The Messenger

by Bill Brooks

  “It sounded like a war in there,” she said as they kicked their mounts into a run. “Couldn’t you have raised more of a ruckus!” The sarcasm was not lost on Davy.

  Townsfolk had already started to approach the brick bank cautiously. Some were also armed, but uncertain and cautious.

  “We best skedaddle before these sodbusters wipe us all out like they did the Youngers!” Little Dick yelped.

  “We best,” Blackbird said.

  They spurred their mounts like there was candy waiting for them at the finish line of a race.

  Off they raced to the north where Davy had previously arranged to lay low overnight at an old reprobate’s shack, where, if not discovered, they would ride off again at first light. Only as before, Davy had conceived an alternative plan that he had not revealed to the boys, and this time not even to Belle. A plan that would leave Little Dick and Blackbird floating on the river Styx, dead as doorknobs.

  He’d have the old fool and his loutish sons kill Little Dick and Blackbird in their sleep. He and the crazed old man had already agreed on a price along with a night’s billet. A bullet to the brain ought to do it nicely enough, Davy had told the old bastard.

  Then he and Belle would go wherever there was a riverboat heading north or south and ride it to the river’s mouth or headwaters and depart for parts unknown.

  He had always delighted himself with what he considered ingenious plans.

  But unknown to Davy, Belle had plans of her own that involved only her and Blackbird—at least for the present—until she grew weary of him as she knew that she would over time. Men were just creatures that soon lost their attraction, and like money or hats or shoes there was always a need to replace them with regularity. She’d like to go to China first, and then travel to England to see Queen Victoria—at least a glimpse—and other forays such as visiting the pyramids. She had become absolutely weary of the West and its characters, such as Gypsy Davy. She already had assured herself that even Blackbird would wear thin in a month or two of steady congress with him. Beyond the fact that he was large and strange—new territory for her—she sensed him to be dull-witted and much like a homing pigeon with a homing pigeon’s instinct for returning to the familiar.

  Hadn’t he already spoken of his wife and children? It was a dead giveaway that he had little or no imagination. Well, let him return once she had finished having her fling with him. But without a red cent to sustain him. She planned on keeping the whole take. And Little Dick was having his own problems: stomach cramps, something he ate the previous night—perhaps the green chili, two full bowls.

  They rode the horses nearly down trying to put distance between themselves and whatever posse might be formed by the good citizens of Cheyenne. Then they turned off the main road and up a back trail to the shack the reprobate and his dull-witted sons inhabited like a brood of opossums.

  Gypsy had it all planned.

  Belle was thinking: You’ll make a pretty little corpse.

  Little Dick was trying not to crap in his pants.

  And Blackbird couldn’t be certain of anything.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Jack Corn had a brood of ill-tempered boys who he sent forth on regular forays to rob and steal whatever they could: chickens, hogs, lumber, crops, and anything that wasn’t nailed down and some things that were. There were five in all: Alonzo, Tobe, Hector, Warren, and Brazil, the one they called Peckerwood.

  They were clearly cut from the old man’s cloth—all with long noses and close-set eyes and ears like jug handles. They spent their free time cursing and fighting one another like tomcats. They were poor and mostly went about barefooted and raggedly clothed. And when they weren’t stealing or fighting amongst themselves, they would sit in the shade of a tree or corncrib and drool over renderings of females in the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. They would fumble with their privates, then sleep like lazy raccoons.

  Jack Corn would haul them to Cheyenne every three months or so and pay a crib girl with broken front teeth $5 for a turn with himself and all his boys. Jack Corn made sure he got first turn with her, then passed her to his brood, the eldest first right down to the youngest, Brazil.

  In spite of his imperfections as a human, Jack Corn kept a pocket Bible from which he read almost any time he wasn’t fornicating, dealing in stolen goods, or kicking his offspring into action. The stealing he sent his boys to do was, as he saw it, simply a way to teach them to subsist on their own once he had passed to the great beyond. In other words, Jack saw himself as a mostly good Christian with a few flaws but doing the best he could, given the circumstances.

