A Disgrace to the Badge

by Ed Gorman

  And the darkness; oh, yes, the darkness.

  "You ever read anything by Louisa May Alcott?" Lucy asked.

  "No."

  "I'm reading this book by her now. It's real good, Hawes, you should read it sometime."

  "Maybe I will."

  That was another thing he liked about Lucy. Where most of the girls were ignorant, Lucy had gone through fourth grade before running away, and had learned to read. Hawes could carry on a good conversation with her and he appreciated that. Of course, she was older too, twenty-five or so, and that also made a difference.

  They fell into silence again.

  After awhile he rolled over and kissed her.

  She said, "Just a minute."

  She stubbed her cigarette out and then rolled back to him and then they got down to it seriously.

  The fear was there as always—could he actually do it and do it right without humiliating himself?—but tonight he had no trouble.

  He was good and hard and he got into her with no trouble and she responded as if she really gave a damn about him, and then he climaxed and collapsed next to her, his breath heaving in the darkness, feeling pretty damn good about himself as a man again.

  She didn't say anything for a long time there in the wind and rain and darkness, smoking a cigarette again, and then she said, "That's why she left you, isn't it?"

  "Huh?"

  "Your wife. Why she left you."

  "I'm not following you." But he was in fact following her and he sensed that she was going to say something he didn't want to hear.

  "That time you got drunk up here in the room."

  "Yeah? What about it?"

  "You told me about your wife leaving you."

  "So?"

  "But you wouldn't tell me why she left you. You just kept saying 'She had a good reason, I guess.' Well, I finally figured out what that reason is."

  He was silent for a time again, and so was she.

  Obviously she could sense that she'd spooked him and now she was feeling bad about it. "I shouldn't have said anything, Hawes. I'm sorry."

  "It's all right."

  He was feeling the loneliness again. He wanted to cry but he wasn't a man given to tears.

  "Me and my big mouth," Lucy said, lighting another cigarette.

  In the flash of flame, he could see her face. Soft, freckled, eyes the blue of a spring sky.

  They lay in silence a long time.

  She said, "You angry at me, Hawes?"

  "No."

  "I'm sorry I said anything."

  "I know."

  "I mean, it doesn't bother me. The way you are."

  "I know."

  "It's kind of funny, even."

  "It isn't funny to me."

  And it hadn't been funny to his wife, Sara, either. Once she figured out the pattern, she'd left him immediately.

  "How'd you figure it out?" he asked.

  "I just started keeping track."

  "Oh."

  "But I won't tell anybody. I mean, if that's what's bothering you.

  "I appreciate it. You keeping it to yourself, I mean."

  "You can't help the way you are."

  "No; no, I guess I can't."

  He thought of how angry and disgusted his wife Sara had been when she'd finally understood that he was impotent all the time except for the night before a hanging. Only then could he become fully a man.

  The snap of the trap door; the snap of the neck. And then extinction. Blackness; utter, eternal blackness. And Hawes controlling it all.

  In the wind and darkness, she said, "You ever think about how it'll be for you personally?"

  "How what'll be?"

  "Death."

  "Yeah; I guess so."

  "You think there're angels?"

  "No."

  "You think there's a heaven?"

  "No."

  "You think there's a God?"

  "No."

  She took a long drag on her cigarette. "Neither do I, Hawes. But I sure wish I did."

  From down the hall, Hawes could hear a man laughing, then a woman joining in. The player piano downstairs was going again.

  "Would you just hold me?" Hawes said.

  "What?"

  "Just hold me in your arms."

  "Sure."

  "Real tight."

  "All right."

  She stubbed out her cigarette and then rolled back to him.

  She took him in her arms with surprising tenderness, and held him to her, her soft breasts warm against his chest, and then she said, "Sometimes, I think you're my little boy, Hawes. You know that?"

  But Hawes wasn't paying attention; he was listening to the chill rain on the dark wind, and the lonely frantic laughter down the hall.

  The wind grew louder then, and Lucy fell silent, just holding him tighter; tighter.

  On Roy Rogers

  "You should have seen Elmer Kelton, Doc Sonnichsen, and others bidding against one another for an autographed picture of Roy Rogers in Fort Worth (the WWA convention). It went for something like fifty dollars, outpulling everything autographed by figures still living."

  from a letter by Loren D. Estleman to the author

  He was never quite heroic, Roy wasn't, not in the way of Gary Cooper or Randolph Scott, and maybe that's why we liked him so much. He was sort of an older brother, and fallible in the ways older brothers can sometimes be, and so even if he didn't have a chiseled face or a mean eye, he was easier to like and identify with than remote figures such as Coop or Randy.

  Plus, he was a hell of a lot of fun.

  A few weeks ago one of my favorite Rogers movies showed up on the Christian Broadcasting Network, with Roy and Dale introducing it and giving us show-biz anecdotes about how it came to be made. The title of the film is In Old Caliente and it contains all the usual singing-cowboy unlikelihoods and even adds a few.

  There is a scene where Roy and Gabby are imprisoned while outside the bars a festive Spanish party goes on. What makes Roy and Gabby's circumstances even worse is that in the morning they are to be hung. By the neck. Until dead.

  Now I don't know about you, but if that were to be my fate I'd probably be bitterly pacing off the size of my cell, cursing my captors and worrying about how to get out of there.

  Not Roy. He sang a song. Not just a few bars but the whole thing. And it wasn't any Negro spiritual bemoaning the troubles-I've-seen. This was a Dick Powell musical type of number cast in the Tin Pan Alley Mexican mode. Roy, the night before he was to be hung, seemed to be having himself one hell of a good time.

