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Sands of Sedona
Copyright 1982-2003 TrixiePixGraphics
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Sands of Sedona -- Western Fiction
Approx. 67962 Words
Chapter Four
Nothing interesting had presented itself to John in Paydirt since he'd arrived. He had seen only a couple of fist fights, and no gunplay whatever. He had not been subjected to violence of any kind, but neither had he made any progress in his quest. No one had confronted him directly, though some of the men had given him hard looks. He was accustomed to hard looks. Some western men were naturally confrontational; it didn't matter if you had a history with them or not. Sometimes it was just their way, to put on a hard look when they got up in the morning, in hopes someone would challenge it during the day. Sometimes someone did.
John calculated that three kinds of men came west. One breed consisted of the folks who were too dishonest, too underhanded, too sneaky and backward and dumb to be comfortable in the established societies of the East or in their crowded homelands, overseas. The organized societies threatened the slippery types, because the law prevailed, at least to some degree. It was hard to act like a wild animal in a place that was so crowded that anyone could see you and most everything you did. Those men had been forced to the West, consciously or unconsciously, in hopes of finding a place where life was easier. They didn't understand that life, for them, would never be easy, no matter where they went or how far into the wilderness they crawled.
Another kind of man that was driven west was the sort who was too honest, too honorable, too straightforward, too stand-up and forthright and decent to flourish in the Eastern societies, for those places and those people disgusted him with their moral impotence, their greed, their inherent, sneaky corruption, their smarm and their glaring, shameless vanity.
Some of these men became good Westerners, and some became bad Westerners. At least they became Westerners.
It was the third variety of pilgrim that perhaps nauseated John the most. It consisted of the Easterners who would always be Easterners, no matter how far west they went and no matter how many generations they spawned there. It was a broad, creeping contempt he felt, and it was based on an ever-growing prevalence in the West of helplessness and ineptitude and silliness and a general, systemic, overwhelming miscalculation of reality by Easterners who should never have fancied to become Westerners. John blamed the railroads for the incursion of witless city folks. Some called them slickers. Some called them dudes.
It was the third class of people that the first two were hoping to find some relief from. But it was not to be.
In the West, the three classes of men clashed on a daily basis. Sometimes the West taught an inferior man to become something more. Sometimes the West took a decent, strong and good man, and chipped away at his sensibilities until he became something crude and unrecognizable, even to himself.
As for the dudes, in the early days of the West they either learned fast or were chewed up and spit out and no one much noted their misfortune. The West was a hard place, full of people that were often hard to understand. The opportunities to be exceptionally good or unspeakably bad were equal; few objected no matter which path a man chose. A man had to learn to find rewards in his own satisfactions. Helplessness was the only consistently fatal flaw that a man in the West could have.
When the numbers of Easterners finally grew in the West, however, and the dudes gained a foothold, they struggled relentlessly to build a society that embraced all the shortcomings they'd sought so earnestly to escape in the East. Once they'd rebuilt it, they recoiled from it again.
It was often hard to tell the good men from the bad, the Westerners from the Dudes, the uninformed from the stupid, the helpless from the witless.
John pursued four men that he knew of. Four men had been seen riding toward his ranch, and four were seen riding away. At about the same time, his ranch, in his absence, was burned, his wife raped and killed, his two girls, eight and eleven, also raped and killed, and his stock, eighty-four head of well cared for beeves, were slaughtered and left to rot. The killers had insulted him even more profoundly by hanging his dog.
He had left Fi Fi to protect his family, but in all fairness she was not a reliable watchdog. John had named the dog Fi Fi because he disliked the type of folk who kept half a dozen mean dogs around, with names like Killer or Butch. He had named his big dog Fi Fi to show folks that he wasn't the kind of person who would name a big dog Butch. She was about eighty pounds, and her size had the cursory effect of scaring off those who were not really bent on any particular misdeed. In reality, however, Fi Fi was ineffectual. She often became so scared in the night that even though her mouth worked up and down like a fish out of water, she was too flustered to bark. That had probably been her fatal mistake, for she had been skinned and hung by the neck from a tree near the smoldering remains of the house. My God, John thought; what kind of men would skin and hang a dog...
