Standing at the Scratch Line (33 page)

Journer grabbed Phillip’s shirt collar and explained. “This is King Tremain! He’s the one that saved me from Cody and Sampson.”

Phillip’s frown vanished and was replaced by a smile. He stepped forward with his right hand extended. “My name is Phillip Duryea. I’m happy to make your acquaintance, Mr. Tremain. I’m beholden to you for what you did for Journer. Please pardon my mistake.”

“Everybody makes a mistake sometime,” King acknowledged with a nod of his head. He looked into Phillip’s eyes. “I told her that I would come back after I finish the hand I’s playin’ in the other room.”

“You’ll help us, Mr. Tremain?” Phillip asked.

“I’m gon’ try, but I got fish to fry now!” King answered. He returned to the room where the game was being held. There were five men sitting at the table. King sat down in his seat.

The owner of the Beau Geste, a Creole named Claude Bichet, was watching the cards, as was his wont during high-stakes games. He was a light-skinned man with thick wavy hair and, as usual, he was dressed to the nines in a double-breasted dark blue suit, with spats over polished patent leather shoes. Bichet was not particularly physically commanding; he was of medium height and build, but he had the air of a man who meant business. He had built the Beau Geste up from a nondescript roadhouse to one of the top sporting houses in Algiers, and it was still his although more than a few had tried to take it away. “Everyone is back, yes? The game begins,” Bichet declared.

The final two cards of a seven-card-draw hand were dealt out. A Cajun named Faison Baptiste led the betting with two queens showing. When the seventh card was dealt only King, Faison, and Jimmy One-Eye remained. Faison raised two hundred dollars. King had two pair, but they were low cards. He threw his cards in and stood up. “This ain’t my night and this ain’t my game! I think eight hundred dollars is all I’m gon’ donate tonight!”

“If you lose eight hundred dollars for three nights straight, I still wouldn’t get back all I lost to you last week,” Faison declared as he was called to show his cards by Jimmy One-Eye. Faison turned over three queens and took the pot.

“Gentlemen, I’ll see you next week,” King said as he walked out of the card room. Phillip Duryea was waiting for him at the bar. There was a brass band playing loud music on the other side by the dance floor. “Where’s Journer?” King asked.

“I sent her to wait at my father’s warehouse. I thought perhaps you could help us devise a plan.”

“Let’s go outside where it’s quieter,” King suggested. Phillip nodded his assent.

Outside the Beau Geste, the night sky twinkled overhead as King and Phillip stood talking in the shadows by the parked cars. King was suggesting that Phillip delay in making any move against the DuMonts until they had worked out a feasible plan when Faison walked out of the Beau Geste. He was a short, thick man with long brown hair. He called out to King. “Maybe next time you stay longer, eh Tremain? I think luck is smiling on—”

Two rifle shots rang out. A car window next to where King and Phillip were standing shattered and the bullet from the second shot splintered the wood above their heads. King and Phillip both dropped to the ground. Two more shots were fired, then silence.

King had a pistol in his hand and was crawling away from the cars when a voice called out. “He gone! He gone now! He run away!”

“Who’s gone?” King demanded. He looked cautiously over the fender of a car and saw the old man who sold spicy fish stew from a cart outside the Beau Geste waving a spoon.

“Chess DuMont!” the old man replied. “He try ambush then run away. He ride his horse toward the old bridge! Another one was with him!” The old man waved his serving spoon in the direction of New Orleans.

“Goddamn DuMonts!” Faison said, picking himself up off the ground. “I just bought these pants! I’ll kill the bastards myself!”

“How was Journer getting back to New Orleans?” King asked Phillip.

“Across the old bridge,” Phillip replied. “You don’t think that Chess might catch her, do you?”

“If he and one of his brothers are on horseback, it seems likely. She couldn’t make it across the bridge befo’ they closed on her. You best go check on her! I’ll meet you at the Hotel Toussant.”

Phillip shook his head. “If he’s taken her, I’ll just have to take some men to Lester DuMont’s house on Front Street and we’ll force our way in! He won’t be expecting us to come to his front door. Hopefully, his men will be spread out all over the city. Maybe he’ll be taken by surprise!”

