Immediately after that, Horace cocked the Winchester again and pointed it back at the lawman.
“She’s gonna die andyouain’t gonna stop me,” he growled.
“Okay,” Eli nodded. “You go ahead and shoot her. But, in a way, she’s already dead.”
“What’re you talkin’ about?”
“In about ten minutes, everybody in town is going to know what she did. So, her reputation will be as shot up as Ed Peterson’s Dodge over there. Her life in Sparkledove will pretty much be over. Who’s gonna trust a person who doesn’t keep their word, Horace? That Jezebel reputation will follow her. ‘Course, if you shoot her now, it’s over in a second. She’ll be free, and you’ll go to prison for life. That doesn’t seem like justice to me.”
Horace’s angry eyes squinted, considering what Eli had said.
“You’re just sayin’ this so I won’t shoot you.”
“Well, thereisthat,” the sheriff agreed. “But that doesn’t make what I said any less true.”
Horace’s eyes started to get moist. He stiffened his chin, looked toward the Dodge, then back at Eli. It was right at that moment that Goldie noticed the barrel of a second gun; a Sedgley Springfield hunting rifle was poised over the hood of a 1937 maroon Olds parked on her side of the street about a block and a half away. The barrel was pointed at Horace Mason’s heart, and Paul McCaw, in his earflap cap, was crouched behind the Olds, ready to fire. A few seconds later, Stu saw the barrel, too.
“You don’t know what it’s like to be rejected like that,” Horace said quietly.
“By a wife? No, sir, I don’t,” Eli said, just as quiet. “But, by a woman? Yes, sir, I do. You remember a girl who used to live in town named Lila Hemmings?”
Horace thought for a moment. “Heard the name, don’t know the family,” he said, keeping an eye on the Dodge.
“Lila was my age,” Eli explained, taking a limping step toward the gunman. “We met in junior college, and I fell hard. Far as I was concerned, she was it. But I also wanted to be a pilot. So, I joined the Army Air Corps.”
“What happened?” Horace asked, interested but still aiming the rifle at him.
“Math,” Eli said, taking a couple of steps and speaking confidentially so others wouldn’t hear. “See, when you’re a pilot, you’ve got to be good at math. Calculating fuel consumption, armament weight... I was pretty good, but not good enough. I failed the math requirement. Didn’t get my wings.”
He took another few steps toward Horace.
“Wound up being a mechanic, working on planes instead of flying ‘em. Got sent to Pearl Harbor and actually worked for a squadron where some of the pilots were guys I went to flight school with. Talk about embarrassing! They were now officers and up there in the clouds, and I was a grunt changing their oil and filling their tires.”
“If it wasn’t for the math, you could still fly with that leg?” Horace wondered.
“Oh, I had two good legs back then,” Eli explained, taking another step. “But that all changed on December 7thlast year. As you know, Japanese planes attacked Pearl. I was at Hickam Field, and pilots were trying to get their planes into the air to fight back. One plane got shot up pretty bad just as it was rolling out of the hangar. The plane caught fire, the pilot’s canopy stuck, and I ran out to get him. I got the canopy opened and pulled the fella out, but Zeros were strafing the field. He got cut in half by machine gun fire, and I took a round in the leg.”
Eli rubbed his bad leg for effect and took another couple of steps toward the gunman.
“Boy, some days it still hurts terrible… Lila was disappointed enough that I wasn’t an officer and a pilot. But when I got that bum leg, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. She wrote me and said she didn’t want a—well—she didn’t want me no more. By the time I got discharged and came back here, she was gone. Moved to California, they said.
“So, no, Horace. I don’t know what it’s like to be rejected by a wife. But Idoknow a thing or two about rejection. By the Air Corps, by a woman, and I promise you, Ipromise,thereislife after the hurt goes away.”
He was now close enough to the shooter to extend an arm.
“You still want to shoot me? Or, can I please have the rifle now?”
Horace looked at the Dodge again, then slumped his shoulders and handed the gun to Eli.
“Oh, hell. I suppose I ain’t no First Prize at the country fair, myself. But I was never untrue to her.”
“To be continued,” Eli said, slipping his right arm around Horace’s left. “But not out in the middle of the street.”
Goldie looked down the street and saw Paul McCaw stand from his crouched position behind the Olds and raise his rifle barrel. Then, he walked down to the next side street, turned, and disappeared.
As Eli walked Horace back to the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street from Goldie, he called, “Alice? Go inside Miller’s, get a cup of coffee or a soda, and sit by the stove. Don’t talk to anyone about this, and I’ll be back directly as soon as I’ve taken care of Horace. Deke?”
The elderly Miller stuck his head out of his front door. “What do you need, Eli?”
