The Road to Reckoning. Robert Lautner

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      ‘Now, Thomas.’ I blinked that this creature had my name. ‘Get back and I will be right over once I am done. I am trading here. Do not fool with my day or it will be the last you drink here.’

      Thomas leaned on his hip, thumbed his belt. The flap on the holster nearest my father was not buttoned.

      ‘I would like to see one of them guns. I heard everything you said, salesman. I am an interested party.’

      There was a childish giggle back in the dark. Another man who had not come up.

      Thomas rubbed his nose at the laugh and showed only the top of his dusty hat as he lowered his face so we would not see it smiling. He flashed it up again.

      ‘Now see, I have me one of them pepperbox pistols that you disparaged so much, salesman. I have it in the back of me. You say it is small and would not stop a dog. What say we try it up against one of these horseshit pistols of yours? See what dog does what.’

      I looked at my father but dared not move closer lest this Thomas mistook me in the gloom for a man of intent.

      My father did not look to me but held a palm out for me to stay. I wanted to go home. Would run if I had to.

      ‘I do not have them with me. They are in my hotel.’

      ‘Well, surely we should test it? Would you not agree? If I am to buy something, I think that that is fair. And my friend Chet there should see it too before he parts with his tin. Is that not right, Chet?’

      Mister Chet Baker shook his head. ‘Thomas Heywood, you are making me regret letting you in here. I will buy what I want to buy without your say!’

      Thomas stepped forward. ‘You got any gun on you, salesman?’

      My father did not hold with guns. He turned to mister Baker. ‘I will come back in the morning, Mister Baker. We can sign up then.’ He picked up the wooden gun, put it slowly back to his belt, and held out his hand to me and said my name, which drew the other Thomas’ eye to me for the first time. I saw that my father’s hand trembled and ran to it.

      Thomas threw down. ‘Don’t you turn your back on me, you son of a bitch!’

      A single-shot percussion, too small for its holster. A belt gun with a short barrel. The under-hammer type where you just pulled the trigger and it fired. No man who had dollars to buy a gun had one. I doubted he had that pepperbox also. But I did not think that gun so little then. It was a cannon pointed to my father’s back.

      There was the giggle again from the black rear. It sounded like it came from a short, fat throat. I still had faith that mister Baker was in charge of this room. He had said that he had a double-shot rifle and I hoped it was as much of his workplace as his apron.

      My father gripped my hand and did something that I did not understand then.

      I have made my peace with it.

      He switched from holding my hand and squeezed both my shoulders and put me in front of his waist, in front of the gun.

      ‘Please,’ he said. ‘My boy?’

      The gun stared at me with its innocent Cyclops eye and swallowed me whole, a chasm before me. My father behind.

      ‘Please,’ he said again.

      I cannot remember how he said it but in my mind it sounded like the ‘Amen’ that people say too loud in church for show to their neighbors rather than in devotion.

      Thomas Heywood roared, buckled over with a callous glee. When he came back up his fist was empty, the flap of his holster closed.

      ‘Run, you son of a bitch!’ He rolled back with laughter, the dust blowing off him like a cloud. I saw that his coat was made out of a blanket and sewn with wide stitches like sharks’ teeth.

      My father pulled me away and out the door with that laugh at our backs.

      We did not run. We left briskly. Everyone else on the street was just slow.

       FIVE

      That night we stayed in a room on Front street above a potter’s called Bastian. This was two dollars for a brass bed but no meal. I figured my father was of the opinion that the man named Thomas Heywood would not spend two dollars for a room so would not likely be one of our neighbors. We had moved our belongings from the hotel along with the sack of guns. I carried the three boxed models like books under my chin. I did not complain about the weight.

      In the room my father moved the kerosene lamp from the window and put it on the floor and drew the curtain. We ate salt-beef sandwiches and sauerkraut from a newspaper on the bed with the lamp throwing grotesque shadows of us on the ceiling like a Chinese silhouette show. We did not talk.

      I had wanted my father to come into the room, lock the door, and laugh and slap his thigh about how lucky we had been and how foolish the whole scene was to civilized folks like us, but he did not. He had hid the lamp and chewed quietly in case the mice heard him. I could hear his watch tick.

      In bed that night a piano along the street tickled me awake and I found myself alone under the blankets.

      The lamp was down and flickering, the whole room dancing around the walls.

      I was just about to lift up when there was a rattle like someone at our door lock and I froze. Then I was fully awake and knew the sound of the knob on our door turning was inside the room. The stranger twisting the lock was the clockwork and snaps of a gun.

      I sat up but my father did not notice as he had the chair faced to the wall and his head down. I saw the box of one of the belt models open on the floor. On the green baize lid was a waxed paper image of the factory with smoke billowing from the chimneys. The inserts where the pistol and its accoutrements lay were skeletal empty. Mister Colt had provided us with caps and balls to demonstrate. Powder too. The boxes held cartridge paper, dowel, and block, and these were on the side table. When they were in their box, in their proper neat holes, they looked like a carpenter’s or an artist’s tools. They fooled you that they could create.

      I went to speak but the hammer’s double click shushed me. That sound cuts you down to be quiet. It silences giants, and only dumb animals roar at it.

      It has committal.

      My father whispered from his corner.

      ‘Forgive me, Jane. My sweetest friend. What I … Oh, Jane, it was … Preserve me. My sweetest friend.’ He took a breath and the piano down the street stopped and people clapped and laughed. He quoted to the wall with that breath.

      ‘“Long is the way, and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.”’

      I threw back the bedclothes and he turned to me.

      ‘Thomas?’ he said. ‘I thought you were asleep.’ He uncocked the gun. Pistols do this reluctantly.

      I ran from the bed and around the chair. The gun was in his lap and his arms wrapped around me. I felt the pistol’s coldness against my belly through my shirt. He patted me closer and my cheek touched his, СКАЧАТЬ