Cord 6 Read online

  Someone below must have spotted his face in the last light, because a voice began the chant again, and immediately they all picked it up: “ANTICHRIST! ANTICHRIST! ANTICHRIST!”

  Some antichrist, Cord thought. He wished the real thing would descend from the dark heavens this moment, with thunder and enough lightning to burn their asses crisp. He was going to be led out and hanged by crazies such as these, and as he stared down at the mob and their flares, he saw everything incandescently colored to madness. Cord quickly turned away.

  Some former tenant had left a frayed book on the floor under the bunk, a yellow-back dime novel. On the cover it said, Beadle & Adams Adventure Library No. 657 in cursive Gothic script, and below, the title The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean; Or, Justice on the Texas Desert. Cord lay down on the bunk and opened the paperback to the page he had dog-eared. Judge Roy Bean and his posse had crossed the frontier to invade the hole-up of the notorious Mexican bandido Pancho Sanchez, whose depredations were the scourge of South Texas. Now, as Cord read, the judge and his boys charged the adobe shack in a great blaze of gunfire, slaughtering the bandido’s compañeros and arresting him. He was to be returned to Langtry, Texas, the judge’s jurisdiction, where Pancho Sanchez’s brown greaser neck could be stretched at their leisure.

  “The judge struck the bar top with the butt of his six-gun pistol, gavel style,” Cord read. “He pointed balefully at the hapless beaner. The law is the handmaiden of justice, sir,” the judge intoned. He turned to his bailiff. ‘Hang the dusky son of a buck.’” Cord lay the open book on his chest, spine up.

  “Cute bastards, ain’t they.”

  It was the old man in the cell across the narrow passageway. Cord closed the yellow-back and sat up. The old man had been curled up tight under a gray blanket on his bunk when the two deputies brought Cord back from the courtroom, but now he stood staring across out of red rheumy eyes, grasping the bars with two white hands. He wore three-days’ growth of salt-and-pepper beard and was nearly toothless, and Cord wondered what he had done to convince this town he was prime for jail.

  “I saw them hang a nigger onct,” the old man said, grinning at Cord in a thin way. “Down near Biloxi. You ought to be glad they got this high stone jail. Them buggers turn crazy once they get a mob around them.”

  Cord stared. “You better shut up,” he said. “I don’t think I want to listen to you.”

  “You got no choice,” the old man said.

  Cord lifted a hand and started to speak, then stopped. The old man was right, and there was no use getting him started on some gabbiness that might last the night.

  “Maybe so,” Cord mumbled. He was saved from any more discussion by the sounds of tumblers falling. The sheet-metal door at the end of the corridor opened to admit the jailer, carrying a brass ring of clanking keys hooked under his thumb and a covered lunch bucket. Robert Chapman was on his tail. Chapman was as tall as Cord and bigger across the shoulders, a little too rawboned to fit Cord’s preconception of a lawyer, a man mostly concerned with fine rules and arguing narrow points as a way of life. That Chapman did not seem to be a typical lawyer was something of a reassurance, at a time when Cord had little to feel sure about.

  While waiting for the jailer to unlock the cell door, Chapman studied Cord as if Cord were an exhibition in some zoological gardens. Chapman followed the jailer in and stood to one side while he set down the lunch bucket, went out, relocked the cell door, and returned to his little office. Cord heard him lock that door too.

  The old man bobbed his head toward Chapman and called to Cord, “Here’s your savior, bully-boy, if you got one.”

  “Shut up,” Chapman said, without looking at the old man. “Otherwise you’ll be talking to yourself. There are cells in the basement, no windows and dark as damnation. You could find yourself in one of them, just on my say-so.” Chapman smiled at Cord and lowered his voice. “That’s a lie, you know. My say-so does not stretch far in this town.”

  Cord looked at Chapman curiously while he took a note-pad and pencil from an inside coat pocket. The old man went back to his bunk. Cord opened the lunch bucket and sniffed at the contents, familiar after six days: runny stew, stale bread, and no coffee. There was meat in the stew, but on this night, with the crowd still ranting down below, Cord would have traded it for a rich dark steaming mug of boiled java. He made a mental note: Avoid jails where Mormons dictate the menu.

