Marshal and the Moonshiner

by C. M. Wendelboe

  “I just bought it . . .”

  “I’ll take good care of it.”

  “Okay, Marshal.” Ragwood stood and puffed his chest out. “You can use it for five dollars a day.”

  I whistled. “That’s mighty steep. There’s men hereabouts who don’t make that in a week.”

  “You don’t have to gas it up when you bring it back,” he added quickly. “You gonna get a better offer today? Besides, the government is paying for it.”

  I fished in my wallet and found five ones. I handed him the money, and he handed me the keys. “It’s parked out back.”

  When I headed for the stairs he called after me, “Aren’t you going to need it now?”

  “After dark,” I answered. “After I catch a nap.”

  I splashed water on my face to kick-start me, and I looked out the window. A streetlight, faint and struggling like folks hereabouts to keep going, illuminated Ragwood’s car in Kerfoot’s back parking lot three stories below. In better times—when governments weren’t strapped because of this Depression—even the alley would have been lit up like a Christmas tree. But these weren’t better times. The lot was more dark than illuminated.

  I holstered my .45 and pulled my vest over to hide it. Ragwood’s Model A was parked in the back of the hotel, and I looked down into the dark parking spaces. I could just make out the car: a typical A with a few dings and dents and sporting the obligatory black paint.

  Ragwood told me Mel had serviced the car before he sold it, and that it would take me wherever I wanted to go. “But my tires aren’t the best,” he’d mentioned. And, like most folks nowadays, he’d stashed the tire patching kit under the seat.

  I took the back stairs to the alley. With luck, I could drive to Oklahoma City, look up Vincent Iron Horse, and be back in the morning with Amos’s whereabouts. And before Maris found out I’d given her the slip.

  I opened the back door into the alley, and a blast of hot air and dust hit me. I shielded my nose and mouth with my sleeve as I spotted Ragwood’s car parked between a Dodge Brothers truck and a Plymouth business coupe. I paused for a moment to let my eyes adjust to the darkness before stepping into the alley.

  I fumbled for the keys while I looked around, expecting Maris to come sneaking up and chew me out for not taking her. But I had no choice: I needed to find Amos, and I didn’t need the burden of a rookie deputy hanging on to my coat tails. Especially a woman deputy.

  A shutter banged against the side of the hotel, and I jumped. No Maris. Of course. She was probably crapped out in some lucky drunk’s bed, and she’d find out tomorrow I’d learned Amos’s whereabouts on my own.

  The wind whipped dust around in small eddies, and I leaned into it, my head shielded from the pelting sand by my Stetson. I dropped the keys, and as I came up I caught movement to my right. My blind side. I turned my head just as something crashed down on my skull, cushioned somewhat by my hat. I fell to my knees and saw two pairs of my attackers’ legs coming at me from the other side of the Reo. One pair sported paisley pants, the other dungarees like mine. I looked up in time to see a flat sap arch toward my head, and I jerked back. It glanced off the corner of my head, and I lashed out at the legs with my fist. The owner dropped to the ground and yelled in pain.

  As I struggled to stand, Dungarees moved in, and I swung at the approaching form. Something gave under my fist, something warm and sticky and sharp that cut my knuckles.

  I turned to another sound rushing toward me, but I was too slow. A black sap was all but lost to the darkness as it connected on my head, and the last thing I saw was Dungaree Legs rearing his leg back for a coup de gras.

  Loud clanking woke me, but I lay still, trying to place the sound. People milled about. A man called to a . . . nurse. I opened my eyes. Maris sat in a wicker chair at the foot of the bed I lay on. I tried to sit up, but pain overcame me from bruised ribs and a swollen head, and I dropped back down onto my pillow. “What the hell happened?”

  “Pretty obvious, genius.” Maris stood and walked to the side of the bed. “Someone kicked the shit out of you. Even someone as thick headed as you ought to be able to figure that one out.”

  “Where am I?” I hurt even to speak right now. “I don’t . . . know . . .”

