Damnation Road

by Max McCoy

  I couldn’t think of nothing to do, so I slugged Admiral, one gut-punch and a roundhouse to his jaw, and he staggered back as my boot landed on his shin.

  That might not have been too smart, but it sure was satisfying. He let out a yelp and in about two seconds half of them slicks was pulling me off and holding me down. I figured they’d just string me up for certain, and make no mistakes this time, but Admiral, he got up, dusted off his hat, wiped some blood off his lip, and smiled.

  This sure was getting strange.

  All them slicks let go of me, and I was of a mind to arrest the bunch for manhandling a lawman, but the odds weren’t good. I never got a handle on arithmetic, and took long division over a few times, but I know bad odds when I see them.

  Admiral Bragg, he spat a little more blood, and nodded.

  That old knobby-armed geezer, he fetched that hemp rope and brought her over to me, but he wasn’t showing me the noose end. I was more familiar with that end that I even wanted to be. No, he showed me the other end, which had been razored across, clean as can be, save for one little strand that sort of wobbled in the morning breeze. I hated that strand; it pretty near did me.

  They’d cut that rope for this event, and I sure wondered why. This whole deal was to scare the bejabbers out of me, and it sure as hell did.

  “King won’t be so lucky,” Admiral Bragg said.

  “No, but neither was them three he killed.”

  “He didn’t kill them.”

  “I saw them three lying in the sawdust. Every last one a cowboy with the T-Bar Ranch.”

  “And you jumped to conclusions.”

  “There was the barkeep and two others, saying King Bragg done it, and they testified in court to it.”

  “You’ve got two weeks to prove that he didn’t do it. Next time, the rope won’t be cut.”

  “You tellin’ me to undo justice?”

  “I’m telling you, my boy didn’t do it, and you’re going to spring him.”

  “That boy’s guilty as hell, and he’s gonna pay for it.”

  Admiral Bragg, he sort of scowled. “I’m not going to argue with you. If you’re too dumb to see it, then you’ll hang.”

  Me, I just stared at the man. There was no talkin’ to him.

  “Get in the wagon, or walk,” Bragg said. “I’m done talking.”

  I favored the ride. I still was a little weak on my pins. So I got aboard, next to the geezer, and the buckboard rattled back to town, surrounded by Bragg and his gunslicks and cowboys. They took me straight to Belle’s rooming house and I got out, and they rode off.

  The morning was still young, and I’d already been hanged and told I’d be hanged again.

  It sure was a tough start on a nice spring day.

  I looked at them cottonwoods around town and saw that they were budding out. The town of Doubtful was about as quiet as little towns get. I didn’t feel like doing nothing except go lie down, but instead, I made myself hike to Courthouse Square, where the sheriff’s office was, along with the local lockup.

  Bragg made me mad, tellin’ me I was too dumb to see what was what.

  It sure was a peaceful spring morning. Doubtful was doing its usual trade. There was a few ranch wagons parked at George Waller’s emporium, and a few saddle horses tied to hitch rails. A playful little spring breeze, with an edge of cold on it, seemed to coil through town. It sure was nicer than the hot summers that sometimes roasted northern Wyoming. I was uncommonly glad to be alive, even if my knees wobbled a little. I smiled at folks and they smiled at me.

  I got over to the courthouse which baked in the sun, and made my way into the sheriff’s office. Sure enough, my undersheriff, Rusty, was parked there, his boots up on a desk.

  “Where you been?” he asked.

  “Getting myself hanged,” I said.

  Dusty, he smiles crookedly. “That’s rich,” he said.

  I didn’t argue. Dusty wouldn’t believe it even if I swore to it on a stack of King James Bibles.

  “You fed the prisoner?”

  “Yeah, I picked up some flapjacks at Ma Ginger’s. He complained some, but I suppose someone with two weeks on his string got a right to.”

  “What did he complain about?”

  “The flapjacks wasn’t cooked through, all dough.”

  “He’s probably right,” I said. “Ma Ginger gets it wrong most of the time.”

  “Serves him right,” Dusty said.

