Give-A-Damn Jones: A Novel of the West

by Bill Pronzini

  Burning curiosity made me open the money belt in the privacy of the hotel office after Tarbeaux staggered up to bed. The sight of all those greenbacks weakened my knees, dried my mouth. I put the belt back in the safe, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. A boldness, a recklessness built in me for the first time as the hours passed and the money became an obsession. I might have been able to overcome it if Ma had still been alive, but with her gone and me on my own and miserable, I couldn’t stop myself. Just couldn’t stop myself.

  I took the bag from the safe an hour past midnight, carried it out back of the hotel stables and hid it in a clump of greasewood. Afterward I barely remembered doing it, as if it had all happened in a dream.

  Tarbeaux came down early in the morning, just as the day clerk arrived to relieve me. There was a storm inside me, but the money was all I let myself think about when I faced him. The money, the money, the money! Outwardly I was calm and the lies came easier than I imagined they would. Money belt? I didn’t know anything about it. I had been given nothing to put in the safe the night before.

  The disbelief in his eyes turned to hate and then blind rage. The ruckus he raised brought several people running, all witnesses to his violent attack on me. I was bawling from the pain of half a dozen blows when Marshal Jennison and two others pulled him off me and took him to jail.

  My word against Tarbeaux’s, my quiet, honest reputation against his wild one. The marshal believed me, the Kendalls believed me, the townspeople believed me. At the trial, the county prosecutor accused Tarbeaux of attempting to frame me for the crime, instead of the other way around. And of hiding most of the money and gambling away the rest in the Shantyville saloons—he’d been bucking the tiger and losing that night, though no one at the Free and Easy could say for sure how much. The fact that he’d claimed to be too tired to ride to Anchor and checked into the hotel instead, yet then went and spent three hours gambling and drinking, weighed heavily against him. As did his unprovoked assault on me. As did my solemn and unswerving testimony. The jury didn’t believe his claim that he’d gone to the Free and Easy for just one drink and had the poor judgment to have several more while he played and lost at faro. They didn’t believe he’d given me the money belt to put in the hotel safe. They believed me.

  The only ones who didn’t were Will Satterlee and Mary Beth Greathouse. Satterlee, damn him, wrote editorials implying I was the thief—was still writing them. But they hadn’t mattered then and they didn’t matter now.

  I still remember the pain of the beating Tarbeaux inflicted on me. And I still hear his vow of vengeance as he was being led from the courtroom. “You won’t get away with this, Cable! You’ll pay for it. As soon as I get out I’ll come back and nail your hide to a barn wall!”

  The threat shook me some at the time. But five years seemed like a long way off then and it hadn’t bothered me for long. Neither had my conscience. I had the money, reburied now in a safe place near the river outside of town, and I had my plans. Not spending any of those greenbacks right away wasn’t easy, but I made myself wait because Vernon Norris’s health was poor and I knew he was getting ready to sell his shop and move to Bozeman to live with his son. And when that day came, his saddle shop was mine.

  For the last four years I worked hard and lived well, despite losing the rest of the money on a bad investment. Mostly I didn’t think about Tarbeaux; I had too many other things on my mind, the worst of them the consumption and the doctors’ diagnosis. It wasn’t until one day a few weeks ago that I realized how soon he would be released. Then and all the days since I was consumed by a different worry, a different fear.

  Should I keep waiting for him to come to me, or take the bull by the horns and force the showdown? Either way, the confrontation and its outcome scared me spitless. But I couldn’t go on like this much longer. I hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours any of the past few nights, kept waking up soaked in sweat whenever I did doze off. It had to end soon or I’d come apart at the seams like a cheap Mexican saddle.

  WILL SATTERLEE

  It is my custom to keep the Banner office open until six o’clock on Thursdays, so I had returned after my mid-afternoon meal with R.W. and was at my desk attending to paperwork when the front door flew open and Colonel Elijah Greathouse stormed in. He slammed the door hard enough to rattle the glass, stepped up to the counter and stood glaring at me across it. When I didn’t rise immediately from my desk, he banged one of his large fists on the countertop.

