by Bill Brooks
“Ah well, I couldn’t let it go on credit. Not this shirt. I don’t suspect I’ll ever get another like it. Now some of these others over here, these that are of cotton or linsey woolsey I could let go for five dollars, and maybe if you were to buy three or four, I could give you a line of credit on ’em.”
This Hudson spoke with a slight lisp and wore his hair parted down the middle and slicked off to the sides and had a thin little moustache riding his upper lip. There had been rumors floated about that he had once been an actor back East and there was some question as to his manliness, or lack thereof. It irked Bad Hand Frank more than a little that Hudson wouldn’t sell him that blue sateen shirt on a line of credit. He reached inside his pants pockets and dug out every last bit of money he had: seven dollars and twenty-three cents.
“That’s almost half,” he said.
“Not quite half exactly,” Hudson said in that lisping little voice of his.
It was a most irksome situation.
“Will you hold it for me and not sell it to another if I can go and get the rest of the money?”
“I’m afraid I couldn’t, with that particular shirt,” Hudson said. Frank thought the way Hudson said it he was mocking him a little, letting him know that even if he had the money he might not be good enough to wear such a fancy shirt.
“You don’t want me to have that shirt, isn’t that it?”
Hudson shrugged. “Why should I care if you have it or not?”
“It’s because of this, ain’t it?” Frank held up his hand. “Because I ain’t got all my parts is why you don’t want me wearing it! You see this shirt on the back of a man who is whole and complete, don’t you?”
“Please, Sir, you’re being ridiculous.”
“Well, by God I aim to go get the rest of the money and show you. I aim to own that shirt and wear it ever damn day!”
With that Frank stomped out of Hudson’s and could not help, as he passed by the window, to once more glance with envy and longing at the blue sateen shirt Hudson was placing back on display, a shirt that would have Frank committing murder within the hour.
The unwitting victim of Frank’s wrath happened to come along just a few minutes later. He was a pimp named Joe Hatfield who had once attended seminary school in Connecticut. This Joe Hatfield now ran a string of girls just south of the deadline, a quarter mile out of the town limits. Nobody knew why Hatfield and his girls stayed off by themselves, apart from the rest of the town. Most thought it was simply because he was unusual and did not hold truck with the more common pimps and whores of the town. He saw himself, this Joe Hatfield, as a cut above those of his ilk, and he maintained only whores of good health and nice teeth and pleasant personalities, of who now numbered five: two Dorises, a Zelda, a Juanita, and a six-foot-tall young lady named Salome.
And when Joe Hatfield came down the street that day on his mission of acquiring new dresses for said girls, he spotted that blue sateen shirt in Hudson’s and promptly went in and put it on, liking instantly how it fitted him, Hudson saying, “It looks like it was made to order for you, Mr. Hatfield.”
Joe Hatfield nodded with self-admiration as Hudson directed him to the full-length mirror there at the back of the shop.
“It makes you look…”
“Like the world’s most beautiful pimp,” Joe Hatfield said with mocking pride.
“Yes. I couldn’t have put it better, sir. You are a lucky man to have come along when you did. Why, I almost sold it just moments ago to another.”
Joe Hatfield saw the way Hudson was looking at him, with the eyes of an admiring suitor.
“Don’t get any funny ideas,” Joe Hatfield said. “I’m strictly a ladies’ man.”
Then he paid the haberdasher in hard cash and went out again, leaving his overcoat nicely unbuttoned so everyone could see the blue sateen shirt he wore.
Feeling joyful over the purchase of the shirt, Joe Hatfield made the fatal mistake of entering Bone Butcher’s drinking emporium, where stood Bad Hand Frank miserably contemplating how he was going to raise the rest of the money needed to purchase the blue shirt, the task made more difficult now that Frank had drunk up three dollars of the seven and change he’d had earlier.
It was Bone himself who made comment of Joe Hatfield’s pretty shirt when Joe ordered a glass of top-shelf bourbon. It set Frank off like a rabid dog.
