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“Life is short. Isn’t that right, Harvey?” Longabaugh said, clinking Logan’s mug.
“Who did she claim did it?” Logan asked.
“Who burned her?”
“That’s what I said.”
“That would be you, Mr. Logan.”
Logan’s gaze wandered up the wall, his eyelids fluttering.
“She said you were drunk.”
“Drunk or not, I didn’t do it. If I did, I’d tell you. Then one or both of us would probably commit a rash act. But I don’t get in gunfights over a damn lie.”
“Believe what he says, Mr. Holland. Harvey keeps the lines simple. With Harvey, what you see and hear is what you get.”
Hackberry searched the faces of both men, the clicking of the faro wheel growing louder inside his head. Neither man blinked.
“If you’re holding something under the table, it had better be your dick,” Logan said.
“I’m afraid you’re a little late, partner. There’s a .44 Army Colt pointed at your scrotum. I cut an ‘X’ in the nose of each round in the chambers. It makes an exit hole the size of a plug in a watermelon.”
For just a moment Logan and Longabaugh seemed frozen inside a sepia-tinted photograph, their affectation of modernity a poor anodyne for the shabbiness of their lives. Hackberry waited for a tic in one of their faces, the movement of a finger on top of the felt, the flex of a jawbone, a quiver around one eye. The faro wheel stopped; the moment passed.
Hackberry raised his hands above the table and pointed his index fingers at the two men and cocked his thumbs. “Had you going.”
“You think that’s cute?” Logan said.
“You wet your pants?”
“Fuck you I did,” Logan said.
“Your language is unseemly, Mr. Logan.”
“Look up on the balcony,” Logan said. “See the woman on the end? That’s my wife. One signal from me and she’d stuff a porcupine up your ass. Or put a cupful of bird shot in the back of your head, whichever you prefer.”
The woman upstairs pulled up her dress, exposing her bloomers and a cut-down single-barrel .410 shotgun strapped to her thigh. She smiled.
“Harvey doesn’t mean anything,” Longabaugh said, resting his hand on Logan’s forearm. “We’re not armed. Tell Maggie I hold her in the highest regard. She was always a charmer.”
“Tell her I said she’s a snake and a lying whore and full-time bitch on top of it,” Logan said. “There’s nothing wrong with her a bullet in the mouth wouldn’t cure.”
“See you down the road,” Hackberry said.
“You’d better pray you don’t,” Logan said.
Hackberry heard someone laugh behind him. He got up from the table and slung his saddlebags on his shoulder and drank his beer mug empty, then set it on the bar and walked out of the saloon into the street, trying to pretend he had not made a fool of himself and been bested by a homicidal moron.
The woman he lived and slept with was a manipulator. The only joy he could take from his situation was that he was no longer in her debt. Whether the court granted him a divorce or not, his moral obligation was over. He went to the telegrapher’s window at the train station and sent the following message to Ruby Dansen:
We can be a family again full-time. Say yes and I will be there. Love to you and that little fellow,
Big Bud
The only problem he had now was a level of thirst normal people would never understand. A brush fire raged and withered into ash. A thirst for whiskey did not. The rain was spinning like glass out of the sky. He went into the middle of the street and began turning in a circle, his arms stuck out by his sides, his face lifted to the clouds, his mouth wide. The calliope was still playing, although its operator was nowhere in sight. Hackberry knew an ocean of beer and Jack Daniel’s would never quench the flame inside him. But a man could try.
HE WOKE UNDER a freight wagon. The rain had stopped and was dripping off the eaves of the shacks that lined the alleyway where he had passed out. His gold watch was still in his pocket, his saddlebags in a puddle of water, his .44 in his hand. He rotated the cylinder and counted the rounds in the chambers. None of them had been fired. He opened the cover on his watch and looked at the time. Only five hours had elapsed since he’d confronted Longabaugh and Logan. The calliope was still playing, the lights burning in several buildings along the street. A man wearing rubber pants and suspenders and a long-sleeved striped shirt, his hair parted down the middle, came out of a saloon’s back door, his arm around a Mexican girl. “You gonna make it, sailor?” he said.
