The Good the Bad and the Infernal

by Guy Adams

  I lay on the bed, trying to keep to the edges as far as possible. The damn thing curved towards the middle, and in the end I was just too damn tired to be coy. I rolled with it, and fell asleep.

  IN MY DREAMS I pictured the dirt road that I had travelled, the train tracks that might soon replace it bursting from the rock and pouring forth like a river. With the tracks came the train, a hulking steel behemoth that roared and screamed in the desert night. It was terrifying, this creature: the cries of the dead that fuelled its cavernous engine billowed forth from its stack, caught in the grip of the smoke and ash that danced across the moon. The embers were fat and burned brighter than suns.

  I was laying the track, running through the clouds of dust, hurling sleeper and line in its path, desperate to feed its hunger. I screamed as the razor teeth of its dirt plough chattered and devoured the sustenance I gave it, ravenous and insatiable. The muscles in my arms and back threatened to tear under the weight of the endless supply of iron, swearing that each foot of track I laid (instant and impossible as a spider’s web) would be their last. But I couldn’t stop. I knew this, sure and certain. If I ran out of track, those plough teeth would strip my flesh and run their last on peeled wet bone.

  I woke up after that, the dream shaking me conscious as bad dreams do when a man’s still young. Now, older than most would credit, I sleep right through to dawn without fail. I still have the dreams, but they don’t shock me as they did. It gets so that you can live with fear.

  I swung my legs off the mattress and peered out of the window. There was still little to see, except for a horse that had good reason to hate me. From the main street around the other side of the hotel I could hear the sound of a beaten piano hammering out a tune I almost recognised.

  I reached for my bag, dug out a thin pouch of tobacco and began to roll a cigarette. As I rolled it, smoothly, methodically and, above all, awkwardly (this was a habit I had not long taken up, feeling that if I was adult enough for the road I should look like it), I began to hear a separate piano from my right. There were two saloons in town, I remembered. It appeared that they were in competition. The second player was no more talented than the first, but he made a lot more noise. After a few moments, the original pianist kicked up the tempo a little and began to fight back, the notes becoming rougher and more painful but loud enough to give number two a run for his money. I struck a match and put it to my cigarette, awaiting the inevitable. Sure enough, as I exhaled, number two cranked it up. I figured that was his limit, surely he couldn’t get any more volume without resorting to dynamite. Piano number one took a deep breath and gave it one last shot. Tearing the night in half with their godawful racket, both pianos played together for a few moments before a pair of gunshots rang out, one from either direction. Both pianos stopped instantly. Figuring now was as good a time as any to get some more sleep, I stubbed my cigarette out, removed my glasses and lay back down on the bed.

  MORNING SURPRISED ME in its usual way. I’ve never been good at them. They sneak up on a man.

  I shifted my weight, fighting against the dip in the mattress, and tried to get my feet on the floor. After a few minutes I found myself lying across the bed with my heels skimming the floorboards. Good enough, I thought, so I went for the vertical.

  I shuffled to the window, unbuttoning my fly, and, forehead resting against the wall, I pissed out of the window as I had the night before.

  I guess that was the point at which I truly woke up. Language the kind of which I heard has a way of doing that.

  I grabbed my spectacles and looked down at the street below.

  There were three in total, all the weathered outlaw types I had seen in great numbers since leaving home. There was a certain breed of gunslinger back then, a breed entirely divorced from the dapper, silk-vested creations people talk of these days. This was the true gunslinger: uglier than a fly blown dog that’s been left in the sun for a few days. They looked for all the world as if they had been rolled in shit by their mothers directly after birth and sent out with a Colt on the hip.

  Having made this distinction clear, you will understand my concern when I realised that the horse beneath my window was owned by one of them. What is more, not only had I pissed on the horse but, judging by the sagging brim of his hat and the damp patches on his shirt shoulders, I had pissed on the owner as well.

  I stood there for a moment, pecker in my hand and gormless look on my face, while he stared right back, unable to believe what I had just done. I think it was basic shock on his part; being mistaken for a latrine obviously didn’t happen to him often. Which is a surprise, looking the way he did.

