Dawn in Damnation

by Clark Casey

  “We ain’t seen anyone semi-famous get shot in quite some time,” Red remarked.

  “I reckon the fat man won’t even clear leather.” Fat Wally waved a five-dollar bill to wager.

  “Ain’t that the pot calling the kettle black,” Red said.

  “All right, boys!” Sal interrupted, “I got two-to-one odds that the new man heads south without showing metal.”

  “I’ll take some of that action,” I said, having a suspicion Buddy might show some gumption. “He might not win, but I reckon he’ll get sent to hell with a gun in his hand.”

  The vampire was up on his balcony across the road, smoking a pipe with his feet propped up on the banister. He surely enjoyed himself a gunfight. Seemed the only time a smile crossed his pale face was when some loudmouth got a lead plumb in the gut. Looked on it like a type of vaudeville.

  As the two men lined up back to back in the center of the road, Buddy’s large round body shadowed Jack’s lean figure like a carnival tent beside a stake in the ground. The heft on his hips looked like it might hinder him from lifting a sidearm, whereas Jack’s trim waist gave no such obstruction, and his arms were coiled tight as a spring.

  At Sal’s signal, they each began walking in opposite directions. At the count of ten, they turned and stood for a moment. Jack locked Buddy in a cold glare. He could look at a fella like there wasn’t nothing else in the world, but at the same time he was aware of everything going on around him—always ready in case some upstart in the crowd decided to pull.

  Normally, Jack’d wait till his opponent made the first move. Then he’d gun him down so it looked like it was the other fella’s idea and he was just finishing it. Only this time it was taking too long. Buddy didn’t see any reason to pull, or maybe he’d forgotten why he came out into the road to begin with. He swayed drunkenly in the wind, covering one eye with his left hand to keep from seeing double.

  “Looks like your money’s as good as gone,” Sal whispered.

  Finally, Jack got fed up. His right shoulder popped forward in its socket as his wiry arm collected the pistol in one swift motion. Buddy must’ve woke from his stupor at that particular moment, because he had the good sense to draw as well. And he was surprisingly fast.

  They say steady is more important than fast, because then you only have to shoot once. But when you’re steady and fast, there’s no wasted motion and everything else seems to stand still. Jack’s gun slid out of its holster, and the shine of the metal brightened. He cleared leather with a whip of his wrist and leveled the barrel. Jack always looked as though he moved in slow motion because he was so calm, even though he was really moving quicker than runaway mustangs.

  This time though, Jack looked even slower on account of how quick Buddy really was moving. Drunk as he was, Buddy cleared leather and squeezed off three shots before Jack could pull the trigger once. One bullet hit the ground between them, another ricocheted off a rock into a horse. The third caught Jack Finney in the face, just below his left eye. A drape of blood spread across his smooth cheeks. There was a loud braying in the distance, then the horse and Jack both dropped at once.

  The crowd was stunned to silence. Then the vampire laughed from his balcony above.

  “Shit!” Sal cussed. “Guess you gotta be fast when you drink too much to aim properly.”

  The Chinaman came and lugged away both bodies. Jack was hardly a speck of man, all bone and muscle, and the Chinaman hauled him off by the ankles. Then he hitched the pony carcass to the back of a two-horse carriage and hauled it to the pigpen. Its heft, along with Jack’s bit of sinewy muscle, would later be appreciated as thick white stripes in the bacon. That evening, Buddy moved into Jack’s room in the hotel, just below the vampire, and Damnation had a new top gunman. The paper was a little longer than usual that week, but I suppose it was good practice so my hand wouldn’t cramp up later on when the bodies really started piling up.

