by Tim Bryant
“Yes, sir.”
I immediately hated myself. For sounding small and shaky, for addressing him as sir. A sign of respect eeking its way from my mouth at a time when it wasn’t called for. If he called me son, this man who was no father to me, I would not reply with respect again. I caught my wind, and it filled my lungs. I wouldn’t die so easy.
“Were you born in San Antonio to a mother who makes her living servicing men in the Sporting District area of that town?”
The question was too complex for a simple answer.
“My father was one of the New Orleans Greys,” I said. “He married my mother and sired me and my brother Ira Lee.”
Jack wasn’t happy with that answer. He held his hand out and stopped me.
“I was not asking about your father. I was asking if your mother works in the Sporting District in San Antonio, selling her body to the soldiers and men there.”
I didn’t see what it had to do with my guilt or innocence.
“She didn’t do that when I was a child,” I said. “I don’t have any idea what she’s doing today.”
I scanned the crowd, shielding my eyes from the sun with my hand.
“Mom, you out there?”
The audience roared. I say audience because it was at this very instance that I saw it as more than just a crowd. I remembered mother taking Ira Lee and me to a puppet show at a children’s theater one time when I was small. One of my earliest memories of mother and Ira. I sat watching Robin Hood and Friar Tuck and the Sheriff of Nottingham. At the end I threw a fit, wanting so badly to see it again.
“Son, you shot and killed Leon Thaw to keep him from telling authorities what you did on the ill-fated cattle drive that started in Mobeetie, did you not?”
I didn’t want to answer. He was calling me his son again. I knew silence might come back to hurt me in this instance. I stuck my bottom lip out and pulled up my best six-year-old boy answer.
“No, daddy,” I said. “I promise I never shot Mr. Faw.”
A few people right up front were already playing along. I was playing to them, and every laugh made me want another.
“Are you known as Wilkie John Liquorman?” he said again.
I could sense some frustration already creeping in.
“No, I’m not him,” I said.
Gentleman Jack pulled that old edition of the Panhandle Times from his vest and held it up as Reverend Caliber had done with his Bible. One seemed about as truthful as the other to me.
“So this is not you here?” he said.
I grabbed the paper from him and looked it over like I’d never seen it. I turned to my new friends in the front row and winked. Then I folded the paper and handed it back.
“I believe it is,” I said.
Jack seemed not to notice the laughter. He was on a mission.
“So we’ve established that this is Wilkie John Liquorman, and that he was jailed in Mobeetie for causing a disturbance there less than a year ago,” he said. “Given that small but important piece of information, I will thus be able to show how this same man, the man you see before you, is responsible for the greatest loss of life this side of the Mississippi River.”
“Since when?” the Reverend said.
I wasn’t sure if I liked his interjection, even if I was beginning to wonder if he ever was going to speak up again.
“In modern history,” Jack said.
He was going all out.
“Including the Indian Wars, even?” Caliber said.
You could see Jack sigh for a block in either direction, even if you didn’t hear it.
“Not including the Indian Wars, Brother Elijah.”
Caliber walked up to my right side, putting me square between the two men. I was a wishbone, and one of them was going to win good luck. Either way, I was going to be broken.
“Including the terrible War between the States, Jack?” Caliber said.
I looked at one of them and then the other. Then I saw Sunny standing to the side of the platform. Looking at her cheeks, if she had been laughing at all, it had brought only tears. I wanted her up on the platform with me. That would be my good luck.
“Okay, I’ll give you that one too, Brother Elijah,” Jack said. “Not counting that terrible war.”
It had indeed been terrible to Fort Worth as well as Mobeetie and San Antonio and most of the towns in Texas. Unless you were a coffin maker, you were lucky to have survived those years with anything at all.
