Whiskey When We're Dry

by John Larison

  These was new weapons, three of them, for me. Common folks didn’t ever own new weapons. Even the pistol Pa bought Noah was aged a season.

  Drummond hollered from outside, “Well, you gonna breed ’em or shoot ’em?”

  I buckled the belt around my waist and tied each holster tip to my thigh with the leather already cut for the purpose. The scabbard went over my shoulder. I paused before the fancy mirror. I had on my black hat and duster. I saw myself as I would be seen. By and by I was a damn gunfighter.

  “You worse than a woman,” Drummond hollered.

  * * *

  —

  A crate of ammunition sat upon the shooting bench. Drummond loaded his rifle from it. Then he opened his pistols and filled them with the same shells. The novelty of a six-shooter eating shells would take me some time to overcome. All summer I would be reaching for my old fixings.

  When Drummond finished he racked the action on the Winchester and let the rifle rest on his hip. I will admit he looked like no man could touch him, and I was in awe.

  I stepped past him and took aim downrange, and missed the mark. The sun was hot on my skin. The report echoed about the ravines of my drought.

  Drummond brought up and destroyed what I left behind. “You let your steam get the better of your form. Think first of your feet and work your way up to your fingertips.”

  I hadn’t never thought of my feet, but I knew enough to understand Drummond was right. Balance starts in the feet or it don’t start at all. Pa never mentioned feet.

  “This trigger likes the whole finger. Ain’t like that Sharps.” He demonstrated with his own finger. “Like this, see? Now take aim and exhale and let that finger fall asleep on it.”

  “Why you teaching me?”

  He took aim and fired twice in under a second. Both bullets hit their mark. “You ain’t nothing but farty air, I don’t know why Boss don’t see that. But much as it grinds me, you’ll be riding with us. Your bullet might just be the bullet that saves Tuss or Greenie or Boss himself.”

  I took aim downrange but Drummond put his mitt over the action and forced the barrel toward the ground.

  His eyes was on the sage past the range. There was a shape moving there, a woman in a black dress. Her white hair wasn’t bound in bonnet, it tossed in the breeze. She walked across our shooting without a concern for us or our lead.

  “That’s Lady Mildred. The Governor’s mother.”

  “Mother? She must be ancient.” The Governor looked to be sixty.

  Drummond spat. “Near on ninety and I reckon she outlives half us.”

  She disappeared into a fold in the land and then reappeared on the next rise. She made the uphills quick as the downs. “Where’s she going?”

  “That building yonder. That’s her residence.”

  “That hog shed?” It was a one-room thing. But now I noticed the rocking chair under the eave. The chair faced away from the mansion and toward them mountains. “Why don’t she live inside with us?” I wondered too why she hadn’t joined us for supper.

  “Boss don’t bring his momma around. You stick here long enough you’ll see why.”

  * * *

  —

  When the Governor was home his guardsmen took rotation on various posts. The gate, the roof, the Governor’s office door. The work didn’t come natural. Guard duty was the hardest labor I ever done, occupying ground with no other task than that. Always at war with time. But I was a lucky one. Each day I went to the gun range, usually with Drummond.

  We guardsmen also drilled. They taught me to take a man at gunpoint, bind him, and search him, all without him gaining the upper hand. They taught me to grapple and roll someone twice my size. They rushed me with knives when I didn’t expect it, and then explained errors in my form. If Drummond could think it, we drilled it. Then drilled it again. He never let a mistake go unpunished.

  Drummond wasn’t an easy man to be around, honest, but then neither had been Pa.

  * * *

  —

  My first shooting wager on the Governor’s behalf wasn’t no wager at all. The Boss summoned me to the range on the first hot afternoon of the year. Drummond was already there, dropping shells into his pistols. Will and the other servants was erecting a white cloth to block the red sun. Underneath sat four upholstered chairs.

  “The both of us?” I asked Drummond.

  “It’ll be trick shooting. The men coming is some of them Mormons. Won’t wager nothing but they enjoy a little shooting sport like the next man.”

  I will admit my mind worried that one of the men might just be Mr. Saggat. I pulled my hat low and spat. But Mr. Saggat wasn’t nobody who could hold the Governor’s attention. The men who come was the ones that ruled their city on the Salt Lake. They was serious men without a smile to offer, and they wore their beards in the manner of easterners before the war. Their clothes too was cut in the fashions of thirty years bygone. They looked fresh out some history too boring to talk about.

  I was introduced by the Governor. “This is Jesse Straight, gunfighter and trick shooter. If you read the papers of my city you will soon be reading his name. A preternatural talent for the sidearm.” I tipped my hat to them and tried to rein in my pride.

  Drummond and I shot plates on the fly and plates on the roll, and when we made clean work of those Will put the plates away and brought out the saucers. These we got with equal ease and so our finishing act was a pair of silver dollars produced by the Mormons themselves. It was all an act Drummond and the Governor and Will had put on before. I just followed along. Except when the silver dollars flew, Drummond missed low.