  “Satterlee! Come over here and face me!”

  I remained seated. “This is my shop, Colonel. I take orders from no one and I expect civility from visitors.”

  “Civility, my arse.” On the counter was a stack of the current issue of the Banner; he snatched one up, held it at arm’s length, and stabbed a blunt forefinger into my editorial forcefully enough to tear a hole in the newsprint. “You’ll get none from me after this outrage.”

  “Five cents,” I said.

  “… What?”

  “For the issue in your hand. You damaged it, you’ll pay for it.”

  “Like hell I will!”

  I stood slowly and went through the division gate to stand in front of him. He was a sight as always in his habitual range outfit of buckskin jacket, Union Army tunic, and stagged pants stuffed into scuffed black boots. His shoulder-length graying hair hung in sweaty curls from beneath his Stetson; his untrimmed soup-strainer mustache was caked with dust. Spots of foamy lather marbled his pantlegs, I noticed, testimony to how hard and how carelessly he had ridden his horse from the Square G. Anyone who had never seen him before might take him for an old-style buffalo hunter or a hardscrabble rancher, not the still-powerful leader of the Cattlemen’s Association he fancied himself to be. I restrained myself from telling him so.

  “‘Box Elder’s Little Napoleon.’ Libel, by God!”

  “No it isn’t. It is a statement of fact. As is everything else I wrote.”

  “The devil it is. All that horseshit about my being a scourge and a danger to the welfare of the community. Bringing up those lies about my war record again. Claiming that thief Tarbeaux was railroaded—”

  “I never said he was railroaded. Only that I believe him to have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice.”

  “—and implying I’ll raise hell with him if he tries to stay on at Keystone. It’s goddamned outrageous, all of it!”

  “Freedom of the press, Colonel. And I will thank you not to use profanity when speaking to me.”

  “I’ll say anything I goddamned well please, same as you.” So great was his indignant anger that his mustaches quivered. No … that bright, hard glint in his eyes was more than just anger, it was the shine of incipient dementia. The man truly was losing his grip. “I demand a retraction, or by God you’ll suffer the consequences.”

  “I don’t respond to threats.”

  “You’d better respond to this one. Will you issue a retraction?”

  “I will not.”

  “All right then, editor. But hear this and hear it good. Write one more vicious lie about me and I’ll see to it you pay and pay dear, in one type of coin or another.”

  “I defy you to make that statement in front of witnesses.”

  “You think I’m just talking through my hat? Keep prodding me, you’ll find out.”

  “Just what will you do if I continue to tell the truth about you and your high-handed ways? Have me beaten up? Damage my property as you’ve done to the immigrant farmers’?”

  “More lies. I’ve done no such thing.”

  “Have me shot from ambush some dark night?”

  He banged his fist on the counter again. “Damn you, Satterlee, I’m no killer.”

  “No? Your past record tells a different tale.”

  “What past record? There were few casualties in the campaigns I led during the war, and none that weren’t justified on the field of combat.”

  “Can you say the same about the men you shot or hung the past twe
nty years?”

  “Men! Rustlers, renegade Indians, riffraff. I had every right to protect my property.”

  “According to your dubious code of conduct.”

  “Those were lawless times and you know it. You’d have done the same as me and a hundred others if you’d been around then and threatened as we were.”

  “I doubt that. I am a peaceable man.”

  “A weak man, you mean,” Greathouse said with a sneer in his voice. “A goddamned ink-stained agitator hiding behind the First Amendment.”

  I pride myself on my self-control, but I can be pushed just so far before anger flares in me, too, and I respond in kind. Greathouse has the knack of prodding me to that point far more quickly than any other individual I have ever known.

  “And you, Colonel,” I said, “are a knave, a blowhard, and a fool. Get off my property immediately or I’ll summon the marshal and have you arrested for harassment. And don’t set foot in here again, ever, under any circumstances.”

  We stood matching stares for several seconds. Then he muttered something obscene, turned and opened the door. I called after him, “You still owe me a nickel for the paper,” but he ignored the parting shot, stepped through, and again slammed the door behind him.