“What about the snipers he got set up on the roofs next to his building?” King asked. “If’en you don’t attack with the right plan, you gon’ be the one surprised. They gon’ shoot you down without you gettin’ to the door, much less through the door.”

Phillip looked at King with respect. “I didn’t know he had snipers set up. But what can I do? If he has her, I’ve got to go after her!”

“Even if it means yo’ death?” King inquired. “He got himself a small army and he live in a fort!”

“Even if it means that!” Phillip answered. “I love her! I got no choice! I’ve got to go now!” Phillip cranked his car until it turned over. Once it was chugging, he climbed in and drove away.

Faison walked over to King and asked, “You will help him, eh?”

“This is the second time these DuMont fools have tried to bushwack me!” King explained. “I’m gon’ have to finish all these DuMonts! I was only thinkin’ about Lester, but I see I’m gon’ have to do Chess and Eddy too!”

“Just don’t get yo’self killed,
mon ami
! You still have three thousand dollars of my money I must still win back! And by the way, my friends are very interested in yo’ bootleggin’ idea. We should meet soon. Maybe you come out to the house and we eat, eh?”

King and Faison talked a few more minutes, then parted company. The shadows of the night became more clearly defined as a pale moon waxed across the midnight sky. King looked up and chuckled at the unchanging stars, for fate and circumstance had forced him to take actions that he would have rather delayed. But he was not sad. A waiting game would merely give Lester more confidence. King gave the old man who sold fish stew a few dollars in gratitude and left his car parked in front of the Beau Geste to throw off any potential pursuers. He kept to the shadows and the less traveled streets and soon disappeared into the night.

King rode his horse through the quiet streets. The night had deepened since his meeting with Phillip. The moon was nearly gone, but stars overhead glistened as if they had been newly polished. It was nearly ten o’clock and there were a few small-time merchants and hawkers trudging alongside their tired animals, moving their carts and wagons to their nightly storage. King had an unsheathed rifle across his saddle and the barrel gleamed in the dim light. When people saw him coming, they moved wordlessly to the side and let him pass.

He turned down a small street to avoid crossing through Market Square and heard a group of men laughing and taunting someone. King started to take another route, but decided against it because he didn’t want to travel on any of the larger streets. The sound of his horse’s hooves preceded him. By the time he drew close to the men, he saw they were beating and taunting a man who was huddled on the ground. A couple of the men had long wooden staves and they swung these two-handed, bringing them down on the back of their fallen victim with bone-crushing thuds. As King drew abreast, they stopped to watch. No one missed the fact that he had a rifle across his saddle.

As they stood back to watch him pass, King recognized the man on the ground as the one he had hit on the head when he first met Journer. Suddenly, he was furious. The men standing around the body reminded him of coyotes surrounding an injured wolf. They would never have had the courage to attack a healthy animal, but once their foe was incapacitated they were very daring. He reined his horse. “What’s going on here?”

“Ain’t nothin’. We just takin’ care of somebody that done caused us a lot of grief in his time,” a man ventured carefully.

“Yeah. Now it’s our turn to give him some back,” another cried as he turned and gave the inert body another whack.

“Don’t hit that man again!” King ordered, barely able to contain himself.

A tall, big-boned man stepped forward. “You’s one man. You got the gall to give orders to eight of us?”

King pulled a pistol from his holster and hissed. “There’s eight of you now, but there won’t be one left standin’ when I’m finished shootin’ and I’m gon’ kill you first!”

The first man who spoke stammered, “That’s him! That’s Tremain!” Suddenly, there was a different mood among the men. Several backed away immediately. One dropped his staff. The big-boned man looked around and found that he was standing alone. He pushed the brim of his homemade hat back on his head so that he could get a good look at King. “You Tremain?” he asked.

“Yeah, you ready to die?” King retorted.

“I ain’t got no truck with you. I’s just repayin’ an old debt. I ain’t lookin’ to get killed.”

“Then back away or commence to fightin’.”

“We ain’t got no guns,” explained a man from the back of the group.

“Ain’t nobody said you gon’ have an even chance,” King answered. “If you come up against me, come ready for death ’cause I don’t care what you got!”

