by Tim Bryant
It had to have been middle of the night out there in the desert too, an ironical fact that seemed to slip by our new companion. I hadn’t had any intention to stop and camp, due to the travel being easier at night and me wanting to get on into Fort Worth as soon as possible. He was beginning to make me reconsider though.
“I got out of bed and went down to the tracks wearing nothing but my nightshirt and slippers,” he continued. “It was wet as a beast in the rain. Ain’t that what Chaucer said?”
I looked at him like maybe he was a ghost and I was hearing things. What man from Acorn, Arkansas, riding along the Texas desert in the middle of the night, starts quoting Chaucer? He didn’t give any room for an answer, maybe thinking what kind of man riding alongside him in the Texas desert would know enough to give one.
“I got there not five minutes before I saw the headlamp on that engine come shining through the trees. I straddled the track just like you straddling that mule of yours and swung my lantern for all it was worth, just hoping it had the might to show itself to the engineer.”
By this point, I was trying not to care but was casually curious what would happen next, if only to get it over with and get some peace and quiet.
“I realized too late that I should’ve stood farther up the track,” he said. “The bridge was washed out not twenty foot behind me, which didn’t give me no room for error. When that engine came grinding toward me, sparks flying like July fourth, I thought I was a goner and the crew on the train did too. I kid you not, that damn thing come to a screeching halt no farther from me than you and your mule are right now.”
Considering I could have reached out my foot and given his horse a kick, I found that somewhat doubtful, but, like the impulse to follow through with that kick, I let it go.
“You rebuild the bridge in your long johns?” I said.
If part of me still doubted he was an actual physical being, his bark of a laugh made him all too real.
“Much to my chagrin, I was not suited up in long johns,” he said, “but yes, with the help of the engineer and his assistant, I did rebuild that bridge. I did something else while I was at it. I got myself a job with the railroad. I went back home for breakfast and told the wife, I was now the lead member of the section gang south of Acorn, Arkansas.”
For such a stroke of good fortune, he didn’t seem happy at all in the telling of it.
“Railroad’s a good job,” I said.
I had thought from time to time about a railroad job. What kid hadn’t?
“Far as I’m concerned, only good railroad job is me holding a six-shooter and the engineer throwing down bags of gold and bank notes.”
I turned to look at the fellow, trying to judge whether he was serious or what. He was dim enough to blend into the night. I wondered if I had fallen asleep and dreamed up the whole thing.
“You funning me?” I said.
He barked, and I knew again, he was real.
“I married a girl from Philadelphia who came west to be a teacher,” he said. “She lived in that house in Acorn with me for several months, but her daddy came and took her away. I know for a fact they come down this way, but I lost their track around Fort Worth. I’m starting to think they discovered me and changed course to throw me off. I been riding in circles out here ever since.”
I hawed Bird, and away she went. People don’t realize how fast a mule can run when it’s nudged along. The man rode along next to us, sometimes close enough to hear him talking, even though I couldn’t make out the words and didn’t try, and sometimes far enough out there that I thought maybe we’d lost him.
Soon enough, the sky began to lighten up to our right, which was where he’d been riding, and I couldn’t see any trace of him. Maybe he didn’t want to be seen. Maybe he had no interest in Fort Worth. I dozed off and on, and Bird kept about her business and didn’t tarry. Not long after, the whole incident had grown questionable in my mind, and I struck it up to lack of sleep or lack of food or maybe just a lack of anyone to talk to.
Had the man been the furrier? The mere thought made me seem crazy. Surely I had seen him shot down by my own hand. Only thing I was absolutely certain of, I missed Roman dreadfully.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Me and Bird entered Fort Worth from due south. That route brought me into the Texas & Pennsylvania Railway yard. Just over the tracks lay a small tent city. The only place I’d ever seen anything like it was in war photographs in the shop back in San Antonio. In those, army tents dotted the landscape as battalions gathered prior to battle. My background gave the sight there on the south side of Fort Worth an ominous feel.
