halfheartedly from their doorways. It was the first time he had seen them close up; he had seen them uptown at night, when the light was poor, parading up and down the street with jangling saloon bands, stirring up business. Now, in daylight, at sixteen they looked all used up. A good many of them were probably addicted to opium and morphine, if they weren’t drunks. As he went by, three or four of them shouted raucous, obscene invitations. He shook his head without speaking and wandered on. At the heart of Poverty Row he came upon the Homestead Parlour House, which had a crescent-shaped sign painted high on its false front: GIRLS TWENTY GIRLS TWENTY GIRLS and, painted under that, Beer 5?.
Past that he came to the Bijou Union Saloon. A hand-lettered sign on packing cardboard announced that sleeping space was available on back-room billiard tables, one dollar a night.
He went inside. The place was sick-eningly rich with the aura of beer, whisky, smoke, vomit, and sweat. There were no windows and it was almost pitch dark. The bar was a row of roughhewn planks thrown across a series of barrels. There were a few half-broken tables, and packing crates which served as chairs. Knowing full well what he was doing, he bought a bottle of cheap whisky and carried it to a table in the darkest corner, sat down, leaned his back against the wall, and began to drink.
Fuzzily, he supposed it was nighttime. The place was filling up with miners. Trembling violenty, he sat hunched over the half-empty second bottle, hands pinched between his squeezed-together knees. Lamps were lit; it was brighter than it had been during the day. He felt coiling spasms in his groin and knew he had to relieve himself. He stood up-too fast: blood sank from his head and the room got darker. He leaned one hand on the wall to steady himself and tightened his gut, tensing all his muscles to build pressure until finally light came back into the room and he walked across it with shuffling, tentative steps.. He bumped into a few people and was shoved roughly away once. Finally he made his way outside and went stumbling into the alley alongside the saloon. It smelled of excrement. He unbuttoned his fly; he had to brace his hands against the wall to keep himself from falling while he urinated. Afterwards he buttoned up and lurched down the street, dimly aware he had better get back to his own part of town before he passed out; otherwise they would roll him for the few dollars in his Levi’s, and perhaps kill him for the hell of it. He kept a crafty eye out for would-be assassins but no one disturbed him in Poverty Row. A train rumbled across the trestle, showering him with soot and cinders. He staggered into Main Street in time to see an ore wagon run over a dog. The dog crawled a few feet toward the shelter of a raised porch, then lay whimpering in the street, movements slowing. By the time Tree came by, the dog was dead. He hunkered down to touch it; there was no heartbeat. As he crouched there, tears welled in his eyes and stained his cheeks.