by Tim Bryant
I walked by the building again on my way back to the Black Elephant, and I could see Gentleman Jack, the Jack Rabbit, standing next to my unlucky friend Leon, jotting down notes in a little brown book. Talking to the photographer, he leaned over and rubbed on Leon’s face. That’s when it hit me that he was truly good and dead, for Leon would have never allowed such a thing. Not that I had any tears to give him. He hadn’t been like a brother to me. Truth is, he had tried to kill me on one occasion, and I couldn’t help seeing his current predicament at least partially as being well deserved.
As I walked along Main Street and made my turn on Fourth, I couldn’t help shaking the feeling that the tables had turned and it was now me that was being followed. I watched in the glass windows of the passing businesses. I saw nothing but my own reflection, looking thinner and older and maybe a bit more worried than expected.
CHAPTER THREE
“Wilkie John,” Gentleman Jack said. “Must it be both? Why can it not be Wilkie? Or John? You can even pick.”
We were sitting at the third blackjack table on a slow Tuesday night, which meant the dealer was at the bar chatting up one of the girls and we were sitting alone. My appearance at the table had been requested by the Jack Rabbit himself, earlier in the afternoon. I had been beside myself since then, standing in front of the mirror in Madam Pearlie’s room, practicing answers to every question I could think up. Now, I was sitting three feet away from the man, he was looking me dead in the eye, and all my cool had suddenly evaporated.
“I’ve always just been called Wilkie John,” I said.
That actually wasn’t true at all. I had been called all kinds of things. Wilkie. Will. Wilkes. John. Johnny. Liquorish. Whiskey. I was in the Texas Panhandle News under the name John Liquorman and Whiskey John, so Wilkie John would do just fine, thank you. I didn’t see what the big problem was.
“Okay, Willie Boy,” Jack said, “you expect me to believe you did not come into town with the coach from Mobeetie, the same coach your good friend Leon Thaw showed up dead in.”
I had never been called Willie Boy, and I didn’t like it at all. On the other hand, part of me was fascinated by this man, and his calm manner worked to keep my hot head in check.
“That man is no friend of mine,” I said.
If I hoped to trick the system, he was having none of it.
“Willie, I’m willing to give you that one. You know why?” He leaned across the table and lowered his voice from steady, quiet lilt to full whisper. “I don’t guess good friends put bullets in each other’s noggins, do they?”
So it turned out that the derby hat was tilting because some part of the top of Leon Thaw’s head had been taken off with a bullet. I only knew two things: One, Leon was more the cattleman’s hat type. Two, it hadn’t been me that pulled that particular trigger. Last time I saw Leon, he was fully intact and talking back.
“The two drovers on the drive were located. One was dead and buried just outside Meridian. Fella named Ira Lee Liquorish, I believe it was. Now ain’t that a peculiar thing?”
I was a balloon and he was a pin.
“The cook, from what I can tell, seems to have died before you even hit Wichita Falls. Why, it’s a wonder even two of you survived.”
I wasn’t sure if he was amused by the story he was unfolding or by my reaction to it. Either way, I didn’t like the way he was smiling at me. I figured by the way he was telling it that Simeon Payne had survived and was back in Wichita Falls. That made some sense, because last I had heard from him, he was turning back and heading for home. Still, I could scarcely imagine Simeon hanging around in Wichita Falls.
Things had already been going south for the cattle drive when we reached that damned spot in the trail. Our cook, a Mexican named Jacobo, had come down with food poisoning just days out of Mobeetie. Tainted chili, he said. The whole bunch was thrown out. Rivers of chili. Jacobo talked about going back over the border to his family, but he needed the dinero.
“I will go on to Wichita Falls and see,” he said. “If I’m better then, I continue with you. If I’m not so well, we find a new cook, I collect my pay and get out of your way.”
We even discussed turning the whole drive back to Mobeetie. How things might have changed if we had. It all came down to Ira Lee and Simeon. The Jefe and the Segundo. Ultimately, it was Ira Lee’s drive. They conferred and decided to push on for Wichita Falls.
