Chapter Twenty
Rusty, he was so busted up that I tried to rally him some.
“Rusty, my ma always said, sometimes opportunity’s staring you in the face and you’re not seeing it.”
“I’m tired of you and your ma,” he said. “Leave me alone.”
We were hiking along the midway, watching the last of the visitors as the evening wore on. If Doubtful wasn’t earning much, the carnival would soon pull up stakes and head for the next town. Doubtful wasn’t much of a place, and I wondered if the carny show would stay more than two or three days.
“While this outfit’s here, you got a fine chance to woo the blonde twins,” I said. “You got a real good chance to change their minds. You fetch Riley, and you go back to their wagon, and tell them that you want to be a family, and live right here.”
Rusty sure was quiet.
“You’re on your own,” I said. “I’m looking into this outfit. Some of the things Heliotrope Pike said, they don’t add up. Like buying the blonde bombshell act from a booking agent in the Ukraine, and then showing us a letter from the gals’ ma that was supposed to be a contract. Like taking them gals off the stage at gunpoint, when they could have just as easy left the stagecoach at any stop and joined the show. There’s something not fitting together here, and I’m going to be finding out what it is. I’ll do that tomorrow, and you go visit the ladies, and get to know them.”
Rusty grinned suddenly. “Sure, sheriff,” he said.
He’d never called me that before. I sure was wondering what was cooking in his noggin.
He picked up Riley from Belle, who wakened the boy, and wrapped him in a blanket, and sent him into the evening. Me, I should have climbed up the stairs, but I was restless.
There was a show in town, and a lot of folks in Doubtful who depended on me for their safety. Shows could make me itchy; this one did. I hiked over to courthouse square, and the jail, collected a sawed-off scattergun, and headed into Wyoming Street, if only to rattle doors and make sure folks were locked up tight for the night. The carnival had quit, too, and was real quiet and dark down on the creek.
There was no one on duty at nights. The Puma County supervisors told me there was no money to give me a night man. So anyone who wanted the law, they had to come fetch me at Belle’s. Late at night, that was burglar time; evenings, that was bar brawl time. Days, a little of anything. I started patrolling the business places, rattling doors, peering through windows, but it was real quiet. I thought of all them people safe in their beds, pretty certain nothing real bad would visit them in the night. I was all there was that stood between them and trouble. That’s what I was paid to do, and what I was sworn to do. Upholding the law was mostly keeping folks safe and keeping their property safe.
It sure was quiet around town. I drifted over to Saloon Row, but most of the joints had folded up. They didn’t like shows coming in; they wanted the cowboys and ranchers to unload their pay right there, at their big bars. The ladies of the night felt the same way. Road shows were competition. Outfits with a Little Egypt rolling her belly, well, the cowboys could get all that locally, and didn’t have to shell out dimes to see it on a midway.
But most of those places were sleeping, too. One place, Denver Sally’s, still had a red lantern bobbing on the breeze. That’s how it was. Cowboys, they got tired, and didn’t get laid after midnight. The girls got tired, too, all that hard work, and wanted their beauty sleep.
I didn’t see anyone busting windows or prying open doors, so I figured it was pretty peaceful over in the sporting precincts. But I still felt itchy, like something was bound to happen. My ma, she always said that the biggest things happened behind closed doors, and no one ever knew about them. Like a marriage that was outwardly real nice, and the folks seemed happy, might really be a brawl, or cruel, or rotten, behind closed doors, and no one would ever know how two people were doing their best to wreck each other.
Me, I didn’t have enough of a life to put behind closed doors. The only time I ever closed a door entire, was the outhouse. When I was doing my business, and studying the Monkey Ward catalogue before tearing off a page for use, that wasn’t public. The rest of me, I didn’t care one way or other. I thought to give one last look at the carny. Truth was, those folks were under my protection, too. They might be strangers, maybe crooks themselves, but I was sworn to look after the safety and property of anyone in my county, and that included every person in the carnival, and everything the carnival owned. If someone stole a horse from the carnival, it was my job to find that horse and throw the rustler in the pokey.
The carny people were asleep. Most of their wagons had roll-up canvas sides, and some slept in those, some slept outside. It sure was quiet. I worked along the midway, until a couple of big dogs circled me and growled. Carny dogs. They stopped a few feet away and waited. They seemed to be sending me a message: steer clear of the camp. They’d either set up a racket, or come at me with a lot of big white teeth shining in the moonlight. I eased away, and they let me go. They were the sentries, and that’s all the carny folk needed to keep an eye on things. They didn’t need some country boy like me keeping an eye on them, or the camp.
