Whiskey When We're Dry

by John Larison

  I climbed from the muddy street and stepped into the saddle. Ingrid didn’t need the heels. We rode out at a run, just us.

  * * *

  —

  Once on the grassy flats Ingrid slowed to a trot, then a walk, and I took a cheek of the chewing tobacco I bought. I didn’t intend to be the kind of man who don’t chew tobacco, even if I despised the stuff.

  I unrolled a wanted poster I’d taken from the sheriff’s office and spat.

  Ruthless Noah Harney, leader of the Wild Bunch, wanted for murder and mayhem and thievery during the New Moon Heist. $2,000 reward for his delivery, dead or alive. Reward guaranteed by the Union Pacific Railroad.

  They had a sketch of a man looking mean, but it wasn’t my brother at all. Part of me got to wondering if there might be two Noah Harneys. Maybe my kin had made himself a family and found a spread near some water. I could only hold my belief for a half breath.

  I unrolled the other poster I had took. It had another man’s face, this one narrower and meaner. The Moonshine Kid, sidekick of Noah Harney, henchman and murderer. $500 reward, dead or alive, for his role in the New Moon Heist.

  The small print on both posters mentioned Pearlsville and so that’s where I figured we’d start our search proper. The man at the mercantile had said Pearlsville was a seven-day ride.

  * * *

  —

  We kept on and I lost track of the counties.

  We stopped in wholesome towns when the chance arose and watched the people going about their business. I remember a child holding his mother’s dress and pointing for the sugar treats in a shopwindow.

  In such towns as Cottonwood and Sweetwater I paid money for a bed and a stable and the provisions I craved when in the wilderness. Coming up as I done, town was the place for spending money, so I had little trouble handing a man fifty cents for a supper of fresh meat and potatoes or a breakfast of onions and fried eggs. What was fifty cents next to a full belly?

  In Sweetwater I took a plate of lard biscuits and hog gravy to the porch and watched as people arrived and entered the town’s church. It was a ceremony with music and charm and Ingrid and me enjoyed listening so much we took up a seat in the shade by the open window to hear the words of the preacher. He was a fiery man. I don’t believe love was the fuel lighting his lantern.

  “And so it is the Jews who wage war on Jesus Christ! The Jews who seek to erase their own prophet!”

  I did not know what to make of his claims, and in truth I quit listening a couple turns in. It wasn’t the words that mattered. It was the strength in his voice that held me, the surety of it. This man with answers.

  * * *

  —

  The farther we went the more people we encountered. With those who stopped I practiced the manly arts of introduction. I tried rocking forward in the saddle in that way men do to straighten their back and stretch their muscles. I tipped my hat without giving nothing away with my eyes. I chewed tobacco in big cheekfuls and spat it with no concern for the slop.

  The man part come to me natural enough. It was the seasoned part that took pretending.

  I recalled how Pa carried himself that night we saw Straight-Eye Susan, when that Yankee called him out in the restaurant. Pa turned on that man, Pa looked like he had once stood before a thousand lives and opened the Lord’s floodgate. That Yankee left and did not trouble us when we again saw him and his people at the show. Hard men speak a cold language, and though I did not yet know its meanings, I understood its temperature.

  The men I could handle. It was the women who I believed saw through me.

  * * *

  —

  We come to a desolate section of the trail without even a juniper for shade. It was sagebrush and flat, and the sun beat on us from early to late. The distance quivered in the heat. Dust on our skin baked into a hard crust. Seeds that clung to Ingrid’s mane roasted and give off the smell of fresh bread. For a day and half we barely spoke. There wasn’t no energy for even daydreams. We pushed on because that’s all there was to do.

  Around noon one day we was on the storm side of a mountain, in the dark timber. We was off course but didn’t yet know it. We come around a corner of rock to see a boy before us. He was holding a double-barrel and looking at me as if he’d have to use it. He wasn’t twelve years old.

  Behind come four more just like him, all boys, only smaller. Clear as day they was relations. I raised my hand to them and called my howdies.

  That double-barrel didn’t flinch. It was pointing at my face.

  “’Preciate it if you’d lower that scattergun. I ain’t trouble.”

  He didn’t answer. The weapon did not redirect.

  “You got folks, boy?”

  “Don’t do nothing.” His voice quivered. He was just a child but I saw more season in his eyes than in half the men I passed on the trail. Sure as hell more season than me.

  “I’m gonna put my horse in the shade. If’n you don’t mind. And let you pass.”

  He didn’t answer. I give him a moment to think about it, then stepped Ingrid off the trail and put her behind a thick tree. I climbed down. “Where’s your folks?”

  Around the corner come a woman in a brown dress. On her back was a sack that was bending her crooked with its weight. When she neared I saw a baby wrapped tight and tucked in a sling against her chest. Hers was a white dress that had gone the color of earth.

  Her five boys looked on me without words.

  She swung her heavy load to the ground. She pulled her baby tight to her chest, and I saw in her belt a long bowie knife. “Just passing on,” she called to me.

  “As am I,” I replied.

  She was looking at my pistol. I realized my hand was resting on it. “You got grub?”

  “Not enough to share.”

