The Meaning of Friendship
by Sevenstars
SUMMARY: A Missing Scene from "Men in Shadows," coming between the gunfight in the Sherman yard and the tag. After the death of Dixie Howard, Slim tries to help Jess deal with his emotions. Beta'd by Gloria (thanks, pard!).
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After supper Slim carefully opened the front door and peered out, looking for Jess. In the gathering dusk his compact shape in the homemade chair was unmistakable. "Jess?" he ventured. "You all right?"
"No." The tone was both flat and self-mocking at the same time, which Slim wouldn't have believed was possible until he heard it.
"Mind if I join you?"
Shrug. "Your house. Your porch."
This isn't good, the rancher thought. There were times when Jess seemed to close up like a clam at low tide, but mostly it was his way of mentally "clearing for action," something he'd learned as a gunfighter. This closing was emotional: he was shutting himself away. He'd asked to be excused from supper, claimed he wasn't hungry. When Jess wasn't hungry, you knew something was very wrong.
Slim eased out the door and pulled the other chair around, not getting too close; the one thing Jess wouldn't bear when he was in one of these moods was to be crowded. "Julie's doin' the dishes," he offered.
"Her cookin's sure better'n yours," said Jess. "Or mine." And that was bad too. Running himself down was something Jess didn't often do. Slim remembered what he'd said in the bunkroom when he was cleaning up.
"Jess," Slim began, "I want to apologize again for how I behaved. I had no right to yell at you, and still less to hit you."
"Ain't so," said Jess in that same flat, weary voice. "Dixie was on Sherman property, whether you knew it at the time or didn't. Made it your business."
"Maybe." You had to give at least some of Jess's opinions legitimacy or you'd really shut him down. "It still doesn't excuse me for goin' after you. I knew how you felt about him, I knew you felt you owed him. You were bein' true to your own ideas of right and wrong, and a man should never be rebuked for that."
"Re... buked?" Jess echoed, hollowly. He snorted. "That's right. Use your highfalutin words and make it worse. I already know what I am."
"No," said Slim forcefully. "No, you don't. At least not all of it."
Jess just grunted and stared out across the yard. He hadn't glanced in Slim's direction once yet. This wasn't just grieving, Slim realized, whether for the death of someone he'd cared about or for the necessity of being the instrument of that death. Partly it was, sure, because Dixie had been his friend and trailmate once, but there was more to it. Being a veteran, Slim understood that Jess was going through something very much like post-battle sickness, and it worried him. He'd seen Jess after plenty of fights, but never acting like this before. Maybe it's all pilin' up on him, he thought. Maybe it's like that saying, 'the straw that broke the camel's back.' If he goes now, in this state of mind—and he might: this has to be rougher on him than any other shootout he's been in since I've known him... will he value himself enough to take proper care, to watch his back, to be as fast as he's always been? Or will he let himself get killed without even understandin' what he's doin'? If that happens... in a way I'll have driven him to it. I can't let that happen. "Jess..."
"Don't, Slim," the younger man interrupted. "Please don't." Jess never said 'please.' Not when it was just the two of them. He'd never felt he had to.
And he'd never before sounded the way he did with those two words... as if he were going to start bawling.
Slim fell silent, not sure how to proceed, but mentally urging his friend to say something, to offer him some direction, some hint of what was most on his mind. And, after a minute or two, Jess did. "How can a man change so much, Slim?" he asked, and there was a faint but genuine note of bewildered pleading in the question, like a child trying to puzzle the world out.
The rancher managed, barely, not to sigh audibly in relief. How do you talk a man out of something when you're not sure what it is? "You hadn't seen him in a lot of years, Jess," he pointed out slowly. "People do change. It's somethin' we do—it's what makes us different from the rocks and the trees. You have."
"No," said Jess again. "It's like I said, Slim. It just ain't no good. I can't stop bein' what I am. I've tried, you know I've tried—"
Slim heard it then, the quiet despair, and he thought: So that's what it's all about. "And you've come a long way, Jess. Maybe you can't see it 'cause you're too close to yourself, but I can."
