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Burl Lockhart's In Town

Steve Hockensmith

“Lucas Harte,” someone said. Behind, close. Practically whispering in Harte’s ear. “Why, you thievin’ bastard...you’re still alive after all these years?”

Harte put down his beer and looked into the mirror behind the bar. It was a dirty little mirror for a dirty little saloon, and a crack ran through it from top to bottom. The break in the glass split the man standing behind Harte in two, making his features seem crooked, the halves mismatched. He was a thin man, gaunt even, dressed as Harte was -- for the saddle, rough. But that was all Harte could tell.

“My name ain’t ‘Harte,’” Harte said.

“Oh, yeah? Why don’t you say that to my face?”

Harte’s right hand was still on the bar, near his beer glass. But as he turned around, he pulled the hand in toward his body -- and the Colt holstered to his hip.

“My name ain’t -- ”

There was no use finishing. The man behind Harte knew it was a lie.

“Shit,” Harte said when he saw the man’s face. “You son of a bitch.”

And they both laughed.

“Gunther Tietzmann.” Harte clapped a hand on the man’s shoulder. “I’ll be damned.”

“You got that right,” Tietzmann said. “But my name ain’t ‘Tietzmann.’”

They laughed again.

“How long’s it been?” Harte asked, his hand still on Tietzmann’s shoulder. He could feel the tendons taut as rope beneath the lean man’s shirt and skin. “Ten, fifteen years?”

“Hell, I can’t even remember. When was it they...?” Tietzmann’s grin wilted, his shoulders sagged. “When was it Frank and Smokehouse passed? Sixty-seven? Sixty-eight?”

Harte nodded, somber. “Yeah, something like that.” He gave Tietzmann’s shoulder a squeeze, then pointed at a table at the back of the room. “You wanna?”

“Now ain’t a good time, but...hell, how could I not?”

“Glad you feel that way.” Harte scooped up his beer and guzzled it down to the foam. “First round’s on you.”

A minute later, Harte and Tietzmann were seated side by side in the corner, both turned to face the batwings at the front of the saloon. The Phoenix was a small, dingy place, little more than a shack really, and there were only three other customers there. Two were hunkered at another table, conducting business in angry whispers. The third was stooped over at the bar, sullenly draining glass after glass as if there was a fire in his gut he could never put out.

The light that streamed in through the warped slats of wood that served as walls was slowly changing from twilight-orange to dusky-gray. The day was dying.

“So,” Harte said, “what you been up to?”

Tietzmann shrugged. “Oh, you know -- same ol’ thing. You?”

Harte smiled slyly. “Same ol’ thing.”

“I figured as much. What do you call yourself while you’re at it?”

“These days? This and that. Tommy Taylor, mostly.”

Tietzmann’s eyes popped wide.

“So...you heard of me, huh?” Harte said, his smile stretching, pushing his puffy cheeks up practically over his eyes.

“Course, I have.” Tietzmann hung his head. “Goddamn it.”

“What?”

“I got bad news...Tommy.”

When Tietzmann looked up, he flicked his gaze over to the saloonkeeper wiping glasses with a greasy rag, the huddled whisperers hissing at each other, the drunk doing his damnedest to get drunker. Then at last he looked at Harte again. Looked into him.

“Burl Lockhart’s in town.”

“Burl Lockhart...the Pinkerton?” Harte asked.

“I ain’t talkin’ about Burl Lockhart the Pope.”

Harte picked up his beer and took a long drink.

“I just rode in this afternoon. Found me a room at a boardin’ house,” Tietzmann went on. “And the lady I rented a bed from, she says to me, ‘Don’t miss dinner, Mr. Adams -- you’ll be dinin’ with a celebrity. The Burl Lockhart came in just before you did today. Why, he’s in the room right next to yours, in fact. Two hotels in town, and he chooses to stay here. It’s a real honor, don’t you think?’”

Tietzmann spat into the dirt at their feet.

“‘A real honor.’ Shit,” he said. “At first, I figured Lockhart was after me. I was gonna get myself a bottle of rye for the trail and clear out. But now that I know Tommy Taylor’s in town...?” Tietzmann shook his head. “I’m sorry. He’s here for you.”

Harte took another drink. He was staring off at the mirror behind the bar, the crack that seemed to split the world in two. He said nothing.

“You know what?” Tietzmann said. “You oughta come with me. We’ll put some miles between us and Kansas -- head up to Montana, maybe. Then we can get back to work. Together. ‘Same ol’ thing,’ just like in Texas after the war.”

Harte tore his gaze away from the mirror.

“I ain’t runnin’,” he said.

Tietzmann sighed like he’d just lost a game he never thought he could win. “You always was the brave one, weren’t you?”

“The smart and handsome one, too.”

Both men made noises that were supposed to be laughter. It sounded more like they were coughing, gasping.

“Look,” Harte said, “do you know who the town marshal is here?”

“I ain’t never even been in Jetmore before.”

“Well, you remember Beak Fitzhugh, don’t you? Rode with Cal Hershey’s bunch?”

Tietzmann nodded. “He’d still be wanted for killin’ them rangers, wouldn’t he?”