  “You’re at Catto Hospital on South Williams.” Maris put her cigarette out in a bloody wash basin teetering atop a small table beside the bed. “The doc just finished stitching up your head.”

  “How’d you find out I was here?”

  “You had Maris’s number in your pocket.” A man wearing a starched shirt and white jacket walked through the door. He was nearly twice my age, yet his thick hair was barely gray. I’d have loved to have gray hair. Or hair of any color. “I thought you were a bit old even for Maris at first . . .”

  “That’s enough, Doc,” Maris said. “I don’t need your standard lecture about piety right now. How’s he gonna be?”

  The doctor cocked his head and bent lower to examine his handiwork. “Six stitches from something that left little pieces of leather in his scalp. That and some bruised ribs, but he’ll survive.”

  I used the side of the bed to sit. “Can I go now?”

  “You can, but I wouldn’t drive.”

  The doctor stood aside, and Maris moved the table and chair out of the way. She positioned herself to help me walk, and it surprised me how strong she was as she hefted me off the bed. We started through the door when the doctor stopped me. “You forgot this.” He handed me my .45, and my hand went to my empty holster. “The admittance nurse got real nervous when you came in here with this on.”

  I pocketed the automatic and allowed Maris to help me down the front steps of the converted two-story house that served as the Catto Hospital. We walked slowly, like drunks in a three-legged race, on the way to her pickup. I leaned against the roof while she opened the door and eased me onto the seat. When she seated herself behind the wheel, she turned in the seat and let me have it. And it wasn’t pretty.

  “What the hell happened in the alley behind the Kerfoot? All Ragwood said was that he heard a commotion and came out just in time to see two guys put the boots to you.”

  I leaned back and fought the urge to scratch the itchy stitches. “That’s about it. A couple goons jumped me for no good reason.”

  “Must have been some reason.”

  I felt the wallet still in my back pocket. If they’d intended to rob me, that’s the second thing they’d snatch. My pistol would have been the first.

  “Maybe it had something to do with Ragwood’s car you rented tonight,” she said.

  I looked away.

  “Where the hell did you think you were going at that hour?”

  I remained cautiously silent.

  “You were going to hunt up Vincent on your lonesome, wasn’t you? You were going to drive to the city all by yourself?”

  I nodded.

  She flicked her cigarette butt into the night, and it streaked to the ground like a miniature falling star. If I had time, I would have wished this conversation were over. “What happened to ‘we’ll go to Oklahoma City tomorrow, pard’ner’?”

  “Change of plans.”

  “You mean change in confidence you have in me?”

  “Look,” I said, and a sharp pain caused me to exhale slowly, “I work alone. Always have.”

  “When are you going to realize you can’t find Vincent without my help?”

  “I just didn’t want you caught in the middle of anything nasty.”

  Maris paused midway trying to start her truck. “You’re a real jerk. You think just ’cause I’m a woman I can’t take care of myself.”

  “I got no time to watch out for you—”

  “Who’s the genius who got himself beat up tonight? It wasn’t this rookie deputy.” Maris glared at me, and her eyes reflected the streetlight, piercing. Angry.

  “All right, so I went into that alley with my guard down. So my hopes of finding Amos overrode my commo
n sense. I didn’t figure someone would be laying for me. Who you figure for it?”

  Her stare softened. “I don’t know. Ragwood was absolutely no help. But I’d say Amos or his brother would be at the top of the suspect list.”

  “How would they know I’m looking for him? I just got here yesterday.”

  Maris laughed as she started the truck with a lurch. My head banged against the roof of the truck, and I clenched my teeth against the pain. “This is a small town . . .”

  “Not compared to Bison.”

  “It’s small for around these parts. Word’s gotten around quick that a US marshal is here for Amos. Now, thanks to you giving yourself away, he’ll be cagier than ever.”

  “At least I put a serious hurt on one of the guys who jumped me.” I rubbed skinned knuckles, one cut from the other’s teeth. “Someone will sip soup for a while.”