  Chapman regarded him with a receptive enough expression and no evident rancor. “How are you getting on?”

  “Real dandy.” Cord dropped the cover back on the bucket and waved a hand vaguely at his surroundings. “Handsome accommodations. Convivial company. Grub fit for a prince, and a savory smoke to settle it on the gut. Sitting pretty, Counselor. I could maybe use a drink.”

  “A drink.” Chapman smiled. “Isn’t that how this trouble started?”

  “A couple of drinks.” Cord looked up at him. “But yeah, now that you mention it.”

  The trouble had actually started before the drinking, and at a time when things looked to be settling better than ever in Cord’s life. They had been riding easy, he and his partner Chi; wanted nowhere in the West since they’d foxed the unctuous corrupt governor of Idaho Territory, one William Deane Majors. They’d ridden from there with signed amnesties in their pockets, and they were no longer wanted for a matter involving a time-locked vault in a little bank in Pocatello.

  Life seemed fecund with possibility when they drifted into Las Vegas. Cord and Chi had been running on the outlaw trail for more than ten years now, and Cord was beginning to wonder how long a person could live that sort of drifter life. It was wearying; sometimes Cord’s mind ached with the effort of staying alert. There was another thing: They had money just now. So Cord was pondering ways to talk Chi into thinking along the same lines—toward sharing some meadow-land and a few cows and a log house with her. If she were there, about anywhere would be all right.

  But it was no easy speech. There was no trick way to say what he meant, and Cord finally resorted to three quick drinks of bourbon, bowing his neck and talking straight into the glass, while Chi looked at him as if his whiskey might have been laced with opium.

  “Lots of places we could pick,” Cord muttered in a husky voice.

  “¿Por que?” Chi was attending to her fingernails with a tiny silver-handled penknife.

  “For building a house.”

  She looked up. “You fixing on building a house?”

  “Just one.”

  “Ought to be enough,” Chi said, “by the time you get done.” She smiled, as if sensing he was setting her up for a joke.

  “So where do you think?”

  “I don’t,” Chi said and went back to her nails. “Maybe up Green River.”

  “Tucson for the winter,” Chi said. “That’s what I think. You can take to making adobe. You’ll like adobe. You can turn Mexican.” Her eyes flashed with humor. Her long, thick braid was thrown forward over one shoulder and curled on her breast. The tie was bead-work, highlighted with little chunks of turquoise.

  Cord finally looked up. “Goddamn it, this is no bullshit. What I want is a house.”

  “Living in a house,” Chi snorted.

  “That’s right, mi amiga,” Cord snapped. “A house built out of good fir tree logs, sized and squared with an axe. Down on some creek bottom which is mine – ours – for life, all of it, far up the creek as you can see. Couple hundred cows with a C-Bar-C brand.”

  Chi folded the penknife shut. “Sounds like what you want,” she said, “is a cook.”

  Things quickly went sideways from there. Cord got to honking on the whiskey and he was shouting before the romance was half-finished. Chi tolerated it for a while, then shouted, “You want a bitch for your kennel.” Cord struck her, and she stood her ground with the imprint of his palm livid on her face and stared until he had to leave the table. That was worse than if she’d hit him back.

  Cord came back to her room in that Las Vegas hotel thr
ee days later, stumbling hung over and stinking of bourbon and bile, but by then the room was rented to a Negro tent preacher and Chi had gone down some trail no one knew. Cord went back to the bar and fed his self-pity another few bottles of whiskey.

  When that got stale, he started for his brother’s place near the south fork of the Owyhee up in northern Nevada, but changed his mind after riding half a day. Chi and Jim had been lovers one night a long while ago, and she might have gone there. At the time the looks between Chi and Jim had been fine, but he did not care to confront that sort of business right now. So Cord turned and rode randomly east into Utah, drinking only a little less, and at last found the trouble he had been seeking, here in this town of Zion.

