by Tim Bryant
“And you have no clue why this is happening?” I said.
Junior Ellis said what he wanted to do—why he had come out into the desert to find me—was follow me at some distance while I made my way wherever I was going, to make sure I was safe, on one hand, and to be in a position to act if either man were to show up, on the other. I didn’t like the idea.
“I don’t much like the feeling of being followed,” I said.
If he was going to do such a thing, I wasn’t sure why he wouldn’t just ride alongside me, although I didn’t like that idea any better.
“Not sure how much help you would be to me, following along,” I said. “You damn sure didn’t do anything to stop what happened in Fort Worth. The man hanged me right in the middle of town.”
He had the nerve to laugh again. I was beginning to feel an old familiar twitch in my shooting finger.
“How you supposed we would do that?” he said.
If he hadn’t been a Texas Ranger, I might have drawn on him right then and there.
“It’s your job to figure that out, partner,” I said. “You’re the Texas Rangers.”
He rode right up next to me and winked.
“Well, if we were anywhere good as you say we are, seems like we might be able to stretch a rope a little bit.”
That was what Ira Lee used to call a mouthful of useful information, and I would reflect back on what all it might have contained, what it hinted at and implied, many a time. For the time being, I continued on my way.
“So,” I said, a few minutes later, “are you telling me Elijah Caliber is a Texas Ranger?” I said.
He had begun to fall back behind me at that point. I was trying to convince myself he was going to leave me be, but I knew that was highly unlikely. I did still believe in my own ability to change direction and lose him though. It was a natural born talent.
“Why don’t you ask Madam Pearlie that question next time you see her,” Junior Ellis said.
I contemplated on that a while, and, next time I looked back, he had disappeared. I stopped and looked hard for him, but, like so many people I’d shared the trail with, he was nowhere to be seen.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
I almost named the mustang Maximilian after the stories Jacobo used to tell about making beans for Emperor Maximilian. It was a good idea, but Jacobo had survived the emperor’s overthrow only to die of food poisoning in the Texas desert. It didn’t quite fit. I thought about naming him after one of the characters in Journey to the Center of the Earth but all the names except Axel were difficult to pronounce. I identified with Axel too much to give that one away. Again, it didn’t fit.
I finally decided I’d been calling his name all along. That’s how he came to be Little Cuss. After a while, it ceased to have any meaning. It was just his name.
When we left Clara, I didn’t have a clear picture of where I wanted to be. I did have a list of places not to go. Those included Mobeetie, Clara, and Fort Worth. Dallas was a possibility. That whole city was lighting up with electricity, and they had a new power plant where I might get a steady job. Indian Territory beckoned, but, if Gentleman Jack was laying low up there, I didn’t want to poke a stick in that nest. Not yet anyway. Indian Territory would wait.
There was Birdville just because it reminded me of Bird. Nacogdoches because I’d never been that far east. Then there was The Flat. I’d spent a night or two down there, and something told me I had more to spend there. Me and Little Cuss headed off in that direction. There would be plenty time for talking and lots of stories to tell. I would tell him, from memory, stories of Axel and Professor Lidenbrock and their amazing journeys. I would read from the Encyclopedia Britannica, sixth edition. I’d tell him about Roman, the most noble horse I ever saw in my life. Greer Lusk who came from a place called the River Clyde and had the most beautiful eyes I ever saw. I would tell him about Long Gun and Lieutenant Hanley. About Reverend Caliber and Madam Pearlie and Sunny, who I found stayed in my heart, just as Ginny Hay had. I would tell him stories about Mama and Ira Lee and the school nuns back in the District.
Yes, in time, I would tell him about Gentleman Jack too. But for now, whatever the story was about to be, he wasn’t a part.
On our way toward The Flat, we passed through Meridian. I found Ira Lee’s grave easy enough, not ten yards off the trail. We stopped and paid our respects.
