Shotgun

by Courtney Joyner

  Eli looked from one end of the landing to the other, expecting an angry crowd or a blue-frocked Parrish Policeman coming for him. But the shore was empty, because screams along the New Orleans waterfront meant nothing. There was only the sound of the river, calm and running forever.

  Eli’s lungs filled again and he settled by a broken piling, the drunkard lying quietly at the river’s edge, the water swirling pink around his face. Eli tried not to stare at his attacker, but he couldn’t help it. This was the first dead man he had ever seen, and he was the one who had taken his life. The thought was too much; Eli didn’t want to talk to his papa or God, Eli just wanted to ride to the end of the world.

  The night broke apart and Eli hid behind the remains of an old pier that had been shattered by Union cannon fire. At first light, he watched his father walk a team of mules and a lumber cart onto the ferry while teamsters, sharing biscuits and coffee, boarded behind him and settled against a wooden railing. The teamsters were a strapping pair and Mr. Greene was stoop-shouldered, but he secured the load without their help then asked for their money as if he were apologizing. Mr. Greene called out over the morning din of Canal Street, “Son! We’ve got customers!”

  Eli ducked down, waiting for the cast-off bell. Mr. Greene spotted his son’s bay hitched by the fire station and shouted his name again, clanging the rusty signal three times. The ferry broke for the opposite landing, Mr. Greene pulling the guidelines, as Eli took a few fast steps from the pilings and stopped, his eyes fixed on the corpse. The man’s threatening hands looked like shapeless bags, and purple blotches were surfacing under the skin turning his face into a clownish mask.

  “You’re dead,” Eli finally said aloud so he’d believe it. “You’re dead and I’m alive,” he repeated as instinct took over again. He grabbed the knife, struggled to put on the man’s wet jacket, and then ran like hell.

  Mr. Greene wasn’t looking back at Canal Street when Eli swung onto his bay, weighed down by a dead man’s coat with a knife in the pocket. Eli didn’t have a gun, canteen, or bedroll as he spurred his horse toward Faubourg Marigny. Behind him, he could hear the fading shouts of his father and the laughter of the others as they spotted a “dead ’un!” lying in the mud.

  Crutcher sneezed, then locked back his lips with his thumbs, trying to force a smile from his crooked teeth. “I’ve got to look damn good. When folks come into the place, they’re gonna wanna shake my hand.”

  Eli trimmed an eyebrow that was curling wild. “I wouldn’t smile too much, Mr. Crutcher. You’re a serious man and people want to know you mean business.”

  “You’re a barber and you only got seven fingers! Who takes you serious?”

  Eli steadied the tip of the scissors next to Crutcher’s eye and snipped a few stragglers. “You’ve been coming in since I opened.”

  “I come in because you got the two-bit shave and haircut.”

  “There are other shops, but I’m a good barber. Just like you’re very good at what you do.”

  Adding the compliment is something Papa would have done, Eli thought. He trimmed the back of Crutcher’s neck and glimpsed himself in the long, gilt-edged mirror he had brought in from San Francisco. He’d inherited his father’s widow’s peak and adopted his moustache, but now he thought he saw a familiar servitude in his shoulders and manner. His expression darkened and his eyes knit together. The transformation wasn’t sudden, but this was the moment it hit him. He stopped cutting.

  Crutcher adjusted himself in the leather chair and gave his bib a snap, sending clumps of hair to the floor. “Yeah, I’m good. And I’m a real part of this town ’cause I was born right here in Prescott, not two blocks from the Palace Hotel. You’ll always be an outsider. That’s just the way it is.”

  “But you’re a man of the world, too.” Eli began snipping again.

  “I’ve knocked around some. There’s parts of the country where folks are afraid to say my name out loud.”

  “Because you were, well, a gunfighter.”

  Crutcher cranked his neck around, “That’s right. I lived on the other side of the law and I built me a rep. That’s how come I got the job keepin’ the peace in the saloon, but I don’t make it no secret. If folks are scared, then they behave. Nobody trifles with me.”

  “There was the gentleman with one eye.”

  “He made a damn mistake, didn’t he?”

  Eli nodded again. “Oh, I didn’t mean any offense. And I know your deadly reputation because you told me all about it the first time you came in for the two-bit.”

  “So you’d know not to trifle with me! Why don’t you tell me somethin’ for a change? Hell, nobody knows nothin’ about you.”

  Eli straightened Crutcher’s tie with the thumb and index finger on his right hand. The stick man winced at the lump of congealed flesh that had grown over the open wound left by the missing three fingers. “I tried to get a job as a barber at the Palace, but the manager said my hand would make the guests a little squeamish.”

  “You just come out of nowhere, lookin’ for work? You shoulda written a letter first.”

