The Last Shootist

by Miles Swarthout

  “But you could have been killed.”

  Anel smiled. “No. I believe you … are the best.”

  He could only nod. And give her another kiss.

  Ravenous, they dressed to go downtown for breakfast. It was Monday, so Anel didn’t have to work after her weekend shift at the Red Light. But Gillom was due at the bank. They slipped out his back door quietly, then got stuck in the mud trying to cut across the wet grass to get to the long stairway down Youngblood Hill. Anel swore in Spanish about getting her high-button shoes dirty. Gillom looked back over his shoulder to see Mrs. Blair peering out one of her windows into the gray morning mist, watching them leave. Maybe I can excuse my way out of this, he thought. Just providing a wayward miss shelter from a bad storm, ma’am.

  The creek running from the spring at Castle Rock down Tombstone Canyon rushed by wider and faster, muddy red water racing toward the mouth of Mule Gulch. The two got off the bottom of the stairway and made their way slowly toward downtown, slogging along the muddy hillside, trying to keep from slipping and falling over. Anel’s yellow dress was muddy at the hems and Gillom’s jeans were spattered with dirt. They saw tree limbs and wooden siding floating by, even a soaked dog paddling hard for the far bank in the rushing water. Bisbee’s hillsides had been denuded by woodcutters and every heavy rain now caused a mudslide. Sulfurous smelter smoke had killed the canyon’s root plants as well. This flash flood was dangerously dirty, too. Cesspools overflowed and up Brewery Gulch on the right side of the dirt street, businesses had built their rear bathrooms on stilts over the creek with enclosed structures below. When a flash flood like this occurred, the owners went below and opened the up- and downstream side doors on their hinges to let the storm water give their outhouses a good flushing.

  “I cannot go home!” Anel shouted as they neared the downtown junction of the canyon and the gulch, where two flood streams joined to run south onto the floodplain below Bisbee.

  “Bank’s not gonna open today, either.” Nearing Main Street they could see the bank’s big wooden doors shut. The sheriff already had his chain gang out, trying to clean up the business streets, supervised by deputies. They noticed carcasses of dead animals washed up in doorways, a cat, a young steer, plus items of discarded apparel, from hats to stray shoes, being sniffed by a foraging mongrel dog that had ridden out the storm.

  “There won’t be many restaurants open today, till they get this mess cleaned up.”

  He pointed to several hand-painted signs some wag had planted outside the Bonanza, Ease’s saloon near the now sandy, watery bottom of the Gulch. NO FISHING ALLOWED HERE, stated one. FERRY LEAVES EVERY HOUR, another. Gillom grinned in spite of this municipal disaster.

  “Let’s go back to my place, till this mess dries out. Maybe I can get my landlady to cook us breakfast. She enjoys my money, if not my female guests.”

  “Boil water,” his girlfriend reminded.

  “Already am. Now all the town’s wells will be tainted.”

  Mrs. Blair did not cook them breakfast. She was so perturbed by the first big rainstorm of the summer and the leaks it had divulged in their roofs, she said nothing about Gillom’s entertaining. But her renter promised to get out the tar brush and help her caulk the new holes, so his premarital sinning was ignored. For the time being.

  * * *

  Next day, when the water downtown had subsided, one of his new duties was shoveling mud off the bank’s cement steps so customers could come in. But Gillom had more important things on his mind. So smitten was he, he arranged to get off early later in the week to meet his lady love at the Atlantic and Pacific Portrait Studio, a small shop just north of Castle Rock up Tombstone Canyon. Gillom told Anel to look her best, but she later had to go on to work at the Red Light, so the red satin dress with black lace trim she showed up in was pretty sexy.

  Their photographer, C. E. Doll, was a short man with an overbearing attitude. Prissy, Gillom thought. He posed them just so in front of his compact Pony Premo camera as he adjusted its rectilinear lens. Their backdrop was ornate flocked wallpaper on one wall. Then Gillom changed his mind and asked Mr. Doll to put up a drop sheet of black velvet instead. This set the little photographer clucking his tongue, since he no longer had decisive control of his composition. His paying customer ignored the artistic tension.

