.45-Caliber Widow Maker

by Peter Brandvold

  The two men near the window sat side by side on a plankboard bench, their backs to the wall. They were shabbily dressed hombres, with pistols on their hips beneath the table, a Winchester carbine leaning against the wall, within easy reach of the man on the right.

  The one nearest the window was gazing out the fly-spotted glass while the man beside him, arms crossed on his chest, boots propped on a chair, regarded Cuno dully beneath a flat-brimmed, cream hat bearing a crow feather, a faint sneer curling his thin-mustached upper lip.

  The one nearest the window turned to Cuno. They locked gazes for a stretched second.

  Cuno slid his eyes toward the other gent, who sat so close to his friend that their shoulders nearly touched. The gent near the window looked at the gent beside him, gave an annoyed grunt, and nudged the other man with his shoulder. Flushing slightly, the man with the feathered hat slid a few inches down the bench from his friend, then resumed sneering through the shadows at Cuno.

  Cuno sauntered toward the bar, quickly sizing up the three men at the other table—two playing cards while the third, with long, tawny hair curling over his shoulders, slumped down in his chair, arms around one drawn-up knee, his felt hat with a braided leather band tipped low over his eyes, as though he were dozing.

  The cardplayers glanced at Cuno as he passed their table—both wearing dusters and dust-caked sombreros, one bearded, the other with a shaggy, gray-flecked mustache, bandoliers crisscrossed on his chest—then returned to their card game, speaking in hushed, desultory tones as they flopped down their cards and clinked coins together.

  Several yards down the bar from the table, Cuno turned toward the mahogany and rested a boot on the brass foot rail. The old woman had been slowly swiveling her head toward him as he’d moved along the bar, her eyes expressionless.

  Now, taking a deep drag from a long, black cigarillo, she said in a man-husky voice almost too low to be heard above the thud of hooves and creak of wagons outside, “If you’re here for cooch, my girls’re upstairs. But all mattress dances are paid for in advance, and go easy on the furniture. If you’re here for hooch, it’ll be twenty-five cents a shot, and I take no responsibility for sterility, insanity, or blindness.”

  The woman’s eyes brightened slightly as she glowered at Cuno through a harsh black cloud of Mexican tobacco smoke. Her shoulders jerked as though from a slight ague. What sounded like the last faltering croaks of a near-dead chicken bubbled up from her scrawny chest.

  After a few puzzled seconds, Cuno realized she was laughing.

  2

  “I’LL FORGO THE mattress dance this time through.”

  Cuno eyed a plate of sliced beef, ham, and cheese, and another of crumbly wheat bread. Flies were making a meal of the moldy cheese, and the bread looked dry as hardpan. Still, after two days of beans and jerky, the complimentary bar fare made his stomach mewl with hunger.

  “Just the suds and the fixin’s there, if they go with the suds.”

  The old woman planted her cigarillo in a wooden ashtray carved in the shape of a bobcat paw. She grabbed a glass schooner off the back bar and pulled a frothy beer.

  Scraping the foam head with a flat stick, she glanced at the two three-gallon jars flanking the meat and bread. Both were filled with murky brine rife with the smell of vinegar and spices. One contained eggs. The other held hog knuckles. The eggs were clustered atop what appeared a coiled sand rattler complete with head and tail. Razor-edged fangs showed between the half-open jaws.

  “Don’t run from my pickles, neither.” She set the beer in front of Cuno, knocked ashes off her cigarillo, and stuck the long, black cylinder between her froggy lips. “Best in the territories.”

  “What’s the snake add?”

  “Secret I learned from my late Mexican husband. Claimed he cooked for General Santa Anna.” The spidery old barmaid drew another deep puff, batting her long eyelashes against the smoke curling up in front of her face. “That old rattler not only lends a certain sagey flavor, ole Paco claimed it enhanced a man’s virility.”

  She winked as that croaking laugh rumbled up from her sparrow’s chest again and she tapped more ashes off her cigarillo. “I don’t guarantee any such thing, but I’ll tell you this. Ole Paco was a virile son of a bitch till the day he died with a cancer the size of a coffee mug hanging off his neck.”

  Cuno sipped the frothy beer, warm but somehow still refreshing and instantly tempering the windburn and sunburn that gnawed not only his face but every inch of hide on his hard, muscular frame.