  In the alley below Cord’s cell, a preacher delivered a sermon on concupiscence and damnation, aiming his speech against Cord’s abominations. ‘“Abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul,’” he exhorted in a thick mad voice, its vehemence drifting on the lazy breezes of the Utah night, as thickly as the perfume of lilac blooms in spring. A trace of it filled the room when Cord finished his story. “ ‘For all that is in the world,’” the preacher screeched, “ ‘the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.’ So writes the apostle John in his first epistle, Chapter two, verses sixteen and seventeen.” Lawyer Chapman listened thoughtfully for a while.

  “I never figured on abiding forever,” Cord said to Chapman’s back. “Didn’t figure on dying for something I didn’t do, either. Still don’t.”

  “You’re goddamned lucky,” Chapman said with surprising bitterness, and Cord looked up from the bunk, startled by the profanity.

  Chapman turned from the window. “These people build their jailhouses to last the century. No lynch mob will molest you. You will hang legally.”

  The old man in the opposite cell laughed, and the laugh turned to a racking cough. “There is not a shred of hope,” Chapman said to Cord, “in what you’ve told me thus far.” He shook his head. “This Landy family is white trash and not well regarded in this town, but that makes no difference. You are an outsider and an interloper. You have no home or visible means of support, and you carry your gun in a certain way.”

  “What way is that?” Cord asked.

  “As if you know what it’s for. That’s disconcerting to some folk.”

  “There’s the idea.”

  “Those Landys are Mormon, as is this town and fifty miles around. Trouble has dogged the Mormons. We have reason to fear and hate people like you.”

  “We?” Cord echoed.

  “Did you think I was a Jesuit?” Chapman said impatiently. “Of course I’m Mormon—why else would I be here? I came to Zion to make a place for myself, and now I will be a pariah.”

  “How so?”

  Chapman looked down at Cord with indulgent incredulity. “Do you think they forced me to take your case? I volunteered—and it will cost you some money,” he added with some vehemence.

  “I’m going to sleep uneasy tonight,” Cord drawled, “thinking about your bill and how I’m going to pay it and all—after they hang me.”

  “Never mind,” Chapman said briskly. He pursed his lips at Cord as if considering whether to go on. “I left Salt Lake City six months ago. One month ago the local elders learned I had left my wife.”

  Cord laughed.

  “Divorce is not a state lightly accepted among Mormons,” Chapman said dryly. “I was washed up here anyway.”

  “I know how you feel,” Cord said.

  Chapman shot him a sharp look. “I will defend you, Mr. Cord. I will defend you, and I will lose, and I will be scorned in this town, if I am not already.”

  “So why do it?”

  “The law,” Chapman said, but he grinned too quickly, so Cord could not tell if he was being sarcastic.

  Chapman cleared his throat. “These towns are a bit too generous with their self-pity for my taste. Take that for what it is worth. But my story isn’t to the point. Yours is.”

  “You’ve heard it plenty,” Cord said. “You must have an interest in sordid tales.”

  “I do. It’s why I practice law.”

  Cord hesitated.

  “You listen, my friend,” Chapman said. “Tomorrow I’m duty bound to convince that jury that you should not swing. Between us, I have about as much chance of doing that as you have of turning into the angel Moroni. But I don’t like to lose a case either, and now is a good time to see if we have any good ideas left, so we are going to talk.”

  “Fine.”

  “Begin by telling me all about it again. I don’t want to worry that I’ve overlooked a chance. What if they sprang the trap a moment after I remembered something? Picture my chagrin. So tell your tale, and we’ll pass the night, and maybe something will turn golden for us.”

  He should have known better, and in retrospect he did. It was, after all, an old story with him whenever there was more complication to life than he could stand: Drink some and look to hit yourself against the hardest thing you could find. “Five weeks of riding alone,” Cord said to Chapman, “with the whiskey mixed in. There’s trouble down that trail.” The lawyer had no answer to that. “Maybe this time more trouble than I can handle.” Cord looked at his boots. He didn’t like hearing himself say it out loud that way.