Joe Hillary had been one of the four men. His reputation was known through several territories as a murderer and worse. Folks had seen him riding away from the ranch that night, and they'd seen the dull, orange glow on the horizon that was John's ranch burning.
On that rainy night up on the hogback, five months later, John asked him to describe his part in the affair, but Joe had just stood there, refusing to speak, looking at the ground. It seemed as though he wanted to say something, but he didn't. Perhaps, John thought, Joe was afraid of making things worse by talking. If he said nothing at all, it would leave some doubt in John's mind. John had become enraged and commanded him to deny his part in the killings. Joe continued to stand and say nothing. John hit him in the face to be sure he had his attention. Joe went down, then got slowly up again, but again refused to speak. He refused to speak of it to the end. Joe Hillary never revealed the identity of the other three, either. He just died.
John had a hunch about Erin, the deputy in Paydirt. He had seen the way Erin looked at his wife once, a year before her death. The deputy stopped to water his horse in John's little town of Walker. It was a look that made John sit up and take notice. It was a dark, hungry look. Wendy, John's wife, hadn't noticed, and John never mentioned it to her. Perhaps he should have. Perhaps she would have been better prepared when Joe and the deputy and his friends came calling.
John had tried to the point of exasperation to educate his wife in the ways of hard western outlaws and tricky men. She resolutely refused to see the bad in anyone. Likely, John thought, that was why she'd stayed with him.
Erin had now tipped his hand. It was John's good fortune to return to the window at the Sheriff's office the first morning he arrived in Paydirt. The piece of Ivory grip John found in the ashes of his ranch house exactly fit the broken grip of the gun the deputy kept hidden in a rag in a locker. Now there was no question; the deputy was involved. Perhaps the deputy had been with his wife, or even his young daughters. Perhaps the deputy had even been the one to kill them. John realized that his body was stiff with hatred; his heart was pounding; his fists were clenched as tightly as his teeth. It took every ounce of self control he could muster to refrain from walking into the Sheriff's office and gunning down the deputy. The deputy was a weasel. He would be easy to gun down. John would even give him a chance...
He had promised himself, however, that he wouldn't make the same mistake he'd made with Joe. He had killed Joe too soon, and consequently had killed his only real lead. He should have kept Joe alive awhile longer, he thought. Perhaps he could have tortured him for the names. He should have tortured him. It was in him to do it. More than that was in him to do.
Had he not followed his hunch with Erin, John did not know what he would have done. Now, however, his purpose in life was renewed. He called it justice. Since no good or legal form of justice resided in the territory, he would adopt his own version and implement it as he saw fit. A man not so riled might have called it revenge.
There were altogether too many outlaws in the territory. John had known that when he decided to settle on the high plateau two years before, near the village of Walker, three days ride from Paydirt. He figured he could handle the trouble. Besides, two friends also had plans to start up some sheep less than a mile from his house. They were solid families, the Moores and the Nodells. He had a sense that more good folks would move in, in time, and that he would only have to endure the wildness for a while. In a year or two, he thought, the bad men in the area would get the word and move on to easier hunting grounds. But he had been mistaken and he had underestimated the evil and the backwardness that prevailed in New Mexico. He would not be caught lacking again.
John finally took up a somewhat prominent residence in the Mermaid Hotel, reasoning that if anyone had a notion to try and kill him, he wanted them to have their chance. Besides, he was tired of his grass bed, and he was allergic to the local grass anyway. He'd become soft after settling down with Wendy. He'd grown accustomed to soft beds and softer skin, regular meals and sleeping indoors.
Wendy had insisted on an indoor bathtub. It was a wood frame affair, lined with canvas. John was commanded to leave the cabin when Wendy took a bath, for the canvas bathtub was dragged out and set up in the middle of the main room. She said it was her one opportunity to have a little privacy in life, though John did not consider it very private when the girls got to stay. He suspected, rather, that Wendy simply didn't want the girls to see him see her naked, even though he saw her naked every night, and sometimes in the daytime.