“Yeah. But George Thornton’s not -- and that’s what he calls himself now. Marshal George Thornton.”

Tietzmann grunted out another dry, mirthless chuckle. “Damn. They’ll pin a badge on anybody, won’t they?”

“I don’t know...kinda makes sense to me.” Harte tipped his seat back on two legs, his back against the wall. He was a burly man, and the chair beneath him groaned in protest. “Outlaws and lawmen, we’re just two sides of the same plugged nickel, ain’t we? A little thievin’, a little bullyin’, a little lyin’, a little killin’. It’s all in a day’s work.”

“Yeah, maybe. But that don’t mean you can count on Beak to stand with you against Burl goddamn Lockhart.”

“Badge or no, Beak still hates the big outfits and the Pinks,” Harte said. “He’s not gonna let the Cattlemen’s Association send some assassin in here to gun me down. And the town’ll back him up, too. Hell, half the squatters in this county are rustlin’ themselves. It’s safer to be a brand artist around here than a range detective.”

Tietzmann shook his head. “That won’t stop Lockhart. You’ve heard the stories. Just look at how he done Little Billy LaFollette. Tricked him into drawing first -- right in front of the kid’s own damn church! Almost got Lockhart lynched, but after the inquest he rode out free as a bird.”

Harte leaned forward, bringing his chair down on all four legs again. He spread his hands flat on the table, too, as if bracing himself for something -- a punch, a cyclone, an earthquake, worse.

“I ain’t runnin’ with you, Gunther,” he said.

“Alright...I suppose that’s just as well.” Tietzmann took a prim little sip of his beer. “Lockhart’d track you down soon enough, anyway.”

The two men sat in silence for a moment. Over at the bar, the drunk was still drinking, the saloonkeeper still spit-polishing dirty glasses that never got clean. The whisperers had left to do whatever it was they’d been whispering about doing. No one else had entered the Phoenix. It was a dive so low-down even the whores didn’t bother with it.

“Did you see him?” Harte finally said, his voice low. He didn’t look at Tietzmann. He was glaring at the drunk. “Lockhart?”

Tietzmann shrugged stiffly. Now he was giving the boozehound the eye, too. “I don’t think so, but that don’t mean nothin’. You know how he keeps his face out of the papers.”

The souse at the bar noticed their stares. He was a nondescript man of perhaps fifty years dressed in the manner of a clerk or small-time merchant. He squinted at Harte and Tietzmann as if he couldn’t quite make out their faces, was straining to see if they were smiling or frowning. He played it safe and flashed them a shit-eating grin.

He had half a dozen teeth left, at most, and those were as worn-down and brown as old tree stumps.

“Gentlemen,” he croaked.

Tietzmann saluted him with his beer glass.

Harte slumped back into his seat.

“I know this much,” Tietzmann said. “Burl Lockhart doesn’t have to gum his mush.”

“And that’s about all we do know.”

“Well, I bet you he doesn’t have a peg leg, either. Or an eyepatch. Or green hair. Folks’d say so.”

Harte turned his stare on Tietzmann.

“Sorry -- it ain’t funny,” Tietzmann said. “How do you keep a feller from shootin’ you in the back when you wouldn’t even recognize him face to face?”

“The lady at your boardin’ house has seen him. You could ask her what he looks like.”

“Sure, I could. And then have her run straight to Lockhart himself.” Tietzmann pursed his thin lips and spoke in the warbly, high-pitched voice of an old woman. “‘Ooh, Burl -- remember how you told me to let you know if anyone started askin’ nosy questions about you? Well, guess what Mr. Adams just did. And him with the room right next to yours!’”

“Yeah, I know it’s risky,” Harte snapped. “But, dammit, we know where the man’s beddin’ down. There’s gotta be some way we can....”

Harte’s voice trailed off. But his mouth kept moving, curling at the edges, dimpling his round face.

“I remember that look,” Tietzmann said. He sounded wary, as if Harte’s smile was a hat on a bed or boots on a table -- a bad omen.

“We don’t need to know what Lockhart looks like,” Harte said. “Cuz we know where to find him.”

“Us...find him?”

Harte nodded.

“You can’t be serious.”

“We do it quiet,” Harte said. “With knives. Two on one, it’d be easy.”

“You...cannot...be...serious.”

Harte’s smile grew wider, becoming not just a toothy grin but a prod, something with which he could push, steer.

“Now, come on, Gunther. Show a little backbone here. You don’t know Lockhart’s after me. You’ve still got a hand in the game -- he might be trailin’ you. Either way, you or me, we could end it tonight...if we do it together.”

Harte waggled his bushy brown eyebrows.

“Just like old times.”

Tietzmann played with his beer glass a moment, tilting it this way and that, watching the suds rise up and slide down, rise up and slide down. Then he made a sound that was part sigh, part growl.

“Yeah...you always was the brave one. Shit.”

He threw back his head and practically poured what remained of his beer straight down his throat. When he was done, he pounded the glass on the table.

“Alright. I’m in. But the next round’s on you.”