  He had come riding into Zion from the north a week earlier. In different times under different circumstances he would have ridden south. Another state and two territories were within a day’s ride, the desert nights were still plenty warm enough for sleeping under the stars, and besides, Cord had developed over the years some wariness of Mormon ways, which seemed steeped in too much fervor and too little tolerance, for his taste.

  But he’d been without the company of men for a time and wanted whiskey, and his whimsy often ran contrary to reason when he got this way. First he boarded his horse at the livery—caring for your animal before doing your drinking was a rule never subverted by whimsy. Then, walking back toward the center of town, he encountered Ellen Landy.

  She looked haughty and untouchable in a corn-yellow dress. When Cord stepped politely off the sidewalk into the gutter of the stone-paved street to let her pass, she veered at him and bumped him anyway. “Don’t you see where you are going?” She snapped, loud enough so two men across the street gave Cord narrow looks.

  Cord leered at them. “Where I am going is to get a drink,” he told the woman in a low insinuating tone. “If you have a mind to get familiar, come along.”

  Ellen Landy’s lips formed an O, and Cord noted her slightly bucked teeth before she put her hand over her mouth in what must have been an old habit of vanity. There were spots of red high on her cheek when she flounced away. Cord smiled at her retreat and let her fall from his mind. He’d seen her sort of act before.

  There would be no saloons in this town, but there would be a cafe or two where the proprietor kept a couple of bottles under the counter to serve the trade of any unregenerate sinners passing through town thirsty. Cord walked the length of the main street, past stone buildings, streetlights, and shop fronts with large stenciled plate-glass windows. At the south end, a church faced the Zion branch office of the Bank of Utah, and behind it a white-painted wood-frame building was tucked into a weedy lot. Dad’s, the sign read. As soon as he saw how close the place was to the bank’s back door, Cord knew: They would have whiskey, best you could get in a town like this, for men who minded their manners.

  Cord ate a thick meatloaf sandwich and drank a glass of milk, then rolled and smoked a cigarette. A short red-faced man in a vest and bowler hat cocked at an angle came in and crossed the room as if he knew where he was headed. Cord left a two-bit piece on the table for the girl and followed the short man through a thick curtain which opened onto a hallway toward the back of the building.

  “Looking for something?” The short man asked.


  “Maybe a drink of whiskey.” Cord held up a twenty-dollar gold piece pinched between thumb and forefinger.

  The short man looked him over. He opened the back door. Cord smelled the whiskey right away.

  The three men leaning on the plank bar twisted around far enough to eyeball the newcomer. They turned out to be a pharmaceuticals drummer from Omaha, a Wells Fargo teamster whose overnight had turned into three dead days of waiting for cargo, and a tall jug-eared cowhand who had worked the last eleven years on a ranch down in New Mexico along the San Juan. He was in town picking up the new saddle he’d ordered six weeks earlier, and thinking about not going back.

  “Got this idea about riding the trail again,” he said, once Cord was fixed up beside him with whiskey and a glass of water. “You look like you been traveling.”

  “Some distance,” Cord said. The cowhand smiled a thin smile. They talked on that way, not saying anything particular, but letting information pass laconically while the fat bartender served good drinks and kept out of hearing range. By and by, the afternoon was ruined.

  “I’ll buy you a dinner,” Cord told the cowhand. “I ate once already, first time in two days, and it made me hungry.”

  The cowhand smiled. “Steaks,” he said. “They can bring ’em in here.”

  But before the bartender could fetch the girl from the kitchen, the Wells Fargo man came back from checking his draft animals. He touched Cord’s shoulder. “You must be the one.”

  “For what?”

  “There’s a woman out there. Says she saw you come in here, and she wanted to talk.”

  “Don’t know any women,” Cord said. “Not one.”

  “You’ll want to know this one.” The teamster smiled in a way there was no mistaking. “Take a look.”

  So Cord went out the back door and there was Ellen Landy, looking immaculate and agitated in the warmth of the evening. Her yellow dress flounced a little as she stepped this way and that, and then she stopped to study Cord’s face for a time before speaking.