The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Haw-haw! I heard you’d a hand for light comedy. The ninety was in the way of appreciation from the house, over and above Mr. Foy’s percentage of the box office. You’ll break his record, or I’m a horse thief. When do you expect the rest of your company?”

  “Mr. Ragland is on his way,” said Johnny, “with the costumes and properties we stored in Denver at the end of last season. I expect to hear from Major and Madame Mort-Davies any day.”

  Before leaving New York City, Johnny had placed the following notice in the classified sections of the St. Louis Enquirer, the Denver Post, and the San Francisco Call:

  SIR JOHN, DR. CAIUS, MRS. FORD:

  Come home. All is forgiven. Wire

  Fenton, Breevort Hotel, NYC.

  The names addressed belonged to three of the principal characters in The Merry Wives of Windsor; Fenton was the leading man. Johnny selected the three major newspapers as those most likely to be obtained wherever the cast had scattered.

  “Why so formal?” April had asked, when he showed her the text. “One would think you met them in a drawing room. What could they possibly have done that would require your forgiveness?”

  “The gentleman from Avon saw fit to give only one of them a Christian name. I told them to expect something on this order. If they’re smart enough to rob banks, they’re smart enough to respond.”

  “Peace officers read Shakespeare, too. Some of them must. You could be arrested the first time you inquired for a message for Mr. Fenton at the desk.”

  “Am I to stand trial for placing a counterfeit notice? I rather think three wars were fought to preserve that right.”

  “Two, perhaps. Mr. Frederick Douglass might present you with an argument as to the third.”

  “I thought you were reading about Joan of Arc. When did you switch to Harriett Beecher Stowe?”

  “You’re always throwing up your education to me. One would think you studied at Oxford instead of the trash bin behind the city library.” She returned to La Vie de Jeanne D’Arc, in which she’d made scant progress.

  Johnny had then wired out the notices with payment.

  Lizzie saw the advertisement in the Call and pointed it out to the Major, who’d seen the paper first but seldom ventured beyond the theatrical columns. They dispatched a telegram to New York saying they were under way, sent a message round to Peter Ruskin to inform him they would be unavailable to meet with him again in the forseeable future, and set about packing their bags and trunk with the tent-show efficiency of experienced troupers. For once they settled their hotel bill; the guarantee of another successful season had made them expansive.

  “Falstaff, by thunder!” said the Major on their way out of the lobby. “I’ve always wanted to play the old rogue.”

  “You do, Evie; you do.”

  After reading their message, Philip Rittenhouse lost no time. He closed his office, wired Chicago that he was on the move, hurried to the station with his bag, and upon learning that no couple of the Davieses’ description had bought tickets that day, waited in an unobtrusive corner of the depot for them to arrive. He’d traded his bowler and loud waistcoat for a soft hat and linen duster and now looked very little like either a booking agent or a detective. When the Madame and the Major swept in with all the furor and feathers of comic-opera royalty, he waited until they’d checked their trunk and boarded before buying his ticket. They rode in separate coaches. He knew their destination, thanks to the loquacity of the Major, and that there was small danger of losing them at some stop along the route. He avoided the dining car and the possibility of a chance meeting there; it had been important to convince them Wichita was too far for him to travel just to ensure their availability.

  “Pleasure trip, sir?” The conductor handed back his punched ticket.

  Rittenhouse smiled. “Yes. As a matter of fact, I suppose it is.”

  “One can always tell.” He turned toward the next passenger.