  We reached the front of the Kerfoot without a further lecture, and she stopped close to the front door. Before I could extricate myself from the cramped truck, Maris had run around to the passenger side. She wrapped her arms around my waist and headed for the front door and the elevator. “I can make my room from here.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said as she squeezed harder than I wanted. “I’m not going to jump your bones in your room. At least not while you’ve got a hurt on.”

  CHAPTER 7

  * * *

  I was on my fourth cup of coffee when Byron reassured me, “She will be here. She is just on Indian time, is all.” Louis Armstrong sang “Body and Soul” on the Rockola in the corner, but it did little to relieve my apprehension.

  Byron cocked his head and eyed the stitches running across the back of my head. “Relax. She will be here. Besides, it will give you time to mend up a little more if she is late.”

  “I’ll relax when I’m dead. And she ought to know I don’t run on Indian time.” I stirred cream into my coffee. “I have to find Amos before he buries himself too far under.” I opened the cover of my Waltham pocket watch then slipped it back into my vest pocket. “Where do you figure Maris is?”

  “Waking up in somebody’s bed,” he answered immediately. “You ever done that when you were a younger, woke up in some strange lady’s boudoir?”

  I laughed. Pain shot to my ribs where the thug in dungarees kicked me. “I can’t say that I ever did. I grew up with natural celibacy—something about living forty miles from your nearest neighbor forced me to live like a monk.”

  “And when you moved away from the ranch?”

  I wiped coffee from my chin, thinking the cup had a hole in it. But it just had too many chips along the rim, and Byron replaced it with a mug with fewer chips. “Dad’s ranch folded after he died. I had nothing else to do, and most spreads around ours had enough hands that they didn’t need more help. So I enlisted in the Marines. I wanted to travel the world. Bad timing. They shipped me out to France on the first wave over to fight the Krauts. I drew Belleau Wood and made it through the third charge of German machine gunners before an artillery shell exploded near me.”

  “How close?”

  I waved my hand on my blind side. “Close enough that I got an all-expense paid trip to Portsmouth for the next year and a half.”

  Byron nodded knowingly. “But the Marines finally took the Wood.”

  “Thank God.”

  “And you laid in the hospital while every nurse pined away for the young marine.”

  “Now what would they want with a one-eyed man?”

  “But you mentioned you met a nurse there and married her.”

  “Helen wasn’t a nurse. She was my tutor. I had nothing else to do but sit around the recovery ward, so the military arranged for me to enroll in college. If you can believe that. Some shit-kicker from Wyoming going to college. Helen would bring me my books and assignments and administer tests. She came every day.”

  “And she got you through rehabilitation?”

  “Her and John Barleycorn got me through.”

  Two roustabouts—dirty and oily and in bad need of shaves and haircuts and baths—stumbled into the café and plopped down into a booth. After Byron handed them menus, he came back to the counter and sat.

  “Once I started to feel sorry for myself, I began to tip the bottle. I just couldn’t shake the habit.”

  “Been there,” Byron said. “Where the most important thing in the day is that bottle of heaven.”

  “You, Professor Black Kettle, a lush?”

  Byron refilled our cups and leaned over the counter as he whispered, “Only man I would allow to call me a lush is another lush.”

  I raised my hand. “That would be me.”

  “All right, then. In answer to your question, I would not have been the first Cheyenne to hit the sauce. But you probably saw that when you walked the streets here.”

  I had. I saw far too many drunks—many Indian—passed out on the wino benches and steps of stores to remind me I was like them once.

  “How did you keep your secret?” he asked. “Seems like it would be hard for a lawman to hide his habit.”

  I hadn’t thought much about that until Byron mentioned it. “I got my hooch from some boys over in the Big Horns. I paid cash and left them alone, and they kept their mouths shut.”

  “Did you ever have a notion to round them up and arrest them for moonshining?”

  “Never,” I answered immediately. “And when did you quit?”

