by Bill Brooks
“What is it I can do for you, Colonel?” Teddy said.
Billy rose from his chair and went and closed the double doors to the room, then returned and settled in again. John thought the chair made of steer horns Billy sat in looked damned exotic and not something he’d care to sit in, for fear a feller could puncture himself.
“I’ve had a bit of trouble. I aim to take a party of some wealthy folks on a hunt to raise money for a new Wild West combination I’m putting together. I can’t afford any trouble.”
“Trouble, such as?”
“Somebody shooting a hole through me, or one of them.”
“You know anybody who’d want to do that?”
“There’s lots who would, I suppose, but I don’t know any of them personally. Thing is, somebody took a shot at me a few days ago. I was lucky. Else, Louisa might not have found my bones till next spring.”
John said, “You couldn’t spare another glass of that Kentucky whiskey, I don’t suppose, could you?”
Billy went and got the bottle and brought it over and handed it to John and said, “Help yourself.”
“Obliged,” John said and did.
“You have any idea of who it was took that shot, Colonel?” Teddy asked.
“No, sir, I sure don’t. And I didn’t wait around in that open country for him to get a second opportunity. Listen, I know one thing, death comes in threes. First, there was Georgie at the Little Big Horn, then Wild Bill. Me and them boys was tight, ran our string together on and off. You might not believe in such things, but fate plays its hand every time and I figure I’m next on the list. I don’t want to be next on the list.”
Teddy was hesitant to say what was on his mind but he figured that he had no choice.
“Colonel, I’ve come here reluctantly. I never felt I was any good at this detective business. In spite of what Colorado Charley said about me, the plain fact is, Wild Bill ended up a corpse. I may not be any better at protecting you than I was him.”
“I’m willing to run that risk, Mr. Blue. You came at my request, and that shows me all I need to know about you. I’ll take my chances with you if you’ll accept the job.”
Billy cut his gaze toward John.
“Mr. Bangs never said he was sending two men.”
“John here is a friend, I’ll pay him out of my cut.”
“Oh, it’s not that,” Billy said. “I’m pleased to have the additional help. One of my people never arrived. I don’t suppose you’d know much about horses, do you, John?”
“Horses?” John said with a sort of smile, now that he was feeling loose with the good whiskey in his blood. “There ain’t much I don’t know about horses.”
“Well, I’m in desperate need of a wrangler. The good folks I’ve got coming from the East for this hunt may not be the best riders and they’ll require sound horses, nothing too skittish, no hammerheads. Fact is, I’m not sure if any of them have ever been on a horse. How do you feel about rich people, John?”
“About the same as I do everybody else. Just because they got money don’t eliminate ’em in my book.”
Billy liked John for his open ways.
“I’m paying seventy-five dollars for a week’s hunt with a bonus if we have a good trip.”
“Sign me up, then,” John said, used to more like forty a month, working cattle.
“I’ve worked out the financial arrangements for your services with your boss, Mr. Bangs,” Billy said to Teddy.
“Yes, sir.”
“Good, let’s go have some lunch, then.”
They followed Billy into the living room and sat around a large table, Teddy and John, Billy and Louisa, and the three girls, who could hardly take their eyes off John’s right hand where the thumb was missing. Louisa caught them staring and said strongly, “Girls!”
John said, “Oh, I don’t mind, ma’am. Ain’t often you see a man without both his thumbs attached…”
“I appreciate your candor, sir,” Louisa said, “but it is important that they act like young ladies.”
John nodded, then dug into the beefsteaks.
Later in the hotel bar where he and Teddy stopped for a nightcap, John said, “She’s rather dry, ain’t she, the Colonel’s wife?”
“I don’t guess it’s easy being married to a legend,” Teddy said.
“I wouldn’t know nothing about it,” John said.
“Me either.”
They drank until it got late enough to go to bed.
John said on the way up the stairs, “This feels like it’s going to work out, us going on this hunt. We’ll make some spending money and we won’t be hanging round town where some local law might get wise to who we are.”
Teddy’s thoughts had returned to Kathleen; he felt glum about the way things had turned out. Once in his room, he lay on the bed and continued to think about her there in the dark. It felt lonely. He could hear John singing in the next room. Something low, like what a cowboy might sing, night hawking.
Teddy sat up, struck a match to the lamp beside the bed, dug around in his kit, and found the writing paper and pencil he’d brought along.
Dearest Kathleen,
I can’t find the words exactly to convey my feelings. Leaving you for the second time was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do. I can’t stop thinking about you, about us and what we might have been for each other. I don’t know if what I’m feeling is love. I’ve never been in love before I met you, so this is all new to me, these feelings. There is something I must tell you, the true reason why I didn’t fight for you so you’ll know that it wasn’t because I didn’t care, or that I didn’t love you, for I think I do. I think that is what these feelings I have are—love. The true reason I didn’t fight Antrim for you was because I did something wrong, I broke the law and I was worried that the law would find me. That you would come to depend on me, trust me, and then the law would come and take me away from you and you’d lose your chance with Antrim and the security he offered you. I’m sorry it turned out this way. I cannot express to you how sorry I am. But I’m going to set things right somehow, and maybe it’s not too late. Maybe fate will be kinder to us in the future.
