Support Your Local Deputy: A Cotton Pickens Western

by W. , Johnstone, William

  “Slivovitz,” said Rusty.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s almost as good as marriage.”

  I smelled his glass and pretty near passed out. “You’re on duty,” I said.

  “Cotton, you’re a peckerhead sometimes.”

  “You could always quit,” I said, “and drink slivovitz the rest of your life.”

  “This here’s Anna, and this here’s Natasha,” he said.

  “Is real damn nice, good piss water,” Natasha said. Not bad English, I thought.

  “I told them I wanted to marry, and they laughed, and then said which? I said, either way, I’d flip a coin. So we flipped a coin. Heads, Natasha, tails, Anna. Natasha won, so I proposed. I said, Natasha, let’s get married, and then Anna got mad. Anna said that’s not right, I’ve got to marry her, or both. I said I can’t marry both, and they said go to hell, skunk head, and I said maybe I’ll marry both. And now they’re both mad at me.”

  “I gotta talk to them. Help me,” I said.

  I turned to Natasha. “You were coming here on the stagecoach and some men stopped the coach and made you get out, right?”

  She dimpled up. “What a wedding invitation,” she said.

  But Anna elbowed her. “Every day, crossing the sea, people look at us. On the boat, on the railroad, people look at us. We’re used to it. Some days, men give us cards. One man said he wanted to put us in a show; we’d be happy. But Natasha, she always said no; she’s getting married. Me, no one asks.”

  “So you got to Laramie and caught the Laramie and Overland coach here? Then what?”

  “They are watching us. We get into the coach, and then we start to come here, yes? And then they stop the coach, out on the grasses, and make us get out. Three men, wearing masks, waving guns. And there is this cart, stand-up room. And there’s a driver, also masked, and we get carried away, and go to some place I don’t know, and we are told we are in a carnival, and that’s better than one getting married and one not. We both get paid, yes?”

  “Did the masked men who took you off the coach meet your boss here, Pike?”

  Anna shrugged.

  “They gave us this wagon,” Natasha said.

  “Didn’t you protest?’

  Natasha giggled. “We got a house!”

  “Did anyone call it an act? Were you an act?”

  Anna giggled.

  “Did you sign a contract for an act? A show performance?”

  They both looked puzzled.

  “They like it because they’re taken care of,” Rusty said. “They can’t care for themselves, so they like this carnival. They get fed.”

  Both the ladies were smiling at me.

  “This sure makes Pike look like the one who planned this little deal. Is there a two-wheel cart around?”

  “You mean the gold-and-red chariot?” Rusty asked.

  “I mean any cart. A coat of paint, that makes a difference. Witnesses, they see a red chariot. My ma, she always used to say a little war paint on a woman hides the real McCoy. So I want to see if this outfit’s got a two-wheel cart, and maybe, any color.”

  “You and your ma,” Rusty said.

  The women, they followed little of that.

  “You got put here in the carnival? Did you say no to Pike?”

  Natasha, she figured out that one. “I wanted to get married; this is my lover boy. Anna, she don’t want that. So she’s stuck. And I’m stuck. She won. She got us here. Me, I’d like to go to bed with Rusty. Wooee! Hot pajamas! Anna, she don’t care.”

  This here was getting more and more tangled up, I thought. But one thing was clear: Pike abducted the twins and stuffed them into his show, one way or another. And I was going to get the facts, and figure what laws got busted, and no one was leaving Doubtful until justice got done.

  “Make your deputy leave,” Anna said. “He comes in here like he owns us.”

  “Make him stay,” Natasha said. “He’s my man.”

  “He’s not my man,” Anna said. “Make him go away; we got a good wagon, and a good act.”

  “Rusty, you wanna marry me, like in the letters?” Natasha asked.

  “Maybe I could marry you both,” Rusty said.

  “You get her, not me,” Anna said. “Go to hell.”

  “You’re robbing me,” Natasha said. “You’re keeping bride from groom.”

  “I ought to kill you,” Anna said. “And maybe someday I will.”