  JADA KINCH

  An hour or so after Miss Mary Beth left the Square G on Friday, Colonel Greathouse sent me and Al Yandle over to the Keystone ranch. He figured that was where she’d been going the past few days, not out riding alone like she said but over there to see Tarbeaux.

  The Colonel had been on the prod since he got back from Billings, Will Satterlee’s latest horseshit editorial festering in him like a boil. I’d been with him twelve years now, through good times and bad, and him and me don’t always see eye to eye. More’n once I’ve been tempted to draw my pay and hit the trail. But at thirty-seven I’m too old now to become a loose rider; I’ll be ramrodding for the Colonel until one or the other of us drops dead, and he knows it as well as I do. Besides which, when it comes to Satterlee, and Tarbeaux and Miss Mary Beth, we do see eye to eye. I felt as riled as he did and for the same reasons. Seemed like nothing went right for him or the Square G any more, and when it don’t go right for them, it don’t go right for me.

  There was a rise rimmed with cottonwoods a couple of hundred rods west of the Keystone ranch buildings. Me and Yandle rode up into the trees from the blind side, picketed our horses, and went to where we had a clear look below. I had my field glasses and I took a long look through ’em.

  “She’s there, all right,” I said to Yandle. “Both of ’em outside, at least.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Tarbeaux’s on the house roof, Mary Beth’s handing wood and shingles up to him.”

  “So he’s fixing the place up to stay.”

  “Or getting it ready to sell,” I said. If selling wasn’t what he had in mind, it would be sooner or later.

  Yandle took off his hat, sleeved sweat off his forehead. He had the damnedest hair—long, scraggly, orange as a carrot except for streaks bleached almost white by the sun. He’s not too bright, but he takes orders well enough and does what he’s told without complaining.

  “You think he got the money yet, Jada?”

  “What money?”

  “The money he stole and hid.”

  “Where’d you hear about that?”

  “In town. Saloon talk. It’s true, ain’t it?”

  “He wouldn’t have gone to the pen if it wasn’t.”

  “So you reckon he’s got it now?”

  I shrugged. “Depends on where he stashed it.”

  “Over five thousand dollars,” Yandle said, and licked his lips. “Man, that’s a lot of dinero.”

  “More’n you and I will ever see. But it’s none of our concern unless he aims to spend it on Miss Mary Beth.”

  We went back to the horses and rode on down into the ranch yard. Miss Mary Beth was halfway up the ladder, Tarbeaux still on the roof. He didn’t move as we drew rein and swung out of leather, but she climbed down and came stomping over to me. Her face was flushed red and shiny from the heat, her hair all sweated on her neck, and there was a streak of dirt on one cheek. She’s got the Colonel’s temper, and her eyes were hot and flashing with it now.

  “What are you doing here? Following me?”

  “Didn’t need to. The Colonel don’t want you here, Miss Mary Beth.”

  “I don’t care what the Colonel wants. I’ll tell you the same thing I told him: I go where I please and see who I please.”

  “He said if we found you here, we was to bring you home and don’t take no for an answer.”

  “Well, you’d better take ‘no’ because I’m not leaving until I’m good and ready.” The girl had spunk, you had to give her that. Spunk, but not a lick of sense when it come to men. Should’ve been married years ago, pretty as she was, give the Colonel the grandkids he hankered after, but no, she couldn’t get Tarbeaux out of her head.

  “You want us to hogtie you on your Appaloosa?”

  “You wouldn’t dare.”

  Tarbeaux was on the ladder now, coming down. He had a clawhammer in his hand and his face was set tight. “Leave the girl alone, Kinch.”

  Well, I never could abide him. Wild kid, then a thief, now an ex-con—hell, he wasn’t fit to stand in her shadow. Hollow-eyed, prison pale, leaner than I remembered in dusty new Levi’s and a linsey-woolsey shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his elbows. You could maybe figure what Miss Mary Beth seen in him five years ago, but now? He looked no better than a trail bum or one of those hardscrabble sodbusters that kept tearing up the land.

  “Don’t tell me what to do, jailbird,” I said. “I take my orders from Colonel Greathouse.”

