Black Hat Jack

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Well now, that caused the air to thin. The other men was silent for a moment, and then a young one laughed out loud, a fellow that was probably no more than a teenager, maybe twenty if you gave him an edge, but walked and talked like a grown man. The young one said, “He knows you, Jimmy,” and then the others laughed.

  When the laughter died down Jack bowed up and went into a kind of monologue that caused him to sway, way a spreading adder snake will stand on its tail and swing its body above the grass, flaring its head to look scary. “You all know me, the one and only goddamn Black Hat Jack, called such on account of my hat is black and my name is Jack. Nat, standing right here black as the Ace of Spades, is my partner, and due to his shooting prowess in Deadwood, is also known as Deadwood Dick. Paint on the skin don’t matter. You lift a hand to him, I will kill you and skin you and pack you with buffalo shit, and kick you till you are alive and can stand. Then I will kill you again, and if I’ve got the need, I will fuck your corpse. Is that understood, you bunch of ignorant, buffalo hunting, dog-fucking, shit-sucking, dick-kissing, ass licking excuses for grown men that ain’t even dropped your balls or got hair above your peckers?”

  These words hung in the air along with the stink for a while, and then the young man stepped forward, said, “Well, I think that pretty well names us, and there is plenty of buffalo shit out there, and I for one don’t want to be skinned, and the thought of Jack’s pecker in my ass is enough to frighten me off most anything. Hello, Nat. Step up to the bar and I’ll buy your black ass one.”

  With that everyone laughed, including the Southerner, and he said, “Damn right. You’re a friend of Jack’s, you’re a friend of mine, and your black skin is just as white to me as any white man’s.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “That is damn white of you.”

  “That’s my take,” he said.

  There was more laughing, and me and Jack stepped up to the bar, and a jug came out and the young man who had lightened the mood, who I could now see was dressed as dapper as if he was going to a ball somewhere, his mustache waxed and his hair greased and parted down the middle, said, “Let’s knock them back.”

  His clothes looked clean and he smelled pretty enough to live in France, or some place where the light was bright, the water was pure, and the children and women didn’t ever fart.

  He stuck out his hand to me, said, “Bat Masterson.”

  I shook his hand.

  “Glad to meet you,” I said. “I’m glad you had you a sense of humor.”

  “It has served me well. Sometimes, when nothing is going my way, I tell myself jokes. It lightens the mood. Let’s have a jug, barkeep.”

  The cup set in front of me looked like it had been used to dip that buffalo shit Jack was talking about, but when the whisky was poured, I lifted it to my lips. Now, you got to understand I never was a man to drink liquor or beer. I always preferred sarsaparilla, which often got me some laughs and some kidding, but considering the circumstances of where I was and who I was with, and the way things had started, I thought it best to suck me a cup and seem sociable. I did that from time to time, though I can’t say I ever built me a taste for whisky, and this horror from the jug was worse than anything I had ever put in my mouth. Only thing I could come close to thinking it reminded me of was once, when I didn’t have no place to sleep, I slipped under a porch in Abilene and was awakened by a yellow cur pissing on my face, and right into my open mouth. This wasn’t quite that tasty, but it was similar.

  “What the hell is this?” Jack said, having downed a cup himself. Remember, I told you Jack wasn’t a complainer, so this should give you some idea of the rankness of this libation.

  “Well,” Bat said. “They call it whisky, but it’s only a touch of that. It is boiled with snake heads and a squirt of horse piss and some twists of already chewed tobacco by men without teeth.”

  “Oh, don’t tell me that.” I said. “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope, he’s not,” another man said.

  I turned to that fellow. He was a tall man with dark hair, a little beard and mustache. Like Bat, he was dressed pretty snappy as far as his type of clothes was concerned, but it was a snappy that had gone dusty and dirty, and he had the smell of skinned buffalo about him.

  “Say he ain’t?” I said to him.

  “He isn’t lying,” the man said. “I only take a snort of this when I have to, and right now, I have to. Set me up, bartender, and don’t hold the horses. To the lip and don’t get a match near it.”