  Me, I stared at them two, stuck together for life, and felt real sad. When Rusty got loose, I planned to tell him to forget it. He was torturing them two ladies in ways we couldn’t even imagine.

  But Rusty, he just sat there and kept on wooing.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  No sooner did I get back to my office then I tangled with the Puma County supervisors. Reggie Thimble, the chairman, required my presence in the courthouse, so I grumbled my way over there, knowing what was coming.

  Sure enough, he was laying for me. He sat behind a monster oak desk on an elevated platform, giving him an extra foot or so to look down at supplicants. He had a pouty little mouth, and now it was pursed with disapproval.

  “I’ve had a little visit from Heliotrope Pike, who is the chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the Pike Brothers Carnival,” he announced. “Is it true you are threatening to keep them in Doubtful until such a time as you choose to spring them?”

  “No, they can leave whenever they fess up, hand over the masked men who abducted the Ukrainian Siamese twins, and whoever else perpetrated the crime.”

  “I see,” said Thimble, peering at me from over his wire-rimmed spectacles, which were perched delicately on his pulpy nose, with its red besotted veins.

  “Do you suppose you are doing something entirely illicit, immoral, scandalous, and barbaric?”

  “All of them, Reggie.”

  “Mr. Thimble, if you please. Now then, do you have the slightest evidence, I mean actual, hard, court-worthy evidence, that any such crime was committed? And by people in the carnival?”

  “Nope. I’ve got witnesses who saw four masked men, three on horse and one in a chariot, order the blondes off the stagecoach, which they forcibly stopped at gunpoint. And I’ve got a lot of hot air from Pike, who first said he bought the ‘act,’ as he called it, in Laramie, but could supply no contract, and indeed, had more or less admitted there had been no vaudeville or carny act involving these ladies, and he had created one.”

  Thimble rapped his fingers on the beeswaxed desk, which he polished daily. “So there’s nothing.”

  “There’s four men in that company that snatched the women, or woman, off that stagecoach, in Puma County, where I am charged with keeping the law, and when Pike turns them over, and himself, if he was the one giving the command, then I’ll let the carny show loose. But not until then.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d imagine you have no right to do so.”

  “It’ll get the job done.”

  “And what if these supposed abductors aren’t associated with the Pike Brothers Carnival? What then, Mr. Sheriff?”

  “Then I keep this outfit around until they tell me who did the job. They got those twins somewhere, so they know who done it.”

  Thimble stared his most withering stare, but I was used to it. Mostly when he stared like that I noticed his right eye, which was slightly crossed.

  “You’ll not impede the carnival when it chooses to go. That is an order, subject to termination of your job if you should disobey.”

  I’d heard that about fifty times. “I ain’t budging,” I said. “The law got broke, I got the perpetrators right here, and as soon as I can get them tried and sentenced, the show’s free to go to Los Angeles or any other hell.”

  Thimble stared at a passing puffball cloud, through the grimy window. “Has it occurred to you that the merchants of Doubtful are suffering? Already this summer, they’ve had to weather a medicine show, a doomsday preacher, and now a carnival. Doubtful survives on the
trade of the five hundred cowboys and ranchers surrounding us, but this year the cowboys have invested in quack medicine, donated their last cent to the Doomsday crook, and have opened their purses and pitched out dimes and dollars to play games of chance on the midway, gawk at a freak, watch Little Egypt’s belly roll in syncopation with Memphis blues, and pitch rings at little posts, to win some sort of furry stuffed monkey or two. And our shops suffer. Mayor Waller tells me his trade is down. Leonard Silver says his is cut in half; even the blacksmith, One-Eyed Jack, has lost trade. Cowboys would rather gawk at freaks than see their horses shod.”

  “Sorry, but I got laws to uphold, and this show doesn’t leave here until it coughs up the bandits.”

  “Come now, bandits? They didn’t steal a nickel.”

  “They stole two lives, Reggie.”

  “Mr. Thimble, please. The ladies seem quite content. You seem to be inventing a crime and a tragedy out of whole cloth.”

