by Hazel Rumney
“And you can talk sweet to ’em and they’ll listen.”
“Well, you can’t marry ’em.”
“I know a feller who tried—up in Liberal, Kansas, once. Rode straight into the justice of the peace’s office and said he loved his horse so much he wanted to marry it, official.”
“Do tell.”
“That justice got down and looked and said, ‘Well, you can’t marry this damn horse, it’s a gelding.’ ”
Frank chuckled at that, but another hand sitting around the fire that night listening—a dull boy who’d once been kicked in the head by a cow he was milking—leaned in and said, “A geldin’, why gol-dern. Dint he think a mare would be better?”
They all laughed so hard coffee ran out of their noses.
“So, what is it you’re hirin’ for?” Jesse asked the man wearing a sugarloaf hat. He looked like he had money but he talked simple.
“Need me a man to go up to the high pastures and help my other man watch a herd of cattle I got up there, then bring ’em down end of autumn, before it snows and traps ’em up there. Either you boys interested?”
“What’s it pay?” Frank said.
“What’s a feller expect to do, just watch over ’em?” Jesse asked.
“Who’s your other man you got up there now?”
“How come just one?”
“One what?” the man said.
“One man up there now, seeing’s you’re needing another’n?”
So Mr. Flaver explained about the hand that quit and the one who didn’t and poured them another shot. He liked these boys. They seemed just dumb enough to babysit cows.
“I don’t know,” Frank said. “Me and Jesse here is saddle pards. Been together now . . . how long’s it been, Jesse?”
“Almost seven years.”
“Why hell, you’re practically married sounds like,” Mr. Flaver said, attempting humor. Jesse and Frank looked at him without smiling.
“Some might think that an insult, mister,” Frank said.
“Oh, I didn’t mean nothing by it, was just trying to . . .”
“No, sir,” Jesse said. “We work as a team, me and Frank does. You ever rope and heel a cow, Mr. Flaver?”
“Sure, plenty of times when I was your age. Grew up ranching. My daddy was a rancher who had to fight the Comanche and the Apaches and Tonks, too.”
That kind of impressed Frank and Jesse, but they didn’t know why. Maybe it was the good liquor they were nipping sitting there with a man wearing a sugarloaf hat.
“I don’t knows as I could afford to keep three men up there,” Mr. Flaver said, rubbing the knob of his chin.
“Well, then,” Frank said. “I reckon we thank ye kindly for this fine whiskey and the job offer, but here’s the deal: Jesse and me weren’t exactly looking for jobs. We were just passing through. Thinking of going on down to ol’ Mexico and find us a couple of plump señoritas till winter passes.”
“Why, winter is still a time off,” said Mr. Flaver. “It’s a long time to lay around and do nothing.”
“True enough,” Jesse said. “But we won’t exactly be doing nothing, will we, Frank?”
Frank waggled his head.
“Not if’n we find them señoritas, we won’t.”
Jesse reached for the bottle, two thirds empty now, and Mr. Flaver watched him with eyes that were miserly now that it looked like he wasn’t going to hire either one of these rounders. Lots of the men of Askin had fled for the gold strikes in Colorado and California, so help was hard to come by, least anybody who could be trusted to watch cattle and bring ’em down before winter took hold.
“All right then,” Mr. Flaver said, “you boys are holding all the cards and I got spit. Sign a contract to stay and bring my beeves down and don’t lose too many in the doing and I’ll pay you one hundred sound dollars each when you get back here.”
“Hundred and fifty,” Frank said.
“Why don’t I just sign over my place and wed you my daughter in the doing?” Mr. Flaver said sarcastically. “I look rich to you?”
“You don’t look none too poor,” Jesse said. “Does he to you, Frank?”
“Not wearing that fancy hat, he don’t.”
“One twenty-five and that’s as high as I’ll go. I’d as soon let them cattle freeze for the outcome of my profit will be the same I pay you two waddies three hundred dollars just to sit up there and eat beans and cornbread and laze around.”
