by Clark Casey
“Goddamnit!” Red hollered. “You stood too close again, Sal. Done shot the guts clear out his back. Got it all over my dang cards. I call re-deal!” The other players grumbled and mucked their cards, arguing that Red probably didn’t have shit anyways.
“He could’ve at least got sent to hell like a man, instead of a little girl that seen a bug,” Fat Wally remarked. “When your time comes, boys, whatever you do, don’t go out like a ‘Fre…!’” Wally clutched his wrist, imitating the boy’s shock at seeing his hand torn off. The fellas laughed good and hard at that one, and from then on anyone who left Damnation in a cowardly manner was referred to as a “Fre…!”
The Chinaman who tended to the pigs came and dragged Fre’s body to the pigpen. The preacher had bled out by then, so he took him, too. The pigs chewed the cold corpses to bits. There wouldn’t have been any trace that they were ever in town if I didn’t remember to write down a few words about them. On account of all the gunfights, the swine were always plump and juicy. Most folks agreed that the best thing about Damnation was you could eat all the bacon you’d ever wanted.
The vampire finished his drink, then left without a word. A little while later, Jack came back in and scanned the room to see if anyone else needed shooting. Those were the last of the simple days when everyone knew their place, and there was still peace between us and the wolves. Then, just like the preacher had preached, a new gunfighter came to town and stirred up a real shit storm.
Chapter 2
Jack
I slept in the day he first arrived. Sal’s giant halfwit barback came round to fetch me at the rooming house. We called him Stumpy because his hand had gotten mangled in a threshing machine. The stump proved useful for washing out narrow glasses that Sal’s swollen knuckles couldn’t reach inside. He still had the other good hand to pull a trigger and back up Sal, but the stump was the main reason why he’d gotten the job. Stumpy could sooner explain the mysteries of the universe than tell you why he’d ended up in Damnation. Might’ve pulled the arms off a man thinking he was just a bug. For his part, he was just happy to no longer have a nickname relating to his unusual height after all those years of being called Stretch and whatnot. He was so tall he couldn’t tell when his feet were cold. As I opened my eyes, his long skinny frame was lurching over my cot. Though he measured over six and a half feet tall, he didn’t weigh any more than me at two heads shorter. Admittedly, I could’ve stood to lose a pound or ten.
“Please get up now, Mr. Thomas,” he pleaded weakly, his pointy stump nudging me like a dull cattle prod. “There’s someone real important at the Foggy Dew. Sal says you should interview him for the newspaper right away.”
It was hardly a newspaper really, just a one-page leaflet I printed in the back of the general store on an old woodblock press. Rearranging the letters was tiresome work, so I kept the news short. Strictly kept track of who came and left with a few words about what they’d done when they were alive. Called it The Crapper on account of that was where folks read it.
“Hurry up!” Stumpy hollered as I slowly roused.
“Why?” I barked back. “Ain’t like he’s gonna get any deader.”
“That ain’t it. I don’t think. Sal says the man ain’t gonna last long the way he’s boasting. You know how Mr. Finney feels about blowhards.”
“Is Jack there?” I looked at my watch.
“Nah, but Sal says you’ll need time to get his story straight before he comes.”
“Hell, it ain’t even noon yet. Jack never comes in before three.”
“The new man’s real thirsty. Drank up two pints of whiskey already. Sal don’t think he’ll make much sense if you don’t talk to him soon.”
I slid on my trousers and grabbed my cane. The dozen or so cots on the top floor of the rooming house were only half filled with soiled men, but the whole building stank to high hell of whiskey and decade-old boot sweat. It was enough to drive a man to drink ten minutes after he woke—and most did. Some nights I slept on the floor in the back of the general store just to avoid the mingling of so many bad odors under one roof.
“One of you bastards got gangrene?” I called out.
“Red probably yanked his pecker off in the night,” Fat Wally cracked. “Left it rottin’ beneath the sheets.”
Covering my mouth with a handkerchief, I hobbled to the door. Stumpy shadowed me down the steps one at a time, knowing Sal’d scold him if he came back alone.
