Saving Masterson

by Bill Brooks

  “I know it,” John said. “I know she’s his woman. It’s something I respect and I won’t go ’round her. ’Sides, I’ve got a terrible history with women, even if she wasn’t his woman. Of course if he was to take it in his mind to up and go north again and leave her behind, I ain’t promising I’d just let her be sad.”

  Teddy saw the mute girl who lived with the priest standing in the doorway of their adobe watching him and John in the glare of the morning. The priest was giving a mass and Teddy knew what temptation a woman could be for a man down in that country, where there wasn’t any law but one man’s respect for another.

  Teddy touched spurs to his mount and didn’t look back, and John stood there watching him until he had ridden out of sight.

  Two days riding brought him to the Rio Grande and he crossed it and felt almost immediately the change in him when he rode out of the river and onto Texas soil. He wasn’t sure if the feeling he had was a good one or bad.

  He rode all the way to El Paso and sold the horse and bought a train ticket after he wired George Bangs he was headed for Dodge and that he’d be a day in El Paso if George had any further instructions for him.

  He walked around the sun-soaked plazas and El Paso didn’t seem that much different than the village he’d left in some respects, except El Paso was much larger and had an energy to it that the village did not have.

  There were plenty of saloons and billiard parlors, hardware stores and other places of commerce—hotels included. He rented a room and then went and found a barbershop and had the barber cut his hair and shave his beard, and from there he found a public bath and soaked while his clothes were being cleaned.

  Afterward he found a cantina and ordered a meal: steak and fried potatoes, tortillas, and ice beer. Finishing his meal, he strolled around the town now golden with the light of early evening. He was struck by the beauty of some of the women and realized how long it had been since he’d been with a woman. He felt unfaithful even thinking about it.

  He stopped in a saloon for a cocktail, thinking a drink might be the best way to finish off the evening before he went back to his hotel room.

  He stood at the bar and listened to the music of a piano being played by a man with garters on his sleeves. The piano music, the clickity-clack of the roulette wheel being turned in a corner of the room, and the laughter and talk of patrons were all part of the same cacophony he welcomed after so many months down in the quiet little village, where the only music to be heard was the church bell, and occasionally guitars and trumpets when there was a Saturday night dance.

  A tall thin man came in and stood at the bar and ordered a beer. He and the bartender spoke as old friends, the bartender saying, “Pat, when’d you get back into town?”

  “Oh, I just got in,” the tall man said.

  “You still buffalo hunting for a living?”

  “No, the buffalo have all been shot out. I’m looking for some regular work, you know of any?”

  “Might be a bartending job open over to the El Toro is about all I know of.”

  “Bartending ain’t for me, if I don’t have to.”

  “These is hard times, Pat. Ain’t much work to be had unless you’re in the killing business.”

  “I ain’t.”

  “I wish I knew of something else to tell you.”

  Another man came over and slapped the tall man on the back.

  “Garrett,” he said to the tall man. “When’d you get into town?”

  “Just,” the tall man said.

  The three of them stood there chatting until the bartender got summoned for another round of drinks at the far end of the bar.

  “I think maybe I’ll head over to New Mexico,” the tall man said to the shorter one. “Might be able to pick up some work. My pockets is so empty they ain’t even got lint in ’em.”

  “That’s some hard country over there,” the short man said. “Lots of killing going on.”

  “Killing’s common these days.”

  “More so there. They ain’t hardly got no law, the way I hear it. Wasn’t you a lawman once’t?”

  “I did a little before I got into shooting buffalo.”

  “Might think about wearing a badge again. I kindy reckon they could use some extra laws in that country. You ever hear of Hoodoo Brown?”

  It caught Teddy’s attention, the mention of that name.

  “I heard of him,” the tall man said. “What about him?”

  “He was the law up in Las Vegas. They say he’s a hard man to work for, always needing to hire deputies. Might be you could catch on there if you were looking to wear a badge.”

  “I don’t know,” the tall man said. “Politics never was my style.”

