The Messenger

by Bill Brooks

  There was nothing quite like shedding the blood of other men that gave Gypsy Davy and his concubine, Belle Moon, that certain tingle of exotic loftiness and made them feel like little gods.

  “You know the meanest trick I think we pulled,” said Davy, closing his eyes there on the large bed.

  “Hmmm?”

  “Wiring that Pinkerton to the fence post and leaving him there for the creatures to get at.”

  “It was pretty mean, wasn’t it? How you reckon he died . . . starvation, thirst, eaten up by insects, wolves, or maybe even struck by lightning?”

  Davy shook his head.

  “Whatever it was killed him, it was not a slow or easy death, eh? Did you like it, having him chase you through the bush, brazen and naked, knowing he must have thought he was about to catch the brass ring?”

  “Oh, dear, yes. It was a clever idea, I must admit. Naughty, too, but admit it . . . you were just a wee bit jealous knowing another man’s eyes were seeing me thus.” She lifted above him like a she cat, naked and slim and brown.

  “I imagine his bones dangle still and someone will come along and wonder how it was a man came to be wired to a fence post in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Someone will tell the story and it will grow and grow. They will read the note pinned to his shirt signed with your name and it will become legend.”

  “Thinking it was me . . . Gypsy Davy . . . who’d been wired to that post.”

  “The law will have stopped looking for you,” Belle said.

  “And we’ll walk into that bank and out again with bags of money and some might even recognize ol’ Davy and say . . . ‘He’s risen like Jesus, from the dead’ . . . and be in awe and wonder.”

  And the rain fell outside their window, but there wasn’t any gloom in their hearts, thinking about robbing that big stone bank with all the windows.

  Chapter Nineteen

  One came by train, the other by stage.

  It was hard to miss a black man nearly seven feet tall wearing leather britches with Liberty dimes sewn down the sides of the legs. He stepped off the chuffing train and through the cloud of steam and stood there like a dark giant looking about. His mood was not fearsome, but his countenance was. Others de-boarding and boarding the train gave him considerable berth. Men averted their eyes when his fell upon them and women nearly fainted from the sight of him.

  He carried a brass-fitted Henry rifle he kept well-oiled inside a fringed and beaded scabbard and wore a brace of pistols crossed around his waist, butts forward. In his pocket was a telegram from Gypsy Davy of which the big man known back in the pistol barrel of Oklahoma Territory as Blackbird had memorized the few words:

  Need a man for a job. Big pay. Come quick if

  interested. R.S.V.P.

  G. Davy, Cheyenne, WT

  Already he missed his Osage wife, Jane Two Ponies, but not so much the brood of kids that clamored like the wild little things they were. It was good for a man to get away from all that domestic uproar—especially one who was of a solitary mind and liked his liquor neat and his women silent.

  He’d let his hair grow so long he’d had Jane Two Ponies weave it into a rope that fell from under his sweat-stained hat and down the length of his wide back. He made sure he’d not lose the hat by securing it with a stampede string. If you ever lost a hat to the Oklahoma wind, he told Jane, you’ll know why I wear this string.

  He had not seen Davy in years and the telegram came as a surprise. Now and then he’d read about Davy’s exploits in the Police Gazette or Harper’s Weekly. Blackbird prided himself in his ability to read and kept newsprint pasted up everywhere including the two-hole outhouse that had a half moon cut in the door to allow reading light to fall in.

  The other striking thing about Blackbird was his eyes: they were a soft gray that looked like gleaming marbles. He figured he got those eyes from somewhere away back when white blood mixed with an ancestor. He did not care much for white men in general, but preferred his own kind or Indians.

  The stationmaster said to the porter: “That fellow was to fall into a river with all that hardware he’d drown straight off.”

  “Looks to me like he’d kill the water fust,” the porter replied, privately wishing he was as big and bold as the giant black fellow who stood like a freeborn man upon the station’s platform.

  When the telegram had arrived, Blackbird was hoeing weeds and sweat dripped into his eyes and he was miserable. The telegram had been a godsend of sorts.