  Electric lights were rigged in the studio so the portraits didn’t require smoky flash powder often used for formal photographs at the time. Gillom went whole hog, ordering full-length portraits of them together and alone off the five-by-seven-inch glass plates. Plus face shots, from the shoulders up, one of them even kissing! For his solo portrait, Gillom made sure to hike Books’s matched pistols higher on his waist, reversing the gun butts forward, and pulling back his black morning coat he’d brought along so Books’s famous pistols were on display.

  The bill came to twelve dollars, in advance. The teenager paid and they floated out the photographer’s after an hour’s hot work.

  * * *

  The couple celebrated, memorializing their carnal togetherness in the fancy Senate Saloon in the Gulch. Gillom ordered a Rocky Mountain Cooler.

  “We can have more photographs printed, Anel, if you want to send them to your family and friends in Mexico. I want to send one of us together to my mother. Show her my new girlfriend.”

  “Kissing?”

  He grinned. “No, not kissing. That’s just for us.”

  The young lady smiled and quaffed her Egg Flip.

  “That one of me, sporting my guns, I may send to our sheriff in El Paso. Bastard tried to steal these pistols off me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because these are J. B. Books’s matched Remingtons. He was a famous shootist and I helped him die, so he willed ’em to me.”

  She wrinkled her cute nose. “Help heem to die?”

  The young gunfighter nodded. “Long story. But his guns are famous now, too, and valuable. No one else gets ’em unless they pry ’em from my cold, dead hands.”

  “Why you push thees big men?” Anel punched him in the arm, irritated. “Thees sheriff, thees gambler, from Clif-ton? You wish to fight, get killed?”

  “No, no, I don’t want to shoot anybody, or get killed. Sometimes you just have to show your skills, so bad people won’t bother us.”

  She looked worried. “No more fights.”

  Her boyfriend tried to reassure. “Not if I can help it.”

  Thirty

  Work that May week was slow, since the entire town was preoccupied cleaning up and repairing homes and businesses from the early summer’s deluge. Anel took Wednesday night off due to slow trade at the Red Light and their difficulty bringing up Mexican musicians from Naco after the big storm. So they caught a quick meal at a hole-in-the-wall taqueria and then went to the Bank Exchange for drinks. This saloon was famed in Brewery Gulch for the owner’s wild animal menagerie, which he penned elsewhere and then brought to a cage outside his establishment on a rotating basis—a young lynx, a mountain lion, a rattlesnake, a peccary—any desert animal he could display for a few hours to entice interested tipplers to enter for further excitement and one more libation.

  The Bank Exchange had also circulated flyers around town advertising an “intimate” performance tonight, to pump up business during a slow summer midweek. The show was under way when Gillom and Anel arrived, so they stood at the long bar to watch. On a small, elevated stage in back normally used by a piano player or musical trio, an elderly gray-haired man was standing behind a diminutive woman seated in a chair, running his fingers through her long brown hair.

  Gillom ordered mint juleps while they listened to the old gent describe this young lady as “emotional and flighty” due to the shape of her small head. Her organ of philoprogenitiveness, which was located in the middle posterior of her skull, just above the occipital spine, he pointed out, was small, and its diminutive size showed that she was not overly fond of children or animals and could be severe when they misbehaved. The woman’s concentrative
ness, though, was larger, manifesting a power of concentrated application to just one thing. The phrenologist had the young lady turn to the audience as he demonstrated, parting her hair on the crown of her head. She was thusly suited for precise work like bookkeeping in a store. The old boy coaxed the name “Sarah” out of her, and Sarah offered that she was indeed a clerk at the “Merc” and enjoyed working the cash register best. This fact met with mumurings of approbation. But her skull didn’t evince the emotional stamina necessary for schoolteaching or raising a large family, he added.

  “You are not yet married, correct?” This troubling question caused the unfortunate’s face to redden as she teared up, which caused spectators to nod knowingly at the sage’s wisdom as the young lady fled the stage crying.

  The old blind phrenologist babbled about his expertise in “the living science of studying the shape of the skull to learn what is on one’s mind. Phrenology teaches that the mind acts through organization of bodily instrumentalities. And there are, so far as is known, nearly forty mental faculties, each of which has a special and separate function.” He paused to study the crowd with his gaping eye sockets. An older lady was helping him with his act and she had spotted Gillom arriving late to the performance.

