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

by Bill Pronzini

  Well, we’d had our fair share of patent-medicine drummers in Box Elder, and once we’d even had a traveling medicine show that had a juggler and twelve trained dogs and sold an herb compound and catarrh cure that gave everybody that took it the trots. But we’d never had a painless dentist before.

  Fact was, I’d never heard of Doc Christmas. Turned out nobody else had, either. He was brand-spanking new on the traveling circuit, and that made him all the more of a curiosity. He drove that gaudy wagon of his straight down Central, half the townsfolk and Saturday ranch and farm shoppers trailing after him like those German citizens was supposed to’ve trailed after the Pied Piper. Me, too, as much out of plain curiosity as because it was my job to keep the peace.

  Somebody must’ve told Doc Christmas when he arrived about the willow flat along the river, where a town ordinance made it legal to camp for free except on Independence Day. He drove that wagon of his over onto the flat and parked it in a shady spot, its hind end facing at an off-angle toward town. Then him and the bald gent, whose name I came to find out later was Homer, opened up the back end and fiddled around until they had a kind of little stage with a painted curtain behind it. Then they got up on the stage together, and Homer played more tunes on his banjo while the two of ’em sang the words, all louder than they were melodious. Then Doc Christmas set out a display of instruments on a slant-board table, while Homer went around handing out penny candy to the kids and printed leaflets to the adults.

  When I got hold of one of the leaflets, I saw it said in bold black letters that Doc Christmas was the Territory’s newest and finest painless dentist, and the inventor of Doc Christmas’s Wonder Painkiller, “the most precious boon to the oral health of mankind yet discovered.” It said further that he’d dedicated his life to dispensing this fantastic new elixir, and to ridding his patients’ mouths of loose and decayed teeth so the rest could remain healthy and harmonious. And at the last, in smaller print, there was a list of what his services cost.

  A pint bottle of Doc Christmas’s Wonder Painkiller, a three months’ supply with judicious use—one dollar. A thorough dental examination—four bits for adults, children two bits unless they were under the age of six, in which case there was no charge. Cavity fillings per tooth—six bits for gold, four bits for something called “a special amalgam.” Pulling of a loose or decayed tooth—one dollar for a simple extraction, three dollars for a difficult extraction that took more than five minutes. Bridgework and a partial or complete set of vulcanite false teeth—negotiable, depending on whether the patient could be fitted here and now from available stock or a special order was required, but guaranteed reasonable in any case. No other fees of any kind, and painless results likewise guaranteed.

  “I wonder if he’s half as good as he claims to be,” the gent standing next to me said.

  I’d seen him around a time or two lately, but I didn’t know his name. “Who would you be?”

  “Jones, Marshal. Artemas Jones.”

  Then I noticed his ink-stained hands and I said, “Oh, you’re that printer fella just went to work for Will Satterlee. The one who—”

  “The one who coldcocked me when I wasn’t lookin’ the other night.”

  That came from Elrod Patch, who shouldered up in front of Jones and stood glaring at him. One side of his face was all pooched up and the swelling gave his usually growly voice a kind of lisp. Then he said, “You had no call to blindside me the way you done,” and poked the printer in the chest with one of his sausage fingers. “Busted off one of my back teeth.”

  Jones didn’t flinch. Didn’t answer or give ground, either, just stared back without blinking. Maybe it was because he was standing next to the law, but I didn’t think so. I had the sense that he wouldn’t back off from any man, even one as big and mean as Elrod Patch.

  I said, “The way I heard it, Patch, he saved you from hurting the Rheinmiller boy enough to land you in jail.”

  He ignored me. “I’ll be seeing you again, mister,” he said to Jones, and moved off into the crowd.

  “Disagreeable fellow, isn’t he,” Jones said.

  “That’s putting it mild.” I’d arrested Patch seven or eight times on charges from drunk and disorderly to assault and battery to cheating customers like Hugo Rheinmiller to caving in the skull of Ben Coltrane’s steeldust with a five-pound sledge. He’d been fined a few times, but that was all. Offended parties and witnesses had a peculiar way of dropping their complaints before it came time to face the circuit judge. “He’s a mean cuss and he makes a bad enemy. I’d watch my back if I was you.”