“Ira Lee,” I said, “I hope you found some satisfaction in dying there. Satisfaction seems to come pretty scarce, this side of the dirt. You were a good brother and a fine trail boss. That drive, you know, it should’ve been the start of something. Not the end. I guess I’m not a brother anymore, and I’m not a husband and I’m not in the Army anymore either. But I’m a deputy Texas Ranger. Ain’t that something?”
Later on, I wished I’d told him how I had his Colt and would use it to slay the man who designed our ruin. What did it matter? Ira Lee could no more hear me than the horn on my saddle. I might as well have been talking to it. Or, once again, just to Little Cuss. No question he could hear me. And people who says horses don’t understand don’t understand horses.
I left Meridian for the second time in a month. On the way out, I passed a man driving a horse and wagon. He doffed his hat as he approached.
“You looking for somebody?” he said.
I tried to think if there was anybody anywhere I was looking for.
“No.”
He nodded like it was a good thing I wasn’t.
“They just found a guy out there in the desert, wasn’t nothing but a bunch of bones and a pair of drawers.”
“It can get dirty out there,” I said.
Little Cuss passed the wagon, and I saw he was carrying mail. I guess even the few folks wandering around in Meridian get a letter every now and again.
“You know if they found a wagon or horse with the guy?”
I had buried Roman proper, but I had left the man’s horse to fend for itself. It was something I wasn’t proud of, but I had been preoccupied at the time. The man eyed me with not a hint of suspicion.
“Wagon and horse come in here a week or more ago, loaded down with animal pelts,” the mailman said. “Not sure this guy belonged to the horse or not. The bones was found pretty near Fort Worth.”
I could still remember that stranger’s face clear as the blue sky. I could also remember him pitching forward into the sand with his mouth wide open. Could he have gotten up and crawled that far without kneecaps?
“Suppose he must have been a fur trader,” he said.
Little Cuss and me moved along.
“They prefer to be called furriers,” I said.
I could have told him more, but that would have brought more trouble for him and for me. That’s the nature of telling stories. You have to know where to start and, even more important, where to stop. I didn’t get to The Flat, leastways not right away. Seems like I’m always headed for one place and then arriving at another.
The bones of the fellow out there in the sand got to poking around in my head and wouldn’t let me go. Sure, I told myself, it had to have been the fur trader I shot in the kneecaps. He couldn’t have survived out there. Even if he hadn’t bled to death, the snakes or wolves or Comanches would have lucked up on him.
I couldn’t quit thinking about that other man though. The one who rode alongside Bird and me as we made our way across the desert on that final moonlit night before hitting Fort Worth. Had it been Gentleman Jack? Well, no. That young Henry John Liquorish with the envelope in his pocket? Surely not him either. What had he been doing out there in the middle of nowhere? Had he been looking for the fur trader? Had he watched me shoot him down? The rider remained a mystery in my mind, some kind of thing that represented everything else that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I don’t much like mysteries roosting in my mind.
I stopped Little Cuss on a bit of a natural bluff that had a clump of dead trees still standing strong on it and took an early lunch break. By that I mean I fed Litt
le Cuss, but it was more a chance to stop and think. I once had a conversation with an Oriental man who told me if you wanted to go to El Paso, you wouldn’t normally go in the direction of Natchez, but you could if you wanted to. I didn’t want to.
I looked behind me and saw no one. Looked ahead and saw that same no one. The more I thought about The Flat, the more I wanted to go to Waterproof, Louisiana. Or New Orleans. Even Acorn, Arkansas. Exactly why I gave one whit about this Arkansas horse rider, the lady he left behind and that night train coming down toward the washed out bridge, I couldn’t have told you. Maybe it was the fact that I couldn’t tell you that appealed to me. Maybe the whole story was beginning to get away from me, like that dream you’re having when you first wake up, how it seemed as real as the morning sun but then begins to lose its hold on you.