Frank looked at Jesse and Jesse nodded slow.
“Looks like you hired two rootin’-tootin’ sons-a-bitches,” Frank said with a grin. Now how ’bout we celebrate with another bottle.”
“And we’ll need a small advance,” Jesse said.
“For what?”
“Well, it’s gone be at least three months up there in those mountains with nothing but our hand. So me and Frank would like to get in one last poke before we go, assuming you’ll want us to leave tomorrow?”
Mr. Flaver could not but shake his head. But on the other hand, he had been young once himself and knew what it was like. Now, he had a young wife, about half his age, and as much as he liked diddling, she about wore him to a nubbin after the first year by wanting it almost every night. She didn’t seem to understand that men’s plumbing was different than a woman’s and that the older a man got, the more the old faucet got creaky. He envied those boys their youth. He’d have given everything to be one of them again.
He pulled out his wallet and slapped twenty dollars on the table.
Jesse and Frank looked at it, then at each other, then at Mr. Flaver.
“That sure won’t buy much in the flesh department,” Frank said.
“Puncher, in this town that will buy you all the pussy there is twice around. We got but one crib whore left on account of the preachers and married women prodding the town marshal to run them off. Between them and these waddies running off to the gold fields and needing the company and somebody to cook and clean and wash their clothes, the flesh pot has gotten mighty slim. And if you don’t hurry, even she might be gone. You’ll have to take turns, of course, but she’s a good ol’ gal and will do right by you. Name’s Alice Shadetree and you’ll locate her just east of the town limits living in a Sibley tent some soldier gave her in trade. Can’t miss it. Have fun and come ’round to the café seven sharp in the morning and I’ll meet you there.”
“This other man you got up there,” Jesse said. “What’s he gone be doing if me and Frank go to tend the cattle?”
“He’s a cook and all-around hand. Do whatever you ask him to. Real nice fellow. Just got one arm, but a worker nonetheless. Sort of felt sorry for him. He’s my wife’s uncle. Charlie Morrisey’s his name.”
“He does the cooking and cleaning around camp?” Frank said.
Mr. Flaver nodded.
“You boys stumbled across a real sweet deal, damned if you didn’t. See you first light then.”
Mr. Flaver watched them mount their horses tied off at the hitch post—a dun and a bay with double rig saddles, Winchesters in the boots. They rode easy, confident, talking to each other. He figured they were discussing who’d get first crack at Alice Shadetree. And he wasn’t lying about her sexual skills or appetite. For a fifty-year-old, she screwed like her back had no bone.
Then he smiled and headed home, already thinking that with all that talk and remembering his youth, he might just take a bath, then haul Minerva up to the bedroom. It had been two months and she’d been after him and after him. Well, tonight she wouldn’t have to.
He’d be after her.
II
The next morning, Mr. Flaver was out front of the café sitting high in the saddle, a fancy English thing, and holding the lead rope of a big jack mule loaded with supplies.
He could see Frank and Jesse’d been drawn and quartered by Alice Shadetree by their tired looks when they rode up.
“See you boys had a good go-round or two with Alice,” he said gleefully.
Frank grunted. Jesse
did the same.
“You didn’t mention she was somebody’s grandma,” Jesse said.
“Maybe great-grandma,” Frank said.
“Well, did you or didn’t you. My money is on you did.”
“It ain’t nobody’s business,” Frank said. “Let’s get going.”
They rode behind Mr. Flaver with heads that felt like rocks and feeling a might uncomfortable in the saddle after their adventure with Alice Shadetree. They couldn’t hardly stand to think about it, but that is all they did. That and the whiskey they consumed. But they had to admit, too, that despite Alice being long in the tooth, she had an amazing body and an amazing way of using it, so after one or two bottles of ol’ blabbermouth, they didn’t much care her age or looks in the throes of passion. In addition to which she played a concertina and danced for them and wore red pantaloons in the doing.
Up all night and had to force themselves to go and meet Mr. Flaver when they’d much preferred sleep.
