Cord 9 Page 3

  The kid at the bar had almost no chin and wore trail clothes. He was drinking beer, half facing away. Chi looked at him over her shoulder. The chinless kid swiveled away and put both elbows on the bar. There was an oil painting of a naked woman over the whiskey shelf, but he kept his eyes down.

  Chi turned back to Stern. He had stopped smiling. He watched Chi take out a leather pouch, worry open the drawstring.

  “I watched you play cards yesterday, in that other place.” Chi fished out a brown leaf of cigarette paper. “And that rat-faced boy, wandering around the table, peeking and peering, tipping you to other people’s hands.”

  “How was he doing that?” Stern asked neutrally.

  “Every time it got down to you and one other player,” Chi said, “your boy tried to get himself a look at the other fellow’s hole cards. I remember him bending down to tuck in his pant leg a lot.”

  Stern put on a skeptical look.

  “When it worked,” Chi said, “he cued you if the other hombre had the tickets.”

  “How did he do that?”

  “He lit up a smoke.” Chi laughed. “That all you can think of for the signal? Don’t you have any imagination?”

  Stern turned the glass between his long, pretty hands. “Are you calling me a card cheat?”

  “Oh yes,” Chi said. “Yes indeed.”

  “Miss Chi,” Stern said, courtly. “You are drunk.”

  She looked at him blankly. A moment passed during which she could have taken it as an insult or let it pass, when she could have gone into blind rage or raucous laughter. She didn’t know herself for that moment which way she was heading, nor much care. This Stern had better watch his step. Stern had uncrossed his legs and looked a little like her expression bothered him. But then Chi laughed. “Por supuesto,” she agreed amiably. She shook tobacco into a creased paper, twisted it up between her fingers, and pulled the drawstring tight.

  Stern struck a match with his thumbnail and held it out.

  Chi ignored it. She pointed at Stern with her cigarette, and her voice was hard and cold and nothing drunk in it at all. Right now she liked hearing herself this way. “I am drunk,” Chi said, “and you are a sharper and a cheat, trying to court my favor. No telling what you want.” She shook her head and contracted herself. “Yeah, there is, when I think about it. I guess we both know what you are after.”

  Stern gaped at her.

  “Someone is looking for trouble,” Chi said.

  “Not me,” Stern said.

  “Me,” Chi said. “I am.”

  The match burned down to Stern’s fingers. He grimaced and waved it out, dropped the charred stick on the scarred tabletop.

  Chi put the cigarette in her mouth. “You got a light?” she asked sweetly.

  Stern stared at her half-shrewdly. He looked like a man thinking he might have taken a wrong turn and wondering if it would be shorter to go back or on ahead. He shook his head and pushed his chair away from the table, started to rise.

  “Where you going?” Chi said. “Drink your drink.”

  Stern put charm in his smile, and said, “I won’t intrude if I’m not sure I’m welcome.”

  Chi stabbed a finger across the table. “Drink your goddamned drink, cabrón.”

  Stern lowered his ass back into his seat. He picked up the double-shot glass in three fingers and drank down the straight whiskey.

  “You stick around,” Chi said, “and maybe your dreams will come true after all.”

  A good deal of the light in Stern’s smile had gone out. In what was left, Chi read his hope that there might be some shot at her after all. “Figuring odds?” she asked. “Looking at the size of the bet against the money in the pot?”

  Stern said, “Why do you want to be this way?” honestly enough that she almost felt sorry for an instant.

  She turned away and called, “Mesonero.”

  The bartender came to the table with a squarish bottle of whiskey labeled Heaven’s Kiss Sour Mash Whiskey. He said, “I like being called that. Finer than barkeep, and smoother on the ear.” When he filled Stern’s glass, his pink eyes flashed happily.

  Chi produced a one-dollar note, and when the little bartender took it, she patted him on his shiny fat cheek. “Oh, my,” the bartender said brightly. His cheek quivered like a big dog’s jowls.

  “Drink up,” Chi said to Stern.

  Stern studied the drink. “Maybe we ought to eat a bite,” he said. “After that we can work out some plans for this fine evening.”