Tough people, carny folk.
I itched to go on in there, wake up Heliotrope Pike, and get some answers about them Siamese twins from the Ukraine. His story didn’t make sense. But tomorrow was another day, so I eased back from the camp, turned toward the creek, and wandered into their herd, which was artfully contained in a rope corral that employed wagons where there weren’t trees to hold up the rope. Not that a rope would hold anything, but these mules and horses weren’t going anywhere. They eyed me, ears up, as I drifted in. It was quiet there, too. All I heard was the purl of Doubtful Creek. The animals stirred slightly, and began a gentle rotation. They looked pretty thin; Pike used them hard. But at least they got vacations between each haul.
Some were eyeing me, and some were staring down the creek some, and that always is a sign. So I watched, too. A quarter moon didn’t shed much light, and the bottoms were blurred and bleak, but finally I saw what them horses did. Something was moving along the creek. That’s about all I could make out. Maybe it was a critter, like a catamount or a coyote, or maybe not so big. But I just stood in the quiet and studied on it, letting nature take its course.
Whatever it was, it edged forward slowly, half afraid. I studied on it, not making sense of what I saw until it was closer, and then I realized it was a person, and he was carrying a bindle stick, and he was a bindle stiff. A tramp. A small tramp, this time. Them hoboes, they put all their possessions into a bandanna or sometimes a piece of canvas, and tied it up and hung it from a pole, or stick, and carried the stick over their shoulder. That was a hobo suitcase: a stick over the shoulder with a bag hanging from it. It was the easiest way to carry a few things. And the cheapest.
This here puny hobo, he seemed a little itchy, sort of walking ahead some, quitting to look around, and then walking some more. He got to the rope corral, edged under the rope, but kept to the creek bank, as if all them mules and broncs weren’t there, and he simply headed up the creek.
That’s about when I got the oddest feeling. I knew that walk. That was a boy’s walk, both cocky and scared at the same time. I’d seen that walk.
“Going somewhere?” I asked.
The boy, he turned, stared hard, knew I could catch him, and seemed to deflate there.
“Nice night for a hike, Riley. Mind if I walk along?”
“Leave me alone,” he said.
“Heading out, are you?”
“I don’t like it here.”
“I’ll walk with you, boy. We’ll go where you’re going.”
“You’d let me?”
“Unless you want to go sit on that cottonwood log yonder.”
The boy headed for the log, propped his bindle stick on it, and sat. “You gonna take me back?”
“I don’t know. You want to quit us?”
“Yeah. I don’t have anyone.”
“You got a little food?”
“Cookies.”
“Guess I’ll have to rustle up more than that. You got some extra shoes?”
Riley shook his head.
“Peaceful night,” I said. “Summer’s always fine, except when it rains. Trees are all leafed out, there’s berries on the bushes, at least in July and August, and lots of hills and valleys to look at. Wild animals, too. Used to be buffalo through here, but they got shot away. Now it’s mostly ranches, lots of steers, and a few horses.”
“It was better wild,” Riley said.
“Some ways, yes, but it took a good shot to keep one’s belly full.”
“No, it was nicer when there wasn’t anyone. That’s what I think.”
“Lot of people think that, too. I don’t. I like a place where I’m safe and I can earn a living.”
“You gonna let me go now?”
“How’d you get that name, Riley?”
“My pa, he was a sergeant.”
“But the name. Where did it come from?”
“At Fort Riley. But he quit my ma, and I never seen him. Then she went East, and couldn’t take care of me, and I got put on the orphan train.”
“You named after a soldier post? I like that.”
“It’s a bad name. No one else is named Riley.”
“That’s what’s good about it. Gives you the edge in life.”
“Can I go now?”
“You unhappy with Rusty and Belle and me?”
“I don’t belong to anyone.”
“Maybe you got it backwards, Riley. Do we belong to you?”
The boy was puzzled. “Why should you belong to me?”
“You got to want us, Riley. All along, we’ve been hoping you’d adopt us. But you ain’t done it yet, and we’re pretty blue.”
“Adopt you?”
“Yeah, Belle, she’s just hoping you’ll adopt her; Rusty, he’d like nothing better than to be adopted. Me, I’ll be an uncle if you’ll adopt me.”
He sat quietly on that log, and I let him. Me, I don’t know nothing about boys, not having been one in years, but I figured if he sat there on the log long enough, he might adopt all three of us. And I wasn’t far off the mark.
I pulled out my jackknife and started whittling a stick.
“I’m tired, Cotton,” he said. He picked up his bindle stick and started home.