  “No offense to Paco, and I ain’t braggin’, neither, but I believe I’ll pass on the eggs,” he said, setting the glass atop the bar and moving down toward the meat and cheese. “But I’d build a sandwich.”

  “Build you a big one.”

  The old woman ran an admiring gaze over Cuno’s taut, brawny frame. Fully half of his twenty-two years had been devoted to back-and-bellying freight in and out of cabin-sized, iron-shod Murphy wagons and maneuvering four-mule and six-mule hitches across cold, steep mountains and windy plains.

  Those years had ridged, sculpted, and swelled his chest and arms, broadened his shoulders, hammered his flat belly to the texture of sun-cured rawhide. They’d bulged out the thighs and calves of his scarred deerhide breeches, drew his fair skin taut across high-boned, tapering cheeks, a dimpled chin, and anvil jaws, and spoked the deep-tanned flesh around clear, lake-blue eyes.

  His rope-burned hands were large and red as fresh-carved roasts. During long freight runs manipulating the long rein ribbons trailing out to belligerent teams, his forearms, as round and corded as cedar fence posts, often pitched and flexed until they tore out the sleeves of his buckskin tunics and work shirts.

  His yellow-blond hair, perpetually sun-bleached, hung down from his tan, flat-brimmed, low-crowned plainsman, brushing his shoulders.

  “Looks like you could hold all that food and more,” the old woman observed through swirling, webbing tobacco smoke. “I got plenty. Don’t get many through these days, since the gold pinched out. Bet you could use your ashes hauled. Want me to call Carlotta? She’s the only girl I got that could handle a young man of your size and obvious vigor.” That cryptic laugh again. “Mamie’s prettier, but I fear you’d snap her back!”

  “This’ll do me,” Cuno said, patting a thick sandwich together, then taking a long sip of the beer.

  The old woman grumbled her cryptic disapproval and drifted down the bar in a cloud of wafting, nose-wrinkling smoke to a dime novel open at the other end of the mahogany.

  Cuno leaned forward, elbows on the bar, and went to serious work on the sandwich and beer, thoroughly enjoying both in spite of the beer’s warmth and the dry bread and moldy cheese. He’d nearly devoured half the sandwich when one of the cardplayers flanking him growled, “Girl, get on up there and get me a sandwich before that big rannie devours the whole damn mess. A couple more whiskeys, too.”

  Chewing, Cuno peered into the back bar mirror. The long-haired man sitting with the cardplayers, hugging a knee to his chest, lifted his head suddenly. The flat hat brim fell back to reveal the pretty, oval face of a scowling girl.

  “Get your own goddamn food,” the girl said.

  The two cardplayers stared across the table at each other. Suddenly, the man who’d given the order threw his left arm out from his side.

  There was a sharp crack as the back of his hand smacked the girl’s right cheek. Head whipping sideways, tawny hair flying, and hat tumbling off her head, she and her chair went over backward and hit the floor with a raucous thud and a slap of bare hands against floor puncheons.

  The girl scrambled to her feet in a rage, throwing her chair aside. “Goddamn you, Pepper!”

  Teeth gritted and eyes slitted, she lunged at the man, right fist extended, a steel blade flashing in the wan light from the window. Pepper loosed a high-pitched laugh as, twisting around in his chair, he grabbed both the girl’s wrists and jerked her down to her knees.

  The knife clattered onto the
floor.

  The girl cursed as she fought against the man’s grip holding her down in front of him. Her crimson cheeks bunched with pain as Pepper crouched over her and drove her toward the floor. The man on the other side of the table held his cards, waiting to resume play, and laughed.

  “Now, Miss Johnnie,” Pepper said, “you gonna do what I tell you, or do I have to snap these pretty little wrists for you? I could. I could snap these wrists like a sparrow’s neck!”

  Cuno’s right hand hovered over the Colt .45 thonged low on his right thigh. His instincts, honed over the years and from dealings with such men as those before him now, were to help the girl by slapping leather and drawing iron. Opting for a less aggressive stance, he grabbed the two plates off the mahogany and moved toward the table.

  The head of the other cardplayer snapped toward him. “Hold up there, big boy.”