“What’d you think of that lady?” Jesse said quietly to Frank as they rode along, ever climbing into the higher elevation of the mountains that lay directly ahead.
“How do you mean, what did I think of her?” Frank said.
“I mean what’d you think of her?”
“Well, hell, I don’t know what you’re asking.”
“I have to spell it out to you?”
“I reckon maybe that would help.”
“I mean, did you feel bad diddling her seeing as how old she was?”
“No, not overly much, not after I got some liquor in me and she stopped dancing around and playing that damn squeeze box and turned out the lights.”
Jesse stayed silent.
“Why, what’d you think of her?”
“Same, I reckon.”
They both rode along silent for a time, then Frank said after he rolled a shuck and started to smoke it, “I admit it was kinda strange all three of us in the bed together. I never done nothing like that before.”
“You ain’t?”
“No. You have?”
“No.”
“Bullshit. I know you did by the way you said you didn’t.”
“You couldn’t hardly calm her down, could you?”
Frank shook his head, the cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth. They got into the trees and could smell the vanilla, the smell of the pines, and the cooler air was welcome from what it was down in Askin.
“It was damn near a rodeo,” he said, “and here I thought when she first answered the door there wasn’t no way she could . . . would. Hell, you know.”
“There you go again asking me to read your mind when all it is, is but a single page scribbled with nonsense. Would what?”
“I thought at first it was somebody’s mama and the daughter was inside. So when we found out that she was her, I thought was we to go ahead with it, we’d kill her first try and it scared me some, I do admit.”
“You mean when you went to do it to her?”
“Yes. You?”
“Maybe, somewhat. That’s why I let you go first. Figured she died, I wouldn’t have to bother.”
“I bet you was surprised when she didn’t.”
“I bet you was too. Figured anybody’d kill her off diddling her, it would’ve been you.”
“Well, you can’t say I didn’t try. I mean not to kill her, but just in the course of action, you know.”
They stopped for lunch by a gurgling stream and drank of its water and it was cold and sweet. They ate cheese and liverwurst sandwiches with slices of onions.
“My Minerva made these,” Mr. Flaver said. “She knows I like a good liverwurst sandwich, but says it makes my breath bad.”
Jesse and Frank sniffed them but were too hungry to not eat and they proved to taste better than they smelled, but soon as they devoured them, they lay back in the grass with their hats over their faces and fell fast asleep, exhausted and wishing now they hadn’t agreed to the job. For jobs, as they’d come to learn, required commitment to another and they weren’t the committing kind, so much having been ruined on the subject from being in the war and often under command of fools.
They had often discussed getting their own spread and being their own bosses, but that required money for a down payment and the only way that could happen was to work for someone and save their earnings.
Robbing banks and stages and trains was an option, but the very idea of getting locked up in a jail or prison put them off such notions. Once, while discussing this, Jesse said, “What do you suppose them fellows that get locked up for a long time do for the lack of female companionship?”
“You don’t want to know,” Frank answered.
“Oh.” Suddenly it dawned on Jesse.
Then there was the aspect of possibly getting shot by lawmen or irate townsmen, or worse, bespectacled bank clerks. No, they agreed they weren’t ready for the owlhoot trail.
Seemed like they’d hardly closed their eyes before Mr. Flaver shook them awake, saying, “We best get going. We’re lucky we’ll make the pasture before dark. Some of this trail is tricky in the dark. Once saw a man ride his cayuse right of the edge a little farther up. I guess he had a hell of a ride for about five, six seconds before the rocks ended his nonsense.”
He tapped heels into his horse’s flank and tugged the lead rope on the pack mule.
“Wonder if we did the right thing taking this job?” Jesse uttered so that Mr. Flaver couldn’t hear them.
Frank just shrugged his shoulders, letting his horse follow along as he fished out his makings and rolled himself a shuck.
“It is kinda pretty up here,” he said after exhaling twin streams of smoke through his nostrils.