  What happened next is going to be difficult to describe without giving the boys names, and as our relationship never got on such terms, I guess I’m just going to have to christen them myself, something apt and charming. Rat Shit, Tinkerbell and Horse Ass should do them justice. Fine upstanding gentlemen as they were, these may have been their mothers’ first choices too, I really couldn’t swear on it either way.

  Rat Shit, whose attention I had drawn by emptying my bladder on him, replied by drawing his gun and shooting at the window. As much as I would like to claim lightning quick instincts, I think it was utter terror that sent my legs out from under me. I dropped out of harm’s way even as the frame splintered with the impact of the bullet.

  After that, a degree of instinct did take over, as I crawled back from the window, climbed to my feet once out of immediate harm’s way and ran out the door to my room.

  One of the other doors in the corridor had been opened by an associate of the hooker downstairs. She looked me up and down for a moment before rolling her eyes and stepping back inside.

  Downstairs I could hear the sound of shouting as my new friends burst into the foyer. There was no escape that way.

  I went back into my room and worked my way around to the window. I peered outside; it was clear that all three had come inside to find me, leaving this the only route out. I clambered onto the frame and tried to judge the distance between the window and the horse beneath me. I’d seen a couple of hustlers perform this trick back home, escaping from the lodging house at the end of my street in order to avoid paying the rent they owed. How difficult could it be?

  I closed my eyes and jumped. For a second, there was a pleasing feeling of weightlessness, before my face connected with the horse’s rump, dislodging a tooth, and I was thrown in the air by its startled thrashing. I came to earth in a cloud of dust, with blood in my mouth, but in a better state than had I stayed upstairs and waited to be shot.

  Getting to my feet, I limped around to the front of the hotel, just in time to walk directly into Tinkerbell (named on account of his sweet-looking face and gentle nature), who had waited outside in case I was stupid enough to try and sneak past the front door.

  I gave a manly scream, pushed past him and ran towards the end of the street, where I had the good fortune to be run down by a coach.

  Lying on my back, with a bloody mouth and a searing pain in my left side, I did a strange thing. I laughed my head off. I mean, really, laughed like a loon. Even as I heard a couple of passengers getting off the coach, felt their hands in my armpits as they pulled me upright, I couldn’t stop.

  “Jesus, fella!” someone said. “You’re damned lucky.”

  “Not the way I see it,” came another voice. “Figure he’s just takin’ a breather before I put this bullet in his face.”

  That would be Rat Shit.

  “Hey, now,” replied the first voice. “You’d better have a damn good reason to go talkin’ that kinda talk, what did this man do?”

  Things were looking up, I had a casual bystander willing to fight my corner.

  “Bastard pissed on my horse.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  The hands let go of me, and I fell back to the ground.

  “Guess you’ve got due cause, then. I’ll leave you boys to it.”

  Nice town. Under other circumstances, I would have
considered settling down there.

  I heard the sound of a pistol cocking. Its owner laughed with the pleasure of what lay ahead.

  “Tell you what, boy,” he said, “I’m going to do you a kindness.”

  For a second there, I hoped. He crouched down in front of me and I winced at breath that reminded me of my old mule’s gas.

  “I’m gonna let you tuck your dick in your pants ’fore I kill you.”

  Glancing down, I realised that, what with everything else on my mind over the last few minutes, I’d forgotten to ‘stable the stallion.’ So much for a dignified end.

  Seconds passed.

  Then a gunshot rang out.

  I COULD CREDIT Rat Shit with many qualities: he was clearly able-bodied, had a force of personality stronger than most and breath that would embarrass a skunk with a yeast infection.

  The one thing I would never have credited him with was possessing brains.

  Shows how wrong you can be. The man had lots of brains. I knew this beyond all doubt a fraction of a second after I heard the gunshot, because most of them were now plastered in my hair and dripping off the end of my nose.

  That boy had brains aplenty.

  About a bucketful.

  Tinkerbell followed quickly after, left twitching in the dust bare seconds behind his friend.

