“Match?” he asked Sam, Sam handing him a Lucifer. As usual, no thanks acknowledged the granting of his request.
Somehow smoking this piece of cigar had become of vital significance to Bill Longley, as though it were a magical rite that would open the gateway for a return to normality and the righting of his world. A world that had gone so wrong starting on the day a couple of Combine men had come to the landing at a river called Torrent to demand the weekly taxes they were now required to be paid on the barge crossing operated by Cullen Baker and Bill . . .
The Combine was the name of the holding company that provided the business and financial umbrella for all of Barbaroux’s operations now that he had crowned himself the supreme power in Moraine County. Clinchfield was the capital, the county seat of Moraine County and the locale where Barbaroux had set up headquarters.
The Combine’s tax-collecting team for this wild region of the swamp was a duo named Deeter and Thissel. Deeter was a river rat version of the tinhorns Bill Longley knew all too well from the gambling hells of the Texas honkytonk districts, the ones who idled their hours away steadily losing at the card tables and roulette wheels and getting money by crimes of violence associated with the sporting milieu.
Deeter had a widow’s peak whose pointed tip came near to touching the space between his bushy eyebrows. Oily dark hair was slicked back from his forehead, long, wide sideburns ran down to his jawline, and he had a thick dark mustache and goatee. Very little bare skin was left showing on his face.
He was a would-be dandy who wore flouncy white shirts with ruffled fronts, tight pants, and cream-colored custom-made boots. His arms were so long they gave him an apelike appearance.
Thissel was Deeter’s exact opposite. He was small, quiet, orderly, and unassumingly dressed. He peered at the world through steely wire-rim glasses with round eye frames and circular lenses so thick that they gave him a froglike appearance, magnifying his eyes so they appeared unnaturally enlarged and goggling in silent amusement at the world around them. He had a thick neatly trimmed sandy-brown mustache; the tips were waxed and turned up, like a cat’s whiskers. He habitually carried a leather-bound pocket notebook into which he was constantly writing with a gold pencil.
Deeter and Thissel arrived on horseback on a weekday in mid-afternoon at the landing on the east bank of the Torrent River, the site of a barge that ferried passengers back and forth across the river, a barge and line jointly owned and operated by Cullen Baker and Bill Longley.
* * *
Cullen Baker was big, well over six feet tall, raw-boned and strong-armed, with the powerful sloping shoulders often seen on heavyweight prizefighters. He was shaggy haired, thick featured, and red faced, with pale eyes set well back under an overhanging brow. His nose had been broken several times and never properly reset. He was clean-shaven, more or less.
Cullen Baker was known as a “booze-fighter.” This does not mean he was anti-booze, or a Temperance man. It meant that he was a brawler who got drunk and into fights. Lots of them. He won most because he was a formidable fighter with considerable physical resources.
“It’s not that I get into fights, it’s that the fight gets into me,” he liked to say.
“The hooch gets into you,” his first wife used to fire back at him. There was nothing he could say back to that except laugh, because it was true. Martha Jane, her name was. She was quite a gal. He didn’t intimidate her, not one little bit, and she never hesitated to say what was on her mind, no matter the circumstances. That was one of the things he’d liked about her, courage being the virtue he admired most.
“She sure had me pegged dead to rights,” he’d say when he thought of her, which was more and more infrequently now. He’d married her in 1854, back when he was a pup and she a mere slip of a girl, damned pretty, too.
He never expected to outlive her, he who followed the gunman’s trade and rode the outlaw’s dark trail for most of his life. No doubt Martha Jane thought the same. She was always going on to him about what it was like to be an outlaw’s wife, never knowing when he went out the door if that was the last time she’d ever see him alive. What would happen to her and their two daughters if he was shot dead during some holdup?
Martha Jane caught the sickness and died. She must have been surprised as hell to realize that that no-good badman of a husband of hers was going to outlive her. Cullen had tried to bring up their two daughters by himself after her death, but it was no good. He was an absentee father at best. He left the girls with his in-laws in 1862 to be raised by them. He wondered if they ever thought of their daddy, if they even remembered him?
