CHAPTER 1
KILLING IS A part of living.
A man kills a deer with those soft, innocent eyes the size of large black cherries. He kills the plodding, harmless steer standing knee-deep in manure in the stockyards waiting to be slaughtered. He kills young men in religious wars over a god who was nailed to a cross. He kills whole cities with a single bomb, the children splayed and gutted and burned and the dead mothers’ breasts drained empty on the pavement. And when the landlady said we couldn’t keep all of the kittens that our cat deposited one night in her bed at the far corner of the kitchen, my father put all but the black kitten in a sack full of rocks and threw them in the river. Seven kittens. My mother said he had to. My mother said he cried, but I never saw my father cry.
The people of Jackson Hole are my people. The people know I’m a killer, and although some claim I have kind eyes and a good sense of humor, nevertheless, down where life and death meet I can be on the side of death, and the color of my robe—black—admits that. The people may smile at me and nod when we pass, but they know that given certain facts I can kill them, and that I will kill them. I hope they understand. I’m not a killer at heart. I kill only out of duty.
A winter in Jackson Hole feels as if time were caught on a snag in an eternally frozen river. Sometimes the temperature drops to forty below. The people burn their woodstoves twenty-four hours a day, and the smoke settles down on the valley in a dark gray ground-hugging blanket. In the winter, the ranchers hitch up a team of good horses to their hay wagons and feed their stock the hay they’ve put up in the summer. Used to do some feeding myself when I worked after school for old Henry Johnson. A good team knew its path. You tied the reins to the wagon’s front, and the team plodded on while you forked off the hay to the cattle, and as I’ve always said, in the winter the sweat of a man at work reduced the cold to good medicine.
In winter the people dress to challenge the climate. Men wear those Converse leather-legged rubber boots and woolen socks with their Levi’s tucked in, and they cover their bodies with sheepskin coats, the buffered raw wool still on the hide. Some women also wear jeans and boots. And some wear long dresses to make a decent attempt at hiding their feminine proportions and “to keep their knees warm.” The countrywomen here often fulfill the role of a hired man. A good wife knows how to plant and hoe the garden and milk the cow and gather the eggs and ax the head off a frying chicken for Sunday supper. She cooks over a woodstove, the kindling for which she’s likely also chopped.
“Out there,” as we placid people of Jackson Hole refer to the remainder of the world, the people are panicked. The government is encouraging our women to do what we’ve always done here in the Hole—to keep a good stock of canned goods on hand, and in a safe place store a tub full of dried beans, and another tub full of wheat. The people out there are told they’d better have a bunch of flashlights and half a truckload of batteries, because all power sources may be demolished. “Look what a couple of A-bombs did to the Japs,” the people say to one another. All the while, Elvis Presley is banging out rock and roll, and the people are jumping and jerking as if their last jerk were close at hand.
Then the one night the world came crushing in on me. I was in deep sleep. I stumbled to the ringing phone and recognized the voice immediately. The caller said, “He’s dead, Judge Murray.”
“What do you mean, ‘He’s dead’?” I asked.
“He’s dead. Dead.”
I knew the caller. I loved her like a father loves his child. “And they’ve charged me with his murder,” she said. And that’s all she said before I heard the phone click dead.
CHAPTER 2
EVERY WORKDAY MORNING, the town fathers gathered at the Big Chief Café for breakfast. Hardy Tillman claimed the joint hadn’t been hosed out since the big fire in ’47. “This place even smells like the Old West, and I mean the Old West,” Hardy said. He ran the Main Street filling station in Jackson Hole. He sported a budding beer belly, but everybody in those parts admitted Hardy was tough. Nobody tried Hardy Tillman.
Generations of spiders had spun their webs between the horns of mounted elk heads that stared down with glass eyes from the once-whitewashed walls, now smoke-stained and, near the kitchen, darkened to bay-horse brown from the blowout of scorched pans and flaming grills. Under half an inch of dust and grease, a rusted musket lay across the antlers of a mule deer’s head, the trophy of a forgotten hunter.
Posters of current movies starring Doris Day as Calamity Jane, and the fast-gun hero, John Wayne in Hondo, curled at their corners, as if struggling to roll up in slumber. The floor was covered with linoleum that was mopped daily, and the hard boots of workingmen had worn away its original redbrick design except in the far corners of the café.
