by Steve Vernon
Nobody is stopping and this is starting to feel like one of those crazy Steven King monster movies where everybody dies horribly.
Except I’m not going to get to die horribly.
I’m going to get to live horribly, here inside this sticky pink body bag.
There’s something leaking out of the top of my skull, and I guess it’s from where that bus driver shot me. I don’t know. Maybe if he’d hit me in the stomach, or somewhere covered by this pink sticky stuff I’d have been alright.
But right now I think I might be dying.
So I’m going to get up now and allow myself a single sentimental moment as I say goodbye to this here armadillo skull. I’m going to start walking, and maybe I’ll head for the desert and maybe I’ll head down the road, and maybe I’ll drop halfway to nowhere in hell, or maybe I’ll get there.
Maybe I’ll get to a city or a truck stop and maybe some good old boy’ll pick a fight and god knows what’ll happen next.
Maybe I’ll get a chance to get out of this pink slug death trap.
Maybe when I get out, my brains won’t be leaking all over my feet.
This here is a whole bagful of maybe’s and me without a pot to piss in.
One thing’s for certain.
Texas is one hell of a long life sentence, period.
Two Good Hands and a Holdout
I woke up in the morning and my brain was gone, cut clean out of my skull. It kind of left an empty space I just couldn’t seem to scratch, like a hive where the honey had run dry and the bees had all flown south.
It was the flies that did it.
It was the flies that woke me up, I mean.
The flies woke me up, buzzing about my skull like I’d washed my hair in a tincture of horseshit and dead man’s guts. I didn’t notice it first off, you understand. It dawned on me later in the morning that my brain just wasn’t there any more, which was kind of absent minded of me, in hindsight. Of course I always say that hindsight is only good for looking out of your own poophole which can lead you to a serious case of brown-eye.
I stared out of the hotel window.
There were two towns out in front of me, one as ugly as the other. I was seeing double. I’d been drinking again, I guess.
Over-drinking was a nasty habit, one I fell into freely and frequently, as easily as a dancehall whore falling into bed. When I squinted, the two towns became one.
The resulting union didn’t help much.
It was still an ugly town with ugly cowboys, ugly horses, and an ugly kind of sunshine.
I stood there framed in the cutout of sash and sill like the water-colored portrait of a hung-over forty year old saint’s torso. I could see myself in the reflection of the dirty flyblown window glass. My face was a blur of good morning and hopelessness. I’d need a mirror to shave, but the window did fine for a once over.
“Good morning, ugly,” I said to myself, trying to stay on the right side of amiable.
I was fully dressed in what I’d woken up in – a cavalry red shirt and a pair of dirty dungarees. No belt but my gun belt, nor suspenders either. A belt would cut a man’s belly when he rode, and suspenders just plain chaffed my back. I wake up like this a lot these days, like a rag doll thrown down into the dirt, picked up the same way it fell.
Fuck it.
I am a creature of habit.
The only belt I tolerate was my tooled leather buscadero gun belt with my two trusty Colt Walkers, the only friends I ever cared for. Forty four, model 1838. The same guns my daddy gave me, after he was done using them to single handedly win the War of Texas Liberation.
“Yeehaw for Brazos!” I shouted out the window. “Texicana hallelujah or bust.”
That was for you, daddy. Too bad we lost the war, even though you never could bring yourself to admit it.
Them two guns were my two right hands. Them and a little surprise tucked up my sleeve. A derringer, same make and model as what laid Master Lincoln into his final tuck-in-goodnight. I had it sprung on a holdout, like a gambler sneaking an ace. A little insurance was a handy thing to have when lead started to fly.
I adjusted my hat. A flat Texas rain-catcher, black as pitch and worn smooth with age, only today the damn thing didn’t seem to fit properly, like it had swollen up two sizes too big while I slept.
I blamed it on my headache. It was a thumper. Two hundred Indian drummers were tom-tomming my brain and none of them had a whit of rhythm. Last night’s half barrel of whiskey was fermenting nightmares, wide awake. I touched the flat of my forehead just under my hat. It felt like an extra scar had grown overnight.