I hadn’t ever been to Arkansas, but there wasn’t nothing stopping me. Little Cuss was raring to go. Maybe I could even stop off in Waterproof and say hello.
On one of the last nights I spent with Sunny, I was telling her about my days in the U.S. Army, about how it had seemed that a whole different world was laid out before me, if only for just a brief time.
“When you’re out there in that part of Texas, it seems like you’re in a completely different world,” I said. “It’s hard to believe you can be standing in Fort Worth and San Antonio and Mobeetie and The Flat and you’re standing in the same Texas in all four places.”
I think part of me had already been looking beyond Texas at that point, trying to see what was over the state line, over the border. Before I knew it, I was telling Sunny about Long Gun and his rabbit-killing gun. She waved me down.
“Wait, wait,” she said. “His name was Long Gun?”
I told her that his real name had been Dohoson Tay-yah, but they had nicknamed him Long Gun because of his skills with the Whitworth rifle. She squealed with laughter.
“Oh, I thought you said his name was Long Gone.”
I remembered a day when I wondered if it had all been for real. If I had been Long Gun all along. Of course, I didn’t tell her that. And I was never good enough with a rifle to be Long Gun anyway. I was pretty good at being long gone though. That fit me like a well-worn pair of gloves. And so, Wilkie John Liquorish—Liquor Man—became Wilkie John “Lone Gone” Liquorish. It was that difficult, that easy.
You have to know when to stop telling a story, because every storyteller knows, stories never end. They twist and turn and circle back on themselves like a snake, but they don’t ever end. They do have away of becoming truth through the telling though, and you have to live with them. That is, if they don’t get you killed. Riding off with my back to the sunset, I was lucky to be alive and looking forward. What I was looking forward to I didn’t know, but at least I was looking forward.
TURN THE PAGE FOR AN EXCITING PREVIEW!
On the untamed, harsh American frontier,
living wasn’t always easy.
On the other hand, dying was.
Wilkie John Liquorish is a hard-luck young man trying to make his way in the Wild West. He doesn’t look for trouble—it’s usually there when he wakes up in the morning.
DEAD AND BURIED
A Wilkie John Western
BY TIM BRYANT
The Wild West is about to become even wilder.
Coming in June 2018,
wherever Pinnacle Books are sold.
CHAPTER ONE
People who live out in the sea of sand that is West Texas tend to have strong beliefs in God and the devil. It’s not really any mystery. When you walk out into the landscape and take a look at the mountains and plateaus, the cliffs rising up dramatically out of the earth in streaks of reds and browns and even a few greens here and there, it’s real easy for these people to see God. Even a nonbeliever like myself can be swayed. Walk out farther into that same landscape, try to ride very far across the flatland, into or around one of those mountains or maybe through a pass between them, hang out for a while with just you and your horse and the sun, it gets pretty hard not to see the devil too. You can hear him rattling, cooing and cawing at you. He might show up in the form of a black bear or a javelina. He might even show up as a man.
I found the bones of a guy out there in the middle of nowhere, and I just as well might have been looking at my own self. I was out of water, my horse Little Cuss was down and dying, and I had good reason to think I was following shortly behind.
When I say the man I found wasn’t nothing but bones, I’m speaking in the most literal of terms. There was some leather chaps less than ten feet away, and the ripped remains of a shirt pulled over some scrub brush. The only other thing was bones bleached pure white in the sun, gleaming like the teeth of some dust devil.
Of course, everything was starting to look white. The sun was bleeding into everything and washing out enough of my eyesight that I was blind to just about anything farther away than ten feet. I was hoping I didn’t step on a rattler or run up on any of the black bears that called the area home.
“Hell’s Half Acre got nothing on you,” I said.
I had been talking to myself ever since I left Little Cuss back a few miles. I had reason to believe there was an Army encampment just over the hills to the south, and that’s what I was aiming for. If I made it by nightfall, there was a chance they could send back for the horse. At least that’s mostly what I was telling myself.
