by Tim Bryant
Sunny pulled me backward, as if she could pull us away from the reality of what was going on. Madam Pearlie looked stunned, as if she’d been under the impression she was escorting Gentleman Jack upstairs to sing happy birthday to me.
“Why, he’s just a boy,” she said.
I could have pulled Ira’s .44 Colt from its holster. Had Jack reached down to draw his gun, his lanky arms would have had farther to go to get there, farther again to lift it up. I would have caught him just as he raised the barrel. Madam Pearlie would have stepped aside so as to allow the big man to fall unhindered, his pistola maybe firing off a single shot into the roof. As if to prove to myself that I wasn’t always impulsive, I did none of this.
“Eight hundred head of cattle?” Sunny said.
I couldn’t tell if she was horrified or impressed.
“I’ve never killed an animal in my life,” I said.
“An ex-associate of Mr. Liquorman, a man by the name of Simeon Payne has testified that this man was responsible for bringing a cattle drive infested—I believe that should read infected—with red water fever to the town. That he traded sixty head of said cattle to a meat packing operation in exchange for goods and services while on the outskirts of the town. That those sixty head of cattle were infested with the fever. That he had, in fact, buried his own cook, a man named Jacobo Robles, on the outskirts of Wichita Falls because he came down with the fever. That he recklessly and wantonly transmitted such illness to both man and beast before leaving Wichita Falls and is responsible for what took place as a result.”
Why, I had never accomplished so much with so little effort in all my days.
“The name is Liquorish,” I said. “Wilkie John Liquorish.”
I wondered why he was reading the paper in the manner that he did, as if he were reading it to Madam Pearlie and Sunny and not me, standing right before him.
“He was jailed in Mobeetie under the name John Liquorman,” Gentleman Jack said.
He pulled the paper down and, for the first time, seemed to acknowledge that I was present.
“How is it that you are John Liquorman and your brother is Ira Lee Liquorish. You are a liquor man and he’s only a little liquorish?”
I told him John Liquorman had been nothing more than a newsprint error. Nothing more. My mama named me Wilkie John Liquorish and that was what I answered to. He didn’t seem that interested. His head was back into the paper.
“Shall we tell the ladies here what that little jail sentence was all about?”
It had been my first time in jail.
“I was only trying to expand my vocabulary,” I said.
It’s not what it sounds like. I didn’t call the deputy sheriff names or curse him in Latin or anything. The sheriff had split town the previous year, heading for Alaska to mine gold, and the Deputy had his hands full enough without making trouble for me. He was also the local judge, and he preached at the Methodist church on Sundays.
“He was jailed for refusing to turn over his copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica, sixth edition,” Gentleman Jack said.
Madam Pearlie laughed. It wasn’t a troubled or shocked laugh. It sounded like a mother laughing at the hijinx of her child. It sounded like home. Safety.
“That true, Wilkie?” Sunny said.
My right hand moved to the holster at my hip, but Jack saw it and silently shook his head. Pulling his duster back, he made sure I could see the Smith & Wesson hanging ready at his side, hand already in position. I relaxed, content that I wouldn’t have to kill him there in Madam Pearlie’s corner room.
“It contained the words beer and alcohol in it,” I said. “Even reading about them was against the law in Mobeetie.”
What took the cake was, it was perfectly legal to drink in Mobeetie, so long as you did it in a saloon, of which there were four. If I’d kept my dictionary in the saloon too, I’d have probably made out alright. Truth is, I never felt a speck of guilt in Mobeetie, and I didn’t feel guilt in Fort Worth either. I didn’t feel guilt over killing no damn cattle or no people in Wichita Falls. That whole notion was nothing but foolishness. If it had happened, it was God’s work, and I had no hand in it.
