~~The Time
In Between
Summary:
A prequel to my story, “After the Gallows.” Contains spoilers for the episode “The
Gallows.”
If you only ever watch one episode of Gunsmoke, watch that one.
If you only ever watch one episode of Gunsmoke, watch that one.
A/N: As usual, I’m too vain to let
anyone edit my writing. All my fubars
are belong to me.
~~~
After
leaving Pruit Dover to hang, I stayed off the roads between Hays and Dodge City. I faded into the brittle, bleached prairie
grass, angry and hung over, my insides aching from grief and cheap
whiskey, unsure if I was going back to Dodge or turning south to break for Mexico
or the Texas coast, where I would live among the fishermen and forget this dry,
hard land.
Of all
things evil in the world, there are few things worse than injustice. Pruit Dover held me blameless for the
terrible iniquity perpetrated upon him but I could not be absolved for my part
in it. My penance was to share the last
hours of life with this vibrant, good
boy and then to watch him die.
On the way to Hays, he rode ahead of me, singing
a made-up cowpoke song, his hat pulled low on his forehead, the breeze parting the
sun-kissed hair that curled on the back of his neck. I followed behind, on my pale horse.
I sat
with Pruit the night before his execution. I brought him a good steak, cob corn
and roasted potatoes. I stayed and took
the meal with him; or rather, I watched him eat. Dover ate with the gusto of a
hungry child. I had no appetite. As I watched him plow through his supper, I noticed
again his good table manners. He ate
quickly but he chewed carefully and swallowed the food in his mouth before
talking. He used his napkin like a
gentleman. I felt a rush of sadness and looked away,
swallowing past a lump in my throat.
During
the three weeks he waited for trial in Dodge, I discovered that Pruit loved to
read. I brought him David Copperfield and watched the expression on his face go from
wonder to delight to fierce concentration.
He talked about the characters as if they were real people and felt so
bad for Pip, that he couldn't finish reading Great Expectations. A French clergyman who worked for the War
Department kept a large collection of books that he and his son didn't mind
lending. I escorted Pruit there every couple of days. It was the War Department office
but everyone called it the library. We’d linger there, drinking coffee. Pruit listened with wide eyes as Father
Lemieux told stories of the places he’d traveled as a missionary, many of which
were in the books Pruit read. I left him in the care of the pastor more than
once when I had errands to run. I couldn't bear to leave him locked
up. When I was in the office, I kept his
cell door open – even while I slept.
To feel
too kindly toward a prisoner is never a good idea. Men are tricky. Someone you thought was innocent would then
turn at trial and confess to worse crimes than what they were being tried for.
Dover was different. I knew down to my bones that he was innocent -- and
I liked him. We all did. Kitty really took to him – hugging on him, bringing
him sweets and kissing his cheeks. Pruit
would duck his head and grin, his ears burning bright red with pleased embarrassment.
I once brought him with me to share
Sunday dinner at the library. He emerged
from his cell with his threadbare shirt buttoned to the neck and his hair damp
from his vain attempts to tame it. He was quiet during the meal but during a
lull in the conversation he looked up from his plate.
“This is
nice,” he said. He smiled at each of us
-- Doc, Father Lemieux and his boy, Chester, Kitty and me. “I never had better than this. I never had no
family. You all are the closest I come.”
Usually,
my job ended at the foot of the gallows. I had no desire to see even the baddest of men
swing from a rope and I never stayed around for hangings. But I wanted to stay in the Hays City jail
with Pruit until the end -- as much for him as for myself.
After we
finished eating Pruit's last meal, I gathered our dishes to take back to the café. I rose to
leave, and panic flared briefly in Pruit’s eyes.
“I’m
taking these to the café then I’m going to get us a couple of bottles,” I said.
Pruit
bobbed his head and smiled. “I’m proud
to drink with you, Marshal,” he said.
As I
left the jail, it took every ounce of strength I had left in me not to smash my
fist into the smirking face of the low-rent deputy kicked back in the sheriff’s
chair with his feet on the desk. I
glanced back and saw Pruit watching me expectantly, his hands wrapped around
the cell bars. He was still standing there when I came back a half hour later.
Pruit
and I drank through the night, neither of us managing to get very drunk. I listened as he rambled on about a wide
range of subjects and told me long-winded stories of his adventures drifting,
laughing hard and slapping his thigh at his always horrible luck.
“You
know, Marshal, I always paid my debts first so I never had no dollar for a
saloon girl. I was finally going wet my whistle with some of that hundred dollars
Ax owed me. Just my luck. I never had
ice cream and I’ll die a virgin.”
“I’m
sorry Pruit," I said.
“Whew,”
he laughed. “I’m drunker than I thought.
I never told nobody that.”
“Your
secret’s safe with me.”
“Miss
Kitty’s your girl, ain't she?”
“Kitty’s
her own woman.”
He gazed
at me in silence, his eyes suddenly old and infinitely tired. “Nunc
est bibendum, nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus,” he said.
“Did the
padre teach you that?” I asked.
“Nope. Louie
Pheeters. It means, “Now is the time to
drink, now the time to dance footloose upon the earth.” Some guy named Horace said it. I think he was
a philosopher or a poet or something.”
“He was
both.”
“You have to grab life, Marshal. And hold tight.” He held up his hands and
squeezed his fists. “You find someone, you grab her hand and you take to the
sunlight, the two of you.” He reached
out and gripped my forearm. “Don’t be
alone. Promise me, Matt.”
“I’ll
try,” I said.
Pruit
leaned back and studied me with his head cocked. “I've been thinking,” he said.