Over the course of the next three hours -- and the next six rounds -- there was no talk of Burl Lockhart. Instead, Tietzmann and Harte swapped gossip: where the wire was going up, where the easy pickings still were, which outfits were sending herds up which trails, who was buying cattle with blotched brands. And every so often one or the other would make a reference to the “old times” in Texas. “Frank would’ve laughed himself sick at that.” Or “Now ol’ Smokehouse, there was an artist. Give that man a runnin’ iron, and he could turn a Bar 6 into a Diamond 9.”

But there was no mention of the day the old times had ended. The day Tietzmann and Harte rode in with supplies -- and found their friends hanging from the oak tree behind the cabin, each with a sign around his neck as well as a rope. “RUSSLER” on Frank. “THEEF” on Smokehouse. Two other signs had been left propped up against the oak’s trunk. They each said the same thing: “KILLER.”

Harte and Tietzmann never even dismounted. They spoke for all of half a minute, then wheeled around and galloped off without the packhorses. Headed in different directions. They hadn’t seen each other since.

“Well, Mr. Adams,” Harte said after finishing yet another beer, “it ain’t gonna get any darker.”

“I reckon you’re right, Mr. Taylor.” Tietzmann drained the last drops from his glass. “It’s time decent folks was in bed.”

In the ten minutes it took to walk to the boarding house, Tietzmann pissed once, Harte three times. They made their plans between stops.

“You’ve got a knife on you, right?” Harte asked.

“Of course. You?”

“Of course.”

And then:

“What if he’s not in his room?” Tietzmann asked.

“Then we settle in and wait for him to come back.”

“Well, I’m gonna hope it don’t play out like that. If I have to go up against Burl Lockhart, I’d rather do it when he’s asleep.”

And then:

“We oughta go in through the window,” Tietzmann said. “The floorboards and doors in that place creak loud enough to wake the dead.”

“The old lady’ll get to test that out tomorrow mornin’. On Lockhart.”

And then:

“This is it.”

The house was small but pretty -- one story, crisply painted, neat, with flowerbeds along the front porch and vegetables around back growing in lines as straight as soldiers on review. Even the water pump had been whitewashed, and it seemed to glow eerily in the moonlight.

There was no light at all in the windows.

“Over here,” Tietzmann whispered, leading Harte to the back of the house. “Me.” He pointed at a window, then crept on toward another. “Lockhart.”

Tietzmann crouched down beneath the second window. Harte knelt beside him.

A black strip of nothingness about three inches tall ran along the sill. The window was open just enough for a breeze to slip in. Or fingers. The room beyond was a void, the kind of dark so deep it hurts a man’s eyes to look into it.

Harte and Tietzmann stared up at the window, then at each other. Neither moved. Their plan was incomplete -- one question remained.

“Who first?” Tietzmann said.

Harte swallowed spit. He looked like he wanted to piss again.

“You,” he said softly. “You said the floorboards creak. You’re skinnier than me. It should be you.”

Tietzmann shook his head. Not like he was arguing. More like resigned.

“And you the brave one,” he sighed.

“Me the smart one,” Harte said.

“Right.”

Tietzmann stood, slid his hands beneath the window and lifted. It rose four, five, six inches silently, smoothly -- then suddenly jerked upward with a clatter.

Harte and Tietzmann jumped to either side of the window, both men reaching for their guns. They stayed pressed against the house for a full minute before Harte spoke.

“You hear anything?”

“I...I can’t tell. Maybe...maybe snorin’?”

“Yeah...maybe.” Harte jerked his head at the window. “Alright, let’s get this over with.”

Tietzmann nodded slowly and holstered his forty-five. The window was open high enough for him now. He took a deep breath and slithered through it.

And then he was gone, swallowed by the blackness beyond the sill. Harte waited a moment, then hauled himself in, too.

“Just hold still for a second, Gunther,” Harte whispered as he came to his feet inside the room. His words came out so quiet he could barely hear them himself. “We’ll do this together.”

He drew his knife and took a step into the dark. The floorboards didn’t creak.

“Lucas,” Tietzmann said, his voice hoarse, strangled.

Harte turned toward the sound, seeing nothing.

Then Tietzmann spoke again. One more word. It sounded different this time, coming out hard, low, like the bitterest of curses -- a curse he was aiming at himself.

“Tommy.”

Harte saw the flash of light, heard only the beginning of the thunderclap. And then the bullet was tearing its way through his brain, and there was only oblivion.

The body toppled back against the window, then crumpled to the floor in a shower of shattered glass. Yet Harte never dropped the knife.

Tietzmann shot him again, twice. Because that’s what startled men do. Not that Tietzmann was startled.

He walked over to the bed, pulled off his boots and got under the covers.

Down the hall, he could hear the old lady screaming. In a moment, he’d step out, calm her down, send the other lodger off to fetch Marshal “Thornton.” Beak would be pissed, but what could he do? It was self defense. Obviously.

There was a soft knock on the door.

“H-hello?”

It was Sears, the drummer who’d rented out the next room over.

“Are you alright, Mr. Lockhart?”

“I’m fine,” Tietzmann said. “But I can’t say the same for the other feller in here.”

Copyright(c) 2006 by Steve Hockensmith

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