  Chi looked past him out the window and shook her head with something like sadness. “My right hand,” she said. “Yes?”

  Stern could not see where this was going. “Guess what is pointed at you under this table. Guess what part it is aimed at.”

  “That’s a poor joke.”

  From beneath the center of the table came the unique click of a revolver’s hammer being cocked.

  The last of Stern’s smile quick-froze. His eyes looked rheumy.

  “Having a woman like me,” Chi said, “has got to be dangerous. Otherwise where is the fun in it?” She picked up her glass in her left hand and drank.

  Chi rapped the underside of the table with her gun barrel, and Stern started. “Play along,” Chi said. The hammer of her gun clicked down again, and in a moment her right hand appeared above the table.

  “You are addled,” Stern said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Chi said. “You still got to hear my story.”

  Stern’s shoulders relaxed, and he ran both palms along the wavy sides of his blond hair. Chi folded her arms and leaned forward and pointed at the cigarette in her mouth; Stern hesitated a moment, then passed another match to her. She struck it on the underside of the thigh of her black britches. A woolen serape was draped over her shoulders, and her flat-brimmed black sombrero hung from a thong beneath her chin.

  When she picked up the story again, she told it seriously enough, but at first Stern listened warily, as if he feared this was bait for some other demeaning trap. But Chi no longer smiled and seemed to choose her words with some care, pausing now and then as if to get them exactly right. Once she stopped to refill her shot glass and another time to crush out the butt of the thin brown cigarette under her high bootheel, but otherwise she went at it in a straight line from there on. Stern relaxed and smiled his thin smile now and then, as if he were still preoccupied with possibilities involving the two of them.

  But presently, as the tale began to take shape, he was drawn in despite himself. He propped his elbows on the table and listened with genuine interest and little interruption.

  The man Chi called Hardiman was a boy at the time in which her story began, perhaps seventeen years old and muy simpático. The woman was much older (Chi said), twenty-five or -six, experienced with the world and men, and she teased him and would not take him seriously. “He was sensitive,” Chi said. “He wrote poems.” He had a sensitive boy’s ideas: He would end up rich and happy or dead and well-grieved. “Hardiman could not lose,” Chi said.

  “I’ll bet he did, though,” Stern said. “Otherwise where is the story?”

  “Listen to what happened,” Chi said.

  No robber was ever as dumb or wrong-headed as this Hardiman boy, Chi went on. If he had a reason for picking the bank he chose, no one ever knew what it was.

  It was a small establishment in a backland town that Chi called Victoria. On the way, Hardiman had a whiskey or three for his nerves and, thinking to do some business with his drinking, asked a bunch of questions about the Victoria Bank. A sheriff overheard all this and rode out ahead.

  Hardiman hit Victoria about midday, and by then the sheriff had time to make a few arrangements. Two men with rifles were hunkered behind the false front on the roof of the mercantile across the dirt street from the bank, and the vault was locked up tight. The sheriff borrowed the cashier’s green eyeshade and took his place, his pistol close to hand in a half-open cash drawer. The bank president could not be persuaded to leave, though
; he stood his ground by the vault, as if the money were his.

  Hardiman rode in, hitched his horse in front of the Victoria Bank, and looked around the noonday street. There was no mistaking him because he pulled his neckerchief over his face in proper outlaw style and took out his pistol, right there in the street. But the riflemen on the roof were too young to be veterans of the war and thus not hardened to the idea of gunning a man down in cold blood. While they hesitated, Hardiman went inside.

  The sheriff saw the gun and kept his mouth shut, but the banker said something like “What is the meaning of this, young man?” The sheriff’s hand crept into the cash drawer toward his gun, thinking out his play and careful not to push it, figuring time was on his side. Meanwhile Hardiman was ordering the banker to open the vault, and the banker was refusing. About then the street door opened, and several things happened quickly, one after another.

