by Len Levinson
~*~
Frank Quarternight sat by the window in his hotel room, whiskey in his hand. He glanced toward the bed, saw the whore take off her clothes. Her skin was white as the sheets, and her ribs visible through her skin.
“Come over here,” she said, breasts standing firmly, eighteen-years-old.
He was ashamed to take off his clothes and let her see his loose flesh. She’d rather be with a young man, but he’d killed one tonight. He unbuttoned his shirt.
“What you want first?” she asked.
He stepped out of his pants and felt her eyes upon his naked folds of blubber. Quickly he crawled beneath the covers. His head swam as it hit the pillow.
“You all right?” she asked.
“Let me close my eyes for a few moments.”
She held his face, he snored softly. Older men are like children in a candy store, she mused. They want everything in sight, but can only handle very little.
She sipped her whiskey, while the famous gunfighter slept like a baby in her arms.
~*~
Stone and Cassandra came to a sign that said:
SUNDUST
Cattle Capital of the Plains
One mile to Go
Don’t give up Now
They spurred their horses, and the animals could smell manure in the stockyards, smoke, the garbage dump, open outhouses, gunpowder.
“I know sometimes a man can say things he later regrets,” Cassandra told Stone. “I’ve lived with your moods the past few months, and they run all over the place. You want to change your mind, don’t be afraid to say so.”
He glanced at her sharply. “You trying to back out of it?”
“I just want to give you all the rein you want.”
“Sounds like you want to give me so much rein, I won’t even be in sight.”
“I don’t want a man who’d rather be someplace else,”
“When I tell a woman I’m going to marry her, it’s not something I just dreamed up. You’re the woman for me.”
They saw Sundust, a scattering of shacks on a vast plain. Railroad tracks and stockyards lay beside it, with a curved column of smoke arising from the smokestack of the engine car.
“Don’t get too drunk, Johnny,” she said. “I don’t mind you having a few, but let’s not pass out on any floors, all right?”
“Anything you say.”
Acres of holding pens were packed with snorting cattle, their long journey nearly over. Hereafter they’d ride boxcars, and next stop was a slaughterhouse. The stink of cow manure, urine, and dust filled the air as cowboys loaded cattle into the cars. Engineers sat in the cabs of their locomotives, watching the show.
Cassandra and John Stone turned onto the main street of Sundust. The first building on the near corner was a saloon, across the street was another saloon, and there was a saloon every few doors down. They heard the tinkle of pianos and women’s laughter. Somebody fired a shot. A group of cowboys galloped down the street, screaming at the tops of their lungs. Cassandra and Stone pulled their horses to the side so the cowboys could pass.
Stone peered through the door of the nearest saloon, and saw men sitting at the bar, cowboy hats silhouetted by rear windows.
“Looks like you can’t wait,” Cassandra said. “Don’t let me hold you back.”
“I’ll see you to your hotel.”
“I can get there myself.”
“Let’s understand something, Cassandra. I’m a good-timing man and I never tried to hide it. You marry me, you’ve got someone who appreciates a fine glass of whiskey.”
“Wouldn’t mind if it were just one.”
“Sometimes it’s a man’s sacred duty to get drunk.”
“Getting drunk isn’t duty. It’s the mark of a pig.”
“Oink,” said Stone.
“Stop that.”
“Oink, oink.”
They came to the Majestic Hotel, a big box three stories high, with a wide veranda in front.
“Getting a room for the both of us?” Stone asked.
“Not until we’re married.”
“We’ve been married since that night in Texas, you know the one I’m talking about.”
“I want a church ceremony. This lady doesn’t get married every day.”
“Give me the address, I’ll be there in my best clothes, on time every time.”
“I don’t know why I love you so much, but I do.” She kissed his bearded cheek. “Stay out of trouble, all right?”
She entered the lobby of the Majestic Hotel, crowded with men in every conceivable manner of dress. All eyes turned toward her, and the old whoremasters among them raised their brows, because this was an exceptional female creature.
