by Tim Bryant
“No,” he said. “Save your part for tomorrow. It’s much better that way.”
Part of me wanted to believe it really was a big play. An act by Jack to scare the tar out of me and then laugh and let me be on my way. Maybe even an act for all the people. Some kind of debate or show like I’d seen from vaudeville players traveling through Mobeetie. If it weren’t for the thirteen steps leading up to the stage. If it weren’t for the trapdoor right in the middle of the stage floor.
“Some say that little theater came straight from Governor Davis down in Austin,” Jack said. “I’m here to tell you, Willie Boy, it came straight from hell. Straight from hell, no stops.”
What was hell was getting to sleep that night. I laid in my little bed in the broom closet for half the night, turning one way and then another, staring at the ceiling and imagining faces in the wood. Not the face of the High Sheriff or of Bill Tubbs. Not the face of Leon Thaw. Not even the face of Gentleman Jack. It was a face from a little farther back. A time that seemed, like the ceiling itself, so close I could touch it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
We weren’t the Three Musketeers, but Long Gun, Jacobo, and me became something of a team. That was mostly due to Long Gun and me continually being assigned to kitchen duty, even though Long Gun pled daily for an assignment with the soldiers who rode out and ushered settlers into or out of the fort. Dolon wouldn’t even entertain the thought.
It didn’t bother me so much. There were several families living among us, most of them waiting to be taken to Buffalo Gap. One of the families, the Lusks, had come to America from Scotland. The father, Bricky Lusk, was a wall of a man, standing a full head over Dolon, one and a half over Hanley, and as wide as both men side by side. Lusk had been a shipbuilder back in Scotland, living on the River Clyde. Then one day, he had enough of building ships and watching them sail off into the blue. He told his wife and three kids to pack up their things, and away they sailed for North Carolina, U.S.A.
One of the horse soldiers said Bricky had got himself into trouble somewhere back east and left town rather than deal with it. The specifics were vague. He talked of bashing someone about the ears with his Welsh comb, which I believed to be a literal thing for a considerable time. How was I to know? I had trouble making out half of what he said, and he was likely having the same trouble with me.
Whatever, I had no quarrel with Mr. Lusk. But I confess I lusted after his daughter, an eighteen-year-old brunette named Greer who had the palest skin I had ever seen. I half-heartedly shuffled along behind Long Gun on his requests to join the soldiers on horseback, but I tried my best to look uninterested. I was more than content to sit in the kitchen and peel potatoes and onions with Jacobo, just for that five or ten minutes each day when she would come through and ask for a meal.
“Where are y’all going?” I finally said one day after several silent passes.
She spooned at her plate of beef stew and studied me, as if trying to determine if I was worth any answer at all. Maybe she was working out my Texian accent.
“First, Father wanted to see Texas. We came to Wichita Falls for a year. Then he decided he wanted to get a look at Mexico. Mother is tired of traveling.”
They had come a lot farther than Long Gun and me, and not for much of a pay-off as I saw it. There was little between Fort Griffin and Mexico to get excited about, unless you were aiming for San Antonio. I had no desire to return there, although I might have followed her back, if only she had asked.
It was established within the next twenty-four hours that a group of soldiers would escort the settlers to Buffalo Gap at the end of the week, when a new relief unit arrived to hold down the fort. Long Gun was determined to get a spot on the escort. I was ambivalent.
“You like Greer,” he said.
I was a rabbit in his sights.
“Doesn’t mean I want to escort her out of my life,” I said.
She was little more than a daily glimpse into another world, a world I had never known or even imagined, but I closed my eyes and there she was, her big brown eyes, her small nose, her smile crooked in just the right way. Suddenly, my own world seemed insufficient without her. I might not have ever summoned up the courage to talk to her if I hadn’t just been inducted into the U.S. Army. I took the situation on like it was a battle.
“I’m from San Antonio. I’m planning to go north and work cattle drives.”