“If I’d a known it was gonna come to this…” I grumbled. “Racing to interview some dead man before he drinks too much and gets himself sent to hell… Well, shit! I’d a stayed alive!”
“Really?” Stumpy said in his childlike way, as if it was just a simple matter of choice. “But then who’d write the paper?” he asked.
Even with a limp, it was barely a two-minute walk from the rooming house to the Foggy Dew. Damnation consisted of two long roads bisected by three short roads, making twelve blocks of rickety wood buildings. You could see the whole town from end to end in the time it took to smoke a pipe. Each structure was more lopsided and rotted out than the last. The roofs were shedding shingles like a lamb’s coat in the springtime. A narrow boardwalk lined the storefronts, but it was more of a hazard than a convenience. With all the missing and broken planks, you had a better chance of tripping and getting a splinter in your face than reaching your destination unharmed. The only use for it would be keeping folks out of the mud, and there wasn’t any rain to make mud. Nobody remained from the time of Damnation’s construction to tell why it was even there. The builders must’ve been a peculiar lot. Some reckoned they had special powers, for they somehow managed to construct the entire town without a single level surface. Every windowsill, doorjamb, and floorboard was as crooked as a dog’s hind leg.
Across from the Foggy Dew, the vampire was sitting on a rocking chair up on his balcony, looking bored as usual. He had the whole third story of the hotel to himself. It was the tallest structure in town, but didn’t offer much of a view on account of the brown dust cloud around the perimeter of Damnation. Dead men and animals came in on a single road that vanished into the dust. If you tried walking out, you just came back again from the other direction.
Most days, he sat looking down in quiet disgust. Could’ve wiped the lot of us out any time he wanted, but then it’d be just him and the wolves and the dust. The men often brought their arguments out in the road and that offered a little entertainment. There wasn’t much to do except drink, play cards, and watch the occasional gunfight. The vampire hawkeyed me, probably wondering how a cripple managed to last so long. Truth was I had a better chance than most of making it a year without getting caught up in a gunfight. I didn’t have many personal ties that’d draw me into conflict. It was my nature to watch from the sidelines and listen. And sooner or later, every sorry bastard wanted someone to tell their stories to.
Stumpy noticed the vampire glaring at me. “Don’t mind him, Mr. Thomas. He’s just jealous. Knows he could never last as long as you without tearing someone up.”
“Some folks got a taste for killing that never goes away,” I said. “No matter what’s at stake.”
“How long’s it been now?” Stumpy asked.
“About two and a half months. Kinda feel like I got a target on my back these days.”
“Ah, nobody’d shoot you, Mr. Thomas. If they did, wouldn’t be nothin’ for them to read,” he said simply. Of course, the wolves weren’t fans of my writing, but there had been a relative peace between us and them—so far.
In the Foggy Dew, the new fella was sitting at the bar drinking whiskey with a tequila chaser. Had a mess of dark curly hair like a buffalo hide and the sallow skin of a longtime drinker. A round table muscle sagged over his belt. His eyes were just bloodshot slivers between swollen lids. Most of his scarred cheeks were covered by a patchy beard, except a trail of pockmarks that crept toward his temples.
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br /> “Came through the dust an hour ago, and he’s already stinking drunk,” Sal complained. “Figured you’d wanna make a record of him before Jack shoots him. Claims to be kinda famous.”
“Kinda?”
“You’ll see.”
Rope marks wrapped the fella’s neck, and he was gasbagging about how he’d been hanged for robbing a stagecoach then killing a posse of men. Got caught near the Mexican border coming out of an outhouse. I dipped my pen in ink and started scribbling a few notes. Some folks got shot before they said anything of much interest. Left me trying to recall their name and where they came from. Others kept repeating the same nonsense over and over, so I didn’t write anything down, thinking they’d never shut up. When they got sent to hell, I forgot what they were going on about. So I found it best to collect whatever facts I could up front, then clean it up later. I ordered a beer and restricted myself to one sip for each sentence I wrote, which proved a fair incentive.
