by Tim Bryant
“Can you hang around until everybody’s gone?” I said. “I’d sure like to talk to you.”
Of course, Sheriff Thatcher was there, walking around and inserting himself into each person’s story. Yep, he had seen Jack Delaney in Decatur within the past week. Yep, he had been instrumental in selecting the church as a meeting place, because he knew Jessie could make it work. Even when Jessie was unsure of the plan, the sheriff had encouraged him to push on with it. Yep, he swore, Delaney had been so close to him at a restaurant in Decatur, he could have spit in Delaney’s soup as he brushed by.
Thatcher went on and on, scarcely taking a breath. He never referred to Delaney as Gentleman Jack. Just Delaney. Only the newspaper man and me seemed to know who we were dealing with.
“Sheriff Thatcher says Gentleman Jack was coming after you. What you done to cause such a stink?” the newspaper man said.
The Wichita Falls Times was a weekly rag. Small and just barely legible. But, if I was lucky, the word might eke out to Fort Worth, Dallas, to Kansas even. Who could tell?
“He killed my wife,” I said. “Tried to kill me too, but he underestimated me. Maybe he overestimated himself. Either way, he should’ve known better.”
He was as slow jotting down my response as I figured he would be. I started to ask if it would be easier for me to just interview myself, write it all down, and hand it in next time I was in town.
“I guess you got a pretty good look,” the reporter said. “You think he’s gonna make it?”
I took my time and thought on that one.
“Make it?” I said. “He’ll make it for a little while, but, in the end, he won’t. Same as all of us.”
He must not have liked that answer much because he didn’t even try to get it down. He nodded and walked on, looking for his next good quote. Most of the men pushed him away. They were too busy talking to each other. It was a regular old Texas Ranger congregation, right there on the church grounds. These were my people. Well, for the most part.
As for Gentleman Jack, he was carried out on a wagon, and he was making as ungodly a noise as I’d heard all night. Sheriff Thatcher said it was a good sign, as it proved he still had the fight in him. He may have, but he also had more bullets in him than anyone could count. He’d somehow managed to keep most of his essential parts intact. There was a bullet hole in his chest that came within an inch or two of blowing his candle out forever.
“Jack, you might not see it this way,” Thatcher said, “but today was your lucky day.”
I felt a little bad seeing Jack in such shape. I pushed up through the other Rangers until I got to the side of the wagon holding his ripped and torn hulk. They had him wrapped in a blanket, but you could count the spots in the fabric where blood was oozing in and get a good idea of how shot up he was. I looked at his eyes, still open even if they were glassed over, and moved myself accordingly. I wanted to make sure he got a real good look at me as the driver hawed the horses and drove away. Jack didn’t say anything, but I could tell he saw me. You could see the light get just a little dimmer as I smiled and waved at him.
The Rangers stood around outside the church, drinking from flasks and smoking cigars, for half an hour after the horse and wagon departed for Wichita Falls. Some were placing bets on whether Jack would last the trip. Money said he wouldn’t. I knew better and got in on the action. After a while, Preacher Jessie hobbled around to me. He was using his shovel for a crutch and still managed to have a flask in one hand and a cigar in the other, so it seemed like he might have been my kind of preacher. I even gave him a small chance at redemption.
“So what was it you wanted to say to me, young man?”
I had been hoping we would be alone. Unfortunately, there were still six or seven other old Rangers still milling about. They looked like they were at some kind of strange military dance, the way they stood together and then stepped away to the next partner and started the process again.
“I was wondering about something you said earlier,” I said, “about me not being Texas Ranger material.”
When he laughed, he sounded like a donkey braying.
“Well, son,” he said, “I respect that you’ve got the badge. Obviously, someone must have thought you had the beans to wear it.”
He tossed the soggy end of his cigar on the ground at his feet and danced it out with his right foot.
“You hold onto that thing, I expect you might grow up and into it one of these days,” he continued. “Specially if you watch us grown folks and see the way it’s all done.”
He didn’t talk his way out of my anger. If he’d kept on with it, he might have done it, although my suspicions are he’d have just kept talking his way farther in.
“No,” I said,” I want to talk to someone about my soul and dying and heaven and so forth. Could I meet you maybe tomorrow morning, Preacher?”
His look said he didn’t really want to do anything tomorrow morning unless of course it was Sunday, which it wasn’t. All the same, I needed to get on the road early and didn’t care to hang around Clara, Texas, any longer than necessary. The place spooked me, and I wondered if there was anybody who was born and raised there and had warm thoughts of the place. Then it hit me.
“Did Gentleman Jack really come from New Orleans?”
“Hell, no,” Preacher Jessie said. “Who told you that? He come from right here in Clara, same as me. I knew his old daddy when Jack wasn’t no bigger than a mess of minutes.”
“Jack his own self probably told him,” one of the other Rangers said.
“Half of everything that man said was a ball-faced lie,” the preacher said, “and the other half was just flat-out wrong.”
He leaned over to me and whispered.
“Meet me here at the church. Tomorrow, noon. Don’t be late.”