  “I got laws to enforce, and if you fire me, the law of Wyoming and this county won’t get enforced.”

  “That’s the idea, sheriff, exactly the idea. You will not impede the carny. We want them out as fast as they can harness up and go. I wish they had left yesterday, but no such luck.” He eyed me real severe. “You’ve been warned. This is the second offense on your ticket this week. The first being appointing a little boy a deputy, putting the whole county at risk. Have you taken the badge back?”

  “Nope. He’s pleased as punch. There ain’t another kid in the county gets to be a deputy sheriff.”

  Reggie sighed. He had a way of sighing that was plumb theatrical. He sighed slowly, sadly, shaking his head, lowering his chin in sorrow, his eyes mournful. He used it at every board meeting, and every political rally. There wasn’t nobody in Wyoming with a sigh like Reggie Thimble’s.

  “That was a good one,” I said.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea what you are talking about,” he said, sighing once again.

  “That’s how you got elected,” I said, and walked out.

  My ma always said I was stubborn, and I’d get myself in trouble because of it. And now I was being stubborn all over again, and pretty soon I’d be looking for another job. But as long as I was sheriff, I’d be the best one I knew how.

  I found Rusty in the office, mopping up the jail. We’d had a couple of drunks in there, and they missed the piss pot, and puked in the bunk, so after Hanging Judge Earwig fined them two dollars each, we had to clean up. That’s how it is for sheriffs. Mostly, we get to be chambermaids.

  “How are your lady friends?” I asked, when Rusty emerged from the iron cage with a bucket of slop.

  “They’re getting into a catfight,” he said. “Natasha wants to marry me and quit the show, but Anna, she don’t want nothing to do with me, and they’re really steaming. It sure ain’t easy, being stuck so close to someone you’re fighting with all the time.”

  “They talk to you about getting took off the stagecoach?”

  “Oh, yeah, Natasha does. She wishes I’d come rescue her. These here masked bandits, they stopped the stagecoach, opened the door, and told the twins to get out. So the twins get into the cart, and bandits get their luggage, and away they go. They went direct to Heliotrope Pike. There wasn’t any buying or selling of theater acts. Pike got the gals and put ’em in the show, and that was that.”

  “You think they’d testify?”

  Rusty scratched his head. “Natasha, she would if you asked her questions real slow so she could understand. But everything she’d say, Anna would say different, and the testimony would nullify.”

  “I guess I hadn’t thought of that. Who’s telling the truth?”

  “You need to ask?” Rusty asked.

  No, I didn’t. Natasha was. Anna was playing the spoiler. But maybe if they were both sworn in to tell the truth and nothing but, maybe she’d come around. But it sure made a mess of things.

  “They know who abducted them?”

  “Maybe one, but the gunmen wore masks, and they plain don’t know for sure. No one was talking.”

  “You still want to marry them, the two fighting like that?”

  Rusty, he grinned real crooked. “Both at once, that’d do it fine.”

  I told him about my talk with Reggie Thimble, and how the merchants wanted the outfit to leave town.

  Rusty grinned. “The cowboys, they’ve hardly walked into a saloon since the carny show came, and before that, they were buying tonic from the medicine man.”

  “Let’s do a little walk down the midway. If that outfit’s going to slide out of Doubtful tonight, there should be a few clues.”

  “How you gonna stop them? If they go, they go.”

  “I got ways,” I said. I was afraid if I told Rusty, he’d tell Natasha, and my little plan wouldn’t work.

  “You’re gonna round up the draft horses, that it?”

  “Nope, they’ll be tight guarded tonight, and someone will get hurt. I got better ideas.”

  “That’s what your ma always used to say, right?”

  Rusty, he didn’t believe I had any wits about me, just the same as no one else did, either. I never quite got used to it. But sometimes it came in handy, and it would tonight if the show was gonna pull up stakes after the midway died down.

