Kinch Riley and Hickok and Cody Page 8

  “I don’t get you.”

  “Well, it’s like this. Some folks are just miserable inside unless they’ve got something to feel guilty about. Sort of like it’d been bred into ’em, the same as horns on a cow. They’re not really happy unless they’re sad. All choked up with guilt. Y’see what I mean?”

  The boy mulled it over a minute, frowning thoughtfully. “You’re sayin’ that if they kill a man to keep from gettin’ killed, they still feel guilty. Like it was wrong doing it even to save themselves.”

  “That’s about the size of it, I guess.”

  “But shouldn’t you feel sorry, even a little bit? Somehow it don’t seem the same as slaughterin’ a pig or knockin’ a steer in the head.”

  “Sport, it’s not ghosts that haunt our lives. It’s people. The live ones are who you’ve got to worry about. Don’t waste your time on the dead. Where they are, it won’t make a particle of difference.”

  Kinch again looked away, troubled by something he couldn’t quite come to grips with. The game McCluskie played was fun to watch, the same way there was something grimly fascinating about watching a snake rear back and shake its rattles. But all week something had bothered him about the gun. Not anything he could exactly put his finger on, just a worrisome thought that wouldn’t go away. Now he knew what it was.

  The game had only one purpose. And it wasn’t to perforate tin cans.

  Since his little siege in the charity ward back in Kansas City, Kinch had had plenty of time to think. Mostly about death, and especially his own. In some queer sort of way it was as if he and Death had become close acquaintances, without a secret between them. Yet in the closeness came a curious turnabout. It wasn’t that death frightened him so much as that life had suddenly become very precious. Each day was somehow special, a thing to be treasured, and every breath his lungs took seemed sweeter than the one before. Death in itself was sort of shrouded, a misty bunch of nothing that even the preachers couldn’t explain too well. But the loss of life was very real, something he could understand all on his own. When the candle was snuffed out, everything he was or might have been just stopped. Double ought zero.

  The thought of killing someone wasn’t just repugnant. It was scary in a way that resisted words. Like killing another man would somehow kill a part of himself. Almost as if the time he had left would be whittled down in the act of stealing from another what he himself prized the most.

  Then again, maybe it was like the Irishman said. Life couldn’t be all that precious if a man wouldn’t fight to save it. Only something of little value was tossed aside lightly, and that didn’t include the privilege to go on breathing.

  Kinch glanced at the big man out of the corner of his eye. Since the loss of his family a year past he had been drifting aimlessly, with no real goal in mind except to taste life before his time ran out. McCluskie was the first person to show any interest in him, to take the time and trouble to talk with him. Strangely enough, these talks somehow put him in mind of quiet evenings back in Chicago. When he and his father would sit on the tenement stoop and discuss all manner of things. But that was before the fire. And the screaming and smoke and charred stench of death.

  He shuddered inside, remembering again how it had been. Then he took hold of himself and wiped the thought from his mind. There was nothing to be gained in living in the past. Just bitter memories and grief and a void that ached to be filled. Here and now, with the Irishman, he had the start of something new. A friendship certainly, otherwise McCluskie would never have taken him in and cared for him and given him a job. But over and above that there was something more. A closeness shared, unlike anything he’d ever known for another man. Except maybe for his father, and even that was somehow different.

  Despite McCluskie’s brusque manner and gamy joshing he felt drawn to the man. Not that McCluskie treated him as full grown. Nor was it just exactly a father to son kind of thing. Instead, it was something in between, a partnership of sorts, and perhaps that was what made it different. One of a kind. A rare thing, and exciting.

  Puzzling over it, Kinch decided on the spur of the moment that he could have picked worse spots than Newton to pile off the train. Lots worse. Truth to tell, getting clobbered by the Irishman might well have been an unusual stroke of luck. They made a pretty good team, and it came to him all of a sudden that he had found something he didn’t want to lose. Something damned special. And he wasn’t about to rock the boat.

  Whichever way the Irishman led, he meant to follow.

