“BE MY EYE, DEAN,” he whispered into the blackness. “Tell me what you see, hear and feel. Show me the ville like I was looking at it myself.”
The boy leaned toward his father, his voice low, barely audible above the jingling of the harness and the clattering of the hooves on the packed dirt of the road into the ville.
“Poor place. Not as bad as some frontier pestholes, but still poor. Sacking over some windows. Shingles missing and doors hanging crooked in their frames. Bushes untrimmed in gardens. Nobody noticed us yet and Yeah, there’s a young girl who spotted us. Took awhile. We’re already well on past the first of the outlying houses. Almost in the heart of the ville.”
“What kind of state are these buildings in? The main structures?”
“Kind of falling down, just about repaired, Dad. Know what I mean?”
“Sure. Any sign of anyone carrying decent blasters around the place?”
Dean hesitated, and Ryan guessed that the boy was looking all around the slow-moving rig.
“Like Jak and J.B. said. One man closing on forty, with a beer gut, wearing a handblaster on his hip. From the shape of the butt I’d say it might be something like a real old Navy Colt. Another man’s got a long single-shot musket with a wire-bound stock slung over his shoulder.”
“They don’t seem all that surprised to see strangers,” Forde noted. “Not excited. Not scared. Not nothing at all. Sort of odd.”
“Some women coming out now, Dad.”
“Many?”
“Eight or nine of them. Clothes look well worn but clean. Ragged bottoms to skirts. Muddy shoes. Most long-haired. Look all right.”
Ryan heard the sound of a dog barking, but it was a halfhearted effort, quickly subsiding back into silence. It was the lack of noise that freaked him. Over the years he’d ridden into hundreds and hundreds of frontier villes, and there’d always been noise, sometimes welcoming and sometimes threatening.
But always noise.
He heard Forde reining in the team, bringing the wag to a swaying halt.
The man’s voice boomed out into the morning stillness. “This the way you welcome outlanders to Bramton?”
Doc was standing close by the canvas side of the rig, and Ryan heard him mutter, “Not so much as a bang as a whimper. Truth be told, there’s not much of a whimper, either.”
“We don’t see that many outlanders here in Bramton,” a man said. “Mebbe you’re right, and we’ve gotten out the way of being hospitable. But you’re welcome. All of you.”
“Thanks,” Forde replied. “Need stabling for the animals and some kind of hotel or boardinghouse for the rest of us. Point us in the right direction?”
“Surely. Livery’s down a ways on your right. Past the Clanton Corral. You’ll see the sign unless it’s fallen down again. Does that when it’s a mind to. Hotel’s called the Banbury. Like I said, don’t get many strangers so you won’t find it up to big-ville standards. But give awhile to get the roaches out the beds and the rat out the water tank and you can be snug as snug.”
Forde laughed. “Glad to meet a man with a sense of humor in town.”
“Name’s Winthrop. John Winthrop. Don’t catch your meaning about me having a sense of humor.”
“Saying that joke about all the roaches and the rats,” Forde said.
“Oh, that.” The voice was as flat and featureless as a Kansas prairie. “That weren’t no joke.”
FORDE DROVE THE TEAM a little farther down the main street of Bramton, with Dean perched at his side and giving a running commentary to his father, who sat uncomfortably in the back of the wag.
“More folks coming out. Women wiping their hands on aprons. Man with bloodied hands and a big cleaver. Butcher, I guess. Or a slaughter man.”
“No more blasters?”
“Nothing to worry about. Lot of knives. Axes. That kind of stuff. Not many children, Dad.”
It was something that Ryan had encountered before. villes with few young ones tended to be bad news.
“Stable’s coming up,” Forde announced. “Folks don’t look to be either welcoming or outright hostile.”
Ryan heard Krysty’s voice. “Get the horses fixed up, Johannes. Rest of us can head for the hotel.”
She addressed someone else. “Get us a wash there?”
John Winthrop spoke. “Sure can. But they’ll want some time to pump up the water and get it heated.”
“Go with them, Dean,” Ryan said.
