by Paul Bagdon
When the saloon was completely off its foundation, Jake swung the horses hard to his left. With a gigantic creaking roar like ice breaking up on a lake, the entire front of the building was torn off and teetered precariously for a moment. Jake asked the horses for a little more, and they gave it to him. The front—batwings and all—crashed down onto the street.
The lanterns inside had been smashed and dumped, and the fire that started was very hungry—and there was lots of dry wood to feed on.
As that fire grew, the one in my stomach diminished.
I waved my men over to me, and we moved down the street to watch the action. Men and women were running, banging into one another, falling: some of them were a bit singed. A whore saw that her hair was on fire and tore it off her head—a wig that had looked quite natural.
The blaze lit up the night sky beautifully—particularly since there was such heavy cloud cover that no starlight was getting through. Big Nose passed around licorice whips and we stood there munching.
I figured the chance of a retaliation attempt that night was about fifty-fifty.
We headed back to the office, added some wood to the stove, and had a sip of whiskey. “There’s a chance they’ll try something tonight,” I said, “and if not tonight, within the next couple of days. We need a man on the roof at all times and a man awake in the office all the time, too. We’ll have to sleep in shifts.”
The conflagration that last night had looked so pretty was, in the morning, a grotesque mass of charred and broken wood, and smashed glass. The piano, on its back with its four legs unevenly burned away reminded me of a dead buffalo—they sometimes died that way when they were gunned down, on their backs with all four legs in the air.
We decided, after several days of nothing going on, that we needed to keep up our full-time watches. None of us could see Powers letting go without retaliation anything as flagrant, as egregious as hauling one of his saloons out into the street, tipping it over, and watching it burn.
I enjoyed the roof watch, both night and day, regardless off the bitter cold. Not only could I see the entire length of the town, but I could see the rear of the other buildings beyond the jail. It was strangely peaceful.
I got to do some thinking on the roof, which was impossible when I was with any or all three of my troops.
I liked teaching when I first got out of normal school—I really did. I liked the kids, their quick smiles, their willingness to accept and learn what I told them or put on the blackboard.
How I got into the bottle was a fog to me. I knew I stopped at the town bar for a beer most evenings, and then the beer grew to a few beers, augmented by a taste of whiskey. I think I gave up the beer and stayed with hard liquor. That’s pretty far as back as my memory goes. A couple of things stood out clearly from the fog: the morning I awakened behind the bar to find myself covered with a foot or more of horseshit and mud, and parents pulling their kids out of school. I deserved to be fired, and I was. I recall swamping out the bar, cleaning the spittoons, wiping up the vomit, for the wage of a couple of drinks. It was right about that time I met Zeb Stone.
Good ol’ Zeb: purely as crazy as a shithouse rat, but a man I’d take a bullet for. He gave me back some pride. It’s odd how things work out.…
As I mentioned, I could see pretty much everything from the roof of our office. Maybe that’s why the two riders coming into Gila Bend caught my attention. Both wore Confederate officers’ coats—which wasn’t at all strange—but the bandoliers of cartridges crossed over their chests were a little odd. Both their saddles had rifle scabbards on each side. Each rider carried a sidearm, but I couldn’t tell what they were; the weapons were in military holsters with leather flaps over the guns.
There’s a certain degree of inherent intuition involved in living outside the law: decisions about other men need to be made very quickly, because they were often a matter of staying alive or pushing up daisies. My intuition told me that these two weren’t disgruntled buffalo hunters, pretty much out of work because of the terrible reduction in the herds of shaggies. What they were was bad news. They pulled up in front of a saloon down the street on the opposite side, tied their horses, and went in.
Later that day, a man I recognized rode past the office. Eddie Halpern was a stagecoach and train robber and hired gun I’d met through Zeb Stone. I hailed him, and he rode over to the office.
“Why, damn,” he said jovially, “I ain’t seen you in an owl’s age, Pound.” His face changed quickly. “Say, I was real sad to hear about Zeb getting shot up, Pound. He was a good boy—a damn good boy.”