“Oh?”
“That
Frenchman preacher’s boy don’t make me feel like he’s a boy.”
I
coughed on the sip of whiskey I was swallowing. “What are you looking at me for?”
He
grinned and pointed two fingers at me. “You’re of the same mind. I can tell.”
“Pruit
--.”
“Ah,” he
said, waving a hand. “I’m just hurrahing you.”
“That’s
a hell of a joke.”
He
poured us another shot. “Take to the
sunlight, Mr. Dillon,” he said.
He
drifted into to sleep at about four in the morning, laying his head on his
folded arms. His lashes made shadows on
his cheeks and I resisted the urge to smooth his hair from his forehead. I settled for resting my hand on his. After a moment, I gently gripped his fingers and
held his hand until he woke.
In the
end, I couldn’t watch Pruit die.
He stood
on the trap door beneath the noose and held my eyes for a long moment. He gave
me a brief nod then turned his gaze to the bright morning sky. I walked away but stopped when I heard him
drop.
I stood
in the middle of the street listening to the creak of the rope as Pruit Dover
swung in the dark belly of the gallows.
Back in
my hotel room, I gathered my things. I
folded Pruit’s short, thin jacket and put it and his battered felt hat in his
saddlebags. There was a book in the
bottom of one of the bags. It was a copy
of Great Expectations. On my
way out of Hays, I gave his horse to a scrawny boy lugging burlap sacks of wood
along the side of the road.
I stopped at a leaning shanty
of a saloon on the outskirts of town. Behind the building, Irish
and Mexican prostitutes sat on the steps of a row of tiny, door-less shacks
called cribs, where they serviced their customers. They hiked their skirts and cooed at me when
I tied my horse at the rail. I slipped
my badge into my pocket. My stomach was
sour from no food and last night’s whiskey but I ordered another bottle. I bought a couple of rounds for the house so
I could drink in peace and so no one would steal my horse. I don’t know how
long I was in that saloon and I lost count of the number of bottles of whiskey
I drank, but it was late morning when I went in and dark when I bought yet
another bottle and took it with me out back.
I had to
be drunk from all the whiskey and an empty stomach but I couldn't feel it. I couldn't feel anything. A dark, slender girl walked over and rubbed
her hand over my sex, murmuring in Spanish.
Another woman with red hair and a flattened nose gripped her bodice and
bared her breasts. The Mexican girl hooked
a finger in my waistband and gently pulled me to her crib. She knelt before me and began to unfasten my
belt. I stepped back and leaned out of
the doorway. I motioned to the redhead. She
laughed and sauntered over, her hair and eyes shining in the moonlight. I sat on a narrow bench built into the
wall while the dark-eyed girl finished
unfastening my pants. I watched her slide my cock into her mouth. The redhead sat next to me and wrapped her
hand around my shaft. She jacked me in rhythm with the other girl’s mouth.
“Ooh,”
she purred. “You’re big as a horse all over.”
The rest
of the night was a blur. Hours later,
the saloon keeper rousted me from the crib. The redhead was gone but the
dark-eyed woman sprawled naked across my body. The barkeep pulled her off me
and threw her dress at her. She stumbled
out, cursing. My cock was chafed. I hadn't even taken
off my gun belt.
The
barkeep gave me a crude grin. “You certainly
got your money’s worth,” he said.
My horse
had waited in front of the saloon for almost a day so I walked him for a mile
before I mounted. We turned off the road
into the prairie and I let the horse chose the direction.
I was in
the grips of an ague of self-pity but I didn’t care.
I
swigged from my canteen of stale water and rode until my horse found a creek in
a small stand of trees. The sun was high
but I made camp because I was too tired to go on. I unsaddled my horse and rubbed him down with
a handful of grass. I let him graze
while I built a fire and heated a can of beans.
I was bone weary but I slept in light, fitful snatches until the sun
went down. I lay awake all night and
broke camp well before dawn. I repeated this pattern for
the next couple of days, stopping to make camp only when my horse got tired. On the
third day, I realized that I was on the road to Dodge.
My dumb horse had brought
me home.
“Damn
you, Buck,” I muttered.
I stared toward Dodge for a long
time. I could see the lights of the
depot from where I was, just over a mile away.
I almost turned back. I turned instead, to the prairie again, where an
outcropping of rock perched on the crest of a hill and where I knew an
underground spring bubbled into a deep, clear pool hidden in the center of the
boulders. I would drink and bathe and
head into Dodge when the sun rose.
I
stripped and laid my filthy clothes across the rocks to let some air blow
through them. I stretched out on a flat boulder next to the pool. The rock was cool against my bare skin but
the breeze was warm. The stars swirled
in the sky and the world seemed to tilt beneath me. I felt weightless and safe,
the way I supposed a child would feel being rocked in his mother’s arms. Finally, I slept.
My eyes
fluttered open. A wild-haired Negro girl
wearing only loose, cut-off pantaloons stared down at me. She was spindly, almost painfully thin, with
incongruously full breasts perched high on her narrow chest. Her eyes were
large and grey – the color of smoke and gunmetal. I watched the expression in
those unusual eyes change from concern to compassion then to alarm when she finally
noticed that I was awake. She gasped,
rose to her toes and spun away.
I heard
Pruit Dover’s voice in my head.
My hand shot out, quick as a draw. I grabbed her ankle, yanked her off her feet and pinned her to the ground. I peered into her face.
My hand shot out, quick as a draw. I grabbed her ankle, yanked her off her feet and pinned her to the ground. I peered into her face.
“You’re
a girl,” I said.
~~End
girl6
10/12
