by Amy Faye
Bad Cowboy
Western Romance
Amy Faye
Published by Heartthrob Publishing
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One
There are plenty of things that someone needs to be taught to know. I needed to be taught about salvation. I needed to be taught about arithmetic. And I needed to be taught not to get friendly with strangers. Because when you’re a newborn babe in the world, you don’t just come out knowing.
You know nothing about the Lord’s sacrifice that redeemed mankind. You don’t even know that mankind needed redeeming. Someone tells you, and they show you, and you learn that you hadn’t been seeing the whole picture.
When you come out as a little babe, you don’t know what two is. You’ve seen two things together, but there’s no concept of numbers. Then, your mama or your tutor teaches you a little of the world and you find out that there’s a whole way of describing the world you didn’t know about.
Strangers seem friendly enough, to a child. And they usually are. Which creates the most insidious trap of all, because the ones that aren’t friendly are the ones you have to watch out for the most. If nobody teaches you that lesson early, then the first mistake can be the last one you ever get to make.
But I did learn all of those things. I learned them as a little girl, and they were all very important. I have to go forward and teach God’s word. I have to take care of money, since Jodie’s not old enough and Dad’s gone. Mama’s not in any shape to do it herself, not any more. And I have to make sure to be polite, but not too trusting, with strangers.
There are other lessons, though, that you don’t need to be taught. You have to be taught the individual parts. But once you know what a gunfighter is, you don’t have to be taught that those kind of men live short, violent lives. It came together like it was obvious. For all they who take the sword shall perish with the sword. It follows that the Lord wasn’t simply referring to swords. Guns probably followed the same pattern.
I adjusted my scarf and leaned closer to Jodie. He stood straight. He was only fifteen, five years my younger, but he was already almost half a foot higher than me, and already weighed twice what I weighed. And at some point, numbers would get put into his head and he could take care of these chores. It was just a matter of time, and I was more than ready for him to take over. After all, a woman only has so many marriageable years to live.
The bank was busy today. I never preferred to come in when it was busy, but we only came into town for Church and to buy supplies, and we weren’t about to go back home and wait for another day while the hens went without feed.
I sucked in a breath and stood up on my toes to speak into Jodie’s ear.
“Come on, let’s get this over with.”
He nodded and started walking. He was stiff. Still unused to going into town in the first place as far as I could tell. It was something that would pass. There was no trick to it other than to practice. He just had fewer years of having to act like a man than I had trying to fill in for Mama. It would come.
I stepped into line and he turned away and walked away from me. I watched him go curiously; he shrugged off his coat and hung it up on the rack. I didn’t understand what he was doing, but he was free to do whatever struck his fancy. I wasn’t about to jump on him about it, at least.
The door swung open. Hard. It struck my brother in the nose and he went down grabbing at it, blood pouring out. I moved almost by reflex, and stopped after two steps. A man stepped through the doorway, holding a long gun. Like he was used to it.
The lessons about men with guns flashed through my head. Some of them I had been taught; others I’d reasoned out for myself. But there were plenty of them.
All men had guns. Out here, you have to have them. Have to make sure that you can keep the farm safe. I’ve held Papa’s rifle a few times. It’s heavy for me. So when we need to scare off a cougar, it’s usually Jodie these days who does it. He can hit a coffee can at twenty paces. I can’t.
Some of the men with guns, though, weren’t planning on using them to protect themselves. Some of them were planning on using them on other people.
Those men were criminals. They lived a hard life. Men with hard, violent, short lives tended to pick up injuries. It was part of what made their lives so short.
All of those things flashed through my head so fast that for a moment I didn’t even understand what I was looking at when I saw the man in the doorway.
He didn’t have any injuries. Not so far as I could tell. There was a carnival that came through on occasion. They had a boxer who would take all comers. Jodie had already been knocked on his bottom three years running. It would be a fourth this autumn, I knew.
The boxer had a twisted, mangled ear from having it smashed into his head a hundred hundred times. He had a nose that was all twisted up. The boxer wasn’t a good-looking man in spite of his obvious size and his jaw that could have been handsome once.
This man didn’t have a smashed-up ear. He didn’t have a twisted, broken nose. He didn’t have a thick scar across his face.
“My name,” he said in a low, threatening voice. “Is Baron Euler.”
It was a lie, because I knew the name. I’d been in the Sheriff’s office once, when someone, who turned out to be that drunken lout Hillary Rubles, had been stealing our cows.
Baron Euler had his name stamped on a poster, marked Wanted, with a drawing of a man’s face. He looked exactly like I’d have expected a gunfighter to look. Grizzled and pock-marked and scarred up.
This man wasn’t any of those things. His hand moved slightly, and I heard the rifle in his hands rack a shot.
“If everyone cooperates with me here, nobody has to get hurt.”
I didn’t think before I spoke. I was so stunned by the whole thing that I didn’t even think for a second.
“You can’t be Baron Euler. That’s impossible.”
The man with the rifle, the man calling himself Baron Euler, smiled.