  “You, sir! You in the back, yes, standing at the bar with your girl. We need another young head up here.”

  Gillom pointed to himself, surprised. Me?

  “Yessir! We need your help with a reading, please. A free drink for you two, if you will.”

  Smiling amiably, Gillom walked past occupied tables to join the elderly couple onstage.

  “What’s your name, lad?” the old gent asked as he seated Gillom right in front, facing the bar patrons.

  “Gillom Rogers.”

  “And how do you earn your daily bread?”

  “I’m a guard, Bank of Bisbee.”

  “You stand watch over all our money.”

  Chuckles from the boozy crowd.

  “No, I don’t touch the money. I make sure our customers get their money back and forth safely to our bank.”

  After removing Gillom’s Stetson, the old man’s long, wizened fingers were in his victim’s thick blond hair. He rubbed and traced the teenager’s scalp like a mind reader.

  “You have the head of a mule, young man. Long ears and a long jawline, mulish. I feel a large organ of combativeness, at the posterior of the parietal bone, about an inch and a half upward and back from the external opening of your ear. A continuation of the length of the head from above the ear backward indicates a strong faculty to defend, oppose, and resist. That will make you a good sheriff or newspaper journalist someday when you’re finished with this first job. I don’t forsee you guarding a bank forever, young man. You have a fairly thick neck, corresponding with a broad base for your brain. We also often find in the fighter a wide, rather straight, and very firm mouth, like yours.”

  The old man’s thin fingers played over Gillom’s face like spider’s legs. “The moustache on some of our important military men partially conceals their straight mouth, but it is evident enough in the portraits of Caesar, Wellington, Napoleon, and Ulysses S. Grant, among others. A firm mouth indicates good development of the nasal cavities and especially of the jaws, and the great masticating power which allies such great men to the carnivore, and makes them not averse to blood.”

  Anel stopped sipping her julep.

  “To sum up, you’re not a fast, sleek horse who will readily gallop through life and friends, Gillom, but a steady, mulish plodder whom one can count on being steady in a tight spot. Law enforcement may be your game. That about right, son?”

  “No. I’m more racehorse than mule. But I am steady in a fight.”

  Laughter and a smattering of applause as Gillom sauntered off the stage.

  “Get a bull up there to go with that mule!” yelled a drunk from the rear bar. The lady assistant quickly began coaxing a stolid cattleman onstage to cover Gillom’s dissatisfaction. Anel and he quickly finished their free drinks, wished good night to the Bank Exchange’s gila monster, and breezed outdoors for a long stroll hand-in-hand down Brewery Gulch and up the squeaky wooden stairways to his miner’s cottage.

  They snuck in quietly and didn’t go back outside to enjoy the summer’s starry night, for Gillom still wasn’t certain Mrs. Blair would permit his entertaining a girlfriend often. They gulped glasses of boiled water from his ceramic jug and undressed quickly without even lighting a lamp, so hungry were they for lovemaking. This time he stayed with her better, climaxing as he matched her rising excitement, so they both collapsed with a final shudder in a tangle of sweaty sheets. Anel panted in the sticky air and Gillom inhaled lying on his back.

  “That was better than wrestling,” he grinned.

  “Who wres-tle?”

  “Oh, that henchman of Luther Goose. He surprised me in the men’s room of the Orpheum, night we saw that variety show.”

  She squinted in the darkness. “I no remember?”

  “He banged me around some before I could even fight back. I didn’t have my guns on that night.”

  “A good thing, no? No lose you to a bandido.”

  She could see Gillom’s frown in the moonlight. “He in last night, Luther Goose. Say come with heem to thees mining town, north. Have saloon there.”

  “He bother you?”

  “No, just dance, buy drinks. I need earn money, too, you know.”

  “He may promise you more money, Anel, but Luther is a bad man. Red Jean said so. Doesn’t treat his saloon girls well.”

  “I no go with heem.”

  “Clifton’s a smaller copper mining town. Rougher, isolated, up in the mountains, north and east of here. Never been there, but that’s what I hear.” She saw his eyes slit in the darkness, gleaming like an aroused cat’s.