It wasn’t the sheer of her cheek or the curve of her hips, nor her piercing blue eyes or pronounced cheekbones. Her most arresting quality was strapped to her slim waist: a Colt in a well-worn holster. They seldom saw a woman heeled like a man.
The room clerk looked at her, and even he was impressed. Women appeared in the Majestic Hotel all the time: whores, wives, sisters, and mothers. Some had been scared, and many left after one look around the lobby. A few walked in as if they owned the place. This one carried a gun, and looked like she knew how to use it.
She was tall and looked tawny underneath her rough trail clothes. Her legs were slightly bowed from so many days on horses, and she appeared ready to wrestle a steer to the ground. Her beauty was striking, without a smidgeon of makeup, only the dust of the trail. There was nothing dainty about her.
“Room for the night,” she said.
“One person?”
Cassandra looked at him, and he was shorter than she, with a round face and carefully waxed mustaches, a different species of animal compared to her rough sons of bitches back with the herd. They could tear the Majestic Hotel apart in fifteen minutes. “Yes, and I’d also like to have a bath.”
The clerk pushed the register toward her. Cassandra took the pen in hand, and the clerk could see hard calluses, the scar near her right thumb, no wedding ring. She signed her name and pushed the register back.
“What herd you with, ma’am?”
“Triangle Spur.”
The clerk wrote it on the registration form, handed her the key. “Hope you enjoy your stay with us, Miss Whiteside.”
“Mrs. Whiteside.”
“Will your husband be joining you?”
“I’m a widow.”
“If you require anything, Mrs. Whiteside, please don’t hesitate to ask.”
“I’d like to buy some new clothes. Where would you recommend?”
“You might try Shaeffer’s Dry Goods a few doors down. They have everything a lady might want.”
No store can give a lady everything she wants, Cassandra thought. She carried her bedroll to the second floor, entered her room, saw whitewashed plank walls, bed, chair, and atop the desk a printed list of authorized cattle buyers. Authorized by whom? she wondered.
She threw her bedroll in the corner, washed her face and hands in the basin. The bed would be her first in nearly three months, but there was work to do. She needed clothes. A person can’t conduct important business in rags.
She looked at herself in the mirror and tilted her hat low over her eyes, the way Truscott always did. He’d been her foreman, big brother, father, uncle, and sometimes she’d felt strange desires. Trampled to death in the worst stompede of the drive, and she couldn’t forget him. The man had been utterly fearless, tough as rawhide.
The sooner she sold her herd, the better she’d feel. Her cowboys and vaqueros were chomping their bits, they hadn’t seen a town since Texas.
It was midafternoon, the street of Sundust full of riders, carriages, wagons. Rows of horses were hitched to rails, sidewalks crowded. She looked like a cowboy at first glance, if you didn’t examine too closely. She saw the sign: Shaeffer’s Dry Goods.
It was a wooden box like the Majestic Hotel, one story high. Dresses and pants hung from the rafters. A man, a woman
, and children worked behind the counter. Cassandra took off her gloves and tucked them into her gunbelt the way Truscott always did. She found an empty spot at the counter, and a little girl popped up her head in front of her.
“Help you, sir?”
“I’d like to buy a pair of pants, a shirt, and a hat,” Cassandra said out of the corner of her mouth, because that’s the way Truscott always had talked.
The child was eight-years-old. “Are you a man or are you a woman?”
“Woman.”
“Ever use that gun?”
“Please get me the clothes. I’m in a hurry.”
A man with a mustache appeared beside the little girl. “I’ll take the gentleman, Annabelle.”
“It’s not a gentleman, Daddy. It’s a lady.”
Mr. Shaeffer’s eyes scanned Cassandra’s face. “Sorry, ma’am. Can I help you?”
Cassandra told him the items she wanted, and he retrieved the merchandise from boxes. She tried on a new pearl-gray cowboy hat.
“Perfume?” he asked.
“Your best.”