“You willing to bet your life on that, little lady?”
Two
The next moments didn’t take a terribly long time to play out. Not in terms of the clock tower out in the town square, ticking softly in spite of it’s size. It might have ticked perhaps forty or fifty times. The minute hand might have moved, a little. But not overmuch.
I watched him and felt a twisting in my gut and realized that he wasn’t pointing that rifle at me. But it wouldn’t take but a single sweep of the barrel, barely any movement at all in his shoulders, and I’d never make it home.
“Now,” Baron Euler said. I made the conscious decision that he was who he said he was. “I want you there.” He pointed with the barrel of his gun, and a man behind me made a sound like he was going to be sick to his stomach. “Go into that vault, and fill this bag with money.”
Euler shrugged a bag off his shoulder, caught it with his off-hand, and threw it across the room. It made a sound on the counter as it landed.
It took every part of me to turn and watch the man disappearing into the back. Everyone made like they were terrified to being shot. I knew that I certainly was, myself. I couldn’t blame anyone else who decided that they wanted to live today.
My eyes flicked off behind Euler. Jodie was sitting, pressed into the corner, his nose bleeding through his fingers. His eyes were wide with fright, and his shoulders all bunched up like he was trying to cover his ears with them. He wasn’t moving, and I was glad he wasn’t.
“You don’t need to threaten anyone,” I said. “Nobody wants to get hurt.”
Euler stepped closer to me. “Hands up, Missy,” he said gruffly. My h
ands went higher. “Above your shoulders.”
My hands went up higher than my shoulders. I could feel his eyes on me. Could feel them looking. He wasn’t looking at me like Jodie looked at me. Like the preacher looked at me. I felt my face go red.
“Hands above the counter,” he said. I turned to where he was looking. A man in a dark-blue vest had his hands hidden behind the thick wooden counter-top. I realized sickly that there was a very real threat here, and not just to Baron Euler.
“Do what he says,” I said, as if I had some kind of authority here.
The bank teller ignored me. His shoulders shook as he straightened up, and then all hell broke loose. An explosion went off right by my head, and something started whistling in my ears. In the edge of my vision, I watched Baron Euler’s hands working the lever on his rifle. In the center of it, the bank teller’s blue shirt was being painted black by blood that was pouring out. He had a pistol in his hands. Smoke poured out of the barrel.
Euler yelled something. He sounded far-away. The whistling was too loud to hear over properly. Like he was calling from the other end of a cave I heard his voice, low and rough. “Where’s that money?”
The man reappeared in the door. I could see his teeth chattering, and I could see wetness in his eyes. He stopped dead when he saw the other teller. I had gone numb at some point to the violence. I just wanted to survive. My whole head felt empty, like there was too much space inside it, and at the same time the only thought that would fit was, I wasn’t in his line, so it’s okay.
I could feel my own hands shaking. Jodie pulled his hands away from his face and looked at them. Euler gestured with the gun and said something. He didn’t yell this time, so all I could hear from his end of the cavern, over the whistling in my ears, was the fact that he was saying something.
The banker didn’t seem to have trouble hearing, though. He looked up like he’d forgotten that Baron Euler was robbing the place, and started walking again, tottering on his feet like he’d forgotten how to walk. Euler took the bag from his hands, then swept the barrel of the rifle across the room quickly. I felt my heart stop when it passed over me.
Then he passed me. The barrel never hesitated for a second. He knew that I wasn’t going to fight him. And in that moment of certainty he made a decision, though I didn’t know it until a second later.
He turned back to me. The barrel of the gun didn’t quite sweep all the way onto my chest. I was still afraid, though. It would be so easy for him to move it the extra three inches that it would take to put the barrel squarely pointed at my chest.
He said something. The whistling got a little quieter. It sounded like You. The word was short, in any case.
“What?” I raised my voice to hear myself over the infernal racket that was still going inside my head.
He didn’t answer me. Instead he grabbed my arm and pulled. It felt like if I tried to stop him, he’d pull my arm right out of the shoulder. I only tried for an instant, and then I let him win. He didn’t stop to thank me.
Instead he pulled me out of the bank, and pressed me forward. Up onto a horse. I was so stunned that I didn’t think to fight. And I knew in my gut that if I did, there would be no guaranteeing my safety. I wanted to live.
So I didn’t fight, and that was the biggest mistake I’d made all year. It was only going to be the first of many, though. And they were all going to center around Baron Euler. The biggest mistake I ever ran into, and the one thing I know I wouldn’t have changed if I could.
Three
By the time we were on the road, it was already far, far too late for me to have done anything. Euler’s arms were tight around me. He was a stranger, a man, and I already knew two things about him. That he was attracted to me, he made no effort to hide. The sin was right there in his eyes.
The second was that he wasn’t afraid to break the Lord’s commandments. He’d already killed right in front of me. Could it have been self-defense?
Sure it could have. But then again, it was self-defense that made Brighton Smith pull that gun in the first place. It wasn’t that Baron had the right to shoot him. He shouldn’t have come to rob the place at all; that would have saved him much easier and much more rightly than killing a man.