I felt guilt-free of killing the High Sheriff and Mr. Tubbs too. Why would I not? Folks were celebrating in the streets over that, and I had been selfless enough to not even take credit for it. Didn’t matter. The thanks I got for it was a summons to appear in front of the courthouse two days later. It promised to be a hell of a show, and Gentleman Jack did love a show.
“They’re building a stage especially for it, just so everyone can come and get a good look at you,” he said. “And I’ve asked them to build a special door in it just so you can make a grand exit.”
I looked at Sunny and smiled like none of it worried me. Inside, I was thinking I needed to figure out who really killed Leon Thaw.
CHAPTER SIX
Long Gun and I reached Fort Griffin just as it was being fortified with additional troops from Oklahoma Territory. They had a sawmill built on a creek just southeast of the fort, which was the first thing we laid our eyes on. Part of a corps of soldiers was there, loading logs onto a mule train and pulling them up a hill into the fort. They shouted out to us, not appearing to be the least bit thrown off by this skinny cowboy and his Indian companion.
“You boys look like U.S. Army material to be sure,” the lieutenant, a man named Granville Hanley, said.
Long Gun introduced himself and said he was hoping to find employment working as an Indian guide. Hanley didn’t seem to put much stock in the idea.
“Only need I might have far as redskins go,” he said, “is that long gun you’ve got strapped to you. How is your aim?”
Long Gun told him the story about shooting at rabbits from five hundred yards, which suitably impressed Hanley. He nodded appreciatively and turned to me.
“What about you, son?”
I don’t like being called son, unless you’re my mother. I overlooked it.
“I can’t compete with hitting rabbits at a quarter mile,” I said, “but, last I heard, we wasn’t at war with no rabbits.”
Hanley seemed to like my reasoning.
“Go up to the fort and tell Colonel Dolon to feed you and your horses. We’ll talk more after dinner.”
Colonel Marcel Dolon had all the warmth of a root cellar. Even so, he was wearing his dress coat on a day that the sun had traveled from one horizon to the other without a single cloud to cool it down. He had the jittery disposition of Napoleon at St. Helena, but he did see that we were escorted to the kitchen and that our horses were watered and fed.
Fort Griffin turned out to be not much more than half a dozen small buildings scattered around on a plain just above the winding stream they called Mill Creek. There weren’t any trees to speak of, and it seemed like a poorly chosen spot to fortify against groups of wild Indians. We were afforded a sleeping space separate from the soldiers on that first night, and I confess I slept like the dead. At first light, we were shaken awake by a reveille bugle call, which stirred feelings of home, as I’d heard it played so much around the barracks back there that I considered it my own personal wake up call.
If the truth of it is known, it very well may have been that reveille bugle that determined what would happen that morning. After the breakfast call, the soldiers all went on fatigue duty, which meant Lieutenant Hanley took his men back down to the sawmill and Colonel Dolon oversaw the building of two new barracks at the back of the fort. With duties dispatched, he soon turned his attention to me and Long Gun.
“So you fellas want to join the U.S. Army?”
I might have had no interest in it twenty-four hours before, but, at that very moment, it seemed clear enough that my whole life had been pitching toward that very decision. Part of me saw it as taking on the unfinished work of my father Henry.
“I would like to work either here or at Fort Phantom Hill,” I said.
He didn’t seem the type to be moved by emotional pleas, so
I gave no reason, and he asked for none.
“Fort Phantom Hill has been abandoned,” Dolon said. “You’re stuck with me.”
Long Gun reiterated his ability with rabbits and said he wanted to be an Indian scout.
“He speaks five languages,” I said, sure that the colonel would be impressed.
“There are over one hundred Indian languages,” Dolon said.
Long Gun looked dispirited.
“I speak Comanche and Apache,” he said.
Dolon reared back in his chair and peered over a pair of reading glasses at him like he was inspecting an animal in a trap. I wondered why they didn’t have Hanley in the fort and Dolon down at the mill, as it seemed Hanley was much better with people. Then again, the U.S. Army wasn’t in the business of getting along with people, especially if they were Indians.