  “You empty his bucket?”

  “You sure stick it to me, don’t ya?”

  “Somebody’s got to do it. I’ll do it.”

  Dusty smiled. “Knew you would if you got pushed into it.”

  I grabbed the big iron key off the peg and hung my gunbelt on the same peg. It wasn’t bright to go back there armed. King Bragg was the only prisoner we had at the moment, but I wasn’t one to take chances. I opened up on the gloomy jail, lit only by a small barred window at the end of the front corridor. Three cells opened onto the corridor. King was kept in the farthest one.

  He was lyin’ on his bunk, which was a metal shelf with a blanket on it. The Puma County lockup wasn’t no comfort palace. King’s bucket stank.

  “You want to push that through the food gate there?” I asked.

  “Maybe I should just throw it in your face.”

  “I imagine you could do that.”

  He sprang off the metal bunk, grabbed the bucket, and eased it through the porthole, no trouble.

  “I’ll be back. I want to talk,” I said.

  “Sure, ease your conscience, hanging an innocent man.”

  I ignored him. He’d been saying that from the moment I nabbed him out at Anchor Ranch. I took his stinking bucket out to the crapper behind the jail, emptied it, pumped some well water into it and tossed that, and brought it back. It still stank; even the metal stinks after a while, and that’s how it is in a jailhouse.

  I opened the food gate and passed it through.

  “Tell me again what happened,” I said.

  “Why bother?”

  “Because your old man hanged me this morning. And it set me to wondering.”

  King Bragg wheezed, and then cackled. I sure didn’t like him. He was a muscular punk, young and full of beans, deep-set eyes that seemed to mock. He was born to privilege, and he wore it in his manners, his face, his attitude, and his smirk.

  “You don’t look hanged,” he said, getting smirky.

  I sort of wanted to pulverize his smart-ass lips, but I didn’t.

  “Guess I’m lying to you about being hanged,” I said. “So, go ahead and lie back. Start at the beginning.”

  The beginning was the middle of February, when King Bragg rode into Doubtful for some serious boozing, and alighted at saloon row, five drinkin’ parlors side by side on the east end of town, catering to the cowboys, ranchers, and wanderers coming in on the pike heading toward Laramie.

  “You parked that black horse in front of the Last Chance and wandered in,” I said, trying to get him started.

  “No, I went to the Stockman and then the Sampling Room, and then the Last Chance. Only I don’t remember any of that. Last I knew, I took a sip of redeye at the Last Chance, Sammy the barkeep handed it to me, and I don’t remember anything else. I couldn’t even remember my own name when I came to.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  There’s some folks you just don’t like. It don’t matter how they treat you. It don’t matter if they tip their hat to you. If you don’t like ’em, that’s it. There’s no sense gnawing on it. There was no sense dodging my dislike for King Bragg. I don’t know where it come from. Maybe it was the way he kept himself groomed. Most fellers, they got two weeks to live, they don’t care how they look. But King Bragg, he trimmed up his beard each morning, washed himself right smart, and even washed his duds and hung them to dry. That sure was a puzzle. The young man was keeping up appearances and it didn’t make no sense. Not with the hourglass dribbling sand.

  Now he stood quietly on the other si
de of them iron bars, telling me the same story I’d heard twenty times, and it didn’t make any more sense now than the first time he spun it. It was just another yarn, maybe concocted with a little help from that lawyer, and it was his official alibi. Actually, it was more a crock than an alibi.

  What King Bragg kept sayin’ was that he had dozed through the killings, and when he woke up, he was holding his revolver and every shell had been fired. So he’d gotten awake after his siesta and got told he’d killed three men. And that was all he knew.

  Well, that was a crock if ever I heard one.

  “Maybe you got yourself liquored up real good, got crazy, picked a fight with them T-Bar cowboys, spilled a lot of blood, and got yourself charged with some killings.”

  That was the official version, the one that had convicted King Bragg of a triple murder. The one that was gonna pop his neck in a few days.

  He stared. “I have nothing more to say about it,” he said.