  “No, I mean, you need grub? I see a lot of mouths here.”

  She blinked at the thought. Some of the boys looked on one another.

  “I don’t got much, but I do have me some dried venison.” Ingrid had spooked a forked buck some mornings before. I neck shot him and we dragged him downwind of the trail and went to work building a rack and drying up what we could. I’d only eaten the last of the fresh meat the night before.

  I filled my arm with the jerky strips from the saddlebag and brought them to the boys. The youngest took his first, then the next youngest, then the next. Finally it come time for the oldest. He held the scattergun with one hand and reached with the other to take the meat. His eyes stayed on me as he ate.

  I brought the remainder of the jerky to the ma.

  She was a worn woman. The sun had turned her face and hands to buckskin, and her eyes had lost their color. I could see her hair was falling out in clumps. The baby stirred and she shushed it by putting the sugar rag back in its mouth. She smelled the meat, then tucked it away, for her boys, I reckon.

  “Where you heading?” I asked.

  “Somewheres else. My man is coming up behind us any minute.”

  It didn’t make no sense for a man to send his woman and children first up a trail.

  I took off my hat. I pointed off up the trail. “Hard desert up yonder. Two days to cross on horseback and only one water along the way. Got to dig it out.”

  This news got her looking sick.

  “You got something to hold water in?”

  She nodded.

  I searched for good news. “Could be hotter yet. Least these nights is cool. Summer ain’t on us square.”

  She waved the flies from her baby’s face. “The Lord shall guide.”

  “Yep, that’s what they say.”

  * * *

  —

  That night I built up a small fire some distance from the trail and stared into it until the heat dried my eyes. I picked this spot as I done every spot now, with defense in mind. I put a cliff against my back
and a dry creek bed before me and the Sharps and its charges was waiting behind a pile of rubble I imagined I’d use as my retreat. But on this night sleep would not come.

  I couldn’t shake that woman. She had all those babies to look after, and the passing of any one would be an impossible suffering to endure. But she had to endure because the fates of the remainder hung in the balance. She couldn’t even retreat into her own death, for her babies would be lost and alone and without a hope. Nothing was hers, not even her own lifeblood.

  I had to do something so I took Pa’s fiddle and give it a tune and then looked about the cliff and the creek bed. I took out the bow and give it fresh resin. I drew the horsehair across the A string and then I held perfect still and listened for its return.

  * * *

  —

  The next town was called Bastion. Even from its outskirts I could tell it was different. It was a highway town, built at the confluence of trails, and its services was for travelers, not loggers or miners or cattlemen. Wagons was circled and oxen corralled and little children chased each other with sticks. I saw women tending to cookfires and men leaning against barrels spatting tobacco. There was the smell of meat sizzling and lard potatoes roasting. Some drunk fools danced to a Jew’s harp and harmonica.

  On the town’s edge was an army encampment of maybe twenty-five men. Their rifles stood in threes and the soldiers lay in the shade with pipes and cards. The reds was warring again in these parts.

  This was a day on from my last proper meal. But a look in my pouch revealed I didn’t have enough money for even the stable. Fact was I was near on broke.

  “How far to Pearlsville?” I asked one traveler.

  “Six, seven days maybe.”

  “That can’t be.” I had heard that same figure six days before.

  He shrugged. “Okay then. Can’t be.”

  I rode straight into town and to the sheriff’s office. On the wall I looked for the likeness of my brother. Noah had a new reward, five thousand dollars, and a new, better likeness. In this one I could see the shape of my brother’s eyes. No mistaking those eyes. Even on paper they pulled you in. The money was being put up by the “Good Governor and the Friends of Industry.”

  I pulled down the poster and folded it into my coat pocket.

  There was also a different type of poster on the wall. This one was for a traveling trick shooter. His name was Lightning Lance and he was charging fifty cents a man to witness the spectacle he pledged to put on.

  We rode back to the families gathered on the outskirts of town. The cooking fires was sending gray smoke into the still air, and children chased a dog about.

  I rode toward a ma with a particularly large caldron. She caught my eye and hollered something over her shoulder. That’s how I come to be greeted by five weathered men, standing between me and that stew over the fire.

  “What’s your business?” one of the men said. His teeth was brown as dirt and several was missing. He wore a buckskin coat and a thick leather belt and in it was a short-barreled Remington.

  “I come to see if you might be interested in a show, a little quick shooting.” It was as good a starting line as I could muster. I will admit I was fearful of this crew but their stew smelled heavy on the meat.

  The tallest man took a step toward me. His shirt was off and his chest bare. His blue eyes was kind and I guessed him to be a father to daughters. He had narrow shoulders but arms of sinew and muscle. He had a healed-over burn or bullet wound on his shoulder. He said, “We ain’t interested.”

  The one with the Remington said, “Quick shooting?”

  “That’s right. I’m putting on a little show this afternoon. In trade for a bowl of that stew.”

  “We ain’t interested,” the tall man repeated.

  The one with the Remington was looking at my front-loading Colt. The Dragoon I had taken was in my saddlebag. If these folks didn’t bite I was gonna try selling them that Dragoon. “I’ll be shooting on the fly.”

