by James Short
“I resent…” Tomàs started to say.
“I resent bullshit! Resent it to the core of my being, and that’s what you have been shoveling into our craw all night, boy. Let me tell you something. In ’49, during a spell in the mining camps, we strung up a gambler who had come through and bled us dry. Had the same act as you, boy. Pretending to be as green as spring grass, pretending to have a sick mother and a sweetheart waiting back home, pretending he had never seen a deck of cards in his life.”
It was difficult to tell whether Kurtz was grinning or grimacing as he recounted the incident. “Hell, he showed us a letter from his sweetheart. Made us all want to cry. Well, he was careless. When he left, he dropped a card, an ace which he forgot to put back in the deck. We chased him nearly all the way to Yerba Buena. When we got him, we gave him miner’s camp justice. A few were for just tarring and feathering or whipping the cheat, but I held that as soon as he scraped the tar and feathers off his hide or the scabs on his back went away, he’d stiff some other poor miners, so we might as well do those other miners a favor. We let him say his last ‘amen’ and cry for his mother, then strung him up from an oak with a sign warning other cheats this is what they should expect if they steal from a miner the fruit of his back-breaking labor.”
“Look at the deck if you think I’m cheating!” Tomàs felt his neck itch.
“That don’t mean nothing. Deck is clean.”
“Search me!”
Mr. K nodded. Two of the four players stood up and excused themselves from the table, the other two lighted cigars, choosing to be spectators. Mr. K called in three of his hands and they went about their work stripping Tomàs. Although no cards were found, the derringer and spring-blade knife were discovered, which in Mr. K’s mind was sufficient proof. “A cheater’s weapons of choice.
Tomàs glanced at the money on the table. “I hadn’t thought you’d stoop so low as a grab-game…”
The force of the blow made Tomàs feel as if he had been kicked in the jaw by a horse. “That money ain’t yours,” Mr. K said.
“Ain’t yours either,” Tomàs pushed the words out through the good side of his mouth.
Mr. K ’s fist struck his stomach, which lifted Tomàs off the ground an inch, a split second later another landed in his groin, and it took all of Tomàs’s will to not crumple. “I did you a favor of stopping you before you got so far that we’d have to hang you. You understand we can’t let you off scot-free. I’m inclined to break all the fingers on your right hand so they won’t be so nimble the next time you stack a deck. We put your hand on a stump and sort of disconnect things with two blows of a sledgehammer, but if you want you can choose Old Ed Bergen.”
“Ed Bergen?” Tomàs coughed up blood and a tooth.
“My bullwhip. Named in the honor of the man who gave me my first job when I was eleven. For the three years, six months, and eight days I worked for him, I don’t think my back was without a fresh stripe. Although Ed had a reputation for breaking men, he couldn’t break me.”
Tomàs chose Ed Bergen, and so was taken to the barn. There, illuminated by the orange-ish light of two lanterns, and surrounded by a grim and grinning audience, he was trussed up. Tomàs’s last unpainful memory was the sound of the horses shifting uneasily in their stalls.
He had no idea of how many lashes he received. Mr. K didn’t count, saying, “Don’t want to get your hopes up, boy. This is hell, and hell, as the preachers tell us, goes on forever.”
Two hands wore themselves out swinging the whip. Then Mr. K stepped in and went at it with fresh vigor. Tomàs would have preferred to die. He begged for it, in fact. Mr. K replied that he was enjoying himself too much. “Besides,” he said, “learning you this lesson is a good deed. Not in my nature to do good deeds, although after I do them, I always feel better.”
Tomàs could only issue hoarse moans as they poured vinegar on his skinless back. When they tied him to his horse, Mr. K told him, “Ed got a little carried away tonight, as he’s apt to do from time to time. I doubt you’ll last much past my property line. When you see the devil, give him my regards and tell him to hold a place open at his game for me.”
Revenge
“Tomàs did make it to the property line, and beyond.” After saying this, Jacinto fell silent and stood as if frozen. It seemed to Philip that his companion was becoming vapory. Then he resumed speaking and regained substance. “He disappeared into the wastes of the great desert. Some believe a band of Utes found him and nursed him. We only know for certain that he returned fourteen months later.”