Had I been fighting?
It wouldn’t have been a first.
I poked the scar a little harder. It felt like stitches. To hell with it. What was one more scar going to hurt me? I’d kicked around the rough edge of this world long enough to accumulate an army’s worth of battle wounds.
I was a gunfighter, a worthy accomplishment for a graduate of a prestigious east coast university – a school which for posterity’s sake I will leave unnamed.
I’d left university quicker than most, goaded by the taint of a purely understandable sex scandal. Nearly anyone could have been caught in bed getting their hat boxed by the dean’s daughter. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the dean’s wife hadn’t walked in on us and taken it so hard.
I never understood it.
I’d slept with her just fine, the night before.
I stared out the window some more. It was better than taking up butterfly collecting. Besides, I liked second floors. They’re a great place for staying hid.
That’s the thing to remember about towns. All of the secrets are kept on the second floor upstairs, like the brains of the town. Secrets breathe best in rarified air. There’s quiet and wisdom up here in the high shadows, and nothing but talk and foolishness down on the main floor.
You think I’m just blathering?
It’s a God honest fact that there’s more crap spread around on the saloon floorboards than on an acre of Augean real estate.
I shoved the window open. It stuck halfway up and slid back down. It damn near decapitated me. I drew my head back, drew my gun and shot out the glass. It sounds stupid when you say it, but that’s the way it is when you’re a gunfighter. Shoot first, think later. The brain doesn’t come into it at all.
I leaned out, wary of the scalpel dangles of broken glass noosed about the window frame. Nobody I could see seemed particularly upset about the shot out window. I didn’t hear no three hundred pound bellhop beating at the door. Wasn’t a sheriff’s badge in sight, nor a herd of cowboys clamoring for my blood with handfuls of rope and lit torches.
None of that surprised me none. The fact is I’d have been surprised to see any kind of reaction at all, in this here town.
The town’s name was Jotomano. Loosely translated, it was Blackfoot for heavenly journey. Some wayward buffalo guide had hung the handle on it, when he’d stopped along the trail to squeeze out a particularly satisfying crap. Folks around here were just too lazy to bother changing the name to anything else.
There used to a railroad, and a gold mine. There wasn’t much left of any of that happy bullshit. Nothing left but a stitch of rusted track bisecting the town just north of the played out gold field.
This town was built upon the law of diminishing returns. Apple pie will rot in the brightest sunshine if you leave it out long enough to spoil. Riches render down to rags. Downhill is always the direction that things run fastest.
I like this town. There ain’t a sheriff nor a marshal who will stand against me, since I gunned down the last posse come tracking my path. Jotomano is mine, and there ain’t nobody standing in a pair of big enough boot holes to say any different.
I hawked a hunk of whiskey stained phlegm out through the shot out window. The lung turds made a perfect arc in the sky, and fell like a soggy comet. If the sputum landed on any one, he didn’t have the nerve to look up and curse. Or maybe the spit had hit the su
n caked dirt and instantly evaporated.
It was that hot. Or maybe it was just me. I was sweating, in an uncomfortably cold burning icicle kind of way. My head ached like my brain had just had an argument with my mouth and was fixing to move out. It felt like somebody had peeled off the top of my skull and stitched it into a tight skin drum, and was beating out Marching Through Georgia on it in double hard time.
The sun was just way too bright.
I leaned back into the welcoming shadows of the room, lazily scratching the scuzzle of my half grown beard. I evicted a bloodthirsty flea and squeezed the white head of a pesky pimple until the puss ran out. My morning ablutions complete, I poked my other smaller head back out the broken window and pissed a long yellow rainbow.
“Aaaaah,” I sighed.
My lizard happily drained, I dragged my cigarette makings from out of my sweat and dirt stiffened shirt pocket and rolled the first cigarette of the morning, whispering a prayer of thanks to the blind drunked-up god that had made and guided the spermy messengers of Sir Walter Raleigh’s father, resulting in the creation of his wandering tobacco-bound boy child.