  “I have been watching it, Marshal. You’re not the first to warn me about Mr. Patch.”

  Up on the wagon, Doc Christmas had all his instruments laid out now. Homer quit playing his banjo, and the doc commenced his spiel in a voice surprisingly strong for such a beanpole of a man. He said pretty much the same things his leaflet said, only in words so eloquent any politician would’ve been proud to steal ’em for his own.

  Then he said he was willing to demonstrate the fabulous power of his painkiller as a public service without cost to the first suffering citizen who volunteered to have a tooth drawn. Was there any poor soul here who had an aching molar or throbbing bicuspid? Doc Christmas invited him or her to step right up and be relieved.

  I figured it might take more than that for him to get himself a customer, even one for free. Folks around here tend to be leery when it comes to strangers and newfangled painkillers, after the traveling medicine show’s catarrh “cure.” But I was wrong. His offer was taken up right away, and by two citizens, not just one.

  The first to speak up was Orville Flowers, who owns the feed and grain store. He was standing close in front, and no sooner had Doc Christmas finished talking than Orville called out, “I volunteer! I’ve got a side molar that’s been giving me fits for a month.”

  “Step up here with me, sir, right up here with Homer and me.”

  Orville got one foot on the wagon, but not the second, because just then Elrod Patch came barreling through the crowd, shouting in that funny half-lisping growl, “No you don’t, Flowers! I got a worse swole-up mouth ache than you or any man ever had. My broke-up tooth is gonna be yanked first and yanked free and I ain’t taking argument from you or anybody else.”

  Patch shoved Orville out of the way, even though it didn’t look as though Flowers was fixing to argue. Then he climbed up on the stage, stood with his feet planted wide. “All right, sawbones,” he said to Doc Christmas. “Pick up your tools and start yanking.”

  “I am not a doctor, sir. I am a painless dentist.”

  “All the same to me. Where do I sit?”

  Doc Christmas fingered his whiskers. “The other gentleman volunteered first, Mister…?”

  “Elrod Patch, blacksmith, and I don’t care if half of Box Elder volunteered first. I’m here, and I’m the one suffering the worst. Get to it. And it better be painless, too.”

  I could have stepped up on Orville Flowers’s behalf, but the mood Patch was in, it would likely have meant trouble. And in a crowd like this, a third of ’em women and kids, trouble was the last thing I wanted. Doc Christmas didn’t want any, either. He said to Patch, “Very well, sir,” and made a signal to his assistant. Homer went behind the painted curtain, came out again with a chair like a cut-down barber’s chair with a swivel mirror attached to it, and a long horizontal rod at the top—to hold a lantern for nighttime work, I supposed. He put the chair down next to the table that held the dentist’s instruments.

  Patch squeezed his bulk into the chair. Doc Christmas opened up Patch’s mouth with one long-fingered hand, poked and prodded some inside, then picked up a funny-looking tool and poked and prodded with that. He did it real gentle. Patch squirmed some, but didn’t make a sound the whole time.

  Homer came over with a bottle of the wonder painkiller, and Doc Christmas held it up to show the crowd while he did some more orating on its virtues. Then he unstoppered it and swabbed some thic
k brown liquid inside Patch’s mouth. Once he was done with that, Homer handed him a pair of forceps, which the doc brandished for the crowd. That painkiller of his sure appeared to be doing what it was advertised to do, for Patch was sitting quiet in the chair with a less hostile look on his ugly face.

  Things didn’t stay quiet for long, though. All of a sudden Homer took up his banjo and commenced to play and sing “Camptown Races” real loud. And with more strength than you’d figure a man with his frame would have, Doc Christmas grabbed Patch around the head with his hand tight over the windpipe, shoved the forceps into his wide-open maw, got a grip on the busted tooth, and started yanking.