“Soy yo!”
“Who said that?” Conrad Kurtz opened an eye painfully. A small black squirming object three inches away caught his attention.
“Shit!” He jerked violently back and flung himself out of bed. On his pillow, next to the impression of his head, a black scorpion writhed impaled by a penknife.
“Shit!” He slowly looked around. The door was closed; the windows closed, the curtains still. It was early morning and the house was quiet. Kurtz shook his head and listened hard. The mongrel boy hired to do chores should have been chopping wood; his cook should have been singing her Mexican songs as she prepared breakfast, and his dog usually would be scratching at the door asking to be let out. He returned his gaze to the scorpion, withdrew the penknife, brushed the insect onto the floor, and watched it retreat warped and dying under his bed.
With a revolver in hand and blinking constantly to clear his blurry vision, Kurtz paced through his house. Each room was exactly how it was supposed to be, except with the life sucked out. He would have preferred to have dealt with blood and death, a corpse, an enemy with an ax or gun. Not this.
Imelda, the cook, Graciela, the housekeeper and Maria, the fifteen-year-old Mexican girl as fresh as May flowers whom he as good as owned were all gone. In the chuck house, ranch hands should have been sitting around their breakfast table, loudly eating and swearing. The one-eyed Indian beggar should have been tapping at the window. His brown, rangy hound should have been at his heel basking in his master’s aura of power.
Kurtz stepped cautiously outside into the yard. The outbuildings included the bunkhouse, a barn, a butchering shed, a chicken coop, a separate stable for the horses, a kiln house, and various corrals and pens. He could tell immediately by the silence in the stables that the horses were gone. The sty was empty. The chicken coop was empty. The men had left their belongings as if they had gone to the town for the day.
Kurtz shouted: “Show yourselves, goddamn it!” Then he realized that there was nothing so foolish sounding like a man shouting at what wasn’t there. “Don’t show yourselves,” he muttered, “I’ll smoke you out, sooner or later.”
Kurtz nearly sank down to his knees, holding his throbbing temples, which had begun to feel like a sack filled with large stones, bulging and on the verge of bursting. Then, he heard a bird trill in a tree. He straightened and again walked through the yard. He found three piglets underneath the bunkhouse, three eggs in the chicken coop, and ascertained that the manure in the stables was cold.
Kurtz returned to the porch and sat in the rocking chair Imelda used to rest her feet. He made an effort to think back to the evening before, but sleepiness and the headache fogged his brain.
He was vaguely aware that last night had been different, but how? A visitor—yes. Who was the visitor? A priest, of all people. An entertaining individual, despite being a priest. Not the plump, womanish sort of godly man who gossips with ladies at endless teas, rather a handsome man with gray in his dark beard. He had a frank open face and the comportment of someone who contended joyfully with life. A priest who could match him glass of whiskey for glass of whiskey, who could tell a wicked story or joke about the confessional. He had been sent to minister to the needs of the Mexicans who were really just damned Indians with sombreros, and who, in the absence of spiritual direction, would quickly revert to savagery and pagan worship.
Although hardly a practitioner, Conrad Kurtz valued re
ligion. Religion taught people obedience—a good habit. He invited the priest to dinner. They sat up late. The priest told about his years in the Isthmus of Panama, giving entertaining descriptions of the state of undress of many of the native señoritas. Such details. The priest had had adventures—although he explained that technically he maintained his celibacy. At the very end of the evening, the priest brought out a flask, two small glasses and poured into them a beautiful green liquid. He said that if this liqueur were a mortal sin, the only thing that would keep him from surrendering his immortal soul was that he supposed heaven had better. The liqueur was as bitter as hell and wonderfully warm. Kurtz’s last memory was the priest mounted unsteadily on his donkey, singing a lubricious Irish ditty as he rode away.
Kurtz would have preferred to believe he had died and gone to hell rather than he had been duped. “Between being a damned soul or a damned fool,” he said to himself, “I’d choose the former.”
