Hell's Angel

by Peter Brandvold

  “Ah, that’d be Chaz Burdick’s train from Amarillo,” the dwarf said. “His crew always comes in thirsty and girl hungry. We’re gonna make us a killin’ tonight, my dear Griselda.”

  Moon ambled toward the window and stopped in front of Ruth. He placed one of his big, horny hands on her cheek, lifting her face to meet his wretched, leering gaze.

  “You shouldn’t have piss-burned Griselda, Mrs. Rose. For that, I’m gonna turn you over to ole Burdick. He’s just rollin’ in money, and he’s asked about you before.” He winked. “Before you was in my stable.”

  “You son of a—!”

  “Oh, hush!”

  The dwarf removed his hand from her face, hopped up on a chair fronting the window, and looked out. He yelled down a greeting and waved, then said with a big grin over his shoulder, “It’s him, all right. Burdick and his half-dozen skinners from the panhandle. They look even thirstier an’ hornier than usual!”

  Leaping off the chair, he looked at Griselda as he stuffed his shirttails into his pants. “What do you say, honey? Would you like that—me turnin’ her over to ole Burdick and his boys! They’d pay a purty penny for her, too. Virgins and married women. Nothin’ turns a man’s wheel faster!”

  Griselda was strapping her derringers around her narrow waist. She looked at Ruth still sitting on the edge of the bed and curled her lip evilly. “I’d like that just fine, Mordecai.”

  The dwarf ran over to her, wrapped his little arms around her legs, rose up on the balls of his stocking feet, and pooched out his lips. Griselda glanced once more, proprietarily, at Ruth, and then leaned down and pressed her lips to those of the dwarf. She tried hard to appear as though she were enjoying herself.

  Moon groaned and cooed. When Griselda pulled her head away from his, he chuckled as she turned and walked toward the door. He stared at her butt until she’d left, leaving the door open behind her. Moon shook his head and sighed, thoroughly smitten by the girl who was every bit as demonic as he himself was, and then turned to Ruth.

  “Ain’t she somethin’, Mrs. Rose? Ain’t she just somethin’?”

  Ruth’s heart felt as though it had been torn to ribbons in her chest. She’d been violated with the promise of more violations to come. On top of everything, her husband was likely dying in the most ghastly way back at the Rose Hotel and Saloon.

  “Why are you doing this, Moon?” she asked. “What did Frank and I ever do to you?”

  The dwarf sat on a footstool to pull one of his little, black boots on. “You didn’t pay your taxes, Mrs. Rose. You know that. And you barely even been payin’ on your water contract.”

  “You don’t need our money,” she said, her voice dull with shock and bewilderment as well as the torment and degradation she’d just endured—the wet lips and pawing, clawing hands of both him and that evil girl of his. “You make enough here to satisfy every need you could possibly have.”

  “Yeah, I do, don’t I?” he said, buckling his shell belt and twisting his rounded hips this way and that, adjusting the holstered Colt.

  He smiled so that his pasty, craggy cheeks dimpled and his little eyes narrowed to slits. “I do it ’cause I can do it.”

  Moon scooped his hat off a chair, frowned at the hole in its crown, and then set it on his head. He walked toward Ruth, stopped about a foot away from her.

  He said, “When you can do something—a man like me—you do it, no matter what it is. No matter how bad. Fuck good! To a man livin’ in a body like mine, eye level with crotches all my life, raised by folks who’d as soon spit on me as treat me even halfways decent, who kept me locked in a cellar when neighbors came cause they was embarrassed—laughed and called me the devil in the hole or hell’s little angel!—there ain’t much good in the world to begin with.

  “See how it is? Well, I found out early that my body might be small. But my spirit was big, bad as it was. Big and bad! And for one reason or another, small as I was body-wise, I could command men. Get ’em to do just whatever I wanted. Don’t ask me how. But I could do it then and I can do it now. And by God, for a man like me, that’s everything!”