I lit a lucifer match off the window casing and sparked up the cigarette. I drew in and swallowed hard. The first blast of kindled tobacco roared through my skull like a locomotive howl-hoorawing through a long granite tunnel.
Jesus polka dot Christ.
I leaned over like I was taking a bow, felt a mule kick me hard in the bottom swag of my belly hole, and then I upchucked a half gallon’s worth of something I’d rather not talk about, right square out of the open window.
Bullseye.
Someone howled up from below. “Well legion fucked up a herd of pigs! Who the hell has puked on my head?”
I looked down.
There was a cowhand standing in the street below me, wearing the bulk of what my belly hole couldn’t hold. He was a tough looking hombre with a hard gun sight stare beating through the malodorous veil of festooned puke drifting down about his eyebrows and moustache. He grabbed for his gun, but my hand had flown to roost on my own, long before I’d ever thought about it.
I had my iron drawn half way out of my holster, still not knowing if I’d make it in time. He was firing uphill, always a bad angle to shoot from, but all bets run off to Gehanna when the devil calls for gun play.
Except he wasn’t shooting, he was standing there and gawking.
His stare widened as he looked up at me, like he was watching from the wrong end of a massacre. He opened and closed his mouth, which isn’t a particularly intelligent gesture to affect while you’re covered in a drunkard’s chowder. Then he screamed like a shivareeed banshee queen and scrambled out into the street.
Shit.
He had stared at me like I was some kind of a monster. That just didn’t make any kind of sense. I was God in this town – God and the Devil and Hell itself - but I’d never exactly call myself terrifying.
That puke-stained asshole ran out and damn near killed him self beneath the copper plated wheels of a rolling hearse.
I suppose that might have been a conveniently ironic manner in which to meet your maker, but he kept on running right across the street and out of sight, screaming like the last piggy all the way home to the sausage knacker. I stared, watching him fade off into the distance. I thought about washing the puke out of my mouth and going on back to bed.
At least I think I thought that.
I leaned back, feeling dizzy and light-headed, half out of my skull with ache and confusion. Then I straightened up and stared in the mirror. I took my hat off, like a man at a funeral, taking his hat off to wave away the wandering blow flies.
What I saw in the mirror made me want to puke again.
There was a rough scar stitched across the front of my skull. It went clean around like the top of my scalp had seceded from the rest of my body. I was crowned with a ring of blood clots, rowed up like a corona of crudded red rubies. Bruising and swelling and agarish rot sequestered about the scalpel cuts. A fly, happily rooting at the red festered train track of a stitch, swished his hands together like a buzzing little miner panning out a lode of red brick gold. Only it wasn’t just the top that was gone. I could see the tattle tale glints of light squinting through the notches where the skull didn’t quite meet.
Well, hell.
Someone had stolen my brain.
*
I walked downstairs into the hotel lobby. I passed a girl coming up on the staircase. I guess she didn’t know it was bad luck to pass someone on the stairs. I guess she was in too much of a hurry to get past what was left of my face. I didn’t tip my hat. It seemed the only polite thing to do, given my circumstances.
I kept walking down, taking each step with a slow measured carefulness, like an old time drunkard headed for home. Did you ever watch a man walk the stairs of a gallows? There was a certain sort of heaviness to his step, like his feet know where they were taking him and his head doesn’t want to go.
I was feeling that pace at this very moment in time.
The desk clerk stood behind the counter. He was a big man with a head that looked like it didn’t quite belong on him, too small for that big sack of a body he wore underneath his neck, tiny shoulders and a huge belly, all slouch and dead weight like he was trying to grow himself down into the floor boards. He didn’t look American, if you know what I mean. Just another foreign transplant, of course that’s a bit of a double standard when you think about it.
If you ask a red Indian, none of us look American.
“Are you checking out, sir?”