“Hell,” Dolon said, “I can pretty well speak Comanche myself at this point. All you really have to know how to say is ‘get a move along before my men put so many bullets in you, you’ll just be a big hole in the middle of the happy hunting grounds,’ son.”
We didn’t have anything else to do that day, and we weren’t in any hurry to get back on the trail, so we joined the United States Army that morning and were part of the kitchen help by lunch time, spooning out plates of beans to soldiers who didn’t look much different than me. By the time bugle call sent everybody back to work, I was starting to wonder if I had been hoodooed.
“The beans taste good,” Long Gun said.
It was his way of telling me to stay put. For the next week, I think he was afraid I was going to abandon my post at any moment, and, with it, him.
To be truthful, the beans were good, and so was the cot. We spent less time with Dolon and more time with the cook, a Mexican who knew enough English to tell stories of when he was a cook for Emperor Maximilian and Empress Carlota of Mexico. Me and Long Gun were never sure if he was saying that he cooked for them or he knew the man who did it.
“How did the emperor’s personal cook end up cooking beans for a bunch of soldiers in Texas?” I said.
After a week of beans, we considered that maybe he had been banished for only cooking that. Finally, it was Long Gun who put the question to him.
“How I wound up here?” he said. “The emperor killed many, many people during his reign. Finally, the opposition party gain enough strength, they run Carlota out of the country, then they come for the emperor. Emperor Maximilian tried to escape, but they catch him. He and all of his people executed. All of them. They want to kill the cook too. Can you imagine? A lowly cook like myself.”
Seeing him there in the little kitchen, he seemed too lowly to have ever made beans for an emperor.
“They tried to execute you?” Long Gun said.
He shook his head.
“President Juarez, the man who take over Mexico, I tell him, let me cook you a meal. If you like the meal I cook, you let me go, and I will leave Mexico. You don’t like it, you may shoot me. I will not even run.”
To believe this man’s tale or not?
“And you cooked him beans?” Long Gun said.
He laughed in response.
“Yes, beans. And corn. And meat. Much meat. I use French breads. Custard. I cook a feast. And the president tells me, you are a good man. Go. Go away, Jacobo. Never let me see your face in Mexico again. And so I leave, and I come here.”
And that is how I met Jacobo, the Mexican cook who made the best beans a Mexican emperor ever ate.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Gentleman Jack afforded me my freedom, if you can call going through your daily chores with a tall colored man in a suitcoat and red hat freedom. For the most part, it beat sitting inside a jail cell, a fact he reminded me of at regular intervals. My room was moved from the upstairs corner of the Black Elephant to a downstairs storage room directly off the bar, so the Jackrabbit could spend his time and money in the bar and still keep an eye on me. The room, having been a broom closet, had no windows and no exterior exit, so the only escape was through the bar.
Not to say I was a constant prisoner in the cell. Jack still went on his daily rounds, and he paraded me around with him as he did.
“We’re going to town,” he would say. A funny thing, because we were right in the middle of town. By that he meant, more than likely, we were going to Main Street, to the bank to do business, to the Post Office to check for telegrams, to the White Elephant for more business and pleasure.
It was during a visit to the White Elephant that I discovered a relevant piece of information concerning Mr. Jack Delaney. Of course, I could walk into the White Elephant and cause less commotion than him, even if I did look like I’d just gotten out of school.
“Stay with me,” he said. “Get five strides away from me, I fire one warning shot over your head. I can promise you won’t hear the second one.”
The crowd in the White Elephant—and there were always longer lines there than in the Black Elephant—could easily be divided. A large portion looked at Jack like they were seeing Bigfoot Wallace himself walking in. The others stiffened up like children caught passing notes in church.
“Mr. Delaney,” the barkeep said from across the room, “your usual?”
Jack nodded, and, by the time we strolled across the floor, a shot glass of whiskey was waiting. Gentleman Jack knocked it back and pushed the glass back across the bar.