  It had not occurred to Hardiman that anyone might interrupt his business, and he turned abruptly. A middle-aged capitalist was holding the bank door for a young bonneted woman carrying a tiny baby. Hardiman took a step toward them, tripped over his own boots, and stumbled into the cash drawer, slamming it on the sheriff’s fingers. The sheriff yowled, the woman saw Hardiman’s gun and screamed, and the baby began to bawl. The woman shut her mouth and fainted, but she held on to the baby. It bounced off her stomach and rolled onto the floor, unhurt but damned surprised.

  Hardiman saw the capitalist reach inside his coat and, misreading the move, snapped, “Bring it out slow.” The capitalist produced a bulging pocketbook. Hardiman did not know this was a wealthy feed-and-grain speculator or that the man had cleaned the table at the monthly poker game with his rich cronies, but he knew enough to grab the man’s poke and stuff it in his shirt.

  The baby was screaming, the sheriff was swearing with his mouth full of broken fingers, and the banker snorted with outrage. He went to his desk and rummaged in the top drawer, too single-minded to be frightened. Meanwhile the woman was coming around, to Hardiman’s relief. Still, there was no telling what sort of voice she’d add to the din, so Hardiman shoved his gun in his holster and hit the road.

  He realized his horse was gone about a second and a half before the two men on the rooftop across the way emptied their magazines in a wild spray of shots, none of which came too close. At about the same time, a big farm kid in coveralls and no shirt came lumbering down the street astride a big yellow Belgian draft animal with a rope hackamore and no saddle.

  At the gunfire, the farm horse rolled its eyes, snorted, and thundered up on the boardwalk in front of the bank. The canopy clotheslined the big kid. He tumbled off into the dirt, made his feet with surprising speed, and skedaddled. Hardiman dragged the horse back down to the street and swung onto its back.

  By then the marksmen had gotten reloaded, and they let go at Hardiman at about the same time the banker came running out the door firing a short-barreled revolver fast as he could cock the hammer and pull the trigger. Hardiman’s gun was still in his holster; he seemed to have forgotten it was available.

  The banker missed twice and then shot Hardiman in the gut, bending him over double. The farm horse stumbled, and Hardiman grunted and jerked hard on the rope bridle, but the panicked horse shied around the wrong way. The banker’s fourth shot slammed right into Hardiman’s chest. It hurt instantly and massively, and he was pretty sure he was dead. Before he could decide absolutely, another bullet struck his head and everything got dimmer.

  Chi stopped at that point in the story to concentrate on fashioning a cigarette. Stern watched her hands, not missing the fact that they were a tiny bit less steady. “Bank robbing is not my line,” Stern said. “But I would rate it risky business in the best of circumstances. The way this boy went at it, he was asking to die.”

  “That’s what I said,” Chi said impatiently. “When I started this story.”

  “That’s so,” Stern admitted.

  “Only he didn’t.”

  “Didn’t what?”

  “Die,” Chi said.

  At seventeen you are tougher than you know, Chi told Stern, and Hardiman managed to hang on to the big Belgian and some bit of consciousness until he got to a fair-sized creek. He sent the horse running for home with a swat and waded upstream. He got about a half mile and into a thicket of willow before passing out for good. He did not come to until the next morning, so he never knew that mounted men passed him close by in the dark three times.

  Hardiman lay still and kept his eyes closed for a bit; he hurt like hell and wasn’t sure he wanted to know why. But then, with the sun climbing into the sky of a new day, Hardiman dragged himself up against a tree trunk and took inventory. The more he discovered, the more he marveled.

  The last shot, the one that had caught him in the head, was the only one that had done anything that could really be called harm, and most of that was to his sombrero. A hole had been tom in the front and back of its felt crown, and when Hardiman took it off and touched at the top of his head, he found a sticky line running about where the part would have been if Hardiman had combed his hair to either side. Even then there was not so much blood, and no double vision or fuddle-mindedness, and the pain was not as bad as the previous night’s blackout headache.

  “You are ribbing me, right?” Stern said then. “You get this Hardiman shot in the tripes and the heart, and now you have him sitting up counting his blessings. Is this tree in the hereafter?”