The girls stayed to pour hot water from a pot that was heated on the stove. Cold water was readily available; John had piped it in from a spring on the hill behind the house. His was one of the few homes in the valley to sport such luxury. Most hauled water in wagons from town.
He had moved his family to Walker when his mother left him the property. In reality, it wasn't as homey a place as he and Wendy had down by the Rio Grande, but his mother had left the Walker place to him, and rather than sell it to strangers, something made him decide to relocate. He sold his old ranch and it brought a good price. He regretted selling it and moving to Walker, but it was done. He lived with it. It was a good enough home for Wendy and the two girls.
He and Wendy had given birth to three children in truth. The third, a little boy named Kevin, was never spoken of. He was three when they lost him. Still, he lived in their hearts. John tried to console Wendy at the time of the boy's death by reassuring her that it was not as if they would never see him again. Sooner or later, he told her, they would both be going to wherever little Kevin was, and he would be waiting for them. At that Wendy broke down, and John was never sure if he had helped her or hurt her more deeply.
Kevin had been playing in the garden one day. Wendy checked on him often; the yard was fenced and Fi Fi was on guard. In the daytime the big dog generally barked when there was danger. She was much braver in the daytime.
Kevin came into the house crying, and Wendy picked him up. His hands were swollen. She assumed he'd gotten into a plant or some stickers. She brushed them off and kissed them and told him not to cry-- it would be okay. As she kissed his hands something about the scratches disturbed her. She examined them more closely.
"What have you been playing with?" She asked him cautiously.
Kevin looked at his hands and between sobs he said, "Worms Mommy."
The realization struck Wendy's soul. Screaming, she carried Kevin from the house to the barn where John was repairing a stall.
"Look!" She shrieked.
John examined his son's hands and without another word threw a saddle onto his horse. He scooped little Kevin up in one arm and bolted from the barn. He reached the doctor an hour later, but already the boy was deathly ill. They lost him early the next morning.
John returned to the ranch grim faced. He spoke to no one. He found the rattlesnake den, teeming with wriggling babies, and he soaked them with coal oil. Then he lit them. The blaze nearly cost him his house, for he continued to pour oil on them even after the snakes had long since burned to hell. Once he was finally out of kerosene he'd had to work hard to control the blaze as it burned his fences and several sheds.
For a long time afterward he killed every snake he saw, even riding miles out of his way to neighboring ranches where he'd heard someone had seen one. After a while his killing slowed, until he only killed those that were in his vicinity. After a while more, he killed only those who were a direct threat. The relent had not been entirely his idea-- Wendy asked it of him.
After the loss of his boy he wondered if he should have stayed on the old place, down on the Rio Grande. After the loss of his family, he was sure of it, even though it had its share of outlaws and rattlesnakes too.
He had never been close to his mother-- barely respected her. Still, she was his mother, and some misguided sense of family obligation had compelled him to move to Walker and take over her property. It had been a mistake. He was tired of making mistakes.
John planned to give Paydirt a few more days to provide him a clue. If not, he would kidnap the deputy, and torture him until he revealed the names of those who had helped in the atrocity against his family. Then he would kill him, but not like Joe; this time it would be slower and infinitely more painful. John knew many forms of Indian torture. He had heard of them or seen them done-- he'd never practiced them himself, but he knew he could, when it came time. He planned to use them all.
Next Chapter
Sands of Sedona, Chap 1
Sands of Sedona, Chap 2
Sands of Sedona, Chap 3
Sands of Sedona, Chap 4
Sands of Sedona, Chap 5
Sands of Sedona, Chap 6
Sands of Sedona, Chap 7
Sands of Sedona, Chap 8
Sands of Sedona, Chap 9
Sands of Sedona, Chap 10
Sands of Sedona, Chap 11
Sands of Sedona, Chap 12