However, Kurtz was a practical man. He could still spit the phlegm out of this throat, and he needed to take a piss. He had never heard of anyone doing that in hell or heaven. Kurtz saw no other way of getting to the bottom of this than going into town, eating his pride and inquiring about his missing hands and the priest who had duped him.
On the road, Kurtz met a neighbor driving an oxcart who asked him, “Did you ever hear anything like the thunder in the mountains last night? Thought we were in for a biblical flood, yet here we are on another morning as dry as a bone.”
Kurtz spat and asked. “See a priest on a mule?”
“A priest? Why would a priest come to these parts?”
“Mexicans. They’re Catholic.”
“That takes the cake! Not only do we have to put up with that shiftless race, we have to suffer priests.”
Kurtz discovered three of his boys lying on cots in the doctor’s office. The doctor explained that he had found them roughed up and unconscious behind the saloon. Despite rubbing their temples with turpentine and goose grease for laudanum poisoning, he still couldn’t rouse them. It was now past eleven, and even with laudanum poisoning they should have been grumbling and cussing and showing other signs of life.
“So if it’s not laudanum poisoning, then what the hell is it?” Kurtz asked. In his experience, men too foolish to become preachers became doctors.
“If I knew exactly what put them out, I’d bottle it and sell it to every tooth extractor and sawbones in the country.”
Kurtz found three more of his boys propped up against the back of the general store, appearing more dead than drunk. On hearing their boss’s guttural hawking voice demanding their attention, two began to mumble. Several buckets of cold water increased the mumbling, but it would be a while before they found their tongues or their brains.
When crossing the street with the intention of visiting the sheriff, Kurtz spotted the boy who did his household chores creeping behind the hostelry.
“Joselito!” he shouted.
The boy fled towards Mex town—a suburb of about forty ramshackle dwellings where the majority of the two hundred Mexicans in the area lived. Damn boy isn’t doped Kurtz realized as he pursued the quick youngster. Joselito disappeared behind a stout oak door in a thick mud-brick wall.
Kurtz battered on the door with his two fists, and then he kicked it twice making the wood tremble. “I’m going to break my goddamn leg,” he hissed and pulled out his gun to shoot away whatever was barring his entrance. Kurtz was aware that he was acting stupidly. No matter how much you hated the Mexicans, and they knew you hated them, if you entered Beaner Town in peace, they left you in peace. But if you threatened their wives and daughters, then you had to contend with an army of panthers.
“Busca el sacerdote?” A small voice said behind him.
“Eh?” Conrad turned with his drawn gun.
A girl, not more than seven, stood behind him gazing up with her great soft dark eyes. “El sacerdote?”
“Yeah, the priest. Where in the hell is he?”
“Allà!” She pointed west. “El Arroyo de Gómez.”
“Aren’t you afraid of me?” He directed the gun away from her head.
“Mis hermanos estàn arriba.” Her finger shifted to a rooftop across the way where two young men trained muskets on him.
For the next hour, Kurtz twisted arms and called in favors until he had a small army of twenty-five men. He strapped the least comatose of his hands to a horse, thinking the ride might jar him into consciousness, and he would be able to relate what happened.
The little army rode the eight miles to Gomez’s Ravine, so called because a luckless prospector named Gomez had staked a claim there. Kurtz owned much of the land they passed through. The gullies and hills were telling him the same silent story as his ranch. They should have come across dozens of small groups of cattle strung across the range. Instead, they spotted only four heifers grazing peacefully on the side of a hill. Kurtz’s companions spoke in whispers, taking their cue from their leader’s grave demeanor.
By now, Kurtz had a good idea of what he was going to find. The single bird at the ranch had given him the clue. Magpies and crows wouldn’t desert such a rich source of food as a slaughterhouse unless there was something better, and for the last hour, Kurtz had been observing a shadowy smudge in the western sky over Gomez’s Ravine. A few of his band slowly came to the same realization. A cowboy commented on the god-awful cacophony of thousands of birds they were hearing.