  Cornelius Ragland, who in keeping with a lifelong habit of caution had formed the custom of purchasing all three of the above-named newspapers daily, as well as the Kansas City Times, the New Mexican of Santa Fe, and the Portland Oregonian (although he admitted to himself he took the last mainly for the variety of patent medicines whose manufacturers advertised in its inside pages), read the notice in the Denver Post and sent his immediate reply, volunteering to make arrangements to transport their costumes and stage equipment from Denver to Wichita. Johnny’s response came by return wire:

  BREAK A LEG

  FENTON

  The young man treated himself to one last, luxurious soak in steaming sulphur water, returned to his room, read and made corrections on the last pages of The Tragedy of Joan of Arc, and put the draft in his old leather portfolio along with a copy of The Merry Wives of Windsor bound in scuffed green boards and his notes for the adaptation. He’d intended to polish his original play first, then organize his notes on the comedy into a script, but now he would have to embrace Shakespeare on the train. He packed his valise, paid his bill, and took the hotel carriage to the station. He didn’t regret saying good-bye to Hot Springs. His stay there had been rewarding personally and professionally; his health was stronger than it had ever been, and he had written the best thing of his young career, which he did not delude himself would ever be an old one. But it was a deadly dull place, and his adventures with the Prairie Rose had spoiled him for the life prosaic. Thus, his patience was strained when the conductor announced that the train’s departure had been delayed to make room for an express train headed West; he had no details to add.

  Five minutes later, Cornelius spotted the conductor on the platform outside his window, in conversation with the clerk who’d sold him his ticket. He lowered the window and strained to overhear what they were saying.

  “. . . make it up on the other end if they’ll just come on ahead,” said the conductor, frowning at his turnip watch.

  The clerk set fire to a stubby pipe, broke the match, and ground it underfoot. “When’s the last time you ever knew the army to hurry up and do anything?”

  “Well, it ain’t like Fort Dodge has needed ’em since the injuns went west.”

  18

  When Tom Riddle was lying on his saddle blanket in a dank cave half a day’s ride from Table Rock, burning with fever on one side, shivering with cold on the other (a living campfire steak), he changed.

  He wasn’t proud of it, never spoke of it, but a fact was a fact; color of one kind meant you’d tapped into the mother lode and color of another meant you’d tapped out, and no matter how hard or soft you swung your pick, you couldn’t change it. If he could, he’d be soaking his saddle sores in champagne up on Nob Hill right now and not contributing to them on the board seat of a day coach rattling its way north to Kansas.

  Normally he liked to talk, and if it had been anyone else who’d survived a .44 slug fired into his chest at close range and Breed’s indifferent efforts to carve it out with his big Bowie, he’d have gone on about it in all its detail until Ace-in-the-Hole’s voices rose in chorus telling him to shut up. Instead he’d contented himself with a stretcher he’d concocted during his convalescence on his sister’s pig farm about teaching a hog to do sums. Tom saw himself as a pioneer on the road less traveled, both in his choices of professions—prospecting, then robbery—and in his ability to tell tall stories he made up as he went along. But being a changed man was a commonplace on the frontier, where every third man had fled to escape illness, creditors, and past mistakes, and where every third one of that third had changed his name in a ceremony of self-baptismal gratification. If he’d wanted change, goddamn it, he’d have gone through it when he pulled himself out of that badger hole in California where his friends had left him to starve. He hadn’t (although he’d lost his enthusiasm for digging in any kind of dirt), and that had been something to brag on. It was a rare man who was satisfied with himself no matter what; but the business in Wyoming had put paid to that.

  Whiskey tasted better
, for one thing, and the glow lasted longer. His first time with a whore after his recovery had been as good as anything he’d conjured up lying on his back under the stars thinking of the pen-and-ink sketches of the corset models in Sears &Roebuck, and a bowl of beans and a slice of cornbread in Guacho’s Cantina in San Diablo after the long hungry ride down had nearly taken off the top of his head. He slept longer and deeper, his dreams were drenched in rich color, and he awoke as alert and ready for the new day as a child. It was a pain in the ass.