  McCluskie finished assembling the Colt and started loading it. Seating a ball, he rammed it down and looked over at the kid. “Y’know, there’s nothin’ stoppin’ you from tryin’ your hand with this thing. Wouldn’t be no trouble at all to show you how it’s done. Matter of fact, what with you being my assistant, it might be a good idea. Never yet hurt a man to know one end of a gun from the other.”

  Kinch uncoiled slowly and got to his feet. “I’ll give ’er a try. So long as we stick to shootin’ at cans.”

  “Meanin’ you’re not ready to try your luck with something that shoots back.”

  The boy grinned. “I’d just as soon not.”

  “Bud, I hope it never comes to that. What I said a while ago about guilt and all—I meant that. But it’s not much fun killin’ a man. Just between us, I could do without it myself.”

  McCluskie devoted the next hour to demonstrating the rudiments of what he had learned through nearly three years of trial and error. Instructing someone in the use of a gun seemed awkward at first, but he found Kinch an eager pupil. Things he had never before put into words made even more sense when he heard himself explaining it, and the boy’s sudden interest gratified him in a way he would never have suspected. Nor did he fully understand it. He was just damned pleased.

  Concentration and balance and deliberation. According to the Irishman, these were the sum and substance of firing a pistol accurately. Distractions of whatever variety—movement, sound, even gunfire—must be blocked out of a man’s mind. Every nerve in his body must be focused with an iron grip on the target. Almost as if he were blinded to anything except the spot he wanted to hit. Without this intensity of concentration, he would more likely than not throw the shot off. Since the first shot was the one that counted, to waste it was a hazardous proposition at best.

  Balance had to do with a man’s stance and his aiming of the gun. McCluskie demonstrated by dropping into a crouch, feet slightly apart, and leveling the gun to a point that his arm was about equidistant between waist and shoulder. Each man soon determined the position most natural to himself, but the crouch was essential. It not only made him a smaller target, but more importantly, it centered the gun on his opponent’s vitals. The chest and belly. At that point a man forgot the sights and aimed by instinct. Much the same as pointing his finger. With his body squarely directed into the target, and the gun jabbed out as an extension of his finger, he had only to bring his arm level and the slug would strike pretty much dead center every time.

  McCluskie paused, mulling over the next part, and tried to frame his words to capture the precise meaning of a single thought.

  “Forget about speed. That’ll get a man planted quicker’n anything. It’s not how fast you shoot or how many shots you get off. What counts is that you hit what you’re shootin’ at. With the first shot. If you can’t learn to do that, then you’ve got no business carryin’ a gun.”

  Kinch gave him a skeptical look. “You sound like one of them preachers that says ‘do as I say, not as I do.’ Cripes, I’ve been sittin’ here for a whole week watchin’ you whip that thing out like it had grease on it.”

  “That’s because you’ve been watchin’,” McCluskie growled, “instead of payin’ attention. You’ve got fast mixed up with sudden. There’s difference, and not understandin’ that is what gets a man a one way ticket to the Pearly Gates.”

  The Irishman leveled his pistol at arm’s length. “Right there’s where you hesitate before you pull th
e trigger. But it’s only a little hesitation, a fragment of a second. Nothin’ a man could count even when he’s doing it. Just a split-hair delay to catch the barrel out of the corner of your eye and make sure it’s lined up on the target. Then you pull the trigger.”

  The Colt roared and a can spun off the plank.

  “Learn that before you learn anything else. It’s the difference between the quick and the dead. Deliberation. Sudden instead of fast. Whatever you want to call it. Just slow down enough so that your first shot counts. Otherwise you might not get a second.”

  McCluskie positioned the boy only five paces from the plank to start. They worked for a while on stance and gaining a feel for pointing the gun. Then he had the kid hold the Colt down at his side and concentrate on a single can. The label on it showed a bright golden peach.

  “Whenever you’re ready.”

  Kinch whipped the gun up and blasted off four shots in a chain-lightning barrage.

  The can hadn’t moved.

  “No goddamnit, you’re not listenin’. I said hesitate. Take your time. Hell, any dimdot can stand there and just pull the trigger. Now load up and try it again. Only slow down, for Chrissakes.”