  A cup was poured for the man, and he pushed up between Masterson and myself, said, “By the way, I’m Billy Dixon.”

  “I know of you through Jack,” I said.

  Billy turned and looked at Jack. “Why, me and Jack have shared many a buffalo wallow and the fine roof of trees and sky, and we once shared a whore who was so fat you had to take survival supplies and a detailed map with you just to get around her ass.”

  Billy turned to Jack. “To Fat Ass Willamena, as good a screw as a pretty girl. And I wish she was here right now.”

  They drank to that, lifting their cups first in a toast, then downing the contents with one mighty gulp. Me, I didn’t drink with them, just pretended to, touching the rim of the cup to my lips and putting it down.

  3

  We was standing there in that strained light, and in comes a woman and a man, and Jack, who had taken to the far end of the bar next to Bat, leans beyond him to me, says, “That there is Mrs. Olds and her husband. She ain’t available. They run the store.”

  He said this as if I was planning on asking her for a dance and a possible visit to a hay pile later. She wasn’t much to look at, thick and big-boned, and though I wouldn’t call her ugly, she was as plain as homemade soap with a wad of hair in it. My take was she could have used a bar of it on herself, with or without the hair, and not just because it was a rough living out where we was. When she come up to the bar with her husband, she said, “Give me the straight stuff, and wipe out the goddamn cup first, and not with your fingers.”

  Her cup would be the cleanest thing about her. She was six feet from me, and had a smell that was whupping the hell out of that that was already nesting in the room, the one collected from all them men. It was the kind of smell that doesn’t come from a sweaty afternoon, but from years of not washing unless she was caught in a rain, and I was certain if she was, she’d run from it to shelter as fast as she could. If she had been available to me, I wouldn’t have wanted to venture what kind of stink was under them dark, dirty skirts she wore. She was about the nastiest looking and smelling thing I had ever seen, and considering some company I’d kept, that was some kind of thing to say.

  Mrs. Olds downed her cup of poison, yelled out, “Oh good goddamn, that is the shit, there. God-a-mighty, piss up a rope.”

  Her husband, a stout man with a hound dog face and maybe three strands of hair on his head, had quietly ordered his cup, and now he sipped at it, looked at her as if hoping she might ask for another cup and that a fresh drought of it might strangle her. She did have another, but she didn’t strangle. That was when she looked down the bar and her eyes having adjusted good, settled them on me and said, “Is that a nigger?”

  “Yes, m’am, I suppose I am.” It wasn’t any use trying to fight being called that. It wasn’t worth the stirring.

  “Well, how the hell are you?” she said.

  “Fine,” I said. “How are you?”

  “I got a twitch between my legs, and my old man here has a razor strop for a dick. Loose and floppy, but not as long. A good sized cigar laid next to it would make it look like the nub of a near used-up pencil.”

  “That is more knowledge than we all need,” Bat said. “Charlie, I think your wife might be deep in her cups.”

  “I ain’t had but them two,” she said.

  “Here,” Charlie said. “But you drank a jug-full at the store.”

  She rocked her head back like that sort of talk was revolting, said, “Well, goddamn you, trying to
tell me how to drink and how much of it, and keeping up with it like you’re measuring out milk for biscuits. Mind your own dick-jerking business.”

  She pulled a knife from somewhere then, a slit in her dress, I think. It wasn’t long, but in the weak light from outside it shimmered a little and made me believe it was sharp. To Charlie, she said, “I’ll cut you from ball-sack to eyeballs, you needle-peckered excuse for a grown man.”

  Charlie had his right arm on the bar, and he kind of heaved his shoulder and his fist came up and hit her solid on the jaw, knocking her backwards against Jack, who caught her. The knife fell on the floor.

  Charlie slipped in then and got his arms around her and hoisted her up like a sack of potatoes over his shoulder. “The lady’s sleepy,” the weight of her bowing his legs.

  Normally, striking a woman wouldn’t have settled right with me, but for the first and only time in my life it seemed like a good choice had been made, and my guess was that was to her the same as a goodnight kiss.

  Charlie opened the door, carried her out, and slammed it shut.