Each morning, two waitresses, Mary Johnson and Molly Hocks, rushed the men’s orders to the kitchen, bounced back to fill their coffee cups, empty or not, and shortly, like gastronomic midwives, delivered their breakfasts steaming hot and laden with grease.
“How’s my darling doing? I dreamed about you all night, honey,” Molly Hocks cooed.
“Don’t give that line again, honey,” Harry Halstead, part-time mountain guide and part-time bartender, said. “That’s what you told me yesterday and I tipped you the last two dimes in my pocket, which’ll have to do you for today, since you’re still giving me that same old dream.”
Peaks of hilarity bounced off the café walls and comingled with the jangle of pans and kettles from the kitchen and the hollering of the cooks and waitresses—the racket reaching the raging uproar of an orchestra gone mad.
A potpourri of appetizing aromas escaped from the kitchen—of ham, bacon, and frying sausage, of fresh coffee and pancakes hot off the griddle. The odor of workmen in their overalls of dirt and sweat mixed with the scent of a few business types, their hair shiny in Brylcreem and radiating a smell akin to lilacs and bug spray. As each waitress whisked by, she was trailed by a wake of fragrance perhaps attributable to a dab of something called Seven Winds, “for the woman who wants to be loved,” or a spray of Nostalgia, which “turns my lamb into a wolf.”
Over the ruckus and racket, the men at Lester McCall’s table were talking in high shouts about Lillian Adams. She’d been charged with the murder of her husband, Horace Adams III. His friends called McCall “Too Tall” McCall. He was six and a half feet tall, and he said, “I don’t give a damn what they call me as long as they call me for supper.” His voice reverberated from the walls like the um-pah-pah of a bass horn in a high school marching band.
“Well, I knew Lillian as a kid,” McCall bellowed through the tumult. “She always did whatever she damn well pleased and got whatever she damn well wanted. But it sounds like she went a little too far this time. Old Adams had more money than I got gravel in my gravel pit, and, at that precise moment before she pulled the trigger, he was all that was standin’ between her and it.”
“I don’t think she did it,” Harold Farmer, the town’s mayor, said. His head was bald, but he displayed an undisciplined beard in order to show some hair, of some kind, someplace. “She wasn’t the kind to go killing for money. When we were kids in high school, I took her rabbit hunting one Saturday. I wasn’t figuring to just hunt rabbits. I wanted to bag me a bunny, if you get my meaning.” He laughed. “But she wouldn’t let me shoot even a cross-eyed jackrabbit. She said, ‘I’m on the rabbit’s side.’ But I will say one thing for her: She sure could outshoot me.”
“Don’t have to be much of a shot to hit somebody with your gun shoved up against his head,” Harv Bailey said as he took a big bite out of a glazed doughnut and a swig of coffee to help wash it down. He owned the local men’s store, with his typewriter shop in the back. He was wearing the latest banded jacket, jodhpurs, and hiking boots that laced up to just below the knees. He wore his mop of black hair in a cowlick, the product of a careful application of hair coloring that contrasted with a sprinkle of white in his three-day-old beard. He took out a pack of Lucky Strikes and offered one to Ben Mays, the Teton County assessor.
“I’m trying to quit,” Mays said as Bailey lit their cigarettes. Some called him “Magpie” Mays. His habitual plumage was a black suit, a white shirt, and a black tie—put a person in mind of a magpie. “The judge should’ve taken himself off the case. She isn’t related to him by blood, I’ll give you that, but the judge and Betsy haven’t got any kids except her, and they always saw her as belonging to them. I know for a fact the Adams dame had the judge’s number couple of times in the past. And I hear she’s still pretty much running things up there in the courtroom.”
“I wonder how come old Judge Murray let her outta jail with practically no bond at all. Fifty thousand is nothing to her,” Henry Green said. “Should’ve been ten mil at least. She probably had a little meeting with the judge in his chambers, if ya know what I mean.”
“You’re full a shit,” Hardy Tillman said. He and Judge Murray had been best friends since grade school. Hardy stood up and spit his words into Henry Green’s face again. “I said you’re full a shit.”
Henry Green looked down, blew on his coffee, and sat tight in his chair.
Copyright © 2019 by G. L. Spence and Lanelle P. Spence Living Trust