I didn’t dare mention my brother. I had heard one of the soldiers mention she was eighteen. Just a little older than me. Maybe I had little to offer her that Ira Lee couldn’t better, but I had seen him talk to the girls in the District at home. At my best, I was a better than average mimic.
“Tell me about the cattle drives,” she said, nice enough to play along.
I checked to see just a couple of the sawmillers left to come through the line and quickly abandoned my post.
“It takes ten or twelve men to drive maybe three or four thousand head of cattle, if they know what they’re doing. Take ’em up to Kansas City, fight off the Comanche, the Blackfoot. Blackfoot Indians are the meanest. It’s hard work, but you can make thirty dollars for four weeks of work, turn around and do it all again.”
It sounded like I knew what I was talking about. Like I had done it all before. Of course, everything I knew, I had learned from Ira Lee and wranglers in San Antone.
“How did you end up in the United States Army?”
I had lain in our tent on a night or two imagining conversations with this new arrival in my life. Now that it was happening, I was thrown off by questions I hadn’t worked through. Thankfully, I was quick on my feet.
“I brought my friend Long Gun here,” I said. “He’s a Kiowa Apache. He wants to be an Indian scout.”
“An Indian scout,” she said.
I heard Jacobo call my name, but I couldn’t tear my attention away just yet.
“Help the soldiers to communicate with the wild Indians in the area,” I said.
“Señor Wilkie.”
I turned to find Jacobo and Long Gun standing in front of Lieutenant Hanley. Jacobo seemed to be sending hand signals with his right hand and shielding them with the left. It was to no avail. Hanley wasn’t amused.
“I’m leaving this place soon,” I said, “if you’d care to come along.”
Even today, I don’t know why I said it. It was as much for other people’s ears as it was for Greer’s. I was embarrassed, but I wouldn’t allow that of myself. I was angry, but I wouldn’t let anyone else see that. I paid for it too, of course. Immediately taken off kitchen duty, I was put to work helping to build one of several new cabins on the backside of the fort. Bricky Lusk was head of the crew. It might have been him or it might have been my guilty conscience that worked at me so hard, but it went well past nightfall, and when I finally went to bed that night, every muscle in my body fought sleep.
I finally fell asleep, long after everyone else around me. I kept building that damn cabin all night long, with Bricky Lusk breathing down my neck. Every once in a while, I tried my best to make it Greer herself, but, each time when I turned around, it was Bricky. If it wasn’t Bricky, it was Lieutenant Hanley, with Long Gun standing by helplessly and Jacobo still trying to send me hand signals. It was a long night, even if morning came too soon.
CHAPTER NINE
The High Sheriff of Hell’s Half Acre, before I retired him, had done his utmost to bring a little order to the disorder that was the Acre. When they found him dancing with the broom of death, no one doubted he’d been done in for his troubles. One of the most visible changes was the gallows built in the most conspicuous place on Main Street.
The sheriff had refused to call it a gallows. According to Madam Pearlie, he insisted that it was a law court, built to enforce the idea that justice had found its way to town.
“Of course, he didn’t have so much to say about that door in the middle of it,” she said. “What soon came clear: every scoundrel he brought up on that stage escaped kicking and screaming by it.”
The fact that the bounty hunter was sitting right across the room, drinking up the house’s whiskey, wasn’t helping matters.
“Don’t Wilkie get nobody to stand up and speak for him?” Sunny said.
It occurred to me that the only people willing might not be the best qualified to do so. At the same time, if I was going to be the special guest at a neck stretching party, I would rather have Sunny up there to hold my hand and whisper into my ear than to stand there truly alone as the mouth of death opened and swallowed me up.
“I can speak for myself.”
True or not, it sounded good, so I said it. When it came right down to it, there were always two separate things going on inside my head. One was some semblance of truth, and the other was something else. Something that captured my interest, that sounded like the character I was playing. Trouble is, a good portion of the times, I couldn’t tell the two things apart. I had become the character. Truth was irrelevant.