Reverend Caliber—Brother Elijah—stepped out of that fight feeling like he’d gotten the measure of the man before him. If Gentleman Jack looked like a formidable opponent, it hid a vulnerability. Caliber knew he was beatable if he could get the crowd on our side. In that moment, Caliber’s brain came up with a plan that neither he nor I had imagined. It was a plan that he hadn’t dared contemplate. He looked at me, nodded, and winked. I took it as a sign to continue what I was doing. I nodded and winked back. There on the edge of death, with Gentleman Jack placing a rope around my scrawny, young neck, I had never felt so alive. I wanted to be right there forever.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Me and Roman rode into Mobeetie, Texas, with a company of Blackfoot Indians, three days after they had scalped and killed Long Gun and his fellow U.S. Army men along with two Anglo families who only wanted to see Mexico for themselves.
Any happiness that my girl Greer Lusk was still alive was somewhat tempered by the fact that the leader of the Blackfoot—if he had a name, it was completely unknown and probably unpronounceable to me—had taken her as his prize and was looking for a place for them all to hide out. When we arrived at Mobeetie, I had a good idea why this was their destination.
“Those Injuns with you, partner?”
Mobeetie was lawless. I’m not saying the sheriff was a bad guy or was outnumbered by bad men. I’m saying there was no sheriff, no deputy—no nothing. It was wild and raucous, and it was up all night. From the looks of the three-man welcoming committee standing in front of us, it never even closed its eyes and rested.
“We’re looking for a place to rest for a day or two,” I said. “I can vouch for them.”
What I could vouch for was the fact that I wanted to keep an eye on them until I had a chance to make my move. If I could kill the leader and take Greer out of there, I didn’t much care what happened to the rest. They were a snake that would be of little danger to me once the head was cut off.
We took three small rooms at the back of a bar. I took the room closest to the bar, not because I cared about it being close by but because I wanted Greer and her captor be as far from it as possible when I took my shot. They put Greer in the third room, way down at the end of the building, and all the rest piled into the middle one. Soon they had whisky brought in. Between their cavorting and the noise from the bar, I would be getting little shuteye, but that was thought out too. I had other things I needed to be doing. Moments later, there was a knock on my door.
“Poker,” the boy in the yellow hat said.
Not one of the things I’d planned. He was pointing at the door to the middle room. It wasn’t hard to figure out what he had in mind. He had a .44 revolver at his side, and he didn’t seem too anxious to use it, but I decided not to push the matter. I grabbed my Sidehammer from the table and followed. I knew how to play poker. I had taken many a soldier’s hard-earned pay in the bars of the District. I had no compunction against taking a little of the Blackfoot’s spending money before I stole their girl back.
It’s a funny thing. There wasn’t a lot we could have discussed in the little room there in Mobeetie. We could’ve compared the names of places we’d been. Names of people we’d shot. Card games we knew and liked. Beyond that, we found it fairly easy to go through the motions of a poker game, and they were soon emptying their pockets and pushing all manner of American and Mexican coins across the table at me.
Half an hour into playing, the leader, whose name seemed to have been something like Tata-hami, left the group while
I was busy reloading my sarsaparilla. A few minutes later, I tried to pull out of the game, but the others were eyeing me warily and having none of it. They wanted another opportunity to win their money back. And then another. I played through a couple games out of respect for their wishes. By this time, the whiskey was impairing their thinking enough that I was trying my best to lose and winning anyway. I finally begged off, saying I was sleepy, and went back to my room. It was 2:30 in the morning, according to the clock mounted on the wall next to the bed. I checked the Sidehammer again and slipped back toward the back of the building, past the room where I could still hear voices and bursts of laughter, cards being slammed down and coins clattering against the table. Glancing back at the bar, I wondered when the people of Mobeetie slept and if there were women and children counted among its citizens. I slipped along to the third door and tried the knob. Against all logic, they didn’t seem to put a high appraisal on locks in Mobeetie either.
