Saving Masterson

by Bill Brooks

  But Teddy intervened, said, “It’s fine with me if we bunk in together.”

  Bat swung the door wide and Teddy walked in and Bat closed it behind him and Ed turned the key.

  “What about those messages I need to send?”

  “Soon as me and Ed are through eating our breakfast, we’ll come get you.”

  Once the brothers had left, the kid went back to sleeping under his hat. The horse thieves sat around in a tight circle mumbling to one another like dotes.

  “What they put you in for?” Frank said. His hand was thickly bandaged. Some of the blood had seeped through, and where there had been white was now varying shades of pink and red.

  “A misunderstanding.”

  Frank stood there looking out between the bars like a dog whose master had up and died on him.

  “Ain’t you gone ask why I’m in here?” Frank said forlornly.

  “I know why,” Teddy said.

  “You seen it, huh?”

  “Out on the street in front of the Wright House.”

  “It was all because of vanity. I got the goddamndest vanity of any man I ever knew and I don’t even know why I’m that way.”

  One of the horse thieves looked back over his shoulder when Frank said the word vanity like it was the first time he’d ever heard such a word spoken. Frank returned the look; narrow-eyed and daring until the thief swung his attention back to the others.

  “Then you didn’t have a personal quarrel with the man you shot?” Teddy said.

  “No, well, other’n he bought the shirt I wanted.”

  “I’ve heard of men dying for lots of bad reasons, but never over a shirt.”

  “Vanity,” Frank repeated. “That’s all it was.”

  An hour later the Mastersons returned, carrying trays of food for the prisoners. The horse thieves set upon their breakfasts like a pack of ravenous wolves. Frank picked away at his, all his appetite fled in front of the pain throbbing his hand. The kid simply rolled over and ignored his. Teddy ate like a man who had plans yet ahead of him and needed his strength to see them through.

  When Teddy finished, Ed unlocked the cell door and stepped away, and Teddy went out and Ed closed and locked the door again.

  “Let’s take that walk,” he said.

  Once at the telegrapher’s, Teddy wired George about the situation.

  If they take me back to Las Vegas, I might not make it back alive, he added as his last sentence. The telegrapher looked up after reading the wire. “Send it,” Teddy said.

  Then Ed walked him out again and almost into the arms of Mae.

  She looked first at Teddy then at Ed, said, “What have you arrested him for?”

  “Let’s not discuss it on the street,” Teddy said.

  “Where shall we discuss it, in a jail cell?”

  “I’ll be right over there,” Ed said, nodding a few doorways up the street. “You two got five minutes if you need ’em.”

  “What’s going on?” Mae asked as soon as Ed walked away.

  “Old problem I had before I got here.”

  “Did you kill somebody?”

  “No, a little less dramatic than that—I broke someone out of jail that killed someone.”

  He saw the look in her eyes, a mixture of tenderness and confusion.

  “What will they do with you?”

  “There’s a sheriff here who intends on taking me back to New Mexico. I’m stalling for some time. There’s somebody back in Chicago that might help me out.”

  She started to speak, then fell silent.

  “What can I do?”

  “Nothing. No point in you getting mixed up in any of this.”

  “I want to help…”

  “Wire a man down in Juarez, little town named Refugio. His name is John Sears. Tell him the situation. Tell him I don’t expect him to come, but that he should probably move on out of that place. Mention the name Hoodoo Brown. John’ll know what I mean.”

  She touched his hands. He looked on toward where Ed stood smoking a cheroot.

  “I’ve got to go, Mae.”

  “I’ll come see you later,” she said.

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “Can I bring you anything?”

  “My razor maybe, some makings, but only if you insist on seeing me locked up.”

  She kissed him quickly and he turned and walked back toward where Ed was waiting.

  “You ready?”

  “Yeah, I’m ready, you?”

  They did not see the three riders who rode into town. And the three riders didn’t see them, with their eyes full of morning sun angling off those bleak prairies, and their blood full of bad whiskey.

  Dirty Dave said, “Boys, this is it: Dodge, where them damn Mastersons are living, but not for long, and where the fat bank is, but will soon be empty, and where three poor bastards will soon become rich men.”

  Hannibal fell off his horse and Dave and Buck sat theirs looking down at him as if he were a strange object they’d suddenly come across.

  “He dead?” Dave asked.

  “No, he’s just too drunk to ride.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing we’re where we need to be then.”

  Buck said, “Shit, I was hoping we could finish up here in a hurry. I miss Charlotte.”

  Dirty Dave started to remind him how it was him who’d said he wasn’t the marrying sort, but then thought what the hell was the point—these boys were as dumb as turtles, and if it wasn’t that they were such mean bastards he’d have left them back in Mister.

  I just want to kill them Mastersons, he thought he said, but he couldn’t tell if he’d actually said it or was thinking it so hard he thought he said it.

  “We best find us a flop and sleep off this bad whiskey,” Buck said.

  Chapter 24

  The boy came one hot evening and knocked on the door, and when John opened it the boy said in Spanish, “Señor, I will pay you to teach me how to shoot this gun,” and pulled from under his dirty shirt an old pistol, what John used to call a hogleg, with worn walnut grips and most of the blue rubbed off its metal.

