Every time I see you, I shouldnt be seein you, Arly Sr said without standing up. He acted as if it was no surprise that the boy would appear out of the woods nearly two weeks after the shootout, a shootout Arly Sr had not been a part of. His nephew Benjamin Belcher had decided to move back to Georgia and had picked the morning of May 19th to leave. Arlys Sr and Jr had heard about the bloodshed in the tent colony as they shoved bedding into a trunk. By the time they arrived, the dead were lined up, their blood had soured black, and Trenchmouth was off and running.
Im on my way to disappear, Trenchmouth said. Mrs Scott turned from him without acknowledgment when he nodded to her. She went inside shaking her head.
You want some coffee? Arly Jr asked. Trenchmouth nodded that he would and Arly Jr followed his mother through the screen door.
Arly Sr struck a kitchen match against his thumbnail and lit a skinny cigar slow and even. I aint going to ask you about how many you shot, he said. Both looked down and neither spoke for a full minute. There was a bullfrog calling from the grass within spitting distance. I see you got you a backpack. Going to be gone for a while. It was the kind of small talk that meant something. Dont forget your push-ups. Sit-ups and jumping-jacks too now. Arly Sr turned his head quickly toward the front of the house. He extinguished the cigar on his boot heel and stood up. Automobile engine. Our guns is hid, he said to Trenchmouth. You got another one? The Colt Cop & Thug was where it always was, where it had worn two small sores next to his spine. He pulled it from his waist and handed it to Arly Sr.
Its Sid and Kump, Arly Jr hollered from inside.
Everybody eased up.
The five men met in front of the house. Sid Hatfield had taken to stopping by the Scotts more and more. Some thought it was because he knew Trenchmouth would turn up there. Other folks said he wanted to enlist the Arlys for dirty work, as theyd stayed clean on the 19th. As they were colored and therefore more expendable somehow. Either way, they all stood together that early summer morning, Sid lazily leaning against Kumps Model T, Kump fidgeting and looking generally malformed about the face and neck. The other three were guarded, uncomfortable even. Trenchmouth couldnt look at Kump since hed seen him shoot men who were already dead.
More trouble comin down, Sid said. He looked Trenchmouth in the eyes like he was mad the young man had taken his advice and found a hideout he couldnt locate.
Anse Pilcher going to testify against Sid, Kump said. He was too excited for anybodys taste, and he was only there because he had an automobile. Anse been runnin his mouth, claims he seed Sid blow up the tipple at Tomahawk way back. But they all knew that had been Trenchmouths doing. Hed lit that fuse.
The message was there: Do away with Anse Pilcher, proprietor of the Urias Hotel, friend to the Baldwin-Felts men, quick-handed smiter of the women he employed to please them, Ewart included. Anse Pilcher, the soft-boned cripple whod let Frank Dallara burn. Trenchmouths neckhairs stood up at the mention of his name.
Sid said nothing, just kept staring at Trenchmouth. Then, without unlocking his stare, he said to Arly Sr, You reckon I might get at one of them cigars you roll?
Come on in the house, Arly Sr said. They went up the porch steps. Below them, Kump climbed into the drivers seat and shifted two rifles to make room in the backseat. Halfway inside the door to his house, Arly Sr turned and watched his boy climb into the beat-up Model T, Trenchmouth following him. The look on Srs face was unfamiliar to those who knew him, for rarely did he display fear or uncertainty. Inside, Sid Hatfield spoke to Mrs Scott, who held her hands tight against one another to stop them from shaking. She did not return the sheriffs greeting, for had she parted the lips set against a worry with no end, she surely could not stifle the cry caught in her throat.
At one a.m., from the roof of the dead Testermans jewelry store, Kump, Arly Jr, and Trenchmouth lay prone and alert as they had done on strikebreaker duty in McDowell so long before. Kump and Arly were getting anxious. They knew Trenchmouth had long since lined up a clean shot through the second story window of the Urias Café. It was just across the street, an easy distance for the crack shot. Kump, always oblivious, kept saying, Blow his brains out, T.T. Arly bit his tongue, assuming that his friend, having had to kill just days before, might now find killing an undoable act. And, on any other night, with any other target, he may have been right. Trenchmouth had thought long and hard in his hideout on never again taking another mans life. But what he saw through the frosted glass of the Urias Hotel ended such thoughts of reform in a hurry.