He reached behind him, plucked a small bottle from a box, pulled the cork, let her sniff. It reminded her of New Orleans, where she was born and raised. “I’ll take it.”
“Traveling with a herd, ma’am?” he asked.
“Triangle Spur,” she replied, dropping coins on the counter. “You meet any cattle buyers, you tell them I’ve got nearly three thousand head of the finest longhorns God made.”
“You came all the way up the trail, ma’am?”
“That’s right,” she said, lifting the pile of clothing. “I’ll be staying at the Majestic Hotel, anybody wants to talk business.”
~*~
John Stone made his way toward the Blue Devil Saloon. They’d promised him a free drink there, his decision was easy. Out of all the variegated saloons in Sundust, he sauntered toward its swinging doors, stepped out of the backlight. It was a long narrow room shaped like a coffin with the bar on the right, tables on the left, dance floor and stage in back. Above the bar hung an oil painting six feet wide, naked harem girls taking baths in a palace garden pool.
Their odalisque eyes followed Stone as he crossed the saloon, passing tables crowded with men arguing, gambling, reading old newspapers, swilling rotgut. A few solitary ones with drool in their beards stared vacantly into space. Stone came to the bar and looked at the row of bottles on the shelf below the mirror.
This was his first saloon since Texas, and his mouth watered at the sight of amber liquid in shiny bottles. “Jesse Roland said he’d buy me a whiskey if I came here.”
The bartender poured the drink. “What herd you with?”
“Triangle Spur. Lots of cattle buyers in town?”
“More’n you could shake a stick at. You got cattle to sell, you won’t have ’em long.”
Stone looked at the whiskey, and it called to him from its lucid depths. If he were smart, he’d leave it alone. But nobody ever called him smart. I can handle a few drinks. Not that goddamned weak.
He raised the glass, let a few drops trickle onto his tongue. It had the deep smoky taste of charred barrel. There was nothing like a drink of whiskey to brace a man. He tossed the entire contents down his throat.
It hit him like a bolt of lightning. For a few seconds it sizzled his innards, then the warm glow came on. He pushed the glass forward. “Hit me again.”
“What part of South Carolina you from?”
“How can you tell I’m from South Carolina?”
“Hear lots of accents. Can pick ’em out.”
Stone reached into his saddlebags, took out the dented and bent photograph of Marie. “Ever see this woman?”
“Don’t believe I have.”
Stone stared at the picture of the pretty young blonde who resembled Cassandra Whiteside. Where are you? He spotted an empty table near the dance floor, walked toward it, passed a whore leaning against the bar.
“Need a gal he’p you drink that whiskey, cowboy?” She followed him to the table, dropped to the chair opposite him, seventeen, tooth missing in front. Her red hair was fixed in spit curls on her forehead, and her breastworks were pitiful. Yet she was pretty, a naughty little girl.
“I’m Sally Mae.”
“John Stone.”
“Just hit town?”
“Yes, thank God.”
“I came a year ago, when we all lived in tents. Been paid yet? How’s about a drink?”
“You’ve got more money in your garter than I have in my pockets, saddlebags, and blanket roll. Why don’t you buy one for me?”
She smiled and wagged her finger in front of him. “It don’t work that way, cowboy.”
She walked away. Stone leaned back in his chair. Many nights on the trail, riding night duty with the herd, he’d dreamed of the next saloon, and here it was in all its splendor.
Numerous panes of glass had been broken out of the windows and replaced with old barn boards. Tables and chairs leaned crookedly on a planked floor covered with cigarette butts, spit, splatters of whiskey, broken glass, chicken bones, and somebody’s boot. Legs of the furniture were stained with gooey tobacco juice. Bullet holes were visible on the walls. Names badly spelled were carved into tabletops, but the feeling was there.
The dirt-stained mirror behind the bar had been witness to every conceivable drunken orgy, marathon poker games, shootouts, knifings, eye gougings, earlobes bitten off, broken bottles, slashed faces, and every other incredible excess and act of brutal violence. You could smell meanness in the air.