  Chi nodded happily, as if Stern had gotten it just right. “That is what Hardiman wondered, soon as he worried up a clear recollection of the day before and the other two slugs hitting him. He felt around his stomach and his chest, and now that he was paying attention he noticed his whole body ached like hell.” Chi drank her glass of tequila and refilled it. There was an inch of the colorless liquor left in the bottle. “But,” Chi said, “no blood.”

  Behind Chi, someone said, “You gonna be long.” It was the rat-faced boy, Stern’s cardsharping confederate.

  “Go somewhere,” Stern said. He smiled at Chi. “You are not needed here.”

  “No dumb card-flashing sheep wanted hereabouts,” Chi confirmed nastily. Behind her, the boy drew a sharp breath. “Get,” she said, returning Stern’s smile, as if this were a lovers’ game they both knew well.

  The boy thought it over a moment too long. Chi spun around and came out of her chair. She kicked the boy hard in the shin, and when he yowled and jerked up one leg and hopped almost comically, she knocked him down. She did not punch him but merely pushed him over with both hands, which was meant to humiliate him and did. The boy fell over a chair and lay there looking up at her through hurt eyes.

  For a moment she felt bad and wondered why she was acting like this. But she knew the answer to that, and not liking herself so much at this moment was one thing and suffering the presence of simpletons and mooncalves was another. She saw the sweet old bartender from the corner of her eye: he looked sad. “You get, boy,” she said in a mean voice to the kid on the floor. She could do what she wanted, and everyone else could like it or stand the hell out of her way. The kid got to his feet and sidled out the door.

  Stern didn’t look too put out, considering he had called the boy partner, but there was a word that meant different things to different people. He was looking at her curiously and amused when she sat down, the way you might regard a pup while trying to decide whether to whip or pet it. But she was nobody’s pup.

  Chi put her smile back on and said again, “No blood.”

  Stern laughed and shook his head. “Imagine that.”

  “Pay attention.” Chi waggled a finger under his nose, as if this was a fine flirt they shared. “Hardiman grabbed at his belt to undo his britches, and the leather parted in his hands. The buckle was a big square of solid silver worked with turquoise, and in its middle was a huge dimple where one fat slug had hit him. It had stretched and weakened the leather and hammered the buckle hard into his belly, but there was no hole—in the buckle or in
him.

  “Once he got over that,” Chi said, “Hardiman ripped open the front of his union suit, and the fat pocketbook of currency fell out. Hardiman had forgotten about the money, but right then it was not what had his eye. The whole front of his stomach and chest was black-and-yellow and blue-and-purple, from his bellybutton up to his throat.” Chi drank down her tequila and began to build another smoke. “And in the middle of his breastbone, right over where his heart would be, a bullet was sticking out of him.”

  “See here!”

  “Hardiman slapped at it like it was a hornet, and the bullet fell away. There was a little circle of ragged torn flesh under it, a pendejo or two deep, no more.” Chi touched herself between her breasts. “The muscle is hardly a half inch thick right there, but this bullet stopped before it reached bone. A scratch.”

  Chi drank. “But the pocketbook full of money was drilled right through the middle.”

  Stern reached across the table for her bottle, meaning to refill her glass. Chi said, “Don’t.” Stern leaned back in his chair, too casually. “Is this a true story?” he asked.

  “Why do you care?”

  “I don’t know.” Stern sounded genuinely perplexed. “What are we talking about? What parts am I supposed to believe?”

  Chi felt the anger coming back. She poured the last of the tequila into her glass, and what was left filled it right to the rim without a drop splashing over. She let it sit. This would be the last one. One quart of liquor was enough for today. She told the rest of it quickly and dispassionately, as if she might have given Stern too much credit for perception and companion ability.

  Hardiman looked at the holes drilled in his hat and buckle and stolen money and contemplated the entirety of his own body, and saw the hand of a higher power. What had happened was uncreditable except by faith. Hardiman decided he was chosen.

  He forgot the woman and gave his love to fate, risk, and outlawry. Within six months he was notorious and within a year he was legendary. He wore the hat and buckle like emblems and gave away notes of punctured currency as his sign, his mark. He had plenty by then.