“You gon’ kill innocent men for beatin’ a DuMont man?” the big-boned man asked with disbelief. “The DuMonts done worse to us!”

“I don’t like cowards! You didn’t have guts to fight that man on the ground when he could stand up, but now he’s harmless, you boys got all the guts in the world. You all make me sick! You’s all cowards and dogs!”

“We ain’t fightin’ men, Mr. Tremain. We’s farmers and workin’ men. Ain’t a man among us ever done killed anyone. We was just gettin’ an old enemy back for what he done to us.”

Without turning, King shot out the street lamp that was on the edge of his vision. “Anybody that don’t want to fight and risk bein’ killed better skin on out of here, ’cause I’m gon’ kill every man jack one of you that’s standin’ close when my feet hit the ground.”

There was no grumbling from the men as they hurried away along the darkened street. King slid off his horse and stooped to inspect the fallen man. The man’s right arm was obviously broken and there were bruises and blood covering his face. His breathing was labored. King felt his chest carefully and discovered what appeared to be several broken ribs. He realized that if he left the man lying in the street, more ill would befall him, but broken ribs could not be slung across the back of a horse. Up the street by a street lamp, King saw a man hurriedly trying to turn his pony and cart around and return the way he came. King called out to the man, who stopped and turned immediately to face him. He offered the man twenty dollars to cart the injured man to a doctor.

The owner of the cart agreed. Twenty dollars was worth two weeks of hard work. He assisted King in lifting the man’s heavy, inert body onto the cart. King mounted his horse and led the way to a colored doctor’s clinic, but he was out making his rounds. King then went to a white doctor named McKenna that he had heard treated colored patients. After diagnosing the patient, the doctor informed King that there was a pretty good chance the man would die unless he operated. King pulled a hundred dollars from his pocket and asked the doctor to do whatever was necessary.

King rode out of the courtyard and headed for Front Street. He stabled his horse down the street from his small apartment and climbed the rickety stairs leading to his rental. He moved the bed, unlocked the metal cabinet that lay under it, and removed two rifles with scopes. He picked up several bandoliers of bullets and, after locking the cabinet, returned everything to its original position. It was a short climb to the roof. Once he situated himself behind a parapet on the roof, he scoped out the positions where he had initially seen DuMont’s snipers. Two were exactly where he had last seen them; the third seemed to have disappeared. King felt comfortable with his position. He would be firing from the shadows behind the parapet and he had a flash protector on the barrels of his rifles.

Half an hour passed before King heard the loud sound of a large body of men coming down the street. King shook his head at the noise they were making. They were making no secret that they were coming, which King thought extremely foolish. He always attempted to have the element of surprise on his side. The band of men appeared, turning the corner of the block, and spilled out into the street like a liquid mass. King shook his head disapprovingly. There was no military precision about this attack and they had given their enemy ample warning as to their coming. As if to confirm his assessment, a shot rang out. King saw the flash of the gun’s discharge emanating from the shadows of a rooftop adjacent to the DuMont house. When he looked down onto the street, he saw the band of men running every which way. He saw Phillip shouting and gesturing, trying to keep the men focused on their purpose.

Another shot rang out. King saw the man next to Phillip fall. They were trying to kill Phillip. He hefted his rifle to his shoulder and fired three quick shots in succession into the shadows where he had seen the flash of gunfire. Without waiting to see if he had a hit, he began firing at the second sniper and saw the dark silhouette of a man fall backward out of sight. He dropped behind the parapet and grabbed his bandoliers and crawled to his second position on the other side of the building. He was still in shadow when he rose up to assess the situation.

The band of men on the street below were running pell-mell through the streets like cockroaches when a light has been turned on. He saw that Phillip was able to maintain a core of ten men out of the rest and they charged the front door. King saw the flash of a rifle from the spire of the church at the end of the street, which only seemed to increase the panic of the men below. This rifleman had been blocked from his view in his initial position on the other side of the building. King trained his scope on the spire and waited. He saw the man stand up and aim his weapon at the street. King squeezed off two shots and saw the man’s body jerk backward and bounce off the wall behind him, then tumble out of sight.