  The Crapper

  Comings: Buddy Baker, originally of Louisville, Kentucky, was orphaned at the age of eight by a fire that took his mother, father, and baby sister. In order to keep himself alive, he took to thievery. At the age of ten, he murdered a man who tried to deprive him of his take in a pick-pocketing, which he makes no apologies for. From then, the list of crimes goes on and on, but Buddy prides himself on having stolen only what others could get along without and never killing anyone without trying real hard not to. In all, twenty-three men were sent to their graves by Buddy’s swift arm and discerning trigger finger. He does not regret a one of them neither, unless any member of the posse he gunned down included orphans, like himself, who never had anyone to teach them right from wrong. When I questioned him about his remarkable speed with a sidearm, Buddy replied, “I had to shoot real fast if I wanted to swallow another breath. Guess I was just hungrier for air than them others.”

  Goings: Many will sigh with relief on hearing that Jack Finney of Topeka, Kansas, left town yesterday by the hand of Buddy Baker (his first beyond the grave and just four hours after his arrival). Jack had been the fastest gun in town for a decade. He came to Damnation at the age of seventeen, after losing his first and last earthly gunfight to a man who had called him yellow. When questioned throughout the years on his (until now) unmatchable speed, Jack always responded, “Fuck off, pencil pusher.” Since Jack only had the one gunfight before he came to Damnation, some reckoned his hankering for killing was fueled by his anger at never getting a chance to grow up or, as Red phrased it, “’cause he died with no hair on his balls.”

  Before he left, Jack finally got around to shooting the preacher in the throat. The old coot had been a little too vociferous in sharing his latest vision of fiery skies, a muddy earth that sprouts weeds, and the son of the devil himself being born here to vanquish us all, after the town grows some. Though the preacher was a tiresome man, his colorful banter did help to pass the time. It’s been rumored that he hailed from New Hampshire, where he had succumbed to frostbite while being a Peeping Tom.

  Oh, and some newbie got his hand taken off by the vampire, so Sal put him out of his misery with his scattergun. I didn’t get a chance to find out where he was from, but his name started with the letters F-R-E. He had the sadness.

  Chapter 3

  Ms. Parker

  One evening a couple of weeks after Buddy arrived, a young lady walked into the Foggy Dew wearing a white wedding dress and sopping wet, which was odd since it never rained in Damnation.

  Every so often, a woman would turn up. Usually, she’d have killed her husband for cheating, then got hanged for it. One lady had killed her sister for sleeping with her husband. Another had smothered her baby with a pillow just so folks’d pity her grief. Womenfolk never lasted long. Right away, the men started quarrelling over them. Often, a woman would promise herself to one man then go off with another. It was easy for them to get mixed up since there wasn’t no Bible to follow, and they didn’t have to worry about their reputations no more. Seldom did any of them have shooting or card-playing skills. Wasn’t much else to prize in Damnation, so the only thing of value they had was beneath their skirt. Usually a woman got shot within a week, and a lot of the fellas’d say it was good riddance on account of the headaches she’d caused.

  We never had any women as proper or as pretty as Ms. Parker though. Shivering in the doorway, her wet dress clung to her body revealing the shape of her slender frame. Her round dimpled cheeks were as pale as moonbeams. The men all glared at her. It must’ve been shock that caused it. She swooned and sort of drifted to the ground like a feather. Even her fainting had some grace to it.

  “Get her to a chair!” Sal ordered.

  A couple of sodbusters carried her over to a poker table. After a sip of coffee, she wanted to know where she was.

  “Tell her,” Sal said to me.

  “I don’t wanna,” I said. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-four, and I didn’t want to be the
one to crush her spirit. When she woke up that morning, she had her whole life ahead of her. Now, she was in a sunless afterlife full of unsavory types. “Why’s it always gotta be me?”

  “You’re the dang reporter,” Sal said. “Now report!”

  “Seems like more of a booze clerk’s job to break bad news,” I argued. “Or what about that preacher fella?”

  “Jack shot ’em in the throat for yapping about the end times, ’member?”

  “Maybe she’s better off not knowing,” I offered.

  “She’s gonna find out sooner or later,” Red said.

  “Maybe not.” Sal smirked.

  “You know I can hear you?” the lady reminded us.

  “Well, ma’am,” I explained. “I’m sorry to say, but you ain’t among the living no more.”