  Cuno stopped halfway between the bar and the table. Two large, round maws of a double-barreled shotgun stared at him from atop the second man’s pin-striped left thigh, in the shadows beneath the table. The square-faced, dull-eyed man held his cards atop the table in his left hand while his right was obviously wrapped around the barn blaster below.

  “I don’t recollect Pepper askin’ fer any help,” he snarled. “So why don’t you turn around and set them plates back on the counter where they was?”

  Pepper had turned toward Cuno now, too, grinning with drunken delight as he continued to hold the girl low in front of him. He had long, dark brown hair, a soup-strainer black mustache, and a goatee. The girl grunted painfully, chin dipped toward her chest.

  “Stan’s right. I didn’t request no assistance.” Pepper winked and stretched a mirthless grin. “Now, put the fuckin’ plates back where they was so my pretty little gal here can fetch me a snack like I just told her.” He shot a glance at the old woman standing statue-still behind the bar, cloaked in wafting tobacco smoke. “Two more drinks, Agnes. Johnnie’ll fetch ’em.”

  Cuno held the plates out in front of him, his mild expression belying the angry burn in his belly. “But if I bring ’em, she won’t need to.” He hiked a shoulder and added in spite of himself, “Then neither one of you will have cause for a tizzy fit.”

  “I know,” the old woman crowed, her high, raspy voice echoing around the room. “Why don’t I haul it out there, and save you all—!”

  “Shut up, Agnes!” Pepper snapped, cutting the woman off but keeping his eyes on Cuno. “What’s it gonna be, big boy? You gonna set down them plates or is Stan gonna have to clean out your belly button?”

  Cuno looked at the twin shotgun maws yawning at him, then at the sneer on Stan’s hard face. His heart thudded. Fury burned through him. The girl stared at him from the other side of the table. Her head, with strands of mussed, tawny hair in her eyes, was level with Pepper’s belly. Her gaze was skeptical, vaguely befuddled, her lips bunched with pain and with contempt for the man clutching her wrists.

  Cuno slid the plates back onto the bar. He should have followed his first instinct and hauled his .45 from its holster. A quiet life had to start somewhere, but he should have known that place wasn’t here.

  “Well, then,” Pepper drawled, turning back to the girl kneeling before him. “Let’s try that again—shall we, Johnnie girl?”

  As he loosened his grip, the girl jerked her hands back, glaring up at Pepper as she slowly scuttled away on her knees, massaging her wrists and flexing her fingers. Her hard, cunning eyes told Cuno she was thinking about the knife on the floor to her right.

  Holding Pepper’s gaze, the girl rose slowly, defiantly, and stooped to retrieve her hat. She pressed a dent from the crown, set it on her head, gave Pepper another cool, lingering stare, then moved out from behind the table and strode up to the bar, her stockmen’s boots skidding across the puncheons.

  She was tall and slender, with a womanish curve to her hips, and she moved with a headstrong, confident grace. But her smooth, peach-colored skin, slightly tanned, told Cuno she wasn’t yet twenty. Gray-blue eyes, innocent despite her girlish attempts to give them a jaded cast, glistened in the light from the front windows, framed by buffeting wings of straight, tawny hair.

  She wore a man’s gray wool shirt decorated with black zigzagging stripes across the front. Her breasts were small and round, and a couple of inches of alluring cleavage shone through the gap offered by the first three open bone buttons. A turquoise ring hung from a sweat-darkened leather thong around her neck, nestling in the V of the open shirt, above the lace trim of a white camisole.

  She stole a glance at Cuno as she grabbed the plates off the bar. Turning around, she favored Cuno with another lingering look, a faintly incredulous, almost disdainful cast now in her eyes. Blinking slowly, dismissively, she sauntered back to the table, plunking both plates down before turning back to retrieve the two shot glasses Agnes had filled.

  “Why, thank you, sweetheart!” Pepper exclaimed, grinning mockingly up at the young, tawny-haired girl when she’d set both whiskeys on the table before him and Stan. “You didn’t have to go to all that trouble!”

  He and Stan laughed as they built sandwiches over their facedown pasteboards. The two other men by the window chuffed bemusedly, wearily, as they slouched in their chairs, the one in the window keeping his eyes skinned on the dusty street outside the saloon, as though waiting for someone.