  It looked to me like Patch was yelling something fierce, the way his legs were kicking and his arms flapping. But Homer’s banjo playing and singing were too loud to hear anything else. Doc Christmas yanked, and Patch struggled for what must’ve been about a minute and a half. Then the doc let go of his windpipe and with a flourish he held up the forceps, at the end of which was the bloody remains of a snaggletooth.

  Patch tried to get up out of the chair. Doc Christmas shoved him back down, took a big wad of cotton off the table, swabbed some more painkiller on it, and poked it into Patch’s mouth. When he did that, Homer quit picking and caterwauling, and as soon as it was quiet, the doc said to the crowd, “A simple, painless extraction, ladies and gentlemen, accomplished in less time than it takes to peel and core an apple. It was painless, was it not, Mr. Patch?”

  The blacksmith was on his feet now. He seemed wobbly and dazed. He tried to say something, but with all that cotton in his mouth the words came out garbled and thick so you couldn’t understand them. Homer and Doc Christmas handed him down off the wagon. Folks parted fast as Patch weaved his way through, giving him plenty of room. He passed close to me on his way out to the track, and he looked some stunned.

  The printer, Jones, said through a grin, “Doc Christmas’s Wonder Painkiller sure must be a marvel of medical science.”

  Once Patch was out of the way, folks began applauding and pushing closer to the wagon. In the next half hour, Doc Christmas pulled Orville Flowers’s bad tooth—Orville didn’t kick up any more fuss than Patch had—and gave a couple of four-bit dental examinations, and Homer sold five bottles of the painkiller. I bought a pint myself. I figured it was the least I could do in appreciation for the show they’d put on and that stunned look on Patch’s face when he passed me by.

  JIM TARBEAUX

  The face-off with Kinch had made up my mind for me. I was not about to give in to pressure from Colonel Greathouse or anybody else, put my tail between my legs and run like a whipped dog. I was not going to sell Keystone. I was all through being pushed around and treated like dirt. I intended to stick on the land I’d been born and raised on, and to protect it and myself come hell or high water. Make the ranch pay again somehow, no matter how long it took, and when I felt I could afford to have a wife and family, then I would marry Mary Beth, and her father and the rest of the haters be damned.

  I wanted to talk over my decision with her, but not at Keystone. She wasn’t to come there any more, it would only provoke trouble. We’d have to get together on the sly for a while. So I’d written her a note asking her to meet me tomorrow any time she could get away after noon, at the place where we used to rendezvous before Cable framed me. I had the paper folded in my shirt pocket when I rode into Box Elder.

  The town was surprisingly empty for a Saturday. Something going on on the willow flat by the river, judging from the banjo playing and loud singing coming from that direction. Nothing for me to bother with, whatever it was.

  I stopped first at the livery to return the roan horse and pay Sam Benson the additional money I owed him for the rental. When I told him I was definitely planning to stay on, he didn’t seem surprised or put out about it; he agreed to let me buy the saddle and a chestnut gelding for five dollars down and two dollars a month. The chestnut would serve as both saddle and wagon horse. Pa’s old buckboard was in the barn at Keystone, still in serviceable condition, or would be once I tightened the wheel nuts and greased the axles.

  The gunsmith’s shop came next. The owner now was a man I didn’t know, and that was just as well. I bargained with him for a secondhand Springfield rifle that he must have had for a while, given the price he settled on, and a box of shells. A sidearm would have to wait until I could afford one.

  The only person in Prairie Mercantile when I entered was Etta Lohrman, Mary Beth’s best friend, who clerked there. Etta was glad to see me and glad to deliver my note to Mary Beth tonight, just as she’d been glad to mail Mary Beth’s letters to me in Deer Lodge and pass on mine sent care of her in return. She was a nice, homely girl, as yet unmarried, and I guess acting as a secret go-between had put some savor into her life.

  With what little money I had left I bought a few essentials—flour, beans, coffee, a small slab of bacon—and while Etta sacked them she told me that the hubbub down on the flat had sprung from the arrival of a painless dentist and patent-medicine drummer in a fancy yellow and red wagon. Most folks find that type of visitor a welcome diversion, but I wouldn’t have cared if I’d had an impacted wisdom tooth. I tied the grocery sacks to the saddle horn, then rode to Cable’s shop.