The cuspidor near Stone’s table was filled with a liquid so vile as to defy analysis. The floor surrounding the cuspidor was covered with brown gunk, because many cowboys, under the influence of strong rotgut whiskey, couldn’t see straight. The bar rail was covered with scars, and at the end hung a gob of a man’s hair left over from the last brawl.
The beat-up old lantern on the wall—how many scenes had it illuminated? Maybe it came from a miner’s tent, sodbuster’s hut, outlaw’s hideout, but it couldn’t illuminate the minds of men blind drunk.
Everybody packed a knife and a gun, and a man could bet, on any given night, somebody’s going to die.
Dark, dingy, filled with spit, vomit, and urine, it was an oasis for cowboys, and they talked of nothing else on the trail. This filthy dark hole in the wall represented their highest aspirations.
In the painting above the bar, Nubian slaves carried water to naked ladies glistening forever in the sunlight. Stone lowered his eyes to the whores. Hungry girls scrambling to stay alive. The life wore them out and beat them down. Garish cosmetics covered pale sickly skin never seeing the light of day. Disease ran rampant among them. The only romance most cowboys ever knew was with these poor lost creatures who charged the going rate for their kisses and hugs.
A boy dropped a sheet of paper on Stone’s table. Another list of cattle buyers, his eyes lazily glanced down the names. Then he blinked, brought the paper closer. “You know this Lewton Rooney?” he asked the bartender.
“Comes here all the time.”
“About my age, this tall.” Stone held out his hand.
“I’d say so.”
Stone looked stunned. “Know where I can find him?”
“Prob’ly in his office this time of day.”
~*~
Cassandra’s hair was combed, tanned skin scrubbed clean, new cowboy clothes not too big for her. She slanted her fine new cowboy hat on her head Truscott style, and left the room.
It was late afternoon when she stepped onto the veranda of the Majestic Hotel. The air was filled with soot and dust, one saloon after another. Cowboys staggered in the muddy street, some passed out on benches in front of business establishments. The shooting usually started after ten at night in San Antone. She hoped John Stone wasn’t drunk yet.
She searched for the office of a cattle broker, saw a white church with a steeple. The sign above the front door said:
MOUNT ZION CHURCH OF GOD
Saturday Night
Cassandra didn’t need beans, but a prayer of thanks was in order. She opened the door, ahead was the altar. Nailed to the wall were two crude branches in the form of the cross.
She removed her hat, and freshly shampooed blond tresses fell out, cascading to her shoulders. She sidestepped into a pew, dropped to her knees, clasped her hands together.
Thank you, Lord, for my safe arrival. She saw the open plains, herd spread over hundreds of acres, faces of men who’d fallen along the way, fighting for cattle that didn’t even belong to them. They rode for the brand, and died for the brand.
She whispered their names: Joe Little Bear, Calvin Blake-more, Duke Truscott. She saw Truscott walking bowlegged toward her, his leggins flapping in the breeze. He’d loved her in his rough cowboy way, she knew that now, and would never forget him. Sometimes she felt his spirit hovering above like a guardian angel.
“You all right, miss?” The kindly, crinkly old face of a minister with a white collar. “Reverend Phineas Blasingame, at your service.” He bowed, showing neatly parted white hair.
She brushed the tear away. “I was saying a prayer for friends of mine who died recently.”
“They are with the Father in heaven, so you needn’t worry about them. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you before ...”
“Cassandra Whiteside, Triangle Spur.”
“You look a little piqued, my dear. Care to have a cup of tea with an old preacher?”
“I have an awful lot to do.”
“We can pray together in the rectory for your departed friends. You say you’ve just arrived from Texas?”
“About two hours ago.”
“You traveled with your husband, I assume?”
“I’m a widow.”
He gazed at her with new interest, his eyes flicked up and down her figure. “Tea is a marvelous restorative,” he said. “You’ve come a long way.”
He led her through a long, dark passageway to a small room with chairs around a low, circular coffee table. A stained-glass window showed Jesus as a child, studying the word of God.