  Outside, the din from the prison wagon had faded. Cuno remembered half hearing, in the midst of the trouble with the girl, the marshals yelling at their mules while cracking a blacksnake over their backs and the rattle of wagon boards and welded strap-iron bars as the wagon had rolled into the street and, presumably, out of town.

  The girl stole another sidelong glance at Cuno leaning with one arm on the bar behind her, near Agnes standing statue-still again in her fetid smoke cloud. She sauntered back around the table, nonchalantly dragging her heels. She picked up her chair and plopped down into it, poking her hat brim back off her forehead, and lifted one boot onto the chair seat, throwing an arm around her knee.

  She cast her bored, tired gaze toward the window. “When we gonna fog it outta this dump?”

  “When I say so,” Pepper muttered, leaning forward to bite into his sandwich. Talking with his mouth full, he picked up his pasteboards. “Now then, where the hell were we, Stan, before we was so rudely interrupted by Miss High-and-Mighty?”

  As the men ate, drank, and continued their game, and the girl stared out the window with the same air as before, Cuno saw that the shotgun had disappeared from Stan’s lap.

  Cuno turned back to his beer and picked up his half-eaten sandwich. Who these people were and what they were after was none of his business. He had his own business to worry about. Namely, his own urgent desire to secure a freight contract with the sutler at Fort Dixon, near Crow Feather in the southern territory.

  The bank loan he’d acquired in Sweetwater was for two six-mule hitches and for two new Murphy high-sided rollers cut under and heavy-braked for rugged mountain terrain. All he needed now was one more freighter, an outrider, and the contract with Fort Dixon, and he’d be set for another year or two.

  After a couple of runs, and it looked as though his contract would be renewed, he’d buy a small warehouse and corral in Crow Feather or Cheyenne and maybe put cash down on his own shack so he didn’t have to hole up in boardinghouses and flea-bit hotels between runs.

  Maybe he’d even think about starting a family again, with the right woman.

  He finished the sandwich and beer faster than he’d intended—before he’d given Renegade enough time to rest—so he ordered one more beer and considered one of the hog knuckles.

  A soft whistle sounded in the front of the room. Cuno turned to see the two men at the table by the window lazily gaining their feet, the one closest the window staring toward the two cardplayers and the girl while the other man stretched and hitched his double-rigged cartridge belts higher on his narrow hips.

  “Come on, now, Gene,” Stan complained.
“I’m finally winnin’ back some of the money this cheatin’ privy skunk fleeced me for in Cody!”

  “The other fellas are movin’—let’s go,” Gene ordered mildly, lifting his hat and running a hand through his thin, blond hair as he headed toward the door.

  The other man nearest the front chuckled mockingly at Stan, who scowled down at his cards and winnings pile. Pepper whooped as, sliding his chair back, he scooped a small pile of coins into his hat. His long, dark brown hair danced around his shoulders.

  Cuno saw, as the man dumped the coins from the hat into his other hand, then deposited the coins in a pocket of his black denims, that Pepper wore a pistol on both thighs, butts forward. Another shoulder holster peeked out from under his open duster. One of his mule-eared boots bulged with a hideout gun.

  As Pepper and the girl headed for the door, the girl walking briskly, stiffly ahead of the long-haired gent, Stan scooped his own coins off the table. “Hold up a minute, damnit! Christ, what’s the big, damn hurry all of a sudden?”

  When he’d shoved his winnings into his pockets, Stan turned toward the door. His cream duster flapped open to reveal that he, too, carried a brace of pistols in the cross-draw position. His sawed-off ten-gauge hung from a lanyard down his neck, swinging low across his cartridge belts.

  Striding toward the still-shuddering batwings, he glanced over his shoulder at Cuno and stopped suddenly.

  “I’ll be along!” he shouted toward the doors from which the sound of creaking saddle leather emanated.

  He turned and angled back toward Cuno. Cuno’s left hand held the handle of his beer glass, his right boot propped on the brass foot rail.

  “Gonna grab me one more bite of cheese,” Stan yelled.

  Stan stopped in front of Cuno. Cuno held the man’s faintly sneering gaze as Stan snaked his right arm out across the bar to snatch a thick wedge of moldy cheese from one of the free lunch plates.