by Gene Curry
I shot him in the head as a way of answering his question, and when I went to the end of the street and could see the harbor, Soapy’s steam yacht was heading out to sea at a fast clip. The ore ship was tying up. It was one of the big new steel-hulled ships with sail as well as steam. I left the dead gunman in the street and went down to talk to the captain.
They were unloading supplies for the mines when I reached the dock. I found the first mate and he directed me to the captain’s cabin. He was one of those Yankees who leave home early and never go back, and he talked the way Yankees are expected to talk, which was hardly at all.
“Guess I can fix you up with some space,” he said after I explained the situation to him. “Have to charge you for the freight, understand? Them’s the rules. You just pack the judge in ice and we’ll keep him on deck for the whole voyage.”
He didn’t whistle when I said I’d brought the judge over the mountains. Yankees think they can do anything, so what was so great about what I’d done?
“You look like you need a tot of rum,” he said to me. “Been sailing this coast twenty years or more, and I never seen a man needed a drink more than you do.”
The captain, a man named Grinsted, sent three of his sailors to help me with the coffin. The dead men lay where they had fallen, but the sailors just looked at them and then at me with mildly inquisitive eyes. We picked up the coffin and carried it down to the ore ship, where the ship’s carpenter made a container for the coffin, leaving plenty of space to pack it with ice. He was a Yankee, like the captain, and didn’t have much to say.
Two days later, with the coffin lashed tight against heavy seas, the ore ship President Hayes sailed out of the harbor at Valdez. Soapy had long gone back to Skagway, no doubt to escape the wrath of the mining company, for if you know mining companies then you know they have their company gunmen that are a lot more dangerous than any law. The captain fixed me up in a cabin usually reserved for company officials, and I ate the same food he did. I laid in my own store of whiskey for the voyage back to Seattle, and it was a good thing I did, because the Yankee captain didn’t drink.
The President Hayes was a fast ship and we made Seattle in a third of the time it had taken me to get to Alaska. Now and then I visited the judge on deck to make sure he wasn’t thawing out.
In Seattle the captain arranged the transfer to a ship sailing to San Francisco. I told him I didn’t want to attract any attention, but one of the crewmen must have talked. Before I was rightly aboard the Frisco boat a horde of newspaper reporters were down at the docks looking to get my story. I knew then I wasn’t going to get off that easy; it would be worse in Frisco. The only consolation was that it would soon be over.
The boat I boarded was a passenger boat, and I had to stay in my cabin to get away from all the people who wanted to shake my hand and hear my story and otherwise drive me crazy. But they came to my door anyway. One portly gent owned a company that sold snow country supplies. That one wanted me to sign a paper stating that the sled I’d used to bring out the judge was made by his factory in Seattle. The money was good—five thousand dollars—but I just couldn’t see myself as a newspaper advertisement huckster, especially when it would mean having my picture taken when we got to Frisco.
Whores came too—all the coast boats have them—offering to do this and that for me. A whore with a French accent arrived to ask if I’d like a “trip around the world.” I told her I’d just had a trip around the world and didn’t feel like another one so soon.
Other women turned up with marriage or money on their minds. It had been going around the ship that I was the millionaire judge’s long lost son, and that drew them like flies to honey. Still other women just wanted to get in bed with a “hero.”
Me, I just wanted to be left alone.
In Frisco I stayed on the boat until the other passengers got off. Then I went ashore to hire a wagon to take the judge up to his fine house on Nob Hill. Crewmen helped me to load the coffin, but by then a crowd was gathering and it got bigger as the wagon rattled away from the dock. There was plenty of noise by the time I reached the house.
Cynthia opened the door and stared at me in absolute amazement. “I was beginning to think you were dead,” she said.
“Got a delivery for you, ma’am,” I said.
In the hallway, with the door locked, Cynthia hugged me so hard she threatened to break my ribs, and I sat down in the first chair I came to after she let me go.
“What I need is a big drink,” I said. “A lot of whiskey and some peace and quiet.”
With a drink in my belly and another in my hand, I told the story for the last time. Wild horses wouldn’t have been able to drag it out of me again. I asked her about the Slocum brothers and she said they’d been acting pretty cocky, as if they didn’t expect me to get back.
“They came close to getting their way,” I said. “So did a lot of people.”
I asked Cynthia if she’d do me a favor and she looked puzzled. “Anything you want, Saddler. Just tell me what it is.”
I gave her a weary grin. “Promise to make your next husband die at home in bed.”
Cynthia smiled too. “No more husbands for me, Saddler. From now on I’m going to be an elegant widow.”
“But you’ll manage to enjoy yourself just the same?”
“You know me, Saddler. I always manage. How would you like to be an elegant widow’s companion?”