Through the notch and groove on his rifle, everything, as usual, was magnified. But his target had grown more complicated. For most in the throes of the mine wars, Trenchmouth didnt need much more reason to shoot Anse Pilcher than he already had. But the hotel owner had made killing even easier. As Anse sipped from a bottle hidden under the serving counter, he pretended not to notice one of his customers, the only man in the place at that late, closed-for-business hour. The man groped at one of the young ladies who worked the hotel. The lady was Ewart Smith. The customer giving the unwanted attention was Hob Tibbs.
Trenchmouth wondered if one more squeeze of his trigger would end his service to the union. And if the recipient of that squeeze was Anse Pilcher, friend of the enemy, murderer of Frank Dallara, and abuser of his one-time girl, then he could surely bring himself to do it. Now two targets had given themselves over to him, but hed already decided he only owed one shot. He could reconcile this problem.
Most folks would never believe he planned what happened next, but most folks never truly knew Trenchmouth Taggart. In the end, the reason he was stalling on taking the shot had nothing to do with his conscience or nerves. It had everything to do with compass points, geometry lines. Trenchmouth was waiting for a pattern to take shape, and when it did, he squeezed his one allotted squeeze.
He had aimed the shot so that it hit Anse Pilcher in the chest, where soft bone and cartilage could not slow it down as it passed in and out of a chamber of his heart, between two flaccid ribs in his back, across the small room and into the left cheek of Hob Tibbs, where it lodged and burned like hells blue tips and caused him to release his grip on Ewart Smiths bosom, fall from his wobbly parlor chair, and scramble for the coat closet where he prayed to his God and pissed his cotton drawers.
He had aimed the shot so that it hit Anse Pilcher in the chest, where soft bone and cartilage could not slow it down as it passed in and out of a chamber of his heart, between two flaccid ribs in his back, across the small room and into the left cheek of Hob Tibbs, where it lodged and burned like hells blue tips and caused him to release his grip on Ewart Smiths bosom, fall from his wobbly parlor chair, and scramble for the coat closet where he prayed to his God and pissed his cotton drawers.
Arly Jr and Kump looked at one another with open mouths as Trenchmouth stood from his position and jumped off the roof onto the lower one next door. From there, he dropped himself to the street and ran to the Urias. He scrambled upstairs, grabbed Ewart by the forearm, and ran back down again. When he shoved her into the car in front of him, Kump already had the engine idling, and the three of them, Kump, Arly Jr, and Ewart, were incapable of speech. Throttle was all that was managed. And it was almost enough. Theyd made it a quarter mile out of town and onto an unnamed road when the grade became too steep. The Model T quit again. Son of a bitch, Arly Jr said, finally breaking the silence. Ewart tried to dab Hob Tibbss blood off her summer corset. You didnt fill the tank again? Arly hollered.
The veins on Kumps neck swelled. Dont no nigger talk to me like that, he said.
Ewart and Trenchmouth watched the two men from the back seat. Kump looked straight ahead and put the vehicle in neutral. Arly looked hard at Kump. What did you say? They were drifting back down the hill now, fast. Ewart kept at the stains and tried not to cry. Arly said again, What did you say?
Kump managed to get the thing turned around, same as Arly had done the first time in McDowell. But now his hands were on the wheel, and he ignored the repeated question from the comrade to his right. They started to climb the hill backwards. But it was too steep a grade, steeper than the one in McDowell, and they kept stalling out in reverse.
Halfway up, another Model T turned onto the unnamed hill. This one was a 1920, a coupe, and its gas tank was lower to the ground. It came up the incline quick, and before Kump could manage another go in reverse, the smaller, faster automobile was within any mans range. It stopped.
Get out, Trenchmouth said to the two up front, as he slowly opened his door and took hold of Ewarts forearm again.
A man stepped from either side of the coupe. Neither spoke a word and each raised a pistol.
Trenchmouth reached back for the Colt tucked into his pants and found nothing. Hed given it to Arly Sr that morning. He grabbed his backpack from between his feet. Get out now, Trenchmouth said, and he did so himself, pulling Ewart to the ground next to the car.
No. I damn near got it. Let me just Kumps mouth exploded before he finished. The same place hed been shot before, only worse, and they kept coming. One split the middle of his nosebridge. His feet ceased to work as the rest of him did too, and the vehicle careened forward, down the hill toward the men unloading all they could. Arly Jr bailed out of the moving mess with a bullet in his left shoulder. He hit the ground fifteen yards down from Trenchmouth and Ewart. Trenchmouth pulled Ewart across the ground into the brush beside the road. When they got there, the shooting ceased as the two men had to crouch and shield themselves with their hands as a car piloted by a dead man smashed into their own, grill against grill. Glass broke up and spread out everywhere, but the coupe had stopped the heavier touring car, and Kump had come through the windshield to rest face down on the hood, dead as the car below him.