  Billy said, “She cut him up a little not long ago. When she sobered up, she stitched him with a needle and gut-string, kissed him and told him what a lover he was. Next day when he was able to stand, she got drunk again, got into with him over something or another, ripping out his stitches. She told him after that if she ever acted up, just to slug her. I don’t think she meant it, but he took her at her word, I see.”

  “I think someone asks something of you nicely,” Jack said, “you should be ripe for doing it.”

  “I have to agree with that,” Bat said.

  Several other men had leant an ear to the conversation, and they agreed that a good punch in the mouth if asked for should be delivered, be it man or woman, horse or dog. Jack backed off on the dog part. He could see the others, but a dog he wouldn’t buy into. Dogs were all right with Jack.

  I don’t guess I have to mention that this was a particularly rough crowd.

  4

  What was left of the day was getting a sack thrown over it, and what light there had been through the windows and the windy cracks in the boards where there wasn’t anymore. Lanterns was lit.

  “I figured I’d let it lay until we was kind of drunk, as that’s how I take things better,” Jack said. “But me and Nat here, we seen some Comanche, and then we seen what they had been at. A fellow who was cut up and burned and scalped. Had a black beard. Wasn’t much to tell about his face, as he was knifed-up good. Color of eyes was two dark holes, and so was the nose. Can any of you put some hair to that, some nose and eyes? He was missing his johnson too.”

  “Was he tall?” said Jimmy, the man who asked if I was a nigger when we first come in.

  “I don’t know he was so tall,” Jack said. “Do you, Nat?”

  “Not as tall as me,” I said. “Maybe tall as you. He had a big belly, but that may have been because they cut him open and his guts was pushed out.”

  “That will swell you,” Billy said. “Being dead swells you, but guts right out there in the open in the sunlight, even if the air’s cold, it’ll swell a fellow. Everything gets bloated in size. A small man can look like a carnival wrestler. I’ve seen it.”

  “Where was the body?” Jimmy asked.

  “Up near Chicken Creek,” Jack said.

  “I’m going to guess it’s Hutchinson,” said Jimmy. “That’s the direction he took, and he ain’t come back. He and his partner went for a hunt on their own, even though we didn’t think there was no use in it. We all felt the herd hadn’t come far enough this way yet. Let them come to you, is what I say. You get so you can tell how they’re going to do.”

  “Only way you can tell,” Billy said, “is if someone tells you they’re coming or the buffalo show up and stand on your feet. The rest of us can tell, but you can’t tell your ass from a hole in the ground.”

  “The hole is below me, the ass is behind me,” said Jimmy.

  “Goddamn, he’s gotten smart,” the barkeep said.

  “His partner,” Jimmy said. “I figure they got him too, or otherwise he’d be snugged up here with the rest of us, out of the cold. He wasn’t one for more hardship than he had to endure. Hutchinson, he might could take it, but that partner of his… What was his name?”

  Nobody knew.

  “Whatever it was,” Jimmy said, “I didn’t never call him that twice, as I didn’t care for him. I think he liked his hand in his pocket more than he liked a woman, way he talked. All that said, I guess ain’t nobody deserves that, being cut up by them savages like they was a link of sausage for breakfast.”

  “Them savages ain’t no worse than us,” Jack said. “They ain’t ones to keep their word any better than us cause they know ours isn’t any good, but they got a streak of honor about them, mean as they are. You might could ask Nat here about savages. His color and his kind have seen plenty of that, and they were white-skins. As far as them redskins go, this is where their people lived before we knew there was a dirt beyond the ocean. Someone come to take land we owned, we’d buck too.”

  “Ain’t like they’re doing anything with it,” Jimmy said.

  “Who says they got to?” Jack said. “And what have you ever done for this country other than slaughter buffalo and shit in the bushes?”

  “You do the same,” Jimmy said.

  “I do,” Jack said, “and that’s why I say ain’t none of us worth a flying fuck in a snow storm. Fill up my goddamn cup again. Let’s lift one to poor old Hutchinson and that other dead fellow we don’t know the name of. May Hutchinson stay buried, and may that nameless son-of-a-bitch be somewhere alive, and if dead, may the wolves eat his bones and may their shit grow green-green grass.”