  The next half-hour was excruciating for both teacher and pupil. The boy fired and loaded four cylinders—twenty shots—before he hit the juicy-looking peach. All the while McCluskie was storming and yelling advice and growing more exasperated with each pull of the trigger. Oddly enough, he seemed madder than if he himself had run out the string of misses.

  But something had clicked on that last shot, the hit. Understanding came so sudden that Kinch felt as if his ears had come unplugged. The delay had been there. Right under his fingertips, like a sliver of smoke. He had felt it, sensed that it was waiting on him. Known even before he feathered the trigger that the can would jump.

  He reloaded, blocking out McCluskie and the heat and the ringing in his ears. Then he crouched, leveling his arm, and the gun began to buck. Spaced shots, neither slow nor fast, with a mere trickle of time between each report.

  Three cans out of five leaped from the plank.

  The Irishman just stood there a moment, staring at the punctured tins. Then his mouth creased in a slow smile.

  “Well I’ll be a sonovabitch. You rung the gong.”

  CHAPTER 8

  MCCLUSKIE HAD given the matter of Kinch’s birthday considerable thought. The kid was turning eighteen, which was sort of a milestone in a youngster’s life. The day he ceased being a boy and set about the business of becoming a man.

  Not that a youngster couldn’t have fought Indians or rustled cattle or killed himself a couple of men by that time. There were many who had, and lots more who fell shy by only the slimmest of margins. Wes Hardin, who had treed Abilene just last month, was scarcely eighteen himself. Yet, according to newspaper claims, he had even run a sandy on Wild Bill Hickok.

  Life west of Kansas City forced a boy to grow up in a hurry. All too often, though, it killed him off before he ever really got started.

  Personally, the Irishman had never set much store with this thing of birthdays. The idea of a boy becoming a man just because he’d chalked up a certain number of years seemed a little absurd. That pretty much assumed a kid couldn’t cut the mustard, and McCluskie knew different. He had joined the Union army at the advanced age of nineteen, and nobody had ever been called upon to hold his hand. From the opening gun he had pulled his own weight, and when the Rebs finally called it quits, he’d felt like the old man of his outfit.

  The killing ground did that. Seared the childish notions out of a boy’s head and made him look at things in a different light. Like a man.

  McCluskie had learned that lesson the hard way. First hand. When he came west after the war, he was a man stripped of illusions. Life fought dirty in the clinches, so he had discovered, and it didn’t pay to give the other fellow an even break. Just as he felt no remorse over the men he had killed in the war, so it was that he felt nothing for the ward boss in Hell’s Kitchen, or the three hardcases he had planted in Abilene. There were some people just bound and determined to get themselves killed. The fact that he was the instrument of their abrupt and somewhat unceremonious demise was their lookout, not his. Not by a damnsight. Yet, in some queer way that he’d never really fathomed, he took neither pleasure nor pride in killing. It was like he had told the kid.

  It’s not much fun killin’ a man.

  Still, it was one thing to feel a twinge of regret and something else entirely to turn the other cheek. A man tended to his own business and tried not to step on the other fellow’s toes. But he also fought his own fights, and anyone who came looking for trouble deserved whatever he got. Whether it was a busted nose or a rough pine box. That’s the way the game was played, and while he hadn’t made the rules, he wasn’t about to break them either. Only dimdots and faint-hearts came west expecting to get a fair shake from the next man, and more often than not, they were the ones who ended up on an undertaker’s slab.

  Understandably then, McCluskie didn’t believe in mollycoddling. The sooner kids learned to wipe their own noses, the better off for all concerned. Curiously enough, though, he had been at some pains to make an event of Kinch’s birthday.

  The excuses he gave himself were pretty lame. Generally he didn’t allow feeling to stand in the way of common sense. He saw himself as a realist in a hard and uncompromising world. A man who met life on its own terms and handed out more licks than he took. Underneath his flinty composure, it grated the wrong way to admit there was still a soft spot he hadn’t whipped into line. But he’d never been a man to fool himself, either. It all boiled down to one inescapable fact.