Another replied, “Don’t you know hell is chockfull of crows, jackdaws and magpies.”
There was also, however, a deeper unearthly sound. Those who followed Kurtz beyond the trampled grass, the crushed underbrush to gaze down the hundred and fifty-foot sheer drop at first couldn’t make sense of what they saw. The mind simply could not grasp that what seemed to be a single huge bloody animal covering the bottom of the ravine was, in reality, hundreds of beasts—the few still living, writhing, bellowing and roaring while the birds feasted.
Kurtz’s fortune lay in the dead and dying cattle. He had often boasted that he became wealthy because he refused to remain poor. Closer to the truth was that he had never taken a single day’s rest since the age of eleven. Conrad allowed his heart an ounce of sympathy for the dying animals, but none for himself because he didn’t deserve it.
Kurtz turned to the sheriff who was had just ridden up, “Tell Cobart I’m buying his tanning business. Fair market price plus two hundred dollars. I’ll pay him another two hundred to learn my boys on the fine points of his profession. And also tell all that’ll listen, I’m paying a dollar a day for any man with a skinning knife and a strong stomach who comes to Gomez’s ravine. We got to go at this before the stench gets too high.”
When Kurtz had finally returned to the ranch, well past midnight, and was undressing, he felt a card in his pants pocket. He pulled out a joker. “Fool,” he muttered. Although many men bore him grudges, only a few had a reason for such thorough revenge over a card game.
Harriet Luxor and the Business Ethics of the World’s Oldest Profession
The brief appearance of April didn’t cause much moral consternation on that relaxed Friday evening, perhaps because in this modern day, self-expression is valued at a premium. On the other hand, between DVDs, gentlemen’s clubs and the virtual universe, the parade of nudity was endless. Apart from a few double takes, a leer, some curious questioning stares, the majority of the passersby reacted with a studied indifference to April’s lack of apparel.
Only one observer took offense, well, more than took offense; she was so outraged that holding a business card with trembling fingers, she punched into her cell phone the number of Police Detective R.T. Middleton.
Harriet Luxor happened to be Solvidado’s most successful practitioner of the world’s oldest profession, and she was resolved to stop this immoral trend among young women of publicly divesting themselves of clothes. Although usually done in the excitement of the moment, such acts distorted market forces and smacked of unfair com
petition. If there was a glut of naked flesh freely visible on the market, and presumably available in other ways at a steep discount, her several square yards of that commodity would diminish in worth.
The fools! The empty-headed ninnies didn’t have the faintest idea of the value of what they were giving away. If the female figure lost its mystery, becoming no longer the wrapped gift, the unpeeled fruit, the unknown country where paradise is rumored to lie, inevitably men in response would revert into their natural state of cheapness and laziness.
Harriet impatiently listened to the phone ring. She had always battled market forces, beginning her career walking streets of the slimy underbelly of Hollywood in a micro skirt and halter top. She was a fifteen-year-old runaway. She had acne, no breasts, and was so skinny that from behind that she looked like a boy. But, along with being scrappy and temperamentally paranoid, Harriet possessed the will to excel.
In less than eight months from turning her first trick, Harriet had, at great risk, squirreled away enough money to implement her plan of pursuing a better clientele. She put a restraining order on her pimp. She rented a small apartment in the better part of Venice, underwent a makeover costing the price of an extended Mediterranean cruise and started a course of self-improvement with the goal of turning herself into the best escort possible. Harriet studied fashion magazines, read books on sexual techniques, listened to talk radio psychologists to glean information on the brains of men. She visited clubs, made contacts with clerks at high-end hotels and filled her little black book with steady customers. Her allure wasn’t that she was gorgeous or sultry or wildly passionate, it was just that she was so damn good.
“R.T. Middleton,” the dry voice on the other end of the line answered.
Harriet couldn’t imagine anyone not hating that voice and that man, which she had done ever since he had intruded into her life six years before. He had appeared at her door, standing stiffly, muscularly proportioned like a comic book hero. His face had an unreal chiseled clean-cut look.