Business was good.
“There’s a lot of that going on around here now,” he said, pointing at the body. “It’s those gunmen from Portland. It’s their work.”
He was the only one talking. Nobody else had anything to say out loud. Greer and Cameron said what they had to say inside their minds.
Magic Child looked so calm you would have thought that she had been raised in a land where bodies hung everywhere like flowers.
The stagecoach drove across the bridge without stopping. It sounded like a minor thunderstorm on the bridge. The wind turned the body, so that it was watching the stagecoach drive up the road along the river and then disappear into a turn of dusty green trees.
“Coffee” with the Widow
A couple of hours later, the stagecoach stopped at Widow Jane’s house. The driver always liked to have a cup of “coffee” with the widow on his way to Billy.
What he meant by a cup of coffee wasn’t really a cup of coffee. He had a romance going with the widow and he’d stop the stagecoach at her house and just parade all the passengers in. The widow would give everybody a cup of coffee and there was always a big platter of homemade doughnuts on the kitchen table.
Widow Jane was a very thin but jolly woman in her early fifties.
Then the driver, carrying a ceremonial cup of coffee in his hand, and the widow would go upstairs. All the passengers would sit downstairs in the kitchen, drinking coffee and eating doughnuts while the driver would be upstairs with the widow in her bedroom having his “coffee.”
The squeaking of the bedsprings shook the house like mechanical rain.
Cora
Cameron had brought the trunk full of guns into the house with him. He didn’t want to leave the guns unattended in the stagecoach. Greer and Cameron never carried guns on their persons not unless they intended to kill somebody. Then they carried guns. The rest of the time the guns stayed in the trunk.
The barbed-wire drummer sat there in the kitchen with a cup of coffee in his hand and from time to time he would look down at the trunk that was beside Cameron, but he never said anything about it.
He was curious enough, though, about Magic Child to ask her what her name was.
“Magic Child,” Magic Child said.
“That’s a pretty name,” he said. “And if you don’t mind me saying so, you’re quite a pretty girl.”
“Thank you.”
Then, to be polite, he asked Greer what his name was.
“Greer,” Greer said.
“That’s an interesting name,” he said.
Then he asked Cameron what his name was.
“Cameron,” Cameron said.
“Everybody here’s got an interesting name,” he said. “My name is Marvin Cora jones. You don’t come across many men who’s middle name is Cora. Anyway, I haven’t and I’ve been to a lot of places, including England.”
“Cora is a different kind of middle name for a man,” Cameron said.
Magic Child got up and went over to the stove and got some more coffee for Greer and Cameron. She also poured some for the barbed-wire drummer. She was smiling. There was a huge platter of doughnuts on the table and everybody was eating them. Widow Jane was a good cook.
Like a mirror the house continued to reflect the motion of the bed upstairs.
Greer and Cameron each had a glass of milk, too, from a beautiful porcelain pitcher on the table. They liked a glass of milk now and then. They also liked the smile on Magic Child’s face. It had been the first time that Magic Child had smiled.
“They named me Cora for my great-grandmother. I don’t mind. She met George Washington at a party. She said that he was really a nice man but he was a little shorter than what she had expected,” the barbed-wire drummer said. “I meet a lot of interesting people by telling them that my middle name is Cora. It’s something that gets people’s curiosity up. It’s kind of funny, too. I don’t mind people laughing because it is sort of funny for a man to have the name of Cora.”
Against the Dust
The driver and the widow came down the stairs with their arms in sweet affection around each other. “It certainly was nice of you to show that to me,” the driver said.
The widow’s face was twinkling like a star.
The driver acted mischievously solemn but you could tell that he was just playing around.
“It’s good to stop and have some coffee,” the driver said to everybody sitting at the table. “It makes travelling a little easier and those doughnuts are a lot better than having a mule kick you in the head.”
There was no argument there.
Thoughts of July 12, 1902
About noon the stagecoach was rattling through the mountains. It was hot and boring. Cora, the barbed-wire drummer, had dozed off. He looked like a sleeping fence.
Greer was staring at the graceful billowing of Magic Child’s breasts against her long and simple dress. Cameron was thinking about the man who had been hanging from the bridge. He was thinking that he had once gotten drunk with him in Billings, Montana, at the turn of the century.
Cameron wasn’t totally certain but the man hanging from the bridge looked an awful lot like the guy he had gotten drunk with in Billings. If he wasn’t that man, he was his twin brother.
Magic Child was watching Greer stare at her breasts. She was imagining Greer touching them with his casually powerful-looking hands. She was excited and pleased inside of herself, knowing that she would be fucking Greer before the day was gone.
While Cameron was thinking about the dead man on the bridge, perhaps it was Denver where they had getter: drunk together, Magic Child was thinking about fucking him, too.
Binoculars
Suddenly the stagecoach stopped on top of a ridge that had a meadow curving down from it. There was an Old Testament quantity of vultures circling and landing and rising again in the meadow. They were like flesh angels summoned to worship at a large spread-out temple of many small white formerly-living things.