“If I didn’t have the backdoor trots from eatin’ so many dang Mexican strawberries, they never woulda got me,” the newbie chuckled loudly. He might’ve been uglier than a new-sheared sheep, but it didn’t bother him none. He was a jolly killer. “They gave me a proper Texas catwalk,” he continued. “I tell you this. The best thing about being hung is I ain’t never gotta go back to Fort Worth!” He broke into a fit of knee-slapping laughter.
“Hey, ain’t you Buddy Baker?” one of the newer boys asked him. “I hearda you. You shot Jared Nichols in Kansas City—he was fast.”
“Not fast enough.” Buddy scoffed. “I bet you didn’t know I shot more men than William Bonney. And that’s a fact!”
“I ain’t never heard that.”
“That’s ’cause there weren’t no witnesses to a mess of ’em. Damn journalist got in the way, so nobody recorded it. Ain’t my fault a man can’t hold a pistol and a pencil at the same time.”
“You boys hear that?” Stumpy said. “Buddy here shot more men than Billy the Kid!”
“Lemme get some more of that pork belly and a splash of that there bug juice,” Buddy said to Sal. “You say I don’t have to eat no more now that I’m dead?”
“Ain’t gonna die of starvation.” Sal raked his fingers over the ends of his handlebar mustache and filled Buddy’s glass. The lamplight glimmered eerily on his bald head. Sal looked more like a mortician than a bartender. “You’ll still get hungry something awful. More outta habit, I ’spose.”
“Ain’t you got nothin’ ’sides pork?” Buddy asked.
The dead animals appeared from the dust with blackened eyes and ice-cold blood in their veins. Sal cooked up the pigs for us. Indians got the chickens since they had the fewest to feed. Werewolves took the cows on account they had the biggest appetites. The vampire could eat whatever he wanted, but he wasn’t hungry for anything in Damnation—that we knew of.
The divvying up of the animals had been decided long ago by the werewolf pack leader, Argus. In wolf form, he stood as tall as a Shetland pony and was quick as a jackrabbit. Could tell him from the others by his white coat with specks of gray. Argus reckoned it was better to give us the smaller animals than to worry about us picking off any of his pack. He told Sal and the chief so. The chief was the oldest dead Indian. Kind of a grumpy fella. He wasn’t too happy about getting stuck with the chickens, but he was used to not getting his way. Some joked that the chief was at the very first Thanksgiving in Plymouth and didn’t get nothing but the gizzard. Others said he was the one who traded Manhattan away for a handful of beads, and that’s why he was so bitter. When the chief got stuck with the chickens, he told Sal and Argus that next time he’d barter with a tomahawk. Sal said there wasn’t no need to worry though—unless a whole mess of Indians came to Damnation in a hurry.
“Just pork,” Sal told Buddy. “They serve beef down the road, but I don’t expect you’d be welcome there.”
“Do I still need money here?” he asked.
“More of a formality,” Sal explained. “But an important one. I’ll run you a tab, and you can pay it when you win in cards. Eventually everybody gives their money to the blacksmith for bullets, and he’s lousy at cards so he redistributes it back a hand at a time.”
Buddy didn’t seem to mind being dead since he’d probably be doing the same thing if he was still alive: drinking, telling stories, and teasing the younger fellas. He couldn’t figure out why he ended up shy of hell.
“Thought for sure I’d done enough killin’ to earn a nonstop ticket.” he smiled. “But I don’t mind hanging out with you boys while they stoke the furnaces for me.”
He was knocking back the whiskey at a furious pace. A lot of fellas hit the bottle hard to wash away the sting of those final fears of death. Buddy might’ve been mourning something else though, some simpler life he never got a chance to live. Every rotten son of a bitch figured he’d get a chance to repent and go straight before he died. Then they ended up in Damnation, never getting the pretty wife and the house with a picket fence and a yard full of youngins.
Sal didn’t usually extend so much credit, but he couldn’t cut the man off without causing a fuss. The boys crowded around to hear how Buddy had robbed a stagecoach dressed as an Indian, then joined the posse to hunt down the thief. He could spin a good yarn, but his speech was slurring some, and the gap between fact and fantasy was getting too large for anyone to swallow.