Cullen’s second wife was named Martha, too, a funny kind of coincidence. She had died little more than a year earlier, of natural causes. Strange . . . you heard about how hard life was for men on the frontier with all its perils of hostile Indians and bandits, and wild animals. Yet it was just as hard for the women, who faced all these threats plus the mortal dangers of childbearing and raising a family, keeping the children fed and clothed and healthy, all that in addition to the never-ending round of chores and hard work that was the lot of all ranchers and farmers and their families.
He’d never planned to be a much-married man, outliving not one but two wives and now hitched to a third. That was the way it worked out. No matter how you planned and schemed trying to shape your fate, life kept happening to you.
He certainly never expected to be living in obscurity under an assumed name in the swampland, living a life of hard work and toil as a bargeman running his own small ferrying service, yet here he was, mostly because of Julie.
Julie Morgan, now Julie Morgan Baker. She was a beauty, reminding him of those rare and lovely flowers sometimes found blossoming amid the marshes and bogs of the swampland.
Cullen Baker and Bill Longley had been on the dodge, running from the law several years ago in the aftermath of the breakup of the old Baker gang. They had fled deep into the bayou heart of the Blacksnake River, coming to roost at last in the remoteness of the Torrent River country along the border of Moraine and Albedo Counties.
The two were known on the Blacksnake but strangers to this still-further-removed adjunct to the territory. Baker here went under the alias of “Mr. Montgomery”—from his full name, Cullen Montgomery Baker.
Smuggling was a way of life here, and feuding, too, and with their ready guns Baker and Bill Longley established a place for themselves in the local milieu. The Law was thoroughly uninterested in shoot-outs between smugglers’ gangs or the vendettas of feudist families. As long as no banks were robbed, river traffic harassed, or legitimate riverfront businesses preyed on, the authorities kept out of the Torrent district.
There was also some confusion about whether Moraine or Albedo Counties had jurisdiction over the borderland between the two, where property lines that were drawn on the map ceased to exist in the mazelike tangle of rivers, bayous, and cross-channels. Lawmen on both sides of the line said the hell with it and stayed away.
Cullen Baker wanted Julie Morgan the first time he saw her at a chance meeting in Highwater, the Torrent’s leading (in fact, only) market town. She had pale blond hair, a fine-featured face with dark blue eyes, and a slim shapely body that was nicely ripened in all the right places. The object of much attention and rivalry between local Romeos, she frustrated would-be swains by remaining elusively, hauntingly beyond their reach.
She was an orphan, her parents long dead. She’d been raised by her sole living kin, a bayou near-hermit known as Crawdad Kate due to her facility in netting great catches of the river shellfish, a delicacy much esteemed for cooking in gumbos, seafood soups, and stews, and étouffées.
Kate was a Morgan by blood, but she and Julie were so physically unlike that one might fancy that they were members of two different species. Julie was a delicate beauty, fair haired, pale, long, and lithe. Kate was dark haired, swarthy, brawny, and buxom, as strong as many men and more dangerous than most. Living by herself in the swamps, Kate vigoro
usly defended herself and her rights by shotgun, gaffing pole, or fisherman’s filleting knife, each of which she wielded with lethal proficiency.
Fiercely protective of this orphan girl she had come to love and cherish, Kate had proved to be an effective deterrent to would-be seducers and swampland toughs used to taking what they wanted.
“I had to marry Julie, I knew Kate would come after me with a shotgun if I didn’t,” Cullen Baker liked to say during their get-togethers after he and Julie were wed, his remark only half in jest. The two of them were alike in many ways and understood each other.
“I may yet, if you don’t treat my girl right,” Kate would reply, and she and Baker at least knew she was only half-joking, too.
Cullen Baker came courting in the proper old-fashioned way of country folk way, and when the time was right he asked Kate to consent to the marriage. Kate said her Julie would never be wed to an outlaw and gunman, that Cullen Baker had to get himself a respectable way of making a living.