  Horse Ass fared better. Quicker to react, he ran in the direction of the coach, hoping for cover. Nearly made it, too, before there was another loud report and his legs were cut from beneath him.

  It takes longer to tell than it did to happen. Bang. Bang. Bang. Three sounds that left me bewildered, terrified and—fuck me, who would have thought it—alive.

  I squinted at the shape walking towards me. A solid rectangle, tattered dustcoat whipping at his ankles. A rock of a man. He drew level with me, slipping his gun into its holster. I was surprised to see how old he was: seventy if he was a day.

  “Do as the man said, boy. Put your pecker away. ’Tain’t seemly.”

  I did as I was told and got to my feet.

  “What’s your name, son?” His voice sounded as if it had been cured, left out in the sun for a few days and then put back in his throat. Somewhere between a whisper and a cough.

  “Wallace, sir,” I replied, just as soon as I’d remembered, “Elwyn Wallace. You saved my life.”

  “That I did. You gonna give me cause to regret it?”

  “No! I don’t know how to thank you.”

  There was a pause at this, as if he was thinking of options. He scratched at his face with a sound as rough as a gang of armadillos fucking.

  “Mayhap you can ride with me for awhile, keep a man company on his journey.”

  I had more than enough reasons as to why this wasn’t a good idea—I had a journey of my own to get on with—but all I managed to say was:

  “Where are we heading?”

  “Small town over that way a stretch,” he gestured meaninglessly behind me. “Place by the name of Wormwood.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  FACE TO FACE

  MY TRAVELLING COMPANION had claimed to hanker for company on the trail. After half an hour I was at a loss as to why. Trying to start a conversation with him was as productive as debating with a tombstone. Maybe he hoped I’d help keep the flies off.

  He rode in silence, and I did my best to keep up. This was a battle lost within a few minutes. To begin with, my old mule—no doubt stirred to impress, somewhere within its ancient lustful heart—had made a good show in front of my companion’s horse, but it couldn’t keep the pace. Either that or it enjoyed the view from the rear. That’s certainly where we stayed, with me gritting my teeth against the dust kicked up from the dry trail we followed out of Haskell and on towards Wormwood. Wherever and whatever the hell that might be. The old man hadn’t seen fit to tell me. All I knew was that, for now, it lay in the same direction I meant to go. What the hell, I thought, I might as well ride with someone that could keep my sorry ass out of trouble for awhile.

  The morning’s journey passed in near silence, the only slight noise being my skin cooking under the heat of the sun. I never did have the hide for bright skies. My companion was quite the opposite: his dust-coat, stiffened to the texture of wood after years of weathering, still looked softer than his skin, which had a cured, reptilian look. He was a man who had been exposed to the most extreme of environments, and they had left their mark. If you pounded at him with a sledgehammer I could imagine he would crumble like rock, revealing not a drop of juice in his entire body. Watching, as we descended into the narrow pass that wound its way through the lower portion of the Southern Rockies, I was put in mind of an animal rather than a man. He controlled his horse so naturally, so instinctively, that the two of them moved as one, navigating the uneven ground like a serpent. I’ll admit I found myself aspiring to the old bastard’s composure. He was the man I wanted to be, someone who moved across the world as if he was in control, rather than—as I was—someone who bounced from one event to another, entirely at the mercy of whatever life threw at him. A leaf on a river, frantic and directionless.

  I did my best to copy him, squeezing that dumb mule between my thighs and yanking at the reins in an attempt to guide him between the rocks and trees as we descended. My skills were not up to the task, and neither was my ride. At one point the animal drew to a halt and looked over his wizened shoulder at me, for all the world wondering what I wanted from him. ‘I’ve been on this earth long enough to know how to put one hoof in front of the other,’ he seemed to say, ‘and you yanking the hell out of me while I’m getting on with it is a distraction, not a help. So sit back, shut up, and let me get on with my job.’ In the end, I did just that.

  WE TOOK A rest at noon, having found a perfect spot by the side of a narrow river where we could fetch water, wash and take a bite to eat.

  Sat in the shade of a tree, chewing my way through the dried meat of an animal I couldn’t place, I tried again to get the old man talking.