  Byron stared into his coffee like he was reading tea leaves. “After they let me go at the university. I cannot say I missed it much. Dean held me up like I was one of Buffalo Bill’s trained Indians. Bragging that Oklahoma had the region’s only Indian professor . . .”

  “Hey, Indian!” one of the roustabouts yelled from his booth. “You going to take our order, or do we have to squeeze you a mite until you do?” He slid out from the booth and started toward the counter. Byron laid his towel down, and I saw the look of defiance in his eyes. Even though he was thirty years older and a lot smaller than the oil worker, he was ready and willing to take a beating to prove a point. I was not prepared to allow it.

  I laid my hand on Byron’s shoulder and grabbed his damp towel. “Sit this one out.”

  I slung the towel over my shoulder and approached the roustabout. We were about the same height, but I had him by maybe thirty pounds. Roustabouts were all work-hardened men, used to hours of back-breaking labor. But I was known at home as someone who broke backs when I needed to.

  The man stopped halfway across the room when he saw me walking toward him. He sidestepped to walk around me, but I matched his movement and blocked him. “I don’t think you’re going to talk to Mr. Black Kettle any more this morning.”

  The roustabout looked me up and down, his grimy fists clenching and unclenching. “I got no beef with you, mister.”

  I jerked my thumb over my shoulder, as my eyes met the oil man’s glare. “My very good friend, Mr. Black Kettle, will take your order in due time. Right now he and I are deep in a philosophical discussion.”

  He grunted and grinned. “What kind of philosophical discussion can you have with an Indian?”

  “He thinks I can break your jaw in one swipe. I told him it’ll take two.”

  His smile faded.

  “Or you can prove us both wrong and take a seat with your friend.”

  “Maybe my friend over there will want a piece of this dance.”

  I grinned. “I told Byron your friend would jump in just for fun. That’s why it’ll take me two blows—one for you and one for your friend. Now, either you treat Mr. Black Kettle with some respect, or you and your buddy both will be bleeding out in the street.”

  For a moment I thought he was going to take me up on it. He looked carefully at the bandage on my head, trying to determine if that would give him an edge. He must have figured not as his hands dropped to his side, and he motioned to his friend. “We’re out of here.”

  When the two men disappeared through the wet sheets, I turned b
ack to the counter. “Sorry I lost you business today.”

  Byron smiled. “I get paid by the brothers whether or not I ever have customers. It was worth it watching you work. Though I did not think a lawman was supposed to act like that.”

  I walked around the counter and grabbed the coffee pot. “Just doing my job. Keeping the peace.”

  “But you looked like you were enjoying that a little too much.”

  “I’ll remember to hide it better next time.” I refilled our cups, grateful that the diner was empty except for us, for I wanted to talk with Byron. Ever since I quit the sauce, I’d kept an ear to the ground for other former boozers. Someday, I told myself, there would be groups of former lushes like us coming together, sharing our own stories in the hopes they’ll help others with their addiction, being there when a brother falls off the wagon. Or threatens to do so. For now, I needed Byron. “What made you give up the booze?”

  Byron’s smile faded, and his mouth drooped down. He sipped his coffee daintily. “Margaret. My former wife. She came home one day and found me passed out on the threshold of our home. She said she was going to live with her mother in Geary. That is the last time I saw her, and that is the day I quit.”

  “Because you knew you couldn’t live without her?”

  Byron tilted his head and laughed so hard, tears filled his eyes. He wiped his cheek with the sleeve of his arm. When his shoulders stopped shaking, he explained. “I quit, Nels, because I could not believe my good fortune. Margaret was impossible to live with. She hounded me night and day. It was like having my mother-in-law living with us all the time. It was terrible. With Margaret gone, I realized I did not need to drink anymore.” He walked to the coffee pot and tossed out old grounds into a paper sack. He opened a tin of Chase and Sanborn and started making a fresh pot. “And what made you give it up?”

  “Helen.”

  “Like me—happy to be rid of her?”

  I shook my head. “No. Helen died after I put her through a lifetime of following a drunk.”

  “Now I am the jerk. I did not mean—”