“Sheep!” the driver yelled. “Thousands of them!”
He was looking down on the meadow through a pair of binoculars. The driver had once been an officer, a second lieutenant in the cavalry during the Indian Wars, so he carried a pair of binoculars with him when he was driving the stagecoach.
He had gotten out of the cavalry because he didn’t like to kill Indians.
“The Morning County Sheepshooters Association has been working out this way,” he said.
Everybody in the stagecoach looked out the windows and then got out as the driver climbed down from his seat. They stretched and tried to unwind the coils of travel while they watched the vultures eating sheep down below in the meadow.
Fortunately, the wind was blowing in an opposite manner so as not to bring them the smell of death. They could watch death while not having to be intimate with it.
“Those sheepshooters really know how to shoot sheep,” the driver said.
“All you need is a gun,” Cameron said.
Billy
They crossed the Shadow Creek bridge at suppertime. There’s nobody hanging from this bridge: Cameron thought as the stagecoach drove into Billy.
There was an expression of pleasure on Magic Child’s face. She was happy to be home. She had been gone for months, doing what Miss Hawkline had sent her to do, and they sat beside her. She looked forward to seeing Miss Hawkline. They would have many things to talk about. She would tell Miss Hawkline about Portland.
Magic Child’s breathing had noticeably changed in sexual anticipation for the bodies of Greer and Cameron. They of course didn’t know that Magic Child would soon be fucking them.
They could see that her breathing had changed but they didn’t know what it meant. They thought she was happy to be home or something.
Billy was noisy because it was suppertime. The smell of meat and potatoes was heavy on the wind. All the doors and windows in Billy were open. It had been a very hot day and you could hear people eating and talking.
<
br /> Billy was about sixty or seventy houses, buildings and shacks built on both sides of a creek that flowed through a canyon whose slopes were covered with jumper brush that gave a sweet fresh smell to things.
Billy had three bars, an cafe, a big mercantile store, a blacksmith, and a church. It didn’t have a hotel, a bank or a doctor.
There was a town marshal but there wasn’t a jail. He didn’t need one. His name was Jack Williams and he could be a mean motherfucker. He thought putting somebody in jail was a waste of time. If you caused any trouble in Billy, he’d punch you in the mouth and throw you in the creek. The rest of the time he ran a very friendly saloon, The Jack Williams House, and would buy a drink every morning for the town drunk.
There was a graveyard behind the church and the minister, a Fredrick Calms, was always trying to raise enough money to put a fence around the graveyard because the deer got in there and ate the flowers and stuff off the graves.
For some strange reason, it made the minister mad whenever he saw some deer among the graves and he’d start cursing up a storm, but nobody ever took putting a fence up around the graveyard very seriously.
The people just didn’t give a shit.
“So a few deer get in there. That’s no big thing. The minister is kind of crazy, anyway,” was their general reaction to putting a fence around the graveyard in Billy.
The Governor of Oregon
Greer, Cameron and Magic Child went over to the blacksmith’s shop to get some horses for the ride out to Miss Hawkline’s in the morning. They wanted to make sure the horses would be ready when they left at dawn.
The blacksmith had a collection of strange horses that he would rent out sometimes if he knew you or liked your looks. He’d had a bucket of beer along with his dinner that evening, so he was very friendly.
“Magic Child,” he said. “Ain’t seen you around for a while. You been someplace? Hear they’re killing people over Gompville way. My name is Pills,” holding out his beer-friendly hand to Greer and Cameron. “I take care of the horses around here.”
“We need some horses in the morning,” Magic Child said. “We’re going out to Miss Hawkline’s.”
“I think I can do you up with some horses. Maybe one of them will get that far: if you’re lucky.”
Pills liked to joke about his horses. He was famous in those parts for having the worst bunch of horses ever assembled in a corral.
He had a horse that was so swaybacked that it looked like an October quarter moon. He called that horse Cairo. “This is an Egyptian horse,” he used to tell people.
He had another horse that didn’t have any ears. A drunken cowboy had bitten them off for a fifty-cent bet. “I bet you fifty cents I’m so drunk I’d bite a horse’s ears off!”
“God-damn, I don’t think you’re that drunk!”
And he had another horse that actually drank whiskey. They’d put a quart of whiskey in his bucket and he’d drink it all down and then he’d fall over on his side and everybody would laugh.
But the prize of his collection was a horse that had a wooden foot. The horse was born without a right rear foot, so somebody had carved him a wooden one, but the person had gotten confused in his carving, he wasn’t really right in the head, anyway, and the wooden foot looked more like a duck’s foot than a horse’s foot. It really looked strange to see that horse walking around with a wooden duck foot.
A politician once came all the way from La Grande to look at those horses. It was even rumored that the governor of Oregon had heard about them.
Jack Williams
On their way over to Ma Smith’s Cafe to have some dinner, Jack Williams, the town marshal, strolled out of his saloon. He was going someplace else but when he saw Magic Child, whom he liked a lot, and two strange men with her, he walked over to Magic Child and her friends to say hello and find out what was happening.