“Wilkie John Liquorish, you will do no such thing,” Madam Pearlie said. “I’ll look all over Fort Worth to find someone to represent you. And if I can’t find anyone willing to take the job, I’ll get up there and do it myself.”
No doubt Madam Pearlie knew more people than all of us combined, so I went about my meager business feeling slightly better about my impending doom. That sliver of hope was magnified when Pearlie went to Gentleman Jack and announced that she would arrange my legal representation for the case the following day.
“We must do this by the law, or we won’t do it at all,” she said.
Jack hemmed and hawed, but, in the end, he consented, taking the news as a personal challenge. Later, I would wonder what Pearlie meant when she said . . . “or we won’t do it at all.”
Did she have the power to put an end to the matter? What were they holding out from me?
Jack, although he held his cards close to his chest, made it apparent that he had what he thought to be a winning hand. This unnerved the first man Pearlie brought in, a young fellow named Gagnon from somewhere up north, whose eyes twitched back and forth over a pair of spectacles like he was watching an imaginary fly dart back and forth between us.
“Gentleman Jack is going to argue that you’re responsible for the deaths of sixty-five people and eight hundred heads of cattle. That calculation would put the largest price on your head of any outlaw in all of Texas and the Indian Territory as well.”
I kept looking in vain for that fly.
“I didn’t do it,” I said.
I don’t know if he didn’t hear me or just chose not to acknowledge my plea.
“Knowing Gentleman Jack, I would suggest you give him the eight hundred head of cattle, just so he feels that he’s winning something, and we’ll make him prove that you were directly responsible for the human toll.”
Gagnon was the guy who had helped Madam Pearlie skirt the law on several issues involving the city, but he seemed to be lacking when it came to criminal defense.
“Give him the cattle?”
I wasn’t sure what he meant. Soon enough I was.
“If you’ve got eight hundred head, you’re maybe looking at an average of twenty, twenty-five dollars a head. He’d have a hard time proving they were worth any more. If we can get him to agree to twenty, that’s a total worth of sixteen thousand dollars.”
He stopped and looked at me like I was supposed to say something.
“I was supposed to make thirty dollars,” I said. “I didn’t even make that.”
Gagnon wanted me to admit to causing the destruction of the complete herd of cattle and then hope that would strike a sympathetic chord in Jack which would cause him to overlook the sixty-five people. I sent him away at once. An hour later, I discovered him coming down the back stairs with one of Pearlie’s girls on his arm. No doubt, he had made an incredible deal for her services.
Later, Pearlie told me that Gagnon had money in every bank between Fort Worth and Chicago and could have paid off the sixteen thousand without batting an eye. That much might be true, but he hadn’t offered to wire me any money, and I didn’t like admitting to doing something I hadn’t done. On top of that, I wasn’t even close to comfortable with laying the deaths of those sixty-five other people on the mercy of the court, even if one of them was Leon Thaw.
I knew the cattle. I wanted to know who these people were.
The second person Pearlie sent my way was a colored man from Hog Eye, Texas, named Kitch Howard. Pearlie was getting into some meticulous thinking, picking Mr. Howard. Kitch knew Jack Delaney, although I wasn’t clear on how. He seemed confident he could outsmart his friend, whom he referred to as “the Rabbit.”
“How is the Rabbit doing?”
“Does the old Rabbit still call New Orleans home?”
“Is the Rabbit keeping a residence here at the Black Elephant?”
He wasn’t, although it might have been easier on all of us had he been. He locked me into my room at night, being sure to keep the key with him when he left. I could move around the hotel while he was there, always with his eye on me and his gun at the ready.
When he saw Kitch Howard in the house, he reacted as if he was seeing the ghost of a long lost family member.
“Kitchen Boy!”