  “Except I’m right-handed. After my accident, I taught myself to cut hair with my left, but my handwriting’s just chicken scratch.”

  Crutcher leaned back with his eyes closed, “You’re doin’ all right for a cripple.”

  Eli poured hot water on a towel, and rung it out, his mind full of the sweet time before he killed his second man.

  Eli didn’t know if he was wanted for murder, so he stayed off the main roads and stuck close to the river, following it into Arkansas. He thought he could lose himself in Helena with a new name, and make enough of a stake to get himself to Utah or Arizona. That was the plan as he sat by a low fire in the evenings, a dead man’s coat around his shoulders, and practicing with his homemade knife.

  The weapon was never out of his hands, flicking it from his hip or throwing it under-handed, depending on where he needed the blade to go. Bringing his arm down from the shoulder was the surest throw, and he hit his target dead-on every time so he could eat. When Eli rode into Helena, it was with empty pockets and a sack of rabbit pelts.

  He got a job in a whorehouse as a bar wipe, and he was washing glasses when a mule skinner, who couldn’t afford any of the better girls, decided he didn’t like Eli’s “half-nigger” face. The old boy wrapped his arms around a five-dollar whore and started to pull her upstairs when the spike flew from Eli’s hand and tore through his windpipe.

  Eli didn’t remember throwing the knife, and thought he’d woken from a deep sleep when he found himself in the back of a wagon, huddled under a canvas tarp, as the five-dollar girl snuck him out of town. A reporter wrote a no-fact version of the killing and dubbed Eli The Bayonet Kid, and that’s what he was called from then on, no matter what his age. Loudmouths and nervous punks challenged him, and they found out that he was faster with a knife than they were with a gun.

  Eli read about himself in the paper, and prayed his papa hadn’t seen the articles and torn them out. Small, mail-hack jobs paid his way as he headed west, and he was wanted in two states when he rode into the foothills of the Colorado Rockies and met up with Fancy Jess Archer. Jess was the man who blew his hand to pieces.

  “This ain’t my day off.” Crutcher’s voice slapped Eli’s ears as he pulled the towel off of his mashed-apple face. “I got things to do, even if you ain’t.”

  Crutcher held his palms out and Eli slathered them with Bay Rum. Crutcher tapped his face lightly, rising on his toes as he did it.

  Eli grinned, “Sorry, Mr. Crutcher. I didn’t mean to talk you to death.”

  “Hell, you haven’t said a damn word for ten minutes. You ain’t much otherwise, but you do got a way with soap and razor.”

  Eli turned the strop over, and struck the razor against the linen side to heat the blade. Crutcher smothered his face with his hands, running his palms over his jowls, “What the hell are you doin’? I already got a shave and it feels fine. Not ‘tip fine,’ but g
ood enough.”

  Crutcher started out of the chair and the razor was instantly at his throat, forcing him to sit back. Crutcher strangled the armrests as Eli leaned in close with a quiet, “Do you remember the time I told you your mouth would get you killed?”

  “What . . . ? You never said nothin’ like that to me.”

  “Look in the mirror—look! And think!”

  Crutcher tried to focus on the mirror, sweat and Bay Rum dripping into his eyes, but all he could see were the distorted faces of two men who were being beaten by their lives. “I’m lookin’ and sure, I know what you’re talkin’ about now. I know.”

  Eli pressed the razor, opening a small cut above Crutcher’s Adam’s apple. “You always were a liar. You get scared and you say anything to get you out of it. That’s why I got my damn fingers blown off !”

  Crutcher was afraid to swallow. “Bayonet?”

  “You’ve been in that chair twenty times and you never really looked at me once, did you?”

  “W-well, you’re the b-barber. And The Bayonet I knew, he was just a kid. But I always said you was a good barber.”

  Eli let the blade slip closer to the jugular. “Bayonet was a name I didn’t even want, but it got me a place with Jess Archer’s Foothill Gang. Remember now? The night I rode into camp, you laughed and called me a runt. One of the boys said I should kill you right there, but Jess put a cork in him. Anything coming back, Clyde?”

  Crutcher shut his eyes and murmured, but it wasn’t a prayer. A hairline of blood trickled down the side of Crutcher’s neck, spotting his collar. Eli dabbed the blood with a tissue, but kept the blade pressed against the throbbing vein. “You were the gunslinger from the Canadian side who’d killed ten men. Funny, you claimed to be from up North when you really hailed from Prescott. Funnier still, I never saw you draw down on anyone. You were all mouth until The Blackhawk.”

  Crutcher hid his words in the back of his throat so it wouldn’t move against the razor when he spoke. “I . . . didn’t do nothin’.”