  “Well I got nothing more to ask you,” I said.

  “Why are you asking? I’ve been sentenced, I’m going to hang. Why do you care?”

  “Your pa, he asked me to look into it.”

  “Admiral Bragg doesn’t ask anyone for anything. He orders.”

  “Well, now that’s the truth. He sort of ordered me to.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He didn’t. He just hauled me out of Belle’s crapper and hanged me.”

  “Now let me get this straight. My father—hanged you?”

  “Noose and drop and all.”

  “I don’t suppose you want to explain.”

  “It sure wasn’t the way to make friends with the sheriff, boy.”

  “You calling me boy? You’re hardly older than I am.”

  “I got the badge. I get to call old men boy if I feel like it.”

  “So my father, he hanged you?”

  “Complete and total. And when I’m done here, I’ll going to haul his ass to this here jail and throw away the key.”

  King Bragg laughed. “Good luck, pal.”

  He headed over to his sheet metal bunk, flopped down on it, and drew up that raggedy blanket. Me, I was satisfied. That feller wasn’t gonna weasel out of a hanging with that cock and bull story. As for me, I was ready to hang him whether I liked him or not, because that was justice. A man shoots three fellers for no good reason, and he pays the price. I’d just have to deal with Admiral Bragg one way or the other. Now I’d talked with the boy to check his story and nothing had changed.

  I didn’t much like the thought of pulling the lever, but it would be my job to do it. They made me sheriff, and now I was stuck with it. I could quit and let someone else pull the lever that would drop King Bragg from this life. But I figure if a man’s gonna be a man, he’s got to do the hard things and not run away. So when the time comes, I’ll pull the lever and watch King drop. Still, it sure made me wonder whether I wanted to be a lawman. It was more fun being young and getting into trouble. I was still young, but this wasn’t the kind of trouble I was itching for. My ma used to warn me I had the trouble itch. If there was trouble somewhere, I’d be in the middle of it. Pa, he just said, keep your head down. Heads is what get shot.

  I thought I’d ask a few more questions, just to satisfy myself that King Bragg done it, and his ole man was being pigheaded, more than usual. Admiral Bragg was born pigheaded, and some time it would do him in.

  This sheriff business wasn’t really up my alley. It would take someone with more upstairs than I ever had to ask the right questions. I could shoot fast and true, but that didn’t mean my thinkin’ was all that fast. There was a feller I wanted to jabber with about all this, the barkeep over to the Last Chance Saloon, Sammy Upward. That was his sworn-out legal monicker. Upward. It sure beat Downward.

  The Last Chance was actually the first bar you hit coming into town, or the last one if you were ridin’ out. That made it a little wilder than them other watering places. The rannies riding in, they headed for the first oasis they could find. It didn’t matter none that it charged a nickel more for redeye, fifteen cents instead of a dime, and two cents more, twelve in all, for a glass of Kessler’s ale. It didn’t matter none that some of them other joints had serving girls, some of them almost not bad lookin’, if you didn’t look too close. And it didn’t matter none that the other joints were safer, because the managers made customers hang up their gunbelts before they could get themselves served. No, the Last Chance was famous for rowdy, for rough, and for mean, and that’s why young studs like King Bragg, he headed there itching for some kind of trouble to find him.

  It wasn’t yet noon, but maybe Upward would be polishin’ the spittoons or something so I rattled the double door, found it unlocked, and found Upward sleeping on the bar. He lay there like a dead fish, but finally come around.

  “We ain’t open yet, Sheriff,” he said.

  “I ain’t ordering a drink. I’m here for a visit.”

  “Visits cost same as a drink. Fifteen cents.”

  He hadn’t yet stirred, and was peerin’ up at me from atop the bar. That bar was sorta narrow, and he could fall off onto the brass rail in front, or off the back, where he usually worked, and where he had easy access to his sawed-off Greener.

  “We’re gonna visit, and maybe some day I’ll buy one,” I said.

  “Someone get shot?”

  “Not recently.”

  “I could arrange it if you get bored. If I say the word, someone usually gets shot in this here drinkin’ parlor.”