The room was laid out same as the other two, so even with all lamps blown out, I knew my way through the front room, knew right where the opening to the bedroom would be, right where to find the Indian and my girl. I unholstered my gun and stepped slowly, deliberately, breathing only through my nose. I was halfway across the room when I brushed up against the corner of the kitchen table, out of place by a couple feet compared to the one I’d been playing at. There was a scuffling sound behind me, somebody moving from the sofa under the front window. I suddenly knew why the lamps had been blown out.
“Greer?” I said.
There was a single step toward the center of the room and a single shot from a rifle. I felt the bullet miss me by inches. The flash from the muzzle fired up the darkness for a brief moment, but it was all I needed. I saw him lunge at me just as I brought the Sidehammer up and fired. I fired again and then a third time. He twisted slightly in his forward momentum, his hips thrown back for a moment, and then he pitched against me with a shudder and sigh that sounded like the propeller on a sinking ship. I backed up, and listened to his head ricochet off the table and onto the floor. I turned to the bedroom and caught Greer coming through the doorway with a candle in her hand.
“He had it worked out, you were coming, but I had no way to send word,” she said. “He’d been sitting there at the window, up to high doh, playing with his wee pistol.”
Her lilt was powerful, musical and intoxicating, but I had no idea what she was saying, and I was too green to see any sexual innuendo, if there had even been any intended.
“We need to get out of here,” I said.
I did want to take her to my room, but I knew it wasn’t possible.
“He had two of his men watching me,” she said, “but I did what you said, and he sent them packing.”
Even if he’d sent the two guards away, they wouldn’t stay for long. There were a few things left back in my room, but nothing I wasn’t willing to leave behind. I took Greer’s candle and leaned down in front of the Indian, moving in closer and closer until the flame licked at his skin.
“Wilkie, don’t,” she said.
I suppose she thought I was going to set his body on fire before I left. While I wasn’t as against it as she was, I had other ideas. As the candle singed his eyebrow, his eye opened and stared blankly across the room.
“He ain’t dead,” I said.
I cocked the Sidehammer and fired one last bullet into his head.
“Now we can go.”
In the room next door, four other Blackfoot heard the gunfire and came to the aid of their imperiled leader. It really wasn’t fair, standing in the center of the darkened room and waiting as they, one by one, appeared silhouetted in the door frame, the gaslight glow of the town giving me a perfect backdrop. I picked up Long Gun’s rifle, still fully loaded, and fired off five shots. Only one of them managed to get a shot off. It hit a leg of the table and rebounded, piercing Greer’s left shoulder and going straight through.
I went over to the poker game which was still in progress, the only two remaining Blackfoot too drunk to even notice when I walked into the room. I put the last two bullets in their Indian heads and they cashed out.
“Let’s get you a doctor,” I said to Greer.
And that’s what we did.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Gentleman Jack loved being the center of attention. The way he dressed said it. The way he talked said it. The way he walked back and forth across the front of the gallows like he was walking a tightrope or a pirate’s plank said it, even if I was the one dangling at the plank’s end. Reverend Caliber, on the other hand, dressed and moved like a preacher who didn’t want to be seen, by God or anyone else. He let his words do his work for him. And he knew how to make that happen, holding onto them when it was right to do that, letting the suspense build like a rain cloud over the heads of the townspeople until it broke and rained down either a cleansing and quenching shower or else a flood of righteous judgment.
The fact that neither of us felt beholden to it made it all the more fun. The Reverend didn’t believe that man in the sky was going to deliver me from the hands of evil any more than I did. It was all up to us. We wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
“Wilkie, when you and your beautiful lady, Miss Greer, got to Mobeetie, was your purpose there to join up with a cattle drive?” Caliber said.
It was one of the few questions we had practiced on earlier. I knew what my answer was supposed to be. In the spirit of the moment, I embellished.
“Ira Lee was in Amarillo,” I said, “and he’d sent word he could get me on a drive to Kansas. I was intending to go to Amarillo.”
I was supposed to stop there and wait for the next part. Maybe I should have. We’ll never know that for sure.