“Maybe later,” I said. “As of this moment I’m too tired to think about anything but sleep and whiskey.”
The very thought of sleep made me yawn and I went upstairs like a man with lead in his shoes. I lay down on the bed without taking anything off and slept through to the next day. When I woke up I was aware of a lot of activity in the house. I figured Cynthia was busy with lawyers and undertakers, getting ready to bury the judge, putting the judge’s brothers in their place. I was out of it now and wanted to stay out of it.
In the afternoon the undertakers took the judge’s coffin away so they could thaw him out for the lying in state. I wondered what the old bastard would look like. I’d never seen him thawed out.
It was the damnedest funeral San Francisco ever saw. The governor was there among all the other politicians. There was fog and heavy rain, but that didn’t stop them from turning out to pay their last respects. The story—and my name—was all over the newspapers. Reporters camped on Cynthia’s doorstep, trying to get me to talk to them. But that didn’t stop them from writing and publishing everything I hadn’t said. The stories got wilder and wilder. Not only had I battled wolves and grizzly bears, I had also fought my way through “hordes of savage redskins” and eaten some of my dogs in order to stay alive. I was a real living legend. The newspapers wanted to take my picture, and when I said go to hell they cooked up drawings that made me look like a cross between Buffalo Bill and Abraham Lincoln. In one drawing I was dressed in buckskins, with long yellow hair and a flowing mustache. They said I carried a brace of ivory-handled Colts, a present from the President himself. One scribbler got carried away and said I was the only man who had escaped the Little Big Horn massacre back in ’76. I liked that one better than any of the others.
I don’t recall what else they said about me. They said a lot, and most of it was a lie. The mayor wanted to give me the key to the city, and sometimes I wish I’d taken it. It might have unlocked the city treasury.
Cynthia grieved in public and laughed in private. This was an unseemly attitude, to be sure, not that I blamed her for it. Now that the judge was back where he belonged, there was no disputing her claim to all that money. The only time she didn’t laugh was when I told her about Hella. Cynthia is a tough gal, but there are certain things she knows about.
“I’m very sorry,” was all she said, and that meant more than if she had gone into a song and dance.
I must say I drank a lot in the days before the funeral, while the judge was lying in state in the federal court building and Cynthia was receiving callers w
ho wanted to say how devastated they were by the old boy’s passing. Naturally they all wanted to meet me, but I wasn’t having any of that. Instead, I drank in my room. So far Cynthia and I hadn’t resumed our sleeping arrangements.
There was nothing Cynthia didn’t want to do for me. All I had to do was yank on the bell-pull and the household staff would come running with liquor, food, anything. I just wanted to get away from there, from all the hoopla, but Cynthia urged me to stay. And so I did because I was too tired to do anything else.
“You look terrible, Saddler,” she said, and I guess I did. There still were patches of frostbite on my face, but the doctor who looked me over said I wouldn’t be marked up after all.
I thought of Hella, what was left of her, out there in the Alaska mountains, and I decided maybe she was better off. The city would not have suited her: she was where she had always wanted to be.
Would you believe it! It took them nearly a week to get the judge into the ground. Not into the ground exactly; they put him in the family vault.
I didn’t go to the funeral with Cynthia, though she tried hard to persuade me to attend. But I said no. Besides, I was too drunk that day. But I did go by myself, standing well back in a crowd of ordinary citizens, and not a person there knew my face. So much for being the only man who survived the Little Big Horn.
It was as solemn as all get-out, with a guard of honor and all the dignitaries in their glossy black hats, and the hearse they put the coffin in must have weighed twenty tons. It was drawn by black horses with purple plumes. Cynthia wore a heavy veil and I’m sure she was smiling under it. Maybe she wasn’t; she had liked the judge in her way.
The hearse moved away and I said, “So long, Judge.”
I was packing my few things when Cynthia came back to the house after the funeral. She came into my room and threw her hat and veil in a corner.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” she said. Before I answered she took a swig from the bottle of bourbon on the dresser.
“Back to Texas,” I said, taking a swig myself.
“Not today you’re not,” Cynthia said. “I’m not going to try to make you forget that girl. But I am going to bring you back to life.” And saying that she pushed me onto the bed and started by taking off my boots.
Well you know how it is. You get over everything if you give it enough time. But you’ve got to have help, and that’s what I got from Cynthia. She helped me every way she could; she knew exactly how to do it. I’d done a lot for her, and now she was doing a lot for me. I lay on the bed grinning while she unbuckled my belt and pulled my pants off, and when she finished she rolled me under the silk sheets and got in with me. I was in bed with one of the richest women in San Francisco, but money wasn’t a consideration at the time. After many weeks of cold, hunger, misery and danger, I needed a warm woman more than anything else.