"No, I ain't." There was a sadness in that warm, gravelly Texas accent, and even without being able to see his face Slim knew how it must look: the taut, grim lips, the flashing eyes, the cant of the mobile brows, angry and miserable together, a muscle snapping in his lean cheek. "Slim, how many times has this happened now? Close on two years and my past keeps on catchin' up to me—to us. It ain't gonna stop, Slim. And it ain't just about me, or you. What if Andy had still been here, or Jonesy? And what about Kelly—or Mose; he could'a been hurt too, or killed."
"But he wasn't," Slim insisted softly, "and Kelly's gonna make it just fine."
"Ain't the point," Jess protested.
"Then what is? Tell me what it is, Jess. Help me understand."
Long silence. "A man shouldn't... shouldn't be askin' people he... cares about... to put themselves in harm's way for his sake," Jess said at last. "It ain't fair, and it ain't right. He's got to ride his own broncs. Ain't nobody else can ride 'em for him."
"I see that," Slim told him. "But I think the key word is 'asking.' You never asked, Jess. What any of us has done for you, we've done because we wanted to. Because we felt it was part of bein' your friends. And aren't you the one who always tells me a man can't live his life on what-if?"
Jess didn't answer. "You were askin' how a man can change so much," Slim pursued. "I wonder if maybe it's not really change at all. Maybe whatever we turn into, as time goes by, is just whatever we've always had the potential to become. Maybe it's not really about us, it's about what happens to us and around us, to bring one part or another of us out into the open." He paused. "For Dixie... well, I don't pretend to know what it would have been for Dixie; I didn't know him the way you did, I don't know what he came from, what he'd been through these ten years. For you—I know what it was for you. It was comin' here. It was findin' a place here, findin' Jonesy and Andy... and me."
"That's just the point of it," said Jess, so low Slim could barely hear him. "I ain't real good at pickin' friends, Slim. Look at—well, not just Dixie; look at Roney. Or Pete Morgan."
"Roney was a different case altogether," Slim argued. "You were never easy about him—you admitted that; it was just that you owed him. As for Morgan... yeah, you made a mistake with Morgan, but if we didn't make mistakes sometimes, we wouldn't be human. And in the end, chasin' him brought you here, and that was a good thing... wasn't it? Jess, haven't you been happy here?"
"Happy?" Jess echoed, and the hollowness was back. "I don't know, Slim, and that's the truth. I don't know as I ever was. How would I know it if I came on it?"
"Well, that's easy," said Slim. "If you've never been happy before, and you feel something here that's different, that's like nothing you ever knew—"
"I reckon I do."
"There you are, then," Slim told him. "I know you're frettin' over bringin' trouble on us. I understand that, Jess. And I don't say havin' you here has always made for the peacefullest life. But... well, you mentioned Andy a little while ago. You remember how he was when you first came here, fightin' his head, talkin' about runnin' away... after you stayed on, he didn't do that any more, because you gave him somethin' he needed. Somethin' I couldn't, maybe, or at least not till you helped me find a way to it. And think what it's meant for the place, to have you here. Think about those horses I bought just a while ago. Think about the mortgage that I got paid off, or Andy in school. I'd have never been able to afford those things if you hadn't been here, workin' beside me. And—" He hesitated. "Jess, you asked me if I knew how it felt to owe someone your life, to know that every breath you take is because of somethin' he did. I do know that. I know it because I owe mine to you, half a dozen times over. That very first day, before we knew much more about each other than names... you probably saved it that day, and Andy's and Jonesy's too. When Bennett came, if you hadn't followed us, I could'a died of exposure under that outcrop. Or when Doc and Sandy and I were kidnapped, who was it tracked us down?"
"Goes both ways," Jess observed. "When Sam Jarrad took me, I'd'a never made it to Willow alive if you hadn't got yourself deputized and followed us. And Gil, he had me plumb hoodwinked—no tellin' what would'a happened to me if you hadn't come along." There was a little less of tightness and strain in his voice now, though the darkness had thickened to the point where Slim couldn't make out his expression. "But that don't count. I may not be too good at pickin' friends, but one thing I know about 'em is that they don't keep score."
I got him! thought Slim, and it was like a shout of joy inside his head. "All right, then. If that's what you think, then how do you figure I'd keep score on the trouble you bring? You say you're not good at choosin' friends. But all you need, really, is to make the right choice one time. I hope—I hope you've made it here. Nobody's life is free of trouble, Jess. But if he's lucky, he's got people who can help him deal with it, who'll stand beside him when he goes to face it." Pause. "I should've done that today. I should've guessed—you knew Dixie so much better than I did, knew how he thought; I should've figured you were just makin' an excuse to come back here, knowin' he'd try to get Julie back. I should've come with you. Maybe you wouldn't have had to be the one to kill him, then."