  We meandered along, watching the afternoon trade. It was mostly women and children, trying their luck on the games. Scalawag Marvel, the little punk, was trying to win a doll by throwing a baseball at a row of bottles. He didn’t know them bottles were loaded with concrete.

  I slid past the midway, into the camp, where the wagons were sitting willy-nilly. It didn’t look like an orderly place at all, but in some ways it was. There were cooking areas, and bunking areas. The harness for each wagon rested in front of it, ready to be hooked up. Harness comes in all shapes and descriptions, but most of these rigs had breast collars, big straps that fit over the draft horse’s chest. A draft horse really pushed into the chest collars, even though it looked like he was pulling the load. These were heavy-duty harnesses, intended to tie a draft horse to a big load. There were surcingles and bridles and reins and all the rest, but what I wanted most to look at was the collars. Without them collars, this outfit wasn’t going anywhere at all.

  “You satisfied?” Rusty said.

  “You know harness?” I asked.

  “Some.”

  “You pick out collars in the dark, maybe?”

  He studied the piles of harness resting next to each wagon.

  “I imagine. You think the dogs’ll stop us?”

  “We’ve been hanging around long enough. What we’re going to do, Rusty, is fetch us those collars and lockup the whole bunch in the jail. We don’t even need to get them all. Get enough harness collars, and this outfit isn’t going anywhere at all, and we got Pike right where we want him.”

  “I suppose your ma gave you this idea,” Rusty said.

  “No, I thunk it up all by myself,” I said. “You just study on where the collars are put, and how they’ll look in the dark.”

  Rusty was grinning. “I guess I get another day or two to woo my wives.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Me and Rusty, we done the job. That old carny show was roaring away on the midway; everyone in the show was over there, gulling the last dimes out of cowboys and suckers. The camp area, it was plenty dark, and no one was around except once when one of the old gals in the outfit came back to smoke her corncob pipe a while.

  Finding the breast collars and unbuckling them and carting them out was a big job. Those things were hard to separate from all the rest of the harness. The breast collars run across the chest of the horse or mule, below the neck and windpipe, and are wider than most of the rest of the stuff. But neither Rusty or me was as good as Turk when it came to harness, so it took some doing.

  There were fourteen wagons, each drawn by a pair of draft horses or big mules, and that meant finding twenty-eight collars. It was no ten-minute job, in the dark. But bit by bit
, both of us collected what we could, stocked it away from camp, and went back for the rest, always keeping an eye out. The company was pretty well packed up. All the loose stuff was stowed away, and the outfit was going to roll out of Doubtful, maybe around midnight, when the rest of us were deep asleep. They planned to be far down one of the roads; they didn’t let us know where they were going next. But they’d come up from Laramie, and I was guessing they would be heading for Douglas.

  After we got all the collars we could find, unbuckled and in a heap, we carted them two at a time over to the jail, and stuffed them all in a cell. That was heavy going, too, all those trips hauling forty or fifty pounds of leather and buckles. But about the time the carny show was winding down, and people were quitting, we got them collars all locked up in a cell, and got the jail all locked up, so there wasn’t going to be any busting in or out.

  Rusty, he just grinned. “I get to visit my Ukrainians for a while more, seems like,” he said.

  I figured that was good for Rusty, but not for the Siamese twins, who were in a big spat over him and his designs. It sure must be hell to be locked into the same body as your twin, especially if one of you got favored, and not the other. But that was the way things were, and they’d have to figure out living, because no one could help them.

  “We gonna sit here with scatterguns and guard the fort, or are we going to bed?” Rusty asked.

  “Go to bed. You go look after Riley. Me, I’m going to Belle’s. If they come knocking, I’ll just let ’em hammer on doors.”

  I watched him go to his cabin, which was not far away, and near Doubtful Creek, where all them draft horses were, and I drifted toward Belle’s Boarding House, where I’d roomed ever since I came to town. It was a quiet night, with a soft breeze, and not much of a moon so it was plenty dark, and I stumbled my way up the stairs and into my room. My guess was I wouldn’t get through the night before all hell busted loose.