Baker had plied the bargeman’s trade years before while living in South Arkansas near the Texas border. He knew the ferrying trade inside out. It had often struck him that a ferry across the Torrent would be a natural and much desired local improvement, saving travelers from having to make long and tiresome detours to find a place where the narrow, swift-running Torrent finally widened and slowed enough to allow a crossing through the shallows.
Cullen Baker marked out a spot high upstream on the Torrent where the river thinned to its narrowest, a site that was ideally suited for a landing. No one had ever developed the locale, though a long-abandoned hunter’s cabin stood in a clearing overlooking the water.
Getting a sturdy barge line built to span the river was the hardest part of the job, a Herculean labor to which Cullen Baker harnessed all his furious energies and prodigious strength. Bill Longley was part of the enterprise from the beginning. He’d strung with Baker steadily since the dissolution of the old gang. Bill greatly admired Baker and was intensely loyal to him; for his part Baker had a great liking for Bill, seeing in this reckless go-to-hell red-hot and fellow Texan a younger version of himself, “only better looking and smarter,” Baker said, “and maybe even faster with a gun, too.”
“Hell, Cullen, you’re the fastest, the all-time champion. Nobody can beat you,” Bill Longley said with every sign and appearance of deep sincerity, yet there was a still small voice in the back of his mind that wondered if, maybe, he really could shade Cullen on the draw. What an achievement that would be, to best the man who many considered the originator of the new fast-draw, pistol-fighting style that had come into prominence during the war and afterward.
Cullen Baker, not immune to flattery, was greatly pleased with the youth’s words, which he considered not flattery but only rightful recognition of his skills. “Keep at it, Bill, keep practicing and someday you’ll be the fastest gun in Texas, which means the fastest gun there is,” Cullen Baker said.
“Especially seeing as how I’m now retired from the gunfighting game,” he added.
“We’re both retired. We’re bargemen now,” Bill Longley said.
It was true, they were bargemen. Once the upright support towers with their flywheels and spinning gears for the line had been built on both banks of the river and the cable line spanning the Torrent put in place, the rest of the project had come together. Modest landing docks were put up on both sides and a flatboat rafting barge constructed.
Baker and Bill did their share of the work but it was too much for any two men so they hired local workmen for much of the carpentry, hauling, and donkey work. They used money they had amassed earlier when selling their guns to smugglers and feudists. When cash ran short during construction, Baker and Bill stealthed their way downriver to Halftown and Clinchfield, donned black masks, and robbed any number of prosperous businesses at gunpoint.
The barge line was open and inaugurated with a big party at which Kate officially gave her consent for Julie Morgan to marry Cullen Baker. They were wed as soon as decently possible. The barge line filled the demand Baker had seen and began turning a profit from the start. Profits and traffic increased as the word spread that the Torrent had been spanned.
Cullen Baker and Bill Longley were making money and socking it away. Baker was as happy as he’d ever been as he enjoyed his newlywed bliss, and Bill Longley reveled in the luxury of going about in broad daylight without a price on his head and total strangers itching to gun him down.
It was too good to last and couldn’t. One sunny afternoon trouble arrived in the form of a dark cloud who called himself Mr. Deeter, along with his seemingly less offensive partner Mr. Thissel.
Deeter stalked around the landing site on the east bank of the river, shouting the name of Mr. Montgomery at the top of his lungs, bawling himself red faced. He wandered around, calling for Montgomery, growing increasingly vexed by his inability to find anyone to talk to at the seemingly deserted site.
Cullen Baker lay slung in a canvas hammock strung between two trees. The hammock was on a shady knoll above the landing, screened by a line of tall hedges.
Baker had tapped into a not-so-little brown jug of whiskey that morning and was sleeping off a drunk in the post-noon heat when Deeter came calling. Literally.
Deeter was shouting in a voice more suitable for selling fish at the Clinchfield open-air fish market down by the docks, or for spieling out the action on the turns of a Wheel of Fortune game in a crowded gambling hall at the midnight rush hour. For an as-yet-peaceful and shady barge landing on the east bank of the Torrent River during the mid-afternoon lull, it was distinctly overloud and overbearing.