“How about you, Dad?”
“Make my own way.”
“But”
“Don’t fuckin’ argue”
Forde’s voice cut him off, checking his sudden outburst of temper. “Don’t take your blindness out on the kid, Ryan. There’s a good man. I’m going to be occupied in the livery for a good half hour or so. Makes plenty more sense for you to go to this hotel with the others.”
Ryan bit his lip, feeling the throbbing rage subsiding. The movie man was correct. He knew that. But it still came triple hard to him.
“Right,” he snapped. “Dean?”
“Dad?”
“Give me a hand out over the tail of the rig.”
“Sure.”
“And,” he added, swallowing the last remnants of his anger, “sorry about shouting at you like”
“That’s okay, Dad. Shout all you like, if it helps you at all.”
Which, if anything, made Ryan feel a good deal worse than before.
THE BANBURY WAS A SORRY run-down establishment. It was doubtful that it had ever seen better days, but if it had, they’d been long ago.
Ryan didn’t need his eyes to tell him what kind of a hotel the Banbury was. He could smell it. Damp overlaid everything elsethe damp of mildewed cellars and lofts with rotting, damp beams, where large gray rats scampered among the old water-tanks; the damp of men living alone in rooms with pee stains on their underwear; the damp of unwashed clothes and moist bedding and carpets; the damp of a building that had never, ever been either warm enough or dry enough.
And there were the drafts that blew in every direction, knifing around corners and along hallways as though they’d come from the wilderness of the Kamchatka Peninsula in farthest Siberia.
The owner of the Banbury introduced herself as Zenobia Simpkins.
From the sound of her speaking, Ryan put her someplace in her eighties, with a croaking voice that told of too many cigarettes and too many glasses of bathtub gin. She had the clipped tones of a hardy New Englander, overlaid with a Southern drawl.
“Haven’t had so many outlanders arrive all at once for nigh on five years now. Stretches the limits of the Banbury’s hospitality. How many rooms’ll you all be needing?”
Ryan started to answer her, but J.B. had gotten in first.
“Need two doubles, and then enough beds for five others. Three or four rooms is all.”
“Who looks after the blind guy? We sure don’t have the facilities to watch him day and night.”
Once again Ryan felt the familiar throbbing of the vein in his forehead, but Krysty put her hand on his arm, gripping him tightly, warning him.
She spoke quickly. “My husband has only just lost the sight of his one eye, but we believe it will soon come back again.”
“I never heard of it.”
“Well, you have now,” Mildred snapped, anger riding clear at the front of her voice.
“Heavens to Betsy! No need to take on so. Talking to you strangers is like stirring your fingers through a nest of peppered scorpions.”
“Baths and beds,” J.B. said.
“And quick,” Ryan added, not allowing all control to slip away from him.
Krysty led him across a thin carpet, past a bowl of flowers that were past their best, and up a flight of eighteen stairs, broken at the halfway point by a right-angle turn, along a corridor of bare boards, past the transient warmth of a half-open window, then stopped.
“This is the first double,” Zenobia said. “Nearest the facilities so it’ll be best for the For your husband, my dear. Rest of you follow me along a mite farther, and we’ll see if the other rooms are in a fit state.”
Ryan heard a handle turn, and Krysty led him into the enclosing walls of a small, cribbed room that smelled even more strongly of the pervasive damp.
The door closed again.
“Double bed with a brass frame that looks like it was last cleaned around the time Noah was building his ark. The one window overlooks the back of the building and there’s a fire escape. Can’t believe anything this wet would ever burn. Small chest of drawers in the corner. And that’s it. Picture on the wall of Elvis Presley dressed as a gunman.”
Ryan felt for the bed, wincing at the sticky contact with a greasy bedspread. He sat. ‘”Welcome to the Hotel California,'” he said, quoting from an old song that was on a tape owned by the Trader.
Krysty sat beside him, her arm around his shoulders, her breath soft and sweet on his cheek. “Just give it time, lover,” she said. “Mildred said it would take time.”