A World of Hurt

by Tim Bryant

  “Okay, so what kind of deal is it you want to make?”

  My first thought was to ask them to let Greer loose. To maybe give her coach fare back to Mobeetie or wherever she wanted. I was feeling for Arkansas Pete who had chosen to die in a town far from family, to spare them having to sit and watch it. Which meant I was feeling pretty sorry for myself.

  Ira Lee had taught me, back in San Antone, to never settle for a little bit until you know you can’t get a lot. When you were playing billiards in a game room or poker in a saloon and you had the Army boys by the thingumbobs, you didn’t tickle. You squeezed.

  “If I can prove I done it, I want you to set me loose and let me go free,” I said.

  Jack looked at the Reverend and then at Madam Pearlie. His lips were moving in a way to suggest he was counting up numbers in his head. No discernible sound was coming out.

  “If it turns out he killed the High Sheriff,” Reverend Caliber said, “you’ll have solved the biggest unsolved crime in all Fort Worth.”

  “And the killer goes free?” Jack said.

  The Reverend pointed out into the crowd.

  “If it turns out he really did it, these people gonna have themselves a new hero. You really wanna go and make him a martyr too?”

  Jack looked out into the crowd. It seemed to still be growing. Not only that, it was getting impatient.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  There was a deputy sheriff of Fort Worth who never set foot in Hell’s Half Acre. Some said it was out of fear. Others said he was getting paid by the saloons and bawdy houses to stay away. Both were probably right. His name was Shadrack Parnell, and he was standing at the bottom of the thirteen steps, too close to Greer Lusk and Simeon Payne and too far from where Gentleman Jack had spit between the slats.

  Jack stood at the top of the thirteen steps, mouthing words down to the deputy while everyone else stood around and switched their weight from one leg to the other and then back. If someone had been renting chairs, he’d have retired a rich man by suppertime. Soon enough, Jack rejoined the festivities, this time bringing his sidekick Shadrack along. Shadrack looked like he wanted to be a thousand other places.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of Fort Worth, this young man has, in a last ditch effort to spare himself from his fate, tried to strike a deal with justice,” Jack said. “It seems that, in a move to curry favor with y’all, he’s trying to take claim for the cold blooded murder of the High Sheriff of Hell’s Half Acre. I would assume, since William Henry Tubbs was also found dead in the same location, he’s going to plead guilty to that death as well.”

  Jack looked at me with a crocodile grin.

  “I shot ’em both,” I said, “and I dumped ’em in the broom closet.”

  Everybody there knew the bodies of the High Sheriff and the General Store owner had been discovered in the broom closet. That had been old news by the time it made it into the next day’s newspaper. Everybody knew how Deputy Parnell brought in the Texas Rangers, and how they’d turned the General Store upside down looking for clues left by the killer. Most had also heard that Parnell didn’t want the job of High Sheriff of Hell’s Half Acre. Some said he was thinking of turning it over to one of the Texas Rangers. Others said an infamous lawman and killer of men had been offered the job.

  “It true Bat Masterson’s coming to town to take the High Sheriff’s position?” I said.

  If Gentleman Jack talked like a man who was being paid by the word, Parnell acted like he was being paid to keep his mouth shut.

  “No,” he said.

  “If he is, you won’t live to see it,” Jack said.

  I’d read Masterson had killed twenty-six people. That put him several ahead of me, and he was being called a hero for what he’d done in Dodge. He was being offered jobs. It was enough to make me vexatious as the Reverend called it.

  “We have your word that Mr. Liquorish will be allowed to go free if he can prove that he was the man who killed the High Sheriff,” Reverend Caliber said. “Are you reneging on that deal?”

  Parnell and Gentleman Jack shrugged at each other and shook their heads no. They weren’t reneging.

  “Deputy Parnell led the investigation into the killing at Tubbs’s General Store,” Jack said. “He knows details that no one else but the killer would know. I will look to his word as the final word when it comes to any evidence.”

  He turned to the people in the street, his words as much for them as me.

  “If you have evidence, present it at once.”