At half past two, Jack Finney sauntered into the saloon. It was easier for him to sleep in since he didn’t bunk at the noisy stinking rooming house with everyone else. Had his own room in the hotel, just below the vampire’s. He wasn’t donning the big hat today. He wore all black except for the colorful stitching on his fancy lizard-skin boots, which he had taken off a tinhorn he shot for having an uppity look. Jack rubbed a hand over his smooth chin, wondering what to make of the new fella. For once, Sal was relieved to see Jack, figuring he’d send Buddy to hell before he ran up too big of a tab. Sal was a frugal man. Some said he’d died just to avoid further taxes.
Jack sat alone at the end of the bar eyeing up Buddy. Judging by his sourpuss, the fat man didn’t rank very high in his estimation.
“One time, I took on four men in San Antonio,” Buddy boasted. “Only had a single-shot derringer, and they was all heeled with fancy Remington six shooters. Had to reload after every dang shot!”
“Did you get ’em all, Mr. Baker?” Stumpy asked.
“I’m still standing, ain’t I? Well, I guess I’m not anymore!” he cackled. “But them boys ain’t the ones that got me. Hey, maybe they’re here. Seen any shot-up Texans with stained shorts ’round here?”
Jack stood, and the room silenced. He wasn’t the sort to put off shooting a man. On the way to the latrine, he ambled by the chubby newbie and knocked against his sipping arm. Some whiskey spilled over Buddy’s hand, but he didn’t make a big to-do of it, like most would. Barely pausing in his storytelling, he licked his knuckle so as not to waste any gut-warmer.
“What’s he, yella?” Sal whispered. “Thought he was supposed to be some kinda big-shot gunfighter.”
“Maybe gun fighting ain’t as important to him as telling tales and drinkin’ prairie dew,” Fat Wally said.
On his way out of the latrine, Jack lingered by the faro table, though he wasn’t the gambling sort. He stood beside the banker, watching the cards come out of the shoe and glancing over a punter’s shoulder toward the bar. After a short while, Buddy stood, hiked up his pants, and staggered lazily to the latrine. Jack made a beeline for the bar to intercept him in his path. Buddy was nearly twice his size but Jack hardly gave him a foot to squeeze by. As they passed each other, Jack stiffened his elbow at the last moment and bumped hard against Buddy’s gut.
“Watch where you’re going!” Jack hollered.
“I was watching just fine,” Buddy replied. “Better learn some manners, son.”
There were a few gasps of s
urprise around the room. Nobody would ever dare to address Jack that way. He still looked seventeen, because that’s how old he was when he died, but he’d sent hundreds of men to hell in the ten years since he’d arrived. It stuck in his craw to be called son, but he didn’t show it.
“If you’re gonna address a man like that in Damnation, I expect you’re ready to draw,” Jack said calmly.
Buddy was in his mid-forties—old by outlaw standards—and he showed his age, but he acted like a goofy kid and thought everything was a game. “Shit, boy!” He looked down at Jack. “I wanted to draw, I’d a got me some pencils instead of pistols.” He laughed good-naturedly, but Jack kept eyeballing him without so much as a blink.
“Ah, you’ll understand when you’re older, sonny.”
“Quit your jawing and pull!” Jack showed a rare flash of anger.
“All right, if you’re set on getting yourself shot, how ’bout high noon tomorrow?” Buddy suggested.
“Ain’t no such thing as noon here,” Jack said. “It’s always dusk.”
“Oh yeah?” Buddy shrugged and took a gulp of his drink. “Guess we might as well settle it now then.” He seemed more put out by the interruption of his drinking than anything else.
“How about you boys settle this outside.” Sal tried to sound stern, but he wasn’t. Jack must’ve been in the mood for some fresh air though, because he obliged him.
Buddy staggered drunkenly toward the door, knocking over a spittoon on the way. He cursed at it for jumping in front of him, but then went back to give it a heartfelt apology.
The whole saloon emptied into the road to watch, except Sneaky Jim. The greasy weasel liked to steal sips from other men’s drinks while they were in the commode. After a good gunfight, you could expect every glass in the room to be lessened by two sips, and for Jim to be lying in the corner with a bellyache.