  Moon rocked back on his heels and poked the first two fingers of each hand into the wool vest he wore under his black clawhammer coat. He considered her for a time. Ruth stared back at him, through the screen of hair hanging in her eyes. Pity only slightly tempered her loathing for the man. In her mind, she could still hear him grunting on top of her, staring down at her and grinning maliciously, his bug eyes crossing as he toiled.

  “I could never win the heart of a woman like you,” he continued, raking his eyes across her, his little chest rising and falling slowly. “No, I could never make a woman like you—purty and upright and well-mannered and sophisticated in a country kind o’ way—feel anything but disgust for me. I seen it all my life. But I can put the fear of God into you, can’t I?” He grinned broadly, showing his yellow, crooked teeth. “And I have, haven’t I?”

  Ruth said nothing, only stared at him, knowing that sooner or later, after he’d had his fill of torturing her simply because he could, he’d kill her. Or cause her to want to be dead in the worst way possible.

  He winked, turned on a heel, and sauntered to the door. He stopped with one hand on the knob and looked back at her. He frowned as though troubled.

  “Tell me somethin’ from your woman’s point of view, will you, Mrs. Rose? You think Griselda really loves me, or is she just playacting?”

  “I think she had far more fun with me than she’s ever had with you, Mr. Moon.” The automatic response, spoken with quiet satisfaction, caused a devilish thrill to ripple through Ruth. She felt the ripple again when, for a fleeting half second, she witnessed genuine injury darken the dwarf’s eyes like a cloud sweeping the ground on a sunny day.

  He covered it with a sigh, smoothed the colorless whiskers dangling off his chin, and turned to the door. “Get yourself ready for Burdick. He’ll be up shortly.”

  He gave her another menacing wink and went out. She heard the key turn in the lock on the opposite side of the door, locking her in.

  16

  THERE WAS A knock on Ruth’s door.

  The key in the lock clicked. She turned from where she’d been brushing her hair in a standing mirror, to see the door open and a man’s hatted head appear between the door and the jamb. The man had a thick mustache with upswept ends and three or four days’ worth of beard stubble on his sunburned cheeks.

  Ruth flushed. So did Chaz Burdick behind the bright pink on his broad, fleshy cheeks, above the mustache that had a fine coating of trail dust. His eyes were blue beneath dark brown brows. The fetor of mules, the man’s own sweat, and wheel grease was an almost visible cloud about him.

  From downstairs came the tinny clatter of Moon’s four-piece Mexican band, one of the men singing along with a girl. There was clapping and the stomping of feet, yells, and ribald laughter.

  Burdick doffed his broad-brimmed Stetson as he came into the room, looking sheepish but also randy, his eyes raking Ruth up and down. She’d cleaned herself at the washbasin and donned the dress the dwarf had given her, likely shipped in from Fort Worth, as was most everything else here, including professional whores who worked for percentages. The dress was red and extremely low cut with very slender shoulder straps. It was the only dress Ruth had, and she wasn’t about to receive Burdick naked.

  She looked down at the gun belt hanging down his right, denim-clad hip. A walnut-gripped pistol jutted from the worn, brown leather holster. Her heart thudded, and she quickly lifted her gaze to Burdick’s flushed, pink face.

  “Well, Chaz,” she said, softly. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  He came in and closed the door, holding his hat down low by his side. His thick hair was sweat-matted to his head, with an indention line caused by the hat’s sweatband. The din from downstairs was loud now. Burdick had the key in his other hand, and now
he stuck the key in the lock and turned it until the bolt clicked and left it there.

  Burdick turned to her, still wearing that sheepish, eager look of a nasty schoolboy about to do what he’d been dreaming of doing for a long time and finally got his chance.

  “Ruth,” he said, dipping his chin politely. “Quite a place here, huh?”

  “You don’t really expect me to indulge in polite conversation . . . like the real percentage girls, do you?”

  Burdick chuckled and glanced at the hat in his hands. “Well, the Apache girls mostly just grunt and groan.”

  Ruth let the smile turn dark. “Is that who you prefer? The little Apache girls here against their will? Moon’s sex slaves?”