  I took one step forward and felt the rope tighten against my neck.

  “There was but one thing missing from the store after the killing,” I said. “I have that thing in a box under a bed in the upper quarters of The Black Elephant Saloon. May I have somebody go to retrieve it?”

  I looked at Sunny. She was the only other person who knew three boxes of bullets lay inside a small box under the bed in her room. I had never even mentioned them to Madam Pearlie, out of fear that it would come out that three such boxes were missing from the store. Pearlie treated me like her son, and I wasn’t sure if that would change things or not.

  Sunny disappeared into the crowd and thus began the longest fifteen minutes of my life. There were times I thought Jack was going to lose all patience and open the trapdoor beneath me. What if Sunny never came back? I learned much later that she had indeed been stopped several times in her journey to the Black El and then back again.

  “Do you think he really killed the High Sheriff?”

  “You don’t think they’ll hang him for it, do you?”

  “If I visit The Black Elephant, may I ask for you by name?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what name might I call?”

  And away she ran, the box tucked tightly against her side.

  I knew she was coming before I saw her. The cue came from the crowd, which began to murmur and then pull apart as she rounded the corner onto Main. Fifty yards from the platform, she held the box over her head like a prize, so that everyone could see. Jack was too busy watching his watch.

  Why did Gentleman Jack agree to the deal that, if I could prove my guilt, he would let me go? There are multiple theories. One was simply that, having been one of the few to see the crime scene inside the General Store, he didn’t think I was capable of it. That is the simplest theory, the most obvious one, and maybe the best. It also had one of the craziest notions I’d ever heard of going for it, and it may have been just crazy enough to amuse Jack. If I proved decisively that I had killed the High Sheriff, I would be free. If my self-prosecution fell short, I would hang.

  Some thought he didn’t support the High Sheriff and was secretly happy for his demise. Reverend Caliber was among that group. He’d heard stories about the two of them duking it out over the future of Hell’s Half Acre. The High Sheriff was bound and determined to clean up the whole caboodle. Also a deacon in the Baptist Church, he didn’t cotton to any kind of natural sin, especially drunkenness and fornication, two of the Acre’s specialties. On the other hand, Gentleman Jack made his living off drinkers and fornicators, so closing down the Acre was akin to pulling down his own shingle.

  Whatever the reason, Jack seemed fully prepared to go along with our scheme, even to the point of applauding the return of Sunny with her wooden box. As she made her way to the front of the stage, I held out my hand to stop her.

  “I don’t want you to hand the box over,” I said. “I want you to hold it closed, so that everyone can see it.”

  I was now the magician putting the pack of cards into the hat, with the hat being Sunny’s box and my very fate being the deck of cards. I had the crowd’s attention. Gentleman Jack and Reverend Caliber were both leaning in. Deputy Purnell looked uninterested.

  “Now,” I said, “does Deputy Purnell know what single item was missing from Tubbs’s General Store after the High Sheriff and Mr. Tubbs were gunned down there?”

  Deputy Purnell looked at Gentleman Jack, and, seeing Jack’s quizzical e
xpression coming back at him, answered as only he could.

  “Yep.”

  I could feel the sweet breath of freedom on my face.

  “And do tell, what might that item be, Deputy?”

  Deputy Purnell cleared his throat and took a long step toward the people.

  “It was four cans of beans.”

  The crowd got a hoot out of that. Purcell smiled in appreciation. I was beginning to see crows circling overhead.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Deputy Purnell got close enough, I could feel his breath on my neck.

  “You really think I was going to be put on the spot like that?”

  I had been made a fool, and I’d never seen it coming. I cursed him, and I cursed myself, and I wanted to go back and do it over. I didn’t know how I would’ve done it, but I knew how I wouldn’t.