  Teddy studied the tall man, didn’t see much that impressed him. He finished his drink and walked out into the still evening, thinking he’d stop on his way back to the hotel to see if there was any word yet arrived from George Bangs.

  There was a telegram from George waiting for him.

  Have wired Mayor Kelly you’re on your way. Still working on getting you cleared in Las Vegas matter. Have sent operative there to investigate. Inform me of your arrival in Dodge. Possible news on Horace’s murder case, may have located sister of shooter. Will inform you soon as I have more information.

  G. Bangs.

  The sun was laying down the last of its light on El Paso’s streets when he emerged from the office. At that hour, the city looked golden and inviting, possibly to some serious trouble if a man wasn’t careful. Night had a way of bringing out the loose in a man, and a woman too.

  Teddy walked toward his hotel. He was a city block away when he saw the tall man named Pat Garrett emerge from the saloon and start across the street. But as he did, a city policeman, a much shorter man in a dark coat wearing a round-crowned hat with a badge pinned to it stopped Garrett. Teddy was too far away to hear what they were talking about, but suddenly the policeman pulled his revolver and Garrett raised his hands while the policeman disarmed him of what looked to be a seven-inch-barrel Colt Peacemaker.

  As Teddy came closer he heard the policeman say, “Vagrancy is what I’m charging you with. Now get your long skinny ass on the move…” then watched as the policeman marched Garrett off at the point of his gun.

  Teddy felt sorry for a man who simply wanted to find work but only managed to find trouble instead.

  The next morning, he boarded the flyer out of El Paso, somewhat glad he was on the move again and maybe staying a step ahead of his own problems.

  Chapter 3

  Bone Butcher didn’t like the Masterson brothers one lick. Not a single one of the three. As part owners in the Lone Star, Jim and Bat were competitors, and Ed being the city marshal and Bat being the county sheriff gave them all an edge on things, the way Bone figured it. In Bone’s eyes, the Mastersons and Dog Kelly, mayor and owner of the Alhambra, were thick as thieves, protected one another’s interest in the gambling and whoring trades. As long as things were the way they were, Bone could feature himself out of business in Dodge sooner rather than later.

  He’d been around this block before, when the Earp brothers were wearing badges in the town. Bone had hired Clay Allison to take care of the Earps. Clay had himself a big reputation as a stone killer down in Texas—but apparently such reputation stopped at the border, because when Clay showed up in Dodge he almost pissed in his boots when Wyatt confronted him and told him to clear town or clear leather.

  “I think the son of a bitch Allison was fruity,” is what Bone told his gofer, one Bad Hand Frank Partridge about Clay Allison’s rather quick departure out of Dodge.

  “Clay Allison is the meanest bastard in Texas,” Bad Hand Frank Partridge replied. Bad Hand Frank Partridge had once been an accountant in a Boston law firm before liquor and cocaine pills turned him bad. Now he kept Bone’s books and accounts of his various business interests, which included the Silk Garter Saloon, with its gambling and prostitution, and a dope den, the Dream Palace.

&
nbsp; “He may be the meanest bastard in Texas, but Dodge ain’t hardly Texas, now, is it?” Bone said, still bitter it had cost him a hundred dollars in expense money for Clay Allison to come to Dodge.

  “I guess not.”

  “You hear how he talked? Like a goddamn woman, real high voice. I think he was fruity.”

  “Maybe so, I wouldn’t know nothing about that sort of thing, Bone.”

  “We’ll be dealing faro out the back of a buckboard and selling whores down out of a tent we don’t do something soon about Dog Kelly and them Mastersons.”

  “What you intend to do?”

  “I intend to kill ’em,” Bone said.

  “All of ’em?”

  “Ever damn last one of ’em. Hell, what if I was to pay you to kill ’em for me?”

  Bad Hand Frank extended his ruined right hand with just the last two fingers and the thumb attached.

  “I ain’t shit with a gun since Leavenworth.”

  Frank had often told the story about his missing fingers, especially when he was drinking hard and maudlin. “Chopped off by a goddamn sumbitch in the pen,” he would bemoan on such occasions.