  “I will be with Jesus, one day soon enough,” he was fond of telling his brood. “And you boys will need to be prepared to forage on your own once I’m passed over. You got no education, and, even if you did, where would you put it to use on this rough frontier?”

  The late Mrs. Corn had been a woman given to unexplained bouts of the vapors and would stay for days inside a locked room reading poetry to herself. She came to believe that she was the Empress Cleopatra and grew increasingly insane over the years.

  Jack Corn grew so afraid of her that he slept with a loaded six-gun under his pillow because he could hear her roaming through the house in the night, rattling pots and pans and talking to herself—spouting that poetry she was so fond of reading, and calling out the name of Marc Antony. She got so bad Jack Corn swore her eyes glowed red in the dark.

  He aimed to have her committed to an insane asylum he’d heard about in Lincoln, Nebraska, but somehow she intuited he was about to do something with her and wandered away from the house to a rock outcropping, found a big red rattler, and carried it back to the house where Jack and her sons, around a table, were eating a supper of stew made from the butchered meat of a stolen goat.

  She burst into the room and stood there, babbling, holding the snake, and all of those who were eating dived under the table, Jack Corn disconcerted that he had forgotten the six-shooter he kept under his pillow. He’d have shot the snake or her or both.

  The snake had become highly agitated and struck her twice, once on the cheek and once on the neck, but still she held it, her eyes ablaze for a moment longer before tossing it aside where Alonzo beat it to death with his chair, busting the chair apart in doing it.

  “Mama, are you crazy!” shouted the youngest boy, Brazil. He alone among the others favored her the most with his fair and freckled skin and bluebird eyes. He also had her sensitivities and his siblings had nicknamed him Peckerwood because he was not as rough and tumble or as coarse as the rest.

  The woman, twice bitten, stood tottering, looking at Jack so longingly and lovingly it scared him. Droplets of blood the size and color of rubies slid down her cheek and neck. Then she collapsed and suffered greatly for seven hours more before she gasped and died. Jack Corn had his boys dig her a grave out back of the house, down the slope, away from the source of well water, while he sat solemnly looking on and sipping from a jug of potato whiskey. Some parts of him were sorry to see her go. She was always willing to give her body to him when he came to her in the night up until she started to go crazy. She was also a fair cook and could sew, milk a cow, when they had a cow to milk, and churn butter. She kept their clothes washed and the house swept out and bathed herself every Sunday so that she smelled fresh as mown grass. Jack knew he would also miss her fine singing voice and the way she could play the piano with both hands and not just one. The boys had come home with an old upright roped in the back of their wagon one day. She was so glad to see it she never questioned its source, although it looked similar to the one a neighbor had in her parlor.

  But then, there were other parts of Jack Corn that were glad his wife had passed over. It would mean saving him a long and arduous trip hauling her all the way to Lincoln, Nebraska, to have her committed. For many times he had thought to himself: What do you do with a crazy woman? They ain’t like a dog you can run off or just shoot.

  It had been pure coincidence that the
last time he’d taken his brood of boys into Cheyenne to visit the crib gal that he’d run into an old compadre—Gypsy Davy—a boy who’d been a member of Chug Matthew’s band of border men along with Jack Corn back in the old days. Gypsy was so young in those days he couldn’t even grow hair on his face. But the boy had showed plenty of promise as a bandit. He had the coldness of winter rain in his blood.

  Jack had just finished with the crib gal and left his boys with her whilst he sauntered over to the Inter-Ocean Hotel and bought himself a bottle and was standing there, minding his own business, having at the free luncheon, when Gypsy came in with a beautiful woman. Gypsy strutted as if in rarefied air and wore two guns and a big sombrero.

  They’d greeted each other with a bit of trepidation, but then warmed to each other after a few drinks had been shoved back and forth between them. Jack Corn could hardly take his eyes off that milk white cleft that was between Belle’s ample bosoms. If she’d been a slab of bacon and he a hound, he’d have scarfed her down right then and there.

