“You fought against the South?” Robert said.
“And killed many.”
“Then how can you condone slavery such as your propose, sir?”
The Colonel laughed, and his men joined in. “If you believe that we were in that bloody and glorious war to free niggers, you’re sorely mistaken, young man. I could care less about niggers. I have niggers at the mine. And I care less what liberalminded fools think about slavery. Slavery is an means to an end, this nation was founded on that, commerce and wealth dictate it.. It’s been going on since the beginning of mankind, and will go on until the end, when our Lord Jesus parts the sky.”
“You, sir,” Robert said, “are a wanton, despicable human being.”
The Colonel gave this some thought, walked back to Robert, and quickly brought his fist into contact with Robert’s stomach. The impact made a horrible sound, and Robert fell to his knees, the wind knocked out of him. Then Robert started to vomit. Judas went to his friend, to help him up.
“I don’t take kindly to critics,” Colonel Charles K. Jodzio said, and to Judas: “You, boy, step away from him. Let him pick himself up.”
Judas still tried to help Robert.
Jodzio took out a Colt six-shooter, cocked it, and aimed. “Boy, I said step away, now.”
Judas did as he was told.
“And what is your name, son?” Jodzio inquired.
“Payne.”
“As in giving or receiving?” He chuckled, but his men didn’t seem to know whether to join or not. “Cross me, and you will be receiving,” he said, and asked: “What happened to your eye, kid?”
“I lost it when the wagon hit a rock,” Judas said. “It just popped right out and bounced on the ground.”
Jodzio chuckled, and this time his men, uncertain, joined. “Boy has a sense of humor,” he said. “ I can appreciate that.” To Robert: “Get on your feet, Mister.”
Robert stood up, wavering.
Jodzio slugged him in the stomach again, knocking Robert hard onto his back.
“ROBERT! NO!” Mary Jo Scroggins screamed from where the women were.
“And what do we have here?” Jodzio put his gun away, and walked over to the women. “Young lady, why are you so concerned about him?”
“Stop hurting him,” Mary Jo said. “Leave him alone.”
“And why do you care? Just good Christian ethic?”
“Because he’s my husband!” she said, with defiance and strength.
“Is that so? And your name—?”
“Mary Jo Scroggins!”
“Ahhh. Well, Mr. Scroggins,” turning back to Robert, who was now being helped up by several other men, but not Judas, “is this indeed your wife?”
“She is,” Robert said, coughing.
“Not a bad looking young lady. I wonder what she looks like without those clothes. Does she have a nice body? I wonder.” He gestured to his men, and three of them grabbed Mary Jo. She tried to get away from them. Several men from the caravan started to make advances, and Jodzio’s men pointed their guns. The three holding Mary Jo quickly, methodically, and laughing the whole time, proceeded to tear her dress and undergarments off until she was naked. Mary Jo tried to hide herself, but the assailants held her by both arms, as if she were being crucified, for the Colonel to inspect. He took his time looking her up and down, and reached out and squeezed one of her breasts. Mary Jo spat at him, but it flew past Jodzio’s face. He smiled, and shook his head. He inspected her backside, a hand on his saber. “Not bad,” he said, nodding. “I’ve seen better, but I’ve seen worse. Not bad. We’ll have fun with her.”
“You bastard!” Robert yelled.
“Yes,” Jodzio replied, “I am.” He raised his voice. “I believe you are all getting the picture of your future. The men will be working in the mines, and the women...will be working as concubines, keeping me and my men happy, and fed, and other various errands. Once in a while, I will allow—granted that there are no problems—conjugal visits for husbands and wives. Welcome to my world.”
* * *
With a gunman at each wagon, the caravan took a course North away from the trail. It was three days journey to Colonel Jodzio’s silver mines. The sun was blaring down hot. No one spoke to each other—if they did, and Jodzio’s men caught them, they were beaten. The women were kept from the men, and while nothing had happened yet, regarding the women and Jodzio’s men, it was only a matter of time. Judas noticed the way Jodzio’s men looked upon the women, and those expressions on their faces, the darkness in their eyes, made Judas feel sick.
Robert Kevin Scroggins remained silent during the whole journey, somber and contemplative. Judas wished he knew some way to console his friend; but the man had been humiliated, his own wife’s nakedness exposed before everyone, his inability to do anything about it. Scroggins didn’t need to say it, he didn’t even need to show it on his face; Judas knew, and so did the others, that his manhood had been injured, and he wasn’t unable to protect his spouse. Nut neither could any of the others, so Judas assumed no one held it against Scroggins.
They were all hungry. Jodzio’s men didn’t give them much of their own food, having it for themselves.
The night before they arrived, as they all huddled in one area to sleep, a blanket afforded to each, one young man said, softly, “We have to do something.”
“Yeah, of course we do,” someone else said, “what?”
“We can’t let them do this to us.”
“They have guns.”
Everyone mumbled. Judas looked at the night sky, so filled with stars...
“We will do something, eventually,” Scroggins spoke up. Everyone hushed. “When the time is right. We have to wait. And when the time is right, we have to act quickly.”
Whispers and nods of yes, of course, when the time is right.