“That he was.” I waited a moment. “What brings you into this screwed up little town?”
He swung a leg up in front of his saddle horn and took a pipe out of his pocket. He was in the process of lighting it when he looked at me more closely. “That ain’t a badge you’re wearin’, is it, Pound?”
“It’s a long story, but I’ll swear to this: it has nothing to do with you or my other friends.”
“On your ma’s grave?”
“On my ma’s grave.”
Eddie got his pipe burning nicely and puffed dense blue smoke from his mouth.
Again, I asked, “What brings you into town?”
“Shit, Pound.” He grinned. “Same thing that brings me ‘most everywhere I go: money. Some Reb named Powers is payin’ big bucks in a range war or some damned thing. He’s lookin’ for guns. I guess the men he has ain’t worth a tinker’s damn.”
“He’s fighting me, Eddie,” I said.
“You? What the hell for?”
“That’s part of the long story.”
Eddie was still for a moment. Then he said exactly what I knew he’d say: “Who’s payin’ better?”
“You’d better stick with playing the hand you already have, Eddie,” I said.
“You don’t trust me?”
“No. I don’t—not any more than Zeb did when you wanted to ride with us. I don’t hate you. Hell, I don’t even dislike you. But I don’t trust you.”
His eyes squinted a bit, and the last vestige of his smile left his face. “I’m liable to kill you, Pound, with or without what’s goin’ on here.”
I held his eyes. “You’ll probably get a chance to try real soon. I guess we’ll see then, no?”
Eddie cursed, spun his horse, and dug spurs into the animal far deeper than he needed to. I could have simply picked up my .30-30 from next to me and blown him out of his saddle. Hell, for that matter he was well within pistol range. But I watched him ride to where a few of Powers’s crew had assembled in front of their saloon.
Zeb Stone wasn’t what you’d call a philosopher, but I’ve never forgotten something he told me: Never ride with nobody you don’t trust all the way, Pound. It’s like raisin’ up a wolf from a pup and playin’ with him an’ takin care of him an’ all that. One day that wolf is going to be what he is and tear your throat out. Same thing applies to men.
I sat out the last few hours on the roof, checking in all directions, watching the street, looking for anything that worried me. I didn’t have to look far.
Men had been riding in every so often. I’ve seen the type all over the place: hired guns who’d kill anyone they got paid to kill. I recognized some of them; most I didn’t. All told, maybe six or seven of these backshooters rode in.
Big Nose came up when he was to take over my shift. “Things ain’t lookin’ good,” he said.
“You mean because of the guns coming in.”
“Yeah. I recognized a couple, maybe three of them. They’re not drunken clowns, Pound, like Powers’s crew. Those boys know how to fight.”
“So do we, Nose. So do we. And I can’t say I’m real surprised at Powers bringing in fighting men. He knows that the four of us would go through his band of stumblebums like a knife through soft butter.”
“I’ve been wonderin’ a bit about that and so has Hairy Dog—why the hell they didn’t attack us right after we played with their saloon. We fi
gured there’s a couple reasons: they ain’t got the balls, an’ their little city of Gila Bend is comin’ apart on them.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if one or two have been makin’ tracks at night, headed wherever. I doubt there’s a single one that’d risk bleedin’ for Billy Powers.”
Nose nodded.
“I was thinking maybe Dog and I would break into the mercantile again tonight,” I said.
“What for?”
I answered his question with a question of my own. “You ever done much with dynamite?”
“Nah. Shit, me an’ Dog are kinda leery of that stuff. Some relative of Dog’s blew hell outta himself and his family screwin’ around with it. Dog said there wasn’t enough of the man, his woman, or their four kids left to fill a cigar box.”
“I haven’t used it either. Maybe Jake has. He’s crazy enough to do anything.”
“Right,” Nose said. “ ‘Course if he blows us up with it, it ain’t doin’ us much good.”
I couldn’t argue with that point.
The wreckage of the saloon we chained and burned hadn’t been moved or cleaned away. There was enough room at the near end for even a freighter to drive by, and horseback travel went back and forth with out a problem.