  “On the fly? With that old thing?”

  “Two targets.”

  “What is you, eleven years old?” Remington said and had a good laugh. That his friends seemed to have the same opinion of me only emboldened him. “I bet you a dollar you can’t hit two targets on the fly with that old iron.” He hollered to the remainder, “What do you say, boys? You in for a dollar?”

  The tall man with the blue eyes put a hand across his friend’s chest. He said to me, “Are you some kind of trick shooter?”

  “No, sir. My brother is west of here and I’m aiming to find him before winter. I’m hungry is all.”

  He considered this. He spat a stream of tobacco. By now children was gathering around us. A ma wiped her hands on her apron.

  The tall man said, “Let’s make this interesting then.” He picked up a stick from the firewood stack and busted it over his knee. Now he held two sticks, each about as long as my forearm and as thick as my wrist. Targets. Maybe he knew that sticks are harder to shoot on the fly than round objects. The spin confuses the eye. He said, “I’ll put a dollar to Jimmy’s dollar, so that’s two. Can you cover it?”

  I nodded. That was my mistake.

  “Make it three,” hollered another man.

  By the time they put their money together they had five dollars.

  I should’ve declined but I had no doubt I would hit those sticks. “One condition,” I said. “I pick my throw. If I don’t like it, I don’t draw.”

  The tall man looked at his partners and shrugged. “Fair enough.”

  And so it was on.

  We walked some distance from the edge of the camp and when I looked back I saw cooking pots with lone women over them stirring, their eyes following our commotion.

  We come to stop near the edge of the meadow. Here the ground dropped away to the creek and the forest offered a dark background. They had picked the location because it was a safe direction for shooting. I was glad because it offered me an advantage. The downhill slope would buy me an additional moment of flight should I need it.

  I stepped down from Ingrid and asked one of the kids to hold her lead. I was worried she might spook on account of all the strangers.

  “Ready?”

  “Not yet.” I stretched my hands. I checked the weight of the Colt then let it slide back into its holster. I knew I wouldn’t shoot the first throw. “Now.”

  The tall man threw the sticks and I watched them rise only fifteen feet over his head and then drop down the bank.

  “You didn’t shoot.”

  “I didn’t like that one.”

  “Picky eight-year-old, ain’t he?” Remington laughed to his buddies.

  A boy returned with the two sticks and handed them to the tall man.

  “You gonna shoot this time?”

  I wiped the sweat from my forehead. “If I like your throw.”

  In a quickdraw everything has to be smooth and steady. There can be no jerky movements or stops in the motion. The target must be led a distance commiserate with its speed and distance from your person. Some use a quick logic of yardage and speed, but these shooters never master what is a pure body experience. The best shooters have no trust in logic. Pa once said, “No sounds, no time, no thoughts other than the sight of your bullet center punching the target. Your eye pulls the trigger.”

  I shot the first stick when it was two feet from the man’s hand and rode the recoil into position for the second. When it paused at the apex of its climb the round went off and I saw it knock dust from the stick’s edge. I’ll admit it wasn’t a solid hit. By the time I realized another shot was warranted I was too far behind its fall to catch up. I was surprised.

  The crowd erupted in cheers. A chill went through me.

  “But I hit them both,” I said. “I hit them! Look at the stick. You’ll see the mark of my bullet!”

 
A boy was sent to find it and he returned to hand a stick to the tall man.

  The tall man said, “The stick is clean.”

  The crowd circled me. Ingrid whinnied. The men would entertain none of my offerings for another round of competition.

  “Pay up, Mr. Big Trick Shooter.”

  “But the boy found the wrong stick!” I was backing away from them.

  “He don’t got the money, look at him,” a man said.

  Once this notion got loose in the mob there wasn’t no hope.

  I looked toward Ingrid and willed her to run away before they might thieve her. She threw her head and whinnied.

  The tall man was coming for me. “Is it true? You cannot cover your wager?”

  “I can trade a Dragoon pistol in fine shape. It’s worth—”

  He delivered a punch directly into my abdomen. It was the first time I had ever been punched like that. I went down in a heap. I lay there looking at their boots and the tall man leaned over me and lifted Pa’s Colt from my holster. Even now his eyes looked kind. “Your people should’ve taught you better.”

  I couldn’t muster no words on account of not having the air for them.

  “Get his horse,” another man said. I heard Ingrid’s feet on the earth and her voice calling out over them. They was holding her and rummaging through my saddlebags. I heard the fiddle fall to the ground inside its box. I heard the Sharps come free from the saddle. The contents of my bags was dumped to the dirt and men picked through them and when they was done, children run off with whatever was left.

  I tried to rise, but now it was Remington’s turn. He drove his boot to my ribs and I rolled onto my back. I was gagging and coughing and he said, “Let’s have some fun for once. Hold him still.”

  Remington drew his knife and showed me and said, “We’s just gonna mark you a little, so nobody will again be fooled by your mischief. A thief must be branded, ain’t that right, boys?”

  “Do it, Barrow. Do it good.”

  I fought but it was no use. I quit fighting because every motion only made the knife slide deeper.