Teddy was sitting there in front of the Wright House when he heard gunshots, which were followed by the sight of two men running up from south of the deadline, one of them chasing the other, both men firing on the run.
Teddy instinctively stood, his hand reaching inside his coat until his fingers touched the butt of the Colt Lightning. He brought it free and held it down alongside his leg until he could discern the trouble.
From up the way he saw Bat and Ed emerge from the Lone Star, hatless, their own guns drawn.
The two men continued at a dead run down the middle of the street, folks on the sidewalks taking shelter, riders on horses spurring them out of the line of fire.
Then the lead man stumbled and fell just as he got near the front of the Wright House. His pursuer ran up to within a few feet, then stopped and aimed his piece as the other man struggled to regain his footing.
“You son of a bitch!” Frank shouted. “You went and stole my goddamn shirt!”
“It ain’t your goddamn shirt, you crazy bastard, it’s my goddamn shirt.”
“Like hell. I seen it first.”
“And I bought it first.”
“Then buy some of this!” Frank fired off another shot, which clipped the man in the blue shirt in the knee and knocked him down again.
Bat and Ed were yelling something as they came running up from the Lone Star.
Joe Hatfield yelped in pain and snapped off a shot at Frank. The bullet took Frank’s cheap hat and sent it flying off his head and Frank looked surprised. Then both men fired again simultaneously at each other.
Blue gunsmoke formed into a cloud that hung between them, waiting, it seemed, for one of those common Kansas winds to sweep it away, to lift the curtain from the drama, which oddly enough did not happen.
What were the odds that Bad Hand Frank would lose another digit to a bullet from a pimp’s pistol, and that Joe Hatfield, former seminary student, would meet a quick and painless death on a frontier street so far from Connecticut?
Teddy Blue was learning fast how the frontier created its own luck for men—both good and bad.
Frank stood stung and bleeding where his forefinger had been, down as he was now to just a thumb and pinky, the blood dropping like a thick red rain, splat, splat, spat onto the hardpan street. He stared with disbelief at his trigger finger lying like a dead caterpillar next to his pistol.
Less fortunate lay Joe Hatfield in his blue sateen shirt now ruined by a bullet rent through its shiny front. And blossoming from the hole across the same front with its white piping was a wet red flower that spread to the neat row of pearl buttons that no longer looked so attractively fashionable. It was a shirt nobody would want to wear, not even the dead.
Frank felt much worse about the shirt than he did about the late Joe Hatfield. He reasoned hotheadedly that there was always an abundance of pimps, but like Hudson had said, that blue sateen shirt was the only one like it in all of Kansas.
Bat moved up behind Frank and touched the barrel of his Policeman’s Model Colt to the back of Frank’s skull.
“You’re under arrest.”
“I know it,” Frank said sadly.
Ed said, “Why’d you shoot the pimp?”
“He stole my shirt.”
“Stole his shirt,” Ed repeated, looking at Bat.
Bat shook his head.
“Pimps and blue shirts,” Bat said disgustedly. “This must be the week for shooting pimps.”
Dog Kelly came ambling up the street, drew even with the corpse, bent to get a closer look and when satisfied, straightened and said, “It’s Joe Hatfield, boys.”
&nbs
p; Bat looked around, saw Teddy still holding his pistol down along his leg.
Neither of them said anything. Bat ordered some men to take the corpse off to the undertaker’s.
“I’m sure his girls will want him to have a nice funeral. I’ll ride out and tell ’em.”
“I’ll go if you don’t want to,” Ed said.
“No. They’re in my jurisdiction.”
The brothers exchanged looks, both knowing the high quality of girls that the late pimp managed.
“We could both go,” Ed suggested. “They might need more than a little comfort over such sad news.”
“I guess we could both go,” Bat agreed.
“Then we oughter.”
There, where some of the boys had lifted away the body, was a dark stain in the dirt shaped almost like a shirt.
As Teddy and Mae sat upon the blanket, the sun low now on the horizon, its golden light spread over the land, Teddy said, “I saw a man killed over a shirt today.”