  “I something have for you.” She rose from his single bed, fumbled in her handbag. He admired her soft curves in the moonlight filtering in from his front windows. Then she was back straddling him naked as she dangled a chain in his face.

  “What’s this?”

  “A loc-ket.”

  “For a girl?”

  “No. You wear eet, round neck. Or keep eet, under thees pillow.” She took the filigreed silver oval and snapped open its hinged case. She leaned forward, her bare breasts distracting him as she put a small photograph in front of his eyes. “Pictures we made. I pay for small one, to fit. See?”

  Gillom squinted. He could just make out her long hair and features.

  “Very pretty. Looks like you. I will wear it. Always.”

  Anel then lifted her left hand to show him thin strands of silky, curly hair she’d tied with a pink ribbon. “Is from here.” She patted the triangle between her legs.

  Gillom was flabbergasted. “Your muff hair?”

  He could almost see her blush in the dark. “Sí. I know dancer did this. Mean I be faithful. Only to you.”

  “Ohhh, Anel. That’s beautiful.”

  “Sí. No matters who I dance with, only you I let in me, in my heart.”

  He pulled her down for a long, tongue-sucking kiss. She eased his manhood back in and then, braced up on her knees, took her sweet time, rocking back and forth atop him, moaning like a contented puppy, until their passion passed.

  Thirty-one

  After work at the bank the next day, Gillom hit the Bonanza just as his pal was finishing up his day shift. Ease pulled them two drafts and they sat at its long oak bar.

  “Goose is bothering her, Ease, least once or twice a week, trying to get her to go up to Clifton, work in his brothel,” Gillom peeved. “She thinks it’s just a saloon.”

  “Well, she has to drink tea with all kinds of customers, bad men even, to make a living in that dance hall.”

  “I know, but Anel says he’s become more bothersome, trying to get her to go upstairs at the Red Light.”

  “Can’t she tell the manager there?”

  “She did, but the owner doesn’t want to bother Luther. He spen
ds too much money.”

  “Huh.” The young barkeep turned to another customer. “Hey, Mickey! You ever work the mines up in Clifton?”

  A wiry Welshman down the bar nodded. “Certainly did. Phelps Dodge pays better down here, though, and Bisbee’s mines are better run, safer.”

  “Uh-huh. You ever frequent a joint up there called the Blue Goose?”

  “Yep. Snootiest saloon in eastern Arizona.”

  “Was it a whorehouse, too?”

  The roughneck rubbed his chin stubble, remembering. “Yes, it was. Upstairs. Never ascended to those heavenly chambers, though. Too expensive.”

  “See?” Gillom nudged his pal. “He wants to turn Anel into a painted cat, pimp her.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “Warn him off. Like he did me, when his sidekick caught me in the men’s room at the Orpheum. This time I’ll have my guns on and it’ll be public. No sneak attacks.”

  Young Bixler looked worried. “Ummm. Trouble. Bad for our business.”

  “Not in here, Ease. Luther won’t be back in the Bonanza after he braced your faro dealer for cheating, remember?” Gillom was aggravated. “I just need your support. Like I backed you when that footpad attacked us.”

  “Yeah, yeah, all right. I don’t want any shooting, but I better borrow a pistola, just in case. I don’t wrestle any better than you can.”

  They clapped each other on the shoulders and Ease went off to borrow a sidearm for the evening.

  Soon Bixler carried a ’78 Colt Frontier .45 double-action revolver in the side pocket of his black cotton coat as the boys stepped onto the boardwalk heading up into the netherworld of upper Brewery Gulch. A warm dusk was gathering along with a crowd of miners just coming off the day shift in the Copper Queen or Irish Mag shafts. The boys scouted the St. Louis Beer Hall with no luck. Ease had heard Luther Goose was still in town and he was a known high roller, so they decided to stalk him in Bisbee’s best saloons, where there was slightly less chance of gunplay.

  Their second stop, the Senate, they hit pay dirt. The Senate was Bisbee’s fanciest restaurant, which offered wild game along with regular beef and chicken dishes, served on silver platters by white-jacketed waiters. The brothel owner from Clifton idled at the back bar, hoisting whiskeys with William and a couple other hard cases in coarse wool suits. Mr. Goose, anticipating further trouble, had beefed up his protection.