  “Why’d he chop ’em off?” Bone had asked, the first time Frank told the story.

  “I’ll tell you why he chopped ’em off,” Frank had said, with a mixture of anger and self pity. Frank prefaced the description of the act of violence that had led to his ruination with a tawdry tale of how men locked up in prison for a long time could get.

  “The man who chopped ’em off was a cook and quite clever with a cleaver. He’d been in the pen for twenty years by the time I arrived and wasn’t ever getting out. Me and him got celled up together.

  “He was always talking about how lonely it was and bringing me extra eats from the kitchen and at first I didn’t think nothing about it,” Frank had explained in blubbering tones. “Then one night I learned why he was being so nice and I told him to forget about such notions and we got to fighting and he just chopped ’em off before I could bash his skull in on the bars.”

  “I wish you hadn’t told me none of that story,” Bone had said afterward. “I never did care for stories of perversion.”

  Frank stood there now, holding his scarred hand forth with its missing trigger and middle fingers. His hand looked like a claw of sorts.

  “You can see I ain’t never could make no damn shootist,” Frank said.

  “You could stab ’em, you wouldn’t have to shoot ’em necessarily.”

  “No, you best hire you a professional killer you want them Mastersons done in.”

  “It’ll take more’n one, my guess is.”

  “How bad you want ’em dead?”

  “Bad.”

  “I know a feller might do it for a thousand dollars.”

  “Thousand dollars!”

  “He don’t come cheap, but his work is guaranteed.”

  “Guaranteed, huh? I like the sound of that. How you know this feller?”

  “I was in the pen with him for a time.”

  “What was he in for?”

  “Killing folks.”

  “They let him out for killing folks? He couldn’t have killed nobody too bad, they let him out.”

  “They didn’t let him out, he escaped.”

  “Why didn’t you mention him back when I was looking for somebody to shoot them Earps and hired that damn fruit Allison instead?”

  “You never asked me,” Bad Hand Frank said. “If you’d asked me then, I’d told you about this feller.”

  “How you gonna find him if he’s escaped from the pen? He’s probably long in the wind by now.”

  “He’s in Montana fixing to kill some people.”

  “How you know this?”

  “My sister told me.”

  “How’s she know?”

  “She’s married to him.”

  “He escaped the pen then went and married your sister?”

  “No, he was married to her before he went to the pen.”

  “Why didn’t you say this before?”

  “You never asked me.”

  “Jeez Christ, I got to ask you everything ahead of time?”

  “Pretty much. I ain’t never been no mind reader.”

  Bad Hand Frank Partridge was feeling pain where his fingers used to be. He looked at his hand and the fingers that were left were trembling like they were lonely and searching around for the missing ones.

  “I need to take me some cocaine pills and drink some more whiskey, because what I already took ain’t doing the job,” Frank said. “It gets worse all the time, the pain does.”

  “Thousand dollars,” Bone said working the figure around in his mouth as though he were trying to chew it enough to get it swallowed. “That’s a lot of money.”

  “Tell you one thing,” Frank said. “When Two Bits shoots ’em, even Jesus can’t raise ’em up again.”

  “Two Bits, huh? How’d he come by that name?”

  “Two Bits Cline. Says he killed his first man for two bits. Says it just sorta stuck, the nickname.”

  “That sounds like a fruit’s name to me.”

  Frank nodded as he poured himself a glass of Bone’s best whiskey to wash down the handful of cocaine pills he shook from a small tin he’d picked from his pocket.

  “Two Bits is the only man I ever met who ain’t afraid of nothing, not even my sister.”

  “Still sounds like a fruit’s name.”

  “Him and my sister has got three kids. I don’t reckon he’s no fruit, and he’d probably shoot you in the head if you was to call him one. He’s sort of an ill-tempered feller.”

  “Go on and get hold of him.”

  “I can’t hardly think, my hand hurts so bad.”

  “Maybe you ought to go pay the Rose a visit.”

  “What for? She ain’t no doctor.”