  “And lick his boots for him, too, same as always.”

  “You looking to start trouble with me?”

  “That’s the real reason you’re here, isn’t it? To make trouble?”

  “We come to take Miss Greathouse home and tell you to stay clear of her from now on. You know what’s good for you, you’ll go get the money you stole if you ain’t done it already—”

  “Jim didn’t steal that money!” Miss Mary Beth said, sharp.

  “—and sell out and pull your freight.”

  “Maybe I’ll sell, maybe I won’t,” Tarbeaux said. “Right now Keystone is mine and you’re trespassing. Pull your freight.”

  “Not without Miss Greathouse.”

  “I told you, Jada,” she snapped, “I’m not leaving until I’m ready.”

  “All right, then,” I said. “Al, I reckon we’ll have to do like I said. Go find her horse and we’ll tie her on her sidesaddle.”

  Tarbeaux said, like I expected and wanted him to, “You’ll have to go through me.”

  I showed him my teeth the way a wolf does. “Well, that’ll be a pure pleasure,” and nodded to Yandle to go ahead.

  Tarbeaux took a step sideways to block his way, the clawhammer coming up in his hand. Miss Mary Beth cried, “Jim, no!” I backed up a little, just enough so I’d have room to draw the Peacemaker if it came to that.

  “You swing that hammer at either of us,” I said, “it’ll be the last thing you ever do. Self-defense, in front of witnesses.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you. I’m not that much of a fool.” He let go of the hammer and it raised a puff of dust when it hit the ground. “You want a fight, unbuckle your gun belt.”

  “Why, sure. If that’s how you want it.”

  “You’re the one who wants it. You and the Colonel.” He glanced sideways at Yandle. “Two against one?”

  “Just you and me,” I said. “I don’t need no help with the likes of you.”

  I started to unbuckle. Tarbeaux was a dozen years younger than me, but I had more size and weight and the kind of savvy a man loses when he’s been locked up in a cell for five years. No matter how much of a scrapper he was, I figured to cut him up good and proper.

  But I didn’t get the chance. Miss Mary Beth stomped her
foot, hard, like a dauncy horse, and grabbed hold of Tarbeaux’s arm. “No! There’ll be no fighting.”

  “Stay out of this, Mary Beth,” he said.

  “I won’t stay out of it. And I won’t stand by and let it happen.” She stepped away from him and said to me, “All right, Jada. I’ll go with you.”

  Tarbeaux said, “You don’t have to do that—”

  “Yes I do. This time. I’ll get Southwind.” She put her back to us and stalked off toward the barn.

  “There better not be a next time,” I said to Tarbeaux. “You keep away from her long as you’re here. If you don’t—”

  “What, Kinch? The two of you’ll ambush me and beat hell out of me? Or back-shoot me some dark night?”

  “I never shot a man in the back and never will. If I put a bullet in you, it’ll be face-to-face and with legal cause.”

  SETH JENNISON

  Some sort of hubbub over on Central Street woke me out of a half doze late Saturday morning. I hoisted myself out of my desk chair feeling a mite grumpy and went outside. Sounded like banjo music and singing, by golly. I walked up to the corner fast as the heat would allow, and got there just as the biggest, fanciest John Deere wagon I’d ever seen came clattering around the fenced-in box elder on the near side.

  Folks were standing along the boardwalks or following after the wagon, staring same as I was. It was painted bright red with a shiny gold curlicue design, drawn by two large bays and so big and wide that the other conveyances in the street had to veer over to get out of its way. Curving red letters in the middle of the design, I saw as it passed me, spelled out DOC CHRISTMAS, PAINLESS DENTIST. Up on the seat were two of the oddest-looking gents a body was ever likely to set eyes on. The one holding the reins must’ve been four or five inches over six foot, shotgun thin, with a head big as a melon and chin whiskers all the way down the front of his black broadcloth coat. The other one, decked out in a mustard-yellow outfit, was half as tall, four times as wide, and bald as an egg, and he was strumming an outlandish large banjo and singing “Buffalo Gals” in a voice loud enough to rattle glass.