  The core problem was he had to keep it all from his companions. Life on the scout was just a little bit better than hell, if you listened to the padres and believed what they said about the contorted chains of mortal souls and the lake of fire. You got piles from riding day and night, you entered every town through the asshole-ugly back section to avoid passing the post office and jail where your description was posted for all to see and compare, you shelled out money like Vanderbilt to live in rooms a dog wouldn’t shit in just to keep your name off the registration, and when you were flush you couldn’t spend a nickel because you were hiding out in a cave or a cornrick or the hole under an outhouse because of the way you got it and how many people were looking for you to get it back. Bitching about the life was your badge of brotherhood, and if for some jackass reason—say, you’re alive when you should be dead—you found yourself whistling in the saddle for the pure joy of hearing the notes, you were just asking the fellow riding next to you to blow your skull through the back of your hat.

  “Tom, you look like you just pissed a porcupine. What’re you so mad about?” Ed Kettleman plunked himself down into the seat beside him.

  Tom straightened his spine. He hadn’t heard him coming up the aisle. “I never did take to trains. Somebody else is in charge and you never know when you’re going to get robbed.”

  Ed hooted. “That’d be a sight to see. I’d admire to know how Jack would take to it.”

  “I reckon he wouldn’t, if Salt Lake City means anything.” That whole episode made him think of Ed’s brother. “How’s Charlie?”

  “Nutty as pecan pie. Now he’s talking about hanging out his shingle. He says getting hit with that doctor’s book ought to qualify him for a country practice. I sure hope he snaps out of it.”

  “Maybe if you clobbered him with a Jesse James dime novel.”

  “It’d take a stack. That book left a dent big as Fort Worth. What you fixing to do with your part of that seventy thousand?”

  The car was half empty, and no one was seated near them. Still, Tom lowered his voice a notch. “Go to Venezuela, I reckon.”

  “What’s in Africa?”

  “Venezuela’s in South America, you dumb Texican. They just got through fighting a civil war; now they’re building railroads, just like it was here ten years ago. I could start all over again with my own crew, and there ain’t a Pinkerton in a thousand miles.”

  This was the first he’d let anyone in on the idea that had been teasing and plaguing him since before he left Nebraska. In order to occupy his mind while he was healing, his sister had handed him a stereoscope and a box of glass plates, among which was a series about Venezuela: the Andes, as tall and jagged as the Rockies; the llanos, indistinguishable from the Great Plains; and Lake Maracaibo, which made the one in Utah Territory look like a glass of tequila with salt floating on the surface. There stood Caracas, the capital, which was San Francisco and Denver and St. Louis all rolled into one huge sprawl, with mansions on the hills and (he’d bet his cut of the payroll train job) cute little mud huts down on the flat where a man could have fun for a fraction of what it would cost him in any of those other places.

  When he was strong enough to drive a buckboard, he’d gone into Lincoln on the pretext of bringing back supplies and spent a couple of hours in the county library reading up on South America. Venezuela had gold and copper mines and tobacco plantations to rival the vast cattle ranches in Texas, and the only law worthy of the name rode on the backs of mules in the persons of loose bands of federal officers, which if they were anything like the ones in Mexico could be bought with a sack of gold dust. Tom Riddle had decided that if there was a heaven for highwaymen, Venezuela was that place.

  “What do they talk down there?” Ed asked.

  “Mexican, I reckon.”

  “I didn’t hear you talk much Mexican when we was in Mexico.”

  “What do I got to know except ‘Stick ’em up?’”

  “Well, you can have your South America, and I’ll raise you China. Me ‘n’ Charlie are taking our cut and opening a saloon in Tijuana. Even the greasers there talk American, and we can have prizefights every Saturday night, and take a cut off the top of every bet for the house. It’s legal down there.”

  “When did anything not being legal ever stop you and Charlie?”

  “We been running from one kind of law or another since we was kids. It’ll be good to find out what it’s like sleeping on the right side of the sheet. Also Charlie can jabber all he wants and no one’ll pay him any more attention than a burro with a bellyful of loco weed.”

  “You can always put a burro down.”

  Ed rubbed his slack unshaven jaw. “I’ll warrant you don’t have any brothers.”

  “I got a brother-in-law on that pig farm I wouldn’t mind putting down. He’d of charged me rent for that ticky bed if Aggie’d let him.”