  Burdick let his arms drop to his sides. “Now, Ruth, goddamnit . . . !”

  “You know I’m here against my will—don’t you, Chaz?”

  Burdick swallowed, glanced at her breasts half-revealed by the low-cut dress, and then lowered his gaze to the floor. “Figured.”

  “But you still want to do this?”

  Now he looked up, angry, and she could see that his dark blue eyes were glassy from drink. “I paid the little man, fer chrissakes, Ruth! And, hell, I got needs! You know how far I come today?”

  “You were friends with Frank, Chaz.” Ruth’s voice was quiet, vaguely incriminating. All she really wanted was to be able to get out of this room, and she thought she had a chance, but she still couldn’t help badgering the man, torturing him a little, seeking a little revenge for the humiliation he would visit on her.

  Burdick had stayed at her and Frank’s place several times, eaten the food she’d cooked, had always acted pleasant enough. He and Frank had often played cards together. Ruth had always felt his eyes on her backside, but now he’d gone much further than that.

  Now he was about to, for all intents and purposes, rape her.

  And she couldn’t help needling him about it.

  She glanced once more at the gun on his thigh and then she set the brush on the dresser by the mirror and stepped back from him, letting him have a good look at her body. Shaming him with his own lust.

  “You’re married, aren’t you, Chaz?”

  Burdick’s face turned pinker. He curled his thick upper lip and angrily tossed his hat on the brocade-upholstered chair to his right. “Enough talkin’, Ruth. I’m sorry about Frank, but you’re workin’ over here now, and by God I paid two silver cartwheels to that little fucker for only an hour with you. Now, you get outta that dress before I get mad!”

  “All right, all right,” she said, feeling an odd pleasure at the power she wielded.

  She’d always thought that whores were the only ones victimized by the transaction, but maybe that wasn’t entirely true. Maybe the men who used them were also victimized in a way. Victimized by their own ugly vulnerabilities and unrestrained cravings.

  Slaves of their own desire.

  She unbuttoned the dress. He watched in eagerness and awe as she slid each strap down off a shoulder, slowly lowered the top of the dress to her waist, her breasts springing free.

  She wore nothing beneath it. She let the dress drop to the floor and stood before him, naked but not ashamed. Her nakedness shamed him. He felt the embarrassment. She could see it flicker amongst the male lust in his eyes—the lust that overpowered everything.

  “Is this what you’ve been wanting to see?” she asked Burdick. “Am I what you’d imagined I’d be?”

  “Holy shit,” he whispered, and then, with a near-manic grin, keeping his eyes on her naked body, kicked out of each boot so quickly that he nearly lost his balance and fell.

  She crawled into bed and stared at him coolly while he removed his gun and shell belt, looped the belt over a rear bedpost, and then shucked out of his shirt and trousers and then his socks and his balbriggans. He fairly ran over to the bed, manhood at half-mast, and crawled under the covers, instantly pressing his sweaty, filthy, hairy body to hers, smashing his lips down on her mouth.

  He tasted like tobacco and tequila.

  “Wait,” she said, feeling his rod press against her belly. “Hold on.”

  “You hold on to this!” he said through gritted teeth.

  “I’d like to be on top,” she said and smiled up at him.

  “Oh. You would, huh?” Burdick said, looking at her slightly askance, vaguely suspicious. Then he grinned. “Well, all right.” He chuckled and rolled off of her.

  She rose to her knees and straddled him. He grinned up at her. One of his teeth was grayer than the others, slightly chipped. His doughy, pale chest was matted with thick, dark brown hair.

  “All right, then,” he said, bucking beneath her. “Here we go!”

  “Close your eyes.”

  He frowned up at her again while she sort of hovered above him, reaching down beneath her for his organ. “Why?”

  She squeezed it, smiled at him beguilingly. “I’m shy.”

  He snorted. “I reckon this is a little strange.” He laughed again and squeezed his eyes closed, keeping his lips parted so that she could see the white line of his teeth between his furred lips.

  Downstairs, the singer was singing more loudly. Someone was banging on a kettle with a spoon while many feet pounded the floor of the main drinking hall.