Cynthia was warm, she smelled good, and she was all woman. I was tired but she stiffened me up like the bed expert she was. After a while I wasn’t tired at all, and I went into her like a bull. I went at her so hard that she gave out little cries of surprise. She lifted her legs until they were over my shoulders, making it possible for me to penetrate her to the fullest. She was wet and warm and I drove in and out of her like a piston. I must have been more desperate than I thought because even when I came I didn’t get soft. Cynthia cried out again when she found that I was still hard, still ready to go on with it.
And that’s what we did all through the afternoon of the judge’s funeral. Winter rain beat on the windows, but it was warm and friendly where we were, and Alaska began to fade from my mind. The only time Cynthia got up was to get whiskey for both of us.
Finally I slept and when I woke up hours later she was still there and just as eager to please as she had been. Her fingertips touched my battered face and she smiled at me. “You’ve done a lot for me,” she said. “I don’t know how I’m ever going to make up for it.”
“You just did,” I said. “Let’s not be talking about what we owe each other.”
“I feel bad about that girl you liked so much.”
“Don’t be like that. Talking like that is a waste of time.”
“I wish you’d think about becoming an elegant widow’s companion. It wouldn’t be like ... well, like it is with other people. We’ve known each other too long for that.”
“Maybe that’s why it wouldn’t work,” I said. “You’re as restless as I am. You’ve got a place here in Frisco and I just wouldn’t fit in. I am what I am and there’s no changing me. You can take the boy out of West Texas but you can’t—and so on. Let it go, all right?”
Cynthia said, “You’re from the shitty end of Texas. Where the hell do you think I’m from?”
I said, “Makes no difference where you’re from. You were born to live like this. ’Fess up now, you know it’s true.”
Cynthia gave a breathy sigh. “I like it fine, but there are times when I get sick of it. Goddamn but didn’t we have a good, wild life in the old days?”
Some of that was true, too; on the other hand, Cynthia was looking at the past from a distance, and that made it seem better than it was.
“You can’t have it every way,” I said. “You got what you wanted. Better make the best of it.”
“Damn right I will,” Cynthia said, reaching down between my legs. “But I’d like it more if you stayed around. What in hell do you want anyway? How about a gambling house? You’re a gambler so how about running your own place right here in San Francisco? If it’s the money you’re thinking about you can pay me back when you like.”
“Be quiet,” I said, drawing her close to me. “If I think of something else I want after this, I’ll let you know.”
It took me a long time to get back to Texas.
About the Author
Peter J. McCurtin was born in Ireland on 15 October 1929, and immigrated to America when he was in his early twenties. By the early 1960s, he was co-owner of a bookstore in Ogunquit, Maine, and often spent his summers there.
McCurtin’s first book, Mafioso (1970) was nominated for the prestigious Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award, and filmed in 1973 as The Boss, with Henry Silva. More books in the same vein quickly followed, including Cosa Nostra (1971), Omerta (1972), The Syndicate (1972) and Escape From Devil’s Island (1972). 1970 also saw the publication of his first “Carmody” western, Hangtown.
McCurtin’s view of the frontier is harsh and unforgiving, a place where a man with any sense looks to his own safety, and to hell with everyone else. His westerns are fast, violent and chauvinistic, but the violence and sex are seldom overtly explicit.
McCurtin’s editor at Leisure Books remembers that he was “a terrific, fluent, natural writer of action, and a solid researcher for his westerns and mysteries. Leisure did not, in my time (1979-1981), let anyone else write under Peter’s name, but Peter wrote under other names in addition to his own byline. He was a real workhorse with, unfortunately, an alcohol problem (like so many), and without question the very best writer that Leisure was publishing at the time. Perhaps he could have been better and more prolific under better circumstances.” For a while, McCurtin himself also worked as an editor at Leisure Books.
An acquaintance adds: “When he wrote most of his books, he lived in a studio in Murray Hill, on 39th Street, only a few blocks from the New York offices of Tower Books, which at the time were located at 2 Park Avenue. His building was called the Tuscany Towers back then. It’s now a W Hotel. He had a Murphy bed, a kitchenette, and a desk with manual typewriter. There was no phone except for the payphone in the building basement. He liked eating at Automats, he went to the movies several times a week and spent a lot of time reading.”
Peter McCurtin died in New York on 27 January 1997. His westerns in particular are distinguished by unusual plots with neatly resolved conclusions, well-drawn secondary characters, regular bursts of action and tight, smooth writing. if you haven’t already checked him out, you have quite
a treat in store.
THE JIM SADDLER SERIES
1: A DIRTY WAY TO DIE
2: WILDCAT WOMAN
3: COLORADO CROSSING
4: HOT AS A PISTOL
5: WILD, WILD WOMEN
6: ACE IN THE HOLE
7: YUKON RIDE
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