They rode along the rest of the day at a slow steady climb, and as the sun sank low beyond the trees, they came out of the forest into a valley of grass like a green bowl full of grazing cattle.
Off in the near distance stood an old log and chink cabin with a stone chimney and shake roof and a cottonwood corral. A lean-to for horses butted on one end of the cabin. There stood an old gray mule the color of unwashed linen watching them approach. It whickered at their horses and the pack mule whickered back.
“Must be old lovers,” Jesse said, ever the wit.
“Must be,” Frank agreed.
“Air up here’s a might thin, ain’t it?”
“You just ain’t used to air ain’t in a saloon or cathouse is all.”
“I reckon.”
As they rode up to the cabin, an older man with hair white and scattered as a pullet’s feathers stepped out of the cabin door, a thumb hooked in one gallus, raising it over his shoulder while the other hung loose. He had a long face with muttonchops that were just shy of a beard, and a squint eye. The way he stood, he looked like a mis-struck nail.
“That’s my other man, Charlie Morrisey, the one I’d have preferred to quit if one was going to. But, of course, God would not be so kind.”
“Hidey,” Morrisey said as they rode up. “I guess you know Bob done quit.”
“I know,” Mr. Flaver said, arching his back from the ride.
The hand looked Frank and Jesse over as they dismounted, looked them over with his only eye.
“Who’re these fellas?” he asked Mr. Flaver.
“They’ll be here the summer, help bring the herd down come fall.”
“Where’s that leave me, Mr. Flaver?”
“You’ll do the cooking and cleaning and whatever else these boys need you to do.”
“Well, now, yes, sir, Mr. Flaver. I half thought you was going to let me go.”
“Normally, I only keep two men for the herd, but I’ll make an exception this time. You help these men unpack the mule, and get settled in.”
They set about unloading supplies and putting them in the cabin with everybody taking notice of the demijohn of whiskey that was packed. And, among the packed supplies, was a fair-sized two-man tent.
Mr. Flaver walked out a ways and looked off toward his grazi
ng herd, took off his hat, and swiped his forehead with his shirtsleeve. It pleased him to look at his holdings.
When they’d finished the unloading and turned the animals out into the corral, Mr. Flaver had Morrisey cook up some grub. He would stay the night, then head back down in the morning, he said.
The grub was hellacious—some sort of stew—but the biscuits were very good, and afterwards, Morrisey fished for a compliment on his cooking but got none.
Mr. Flaver took one of the two chairs outside and set on it, letting the nightshade come down around him, and Morrisey set with him on the other chair.
Jesse and Frank went for a walk, saying they’d like to get the lay of things but really just to talk about their situation.
“I don’t know about you,” Jesse said. “But that old boy seems like something escaped from a madhouse or something the way he watches everything out of that eye.”
“Let’s not judge too quick,” Frank said. “After all, we’re stuck with him for at least two months. It ain’t that long, then we’ll run these beeves down and collect our wages and be on our way.”
“Well, least we got a little whiskey and tobacco and a deck of playing cards to keep us from getting bored.”
“That’s the spirit.”
Mr. Flaver spent the night and was gone in the morning, leaving the three men to watch over things.
“Usually the other man rides out and camps, overlooking the herd,” One-eye said, a nickname they’d already tagged him with.
“And the other’n?” Jesse said.
“Stays here, cooks, brings you’ns out grub.”
“We’ll that sounds fine with us,” Jesse said. “Don’t it, Frank?”
“I reckon.”
“That’s what the tent’s for, you’ns to live in.”
“Why is it us has to live in a tent when there is a roof and walls here. Why ain’t it you?”
One-eye shrugged, said, “I’m the senior man is why.”
Frank said, “To hell with it, Jesse and me will go. Fix us up some grub to last us a day or two till you bring us more. And we’ll take half that whiskey too.”
So it was agreed that Frank and Jesse would ride out to watch over the herd from wolves and possible rustlers.
They were saddling up when Morrisey came out, and said, “You boys ever shoot anybody?”