  The two desperados caught up each other on their own private histories with Davy ending by saying: “You say you have a place a few miles from here back off the beaten track?”

  “Yes, yes. Me and them boys of mine. Why you ask?”

  “I’ve got something I’m working on,” Davy said. “Might need a place to stay overnight, me and some of my pals, if you get my meaning.”

  “I don’t care to know your meaning,” Jack Corn said. “How much you offering to pay for a night’s stay . . . with the assurance you’ll have full protection from me and my boys should trouble come?”

  “I’d pay a handsome price for that sort of assurance.”

  They agreed on $100.

  “Done,” said Jack Corn, spitting in his hand before he offered it to Davy to shake.

  Davy and Jack shook on it, and Jack drew him a map on how to get there.

  “Maybe in a week or so, look for us,” Davy said.

  “I’ll keep both eyes and a peck of potatoes peeled,” Jack said, seeing everything in life to a degree in terms of either humorous or tragic consequences.

  Then Jack started to go, but Davy stopped him by tugging on his sleeve.

  “What?” Jack said. “Don’t tell me you changed your mind already.”

  “No. But I was thinking, I might want more than a place to stay overnight. How do you and those boys of yours feel about making some extra money beyond just a night’s rent?”

  Jack said: “I’m all ears.”

  And Gypsy hinted the extra money might have something to do with a little killing and Jack didn’t so much as flinch as he said: “Anything is possible if the price is right.”

  “I’ll let you know,” Gypsy said.

  And so on a buzzing warm early afternoon Jack Corn saw the rise of dust a mile or so from the house and figured it was Davy having come at last with his little band of cut-throats and thieves, whoever they might be, and it was OK with him. But mostly he was hoping that the woman named Belle Moon would be among his overnight guests. She made the broken-tooth crib gal look like a sack of cobs.

  And $100—just for letting them stay the night—and Gypsy had even hinted there could be more, the price of murder being what it was. $100 sure could buy some good liquor and a better class of whore next time he took his progeny into town to have the edge rubbed off them.

  He stood and stretched, and Tobe, the middle boy, who had been resting there in the shade of the overhang, sat up and said: “Somethin’s coming.”

  Jack Corn ordered Tobe to go kill and dress two yard chickens and peel some potatoes and get a pot of victuals going.

  “Why me, why not Alonzo or Hector or one of them?”

  “’Cause I told you to do it!” Jack Corn kicked him in the rump out from under the shade. And Tobe rubbed his rump while going off in search of two yard chickens to kill for supper.

  Gypsy and the others rode up and halted their lathered mounts there at the altar of Jack Corn’s abode, such as it was. Jack looked over the two men with Davy closely, then said to Davy: “We need to talk about something in private.” Belle was dressed in men’s clothes this time and a disappointment for Jack to have to gaze at her dressed that way.

  Davy dismounted and followed Jack inside the low-ceilinged ranchero. The interior was as cool and dim as a cave and sour with the scent of men living alone for a long time without the cleaning hand of a woman.

  “What is it?” Davy said.

  “You din’t say nothing about no nigger.”

  “Nigger?”

  “What else would you call that big galoot with the leather britches sitting out there on thet horse?”

  “That’s Blackbird,” Gypsy said. “I thought you knew Blackbird from back in the old days, or at least had heard of him?”

  “I don’t know nothing about what you’re talking about. But there ain’t no nigger sleeping in my house and eating at my table.”

  “When’d you get so high and mighty?”

  “I’ll run him off myself personal,” Jack Corn threatened.

  “You ain’t heard all of the plan yet,” Davy said.

  “You best get to telling it to me then afore I go and shoot that black son-of-a-bitch.”

  Gypsy grinned.

  “How’d you like to do it and get paid to do it?”

  “Now you’re talking my lingo.”