  There wouldn’t be any more birthdays for the kid. Eighteen was where the string ran out.

  Oddly enough, the Irishman was having a hard time dealing with that. It confused him, this feeling he had for the kid. Part of it had to do with a small boy killed in a street brawl, the one he’d never seen. And he understood that. Accepted it as natural that a man would dredge up old feelings, musty and long buried, and allow a skinny, underfed kid to touch his soft spot. Even a man who made his living with a gun wasn’t without a spark of emotion. No matter how many times he’d killed. Or told himself there was nothing on earth that could get under his skin and make him breathe life into thoughts dead and gone. That part held no riddle for him, and he had come to grips with it in his own way.

  What bothered him, and left him more than a little bemused, was the extent of his feeling. Somehow the kid had penetrated his soft spot far deeper than he’d suspected at the outset. Little by little, over the course of their weeks together, the youngster had burrowed clean into the core. Like a worm that slowly bores a passage in hard-packed earth. Now the Irishman found himself face to face with something he couldn’t quite handle. It was Hell’s Kitchen all over again. Only this time he was there. Forced to stand helplessly by, as if his hands were tied, and watch it happen. Almost as though life had felt cheated the first time, and out of spite had summoned him back to observe, at last, the death of a boy.

  In some diabolic fashion, the death of his own son.

  That evening, when he got to the hotel, Kinch had himself all decked out in a new set of duds. The Irishman had forewarned him that this was the night. After nearly three weeks of taking it easy and soaking up sunshine, it was high time he got his feet wet.

  Tonight they were out to see the elephant.

  Kinch had splurged like a cowhand fresh off the trail. The wages McCluskie paid weren’t princely by any yardstick, but the best at the Blue Front Clothing Store had been none too good. Candy-striped shirt, slouch hat, boots freshly blacked, and a peacock blue kerchief knotted around his neck. He was clean scrubbed and reeked of rose water, and his hair looked like it had been plastered down with a trowel.

  McCluskie whistled and gave him the full once over. “Well now, just looky here. Got yourself all tricked out like it was Sunday-go-to-meetin’.”

  The boy preene
d and darted a quick look at himself in the mirror. “Just followin’ orders. You said bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

  Damned if I didn’t. Sort of took me at my word, too, didn’t you?”

  “Guess I did, at that. Put a dent about the size of a freight engine in my pocketbook.”

  The Irishman suddenly remembered the package he’d brought along and thrust it out. “Here. What with it being your birthday and all, I figured you was due a bonus.”

  “Aw, hell, Mike. You didn’t have to buy me nothin’.”

  The sparkle in the kid’s eyes belied his words, and it was all he could do to keep from ripping the package open. Setting it on the dresser, he forced himself to slowly untie the cord and peel back the wrapping paper. Then he removed the box top and his jaw popped open in astonishment.

  “Hoooly Moses!”

  Inside was a Colt Navy with a gunbelt and holster.

  Kinch just stood there, mesmerized by the walnut grips and blued steel and the smell of new leather. After a while McCluskie chuckled and gave him a nudge. “Go ahead, try it on. It’s not new, you understand, but she shoots as good as mine. I tried’er out this afternoon.”

  The boy pulled the rig out of the box as if it were dipped in gold and buckled it around his hips. It fitted perfectly, and he knew without asking that McCluskie had had it special made. There wasn’t a store-bought gunbelt the near side of Kingdom Come that wouldn’t have swallowed his skinny rump.

  The Irishman took his shoulders and positioned him in front of the mirror. “Take a gander at yourself, bud. Don’t hardly look like the same fellow, does it?”

  Kinch just stared at the reflection in the mirror, dumfounded somehow by the stranger who stared back.

  McCluskie grinned. “Much more and you’ll bore a hole clean through that lookin’ glass. C’mon, say something.”

  The kid’s arm moved and they were both staring down the large black hole of the Colt’s snout. The youthful face in the mirror laughed, eyes shining brightly. “D’ya see it?”