  The trouble for Drummond was his hands. They just wasn’t nimble no more. His joints was swollen and slow to keep up with his mind’s eye. He cursed when that silver dollar hit the dirt.

  The Boss showed high pleasure after they left. He put his arm around me. “That was damn fine work, son. Did you see the look on their faces when you handed the man back his center punched dollar? Word is going to spread about you.”

  Drummond picked up his scabbard from the bench and walked back into the house.

  * * *

  —

  The mountain behind the mansion was flanked in sage but that give way to mahogany and rock near the top. It bore the Governor’s name.

  That mountain held my attentions when I shot or when I stood duty on the roof, and so my first afternoon off I saddled Ingrid and rode the ridge up until the earth grew so steep we had to cut switchbacks. A pair of tall horned bucks jumped from the bitterbrush in a draw and I could’ve shot them both with ease as they high stepped to the edge and stopped to see about the ruckus. But the Boss was clear on the rules. His employees wasn’t to do no hunting. Them bucks was all his.

  So Ingrid and me rode on until we crested the ridge and found a pass where the wind hummed a song through the rock. I saw at once the tracks. A shod horse. Soon I heard her voice from up yonder. Constance was balancing upon a rock that stood like a pillar from that mountain.

  I looked around and saw we was alone. Still I knew I should turn and go somewheres else.

  “I watched you see me,” she called. “There’s no pretending I’m not here.”

  “Howdy, Miss Constance.”

  “You navigated the steepest route. I use the long arm of that ridge. There’s a clean trail most of the way, deepened now by our frequent hoovings.”

  I looked off at the distance.

  “Come now. Your job is not at risk for talking to me. Why did you come? You didn’t follow my tracks.”

  I spat. “I saw this here rock and took a guess on how big it was. I been watching it when on duty.”

  “Were you right?”

  I leaned and patted Ingrid’s neck. “They’s always bigger than I reckon.”

  Constance’s riding skirt fluttered in the wind. She outstretched he
r arms like a bird. The rock she was balancing on was no bigger than a saddle and yet some fifty feet off the ground. If she stepped forward and did not take flight, she would fall to her death. “Would you like to see the view from up top?”

  “Nah.”

  She frowned. “I would think a man your age would want to climb the face and show me he isn’t governed by fear. Don’t you males relish fear and test yourselves against it at every opportunity?”

  “I listen to my fear. I trust its vision.”

  “You are a peculiar specimen then, Mr. Jesse Straight, especially so given your choice of employment. Tell me, what do you know that the remainder of young men don’t?”

  I shrugged. “I reckon most of us males fear smallness above all else. I’m built small.” A raven sailed over the pass and cawed. We watched it sail out and over the ravine. “Senator Scott has a good instinct for preservation.”

  “Yes, that might be his only instinct.” She pulled a ribbon of hair from her mouth. “Father says love is a luxury not available to the political classes. He questions the very utility of the enterprise.” She dropped into a deep voice, a bad mimic of her father. “What mountains has love reduced? What wars has love won? Where’s the profit in love?”

  She put a hand to the top of her hat as a gust of wind rose up and then died away.

  I studied the distant ridges for the shape of someone watching us.

  She turned her back to me. She put out her arms and tipped her head back toward the heavens and called, “Tell them I died in peace.” She leapt and was gone from sight.

  Ingrid and me come around the back of the pillar to find Constance jumping down from the last step. The back side was a giant’s staircase. She untied Enterprise and swung up on the animal’s back. She was royal in her movements, always. “Did I deceive you?”

  “I best get on.”

  She puffed up in mockery of me now. “Best do what’s best.” The air come out of her. “Do I bore you, Mr. Straight?”

  “Ma’am, I live downstairs in your house.”

  “Downstairs, upstairs. Father can pretend but . . . We all live together in God’s garden. Is not that the premise west of St. Louis?”

  “Maybe that’s the view from upstairs.”

  I turned Ingrid and we started back the way we’d come. “Safe ride to you, ma’am.”

  * * *

  —

  I was still thinking of Constance the next afternoon as I stood duty before the Governor’s office, his voice inside and my eyes on the mountain out the window. Her mother chose to live far away—how could that feel?

  When the Governor put his hand upon my shoulder I nearly jumped. “Glad to see you’re so attuned to your surroundings, young Straight. Man this door as I step down to send a telegram. Maybe you would notice a burglar if he stepped on your toe?”

  “Of course, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  I watched as he descended the steps with Charles behind him, the butler transcribing the telegram even as they walked. A black who could write, I didn’t know such men existed. But that wasn’t what impressed me. To walk and write at the same time, now that was a damn skill.

  I shook such distraction from my mind and resolved to think of nothing but my brother. I’d been with the Governor over a week and still had learned nothing of Noah. My belly was full and my mind was taken with fancy and somehow all this felt like a betrayal to my kin. So I stepped inside that office and narrowed the door behind me.

  I set about my project with haste. The papers on the desk was well ordered. The stacks went deep and I thumbed through them for the name Harney.