  She pressed her hands against her face and began to weep softly. Then she cried out loudly, “Oh, Henry! Please forgive me, Henry!” It must’ve hit her then that she wasn’t ever going to see her sweetheart again. The poor girl collapsed on the table, burying her face in her sleeve.

  Sal poured some whiskey into her Arbuckle’s to take the edge off. Stumpy fetched an old blanket from the storage room upstairs to warm her up, while I filled her in on the particulars of Damnation, much as I knew them. She sat blank-eyed and listened. It ain’t easy hearing that the God you’ve been praying to all your life deserted you in the foyer to hell with a vampire, some werewolves, and a mess of lecherous card players. She took it pretty well, considering. Then she began to unburden herself about the last day of her life. It had been her wedding day, and she got caught in a compromising position with another man.

  “I didn’t do anything improper—I swear! I just couldn’t push him off me quick enough,” she explained. “My father owed the man money, and he was threatening to take our grocery store. Henry, my financé, saw us together, then ran off before I could explain.” She began to weep again. The sight of her dimpled cheeks awash in tears softened the coldest of the dead hearts in the saloon.

  “The scoundrel came after me again, so I stuck a knitting needle in his arm and ran away. I figured my father’d lose the store, and I had already lost Henry. I had nothing to live for, so I went to the lake. I’m not a strong swimmer, you see. Couldn’t doggie paddle more than a few feet. I rowed to the center and jumped in, then pushed the boat away.”

  “Can’t see why you’d end up here,” Sal said wiping the mist from his eyes. “You didn’t kill that man, and even if you did, he’d a deserved it. Far as I can tell, all you did was kill yourself, and suicides don’t usually end up here—unless they done other bad stuff.”

  Her eyes widened as she just remembered something, then more tears came. “I might as well tell you since it doesn’t make any difference now,” she explained. “I didn’t exactly wait until my wedding night.” She blushed. “I was expecting when I jumped in the lake.”

  The room grew silent, and the Christians bowed their heads and crossed themselves.

  “I don’t get it,” Stumpy whispered.

  “It was murder,” Red said in a hushed voice. “She kilt the child when she kilt herself, and that’s why she’s here instead of heaven.”

  “Don’t worry, little lady,” Sal told her. “I’m sure that baby of yours went straight to heaven.”

  Ms. Parker smiled on hearing it. Of course, nobody knew for sure what happened to babies when their mommas drowned. She was the first woman to come in that condition. The tiny corpse could’ve still been inside her. They put Ms. Parker up in the hotel in the room beside Buddy’s. After she left, folks debated the issue at some length.

  “Course it went to heaven,” Sal argued.

  A confused look came over Stumpy’s face. “So God separated ’em when she drowned?” he asked.

  “How could the baby even drown?” Red asked. “It’s already swimming in its momma’s belly.”

  After a few rounds, some folks expected the baby might just crawl up into the saloon looking for its momma.

  “All this talk of dead babies gives me the willies,” Fat Wally confessed.

  “You’re in a room full of dead men, and a harmless baby scares you?” Sneaky Jim teased.

  “But you can reason with a man, or shoot ’em. A dead baby could crawl up and smother you in your sleep.”

  “Why would it wanna do that?” I asked.

  “Revenge, I expect,” Red said. “Jack Finney was madder than a wet hen ’cause he never got to grow any hair on his balls. Wouldn’t you be cross if you got killed before you was even born?”

  The men continued playing cards, but every so often their eyes drifted to the door. Couldn’t help but wonder where that kid might’ve gone. A few candles burned out and Sal didn’t bother replacing them, so everywhere you looked was a dark corner a dead baby might crawl up in. Amidst the speculating, the doors suddenly swung open and the room silenced. We expected the child really was going to come crawling in. Then the Chinaman appeared in the doorway and everyone laughed.

  “Ah fuck you, cowboy asshole!” he grumbled then walked over to the bar so Sal could give him his wages for hauling away bodies and tending to the pigs. Then he went straight to the poker table and lost it all in half an hour. Afterward, he sat back at the bar and had a few drinks on credit.