“You dying, mister?”
The first words uttered to me upon arrival might have been an omen if I’d been paying more attention. I wasn’t thinking of how I must appear to the small boy standing just outside one of the first tents I rode up on. For an answer, I pulled the Colt .44 from its holster, silently poked it in the kid’s face and then shushed him with my finger. He turned tail and disappeared as I made my way down a long row of campsites, temporary homes of families who had come in on the train and were waiting to find jobs and more permanent lodging inside the city proper. Coming into town from that direction, I missed the route the coaches took into town. Because of this, the town rolled out slowly, block after block, until it seemed bigger than San Antonio, though it wasn’t. Third Street took me in a northeast direction, past a scatter of small clapboard houses, all either painted white or else left natural. Each block, the houses got bigger and closer together. Now and then, there was a hotel. I crossed Jones, which seemed to be a street of some significance, but decided to keep moving. I was intrigued. How long would the town continue to unfold? How much bigger would the buildings get? I could see three and four story ones ahead as I approached Calhoun.
“Climb down off that animule and let us pour you a drink, there, feller.”
I looked to the left to find a doorman standing out in front of a two story building called the Panther Saloon. He didn’t look any older than I was.
“I’m looking to find a man named William Henry Tubb,” I said.
He motioned for me to tie Bird at one of several hitching posts in front of the building. I thanked him but declined the offer. Another voice followed, attached to a lanky cowboy just freeing himself from the Panther’s grasp.
“Tubb you say?”
His long legs got him over to me before I had the sense to depart, so I told him what little I knew.
“I believe his name is William Henry Tubb,” I said. “Works cattle.”
He looked up Calhoun to the west and then up Third, like he thought he might see Bill Tubb walking down one of them.
“He own a store?” the man said.
I told him I had no idea. All I knew was, he was expecting a big herd of cattle to come wandering in from Mobeetie soon. I didn’t figure this fellow needed to know any more than that, unless he was in fact William Henry Tubb.
“Tubbs,” he said. “Bill Tubbs. He owns Tubbs’s General Store back over in the Acre.”
I was laying about fifty-fifty odds this guy knew what he was talking about. I was pretty sure from what I’d heard Ira Lee say that our guy made his living in Hell’s Half Acre or else they wouldn’t have been anywhere near that high.
“Bill Tubbs, you say.”
He started telling me how to get to Tubbs’s General Store, and I tried to keep all the turns in order, but I guess the look on my face must have given him some doubt. He started rummaging through his coat pockets, and I hoped he was going to pull out a map. Instead, I got a small card.
“Let me jot the street down for you,” he said. “It’s on Main and Sixth, but the best way to find it is go to Sixth and Main.”
He handed me the card and sent me on my way, which was down Calhoun to the west, in search of Sixth Street. I spent the next few blocks wondering if I’d been foolish to put stock in this total stranger. He might have been the biggest drunk in Fort Worth as far as I k
new, and here I was riding away from the big, new buildings I’d seen farther north and into the wildest, most lawless place in all of wild, lawless Texas.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Tubbs’s General Store was right where it was supposed to be. I sat inside Frank’s Saloon, on the opposite side of Main, and watched it for an hour or two, drinking down a couple sarsaparillas and paying extra for a Garfield Headache Powder that promised to make me feel like a new man. Maybe it worked too, because I did feel like a new man. Fort Worth represented the new life, and all that had come before was like a story leading up to it.
I had seen a fortyish looking man come out onto the front porch of the general store a time or two and decided it must be Tubbs himself I was looking at. I thought about crossing the street to pay him a visit, but by then, the sarsaparilla ran round my head and trickled down into my digits and appendages, and I was beginning to feel a little heavy in the eyes and light in the head.
I flipped the little card over in my hand and noticed for the first time that it was an advertisement for a local establishment called The Black Elephant Saloon.