“We’re going to have one hell of a show, noon tomorrow,” he said.
The barkeep shook his head.
“Twelve o’clock, sir. When I open up for business. Gotta be behind the bar.”
Jack leaned into the counter and pulled me with him. I wanted to take one of the open stools, but the nearest one was a good four paces. I decided not to chance it.
“People will be out, looking for something to eat,” Jack said. “I’m going to feed their taste for excitement.”
The barkeep studied me closely.
“How old is he?”
Gentleman Jack wasn’t happy with the question.
“Old enough,” he said.
The barkeep turned to me. He didn’t look like the kind who had ever questioned a patron’s age. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to.
“Seventeen,” I said.
Jack didn’t seem to care much for the answer either.
“Old enough for a whiskey,” he said.
He nodded at the glass sitting there between them. The barkeep pulled a bottle of something called Moral Suasion and poured. You can choose to disbelieve this, but I have to say, it was my first time to ever swallow whiskey. I had once imbibed a single glass of gin and almost immediately heaved it back up. I never went back in that particular bar again, and I steered clear of most hard drinks from that day on, afraid I might recreate the scene. No big loss, as there were bars on every block around the District, and they offered everything from potato beer to coffee for the less adventurous.
As a result, my first fear was vomiting onto Gentleman Jack’s fancy leather shoes from New Orleans. The whiskey tasted like gold, and I could feel it mining its way deep down into my gut.
“I got something for you to see, young Mr. Liquorman,” Jack said.
I wondered if he had compiled a list of things to call me that weren’t my true name. As far as the Liquorman name went, I had indeed been listed under such a name in the Panhandle News, but it had been nothing more than a typo; one of several within the article itself. I decided to pay a return visit to the White Elephant and ask for another taste of the Moral Suasion.
The walk down Main Street was almost the same as it was when I had followed, and I wondered if I was due a visit to the photographer who had Leon Thaw on display. I tried following behind Mr. Delaney, but he seemed to prefer me walking in front of him. This made our progress slightly awkward, as I had no idea where we were going and had to be pushed along like a mulish child.
We did pass the window of the photographer, who had a new dead body in his parlor. This time, it was
an old woman, framed by a simple wood casket and surrounded by a handful of other women who seemed just as old but not quite as dead. Sisters, maybe, or cousins. Too old to be her children. Or maybe they were; grief doesn’t wear well, and it photographs poorly too. I knew from experience.
“Look yonder,” Gentleman Jack said.
We were standing on the corner of Main and Houston. If there were two thousand people in Fort Worth—which is no more than a rough estimation—at any given time, it seemed that eight hundred of them were within sight of that particular spot. Fort Worth was like a pregnant lady in her ninth month. And everyone knew the baby was going to be trouble.
“I see a bunch of people,” I said.
I could also see coaches and horses. The post office. The courthouse. A restaurant. Hotel.
“Exactly,” Jack said. “And tomorrow, at noon, all eyes will be on that spot right over there.”
People were passing each other in the street, moving around us and anyone else standing still. It looked like a great river winding its way down Main Street, then branching off, much but not all of it into Hell’s Half Acre. Down the street from the stagecoach station, immediately past the platform where freight wagons pulled in and unloaded goods and supplies, there was a great wooden stage of a different sort.
“What’s coming to town?” I said.
I wasn’t dumb. I sure as hell wasn’t innocent.
“You are, Mr. Liquorman.”
I was naive, thinking first of medicine shows and circuses.
“All the world’s a stage, and this is where you will play out your role,” he said. “Tomorrow, every eye will be on me and you, and you will answer for your crimes in Wichita Falls.”
The stage was in front of the courthouse. I counted the steps leading up to it. That’s when I realized the seriousness of the situation.
“I didn’t kill anybody in Wichita Falls,” I said.
He put his finger to lips and sushed me.