Chapter 8: Known As The Rat

It was a miracle that Mr. Carson's house was still standing. However, aside from the fact that it was still standing, it wasn't in terribly good shape. The great glass windows through which my employer had spied upon his city lay on the ground, a shattered mess. The entire building was not in flames, but the surrounding flames licked eagerly at the walls. The grounds were lost to us. Mr. Carson's magnificent garden, the vast hedges, the rosebushes he paid a man $50 a week to cultivate but never touched himself, all gone in mere seconds.

What an unrelenting force, is fire, what cunning and cruelty it displays when unleashed upon the world. By the world, I should say, for it was the earth itself that unleashed this nightmare upon us. The earth shook, and San Francisco shattered. It was a patchwork of fire and glass, just like Mr. Carson's house had become.

It wasn't bravery that compelled me to go inside and search for Mr. Carson. I would never describe myself as a brave man, and if I wouldn't it's safe to assume that no one else ever would. No, it was Miss Eliza's tearful eyes that forced my hand. If it had been mere bravery, I would no doubt have insisted that Miss Eliza remain in the car, and stay safe. Instead I let her follow me in, crying for her grandfather all the while. I could hardly blame her. Her father had all but sold her, and her mother was dead, there wasn't much left for her in this world except William Carson.

The main hall was a scene of devastation. The assorted relics and trophies Mr. Carson had collected throughout his lifetime, once proudly displayed in glass cases, lay strewn about the floor in a sea of jagged glass pieces. As Mr. Carson's valet, I had spent a fair amount of time polishing those cases, and had familiarized myself with every knick-knack, every souvenir from the bad old times.

Eliza was off like a shot before I could stop her, she clambered up the staircase to face god knows what danger on the second floor. For a moment, I was too stunned to follow after her. I spotted dark spot on the floor in the shape of a man's body, and I feared the worst.

Upon closer examination, I couldn't help but last. The shape I'd seen on the floor was not Mr. Carson's body, but his old uniform. He'd kept it in a case in the main hall too, and it had retained its shape as it fell. Although I was by no means "out of the woods," the sight of that gray Confederate uniform with "Carson" stitched to the front filled me with hope.

As a general rule, Mr. Carson didn't like to talk about his past, but he was all too eager to tell of his heroic exploits in the Third Cavalry. His stories were often vague and haphazard, details shifting between each telling, showing the limitations of an old man's memory. He had one particular favorite story though, that he recalled with all the crispness of his old uniform.

How often he'd tell me about the battle at Branston Bridge, how he'd heroically struggled through a days long siege to push on westward. He'd told me of a captain, another man without a name, who drank his courage before the first and second attack each day. In the end, Mr. Carson destroyed the bridge, ended the fighting and saved hundred of lives.

I found out sometime later that the Third Cavalry hadn't been at Branston Bridge, and the confederates that were there were retreating to the east, not pushing west. That wasn't the only peculiar thing about Mr. Carson's military records. In the arduous, ultimately fruitless process of trying to claim Mr. Carson's military pension, I'd stumbled upon a hospital report that claimed he'd lost an eye. So far as I could tell, Mr. Carson didn't wear a glass eye. He might have just been very good at hiding his injury.

Upon examining the fallen uniform, I noted an eye patch tucked discretely under the hat. Of course, how utterly fitting. While lost in my reverie, I didn't notice Mr. Carson descending the staircase, leaning on Eliza for support.

"Hey Blondie!" he called out from across the room. I nearly died of fright. "What the hell is going on out there?"

"There's been a quake." I said. It sounded so simple when put into words, but that quake had brought with it such pandemonium, such utter terror, that mere words could never do it justice.

"The city is burning." I offered weakly. Mr. Carson let go of Eliza and walked towards me. I saw then that she had been leaning on him for support, not the other way 'round. Eliza slumped onto the stairs, near unconscious. Mr. Carson looked out one of the holes where a window had been, and saw the distant flames of San Francisco.