"You'd'a never stood a chance against him," said Jess, in that very positive voice he used when he was talking about his former trade and the men who followed it. "He wasn't young any more, but he'd kept his hand in—had to, the life he'd been livin'. I reckon maybe the only reason I beat him was the whiskey—it builds up on you; that's why I don't drink much."
"But you did beat him," Slim said. "And in the end, you knew what you had to do. Jess—the two of you were friends, once, weren't you? Then he'd have known the same thing you just said, that friends don't keep score. I don't think he held it against you that you'd never settled the debt—if he saw it as a debt."
Jess seemed to think that over for a minute. "Maybe," he said presently. "That helps, some. And like you say, a man can't live on what-if; I wisht he hadn't'a pushed it the way he did, but I accept that he thought he had to, that takin' the risk of me killin' him was better'n a noose. Shoot," he added, lifting a hand to rub the side of his neck, "'most anythin's better'n a noose. And for a man like Dixie, a man who'd been in books, to die that way would'a been... well, he just couldn't let it happen. I understand that. I'm even kinda proud of him for it. But I shouldn't'a lied to you, all the same. Maybe if I'd felt I could tell you the truth, we wouldn't'a come to hittin'. I told Dixie, havin' him here was makin' me a dang good liar. And I didn't like that, Slim."
"I understand that a man's word has to be good," Slim agreed. "Out here, where there aren't many people, you have to know you can trust the ones there are. But you'd never given me a word, Jess, not about this, and I don't hold it against you. You know yourself that nobody thinks the less of a man for tryin' to protect a friend, even if it means throwin' a posse he's ridin' with off the trail; it's expected. I should've expected you'd do what you did, and not thrown it up in your face; you'd already told me, honest and plain, after the funeral, what Dixie was to you. Maybe you were wrong, but not accordin' to your own lights. What I did was worse."
"So you were right accordin' to your lights," said Jess. "I don't hold that against you. How else you reckon a Yank and a Reb could work on the same spread and not be at each other's throats every day? I don't blame a man for doin' what he feels he has to. You got to keep good in your own eyes. That's why I took out to get the truth about Harry."
"Well, then," said Slim, "it seems to me neither of us has anything to be sorry for, if that's how you think."
There was a long moment of stunned silence from the other chair, and then a sound that lifted Slim's heart—a quiet, snorting chuckle. "Dang, hardcase, you done it to me again, didn't you? Talked me plumb around and roped me with my own tongue."
"If it wasn't such a long one, I couldn't," said Slim, letting his friend hear the smile in his voice. "Now, are we straight? You're not gonna give me any more of this fool talk about leavin'?"
"I reckon I ain't," Jess agreed. "I reckon I'm in it for the long haul."
"You better be."
"I am." Then: "Slim, the reward on Dixie... I'm gonna give it to Julie. She was meanin' to leave him anyhow, and a woman... it ain't like a man. Three thousand dollars can give her a good start."
"I think that's a fine idea," Slim agreed at once. "We'll take her in town and she can get herself some clothes and things, sell that buckboard and their horses too—that'll be a little more of a stake for her. And if she wants to stay here till it comes, she can have Jonesy's old room, and you and I can sleep in the bunkhouse. It's not like we haven't done pretty well for ourselves this year—you made a great deal on those cattle in Cheyenne, and the two thousand we got for the Plummer gang loot made up for the reward money on Smith that I gave away."
"You never did tell me who you gave it to," Jess noted, with a faintly suspicious tone.
"Same as you," Slim answered. "A woman who needed it. Smith's daughter."
"Pretty?" Jess asked, and for the first time he turned to face the other man.
"Kinda plain, actually," Slim admitted, "but she had real nice hair—glossy black, like an Indian's."
"What'd she reckon to do with it?"
"Thought maybe she'd open herself a little café somewhere."
"Good cook?"
"'Bout like Julie."
"Good cook," they both said in unison. And laughed.
"Come on," Slim said. "It's gettin' cool. Julie was worried about you. Let's go in."
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