  “So,” I said, “Wormwood. What’s there that’s dragging you halfway across the country?”

  “Home,” he replied, in his usual talkative manner. He turned his eyes towards the trail we had been following, eyes narrowing, like a lizard sunbathing on a rock. “We’ve got company.”

  I turned to look, but couldn’t see anyone.

  “There, a ways back,” he said, “six or seven miles, maybe.”

  “You can see that far?”

  He chose to ignore the question, just gathered his stuff together and gestured for me to do the same. It was no hardship; chewing that goddamned meat was as much effort as if the animal were still alive.

  “You think they’re following us?” I asked as we climbed onto our respective mounts.

  “No reason to guess so,” he said.

  “So why are we running?”

  He stared at me, and I felt bowels that had been tighter than a clenched fist loosen.

  “We’re not running,” he said, “I don’t run. But I don’t like company, either.”

  “I can tell that much.”

  He turned his horse and began to trot deeper into the mountains, ignoring the comment, just as I knew he would.

  THE AFTERNOON’S RIDE saw the old man pick up the pace, always with an eye to the trail behind us.

  I spent the time imagining who or what he might be. I had plenty of territory to guess at, as he’d told me not one word about himself, not even his name. I kept meaning to ask, but he was such a mean old bastard, I felt scared to. I’d talked about myself, yes, because that felt like it was allowed. Asking about him, anything about him; that felt out of bounds.

  My Ma always said I was meeker than a first-time whore. She was a woman of words.

  To hear her talk, I spent most of my childhood leaping from one fear to the next. As a babe I would curl in my cot at the sound of a storm. As a toddler I would hide from the pigs we kept, twitching with every snort and squeal. As an infant I would run from the snakes in the yard. Everywhere
I turned, there was something to be afeared of. I guess she hoped I’d grow out of it. Find myself a backbone once my balls dropped. ’Course, I never did; I just found bigger things to be scared of.

  The biggest of them all was my father. A man who changed his mood with the wind. Never have I known someone so fond of liquor to be so bad at drinking it. Every day he’d go at the sour mash, and every night he’d lose the battle as that sweet fire burned him up inside. Most mornings we’d find him on the porch, looking for all the world like he’d come off worse in a brawl. I guess he had, at that.

  Not that he ever laid a hand on me. He would threaten as much, shout and promise ‘a hellish whuppin’ on either of us if we didn’t do as we were told. He didn’t have it in him, though. He was faulty dynamite, all fire and no force. Ma just ignored him. She’d live her life around him like he was a misplaced piece of furniture, a sideboard that nobody had seen the good sense to shove into a corner. It weren’t no imposition once you’d got used to it. It got under your feet when you were sweeping. Sometimes it would scream at you for being an ‘unholy, worthless cunt,’ but after a while you just ignored that cumbersome old sideboard and got on with your life.

  ‘So that’s what you’re running away from,’ a woman told me after she’d got talking to me in a bar in Indiana.

  I’d not been so long on my journey, then. A train ride across Kentucky and three days down on a twelve day coach ride to Illinois. I’d been tired and lonely, and despite the fact that I don’t drink, I’d found myself in the bar, as there weren’t nothing else to do and I missed the sound of people. She’d soon pulled up a chair, initially to sound me out as a potential client (she made it quite clear that a dollar would have her drawers down with the speed of a Texan sunset) but when it was obvious I had little interest and less money she settled for conversation. I was only too happy to oblige. She told me about her youth in Connecticut, her first husband who had died choking on a chicken bone, her decision to becoming a sporting woman because, ‘when a gal can earn a dollar a dip doing something she enjoys, why the hell would she wait tables?’ All of which was just fine, and listening to it beat the silence. When I told her something of my own life, though, she seemed to feel it all needed cross-examining. She was of the opinion that everything was due to some deep-seated problem or another. Maybe it was the fault of a book. Or maybe one of her regulars was a philosopher who talked when he should be poking. Maybe she was even right. Though I told her clear that sometimes a man does a thing just because it occurs to him to do so. We’re not all the deep thinkers she pegged us out to be.