He didn’t ask about the upstairs gun shots. He didn’t ask me about the window. He didn’t even ask about the mirror I’d shot out. Maybe he was just a polite sort of fellow. Still, it struck me funny, the way he kept looking at his feet like they’d grown themselves a pair of pretty naked women.
“Something wrong with my eyes that you can’t look in them?” I asked.
He opened his mouth to say something but I couldn’t wait to listen. I didn’t want to see that look in his face any longer. I was afraid I might see my reflection in his eyes. In my earlier years I might have simply shot the man, but age had tempered my gun hand, with the exception of the occasional bedroom window.
“No I ain’t checking out,” I said. “You are.”
I picked him up and I threw him out of the hotel front window. He was heavy, like I’d said, with a real low sense of gravity. I had to use my legs, my arms, and my hangover given strength to accomplish the deed. He made a nice smash sized hole going through the window glass.
It didn’t make me feel any better, you understand.
It was just the only thing I could think of to do.
There was another mirror, above the desk. A big gilt glittery thing that looked like there was no way in hell it could ever reflect anything but shimmering beauty.
I shot that one out too.
I looked around the lobby.
Nobody wanted to look back.
I guess I couldn’t blame them.
So what now? Maybe a quick tour through the town, shooting out every mirror I come to?
To hell with that.
I’d had enough bad luck today. I headed for the saloon. Who knows, there might be time for a couple of hands of early morning poker.
*
“Whiskey,” I said. “The cheapest stuff you’ve got on hand.”
“Funny thing,” the bartender said. “But that’d also be the best we have got on hand.”
The bartender was a skinny looking fellow, who looked like he might be easier to throw through a window than the desk clerk. I wasn’t making any plans, you understand, but it was good to know.
He poured me a glass of something strong looking, the color of bull piss. It was probably the same brain stripper brewed in the same horse trough as the best bottle in the house. I tossed it back into my gullet. It hit like a glassful of bottled mule kick. I thumped myself hard in the chest to keep my heart from stopping cold.
>
That was breakfast.
“Good?” The barkeep asked, with all of the solicitude of a well meaning undertaker. He was looking away from me. Not as irritatingly obvious as the desk clerk, but it irked me just the same.
Still, I reigned in my disgruntlement.
“As good as sunbaked horse piss,” I remarked calmly. “But not nearly as stimulating.”
“You asked for our worst,” he noted.
“That I did,” I answered. “But that ain’t the worst.”
I took my hat off. I let him get a good long look.
“That ain’t the worst by half.”
My calm blew away as sudden as a prairie storm. I caught him by his throat. If you catch a man quick like, and keep your arm locked stiff, you can lift him up like a bale of hay on the end of a pitchfork.
That’s just what I did, dragging him across the bar so that the counter was carrying some of his weight, my arm was carrying some more, but the bulk of the load was held up by his skinny little neck. I felt his Adam’s apple jugging up and down in the cup of my hand like a slow drowning frog.
“I woke up hung over and found I left a piece of me behind,” I calmly explained. “And now I want to know where the hell did I leave it?”
He opened his mouth like words were supposed to be coming out, but all I could hear was the sound of the back of his tongue clacking against the roof of his mouth.
“WHERE’S MY BRAIN!” I roared, three words that I never thought I’d use one after another in that particular order.
I felt a hand on my shoulder bone. It wasn’t heavy and authoritative, like the hands of most bouncers and sheriffs I have encountered. It was firmer, and finer. Kind of had a touch to it that reminded me of straight razors and finely woven noose rope.
“I beg your pardon sir, but could you spare the bartender? He’s the only one we have these days. I had to amputate the last one.”
I turned my head around, not letting go of the barkeep. It was good to hang onto something live and kicking. What I saw before me was a little man, wrinkled up like an elderly prune. Hard eyes, like bullets. Like he’d stared into the canyons of hell, and they’d looked right back and found him right at home. He was a gentleman, by the look of him, dressed in a fancy looking suit, but that didn’t cut any kind of limburger with me.