With love & affection,
Teddy
He read it over several times. He wasn’t sure if he would actually send it or not, but it made him feel better having written it. He blew out the flame and lay back again. John’s singing had tapered off next door and eventually things grew quiet.
He was asleep. How long he couldn’t say. There was a noise. Something uncommon. He held his breath even as his hand snaked out for the Birdseye Colt hanging in the shoulder holster at the head of the bed.
Then something hit him hard and lights flashed in his brain and his hand never made the grips of the pistol. He rolled off the bed and came up hard, driving into the shadow with a head butt. He struck belt buckle, a solid belly, felt fists flailing at him as he drove the intruder across the room and hard into the wall, then swung ’round and into the bureau, knocking against it. The water pitcher and wash bowl crashed to the floor. He swung a hard right hand to the stomach, felt it sink into the ample flesh, heard the intruder gasp, the weight of him sink. Then a kick took Teddy off his feet, his head slamming back into the iron bed frame.
He scrabbled to regain his feet.
Suddenly the door was kicked open and someone was standing there holding a lamp forth. It was John.
“What the hell’s going on in here?”
The shadow moved between Teddy and John’s light. Then there was an explosion and the shadow crashed to the floor.
John held the light down close.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “I thought maybe I’d shot you, old son. You okay?”
Teddy felt a trickle of blood down the side of his face.
“Who is that?”
John shook his head.
“Looks rough as a cob, dead as one too.”
Teddy took a good look at the man. It wasn’t anybody he knew.
/> “Lawman, maybe,” John said.
“Tell me it isn’t.”
John searched through the man’s pockets, came up empty except for a small knife and a set of brass knuckles.
“He’s not carrying a badge.”
Teddy exhaled.
“We better call whoever the law is.”
“You sure you want to do that?”
“We’ve got no choice, John.”
“I reckon not.”
They summoned a hotel clerk, who went for the constable, the same one that had found most recent Colonel Billy Cody and Texas Jack Omohundro lying drunk in the street and had begun to wonder just what sort of town North Platte was turning into. When Henry Egg arrived and things were explained and he looked close at the dead man, he said, “That’s Dallas Smith. He’s a local mush brain and now former troublemaker. You boys did the town a good service for putting him out of our misery and his’n too.”
“We’re sorry somebody had to die here tonight,” Teddy said.
“Hell, I am too, I reckon. But by tomorrow after I’ve gotten the rest of my sleep, I won’t be so much bothered. What you boys doing in my town? You ain’t from here.”
Teddy explained that Cody had hired them to help him with the upcoming hunt.
“Oh, that,” Henry Egg said. “The Colonel’s always got one thing or another going. Well, wish you all a lot of luck. I’ll have some boys drag this one down to the undertaker’s. Sorry he cracked your head, son.”
Teddy and John just looked at each other and John said, “I wonder if they’s a saloon still open, I could stand a drink.”
“I could too,” Teddy said.
The letter he had written to Kathleen earlier had fallen to the floor and been torn in the struggle.
Chapter 11
Dora Hand soon came quickly to realize that palm reading didn’t pay nearly as well as whoring. Her rent had come due and she’d only read two palms in the previous week for a total of two dollars: Billy Cody’s and Dallas Smith’s. In neither did she see a bright future. Death lurked near for each. She was tempted to lie to the men and give them jolly good fortune readings so that they would tell their friends, who, she hoped, would come to get their palms read as well. But Dora had never been a very good liar while sober and men could generally see right through her, except when she was whoring. Then she could be the best liar in the world and make men believe anything. She could make the ugliest man believe he was handsome, and she could make dumb men think they were smart, short men tall.
Men in heat, especially if they were drunk too, would believe anything. More importantly, drunken men in heat were generous. She never thought she’d miss whoring, but she came to conclude otherwise.
She went to the Yellow Dog and asked the Hunch-back to take her on again. The Hunchback—whose Christian name was Willard Simpkins—said, “You’ll have to prove to me personal you still got what it takes, Dora.”
She never favored sleeping with the Hunchback; he was dirty for one thing and had breath that stank like kerosene. But Dora did what she had to and took the Hunchback upstairs where the cribs were and gave him a ride on the Dora Express, in order to win back her old job.
And afterward the Hunchback got up and tugged up his trousers and said, “You might have forgotten a trick or two, but winter’s set in and men ain’t got much to do around here but drink and whore. You’re hired back.”
And so Dora returned to her old life and took up the whoring trade in the Yellow Dog Saloon, third crib from the top of the stairs on your right. And it was here that she learned of the demise of one Dallas Smith, for which she was not ungrateful. Dallas was a lummox that had no way with women whatsoever. He slobbered a lot, for one thing. She wasn’t sorry somebody had shot him.
It was on a Sunday that she encountered her next lunatic lover, one Mysterious Dave Mather, who liked doing it with his boots on.
“You’re muddying up the bed,” Dora said the first time they started to do it. “Take them dang boots off.”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Might have to get in the wind, burn daylight, hightail it, go quick.”