  He peered up at me. He needed to trim the stubble on his chin, and maybe put on a new shirt, and maybe trade in that grimy bartender’s apron for something that looked halfway washed.

  “Tell me again what you told the court,” I said.

  “How many times we been through that, Sheriff? I’m tired of talking about it to people got wax in their ears.”

  “All right, pour me one.”

  “I knew you’d see it my way, Cotton.”

  The keep slid off the bar, examined a glass in the dim light, decided it wasn’t no dirtier than the rest, and poured some redeye in. The cheapskate poured about half a shot. I dug around in my britches for a dime and handed it to him.

  “I owe you a nickel,” I said. “Start with King Bragg coming in that night.”

  He didn’t mind, or pretended he didn’t.

  “Oh, he come in here, and he was already loaded up. I could see by how he weaved when he walked.”

  “Why’d you serve him?”

  “I make my living by quarters and dimes and nickels, damn you, and I’d serve a stumbling drunk if he had the right change. Hell, I’d even serve you, Cotton, even if it made my belly crawl. Just lay the change down, and I’ll take it, and that’s the whole story.”

  “You sure are touchy. How come?”

  “I’ll be just as touchy as I feel like, and I’m tired of telling you the story over and over. I ain’t gonna tell it to you no more. You heard it, you’ve tried to pick it apart and you can’t. Now finish up and get out. I don’t want you in this place. It’s bad for business.”

  Upward was polishin’ the bar so hard it was pulling the varnish off.

  But I wasn’t quitting. “What did King Bragg say to them T-Bar cowboys?”

  “He said—oh, go to hell.”

  “That what he said?”

  “No, that’s what I’m telling you. I’m done yakking.”

  “How many T-Bar cowboys was in here?”

  “I don’t know. Just a few.”

  “Was Crayfish with the boys?”

  “I don’t remember. You want another drink? Fifteen cents on the barrelhead.”

  The man I was talkin’ about owned the T-Bar, a few other ranches, and wanted Admiral Bragg’s outfit, too, just so he could piss on any tree in the county and call it his. His name was Crayfish Ruble. I don’t know about that Crayfish part, but since I got Cotton hung on me, I don’t ask no one about their first names. Not Crayfish, not Admiral. Crayfish
Ruble had a southern name but I’d heard he was from Wisconsin, and who knows how he got a name like that. He come west with some coin in his jeans and bought a little spread, and then began muscling out the small-time settlers and farmers, paying about ten cents on the dollar, and pretty soon he was the biggest outfit in Puma County, and the T-Bar kept Doubtful going. Without the T-Bar, Doubtful would be a ghost town, and no one would know Puma County from New York City.

  I sorta liked Crayfish. He was honest in his crookedness. Ask Crayfish what he wanted from life, and he’d not mince any words. He wanted all of Puma County, as well as Sage County next door, and Bighorn County up above, and half the legislature of Wyoming, along with the judges and the tax assessor. I asked him, and that’s what he told me. I also asked him what else he wanted, and he said he wanted half a dozen wives, or a good cathouse would do in a pinch, and his own railroad car and a mountain lion for a house pet. He got no children, so there ain’t nothing he wants but land and cows and judges and women. You sorta had to like Catfish. He was a plain-speaker, and he sure beat Admiral Bragg for entertainment. Catfish tried to buy out Admiral, but Admiral, he filed a claim on every waterhole and creek in all the country, and that led to bad blood and they’ve been threatening to shoot the balls off each other ever since. There’s no tellin’ what gets into people, but I take it personal. I gotta keep order in this here Puma County, and I know from experience that when a few males got strange handles, like Admiral and Crayfish, or Cotton, there’s trouble a-percolatin’ and no way of escaping it. The feller with the worst handle usually wins, and I’ve always figured Admiral is a worse name than Crayfish, and even worse than Cotton, though I’m not very happy with what got hung on me.

  Well, I was gonna go talk to Crayfish again, for sure.

  “Sammy, I think I asked you a question. Was Crayfish Ruble in here when the shooting started?”