  “Where you off to this time?” Jane Two Ponies had asked him when she saw the look of hope light up his gray eyes.

  “Where I got to be to feed you and these kids,” he had told her, quickly gathering the tools of his trade—the rifle and pistols, bullets and gun belts.

  She had already lost two husbands to stormy circumstances—one drowned to death by a pair of drunken cowboys and the other in a fire of uncertain origin. Out of them has come the passel of kids who played most days in the dirt yard or swam naked in a cattle pond, and not a one of them was Blackbird’s progeny, but it did not cause him to love them any less or feel any less responsible for feeding them than if they had sprung from his own loins.

  “I always worry when you go,” she’d said that day.

  “Hell, you ought not. Even if I wasn’t going, I could fall off the porch and break my neck, or some old fool could ride by and shoot me for the sport. Such are the ways of life, my little peach.” It was a stark reminder to her of the two husbands she’d already lost.

  She and the youngsters reluctantly carried him to the train station in a buckboard.

  “If I ain’t back by September, go on and find you a new husband, ’cause it means something bad’s happened to me. Otherwise, I’ll be back sometime before the corn comes ripe. Can’t be nothing shy of a bullet goin’ to keep me from coming back to you.”

  “I wait for you,” she said.

  So now he was in Cheyenne, looking for Gypsy Davy whilst everyone else was looking at him.

  “I ain’t no damn’ freak,” he said to stationmaster and porter. “So stop staring at me.”

  “Yes, sir,” they replied in unison.

  “I’m just goin’ to settle on this bench and wait for my friend to show up.”

  “Yes, sir. Sit long as you want,” said the porter.

  “I will.”

  Across the way from the stage line office, lined up in a row, cheek to jowl, stood a hotel, a saloon, a blacksmith shop, a hardware store, a gunsmith, a dentist office, a druggist.

  I could stand me a glass of hooch.

  Then, while he was contemplating a stroll across the way, in rolled the stage. He sat watching people getting out of it from inside and off the top like fleas leaving a scalded dog, and one of those fleas he recognized as Little Dick Longwinter because Little Dick Longwinter was a hard body to miss with that wine-stain that looked like a map of Europe all over the one side of his face. That as well as the fact that he stood just under five feet tall and had a hump on his back that caused him to look something like a baby buffalo in that moth-eaten buffalo coat he wore summer and winter.

  Little Dick’s true last name was lost to memory, but he called himself Longwinter because, as he was quick to explain to anyone who cared to listen: “I come close to freezing to death twice up in those high mountains in Colorado, trapped by blizzards so’s I can’t ever get warm again . . . not truly. You ever come near to death from freezing, you’ll understand.”

  Blackbird whistled and Little Dick turned to the sound to discover its source. He trudged over, carrying a knapsack and a gun nearly as long as he was tall—a custom-made German model with which he claimed he could hit a target at half a mile.

  “Nobody can see that far,” Blackbird had said the first time Little Dick had made his claim, “much less hit anything that far. You’d have to be mighty lucky, Little Dick, and you don’t look so lucky to me.”

  But Little Dick had showed him. He had blown up a prairie dog just minding
its own business, eating some wildflowers—bluebells, Little Dick had said they were.

  “What you doing here?” Little Dick said, approaching Blackbird on a bench by himself in front of the stationmaster’s window.

  “I’m waiting for Gypsy Davy to show.”

  Little Dick set down his knapsack but not his rifle. He did not trust anyone.

  “Me, too. Got a telegram says he has big work for me.” Little Dick pulled the telegram from somewhere within his moth-eaten curly coat and Blackbird pulled his, too.

  “I guess Gypsy must have something big up his sleeve for him to summon us both,” Little Dick said.

  “Can’t be nothing too small,” Blackbird said.

  “Man sure as hell needs work when he can get it.”

  “This man sure does.”

  “Got expenses.”

  “Got all them kids to feed.”

  “Whores, here,” Little Dick said proudly. “Don’t want no wife nor kids, whores do me just fine.”

  “What’s wrong with you? You got the shakes all over.”