“Jacobo will be fine by then,” Simeon said.
“If not, he’s right,” said Leon. “There’s bound to be cooks in Wichita Falls.”
On we went. You know, there are times in life when you have to make decisions. Sometimes it’s a fork in the road. Sometimes it’s a dancing partner. You choose one, and if it proves out, you become something you weren’t before. You’re a successful business man, or you’re the husband of the prettiest girl in town, or you’re a cattle driver. You choose wrong, you’re every sad son of a bitch drinking his life away in every bar and brothel between Boston and Austin. I was well aware of this. I was also aware that I was sitting in a brothel with a very bad hand of cards and a poker face that had just betrayed me.
“Ira Lee Liqourish was my big brother,” I said. “He was twenty years old.”
I didn’t feel like admitting to this was admitting to anything important to Gentleman Jack. Whether it was important to me wasn’t any of his business, and I couldn’t see how it was any link to the dead stage driver with the tilted derby.
“Let me ask you two more questions, Willie Boy.”
It seemed like as good a time as any to remind him.
“Wilkie John Liquorish,” I said.
He kicked his chair back at an angle and rested one big black boot on the chair next to me.
“If I were to prove that a certain man pulled the trigger that shot the bullet that took our friend Leon Thaw’s head off,” he said, “do you think that man ought to hang for his actions?”
I knew that old trick. I had seen the same approach play out in a courthouse in Mobeetie. If the man on trial said “no, that man shouldn’t hang,” it made him look either morally suspect or just plain guilty. If he said, “yes, that man should hang,” he was tossing the dice on his own mortality. Not many men could do it with any air of confidence.
“Yes, that man should absolutely hang before sundown,” I said.
I don’t know if Gentleman Jack was expecting that response. His boot wiggled, but he kept his calm. I didn’t smile, but I didn’t cry either.
“That he should.”
He nodded and said it again. I looked him square in the eye and willed myself not to blink. After some looking back, his eyes moved down to the table, perhaps imagining the hand he was playing had become just a little less copacetic. If that was the case, I knew the feeling.
“And what if he killed fifty, sixty, more even. Men, women and children, free men and slaves, preachers and sinners alike? What might be due a culprit like that?”
That boggled the mind. I had once run into John Hardin in Gonzales, and even he couldn’t boast numbers like that. It seemed biblical.
“I suppose only Jehovah himself could do numbers like that, sir.”
Jack seemed satisfied enough with that.
“I suppose that’s right.”
He was stone cold and still, but his foot was twisting in its boot next to me, like it could barely keep from giving me a swift one in the side. It hurt my feelings that this most interesting and engaging man from New Orleans had taken such a strong disliking of me. I made note that I should do what I could to rectify it. I also thought it might be prudent to look into moving on out of town, even if I had developed a bit of an attachment to it.
CHAPTER FOUR
I had lived in Mobeetie long enough that some people called it my home. I never called it that. I was born in San Antone in ’64, the second child of Noemi de Salina Liquorish. Noemi had begun life inside the walls of the Alamo, just four days before Santa Anna’s army arrived. A Texian soldier had i
nvited her mother there, ironically enough, for safety reasons. She was released as an infant civilian noncombatant after the battle, along with my grandmother and two aunts. I never knew my father Henry, who came to Texas with the New Orleans Greys. Henry stuck around long enough to marry and pass the Liquorish name to Ira Lee and then me. He then died at the hands of Comanches on the ride home from Fort Phantom Hill, where he had gone to set up a refuge against those same Indians. Irony at work again.
Henry John Liquorish was a hero around our house. Hell, I thought he was a hero around the world until I went to school and found out nobody else had a clue who he was. By then, it was too late. The die was cast, and Henry was someone to measure myself against. A constant reminder of what I wasn’t. Tall, strong, heroic. And, to be fair, dead.