It didn’t do Cullen Baker’s hangover any good, either.
He rolled out of the hammock, nimbly landing on his feet. The straw hat that had been shading his eyes, he now clamped down firmly atop his head. He wore a blue denim bib overall with shoulder straps, his upper body bare beneath it. Few persons could have looked less like he was owner-operator of a barge line.
He went down to the landing to see what the noise was all about. Deeter stood in the foreground with hands on hips, exuding an air of impatience. Thissel stood near the little dockside wharf, eyeing it, making an entry in his red notepad with a golden pencil set.
Deeter did not so much introduce himself and his partner Thissel as announce their arrival: “You must be Mr. Montgomery!” Deeter bawled, crowding Cullen Baker. Deeter was a big man, bigger than most, and the aura of potential violence that oozed off him was often intimidating to others, especially those he encountered carrying out his official duties.
Deeter saw Cullen Baker coming downhill and went to confront him, marching toward him.
“You are Mr. Montgomery?” Deeter shouted at Cullen Baker, now universally known throughout these parts by the alias he had adopted.
“Who wants to know?” Cullen Baker demanded.
“I’m Deeter, from the Clinchfield County River Commission, Excise Department. That is my partner Mr. Thissel, he said, indicating the little man with the goggle-eyed glasses by the wharf. Thissel bobbed his head with a friendly nod.
“I’m Montgomery but I didn’t get that last part. You are who again?” Cullen Baker asked.
Deeter repeated himself, only louder this time. Bill Longley came along. He’d been downstream, tending a baited fishing line.
Thissel scuttled up from the wharf, making the group a foursome. He stood several paces away in the background, a leather diplomat-type portfolio tucked under an arm. Bill noticed Thissel’s ears came to little points at the tops, giving him an elfish look.
Deeter launched into a prepared speech he had memorized, congratulating Montgomery on being inducted into the Greater Moraine County Area’s Riverine Revenue Enhancement Association. As a member of the association, Mr. Montgomery would now have the privilege of paying a certain weekly fee to continue operations, said payments to begin this day, now, with ongoing payments to be made once a week every week.
When Deeter finishe
d, Cullen Baker was frowning. “I ain’t sure I got all of that but what I did get I didn’t like. Is that little fellow over there your translator?” he asked, indicating Thissel. “Because if he is, maybe he can give it to me in plain English this time.”
“He said Moraine County wants us to pay taxes for running our barge,” Bill Longley said sharply, all dark-eyed and serious.
“Is that right? Is that what you said, mister?” Cullen Baker asked.
“That’s about the size of it,” Deeter said coolly.
“Moraine County wants to collect taxes on the barge? Our barge?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re from Moraine County. That’s Moraine County I’m talking about now.”
“Yes.”
“And Moraine County wants to tax our barge?”
“You hard of hearing, Montgomery? Moraine County’s taxing your barge so pay up if you want to stay in business,” Deeter said, starting to get tough.
Cullen Baker’s laughter was long, loud, and insulting.
“I’m glad you find this so damned funny, mister,” Deeter said.
“You will, too, when you get the joke. This ain’t Moraine County, it’s Albedo County. Everybody but a plain damned fool knows the Torrent is in Albedo County,” Cullen Baker said. “I don’t pay no taxes to Albedo County anyhow and I sure ain’t gonna start not paying taxes to Moraine County, too. Ol’ Rufus Redbeard don’t cut no ice up here on the Torrent, boys.” “Mr. Barbaroux thinks he does,” Deeter said ominously. “The Torrent is tributary to the Blacksnake River, and every business on the Blacksnake has to pay taxes to the Combine. You’re running a business on the Blacksnake, so you have to pay.”
“It’s the law, Mister Montgomery,” Thissel said timorously.
Cullen Baker stopped laughing. “I ain’t no Combine man, I have to work for a living. So why don’t you boys just run along and bother somebody else who’s got the time to put up with your nonsense?”
Seven Days to Hell Page 11