Chapter Thirteen
Next morning, I ran into the Puma County supervisor, Reggie Thimble, and he started jacking my hand like it was a pump handle.
“Well, ya finally caught some crook,” he said. “I was beginning to think the county didn’t have a lick of crime in it.”
I sure didn’t know how to answer that one. So I told him the straight truth of it. “Reggie, it wasn’t me. Zimmer simply caught himself. He got himself into a real bind. If he’d shot me and Rusty, especially for a few miserable dollars, his show would be ruined and all them people in his outfit would scatter, so he decided to face the music and come in and get her done with.”
“That’s not what I heard, sheriff. I heard you singlehandedly captured the whole evil lot and brought the ringleader back here to face Hanging Judge Earwig.”
“I hope Rusty ain’t spreading that manure,” I said.
“What’s this about him adopting one of those orphans?”
“Riley, yes. He nabbed one, mostly because I pushed him into it.”
“Well, fire him. You can’t have a deputy running around with some orphan he latched on to.”
“We got it all fixed,” I said. “Belle, she’s gone catawampus over Riley, and Rusty’s gonna have a tough time prying the boy loose now and then and give him a little fathering.”
“Belle must have lost her marbles,” he said.
Reggie didn’t much care for it, but he didn’t have any real comeback, so he just growled a little about duty and loyalty, and don’t charge the county for anything not right, and stalked off.
But all that morning people came roaring up to me, shaking my worn-out paw, telling me how glad they were that I’d brought the archfiend Zimmer to justice. I spent the whole day, pretty near, explaining that Zimmer marched himself in, that all I did was stare into the muzzles of two twelve-gauge shotguns loaded with buckshot, and I didn’t much care for it, preferring that someone else stare into the muzzle of my shotgun. But that’s life for you. They made a hero out of me when all I did was try to stay alive.
At least, I wasn’t likely to be fired. Most days around Doubtful, some leading citizen or official was planning to evict me from my sheriff office, and hire someone more to his liking. But I managed to hang on, one way or another. My ma, she always said just live a day at a time and keep plenty of corncobs in the outhouse. I prefer cobs to Monkey Ward.
A couple of days later, a tent preacher came in, with his own show, and set up shop right where Zimmer’s Medicine Show was playing. He put up a big, worn canvas tent, and a sort of pulpit he could thump with his fish-belly-white fist. This feller, Mr. Elwood Grosbeak, was a sinner-collector. And a first-rate pulpit-thumper. He was looking for sinners under every bush, and inviting them over there to hear all about their evil ways. And he had other things to talk about, too. He said the world would come to an end in three weeks, before sundown, May 28, and woe to anyone who wasn’t real prepared. That sure scared the crap out of a lot of people. But there wasn’t any crime emanating from his shabby tent, so I just stayed away. Mostly, he was attracting townspeople; I hardly saw a cowboy off the ranches anywhere near. They were too busy looking after the crop of new calves to worry much about the world coming to a halt or all the elect sailing off into the wild blue heavens, never to be seen again, at least on earth.
But a teamster down from Douglas told me that Grosbeak had been pulpit-thumping up there, only he told those folks the world would end on May 1, and that had scared the dickens out of some. Come May 1, and Grosbeak was nowhere to be found there, and the sun came up and the sun set, and all that happened was that Grosbeak had cleaned Douglas out of about four hundred smackerinos, before rolling into Doubtful. Now that was an interesting scenario. I sort of wondered if it was proper to scare the hell out of people and run off with their cash.
I asked Lawyer Stokes, who doubled as county attorney when Puma County gave him some business, whether Grosbeak was doing stuff illegal, and he said let it alone. So Grosbeak was holding his camp meetings each night, and hammering his pulpit, and saying May 28 would be the last day on earth, and scaring the crap out of some folks around town. And they were filling the collection plate he passed around in the middle of all this.
I don’t take kindly to it when I see the people I try to protect being fleeced, and I didn’t have much of any notion how to slow it all down. I stopped in at the Last Chance Saloon, where my friend Sammy Upward tended bar, and asked him what he planned on Doomsday and he said he was handing out free drink tokens that could be redeemed the evening of May 28 after the sun set. I told him about the deal up in Douglas, and he enjoyed that, and said he’d maybe he’d invite Grosbeak to the Last Chance to deliver his tub-thumper right there in the barroom and entertain the cowboys at the finish line.
Well, the whole idea just bloomed, and pretty soon all the saloons in Doubtful were passing out tokens for a free drink on May 28, after the sun set. Barney’s Beanery got into the act, and offered a free breakfast to survivors who were still around the next morning. And then the madams got into it, and offered one free lay between midnight, May 28, and dawn the next morning. That sure got the cowboys interested.
Rusty, he had the best idea. “We’ll offer one free hanging at dawn, May 29, and we’ll announce a ballot to select who gets to enjoy the noose. Now if the world ends on the twenty-eighth, like the man says, no one gets hanged.”
“I got an idea, Rusty. We’ll invite Grosbeak to stand there with a noose. If he’s right, he’ll vanish into the heavens. If he’s wrong, he gets hanged.”