But for a man like Baron Euler, killing a man wasn’t much of a problem in the first place. He’d been killing since he was Jodie’s age. Younger, even. This was just one more.
But there was something I noticed, as his arm squeezed around me, holding me and holding the reins as he turned and fired another shot behind us.
His hand couldn’t have been more carefully positioned on my body. Like he was perfectly comfortable giving me the lewdest look I’d ever seen on a man’s face, and he was comfortable shooting at other men, but he was trying to keep my sensibilities in mind. I shivered and pressed my hands hard against my ears and prayed to God that it would all be over soon.
Then, as suddenly as the thought had entered my mind, my prayer was answered. Euler turned. I heard the sound of something scraping on leather, and knew instinctively what it was. His other arm wrapped around my waist. I tried not to think how much I enjoyed the feeling of his arms wrapped around me. Tried not to think how I didn’t have much longer to meet a man, and how unlikely it was that I’d meet any man as handsome as the one with whom I shared a saddle.
The ride was hard. I didn’t have my feet in the stirrups, either, so in addition to being a hard ride, it was a bumpy one. One I didn’t enjoy. I enjoyed it less when I realized what all the jumping and jostling was doing to my bottom, and what my bottom was rubbing up against. It was hard and stiff, and I knew it wasn’t a pistol. It was too thick and too soft and positioned all wrong. I put it out of my mind.
But apparently, my mind wasn’t ready to be put out of it. I was a Christian woman, and raised to think of impure thoughts as something better avoided, but it didn’t mean that I was a fool, either. I knew what men and women did together.
Images flashed in my mind. Inappropriate didn’t begin to describe them. In the back of my mind, unwilled, the thought came to me that a man like Baron Euler probably knew a little bit more than just how to use a gun. My body pressed itself back against him. He hissed, and I realized what I’d done and pulled away again. I wasn’t interested, I told myself.
And this time, I hoped, I would make myself believe it. I had to. Because if I didn’t, then I was afraid it wasn’t going to be a long time before I asked to find out exactly how much he had to teach.
The look I had seen in Baron Euler’s eyes, when he looked me over from my head to my toes and back up again, he didn’t look like he would hesitate to try his hand at teaching me.
I craned my neck to see behind us. Town, such as it was, disappeared behind us. There was a cloud of dust, and I imagined that somewhere inside it, there were men riding after.
But I’d been in that town plenty of times, and I knew that nobody wanted to be the one to get himself shot, not even on my account. And eventually, they’d give up and turn back, and then I’d be the one who was there, all alone.
I thought about Jodie, sitting there bleeding all over himself. He’d been knocked on his bottom before. It would happen again. I hoped I’d be there to see it when it did.
But my gut told me that this was a one-way trip, and my gut, as it happened, as right.
Four
I don’t know how far we got. I stopped trying to figure it out when we made it out further to the west than the farm was to the north. That was twelve miles. And we didn’t stop until full dark had risen. But at the very least, we stopped running the poor horse ragged. Eventually. Her flanks heaved under my heels and she walked exactly as slow as Euler let her.
“You can’t be Baron Euler, though,” I said.
“You told me that already,” he said. “How’s that, you figure?”
“Well, Euler is…” I paused. “I saw a poster. You don’t look anything like that.”
He laughed. It was full and I could feel his
belly, as flat and hard as it was, shaking with the force of it. “You put a lot of faith in those things, huh?”
“What else am I supposed to think?”
“Think what you like.”
“He’s…” I realized that I was about to say ugly. I wasn’t sure whether I would be more offensive with the accusation, or forward, with the implication that this man certainly wasn’t ugly.
Anything but. So I shut my mouth, instead, and he laughed behind me, his hands digging into my hips as his arms tried to hold himself still and found a body in the way. I pretended not to like it, because only a harlot would do anything else. At least, that was what I thought at the time. I don’t know what to think, now.
“He’s what? Scarred up?”
He offered me a way out of my own mistake, and I took it without a second thought.
“Yes.”
“And I’m not. Is that right?”
“That’s right,” I agreed.
“Where do you figure they got all their information?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you think that Baron Euler, grande bandito, sat down to have someone draw a portrait of him?”
I said nothing. He was right.
“Nobody would. Of course you don’t think that. So someone told the warrant office what they thought I looked like, and then they drew a picture, showed it to the guy, and he said, yeah, like that.”
“They were wrong?”
“Who says the drawing wasn’t exactly what they wanted? Exactly what I wanted?”
The way he put emphasis on the word made me realize that he wasn’t making an idle question at all. He was making a suggestion, and the suggestion was obvious. He’d done it himself.
Or maybe it wasn’t Euler himself, but a confederate of his. In the end, someone else had described the picture, and they’d put out an inaccurate drawing. Eventually, maybe, someone would suggest that the picture was an inaccurate one. But that would be after the wrong picture was already sent out and seen by dozens, or hundreds of people.