“Ah, jeez,” she said. “Another in-a-hurry cowboy.”
“No,” said Dave. “I ain’t no cowboy.”
In spite of wearing his boots, Dave proved an amorous lover who did little bragging on himself, and so she forgave Dave his boot wearing. After they made love Dave offered Dora some cocaine pills, saying, “These will make you feel a lot better.”
“Make me feel better about what?”
“Just about everything.”
So she swallowed some of them and Dave’s prediction proved right. Soon the world looked to Dora to be wrapped in blue paper and it did for Dave too. They lay in the narrow little bed naked and giggling like children.
“I think I love you,” Dave said. “What’s your name?”
“Dora,” Dora said.
“Dora,” Dave said. “Dora, Dora, Dora…”
“That’s my name, don’t wear it out,” Dora said, and then they both giggled some more.
Later, after the effects of the cocaine pills wore off, Dave sat up and said, “I got to go kill somebody.” Dora asked, “Who?” Dave said, “I don’t know exactly, but I think his name is Buffalo Bill.”
“Oh, jeez,” Dora said.
“But maybe it’s not him,” Dave said. “That name just somehow sticks in my mind.”
“I wish you wouldn’t kill Buffalo Bill,” Dora said.
“Why not?”
“Because me and him were once lovers.”
“That’s too bad, why ain’t you still?”
“I don’t know. Love is like that sometimes, it just goes away, even though you don’t want it to. That’s what happened between me and Bill; one day we was in love and then the next he was gone, got himself married and stopped whoring.”
“I hope my love for you doesn’t go away anytime soon,” Dave said, pulling on his trousers over his boots and having a hard time of it.
“I hope not either,” Dora said happily for the first time in many years. She could possibly see some sort of future with Dave, in spite of his odd ways.
“Well, it may not be Buffalo Bill I need to kill, but it sure is somebody.”
“Why do you need to kill anybody?” Dora asked, unashamed of her nakedness under Dave’s watchful gaze. She liked the way he looked at her, like a starved wolf looking at a recent-killed calf carcass.
“That’s what I do,” Dave said. “I kill folks. At least I think it is. Seems to me I’ve been in the killing business as long as I can remember, which sometimes is confusing as to how long exactly that’s been.”
“I don’t believe you,” Dora said. “You seem like underneath it all a nice feller, even if you do have some odd ways about you.”
“Hey, watch it,” Dave said.
“Watch what?”
“Nothing. I forget sometimes.”
“You going to come back to see me again?”
“I don’t know, how much is it going to cost me if I do?”
“Same as this time, ten dollars.”
“Ten dollars, huh?”
Dave dug through the pockets of his trousers and pulled out the loose money that was in them and put it on the bed and said, “Count that out for me while I put on my shirt, would you?”
Dora counted and then said, “There’s sixteen dollars and two bits here.”
“Then I’ll come see you again if I still have it later.”
“Why not leave it with me and set yourself up an account.”
“That’s a novel idea, but I might need that money for bullets and trail grub if this Buffalo Bill proves hard to find. Or whoever it is.”
Dave stood and tucked his shirt into his trousers, then strapped on his guns and pulled on his coat and tugged his hat down on his head until the brim bent his ears over.
“How do I look?” he said.
“Like an outlaw, like a very
bad man, like somebody about to go kill somebody.”
Dave grinned.
“You got a way of making me feel good, Dora. I bet you like me as much as I like you.”
“I like you quite a lot. But a girl hates getting her heart broke. I’ve had mine broke plenty.”
“Here’s a dollar,” Dave said, taking up the money Dora had counted and peeling off one of the bills. “As a way of showing my extreme appreciation and undying love.”
“That’s very sweet of you, Dave, but it would be a lot sweeter if you’d leave me the whole amount.”
“I’ve got to go now.”
“Don’t you even want to kiss me good-bye?”
Dave looked down at his boots.
“I guess I do,” he said.
“Then come on and do it.”
“Jeez, Dora, you’re quite a gal. I’m surprised you ain’t already married.”
Afterward Dave rode out from North Platte, not sure exactly which direction he should ride to find the man he was meant to kill, thinking still that it was this Buffalo Bill person whose name kept going ’round in his head.
Buffalo Bill, Buffalo Bill, Buffalo Bill, Buffalo Bill…
Dave rode in a northerly direction from town, giving his horse its head and the horse had a hankering for water and sweet grasses that had not yet been killed by the cold nights and so did eventually head toward a river whose water and sweet grasses it smelled. Some of the land looked familiar to Dave. He’d forgotten that it was the same land he’d tracked Buffalo Bill over but mostly for the reason that much of the snow was now melted and the land looked different without it.
When the horse finally came to a river it stopped and drank and cropped the grasses along the banks and Dave dismounted, feeling the need to relieve himself against the trunk of a tree. He didn’t know what sort of tree it was, nor did he care. Types of trees weren’t a thing Dave was curious about. To him, trees were simply trees, put there for shade and firewood and to hang a man from if the need arose. And to piss against.
He was pissing against the tree when he saw a rider on the far side of the river headed his direction. It could be Buffalo Bill, Buffalo Bill, Buffalo Bill… he thought.