  The time had come for a showdown. I’d waited long enough. Before I could hope to settle in the basin without being shunned I had to clear my name. Cable was the one who’d sullied it; he was the only one who could restore it.

  He was there, working in a halfhearted, distracted way at his cutting bench. He jerked when he saw me come in, then went stiff, his eyes widening and glistening with what I took to be fear. An old double-barreled shotgun leaned against the wall near him; he made a grab for it, swung it up. But he didn’t quite aim it at me, the barrels pointed at an off angle to my left. I held my hands out away from my body, palms toward him.

  He made a throat-clearing sound, but he didn’t say anything for several seconds. In the glow from an Argand lamp hung above the table, he looked small and shrunken. His sweat-pocked skin was sallow, pinched, and his hands weren’t steady. He’d aged fifteen years in the past five.

  Finally he said, “I heard you were back, Jim,” in a low voice that wobbled a little.

  “Expecting me, I see.”

  “I knew you’d come. Took your time about it.”

  “I had other things to do. You fixing to shoot me with that scattergun?”

  “If you fill your hand, I will. Both barrels.”

  “I’m not armed.”

  “Expect me to believe that?”

  I shrugged and glanced slowly around the shadowed room. “Pretty fair leatherwork. Seems you were cut out to be a saddle maker, like you always wanted.”

  “Man’s got to do something.”

  “That’s a fact. Only thing is, he ought to do it with honest money.”

  “All right,” Cable said.

  “All right what? You finally ready to admit you stole the Kendalls’ money?”

  He didn’t say anything. But his eyes were furtive, haunted.

  “You know, it’s a funny thing,” I said. “A man can be in prison even when there’s no bars on his windows.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Sure you do. It’s been a hard five years for you, too. Harder, in some ways, than the ones I lived through.”

  Again no reply.

  “You were on a downhill slide even before you bought this shop and learned the trade. Starting with Clara Davis. You always talked about marrying her, having three or four kids … your other big ambition. But she turned you down when you asked for her hand. Married a storekeeper in Billings instead.”

  The words made Cable’s hands twitch on the shotgun. “How do you know that?”

  Mary Beth had written me about it. Other things about Cable, too. “I know plenty about you, Rufus, never mind how. You proposed to another woman; she wouldn’t have you, either. Then you lost a fair amount in a bad mining-stock i
nvestment. Then one of your horses kicked over a lantern and burned down your barn. Then you caught consumption and were laid up in bed for more than a month—”

  “That’s enough,” Cable said, but there was no heat in his voice. Only a kind of desperate weariness.

  “The hell it is. Your health’s been poor ever since, worsening steadily, and there’s nothing much the doctors can do about it. How much more time do you reckon you have? Two years, three?”

  “Addled, whoever told you that. I’m healthy enough. I’ve got a long life ahead of me.”

  “No, I’m the one with the long life ahead. And I intend it to be a good life, right here in Box Elder.”

  “That won’t happen. You’re not welcome here, not after what people believe you did.”

  “I’ll make myself welcome. Rebuild Keystone, rebuild my reputation, no matter how long it takes. How do you like the idea of having me for a neighbor again?”

  “I don’t, damn you. You better settle with me before you think about doing anything else.”

  “That’s right. First I have to settle with you.”

  “Kill me, like you swore in court you’d do.”

  “I never swore that.”

  “Same as.”

  “You think I still hate you that much?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “No. Not any more.”

  “I don’t believe that. You’re lying.”

  “You’re the liar, Rufus, not me.”

  “You want me dead. Admit it … you want me dead.”

  “You’ll be dead soon enough to suit me.”

  “You can’t stand to wait. You want me dead now.”

  “Wrong. All I ever wanted was for you to pay for what you did to me and admit the truth. Well, you’re paying and paying dear—that’s one part of the settlement.”

  “You can’t make me confess.”

  “Yes I can. A public admission of guilt.”

  “No. I couldn’t face prison, couldn’t stand being locked up.”