  “It’s my blood craving the dope,” Little Dick said. “I got in the habit. I got to find me a dope den or I’ll shake apart.”

  “I’ve heard of dope fiends,” Blackbird said. “Knew one or two down in New Orleans. Musicians mostly. Said the dope made ’em play better.”

  “The dope makes everything better, but it’s a bad habit to take up. Won’t let you go. Got to keep feeding it or else it will shake you to pieces. I run out of cocaine pills halfway here. You try and find cocaine pills in this wilderness. Ha! Good luck with that. But this looks like a town might have a dope den or two. Usually in the China section of town is where I find the best ones. You know where the China section is?”

  Blackbird shook his head.

  “Just got here myself. Don’t know where nothing is except what’s across the street.”

  Little Dick turned and looked.

  “Got to be a dope den somewheres. You mind watching my knapsack till I get back.”

  “What if Gypsy Davy comes and you ain’t here?”

  “Tell him to wait.”

  “He might not.”

  “Hell with him then. Let him do his own shooting.”

  “Go on then.”

  Little Dick was already headed across the street.

  Another hour passed and Blackbird kept thinking on that glass of hooch. He favored Kentucky bourbon best. His people were originally from Kentucky. Slaves till the war happened and Lincoln said they could all leave and most of them did—some going to Chicago and others to New York. But what his daddy did was join the Union Army to go fight Indians on the plains as a Buffalo Soldier and got himself shot several times and carried to his eventual grave a stone arrowhead in his leg bone that caused him to limp and moan when the weather turned one way or the other.

  Blackbird rose to his feet and stood, tall and straight as a chinaberry tree. Then, remembering, he picked up Little Dick’s knapsack and his own Henry rifle and crossed the street and entered the first saloon—The Lazy Sue—and ordered himself a glass of hooch. He sipped it slowly while those around him stared at the sheer size of the man, and stared, too, at those coin-fringed leather britches nobody had ever seen the likes of. And when he finished the first whiskey, he ordered another, figuring if the first one was good, the second should be better, and, by God, it surely was. The liquor settled into his blood like little hot coals.

  “You want a black whore?” the barkeep asked. “I know where you can get one.”

  “I’m a married fool with ten kids,” Blackbird said.

  “Well, lots of men who visit whores are married,” the barkeep said.

  “No, suh. I’m loyal to my Jane. I come home with another woman’s scent on me, she’d take a hoe to me and feed my parts to the hogs.”

  “I never served liquor to a man tall as you.”

  “Lots of men can say that.”

  It was a conversation that wasn’t ever meant to go anywhere so Blackbird let it die then and there, finished his drink, and walked back across the street again.

  Little Dick Longwinter sat on the bench, his head lolled down.

  “You find you a dope den?” Blackbird said.

  Little Dick raised his head, his eyes were dreamy.

  “Yes, I did, thank you very much.”

  “Your eyes is as red as garnets.”

  Little Dick pointed a lazy finger.

  “Chinatown is right up that way.”

  “You still think you can hit something half a mile off?”

  A sloppy grin besmirched Little Dick’s face, parting his reddish whiskers as if a knife had laid open a place where his mouth could fit in.

  “I shoot better when I’m doped up.”

  Blackbird doubted very seriously whether a man juiced up could even hit himself in the foot with a hammer that way. But he hadn’t come all that long way to argue the shooting skills of Little Dick Longwinter, doped or otherwise.

  They heard a voice beside them and it was Gypsy Davy, having sneaked up on them like a shadow. The man came and went like a ghost. Always had, always would.

  “Welcome, boys, to the neighborhood.”

  Chapter Twenty

  This here looks like the Queen of Sheba’s place,” Little Dick Longwinter said when he entered the hotel suite with its Brussels carpets and French furnishings, the ceiling to floor wine-colored drapes, and the carved sideboard with lead-cut crystal decanters of amber liquors.

  “It’s just a taste of what you all can have, too,” Gypsy Davy said, removing his hat and gloves.