"Blondie, would you say I own about…half of this city?" Mr. Carson asked, staring off into the distance. It seemed to me a very generous estimation, but not wanted to offend, I replied in the affirmative.

"My half is not going to burn." Mr. Carson said with much too strong a sense of conviction.

Before I knew it we were both in Mr. Carson's armory. The display cases in this room had suffered the same fate as the cases in the main hall. Weapons and ammunition were strewn about the floor. From out of the rubble, Mr. Carson pulled out the gun that had been in his room. It was almost an antique, assembled from pieces of older guns that had worn out long ago.

"Mr. Carson, this is foolishness." I said, perhaps a bit too firmly. "You're an old man, all you're going to do is get yourself killed."

"No, I'll tell you what I'm going to do: I'm going to put out the fires, get the people off the street, protect my goddamn investments. Isn't that what you're supposed to be doing?"

"There's panic out there, pandemonium, hundreds of people looting rioting it's impossible."

"Blondie, there's two kinds of people in this world. The kind who say 'it's impossible' and let the whole world go to hell, and the kind who say 'no.' As long as my granddaughter is up there, I'm not going to be the first kind."

"If you really love her, you'll get in the Silver Ghost and drive away. Take her somewhere safe." I suggested. It seemed like the only logical course of action.

"Just run away, eh?" Mr. Carson said with contempt. "And then keep on running, one town to another? No, I gave that up, Amigo. A long time ago."

"Mr. Carson," I said as calmly as I could under the circumstances, "the city is lost."

"No, the city is still there." Mr. Carson retorted. "The fire may burn, and we all may crumble to dust, but San Francisco stands unbroken."

"You'd need an army, Mr. Carson."

"Ah, you forget, Amigo, an army came to see us just last week."

It took me a moment to realize what Mr. Carson meant. "You mean the bunkhouse boys?" I asked in astonishment.

"Si. If there's as many of them as they say, we can get the city cleaned up, not problem."

"Why would they want to help us? You killed three of them, remember?"

"Who says they want to? I'll explain things to them my way, the old way. I tell them they got no choice." Upon saying this, Mr. Carson made a threatening gesture with his piecemeal pistol.

"If you're going to kill yourself." I said with a sigh. "I might as well go with you, or were you gonna die alone?"

I reached down to grab one of the pistols on the floor, but Mr. Carson slammed his foot down in front of my hand.

"Oh no, no. No pistol amigo."

"You mean you don't want my help?" I was almost relieved to hear this. Duty compelled me to accompany my employer into battle, but as I said before, I am not a brave man.

"No, I mean you take a rifle." Mr. Carson replied. "You can't soot for shit, maybe with a rifle you do better."

"What about Eliza?" I asked with some trepidation. I didn't want Mr. Carson to drag her along into a warzone.

Mr. Carson simply shook his head. "She stays. Safer here. Not safe, but safer." I couldn't help but agree.

"The bunkhouse boys won't be happy to see us." I offered, somewhat superfluously.

"Ah, don't worry about those idiots. They cross me and leave me alive? They know nothing about Tuco."

"What's Tuco?"

"My name, Blondie. Maybe you better start calling me that, if you're going to be my son-in-law."

My heart skipped a beat when Mr. Carson said those words: Son-in-law. Evidently, in her agitated state, Miss Eliza had told Mr. Carson more than she'd planned to. His non-reaction to the news was a great relief to me, although I hadn't seriously considered the prospect of marriage before now.

The two of us said our goodbyes to Miss Eliza before heading back into that hell. We were the men in her life, we two, I the lover, he the father (or grandfather as the case may be). Though both Mr. Carson and I had done out share of evil deeds, and Mr. Carson had the deep regret of abandoning a family, we three were the finest family I have ever been a part of.

Mr. Carson, or Tuco, as he liked to be called, rode shotgun in the Silver Ghost. The idea of riding shotgun in an automobile would have seemed ludicrous to me mere days before, but now it was a sad necessity.

With Eliza safely tucked away in the crumbling mansion, Tuco and I set off to enlist the bunkhouse boys, and restore order to the city.