  That was the toast, and I actually sipped a bit more, but just a bit. As I put my cup down, Jack turned to it, and knowing my ways, took mine and drained the remains.

  There was more toasts and more cups poured, me having turned mine over so as to show I was done, and as the night went on the voices got louder. There was jokes and lies told, and some things that might have been the truth. A man in a bowler hat said how he could throw his bowler hat and make it fit on anyone’s head. The barkeep volunteered as victim, as he was hatless, and Bowler Hat, whose real name was Zeke, I discovered, cocked that bowler with careful aim, one eye squinted, and away it sailed. We watched it travel across those darkish quarters, and hit the barkeep in the face, banging his eye. Well, then the fight was on. Bets was placed quick as possible, but it wasn’t quick enough. Zeke took a beating so fast, he hit the ground before his knocked-out teeth. Afterward the barkeep punched his fists through Zeke’s hat, so that rain and sunshine would be the same to the top of Zeke’s head.

  We all decided this was just too mean, and we all chipped in and Jimmy went next door to the store, and come back with a new hat, not a bowler, but a wide-brimmed one the color of wet dirt, and tossed it on Zeke’s chest. He then told us he was happy to report that Mrs. Olds was sleeping peacefully in the middle of the floor, her head on a flour-sack, one eye swollen shut. Mr. Olds was watching her carefully, knowing she would finally come awake. He was living in fear of the natural born fact that he had to sleep sometime, or so said Jimmy, though as I have reported, all of us was something of exaggerators.

  After a few pukings and passing-outs, things began to wind down considerable, and there was only a few more shenanigans, among them a cuss-fight, which was seeing who could string the most cuss words together and have it make some kind of sense. Jack won. Well, there was a peach-eating contest. Some fat blowhard said he wished he had some peaches, and that he could eat his weight in them, to which Bat replied, “I judge you about two hundred and ten, and they got canned peaches next door.”

  “Well,” said the blowhard. “Maybe not my weight.”

  “Let me see you eat twenty-five cans of peaches, and I will give you twenty-five dollars,” Bat said.

  “That’s a lot of money,” said the blowhard.

  “Y
ou fail, you give me twenty-five dollars, or that spare Hawken rifle you got.”

  “What the hell you want that for,” some fellow said to Bat. “Now that they got a Sharps, them Hawkins ain’t the gun you need.”

  “Call me a fucking historian,” Bat said.

  So it got called that there would be a peach-eating contest, and somebody went next door to the store and bought the peaches with money we all chipped in, and they was opened a can at a time with a pocket knife. Damn if Blowhard, as I had come know him with some affection, take to them without pause, lifting the cans and pouring them peaches and the syrup they was in down his gullet like a wet fish sliding between mossy rocks. About the time he got to the fifteenth can and was looking spry, Bat started to pale. I was wondering if he had twenty-five dollars. On went Blowhard, volunteers opening the cans for him, him lifting them to his lips, gulping them like water, and then when he hit can twenty, he began to shake a little and took to a stool, sat there with the sweats.

  This heartened Bat, but there was still some worry, as there was only five cans more.

  “I got to pause,” said Blowhard. Then he burped real loud, cut a fart that made the nastiest among us ill, and went back at it. He swallowed all twenty-five cans of peaches, took twenty-three dollars and a pocketknife from Bat for the rest, had a whisky, lay on the ground and cried.

  More time passed, and by then we was all sagging, especially them that had been about serious nipping. It was decided that we’d hunt in the early morning, so some of the men went to set their skinning wagons and clean their rifles, and make necessary preparations. Me and Jack was shooters on this trip, not skinners, so all we had to do was wait until first light, which was going to come mighty early.

  Jack and me decided we’d stretch out on the floor of the saloon, like some of the others. We got our bed rolls and laid them flat. We took off our coats. The night air was no longer cool. It was already growing hot from the oncoming day, though darkness was still about us. We was slipping our pistols and knives off our persons when Blowhard began to roll around on the floor moaning. “Oh, my pancreas. I’ve busted my pancreas.”