Rusty, he whistled. That was Rusty for you. When he really liked an idea he didn’t just say so, he whistled. And now he was chirping like a canary.
That sure was good scheme, all right, and I was wondering how I could pull it off. There were a few in Doubtful that deserved a good hanging, but getting them up on the gallows would take some doing. Getting Grosbeak up there might be a lot easier. If he believed in what he was talking about, he’d gladly step right into that noose.
I decided it was time for a little talk with Elwood Grosbeak. He was staying at the Wyoming Hotel. It wasn’t much of a hotel, but it was the best in town. His six staff people, I don’t know where they were staying. There were rooms for rent over most of the saloons and likely they were parked in those. Sometimes a visitor could arrange a room at a cathouse.
They had a little dining room there in the hotel, so I tried that first. Sure enough, he was sipping java in there. He was a formidable man, with hair slicked back with goose grease, and a fresh white shirt, and one of them huge cravats, red paisley, and a pretty nice suit coat and britches with a knife-edged crease in them. He didn’t wear that stuff in his revival tent, but just a plain gray outfit. The first thing you notice about him was his eyes, big and burning, and lips that seemed to mock even when he wasn’t saying a word.
He saw my star, and rose at once.
“Sheriff Pickens, I believe?”
“You got her,” I said.
“What brings you to my table, sir?”
“Well, there’s fellas around here who don’t think the world’s coming to an end, and they’re getting up some entertainments to celebrate when nothing happens and it’s time for a drink.”
“There’s always skeptics,” he said. “I deal with them regularly. They don’t grasp my message, which is not that the earth beneath our feet will vanish, but that the elect will be whisked away to their eternal reward. One hour you see us; the next hour, we’re gone. The lady down the street has vanished. The man you called a friend is departed. The child you watched grow up has gone away. That’s the story, sir, and that’s what I preach.”
“Yeah, well, are you going up the golden stairs?”
“If I am called, and I am sure I will be, I’ll be gone. Do not look for me on this earth on May the twenty-ninth, because I will have joined the angels, and the seraphim and cherubim.”
“What are those? You got me there.”
“It’s too long to explain, sir, but call them helpers. They are assistants in heaven.”
“Well, Rusty—he’s my deputy—he has a dandy idea. The sheriff office wants to join this here party, and what we propose is to put up our gallows, and have you volunteer for a hanging on May 29. Comes dawn and you’re still around, you get hanged. If you got taken up, there’s only an empty noose dangling in the sunlight of a new day.”
That sure took him aback. He stared with the smoldering eyes until I felt a little put upon.
“You mock me, you mock my beliefs, you laugh at the powers above.”
“Well, my ma used to say, put your money where your mouth is. She also used to say, actions speak louder than words. You want to prove your beliefs? You can come to the necktie party. Your very own party.”
“I am speechless, Pickens, absolutely speechless. You should be recalled or fired.”
“Seems like a good idea, this gallows party. Think what it gets you. A mess of believers everywhere.”
“You forget, sir, I am a man of the cloth, a prophet, and you must not insult anyone who’s been set apart to bring people the good word.”
“Well, they tell me up in Douglas, you collected about four hundred dollars before you vamoosed in the night, on May 1, and now you’re here, and the greenbacks are landing in your collection plate, and I just was sort of wondering if we’d see your outfit on May twenty-ninth. If you all are on your way to heaven, I guess you’d leave behind your tent and wagon, right?”
“Are you done insulting me, sir?”
“I ain’t very good at it, but I am getting better, the longer I’m in office. Maybe, before they fire me, as they’re fixing to do, I’ll get real good at insulting. You could prime me a little.”
Grosbeak, he just glared, and seemed to shut me out. It was like he was no longer sitting there eating his eggs Benedict, oatmeal, tea, toast, and strips of bacon.
“Where are you going next?” I asked.
“What business is it of yours, sheriff?”
That was as much a confession as I needed, I figured.
“I got a saloonkeeper friend, Sammy Upward. He says he’s having a big End of the World fiesta the afternoon of May 29, and you’re invited. He’s giving out tokens for free drinks, and says you’ll get one. He says you can come on in, and spread the word, and he’s got a whole bar full of cowboys waiting to listen to the whole mess. You gonna come on in?”
But Grosbeak, he was methodically eating and ignoring me, and I saw how it’d go.
“You got many of the town’s ladies going out there in the afternoons? They laying out a lot of quarters and dollars to get themselves in good shape to be hauled up to heaven?”
He ignored me.
“If I was you, Reverend, I’d think about giving all that cash back, or donating it to the Doubtful Chamber of Commerce. They could always use a little infusion.”
“You are a crass materialist, sheriff. You haven’t the faintest notion of spiritual matters.”
“Well, my ma used to say, being spiritual is what you do if there’s money left over after paying your bills. I’m thinking, Mr. Grosbeak, maybe you should pull up stakes and get on the road, just as fast as you can, before someone gets his neck broke.”