I nodded, and pretty soon after that, I left them with it. There was a team of Rangers inside the church, scrubbing it down and taking all the blood out of it. The rest were standing around talking about Jack in not-so-gentlemanly terms. One of them looked a lot like Kitch Howard, but I couldn’t be sure. It all left me wishing I hadn’t been such a coward inside the church, and thinking that Gentleman Jack could have very well stood a few more bullets to send him on his way.
I stopped and asked one of them if he had ever heard of a man named Henry John Liquorish. He acknowledged that the name sounded familiar, but it soon turned out to be me he was thinking of. I started to tell him the story of Henry John who came to Texas with the New Orleans Greys. Who fought the Comanches and died at their hands. Of the man who came crawling toward Mobeetie with that same name on an envelope. But I left it at that.
As I rode off on my new mustang, I told the horse he could count himself lucky too. If he’d been a girl, I might very well have called him Clara, just to remind me of where I never wanted to go again.
“But we’re coming back tomorrow at noon,” I could almost hear him say.
He still didn’t have a name, the little cuss. Or I guess he did, I just didn’t know it yet.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
“Word is, Jack Delaney never made it to Wichita Falls,” Jessie said.
I had arrived at the First—and only—Baptist Church of Clara a few minutes early, hoping to scope out the surroundings. A lot of times, places that look spooky in the night will look completely different in the light of day. The First Baptist Church of Clara looked the same.
“Really?” I said. “He’s dead?”
The mule brayed again, but I was too busy trying to work the idea of a dead Gentleman Jack into my imagination to deal with it.
“Boy, he ain’t dead. He managed to get his hand on a gun and shot the fellow carting him into Wichita Falls. Jack’s gone. Horses, wagon, and everything, just gone.”
The inside of the church showed little evidence of what had happened the night before. Someone had already nailed a cross-shaped piece of wood over the gunshot hole in the floor.
“You think he’s coming bac
k this way?” I said.
I’m not saying I was afraid of the thought, but I wasn’t in any all-fired hurry to meet back up with him either.
“He won’t show his face around these parts for a while,” the preacher said. “He knows the Rangers have him in their sights. He’s got nerve, but stupid he ain’t.”
I wasn’t so sure about that.
“He’s not so smart as he thinks,” I said.
Neither was Preacher Jessie, far as that went. He might have been a more spiritual man than my friend Reverend Caliber, but Caliber was the one you’d trust with your life. Which would the Lord Jesus regard most highly? I didn’t believe in any of them enough to care. They could take the Lord and his religion and go jump in the lake.
“Careful, my young friend,” Jessie said. “Foolishness is bound in the heart of the young.”
I was willing to give him that too, at least as a general statement. If he was trying to say something about me, I told him, I would appreciate it if he’d just come on out with it. He said he felt likewise. So I took him up on it.
“You claim to be a Texas Ranger,” I said, “but you don’t wear the badge.”
He stood up and pulled his jacket off, and I thought we were about to launch into fisticuffs.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” he said. “That badge will bring you more trouble than anything. I wear it, but I wear it right here.”
He patted his hand over it, pinned to the inside of his overshirt, against his heart.
“I know it’s always right here, and, if I need to flash it, I can do that too.”
There was something I almost admired about the guy. He had replaced his shovel with a rifle of his own, which gave me some pause, but he seemed about as likely to pull it on me as to whittle it into a whistle and play a tune about the terrible wickedness of life and love.
“So is that what calls us back here on my squirrel hunting day?” he said.
I’d spent the past few nights taking target practice with my left hand. I liked the idea of keeping my right hand open and free, and now, with my Colt moved to the left side and that hand resting lightly on it, I was fighting the itch to unholster a little foolishness in the preacher’s direction.
“What do you think happens when a man dies?” I said.
His face said he was fully aware he could be walking into a trick. He wasn’t.
“A Godly man has nothing to fear,” he said. “An ungodly man has everything to fear.”
I was hoping to hear something I hadn’t heard before. Something more meaningful. I had watched enough people die to realize something profound happened. Even Indians. And horses. Especially horses. Something that didn’t seem to happen when a fish or a squirrel died.
“You think you’re a Godly man?” I said.
He was nervously caressing the stock of his rifle.
“I try to be,” he said.
The Colt was pointing right at his guts. He had no idea how close to God he really was.
“See, I tried to believe in God too,” I said, “but, it always seemed to me, killing a man who has it coming, well, that’s being Godly in its own way. You can see that, can’t you, Preacher? Don’t that make sense to a man like you?”
His lip made a certain move—a tremble, a nervous betrayal—that reminded me of someone I’d seen before, on a different day, a different stage. It was only then that I saw the truth for what it was.
“Jack Delaney,” I said. “I’ll be damned. That’s your boy, ain’t it?”
He sat there and said nothing.
“He didn’t come from no New Orleans,” I said.
He shook his head no.
“That sly dog,” I said. “Never was no slave or blacksmith or a real bounty hunter or a real anything, was he?”
He sat there like he was trying to recall something real about his son.
“Yes, he was a slave,” he said. “We was all slaves so long, we didn’t know who we were supposed to be or how to be free once we finally got there.”