The captor who was guarding them approached, rifle in hand. “What’s all the talkin’ about? What’s so interestin’?”
No one answered.
“Stop talkin’ and do some dreamin’,” the guard said. “We arrive tomorrow. Y’all prolly work tomorrow. You need yer strength.” He spat out some chewing tobacco, and went back to where he was standing before.
In another part of the camp, in one of the wagons, Colonel Charles K. Jodzio was enjoying himself with bottle of bourbon, a cigar, lounging about in his long johns that needed, he noted, a good washing. He’d have the women attend to laundry when they arrived at the mine. Speaking of women, he was waiting for one now. One of his men brought a lady with short dark hair and large eyes. He liked her eyes.
The woman stared at him, almost lifeless, with those eyes.
“What’s your name, my dear?”
“Claire,” she replied. “Claire Brooks.”
“Would you care for a drink?” He held out the bottle.
“No thank you.”
“It’ll help make this easier,” he said. “I had you brought to me first because you seemed to be the oldest of the women here.”
“I’m twenty-nine,” she said.
“Most of the other ladies seem quite young. And the men too. This is a good thing, in certain ways. Difficult in others. You’re married, yes? How many years?”
“Three. I had a husband before that, but he died.” “I’m sorry.”
“So am I. But I love my new husband very much.”
“That’s nice.” Jodzio drank. “Do you know why you’re here? What’s expected of you?”
“I have an idea,” she said flatly.
“After tonight, you will explain it to the other women.”
“And if I refuse? Will you hurt me?”
“I will hurt your husband,” Jodzio said. “I may even kill him, to make an example. I don’t want to. I need all the strong labor I can get.”
“You’re an evil man.”
“No. Just ambitious.”
She stared at him, and said, “Let me have that bottle.”
He smiled, and passed the bourbon over. Clair
e Brooks held it, looked at it. Jodzio had a pistol on her.
He said, “If you’re thinking I’m drunk and you can hit me over the head with that bottle, remove such fantasies from your pretty head at once.”
She raised the bottle to her mouth and took a long drink.
“My my,” the Colonel said. “You like your booze.”
She coughed. “No. I don’t. But you’re right, sir—it will help make the horrible thing I am about to go through easier.”
“Horrible? Must you insult me?”
“Horrible,” she said, and drank, and coughed.
“You may even enjoy it,” he said.
“That I will not,” she said. “You may do what dirty deed you will do, but I will not enjoy it, and I will not call it making love.”
“I never call it making love,” Jodzio said. “I just call it screwin’.”
She took another drink, and handed the bottle back.
“Take your clothes off,” Jodzio said, “and lie here on this blanket.”
“Will you turn the lamp off?” she asked.
“I will turn it down, but not off.” He lowered the oil lamp some.
There were tears in the woman’s eyes.
“Don’t be sad,” he told her.
“I don’t want to do this,” she said.
“I understand. But you have to.”
“And I imagine I will be doing it often, with your men.”
“It may seem brutal and immoral at first, but you, and the others, will learn to accept it.”
“You talk as if you have done this before.”
“Oh, I have,” Jodzio said, “there are other women at the mine. Now enough with talk, undress and lie down.”
Claire Brooks took her time taking her skirt, blouse, and undergarments off, but the bourbon was already hitting her and making her dizzy. She laid down and closed her eyes.
Jodzio started to get out of his long johns. “You’re easier than normal,” he said. “It’s curious. You act like you have done this before. And not just with your husbands.”
“I was no virgin before my first marriage,” she said, very softly, looking away, eyes still closed. The alcohol was burning in her blood, and she remembered another life, a life long ago, “I worked some saloons when I was a girl. It’s something my husband doesn’t know, an never will know, just like he will never know of this moment or any other.”
He was hovering over her. “Well, well.”
She opened her eyes. “Just do it and get it over with so I can go.”
“You don’t understand, Claire Brooks.” He got on top of her. “You’re staying with me all night. And we’re going to have an interesting time all night.”
* * *
Her name was Doña Maldita; she was forty-eight years old, thin as a scarecrow with dark, wrinkled skin, but held herself with a certain amount of elegance and power, as a woman in her profession needed to. She was in a small, dirty backroom watching a young blonde girl being humped by a man badly in need of a shave—all over his body. The man was repulsive, and he was one of the saloon owners. The girl was doing a fair job acting like she enjoyed it, moaning and moving her hips back and forth. The hairy man spent himself, then sat up and buttoned his trousers. He was smiling. The girl lay there, legs spread, staring at the ceiling.
“What do you think?” the man said. “She’s one of my best, too. I’ll miss her if you take her off my hands.”
Doña Maldita stood, and grabbed a blanket to cover the girl. “When they are done,” she said, “you will close your legs and cover yourself. Only a cheap whore lies there spilling seed waiting for the next customer.”
“But she is a cheap whore,” the man laughed.
“Not after she works for me.”
“So you wanna buy her?”
“Yes,” the woman said. To the girl: “Clean yourself when we leave.”