  The Chinaman had been in Damnation long before me, so I never got his story for The Crapper. Seemed like a nice enough fella, but I usually called it a night before he came in and never had the opportunity to shoot the breeze with him.

  The boldness of a few whiskeys took hold of me, so I turned and asked him, “What did you do to get here, anyway?”

  He looked at me kind of funny. He knew some English but didn’t seem to understand what I was getting at.

  “Where were you before you was here?” I asked.

  “Ohio,” he said hesitantly. “Work at pig farm. One night I feed pig, then fall… Hit head. Wake up here. Not know how get.” He sipped his drink nervously like maybe I was the one who took him.

  “You mean to tell me you fell down in a pigpen and bumped your head, and you think you got shanghaied and brought here?”

  “No from Shanghai,” he said angrily. “From Manchuria.”

  “Did you ever do anything bad?” I asked. “You know something that might keep you from going to heaven?”

  The Chinaman looked a might bit upset. I felt sorry for bringing up bad memories, but with him not knowing English so well, I reckoned it could help him understand how he wound up in Damnation. He took another sip of his drink. I don’t imagine he confided with many people, so he probably had some desire to unburden himself.

  “Left family in China long time ago,” he began. “Work on railroad to send money home. Then begin drink sometime. Then gamble sometime. No more send money home long time.” He looked both ways to make sure no one was listening. “Also kill brother.”

  Sal placed a small stack of chips in front of the Chinaman and told him it was an advance on next week’s wages. He took it happily and headed over to the poker table.

  “You know, I don’t think the Celestial even knows he’s dead,” I informed Sal. “Nobody ever told him, so he thinks he’s still alive! He fell in a pigpen. Probably got torn to pieces!”

  “No shit, Tom! Don’t tell him though,” Sal scolded. “If he finds out he’s dead, he ain’t gonna wanna work no more. Then there’ll be nobody to haul them bodies away and tend to the pigs. As is, he still hopes he might win a bundle at the poker table and be able to pay for his family to come to America.”

  I scowled at Sal for his rotten four-flushing ways. “It ain’t right,” I declared. “If there’s one thing a man deserves to know, it’s that’s he’s dead. Can’t go on deceiving him just to get cheap labor.”

  “You think it’s just for me? Look at him!” Sal said. The Chinaman’s rosy cheeks were raised in a broad smile as he pick
ed up his cards. “He’s the happiest dang man in the room. He likes working with them pigs, too. And when he gambles, it actually means something to him. Ain’t just a distraction like for the rest of these stiffs. He’s the only one in Damnation with any hope. Hell, if I could trade places with him, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But if you wanna tell him he’s dead and there ain’t no chance of him seeing his family ever again, be my guest! Not sure what good it’ll do though.”

  I had to think on it some. The Chinaman went on a roll and won a few hands. He soon doubled his money, but he didn’t know how to stop when he was ahead. The drink went to his head and he started chasing bad hands with good money, giving it all back just as fast. When it was all gone, he just shrugged and headed for the door. I still wasn’t sure if it was better to let him hope for something that wasn’t ever going to happen. I decided to turn in not long after. As I turned the corner outside the saloon, the Chinaman was down on all fours on the boardwalk. He had spotted a coin that had dropped between the planks and was trying to fish it out with a couple of sticks.

  “Pardon me, sir,” I said and he stood with a start. As he turned, he already had an itty-bitty derringer drawn.

  “There’s no need for that,” I told him with my hands skyward. “I got to tell you something, sir. I’m not sure if you wanna hear it, but I feel it’s every man’s right to know. You ain’t among the living no more, friend.”

  A bewildered look came over his face.

  “You’re dead,” I said plainly.

  His round cheeks lifted in a strange smile. “No shit! Me no stupid.” He giggled playfully.

  “Oh, Sal told me you weren’t aware.”

  “Don’t tell him,” the Chinaman said worriedly. “Me like work with pig. Only friend in town. If Sal know I wanna work, he pay less.”

  Seemed they were both satisfied with their little arrangement, so who was I to spoil it. Besides, I didn’t know any better way.