I had spent a considerable amount of time in Hell’s Half Acre, the area of Fort Worth where gambling dens rubbed up against the most spectacular whorehouses you ever saw and made the sweetest music ever heard by a sinner’s ear.
What I was standing in right here was more hell than Fort Worth ever thought of raising. A week out of camp in Fort Concho, I’d followed the Pecos River down to the Pacific Railway and then turned west. It had been days since I’d seen smoke behind me. I was on the part of the map that was a big blank. And I could see why.
The bones strewn out in front of me weren’t me. I was pretty sure who they were. If I was lucky, they belonged to a man known among the Apache Mescaleros as Phantom Bill. His true name was Manley Pardon Clark from Chicago, and he had been on his way to Chihuahua with a sack full of money taken from a train from Santa Fe.
I’d stumbled across the carcass of a horse the day before, so I expected to catch up with the phantom. I just thought there would be more to him.
“The Tonkawa ate your horse like it was a fine steak, Manley,” I said, “and, from the looks of things, they got their teeth into you too.”
That didn’t bother me much. I’d heard tales of the Tonkawa eating captured families and then dining on the family dog for dessert. They were a hearty bunch of people. Great trackers too.
“What I want to know is what you did with the money, my friend,” I said.
I knew him well enough to know he would have hidden it before letting Indians get their hands on it. You could tell by a few drag patterns that Manley had been dragged due south, either by the Tonkawa or by bears that came along and took what was left. I walked back north and scanned the horizon. It was all white. If I was going to do this, I was going to have to do it on my hands and knees, a few feet at a time. If I did get down there, I had serious doubts if I’d be able to get back up.
I don’t rightly know how long I searched for that damn money. Time kind of bled all together like the light did. I stopped to rest frequently and slept a bit too. Somewhere along the line, my knees and elbows folded up and left me stretched out across a bunch of rocks, another easy meat stick refreshment for a passing band of renegades.
“Wilkie John.”
In my dream, it was a woman’s voice. Not just any woman’s voice. It was Sunny, a colored girl left behind in Fort Worth. Only now I was back there with her in a big house called the Black Elephant, and she was coaxing me into a nice, warm bathtub.
“What are you doing down there? Wake up, you fool.”
I opened my eyes to the sensation of lying naked in a place you should
n’t be naked. I reached down and fumbled around for my different parts. My clothing was soppy as a dishrag, but it was there. I looked up into the light like a heathen looking into the face of God.
“I can’t see a damn thing, Jack,” I said.
Gentleman Jack Delaney. Probably the last person you would expect to see me with. Jack was something to see, if you could see. He was wearing a new blue suit that looked like it was made from fancy brothel curtains. When I questioned the suit’s practicality, I was given the speech on wind and sun damage and the importance of shielding yourself. He had proven right about that much, but I had heard it all before.
It wasn’t exactly true that I couldn’t see anything. I could see the shod front feet of the fastest quarter horse in all of Texas. I was pretty certain of it because she had caught me and Little Cuss even with a morning’s head start the previous day, and I took no enjoyment at all in that fact. In my mind, that whole episode had been responsible for Little Cuss cutting his leg. If he hadn’t been trying to prove something to himself, he’d still have been right there beneath me instead of the rocks and sand.
“Manley Pardon Clark is lying right over there against them rocks,” he said.
Gentleman Jack Delaney waved his rifle, which cut through my white light like an angel of death slicing through fire.
“Think I don’t know that?” I said. “I was the one who found him.”
I listened to the man swing down from his horse and crunch his way toward me.
“No money?” he said.
I shook my head, and the world seemed to tilt and spin backwards in reaction. I turned away from Jack and vomited a stream of clean water that polished the rocks beneath me. I suddenly recalled that I had done the same thing before. Just minutes, maybe hours or even a day ago, but some earlier time.