  “Come on—hurry up, damnit,” he said, creasing the skin at the bridge of his nose.

  She grabbed the free pillow from beside the one his head was resting on. When she had it, she reached back and jerked his revolver from the holster hanging from the rear bedpost to her left. She clicked the hammer back at the same time that she pressed the pillow over Burdick’s head, leaned forward, bringing all her weight to bear on the pillow, and pressed the revolver’s barrel hard against it.

  He’d just started to lift his head and to struggle, grunting, when she pulled the trigger. Against the pillow and beneath the raucousness rising from below, the report sounded little louder than the popping of a dry knot in a wood stove.

  Burdick’s head jerked.

  Ruth’s heart fluttered. She wrinkled her nose against the stench of gunpowder and charred goose down. A small round spot of blood shone in the pillow. It grew quickly, soaking the pillow and the cotton case. Ruth recoiled from the blood, drawing the pistol back away from the pillow.

  Beneath her thighs, she could feel the convulsions in the dying body. She gasped in horror and revulsion.

  She climbed off Burdick so quickly that she got a foot tangled in the bedcovers, fell onto the side of the bed, bounced, and struck the floor with a heavy thud.

  “Damn!” she hissed, freezing as she sat naked on her rump, pricking her ears to listen.

  The music and the singing and foot stomping continued downstairs as usual. She heard no doors opening and closing around the room she was in, no footsteps in the hall.

  Quickly, she rose, wincing at a slight bruise on her left hip, and picked up Burdick’s revolver from off the rug it had fallen upon. She set it on the dresser, picked up the red dress, and drew it on over her head.

  She looked around for a pair of shoes, but there were none in this part of the two-room suite that the dwarf and Griselda called their own—one that was too large for its sparse, expensive but practical furnishings shipped in from Fort Worth. The walls were of unadorned vertical pine boards still rife with the smell of resin.

  It was almost as though the dwarf and Griselda merely camped here and did not really call the place a home despite the money the little man had obviously put into the sprawling building. From what she’d seen, the parts away from the main drinking hall were as bare as caves, though of course the whores’ cribs were furnished with beds.

  Moon and Griselda had few clothes besides those they wore, it appeared. Certainly no shoes that would fit Ruth. She had no idea what had happened to the ones she’d been wearing when the dwarf’s men had removed her from her
home.

  Going barefoot might be better anyway. Quieter. And she had to flee the dwarf’s place quietly, lest she should get caught. She had to get back over to her own place and see about Frank. The poor man must be starving, his bedclothes soaked with urine.

  If he was still alive . . .

  The thought of him dying so tragically, from neglect, swelled her heart until she felt it rise in her throat, drumming horrifically. Her pulse hammered in her temples.

  Ruth glanced once more at Burdick. She could see his pasty belly, both arms, and one bare leg. The bloody pillow covered his face. His hands rested to either side of it, palms up, fingers curled like claws.

  He was the first man she’d ever killed. Strange how she felt absolutely no remorse whatever. Only revulsion. It was what she’d had to do to so save herself and Frank.

  What she would do once she’d returned to the Rose Hotel and Saloon, aside from tending Frank, she had no idea. The dwarf would find her in such an obvious place, of course, but what else could she do?

  She hefted the pistol in her hand. She ran her thumb across the dimpled cylinder, heard a single click as the wheel turned.

  She’d kill him. He wouldn’t expect her to. That’s how she’d get the drop on him. Drill a slug through his ugly heart. Of course, she’d probably die, then, too. And so would Frank. But at least she’d make sure the dwarf never saw the light of another day, either.

  Holding the pistol low in her left hand, she walked over to the door, twisted the key, and winced when she heard the bolt click. She drew the door open and looked into the hall.

  It was dark as dusk, no candles lit. And vacant. The only light was that issuing up from the saloon. Ruth could hear, beneath the constant din from below, the moaning of a girl behind one of the doors to her right and on the hall’s far side. A man was saying something to the whore in a soft, snarling voice.