Mae did not mention that she’d seen it too, from inside Wright’s. She’d heard the noise and along with others had gone to look out the window just in time to see the fatal shot fired. She turned away, her own emotions at having seen yet another man murdered before her eyes too much for her.
She did not tell this lovely man whom she was growing ever so much more fond of the dark secret she carried, and darker still was the irony of this day, this very moment, as he put his arm around her and said, “See how the sun lays upon the land. In its own way the world seems to me perfect and beautiful in spite of everything else.”
And she looked and saw it too, the thing that he saw, and felt it and wanted desperately to tell him everything.
Chapter 17
“Elvira, honey, I’m home.”
She was bathing in the sink, running a rag under her arms and around her breasts, and hadn’t expected anyone to walk in on her. And when Two Bits called her name she almost screamed.
There he stood, armed to the teeth, looking haggard and hollow-eyed and smelling of whiskey and sweat and unwashed parts. She never quite figured out why she married him other than the fact he was the only man to have asked her. Her people were Pennsylvania Dutch—spare long-faced unhandsome people. Humorless and bland as porridge. She was the only girl-child, had knobby knees and offset eyes. But Two Bits had seen beauty in her other men had not, and said he’d steal the moon for her if she would marry him. She was thirty years old, no prospects looming at that age—most men considered her too old to bear children. So she married Two Bits Cline with more than a little trepidation, for he was like a wild hare. And now here he stood again, after yet another long absence from her life—coming and going like the restless Kansas wind. She never knew when he’d blow into her life, or out again.
He came all the way into the kitchen where she was washing. It wasn’t a very big kitchen, although there in one corner stood a cast-iron stove that was quite luxurious by frontier standards, one he’d ordered shipped in from Kansas City for her—one of his not atypical surprises he enjoyed springing on her from time to time when he was flush. He set his rifle in one corner and took out his pistols and laid them on the table.
“You are a sight for these sore eyes of mine, Elvira.”
She realized her nakedness then when his gaze fell on her, and took a towel and covered herself, but it didn’t stop him from staring at that portion of her.
“I’ve had a lust in my heart for you ever since I left Montana,” he said. There was just something about killing that made him feel carnal. In fact, he had stopped at a whorehouse in Billings and spent nearly a hundred dollars of the money he’d gotten to shoot the Pepper twins. The money paid to him by the boys’ own step-mamma.
It surprised Two Bits how such a pretty woman could have a heart cold enough to pay to have her stepsons shot dead, how coolly she had negotiated the entire transaction, as though bartering with him to shingle a roof or dig a well.
“You’re awfully pretty to be dallying in such ugly business,” Two Bits had said to her.
“What has my beauty got to do with anything?” she said. Her name, he thought she said, was Lucille.
“I guess nothing,” Two Bits said.
She’d talked him down from his usual thousand dollars to just six hundred, using a good bit of expensive whiskey and more than a few of her charming smiles, which hinted at greater rewards to come if he did the job “right and fast.”
“Oh, it’ll be done proper,” he assured her. “I’m very good at what I do.”
“So am I,” she said, this Lucille.
And so off he’d gone and found the Pepper twins and shot them. And he met Mosely and his whorish wife and watched her rob the dead boys and felt sorry for Mosely and would have killed the whorish wife for free if Mosely would have asked him to, so sorry for the man did Two Bits feel. Two Bits was glad he had a wife who wasn’t whorish in nature, but as he looked at Elvira standing there with just a towel to cover her breasts that reminded him of white pears, she seemed to him a seductress. He craved her bad. But even in his craving he thought about the one woman he didn’t get: Lucille.
After he shot the boys and he was about to ride back to the big house where this Lucille—current second wife of the elder Pepper—resided, Two Bits got word the law was looking for him, that they knew his exact name and description and everything about him. Two Bits realized then how the law learned such intimate details. He recalled this Lucille saying how good she was at what she did, which was obviously betrayal.