Kitch made the kind of face that told me there was a past there. It looked to be a past he had hoped to keep in the past. He walked across the room, straight up to Jack, and stuck his hand out. I couldn’t help noticing that he looked like a student approaching a teacher. Maybe a student who didn’t complete his studies and was trying to soften the punishment.
“Rabbit, I’m surprised they let you into an establishment like this,” he said.
I couldn’t think of any student who would get away with calling his teacher Rabbit.
“Any establishment that would let the kitchen boy run rampant through the halls has low enough standards, I suppose,” Gentleman Jack said.
He slapped Kitch on the back, and Kitch dug his heels in so as not to be dislodged from his stance.
“It’s just like you to be picking on kitchen boys, Rabbit,” Kitch said. “And now trying a young drover on such trumped up charges as these? I can’t see any evidence this boy ever swatted a mosquito.”
When Gentleman Jack laughed, it felt like he was laughing directly at me. He’d removed my Colt Sidehammer, and it was a good thing too. I likely would have tried my best to kill the two of them with a single bullet and then used some extras if that didn’t work out. Thing is, he knew it. As for Kitch, I wasn’t sure whether he was more interested in winning a philosophical debate or saving my hide.
“Was he really a kitchen boy?”
I had no idea how Madam Pearlie knew the guy. Far as I knew, he might have met Jack when he was cooking right there in the Black Elephant. It did have its own kitchen, and there were a few boys working away behind its swinging doors. I wasn’t convinced I wanted to leave my life in the hands of a man primarily known for his work in front of a stove. Had he cooked for royalty too?
“My lands, no,” Pearlie said. “That’s just Jack’s way of putting Kitch in his place. It’s all sport to them.”
Turns out, Jack Delaney and Kitch Howard were cousins by marriage in a competitive family that didn’t like each other. Kitch was from the Texas side and Jack was from the Louisiana side. Jack considered himself to be a self-educated man, having dabbled in everything from Greek and Latin to law to blacksmithing, all by way of the public library in New Orleans and a few nice old Creole ladies in the eighth ward. Kitch, whose real name was actually Kitch Corentin Howard, was among the first colored men in the Dallas area to go north to get an education, having crossed the Mason-Dixon five years before the War of Northern Aggression did. Howard’s fa
ther, named Corentin but without the Kitch, had been granted his freedom, mostly because he was in too bad of shape to be much value to his owner. Corentin had, one by one, bought the freedom of his four children, sending two boys up north for school and two girls up north for marriage.
Kitch asked a lot of questions. Some of them seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with the situation at hand.
“Wilkie John Liquorman, when and where were you born?”
“November 30, 1864. The District in San Antonio. And it’s Liquorish.”
“Like the candy?”
“No,” I said. “Like the drink.”
I spelled it out for him, but he seemed to think I was joking.
“By the district, you mean the Sporting District?”
It wasn’t a subject I had the most satisfactory answers for. I took a deep breath and tried to find one that would do.
CHAPTER TEN
First man I ever shot, it was because of his reaction to a similar question. He was called Gallo, and I had seen him playing billiards in a couple of the halls in the District where people would bet on horse races and pretty much any other outcome you could wager on. His father had been a well-known farmer north of town. When Lincoln freed the slaves, Gallo lost half of his workforce, and a year or two later, cotton worms did in what was left. The father sold off his property and became the town drunk, and it looked like Gallo was following in that family business.
He caught me in an alley along the backside of South Concho where me and mama lived. I was coming home from a late night selling cigarettes to soldiers, and never saw him until we were practically eye to eye.
“Your name is John Liquorish, right?”
People have been getting it wrong as long as I’ve had it.
“Wilkie John,” I said.
What I knew of Gallo wasn’t good. I was fifteen, he a good three or four years older, and close to twice my size. I was already running late and not in the mood for idle chatter.
“Your mama stays in the cribs on Concho, right?” he said. “She’s the gorda I see you with in the marketplace.”