To old Calvin, the official town bar-rag, it’d been as if a large piece of heaven had fallen directly into his world, and gave him full license to pluck its wondrous fruits. It probably would have made a lot more sense for Calvin to gather up whatever unsmashed bottles he could get to and haul them off to a safe place, where he could do his level best to drink himself to death.
Calvin had never been noted as having much, if any, common sense.
So, each morning, red-eyed, staggering, his entire body trembling with a sort of Saint Vitus’s dance, he’d scrounge through the burned timbers, smashed tables, and so forth, seeking out his bottle for the day. He’d fall often, but that didn’t slow him down. The treasure remained available to him and a few cuts and bruises were of little consequence.
Nose and I were in the office, Jake on the roof, and Hairy Dog out back with the horses.
Nose called me to the window when a pistol report drew a “…those lousy sonsabitches…” from him. Ol’ Calvin was precariously balanced on an upward-leaning beam, looking at the neck of a whiskey bottle he held in his hand.
“Somebody shot the bottle right outta the old fellow’s hand,” Nose said, voice tight.
“You see that?” Jake hollered down from the roof.
I stood next to Nose at the window, waiting to see what would happen next. What happened was that there was a re-creation of the battle at Gettysburg, with Calvin playing the Rebel forces. Rifle and pistol rounds tore into him, pelted him like a driving rain, putting a faint pink mist in the still air around him. Even after he was dead the firing continued.
We heard Dog’s rifle firing off its twenty-eight to thirty rounds per minute the Henry was famous for, and we watched his slugs stitch across the wooden planks of the second story and the glass in the window of the outlaw’s quarters. A heartbeat later a man came through the window, rifle still clutched in his hand, a series of crimson splotches across his chest.
There was a barrage of return fire, but Jake was behind the beams we nailed on each side of the roof opening. The way it worked was that the roof man could stand on the ladder we made, and fire at will—unless he put his head up at the wrong time. Nose jumped to one side of the window and I to the other a half second before the glass cascaded inward.
“I guess that about tears it,” I said. “We’re at war.”
“That’s what me an’ Dog are here for,” Big Nose said, his voice as jaunty as a kid’s at a birthday party.
Nose watched the window, sweeping the sharp shards away from the bottom sill with his rifle, and I went through the office to the back. Jake stood in the enclosure with his rifle butt at his shoulder, but no target. “We could have a problem here,” he said. “A horse makes a helluva big target an’ we might need these boys real bad durin’ this do-si-do. They could be picked off real easy. I guess my ride is good at the livery ‘cause I doubt if the outlaws know which is mine. Nowhere else to put yours an’ Dog’s an’ Nose’s though.”
“Sure there is,” I said. I gathered up the blankets and spare gear from both the cells and took it to the front of the office and dumped it in a pile on the floor. I carried the three feed buckets in and I split a bale of hay three ways and tossed a third in each cell and on the floor of the aisle.
I led each horse in separately, put my buckskin in a cell, Nose’s in the next cell, and Hairy Dog’s in the aisle. Water wouldn’t be a problem. One of the sheriffs out on Boot Hill had used convict labor to dig a well and put in the pump we’d been using, just a few feet from the back door.
“Might get rank in here if the fight goes on for long,” I said.
Jake grinned. “Hell, it’ll smell better in here than most of the women I’ve slept with,” he said.
I figured Hairy Dog would be the best candidate for going to the mercantile with me. Not only did he have superlative eyesight, but he could move about making no sound whatsoever. I, on the other hand, couldn’t see worth a damn, particularly in the dark, and was about as light on my feet as a bull shaggy.
Bursts of gunfire carried on back and forth across the street all afternoon, but it looked like Calvin and the thug Jake shot out of the window were the only two casualties. The saloon the Powers troop was holed up in was on the opposite side of the street, maybe twenty yards down from our office. It was difficult to get off a fully aimed, clean shot because the angle forced the shooter into revealing more of his body than he’d care to—and that applied to Powers’s men as much as it did to us.