  “It ain’t the same thing. I’d take it a favor if you didn’t bring it up again.”

  Tom was enjoying the conversation, that was the hell of it. He wondered just how long it took being happy to be still alive to wear off. It was worse than mescal, which made you drunk all over again every time you took a drink of water for a week. He changed the subject. “Where’s the Mexicans?”

  “Boxcar. The conductor didn’t like their look, even without their bandoleros on. I expect they think it’s a Pullman. They ain’t rid inside since before the revolution.” Ed produced a plug and offered it to him.

  Tom shook his head, and looked out the window while the other cut himself a cud and went to work on it. For some reason, chaw was one thing Tom had lost his taste for; just watching someone chewing revolted him, and the smell made him ill. “What are the others fixing to do, you reckon?”

  “I figure Jack to bury his part and go on sticking up banks and trains and shooting folks till they put a slug in him or string him up. I don’t figure he got into this for the money as much as raising the devil. Breed, he’ll just keep getting worse and worse till they elect him governor of hell. I don’t calculate Old Scratch will put up much of a contest.”

  “What about Mysterious Bob?”

  “Shit, I know better how that locomotive up front thinks than I do Bob. I seen him reading a book once written in Greek.”

  “How’d you know it was Greek?”

  “I asked him what that book was he was reading. He said it was Greek.”

  “You believe him?”

  “I don’t see why not. It was just about the longest conversation we had since I knew him.”

  “What was the book about?”

  “I didn’t ask. I figured why push my luck. Anyway, the print looked like a mess of squashed bugs.”

  “Huh.”

  Ed nodded. “That about sums up Bob.”

  “When’s the next stop?”

  “About an hour. I asked the porter. We change to the Kansas Pacific in Wichita.”

  Johnny Vermillion had smoked a cigar on a balcony overlooking the Champs Elysées, with the gas lamps glowing saffron at twilight and stately coaches rumbling along the broad avenue with the Arc de Triomphe at their backs; drunk fifty-year-old port on a barge gliding down the Thames past Big Ben, the Albert, and the Houses of Parliament; wagered the last of his father’s allowance on a single hand of poker in the bridal suite of the Palmer House, hung with cloth-of-gold and decorated further with Chicago’s most beautiful ladies of the evening clad in nothing but their beauty patches; attended a reception for Lillie Langtry at the Academ
y of Music in New York City, where she’d sung selections from Faust; yet none of these places had granted him so fine a view as the window of his room in the Occidental Hotel in Wichita, Kansas, looking out on Douglas Avenue and the homely two stories of the Longhorn Bank.

  He knew its history, as he was a serious student of his profession who learned all his lines as well as those of the other members of his cast, and was moreover a quick study. Open only two years, and christened strategically to attract both the cattle barons of Texas and the meatpacking moguls from Chicago, the institution advertised more than a million in assets, and at the height of the season (which it was approaching) stored as much as fifty thousand in its vault; in gold and silver, since neither the unlettered ranchers nor the swollen-bellied businessmen who had survived the Panic of ’73 trusted securities or greenbacks. He wondered just how much that came to in pounds and ounces, and whether he might have to make arrangements involving some form of transportation other than Lizzie’s bicycle.

  He knew the bank’s present as well, or as much of it as five days of casual observation could provide. At half-past nine every weekday the guard, middle-aged and limping slightly in a tight blue uniform and forage cap from which all the military insignia had been removed, arrived and let himself in the front door with a key attached to a ring the size of a duck’s egg; he wore what appeared to be a big Navy revolver in a scabbard on his left hip. (“Left-handed,” the observer noted.) The manager, a comfortable-looking fat man in a clawhammer coat, appeared fifteen minutes later, followed in close order by three cashiers, young men dressed respectably but more simply—a diplomatic decision, no doubt. Almost invariably, customers were waiting when the CLOSED sign on the door was reversed and the door opened to the public. The routine never varied more than a minute either way, and traffic coming and going was steady until nearly closing, when it increased noticeably as the hands crept around the clock toward four.