I stayed in San Antonio, getting a few years of schooling before I took a job as a photographer’s assistant. We took Rip Ford’s photograph after the War between the States, and we took Oliver Winchester’s too. Winchester, who might actually be responsible for more deaths than anyone south of heaven, had insisted on posing with one of his rifles on his shoulder, like he was just returning from battle or maybe a possum hunting expedition.
We took quite a few photographs of soldiers. Most of them were alive, even if they were missing a limb or two, but the first dead person I ever photographed was a Confederate soldier whose body had been returned from a Yankee grave in Ohio. The dirt had turned him just a shade or two lighter than Gentleman Jack, and his lips had tightened into a smile that came back to me when I viewed Leon Thaw in the store window.
“Apply more color to the cheekbones,” said the photographer, a man named Neely who came from South Carolina. “Comb his hair this way. Try doing it that way. Be careful. Don’t mess up his smile.”
I couldn’t see what the color did for the camera, but if I could make Neely think the guy looked alive again in some way, my job was done. More often, it seemed to give the appearance of an actor at a minstrel show.
Truth is, that dead man’s smile had followed me from that job in San Antone all the way to Mobeetie and Fort Worth. It hadn’t been the worst thing I had seen on that job though. Mangled boys my own age made me feel uneasy, as if I had something to answer for, but it was the dead babies that finally drove me to unemploy myself from Neely and look northwest.
There is something about a dead baby that turns on such lamentation inside of me, it became both a hindrance to the job and considerable embarrassment. When a cholera epidemic came to town, the coffin makers only rejoiced until it hit their own families. As for me, the line of tiny coffins was more than my constitution could stand. One morning, I didn’t go in to work. I liked the change so much, by the week’s end, I was on my way to Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was going to join a cattle drive.
“What makes you think those cattle have any need of you?” my mama said.
It was more out of a desire to keep me home than any concern for the cattle. My brother Ira Lee had already left, heading the same direction, and she wanted me around mostly to plow the tiny field behind our house and bring the handful of crops in. We didn’t have much—just enough vegetables for us and maybe a few of the women around us—but it was more work than she cared to do.
“Ira Lee can get me on a drive,” I said. “We might go up to Kansas.”
I promised I would send for her if we ever got there. I never made a more sincere promise. Next morning, I lit out before she was even awake, knowing goodbyes did her the way dead babies did me. I rode through the market full of people setting their goods out for the day, me, my Saddlebred, Roman, my Colt Sidehammer, and the clothes I had on, and I never glanced back. My San Antone days were behind me.
I had three greenbacks in my pocket, half of what I had saved from my photographer’s-assistant job. The other three lay on the kitchen table for mama to find, a last gratitude to her for raising Ira and me best she could in difficult circumstances.
On the days ahead, Roman was usually all I had to talk to, and we talked plenty. We discussed hillscapes and waterfalls, cold nights in the hills and various sounds we suspected to be either wolves or Indians working their way through the sticks around us. I cooked rabbit one night, rattlesnake another. Roman ate with me when there was food and starved quietly with me when there wasn’t. We crossed paths with a German family in a wagon drawn by two mules. They claimed to have land waiting for them somewhere on the Pecos River. It was a notion I didn’t put much stock in, but they were kind and let me have enough salt pork and biscuits to last a few meals.
I also crossed paths with a Kiowa Apache boy named Long Gun on his way to Fort Griffin, a place I had never heard of.
“It’s halfway between San Antonio and Indian Territory,” he said.
It was the general direction I was going, so I invited him to ride along.
“I’m going to be a scout for the Americans,” he said.
I had known Apaches in San Antonio. I had even helped photograph a few in their war dress. I wasn’t afraid of Long Gun, even if he did carry a rifle that was longer than I was. An Apache with such a gun would be a good companion on the trail.
“It’s called a Whitworth,” he said, holding it out on his palms for my inspection. “Made in Britain. Taken off a dead Confederate in Nacogdoches. It can hit a rabbit at five hundred yards.”