Although we had a ton of ammunition, we decided it’d make sense not to spray lead, hoping for hit—we’d shoot only when we thought it was possible to bring down the enemy.
Dog I set off long after dark to the mercantile. The night was only marginally lighter than the first foray the bunch of us had made to steal the chain, with a good deal of cloud cover and a slice of moon. We hugged the backs of the buildings, Hairy Dog leading, me a step behind. We’d decided to leave our rifles behind and carry only our handguns, freeing up our hands to carry off what we hoped to find.
When Dog stopped abruptly, I walked directly into him, eliciting a quiet, “Goddamn idjit.” We made it the rest of the way to the mercantile without problems.
I half suspected Powers would have a watchdog or two behind the store, but that wasn’t the case.
Hairy Dog kicked in the door, leaving a brand new-looking lock and hasp hanging, and we eased inside. We stood still for a full minute, allowing our eyes to adjust to the yet more profound darkness inside the store. I felt Dog bend over and then straighten, and heard an almost silent, angry whispering hiss that brought an image of a coiled and hissing snake to my mind. There was a grunt from across the room and then a thud as something heavy hit the floor.
“Stay right here,” Dog said. “Don’t move. I gotta fetch my knife outta that fool guard. Hell, he should have taken us down as soon as we were inside.”
I waited longer than it should have taken Hairy Dog to come back across the room, my palm sweating against the grip of my Colt.
“Pound,” he finally whispered, “I think I found something. Put your hand on my shoulder and follow me.”
He led me through the store to what was apparently a separate room. He pulled the door shut, scratched a match, and lit a small candle, since the room was windowless.
“It wasn’t locked,” he said. “Well,” he corrected himself, “it was, but somebody went an’ tore off the lock.”
Hairy Dog’s candle spread precious little light, but it was easy enough to see what the storeowner kept in his private room: stacks of overpriced racy books that showed some tit and a bit of ass and that was about all.
The men in the room before us had, of course, gone through the books, looking for what
ever perversions pleased them, and were no doubt disappointed. Hairy Dog called me over to his side. “Lookit this,” he said.
The entire large hardcover book was devoted to men spanking women—most often, nude women. The poses were much the same in all the photographs: the woman would be looking over her shoulder with an intense pleading in her eyes, some overly shiny tears running down her face, and her hands clutched together, almost as if in prayer.
Often, the lady’s ass showed marks across it, like an abused mule’s hide would on his flesh. The price on the book’s cover was four dollars. Given the fact that the average silver mine worker made perhaps ten or eleven dollars a week and a cowpoke or ranch hand less than that, I doubted that the storeowner sold many of these things.
“What’s the point, Pound?” Hairy Dog asked. “A woman needs to be straightened out ever’ so often, I’ll admit that, but a whole booka pitchers of it? It’s dumb.”
“Lookit, Dog,” I said, “we don’t have time for this shit right now. Gimme the candle.”
Dog handed over the candle and said, “There’s a role of fuses over there by the ass-whippin’ books.”
I moved that way. Hairy Dog was correct—it was a roll of dynamite fuses. There was also a spot on the floor that didn’t have any dust on it—like something had very recently been removed from it.
“Powers got the dynamite,” I said.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe, my ass! What else would the mercantile guy stash next to rolled fuses?”
“Damn, if you don’t get prickly,” Dog pointed out, “ ‘ticularly to a man who could tear your head off an’ shove it up yer ass.” After a moment he added, “Only thing we can do is raid the sonsabitches an’ get the dynamite back.”
The raw stupidity of what Dog had just said irritated me further. “They going to just hand it over, or will they shoot our asses off first?” I asked.
Hairy Dog glared at me, what tiny bit of light there was reflecting in his eyes, which were cold and menacing.
That calmed me down a bit. After a few moments I said, “I think what we need to do is this: We gather up all the 12-gauge shotguns, along with a couple cases of 12-gauge double-ought ammunition. Those fuses are as bright as the magnesium a photographer uses—we’ll see them day or night. All we do is shoot at those bright lights and the dynamite will explode in the air.”