  “Why you want to fool with a thing dangerous as a rattlesnake, son?” John said.

  “I need to learn to become a muchacho.”

  “Muchacho, eh?”

  The boy took from his pockets several coins. John counted them: six pesos.

  “You don’t want to spend your hard-earned money on something like gun lessons,” John said.

  “Si, I do, señor.”

  John invited the boy inside the cooler room and out of the hot sun. John reached for the water-filled olla hanging from a peg on the wall, then reached for the olla with tequila instead and poured himself and the boy each half a cup, pushing the boy’s cup across the old scarred wood blackjack table.

  “A muchacho must first learn how to drink before he can go to fighting with guns,” John said and took up his cup and held it forth, waiting for the boy to pick up his. Chico reached for the cup with tentative fingers, and John waited until he had it, then said, “Go on.”

  He watched the boy’s face twist into something like displeasure at the first taste of the raw liquor, then tossed his own back and smacked his lips comically loud and said, “Let’s have another.”

  When the boy couldn’t finish his first cup John told him to come back for gun lessons when he was ready to become a true muchacho. And when the boy went outside John could hear him retching and figured it would be enough to deter him from any further thoughts of becoming a deadly gunfighting muchacho.

  But the next evening the kid was back again, this time with seven pesos, and John said, “Hell, kid, you’ll just get yourself blasted by some ornery cuss who won’t care you’re a kid, for a gun makes everyone equal and dangerous.”

  The boy shook his head.

  John sent him off again and went the next day to see Seamus.

  “He wants me to teach him how to shoot a gun, Padre.”

  “It is the way of young men,�
�� the priest said.

  “He ain’t hardly half a young man yet.”

  “What would you have me do, John?”

  “Talk to him. I mean you’re his…” John almost said it, the word father but caught himself in time. “I mean he’ll respect you and listen to you maybe.”

  “When you were his age,” the priest said, “did you listen to the advice of your elders?”

  John thought back and couldn’t remember a time when he was ever the age of the boy, but could remember running away from home the first time he heard a train whistle blowing off in the distance. And even though his father caught up with him eventually and brought him home again, John ran off the next year and nobody had ever caught him since.

  “Why don’t you satisfy his curiosity, John, and then maybe he won’t be so eager to know such things,” the priest said.

  “Let him learn it somewheres other’n me,” John said. “I don’t want to be responsible in case something happens, like he takes it in his head to fight somebody with a gun over something that don’t mean squat in the long run.”

  “But if he is taught by a professional like yourself, he’ll be less likely to be foolish about guns, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I thought men like you were supposed to be against such violence…”

  “I know the truth of a boy’s heart, of his wanting to become a man, and Chico has no one to teach him certain things. I know nothing at all about guns, John, or I’d teach him what it is he craves to learn. Other things I can and will teach him, but this I cannot do.”

  And so when the boy came again with more pesos, John finally consented to teach him how to shoot.

  They went out a distance from the village, John having told Chico to gather up as many old bottles and bean cans as he could find and put them in a gunny, which the boy did.

  John set the cans and bottles up, then backed the boy off twenty paces and taught him how to dry fire the pistol—an old Army Colt with the initials AJ scratched into one of the grips.

  “Where’d you get this damn thing anyway?” John asked.

  “I bought it from the mailman,” the boy said.

  “It looks like it has some history beyond that old boy,” John said; Chico didn’t seem to understand, but it didn’t matter.

  John took the boy out every day for almost a week and had him practice using the gun, holding it and cocking the hammer back and sighting down it, “like you would your finger,” John said.

  Chico missed about every time, so at least he didn’t have to haul a new sack of bottles and cans out each evening.

  “You want to aim for the biggest part of a man,” John said, pointing toward his chest. “Some try head shots but they hardly ever hit anything. It’s a fool’s game to try and shoot a man in the head.”

  “Then why am I shooting at such little cans?” Chico asked wisely enough.

  John looked at him as Chico ejected the spent shells. “Because if you can hit something that small, you can hit a man in his chest. Of course the thing is, them cans and bottles ain’t shooting back, son. That’s something you’d best keep in mind if you ever get to thinking this is an easy business. It ain’t.”

  By the second week Chico was hitting about half the targets he aimed at, and by the third week, he was hitting most.

  John watched him closely, the way he took careful aim and didn’t flinch and held the gun steady, big as it was, in those small brown hands—so big he had to hold it with both hands to keep it steady.

  John didn’t know anything about some being natural gunfighters, like it was said of men like Hickok and others, and he couldn’t say if the kid had any natural gunfighting abilities or not. Such things were only proved in the test of battle.

  Finally John said, “I’ve taught you all I know, the rest is up to you.”

  Chico looked both satisfied and disappointed. “We don’t come and shoot no more?”

  “You’re on your own, kid.”

  Chico handed John the pesos.

  “Keep ’em, you’ll need ’em for bullets for that hogleg.”

  The woman came often, two or three times a week, and John didn’t know quite what to say to her even though he knew he looked forward to her visits and her quiet presence. He held off on any feelings as much as he could and he didn’t like to guess any longer what she was feeling, and he never mentioned the note she’d left that day in his shirts and she never mentioned it either.