  What's remarkable about the Republic cycle of Rogers pictures is their style. Roy isn't a man's idea of a cowboy; he's a boy's idea of a cowboy and as such he works swell. He'd never crush a man's skull but he would dispatch him with a nice clean shot to the jaw; he'd never slip into any kind of paralyzing melancholy the way Coop sometimes seemed to—he'd take quick swift action; and he'd never lust after any of the dozens of beautiful Republic starlets but only desire them in the ways of western knighthood, doffing his fancy hat and "ma'am"ing them to death.

  They hold up well today and maybe that's the most surprising thing of all, these films. The Rogers movies that were essentially crime movies still work as action pulp only a step or two down from Black Mask at its best and the western historicals are occasionally even superior to their Zane Grey origins, the Texas Ranger cycle being an exceptionally good fusion of history and Hollywood.

  Then there was Gabby.

  Even when I was five and six and seven I knew instinctively that Gabby Hayes was the Olivier of sidekicks and that all the Fuzzy St. Johns and Pat Buttrams were only clumsy imitators. The reason for Gabby's superiority was simple. He didn't do comedy. He did Mark Twain—the ultimate misanthrope. Gabby had two modes—pissing and moaning. Sometimes he pissed and moaned in the same sentence. Usually that involved "females" and what a shoddy imitation of real human beings they were.

  Dale Evans, on the other hand, remains elusive even seen to
day. In some of the films, especially those in which she plays a rich Eastern girl come west to learn humility, she seems at moments almost as cranky as Gabby. But there was a gentle side to her, too, and in many of the production numbers where she sang and danced she was a genuine beauty of great poise and real talent.

  Over the past twenty years several books have been published about western movies. Invariably, each takes its turn chastising the singing cowboys for being silly and inauthentic. In one book, the author goes into something resembling a seizure over how "gaudy" the costumes were.

  But you know what? I don't give a damn about any of it. Roy and Dale and Gabby are good enough for any universe I ever inhabit. They appeared in some very good stories, the Sons of the Pioneers can still sing "Ghost Riders in the Sky" in a way that gives me chills, and any group of people who helped keep Roy Barcroft employed for three decades is all right with me.

  People my age owe the Rogerses and Gabby (and, all right, Trigger, too) a debt we can't possibly repay because they're the sort of friends you take with you on into the cosmos, the Saturday afternoon B movies of the 1940s reverberating forever down the time lines.

  About the Author

  In a survey of suspense authors, the San Diego Union called Ed Gorman "One of today's best crime writers." Gorman has written such novels as The Night Remembers and The Autumn Dead. He has won the Shamus award and been nominated for both the Edgar and the Anthony awards.

  More by Ed Gorman

  Marshal Ben Tully arrives in Pine City to find a double tragedy waiting for him: a lynch mob has taken a suspected murderer out of Tully's jail and hanged him—and the murder victim is Tully's wife!

  Even though he's almost overwhelmed with grief, Tully's instincts as a lawman take over when he uncovers evidence that the man who was lynched may not be the one who killed his wife. It seems that nearly everyone in Pine City has secrets they don't want exposed, and the identity of Kate Tully's murderer is one of them. Ben Tully's investigation plunges him into a web of deceit, lust, and more murder as he risks his life to discover the truth about his wife's death!

  In LYNCHED, master storyteller Ed Gorman has written another compelling Western mystery full of action and suspense. AMAZON LINK

  Ray Coyle hadn't been a real gunfighter for ten years, and that was the way he liked it. He would have been content to live out his life as a performer in a Wild West show. But then he got the news that his son was dead, killed in suspicious circumstances, and so Coyle set out to discover the truth. Coopersville was a town full of secrets, most of them ugly. Brutal ex-convict Harry Winston knows those secrets, many of them involving the wealthy Trevor family. And Harry wants not only money but also revenge on the Trevors. His plans are complicated by the arrival of Ray Coyle, who has a score of his own to settle with one of the Trevors . . . and for anybody to get what they want, blood will have to be spilled. Master storyteller Ed Gorman spins a dark, compelling tale of greed, lust, and murder in TROUBLE MAN, one of the best Western noir novels ever written, now available again from Rough Edges Press. Powerful, tragic, and deeply compassionate, Gorman's critically acclaimed stories and novels have made him one of today's leading authors of Western, crime, suspense, and horror fiction. Amazon Link

  VENDETTA is an off kilter revenge novel; off kilter because it moves in unusual and unexpected ways (i. e. it isn’t necessarily a gun down and it is character rather than action driven). Joan Grieves’ father, Noah, is killed in a Dryden, Colorado bank by a man named Tom Rattigan. Noah Grieves was a wash out; he failed at ranching and mining, and when Rattigan offered him a job he took it. Unfortunately the paycheck came with a frame for embezzlement, and when Noah is released from prison he wants his pound of flesh. Noah’s death is the beginning, but the story is more about Joan Grieves—her journey for revenge—her surrogate parent Father Pete Madsen (who is the closest thing to a protagonist the story has), Tom Rattigan, Dryden’s police chief Walter Petty and Walter’s wife Caroline. In the end, the story is more about betrayal than revenge and it is very difficult to separate the good from the bad. VENDETTA is a beautifully complicated novel hiding in the skin of simplicity. The surface story—a father and then daughter seeking revenge—is simple, but the details, the unravelling of a town’s secrets and the exposure of the characters’ strengths and, more often, weaknesses is complicated and insightful. None of the characters are wholly bad, and none are wholly good. As an example one of the “bad” characters has a daughter with a port-wine stain birth mark on her face, and the love and sympathy he displays for his child is remarkable. The fun of the story is the revelation of who actually is the antagonist; basically the most miserable deceitful man in town (and it is something of a surprise when he is revealed). It is a race to the worst, but the characters’ motives are never dark and murky and are always explained and believable. This isn’t to say it is a dark story, but instead it is a story about human weakness, and more importantly redemption. Amazon Link

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