“Magic Child! God-damn!” he said and threw his arms around her and gave her a big hug.
He could tell that the two men did not work for a living and in appearance there was nothing about them that one would ever remember. They both looked about the same except they had different features and different builds. It was the way they handled themselves that was memorable.
One of them was taller than the other one but once you turned your back on them you wouldn’t be able to remember which one it was.
Jack Williams had seen men similar to these before. Instinctively, without even bothering with an intellectual process, he knew that these men could mean trouble. One of them was carrying a long narrow trunk on his shoulder. He carried the trunk easily as if it were part of his shoulder.
Jack Williams was a big man: over six feet tall and weighed in excess of two hundred pounds. His toughness was legendary in that part of Eastern Oregon. Men with evil thoughts on their minds generally stayed clear of Billy.
Jack Williams wore a shoulder holster with a big shiny.38 in it. He didn’t like to wear a regular gun belt around his waist. He always joked that he didn’t like to have all that iron hanging so close to his cock.
He was forty-one years old and in the prime of health.
“Magic Child! God-damn!” he said and threw his arms around her and gave her a big hug.
“Jack,” she said. “You big man!”
“I’ve missed you, Magic Child,” he said. He and Magic Child had fucked a few times and he had a tremendous respect for her quick lean body.
He liked her a lot but sometimes he was a little awestruck and disturbed by how much she looked like Miss Hawkline. They looked so much alike that they could have been twins. Everybody in town noticed it but there was nothing they could do about it, so they just let it be.
“These are my friends,” she said, making the introductions. “I want you to meet them. This is Greer and this is Cameron. I want you to meet Jack Williams. He’s the town marshal.”
Greer and Cameron were smiling softly at the intensity of Magic Child’s and Jack Williams’ greeting.
“Howdy,” Jack Williams said, shaking their hands. “What are you boys up to?”
“Come on now,” Magic Child said. “These are my friends.”
“I’m sorry,” Jack Williams said, laughing. “I’m sorry, boys. I own a saloon here. Any time you want there’s a drink waiting over there for you and it’s on me.”
He was a fair man and people respected him for it.
Greer and Cameron liked him immediately.
They liked people who had strong character. They didn’t like to kill people like Jack Williams. Sometimes it made them feel bad afterwards and Greer would always say. “I liked him.” and Cameron would always answer, “Yeah, he was a good man.” and they wouldn’t say anything more about it after that.
Just then some gunshots rang out in the hills above Billy. Jack Williams paid no attention to the shots.
“5, 6,” Cameron said.
“What’s that?” Jack Williams said.
“He was counting the gunshots,” Greer said.
“Oh, that. Oh, yeah,” Jack Williams said. “They’re up there probably killing themselves or killing off their animals. Frankly, I don’t give a fuck. Excuse me, Magic Child, I’m sorry. I’ve got a tongue that was hatched on an outhouse seat. I’m saving it for my old age. Instead of whittling, I’ll stop cussing.”
“What’s the shooting about?” Greer said, nodding his head up toward the twilight hills towering above Billy.
“Oh, come on now,” Jack Williams said. “You boys know better than that.”
Greer and Cameron smiled softly again.
“I don’t care what those cattle and sheep people do to each other. They can kill everyone of themselves off if they’re going to be that stupid, just as long as they don’t do it in the streets of Billy.”
“That county sheriff from Brooks. Up there’s his problem. I don’t think he ever gets off his ass, not unless he’s looking for a piece of ass. Oh, God, I’ve done it again. Magic Child, when will this tongue of mine eve
r learn?”
Magic Child smiled up at Jack Williams. “I’m glad to be back.” She touched his hand gently.
That pleased the town marshal of Billy whose name was Jack Williams and who was known far and wide as a tough but fair man.
“I guess I’d better get along now,” he said. “Glad you’re back, Magic Child.” Then he turned to Greer and Cameron and said, “Hope you boys from Portland have a good time here but just remember,” he said, pointing at the hills. “Up there, not down here.”
Ma Smith’s Cafe
They had some fried potatoes and steaks for dinner and biscuits all covered with gravy at Ma Smith’s Cafe, and the people eating there wondered why they were in town, and they had some blackberry pie for dessert, and the people, mostly cowboys, wondered what was in the long narrow trunk beside their table, and Magic Child had a glass of milk along with her pie, and the cowboys were made a little nervous by Greer and Cameron, though they didn’t know exactly why, but the cowboys all thought that Magic Child sure was pretty and they’d sure like to fuck her and they wondered where she had been these last months. They hadn’t seen her in town. She must have been someplace else but they didn’t know where. Greer and Cameron continued to make them nervous but they still didn’t know why. One thing they did know, though, Greer and Cameron did not look like the kind of people who had come to Billy to settle down.
Greer thought about having another piece of pie but he didn’t. It was a nice thought. He really liked the pie and the thought was as good as having another piece of pie. The pie was that tasty.
The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western Page 2