THE BLACK ELEPHANT SALOON
Pearlie Tutt & Frederick Washington, Prop’rs
Main at Fourth Street
~ LIQUORS, WINES, BRANDIES & CIGARS ~
The most beautiful ladys west of the Mississippi
I wasn’t nearly as interested in the liquors and cigars as I was the beautiful ladies, but, three hundred miles from home and feeling newly reborn, I was most interested in finding a bed to lay down and sleep in. I paid for the sarsaparillas with one of the furrier’s coins and mosied on out of Frank’s, letting William Henry Tubbs wait for another day. I was in no all-fired hurry to return to Mobeetie.
The Black Elephant wasn’t difficult to find. Two stories high with a full length porch across the front and a matching veranda above for the girls to stand on and wave down from, the name was spelled out in ornate black letters that took up half a block on Fourth and another half on Main. Coming up on it from Fourth Street, the sign seemed to read The Black El. Then from Main, ephant Saloon. As a result, as I would soon discover, many local folks referred to the place as The Black El.
The first time I saw Sunny, she was standing on the veranda, right above the main entrance. With her golden skin and red hair, she seemed to shimmer in the afternoon light, a strange but alluring new presence. If I was only there out of a mild curiosity, the sight of this girl was enough to bring me through the swinging doors.
“How do you close up shop?” I said.
I had already ordered a ginger cola, and, because the barkeep, a big colored man with one eye, hadn’t poked fun at me, I tried to maintain a conversation.
“Close up shop?” he said.
I motioned to the swinging doors. I hadn’t seen any like them in Mobeetie, or, far as I could recall, in San Antone.
“Fort Worth don’t close up,” he said.
I had yet to learn that, in those types of establishments, most all the money is made between sundown and sunup. Nobody slept those hours. Even so, or because it was so, an empty bed was hard to find. As much as I wanted sleep, I wouldn’t find it until the kitchen cook was making breakfast. Before then, I would see Sunny once again. And I would meet Madam Pearlie, whom I felt like I knew already from the card.
“Where you come from, little one?”
I don’t like being told I’m little. It’s not clever. I’ve never been tall, so it’s nothing I’ve somehow overlooked or never contemplated before. I never liked Ira Lee mentioning it, in fact, the only time I’d ever whooped him was one time when he’d called me Puny John in front of Ginny Hay. Still, the one person who could call me “little one” and get away with it was mama, and, right at that moment, Madam Pearlie was about as close to a mama as I’d seen since the woods burned over, so I let it lie.
“I come here from Mobeetie,” I said, “but in general, I guess I come from San Antone.”
She thought that was such a magnificent answer, she repeated it to the one-eyed barkeep and a man on his way out the swinging doors. They all seemed to agree I was okay, even if I didn’t order up any of the liquors or brandies or cigars.
“You looking for a place to stay at?” Madam Pearlie said.
I sure was. At that point, I didn’t know there was a White Elephant Saloon just a few blocks down Main, but I’m glad. I felt at home there in the black one, and I felt even better about it when Sunny came gliding down the staircase and into the room.
“Come meet Mr. Liquorish who comes from San Antone,” Madam Pearlie said.
Sunny sat down at my table and welcomed me to town in a most hospitable way. She even offered to take me upstairs and give me a look at her room. I took her up on the offer and didn’t leave the room for twenty-four hours. By the time the night was over, Sunny and me had done a whole lot of talking, and I fell hard asleep. It was a dark, dreamless sleep but not restless. I slept better than I’d ever slept in my life and woke up to Sunny sponging me off and patching me up in places that needed it. It was already night time again, and the doors were still swinging.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
“I’m the one killed the High Sheriff of Hell’s Half Acre,” I said.