  “No, but she has her ways of taking a man’s mind off his troubles.”

  The Rose of Cimarron was Bone’s woman—a former whore who he’d fallen in love with. Bone was always testing her loyalty to him just as he was Bad Hand Frank’s loyalty. Frank knew better than to try and show any interest whatsoever in the Rose.

  “Ah, I know she’s your gal,” Frank said. “You can’t trick me.”

  Bone Butcher smiled in a way that both his thin moustaches lifted.

  “You ain’t fruity are you, Frank?”

  “Hell no, but I ain’t crazy enough to dally with the Rose, either.”

  “That’s right, because you know I’d chop off some other parts of you if you did, and it wouldn’t be no damn fingers either.”

  Frank felt the first haze of the whiskey and the pills working in combination to bring him relief. Felt the warmth of his blood traveling down to where his missing fingers used to be and wondered whatever happened to that happy kid that used to spend his days fishing in a creek in Ohio and gigging frogs, and all those wonderful days when he had all his fingers still and didn’t live in the back room of Bone Butcher’s saloon with just a cot and a piss pot.

  He liked life a lot better before he became known as Bad Hand Frank, and sometimes he could almost taste the buttermilk his mother churned and see his big daddy stalking the pastures in search of his cows.

  Those were the best times, he thought.

  Then Bone farted and the whole room stunk.

  Chapter 4

  Dodge rose out of the plains suddenly. Teddy watched the landscape for a hundred miles without seeing much more than a few soddys scattered here and there amid oceans of dead winter grass. Occasionally he would spot a small herd of grazing antelope, their tails switching. If he thought about it hard enough, he could imagine these selfsame prairies dark with the great herds of buffalo that Cody had spoke so poignantly of when he got likkered up. But Cody and others like him had cleared the grass of the wooly beasts until it was rare to see a single one.

  “Jesus, I don’t know why we did it,” he remembered Cody saying. “We shot ourselves clean out of work and clean out of someth
ing we’ll be lucky to ever see again.”

  Teddy had also watched for several hundred miles the train trying to outrun its shadow. Then suddenly there rose Dodge in the distance, and the train never did outrun its shadow.

  At last the train screeched to a halt and he stepped from the car into a stiff wind that whistled along the eaves of the train station and tugged at the cuffs of his trousers. Dog Kelly was there to meet him. Little feller standing under a stovepipe hat and wearing a swallowtail coat, his checked trousers stuffed down inside the tops of his boots. Eyes narrow set, sharp nose, clean cheeks. Goat chin whiskers.

  “You him? The Pinkerton?” Dog said.

  “Teddy Blue,” Teddy said, extending a hand.

  “Dog Kelly, mayor.”

  Teddy held onto his hat.

  “Windy, I know,” Dog said. “Let’s go over to my office and I’ll buy you something to cut the dry out of your throat.”

  Dodge was like a lot of other frontier towns with its wide streets and false-fronted buildings. There didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary to Dodge in Teddy’s view, nothing that would distinguish Dodge from any of the other cow towns he’d been to except for the talk he’d heard about it: the tales about it being one of the toughest towns in the West—a “bibulous Babylon.” You wouldn’t know it looking at it, he thought. He half expected to see dead men lying on the sidewalks and whores hanging out every window.

  He followed Dog Kelly down to the Alhambra, which lay, as Dog explained it, “south of the deadline,” meaning south of the railroad tracks that divided the town in two.

  “This your office?”

  “Being mayor ain’t exactly a high position with a lot of pay to it,” Dog said and went behind the bar and drew them each a beer whose head he swiped off with a paddle.

  “Let’s sit over at my table,” Dog said and led Teddy to a back corner.

  Dog shucked off his coat and hat. He had small hands, rings on several of his fingers, Teddy noticed. Small and smooth like a gambler’s. Frayed cuffs, and his paper collar was yellowing. Teddy saw too, when Dog shucked his coat, a bulge in the pocket of his waistcoat. Guessed it to probably be a derringer, a knuckle duster, perhaps.