  Sometimes he’d sit and tell her things about his life for hours on end and she never seemed to tire of listening to him. And in a way it felt like he was getting a chance to wash his soul clean by talking to her.

  When she’d leave again and he’d lie there on his bunk in the dark of evenings and sometimes hear the music down in the plaza where they held the dances, he’d think of her and wonder what it would be like to dance with her and feel whole and completely human again. But he knew he could never tell her such things no matter how he wanted to at times. He could never tell her how the scent of her fresh-washed hair made him weak, or the way looking into her dark eyes made him crave to touch her.

  She was the priest’s woman and John still had his sin to bear, and that was simply the way it was and nothing was ever going to change that.

  So on such nights, when the thirst for her became too great, John drank himself into a dark place and saw the face again and again of the woman he’d once loved and murdered in a fit of jealous rage, and not even all the tequila in Mexico could ever drown that memory.

  And the boy watched the woman come and go between the haciendas of the two men.

  Chapter 25

  Hoodoo Brown’s mother had warned him when he was still a boy about the evils of liquor and cards and painted women, but none of it stuck then and none of it stuck now as he drank—as they say—like a fish, trying to drown his anger over the rebuff by the Masterson brothers.

  Jim cut him off after several rounds and surly talk about the weather in Kansas and the flat ugliness of the prairies and how nothing about the goddamn place was right and how only halfwits and sodbusters would find Dodge a place of charm.

  “Why I never seen nothing like it,” Hoodoo declared. “She’s so goddamn flat and plain that if she were a woman they’d hang her for spite.”

  Of course little of what Hoodoo carped about made any sense to the much-enlightened Jim Masterson, except he did not like to hear his current town being run down by an outsider, a drunk and a gun toter.

  “You best take your business down the line,” Jim said, stoppering the bottle in front of Hoodoo that Hoodoo had been working hard at emptying and almost had.

  “I was given carte blanche by your own brother,” Hoodoo replied, reaching to pull the plug back out of said bottle.

  But Jim placed his hand there first and said, “No sir. You done run out your carte blanche.”

  The two locked eyes and Jim didn’t like what he saw and neither did Hoodoo Brown.

  Jim could see the belly gun Hoodoo wore in his waistband, and he could feel the hickory club there under the bar with his free hand too. He was betting that if it came down to it, he could smash the club over the bastard’s head quicker than the bastard could pull his gun.

  “I’m the goddamn law!” said Brown.

  “Not in this town you ain’t.”

  “Law’s the law no matter where.”

  “Tell it to the judge.”

  “He ain’t coming till Friday.”

  “Tell it to him when he comes. Till then, move on down the line.”

  “Or what?”

  “You’ll soon find out what.”

  There was a long stringy moment of silence. Hoodoo finally gave up the idea of pulling his piece and taking life, for it was true what this particular Masterson had said about him not being the law in this particular town, and killing the brother of one who was the law would get him hanged for sure. Of all the places he’d been, Dodge was the last place he’d want to die in. He could not imagine having a rope sli
pped around his neck and looking out and having nothing but prairies as flat as planks in every direction as the last thing he would ever see.

  “Tell you what,” says Hoodoo. “You ever get down to Las Vegas in New Mexico, you come say hidy and we’ll finish this particular conversation then and there. You get me?”

  “I do.”

  “Then adios to you.”

  “Good riddance.”

  Hoodoo stalked out into a night filled with snowflakes dropping out of a blood red sky the likes of which he didn’t care for; the wind whipped the snow so it stung his face and cheeks and eyes, and he said, “Goddamn this place and everything in it,” and went on down the walk till he came to another saloon and went in.

  His mood still foul, he ordered a beer with a whiskey back and looked all around for a game he could buy into, feeling a run of luck might change his mood back again from the black that it was.

  And just down from him, standing at the end of the bar, was a singular fellow who stood under a hat nearly as big as Hoodoo’s sombrero. The fellow wore a shear coat under which he kept two pistols that had killed lots of men, and his thoughts were on nothing in particular except lonesomeness. Hoodoo barely paid the fellow any notice, this singular fellow, for he seemed no different than the rest, only more alone in his keeping there at the end of the bar away from everyone else.

  A chair came open and Hoodoo bought into a game of five-card stud and promptly began losing some of his traveling and expense money—what the county of San Miguel called per diem. Eats and lodging money, in order to bring back the wanted felons he went after, in order to see that justice was served.

  But the per diem money ended up in a cardsharp’s pot, a man whose smooth fingers with its silver rings raked it in hand after hand while his gold-capped tooth glinted under the light.

  Hoodoo folded on the tenth hand knowing he was whipped nine ways from Sunday, knowing he could not simply sit and let the slick outslick him one more time. For it was a mighty long way back to San Miguel County yet. He had tried but failed to spot something dishonest—hidden cards up the sleeve or dealing off the bottom—but if such occurred, the slick was too slick to be caught at it. It was just plain bad luck on Hoodoo’s part and good luck on the sharp’s.