Doña Maldita hated scouting small towns for whores. But she needed more girls, her enterprises in Texas were expanding. She returned to the front of the saloon, where her two bodyguards waited, quick and swift young thugs whom she knew since they were children.
“So, that’s three whores you’re buying,” the hairy man said, pouring himself a whiskey. “Why not buy them all?”
“Because the other three don’t know how to fuck,” Doña Maldita said. “Now let’s talk prices so I can leave this hellhole.”
After purchasing the whores, and gathering the girls and their belongings to join her in the hotel she was staying at, Doña Maldita felt like drawing a long hot bath. Instead, she lay on the bed and took a short nap. What the hell was the name of this town? Hand. Hand, Kansas, just outside Fort Larned. How had she gotten here? Someone had told her there was a saloon in Hand that wasn’t doing much business, or one of the owners had mismanaged the profits, or something, and the whores there were for sale.
A few more girls to ship off to Dallas, and she’d return home.
She woke up, one of her young bodyguards standing by her bed. She thought, at first, the boy wanted to lay with her, as she sometimes did with these strong beautiful boys, but there wasn’t any lust in his eyes.
“What is it, mijo?”
“There is a man downstairs, he wishes an audience with you,” said the bodyguard.
“Am I expecting this man?”
“No. He says he has business.”
“Who is this man?”
“He would not give me his name.” The boy looked troubled for a moment. “He is a man of God, Doña.”
“What do you say?” She was on her feet. Her bones cracked. She did not like getting old. She would like—she thought—a quick roll on the bed with the boy; that always made her feel vibrant and alive, to know she still had the sex drive in her.
Sex, however, for Doña Maldita, was more often an ugly thing, and a means to make her wealthy.
The bodyguard said, “He wears the black and white outfit of the Anglo’s church. And a hat. But he looks like a magician or a trickster.” He added, “And he is missing an arm.”
This piqued her curiosity. “Give me ten minutes,” she said, “and then show him in.”
The bodyguard nodded, and left.
Hurriedly, Maldita fixed her hair and touched up her makeup, smoothed out of her skirt and glanced at herself in the mirror. She never saw the woman she was today in that reflection; she saw the raging beauty that she was when she was fifteen, the whore everyone in Mexico wanted when she was twenty.
A man of God with one arm? The thought gave her chills. Could this, she wondered, have any connection to the images that haunted her dreams since she was a child? Always the shadowy men with some part of their body missing: a leg, an arm, an eye, an ear, a foot, even parts of their heads. When she was small, these men were fatherly, and she wasn’t afraid; as she got older, the men would chase her, hurt her, sometimes brutally make love to her. They still haunted her dreams from time to time.
Considering this, she almost summoned the boy back to tell the Anglo to go away, that she would not be granting anyone an audience.. But she felt, she knew, that whoever this man was, he’d just come back, and probably find her before she could collect her whores and go south.
A knock on her door, the bodyguard entered. “He is here, Doña.”
“Thank you, niño.”
The bodyguard retreated, and the tall, gaunt, pale man in a black jacket and trousers, white collar, and one arm, entered. He removed his hat with his good arm.
“Good day, ma’am.”
She smiled. “Is it a good day, sir?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Why do you wish to see me, sir? I was told it was business.”
“It is business.”
“If you’re here to try and save my soul,” she said, “do not waste your time. My soul was forsaken long ago.”
“I realize this,” the man said. “You walk with the devil, as many do in these trying days.”
Maldita had a horrible thought—ma
ybe he wasn’t a preacher, maybe it was a costume, and he was an assassin. She had her share of enemies who would gladly se her dead. But she also knew her boys checked him for weapons before allowing him to pass. Still—although he had only one arm, his hand looked strong, strong enough to choke her, to break her neck.
I am becoming paranoid in my years, she thought.
“You do know what business I am in?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, “I do.”
She laughed. “So what does a preacher want with a Madame? Do you wish to sample the sins of the flesh with one of my young girls? Do you have a circle of deacons who would like a private and secret party of naked young women?”
The man considered this, frowning. “I hope that you jest.”
“Thinking out loud.”
“These things do not actually happen.”
“I have long overcome the shock of what pious and virtuous men do to women behind closed doors,” she assured him.
“I am Reverend Jedediah Payne,” he said.
“That is good for you,” she replied, not giving her name. She assumed he knew her name, if he knew her business.
“My church is in Tyburn, a town about twenty miles east of here. A member of my flock, a sincere elderly woman, had heard rumor that a Madame from lower Texas was in the vicinity purchasing whores for her houses of ill repute. Naturally, my first inclination was to seek you out and, yes, try to save your soul, or at best drive you away from our influence. In fact, I would like you to leave Kansas immediately, but I am in a position to make a business transaction. I have a young harlot I wish to sell to you.”
“A man of God? Selling me a whore?” She laughed at this.
“It sounds absurd, but the circumstances—”
“And what whore do you know, Reverend?”
“She is not a practicing whore, but it is in her blood, and I am sure she will be more suited to life with you, than corrupting my home.”
“And what right do you have to sell her?” Maldita asked. “Surely, a man of your nature does not own a whore.”
“She is my daughter,” he said.
Judas Payne: A Weird Western Page 6