That might have been true. People will put a world of hurt on you, and you carry the scars whether you show them or not. Some got more scars than others.
“You know I’m going to kill him, sooner or later, don’t you?” I said.
He nodded.
“He had it coming, I wanted to be the one to do it,” Jessie said.
There was something to like in Jessie Delaney. I took a single step back and raised the Colt in his honor.
“When he gets there,” I said, “tell him I said good riddance to bad rubbish.”
I shot Jessie Delaney five times. I didn’t have to do that, but I wanted to make sure he died good and fast. He probably deserved that. He fell dead in his own church, which should have meant something to the God he served. He wasn’t a good man. He said a lot of bad things and did bad things too. But I guess he did try to be Godly, whatever that meant to him.
Jessie Delaney. His death served as a promise. A deposit against a future reckoning.
I pulled the star out from inside his overshirt and pinned it on his jacket lapel, where it belonged. Then I got my horse and rode out.
I’ve seen my fair share of towns. No two of them are alike. San Antonio could make you feel like you were in the presence of spirits, even when you lived in the filthy streets of the Sporting District. Mobeetie, in spite of outlawing the Encyclopedia Britannica, was about as bad as a town can get when it comes to murdering, cheating, and general evildoing. Still, those towns had hearts that beat crazy, twenty-four hours a day. Clara was the only town that ever made me feel the way that town made me feel. It reached down in you and just strangled your insides. There’s not a word in the English language for that feeling. At least, not one I know. And I’m glad for it.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
I liked talking to these men. Real authentic Texas Rangers. I read about them in dime novels, people like Buckskin Sam, chasing down Mexican bandits and American outlaws. I had seen a few growing up in San Antone, but they always seemed like a different breed, like if I spoke words to them, they wouldn’t even hear a sound. Now I wished for nothing more than to have Ira Lee to show my peso badge off to. Not that he would have been impressed. Annoyed was more like it. Anyway, I halfway expected some Ranger to come riding up, tear the badge off, strip me of the title and bolt away. If any had ever thought about it, they never said anything or acted on it.
I got word in Decatur that a Ranger named Junior Ellis was hunting me down, and I immediately thought the worst. I didn’t wait around to see if he’d appear. I was traveling southwest, in the general direction of The Flat, and I wanted to stay in motion. I was less then ten miles outside Decatur when he showed up. How he tracked me down in the middle of nowhere, I didn’t have a clue, but he was, after all, a Ranger.
“Heard tell you was asking round about a man called Henry John Liquorish.”
My heart jumped into my throat. Ellis slid off his horse and walked toward me with his hand out. He was built like a beanstalk and wore an oversize hat that called attention to it. I determined not to say anything long as he said nothing of my slightness.
“Well, I’m not sure that’s his name,” I said. “He was toting around an envelope with that name on it. It was my dad’s name.”
We shook hands and quickly confirmed that we were each who we thought we were.
“So where’d you run into this fellow?” he said.
I gave him as detailed a rundown of the story as I could recall and then explained where Mobeetie, Texas, was located.
“I’m guessing that’s an Indian word,” he said.
I told him he guessed right.
“They named the town Mobeetie because they thought it was the Comanche word for Sweetwater,” I said. “What I hear, it really means buffalo dung.”
I didn’t know if that part was true, but I sure hoped it was, and if it was, it fit the town all the better. Not to mention it got a laugh.
“Listen, we’ve been following a cha
racter named Jack Delaney for a good while,” Ellis said. “I know you’ve personally had a run-in or two with him.”
That was an understatement.
“Only reason we ever learned about you, Wilkie John, was because Jack Delaney had you in his sights.”
I told him that Gentleman Jack—I still called him that—had come within a whisker of killing me and that I had, at some endeavor, returned the favor. He already knew all of it, but he listened patiently, chuckling in a few appropriate places, shaking his head and whistling in others.
“If you follow the trail backward,” he said, “we’re pretty sure this Henry John Liquorish is the man that paid Jack Delaney and give him the information needed to bring you down.”
I wasn’t sure I followed.
“You saying Henry John Liquorish paid to have me killed?”
Ellis nodded.
“You may be in some danger from either one of them, or both of them, considering the circumstances,” he said. “Mr. Liquorish seems to have paid Delaney a considerable bounty for your head. He’s bound to be somewhat unhappy, Jack Delaney having his money and you still running and gunning.”
Believe it or not, it was the first time I’d fully contemplated there being a real bounty on my head.
“So who exactly is this man, Henry John Liquorish?” I said.
Junior Ellis looked surprised.
“We were hoping you could help us with that one.”
I told him I was very suspicious. I had never been told of anyone having the name other than my father who died many years ago. I laid out my theory that the unknown man had only been carrying an envelope belonging to my father and was looking to deliver some sort of news to me. Ellis acted like he had never entertained that thought at all and didn’t think much of it.
“Could be true, I suppose,” he said, “but we know he took lodging in Fort Worth under the name Henry John Liquorish.”
He had been in Fort Worth earlier, on his way toward Mobeetie, it would seem. He’d met up with Gentleman Jack there, ordering and paying for my demise like you would a new suit or a mail order bride.