So instead he rode all the way to Billings with this cruel lust eating at him, swearing as he went that he ought to save such lust for his dear wife, Elvira. But lust is a powerful thing, and Billings was as far as Two Bits could go before giving in to it.
The girls he had in Billings were fat and wore bored expressions while he took his pleasure with them. But still the respite made it some easier riding on back down to Kansas, and now next to the pistols on the table he placed what remained of his shooting money—some four hundred dollars and change.
“I had me a good month,” Two Bits said. “Why don’t you drop that towel and come over and say hidy.”
As a Christian woman, Elvira felt the slightest sting of insult by such crude suggestions. However, she’d come to prize Two Bits for what he was by nature and was slightly titillated by his ways, especially after such long absences. It amazed her how much he lusted after her. He looked overall like something horses had dragged over the prairies. He had not one handsome trait about him. She did not know why she loved him, she only knew that she did.
And later as they lay on the sunlit floor of the not-very-large kitchen, the soles of Two Bits’ feet touching the cold iron legs of the stove, Two Bits felt whole and human again and so did Elvira. They both knew there was a long winter ahead of them.
“I’ve got to ride over to Dodge and shoot some more folks,” he said.
“See, that’s the part about you I care least about,” she said. “The fact you shoot people for a living. I wish you’d give up that sort of work and find something regular and less dangerous.”
“It’s all I know to do,” he said. “It’s all I’ve ever known how to do.”
“But someday something will go wrong and it will be you who gets shot or captured and hanged by the law. And I’ll be a widow and no better off than I was before you married me.”
“Well, when that day comes, I’ll worry about it and you should too, but not until that day comes.”
“It will be too late.”
“Oh, it ain’t ever too late to worry,” Two Bits said.
He looked at the sunlight streaming through the windows and it caused him to squint at how bright it was. “I bet that is what heaven looks like,” he said. “Just like that old sun, bright and shiny like a new dollar. I bet it never rains in heaven and it never gets cold and the wind don’t ever blow like it does here in Kansas.”
She looked at the light too. Beyond the panes of glass, she co
uld see the clouds had parted, the rays of sun beaming through to come all the way down into the small kitchen. If she stretched out her hand far enough, she could touch the sun there on the floor, feel its warmth.
She didn’t want to say to him what she was thinking: that assassins most likely would never get to know what it was like in heaven or anything close to it. Heaven was no place for assassins or men who lusted after women, and it made her sad to think that when she died and when Two Bits died they’d never meet again in heaven.
“When will you be going to Dodge?” she said.
Without his clothes, and with the exceptions of his hands and face and part of his neck, Two Bits was as white all over as a fish’s belly, whereas Elvira was more evenly colored.
“Soon as my needs is slaked,” he said.
“You hungry?”
“For everything you got, Elvira darling.”
“You talk so wicked,” she said.
“I know it.”
“You could have been anything in life you’d wanted to be, I imagine,” she said.
“I know it.”
“It’s a shame you took the wrong path.”
“They’s four hundred dollars on that table for a few minutes’ work,” Two Bits said. “I don’t know what other path I could have taken that would have paid me so well.”
“Money isn’t everything.”
“You tell me what is, I’ll go do it.”
“I wish we’d met when we were both young so we could have had babies,” she said.
“Babies,” Two Bits said, the thought of having little ones forming in his mind. He wondered exactly who the babies would look like: him or Elvira. Them poor kids would have been ugly, he reasoned.
“We may have to move down to Mexico for a while,” he said, wanting to change the subject of babies.
“I like it just fine right here.”
“These men I’ve got to go shoot,” he said. “It might make it tough to stay in Kansas or anyplace close after I shoot ’em.”
She thought about the chore of packing their belongings, about the heartbreak of leaving yet another place she’d settled into. She thought about long days of journeying to new places she knew nothing about, about trying to ingratiate herself into such places. She thought about seeing Two Bits hanging from a tree, a rope around his scrawny unwashed neck, his hands hanging limp at his sides, the Kansas wind twisting him around and around. She thought about crows eating his eyes and shuddered.