  After some minutes without finding any sheet that had more words than numbers, I paused a moment to listen. I heard nothing and so kept on.

  It was all paperwork concerning companies the Governor owned. I gave up and instead pulled the handle to his desk drawer. I found it locked, and so set about looking for the key. I looked under his ash-tray, his humidor, even the buffalo hoof he used as a paperweight.

  I didn’t hear no boots on the stairs. I didn’t hear nothing, not even the banister creaking. That banister creaked when the wind touched it, so I don’t know how Will got so close without making a sound. The door opened, and there he was, looking on me.

  “Oh,” I said, a breath behind. “I was . . .”

  Will stood straight as his father Charles, an arm bent around his back. In his other hand was a silver platter with a crystal bottle of brandy perched on top. His eyes narrowed on me.

  I understood then I had to change course. I had to believe he was the one being caught. I stiffened tall. “What’s your business here?”

  His platter rose and settled with a breath. “Shouldn’t you be guarding the door?”

  I pointed at the half-full crystal already on the Governor’s desk. “Who sent you with that bottle?”

  He swallowed. That was all.

  There come the creaking of the banister, and Will was the first to take a step back. I followed him out of the office and closed the door.

  When the Governor and Charles emerged on the landing Will and I stood on either side of his office door as if we had been in silent contemplation all these minutes. The two of them walked between us without a glance.

  I turned to Will and him to me.

  Charles appeared again between us. “Will, I told you to deliver the brandy to the Governor’s quarters, not his office.”

  “Of course, Father.”

  * * *

  —

  I did learn about this New Moon Heist. I caught the arm of the man who delivered our dairy, and when I mentioned the name Noah Harney, he started talking at once.

  Noah and his Wild Bunch had hit a train in Wyoming in the dead of night. Two of them had stepped onto the tracks and waved lanterns in the signal used to warn a conductor of a faulty bridge crossing.

  “They didn’t hit this train at random, no sir,” the dairyman said. “It was coming from Pennsylvania, sent by the old boys who run the world. The men who got the rails, the banks, the cattle herds—these men don’t like Harney, not a piece.”

  “Why? What’s a gunslinger to a high name back east?”

  He leaned closer with a big smile. “Harney keeps kicking the hive and somehow he don’t get stung. Some say the Lord is on his side. You know Harney has more money than the president of these United States? Now that’s a fact. I read it in the papers myself. They say he’s got whole caves filled with gold. But it ain’t for him. He spreads it about the people. That’s why the ranching folk hide him as they do.”

  I didn’t full understand until after, but all across the West families was being pushed from their homes by the dropping prices of what they produced—wheat, cattle, timber. These people who’d bled for their new day was now being forced to move again, and most went to cities where they was paid a day rate that left them in the hole, and this time with no view to stir their souls.

  It was just like I’d seen with Pa at market, each autumn the price was lower than the year before, driven down by the men who owned ten thousand head and so could afford to take a lower price for their beef simply to drive off the competition. Just as soon as the family man quit, the very baron who had forced them out bought up their holdings for a dime on the dollar. Just good business, they said.

  Everywhere he went my brother was being treated as a hero by men like our pa. The dairyman whispered, “They say his Wild Bunch is five hundred men now. Imagine that. Could be a real war coming.”

  The night they stopped the train, a gunfight ensued between the Wild Bunch and twenty-one Pinkerton agents who had taken an oath to defend the cargo with their blood. It went on for an hour, until too much dynamite burst open the armored car like tin.

  The fifty thousand in new-minted money was intended for the Governor, to help finance his militia.

  “Could say the
war is already kicking.”

  * * *

  —

  I rode with the Governor often and always highly armed. As I was the cherry among the crew I was left the seat in the carriage’s rear and ate our dust as we traversed the mesa and climbed the mountains to a company mine owned by the Governor.

  The carriage come to a stop in a mining camp and the Governor went with Drummond into the manager’s office. Greenie and I moved to cover the back of the building while Tuss manned the front. In the bright sun my eyes was of little use and I leaned in the only shade I could find, a thin band thrown by a pillar. The Winchester was in my hands.

  In the distance I could hear picks hitting rocks and the chants of blacks at work. In the near I heard the pleas of a white man who had done wrong by the Governor. His words was no more clear than them chants, but his fear was conveyed clear through them walls.

  Greenie was passing a knife blade under his fingernails. “Makes you glad to be on his good side, don’t it?”

  Some minutes on, the white man come flying through the back door. He was fat and dressed well but he landed like a sack of grain. Drummond was the one who kicked him. He spat and nodded at Greenie and disappeared back inside. The door slammed shut.

  Greenie swaggered over and leaned an elbow on my pillar. He grinned and showed me a bottle inside his coat. “You gonna tell Drum if I offer you a pull?”

  * * *

  —

  One night in the bunks Greenie and I lay awake in our room passing a bottle back and forth and trying to invite sleep. It was slow coming. It had been a day of watching and not much else. The bottle went dry and then we just laid there.