  Blackbird had to duck his head to enter the room and again to avoid banging it into the chandelier hanging from the ceiling.

  “Them diamonds?” he said questioningly, for he had only once before been in a room with a crystal chandelier—a Texas whorehouse when he was a drover in his long ago youth. The madam had said they were diamonds and being youthful and drunk he believed her.

  “Them’s crystals,” Gypsy said. “All the way from Germany or some such. You boys have a seat. What can I get you to warsh down the dust?”

  Little Dick said he’d have a whiskey and Blackbird said: “I always admired champagne.”

  “Then that’s what it shall be,” Davy said, and began to pour a round of drinks from a sidebar. Then Belle entered from the adjoining boudoir dressed in a red as blood silk wrap and looking lovely as a princess, and the boys slung off their hats and stood at her entrance like two fine gentlemen. She smiled so brightly the world didn’t need a sun.

  “Boys, this is Belle . . . my traveling companion and back-up gun. Belle, these are the boys I told you about . . . the tall one is Blackbird and the other is Little Dick. Our new gang.”

  “I guess I could have figured out which of you was which,” Belle said.

  Little Dick shuffled his feet, feeling uncomfortable in the presence of so fine a woman because he was not used to any kind of woman who was not by current profession a sporting gal. He felt overly warm inside his heavy coat but he couldn’t say if it was the heat of day or the heat of a suddenly arisen passion.

  She looked him over carefully and he felt all flushed because of the stain on his face, thinking she was probably put off looking at a man who had been marred at birth and had a hump and stood so short. But she smiled graciously and extended her hand and he wasn’t sure if he should shake it or kiss the knuckles, so he did both.

  “Why, ain’t you quite the gent,” she said in a haughty sort of teasing way, and he blushed all the more so that the good side of his face nearly matched its crimson twin.

  Then she offered her small delicate white hand to Blackbird and his large hand engulfed hers. She was inwardly mightily impressed at his overall size and wondered if other parts of him matched the rest.

  “Pleased to meet you,” he said in a deep baritone voice.

  Both men stood until Belle seated herself next to Davy before taking their own seats in two chairs upholstered with white b
rocade cloth and small carved arms trimmed in gold leaf.

  “I got me a plan,” Gypsy said. “And I need two Turks such as you to help me pull it off.”

  “Go on with it,” Blackbird said. “I din’t come all this way to steal pennies from a dead man’s eyes.”

  Gypsy leaned forward, his long hair hanging loosely around his shoulders like a woman’s, his eyes all sparkles. Little Dick thought Davy as handsome as any actor—like that John Wilkes Booth fellow who shot old Abe Lincoln.

  “There is a big ol’ stone bank in this town and I aim to hit it,” Davy continued. “I figure there’s at least twenty or thirty thousand dollars sitting in it waiting to be stolen and I aim to steal it. Could even be more . . . can’t say for certain since I never robbed no banks before.”

  “I thought your specialty was as a stage and train robber,” Little Dick interjected.

  Blackbird remained quiet as a sphinx. He had learned it paid to listen when white men talked of evil things. He hadn’t come all this way to offer opinions. Let that be for other men. What he did best, he reckoned, didn’t have to do with talk but with action. He caught Belle stealing glances at him as Gypsy and Little Dick conferred on matters at hand.

  I could get into trouble easily enough with that one, he thought, and it won’t be from lack of wanting to go the straight and narrow. But the thought of his wrathful Indian wife, Jane, sent a slight chill through his blood. He believed an Indian woman would cut your throat and let you bleed out while she eats her supper if you give her reason to do it.

  “I used to rob stages and trains,” Gypsy replied to Little Dick’s question. “But I have come to conclude that the real money is in banks and banks don’t have nothing pulling them down a highway like a stage or train does. It is always risky robbing a moving thing, and always uncertain as to what the payload might be. I once robbed a stage that didn’t have nothing on it but crates of house cats a fellow was taking to sell the whores.”

  “House cats!” Little Dick said incredulously.

  Davy nodded and leaned forward farther still, like a leashed dog straining to get at a meat bone.