  “That’s right—you didn’t.”

  Eli angled his horse across the bend of a trail that led to a narrow gorge where Jess Archer was waiting. Archer stood up in his stirrups, his trousers and coat neatly pressed, and looked down at the drop from the rocky slope into a miniature valley that was bridged by a cross-braced trestle. The structure narrowly supported tracks for a mining train, with barely a foot of clearance on either side.

  Jess tapped his bowler for attention, which was his habit. “Looks like it would collapse if you sneezed, but it’s served the Blackhawk miners for ten years.”

  Eli peered into the gorge, “That’s a hell of a fall, Mr. Archer.”

  “And that’s good for us, son, not them.”

  Clyde Crutcher rode up on the side of Archer, jerking his horse to a stop. Archer checked his pocket watch.

  “Sorry I’m late, Mr. Archer. Now what are we doing here?”

  “I’ve been explaining it for two weeks, Clyde.”

  “I mean, what do you want me to do?”

  “The other boys will be dropping a barricade that’ll stop the train right here, with half the cars still on the trestle. Take care of one guard and the rest will fall into line. They’ll be trapped like a pig in a well. We’ve all made the papers, and they’re just miners working a strike. They won’t want to shoot it out.”

  Crutcher laughed, “Not with me. What about the runt?”

  Eli didn’t say a word, but Archer turned to Crutcher, “You claim quite a reputation this side of the Canadian, but everybody knows about Bayonet. They’ll turn over the gold. I want you boys to be ready, but nobody has to get hurt.”

  Crutcher’s eyes were wet as Eli worked the razor against his Adam’s apple, “We faced a dozen miners with Henrys and Winchesters. They were layin’ for us, Crutcher.”

  “But you—you got away.”

  “Jess Archer didn’t, and neither did the others. We were shot to pieces right there by the tracks. I got one in the leg and they blew my hand off. You know what they told me? The miners made a deal with the infamous Clyde Crutcher. They paid you to ride on because they were afraid of you.”

  Crutcher let out a half laugh and said, “They gave me more than any share I would’ve gotten. That’s just good business. You should know about that.”

  Eli’s hand shook as he pressed the razor against Crutcher’s throat, laying open a slit of skin. “Tell me straight, how many men have you killed?”

  “In a straight-up gunfight? None. I killed a fella by accident in a fight. He was kind of famous . . . and then people started to talk. I never faced nobody else for real. I swear to God.”

  “And by running away?”

  “I-I don’t know.”

  “I’ve killed six, I think. Six. For real.”

  “Hell. Preachers an’ the penny books all say an outlaw’s life’ll catch up to him. If this is my time, then get it over with.”

  Eli said, “I should,” then pulled the blade away from Crutcher’s throat and folded it into its ivory handle. “The Bayonet Kid’s dead. Now I’m just a barber.”

  Crutcher leaped from the chair, pressing the cotton bib against his neck. Eli faced him. “Did you know I saw you on the street the day I went to the Palace for a job? If I had my right hand, you wouldn’t be standing here now. But I found this place and I’ve done just fine over the years; better than I deserve.”

  Crutcher grabbed his beat-to-hell hat from the rack, his coat flaring open to reveal the holster by his arm.

  Eli held out a blue towel. “You want to really use that thing?” He unfolded the towel to reveal a long metal spike, with leather wrapped around one end. “It’s up to you.”

  Crutcher stared at the spike. “You’re pretty good with your left.”

  “You want to find out?”

  Crutcher shook his head. “I’m just a fat old man who works in a bar.”

  “And I’m the cripple who cuts your hair. What kind of showdown would that be?”

  Crutcher put his hand on the doorknob. “None at all. And I know it.”

  “That’s two bits for the shave and haircut.”

  Crutcher handed Eli a dollar. “Keep it.”

  Eli smiled. “A tip from The Stickman of the Year. Must be my lucky day. Yours, too.”

  Crutcher stepped from the barbershop and made his way down Whiskey Row. Eli watched him shake a few hands and slap some backs as he walked, not seeing the man trailing behind him. Eli wrapped the spike in the towel and dropped it in the trash as the man in the street quick-walked toward Crutcher. A patch covered one of his eyes and he was drawing something from his belt.

  Eli Greene took a razor from the drawer and began to strop it back and forth against the hanging leather with an even, deliberate motion. He didn’t stop as he heard the muted pop of pistol fire, but kept stropping back and forth.

  Back and forth.

  PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

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  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2013 C. Courtney Joyner

  “The Two-Bit Kill” copyright © 2010 C. Courtney Joyner

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  ISBN: 978-0-7860-3232-7

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-3233-4

  ISBN-10: 0-7860-3233-2