  Two men quickly joined him on the stage, and I first suspected them of being the Texas Rangers we’d heard about. They didn’t have the famous peso badges though. In fact, they didn’t have any badges or uniforms at all. One had Greer by the arm, having marched her back up the thirteen steps and into the blazing sun, which had slid just far enough to the west that it now glared straight at us. The other man had Simeon Payne in an armand-leg shackle. Payne should’ve been hopping mad. Instead, he looked beat. Like he’d just been told some dire piece of news that took the life right out of him. The mood of the proceedings, along with the crowd, had changed as suddenly as a dark cloud rolling over the sun. I could’ve used that cloud. It was nowhere to be found.

  “This is unlawful as all git-out,” Madam Pearlie said. “You can’t be doing this.”

  Gentleman Jim had given control of things to Deputy Parnell and his boys. He raised his palms and shrugged. It was out of his hands. He had done his job. Reverend Caliber was asked to lead everyone in a prayer, and he delivered in his own unique way.

  “Lord, I am weary of my crying.”

  He stopped and waited so long, those who had closed their eyes were peeking, and we who didn’t were thinking he might have fallen asleep or else died and went to heaven right there on the spot.

  “My throat is dried. Mine eyes fail while I wait for you,” he continued. “They that hate me without a cause are more than the hairs of mine head, and they that would destroy me, being mine enemies wrongfully, are mighty.”

  I wasn’t a praying man, and I didn’t want to be one of those men who suddenly become one when they’re facing down their end. All the same, there was something pretty in the words that reminded me of mama and also a little of Sister Mary Constance. Maybe I could see Jesus clearer up there on that deadly contraption, because I even found some reason there, some comfort in the thought that maybe mama could just sit quietly, respectfully and be present while I made my exit from the stage. She had been there when I made my entrance, after all.

  “Lord, I pray for those of us who hate without cause,” the Reverend went on. “I pray like you taught us in the Bible, saying Oh God, rise up against those who would cause us harm. Let their table become a snare before them, and that which should have been for their welfare, let it become a trap. Let their eyes be darkened, that they see not; and let them be blotted out of the book of the living forever and ever.

  Amen.”

  Gentleman Jack shook his head.

  “Preacher, the Lord’s Prayer would’ve worked just fine.”

  The rest happened so fast, it didn’t seem real. I don’t know how to write something that was so real and make it seem like it wasn’t, but it seemed like everything hastened and railroaded on, so that you either went with it or got left behind. Me, pushed aside and into the arms of the preacher, while Greer was fitted for the rope. Part of me got left there in those moments while the sun blotted out the sins of the guilty and lay them at the feet of the innocent.

  “Greer Lusk Liquorish, for the sin of conspiring with your husband, a known and admitted murderer and thief, for keeping knowledge of his deeds in your heart, for being one in the spirit with a moral degenerate, you are committed into the hands of God Almighty. Do you have any final words?”

  Greer shone like a tent with a light inside it, so thin you could almost see through the membranes and into her insides. I couldn’t see her eyes, couldn’t make out her face. She appeared already an angel.

  “God save Wilkie John,” she said. Not loud. Soft. To herself.

  She, like the preacher, might have eventually come up with a few more words. She wasn’t given that convenience. Deputy Parnell pulled the lever, the door opened up and my Greer vanished from the stage, her dress billowing up as she went like she was hanging onto a racing thoroughbred. She made no noise except for the rope stretching and then popping with her on the end of it.

  Simeon Payne went even easier, already so dead to the world that one of Parnell’s men had to hold him up. Payne made no last statement, or, if he did, only he could hear it. Deputy Parnell said some words over him, none of them fitting, about being part of a cattle drive that brought death and suffering to its own as well as others. His tall, lanky frame needed less rope, and still, his boots touched dirt before the rope caught him and dangled him like a dead fish on the end of a line. He coughed up a sound or two but, thankfully, went quiet soon after. They cut him down and unceremoniously laid him next to Greer, a thing that never would have happened in life.

  I thought I would put up a fight. When my time came, I thought I would go kicking and clawing to stay on this side of the dirt. If I had no belief in an afterlife, it stands to reason I would clutch that much tighter to what life I had. Maybe the fact I had no particular belief was working for me. I couldn’t even muster up any belief I was going to die.