My plans for Amarillo were subverted in time, and I wound up going to Fort Griffin with my new companion. I don’t know how my life changed because of that impulsive decision, but, at the time, I was glad for the company. From what I could tell, Amarillo was north and west some distance from the fort, so I could move on and find Ira Lee in time. If I chose to.
“The United States Army settled the fort to protect white settlers from the Comanche,” Long Gun said. “I speak Apache, Comanche, Tonkawa, Spanish, and English. That should give me value.”
I could understand enough Spanish to follow the general idea of a conversation. I couldn’t speak it worth a damn. Long Gun taught me a few Apache words, but they were the kind of things that would stick in the mind for a while and then be gone when you reached back for them. Eeya meant to eat, deeya meant to go. For some reason, I remember those.
Between the salt pork and whatever critters we could kill, we ate well the rest of the way to Fort Griffin and got there on the seventh day after I left San Antonio. I entered Fort Griffin weary from traveling under the hot sun and sleeping on the hard ground. I was ready to join the U.S. Army and help fight off the Comanches if they would give me a bed to sleep on. That was to last about as long as my career in photography.
CHAPTER FIVE
I was sitting in my corner room upstairs at the Black Elephant talking with Sunny. It was a Sunday afternoon, which meant things were slow.
“I mailed myself here from Waterproof, Louisiana,” she repeated, lying across the end of my bed and tugging at one stocking and then the other. “People mail their kids by the Pony Express all the time. I just mailed myself.”
I had heard of the Pony Express, and I knew stagecoach lines criss-crossed east to west and north to south, but I had never heard of anyone mailing themselves anywhere.
“Waterproof, Louisiana?” I said.
All things being what they were, I would have given even odds she was putting me on.
“It’s on the Mississippi,” she said. “There were war boats coming down the river, banging and booming through the night. You couldn’t sleep for the racket. And the days were just as bad. The local battalion would fire on the boats till they drove them back upriver, then it would all start over again after nightfall.”
“Didn’t you have any family?” I said.
I wasn’t naive as all that. I knew more families that had been pulled apart by the war than not. Southern families, much like the South itself, pulled limb from limb by Union soldiers, by disease, by their own deeds.
“My parents were slaves,” she said. “When the Master saw that the war was coming, he sold my mother to a bigger plan
tation. Out of pure spite. Then, when the Union got to Waterproof, he freed my father. Freed all the workers and took a stagecoach west. Daddy, he didn’t know what to do with hisself. Last I saw of him, he was threatening to jump into a river he couldn’t swim out of. I didn’t want to say it, but, way I saw it, he was already there.”
There was a knock at the door, and I figured it was Madam Pearlie coming to find Sunny. Most likely a customer had come in requesting her. She had her regulars, colored folks and a few white ones too, who liked her smooth, caramel skin and the way her red hair worked against it. It wasn’t hard to see why she was one of the most popular girls in the house. I was saving up money for her too. Mostly I was saving up nerve.
“Wilkie?”
It was Pearlie. She knocked at the door again, and I reached out to pull it open. I hoped she wouldn’t be mad at Sunny for being there with me. Not because she would think I was sampling the merchandise, as she called it, but because I was keeping others from doing so.
“Sorry, Madam Pearlie,” I said.
Looming over her shoulder was Gentleman Jack. My first thought was that he had asked for Sunny’s company. It was the first time I ever considered socking him.
“Wilkie, Mr. Delaney here needs to speak with you for a moment,” Pearlie said.
He had a piece of paper in his hand, and he looked at it as if he was about to read a telegram. Sunny came up next to me and put her arm around me.
“Wilkie John Liquorman,” he said. “I am putting you under arrest for the murder of sixty-five men, women, and children, including one Leon Thaw who was the driver of a cattle drive for which you were employed, and over eight hundred head of cattle, all in and around Wichita Falls, Texas. The High Sheriff of Hell’s Half Acre being deceased and no Texas Rangers being available in the Acre, you are to be remanded into my care until such time as you will be tried for your transgressions. If you are found to be guilty, you will be hung by the neck until you have joined your victims in the Good Lord’s vengeful arms of death.”