“I went to Mobeetie because a group of Blackfoot Indians asked me to go and vouch for them,” I said. “Mobeetie wasn’t too fond of Blackfoot Indians.”
The way people laughed made me think maybe they didn’t want to see my neck stretched so bad after all. I scanned the faces for the kid who’d told me I was going to hang. I wondered if he was still so sure.
Gentleman Jack walked across the stage, stopped and rested his chin in his hand.
“Blackfoot Indians are among the deadliest of Texian tribes,” he said. “Interesting that you would join up with such a bloodthirsty bunch.”
I suppose he was angling for that man-is-known-by-the-company-he-keeps line of thinking. It didn’t seem like much to go on.
“I had it in mind to kill their leader, which I did in due time” I said. “He had scalped and killed a group of Scottish settlers and kidnapped Greer Lusk, the girl I later took as my wife in Mobeetie.”
That drew such a loud reaction that Jack had to hold his gun up and threaten to shoot it off if we didn’t all settle down. Blackfoot Indians weren’t too popular in Fort Worth at that time either. I wasn’t looking like such a bad guy after all. What was it about these sixty-five people I had left lifeless in my wake? Had they been Blackfoot too?
Reverend Caliber looked kind of like the floor had just been pulled out from under him. He still had plenty of questions left on his list, but they all seemed to need another lookover.
“So it looks like we’ve already added one more murder to the list,” Gentleman Jack said.
I thought he was getting ahead of himself.
“That might be the sum total of the list,” I said.
This wasn’t satisfying the crowd. And it sure as hell wasn’t satisfying Gentleman Jack Delaney.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I have three people who are prepared to climb up here and point out this man as the murderer of sixty-five Texas citizens,” he said. “They will point out this man as being responsible for sixteen, maybe twenty thousand dollars’ worth of cattle. That puts him ahead of the worst cattle rustlers we’ve seen, as well as ahead of most of the other men I’ve tried and convicted.”
That was a lot of information to process. We knew Simeon Payne was going to say I was responsible for what
happened in Wichita Falls. There was one problem with that. I had never entered Wichita Falls. The fine citizens of that city had seen to that. Payne, on the other hand, made himself a home there.
But who were the other witnesses? I hadn’t seen any other familiar faces in the city that morning. Was he audacious enough to count himself?
The second thought I had was for the other poor bastards he had judged, convicted and sent off to their final rewards with less proof than he had against me. It made me look closer at the man standing there before me, and when I did, it wasn’t pretty. I could see every dead man carved into the features of his face, as if each of us had taken a small piece from him and left him a little less whole.
This was a man who was so scared of death that he was bound and determined to put as many people as possible between it and himself. Maybe he thought they would cushion the fall. Maybe he thought if a seventeen-year-old boy could do it, it would give him a way to follow.
I looked at Reverend Caliber and saw a man so scared of living that he hid from himself, climbing back stairs to pay people to fall into strange beds, hold him and his secrets.
I stepped forward and, in doing so, landed dead center of the black square with its arcane message.
“Better you know a man, better you know his secrets,” I said. “I know enough, I figure both of these men would scatter from the truth if it was to come their way. I give my word, I’ll try my utmost not to do that. I will tell you my story, as fully as I’m able, and if you think it’s of no value, you may decide this day to end me.”
The you I was addressing wasn’t you Gentleman Jack Delaney, and it wasn’t Reverend Elijah Caliber. It was the crowd gathered there at the end of Main Street. I knew they were the key to me walking away or being carried off on a slab. They had the power—not Gentleman Jack—and the sooner I made him see it, the better.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Mobeetie existed in its own universe. There were colored slaves living there who had never been told they were free. Union soldiers in the jail who had never been told the war was over. Nobody just ever got around to it. That’s the kind of place Mobeetie was. And it welcomed me with open arms. Indians were another matter. Unless they were there under the supervision of a white man, they weren’t much tolerated, and they were eyed suspiciously even then.