  “And the other one, too, Little Dick?”

  “Bingo! Put the money in my hand right now.”

  Davy counted $200 extra from what he took out of his pockets. Jack counted it out.

  “A hundred apiece,” said Davy in a low voice. “But I figure once they are asleep. It will be easy.”

  “Tell that big black son-of-a-bitch he can come in.”

  “I reckon,” Davy said.

  * * * * *

  The whole time they sat around the table eating, all Jack Corn could do was think about what Belle would look like without those men’s clothes.

  Belle did her best to ignore the hungry stares of the Corn clan. It was the first time in her life she’d felt nervous around men.

  Later she said to Davy as they walked out to the privy together: “Those boys look like they’d like to cut me up into pieces and chew all the meat off my bones.”

  “We’ll be gone first light,” he assured.

  “I’m not sleeping in there with them all around.”

  “Where will you sleep then?”

  “Out here somewhere.”

  “Don’t be foolish. Let them half-wits sleep on the ground and you and me in a nice bed.”

  “What if they try something?”

  “I’ll put a bullet in them.”

  Blackbird and Little Dick Longwinter sat outside, smoking in the shadows of the night.

  “You see the way that son-of-a-bitch was looking at me,” Blackbird said.

  “How was he looking at you?”

  “Like he hated Africans.”

  “You ain’t no African. You’re from Oklahoma, I thought you said.”

  “All black men are descended from Africa.”

  “Then where are all white men descended from?”

  “Europe, I reckon.”

  “Hell, maybe I’m Italian or French.”

  “Maybe you are . . . somewhere back in your blood.”

  “Wonder upon wonders. Here all this time I thought I was just nobody at all . . . just a man who went around doing what I needed to do. Now I find out I could be Italian or French. Hell, who’s to say I ain’t descended from some king or something?”

  “I don’t trust those white suckers inside,” Blackbird said.

  “That one they call Peckerwood is sure enough a queer-acting duck,” Little Dick replied.

  “Sissy little bastard.”

  “Never seen none no sissier.”

  “I got a feeling about all them Corns.”

  “What kind of feeling?”

  “A bad one.”

  “I wished you hadn’t to
ld me that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Now I got a bad feeling about them, too.”

  “Best keep one eye open when you sleep tonight.”

  “They might be thinking the same with us.”

  “I hope they are.”

  * * * * *

  Night descended, and, even as Gypsy was working over Belle, she trying to be quiet and not moan for fear she’d stir up a hornet’s nest of lust among the Corns, Gypsy was planning murder in his heart.

  And not just the murder of Blackbird and Little Dick, either.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  We did our best to rest all night on the hardwood bench but there wasn’t any comfort to it. Somewhere in the dark, pistol shots awakened me from a light drowse and I sat up, and so did Dew Hardy.

  “What you think that was all about?” he said.

  “I don’t know, but I sure wish I had a match so I could roll a shuck and smoke it.” Inwardly the craving for whiskey had returned, too, but I fought it hard.

  “What you thinking about?” I said, seeing Dew Hardy’s grim face in the moonlight.

  “I was thinking of a house looking over the ocean,” he said.

  “Which one, the Atlantic or Pacific?” I said.

  “Pacific.”

  “I never seen the ocean myself,” I confessed.

  “I seen the one but not the other. They say you can see whales in the Pacific certain times of the year. You ever see a whale?”

  “I heard they were big.”

  “I heard if you was to stand one on its tail, their head would reach the roof of a three-story building. I’d like to see a fish that big.”

  “Sounds like maybe you ought to have become a sailor instead of a detective,” I said.

  “It sure would have been a lot more romantic of a life. Probably safer, too, as it’s proving to be so far. I’d have never gotten wired to a fence post and left for dead.”

  “Well, I don’t know. If you’re on some ship out in the middle of the ocean and it gets a hole in it . . . that don’t sound like a much better deal to me. I’ll take my chances here on dry land, thank you very damn’ much.”