Gentleman Jack looked offended. Not offended that I might have done such a thing. More like offended that he hadn’t thought to accuse me of it first. The crowd hooted and hollered, and a few hats were thrown into the air. Then, just as quick, it fell silent, waiting for Jack’s next retort. He mulled it over like a cow chewing its cud then spit between the slats. I wondered if anyone was unfortunate enough to be standing in that particular space beneath the platform.
“I seriously doubt that, young Wilkie John.”
He’d been trying fairly hard not to make me look too small, too young, thinking the crowd might not have the stomach to watch a youngster dangle at the end of a rope. Now, suddenly, I wasn’t big enough to have done what I said I done. That didn’t please me.
“I shot him right betwixt the eyes,” I said.
I thought about the halo of flour that rose over him as he lay there on the floor of Tubb’s store with his blood and water leaking out. I could tell them about it, but so what? If they weren’t there, what would it prove?
“This little fella says he walked up to the High Sheriff and shot him right between the eyes,” Gentleman Jack said. “Does he really expect us to believe our High Sheriff would let a pipsqueak like this shoot him right between the eyes?”
Some guys down close to the front were laughing at the thought of it. I’d shot plenty of people like them before. I tried to study their silly faces in case I lived to run into them again. Other folks in the crowd were looking at each other and wondering aloud if such a thing could have happened, and how happy they were that it had been done, however it had been done, and whoever had done it.
It seemed to me Gentleman Jack was in real danger of losing the crowd. He’d spent most of the afternoon trying to convince them how dangerous I was. Now, faced with the possibility that his friend the High Sheriff had been beaten by someone half his size, he was tacking in a new direction.
“You really expect them to believe I killed anybody?” I said.
I thought Jack was going to have to take another break. He hiked over to the back of the gallows and took a long look down the stairs. I thought maybe he would bring Greer up the steps again. Part of me wanted to gaze on her one more time like I had around the campfire at Fort Griffin.
Reverend Caliber wasn’t sure what to do at that point. He felt like he had to do something. He stepped up into the space vacated by Gentleman Jack Delaney.
“Wilkie John Liquorish,” he said, “do you have any means by which you can authentically lay claim to killing the High Sheriff of Hell’s Half Acre?”
I was trying to formulate an answer.
“By that,” the reverend said, “I mean, do you have a way to prove your claim?”
I thought for a minute, during which, Jac
k reappeared.
“I think I do,” I said. “When I was in the store where it happened. . . .”
“Stop right there,” Reverend Caliber said. “Hold on tight to the rest of that thought.”
He turned to Jack who had turned to Madam Pearlie, who was still right where she was, at the front of the platform. Sunny had told me a story about Pearlie, back on that first night. Pearlie, she said, had once married a preacher from St. Louis. She had gone to church with the man. Some great big church in St. Louis or somewhere. She had been just fine with it until one day her husband preached on the relationship of Jesus and his mother Mary, and he’d told how Mary sat and watched her son be crucified.
“Pearlie got up and walked out of the church and never looked back,” Sunny said. “She said she couldn’t put no stock in someone who was supposed to be this ideal woman but was really a passive damn mother who would sit and watch her son suffer and die and never jump up there and say something or beat seven shades of you-know-what out of them Roman soldiers who were doing the cross building.”
Turns out, getting away from the church wasn’t even enough for Madam Pearlie. She also got away from that preacher husband of hers and even managed to escape from St. Louis in whatever state it was in. All the story, as related by Sunny, had been offered as an explanation of Pearlie’s fondness for Reverend Caliber. Not that he rekindled any passion for the preacher in St. Louis, but he served to remind her what a doubting, despicable old sinner he had been and how fortunate she was to be shut of him.
Now, here I was on the stand, and she wasn’t going to sit silently by any longer.
“Wilkie, you tell this man, you give him the information he wants, he gonna have to give you something in return. You hear me?”
As inconvenient as it was, Gentleman Jack had a soft spot in his heart for Madam Pearlie too, and this new offer tossed up at his feet intrigued him. Jack walked over between the Reverend and me.