  “Mr. Liquorman, your time of reckoning has come at long last. Do you have any last words before you’re cast into the long suffering arms of justice?”

  I could see no light left in Gentleman Jack. He was already dead as his stone of a heart and angry that I had something he did not.

  “I do,” I said.

  And I began a tale, the tale which you are reading now. A short tale. A tall tale. A true tale of a life of lies. Whatever you want it to be. When I began it, the street was full. The sun was in my face. When it was over, the sun was gone and so were most of the witnesses. Who wants to see a man’s unnatural and ungrounded death when they know him so intimately?

  The good Reverend Caliber stayed by my side, and I mean it when I say he was good. Maybe he had no more belief than I did, but he at least had the grace to listen to my story. Jack filed his fingernails and walked in circles, talking to himself. Was he trying to talk himself out of his actions? If he was, it didn’t succeed. That evening, the story of my life having gone full circle, I ended my soliloquy by raising an invisible sword and quoting a line I remembered from King Henry IV:

  “Death rock me asleep, abridge my woeful days.”

  I got part of the line wrong, having substituted woeful for Shakespeare’s preferred doleful. No difference. I followed that with a petition to hang me high, that I might long wave. Parnell’s two saps accosted me, one on each side, and maneuvered me to my downfall. There was a scramble as they realized they hadn’t a third rope. I would hang on Greer’s, a detail I appreciated. It was brought to position and hung on the tree, then put into position around me. I wanted to say more. I wanted to call out to Madam Pearlie, to Sunny. To Gentleman Jack, whom I could no longer see. I tried to fill my lungs with one last breath. I couldn’t breathe. I panicked.

  “Wilkie John Liquorman, for your transgressions, I commit you into the arms of death,” Jack said.

  I remember the feeling of falling, not unlike falling in a dream. I saw white, and suddenly I seemed to be flailing as if in a river. Pushing up, trying to catch air. Voices. Screaming. I’m sure one belonged to Pearlie. My lungs felt as if someone had lit a matchstick and dropped it down my throat.

  I may have died for a few minutes. I came back alive when they were cutting me down. I thought they were laying me next t
o Greer and Simeon. I thought I was still dead. That was not the case.

  I was splashed with something that burned down into my nerves and brought me roaring back to life. Somebody’s whiskey poured in me from a flask. If I was on fire before, I now thought they’d revived me once just to kill me a second time. I passed out. But I didn’t pass away.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Two more days passed before I began to come to. In that space and time, I visited places in my past, places I knew where I saw faces familiar to me. Sister Mary Constance. Mama. Ira Lee. Long Gun. Lemuel Yost. Bricky Lusk. Greer. I was always looking over my shoulder for Jack, but I don’t remember ever seeing him. Each of the people knew me. Received me warmly. Talked to me. Assured me my life wasn’t over.

  Sunny watched over me during those long nights when my breathing grew labored by the injuries to my windpipe. She poured buttermilk and Vapor-Ol into me to coat it and give me relief. Slowly, I became myself again.

  “You was left dangling there for ten minutes, like a puppet on a string,” she said on the third day. “First off, you turned red in the face, and you wheezed and whistled and gasped and fought something awful. If you weren’t going to die, I wanted to. Just to put an end to watching you. Then you turned white and got real quiet-like. That was no better. Still we kept watch for each small twitch of the leg or eye and lamented loudly to your punishers. They wouldn’t let us cut you down for ages.”

  In her own way, Greer had saved me, by stretching the rope out just far enough that my toes could stretch and find earth. I was near strangled to death but survived with severely bruised neck muscles and a belief I had been spared for a reason. Because I had no religion to pin it on, I believed I was reborn because I had experienced a rebirth. It was, to borrow a term I’d heard Reverend Caliber use, a most simple faith.

  I was nursed back to health inside Sunny’s old room in the Black Elephant. She moved just down the hall, though she was often found reading to me—the newspaper and a copy of Around the World in Eighty Days, left in one of the rooms. So potent were the readings of the book, I would sometimes misremember that I had been the one racing around the world while I was actually recuperating inside that room.