Rueful Regret

by Steve Vernon

  He stood there wondering just what to do next.

  He should know, shouldn’t he?

  After all, he was the bounty killer – the fellow that folks hired to see justice done when justice was too damn lazy to haul its fat pock-marked ass out of bed. He was a professional gunman, a hunter and a tracker – and he ought to know a bit more than a bit about how this killing business was supposed to be done.

  The truth was he didn’t know a goddamn thing.

  He just made it up, every step of the way. What else could any man do? There were no real clear rules in a situation like this was – beyond a simple shoot first and stay un-hit.

  Bass coyote-crawled his way down through the woods, shifting his position from bush to thicket to bramble to trunk. The dirt was drought-dry and ghosted up around him in small puffs and starts that tickled his nose – but he knew better than to sneeze. He always did. His daddy had told him that he could sneak up with the best of them.

  “Just a little closer,” he whispered.

  It was a damn fool habit, talking to himself in the midst of an ambush bounty killing but his ears got lonesome for words sometime and his mouth had just never learned to stay shut up for very long. It could be that there was strong streak of Hawley in his blood after all.

  “So shut up whispering,” he told himself fiercely.

  That window light kept sheening out in the darkness and Bass kept his eyes leaning towards the shadows of the shack. He had seen moths flitter into a burning candle flame just because they could not unfix their eyes from all of that glittering light. Bass for sure was a little smarter than a moth.

  He kept on moving.

  When he got close enough to the shack to chuck a horseshoe through the window the light spooked out, hard and sudden.

  Damn.

  Was it past Grimes’s bedtime?

  Did the lamp burn out?

  Did the night breeze catch the candle or maybe a moth had flown too close and snuffed it cold.

  Or maybe Grimes had dimmed it out.

  Maybe he was waiting for Bass down there in the darkness of the shack?

  Bass crawled a little closer. He had to get nearer to do much of anything. If Grimes saw him and started shooting it was too late to worry about anything more than getting close enough to kill back.

  There was a tumbledown heap of firewood piled up about a good long outstretched corpse’s reach away from the cabin wall. Bass crawled up behind the logs, keeping the wood between him and the shack. If Grimes was to shoot back he’d have to hit through the firewood before he stood a chance of hitting Bass.

  Bass took a deep breath.

  There were two ways to come at a problem like this. One was to come around of it, sneaking in some kind of way that you figured whoever you were sneaking in on wasn’t figuring. The other was to move straight on in. Bass figured that Grimes knew someone was coming – so he figured there wasn’t much sense in sneaking any further.

  “The hell with it,” Bass growled to himself. “Let’s get this over with.”

  He pulled himself up over the firewood, nearly tripping and braining himself on a chunk of particularly cantankerous hickory. He fell flat against the side of the shack, swung around and brought his shotgun to the level, pointing through the window frame. He let fire, maybe accidentally, maybe not – and the shotgun kicked hard against his shoulder bone, letting him know that the load was true.

  He pictured pieces of Grimes painting the walls of the tumbledown cabin but Grimes wasn’t cooperating with the strength of Bass’s vision. The return fire gun flash danced spots before Bass’s eyes. Grimes fired back out of the darkness of the shadow and the bullet cut clean through the chinking of the logs and banged into Bass’s belly, maybe breaking a rib. Ignoring the pain, Bass swung himself through the window and Grimes didn’t fire back.

  “You’re dead, ain’t you?” Bass asked.

  “Not hardly,” Grimes said from out of the darkness.

  There was a pain tearing in his voice. It sounded as if the man had been hit, hard by the sounds of it – pretty hard.

  “Not me, anyway,” Grimes continued.

  Now what did he mean by that?

  “Don’t move,” Bass said, pointing his empty shotgun after the voice. “I’ve got one barrel left to blow.”

  “One barrel was plenty,” Grimes said. “It did the job just fine.”

  There was something hiding behind Grimes’s tone of voice that Bass did not care much for. He fumbled around until he found the lantern and lit it. He could see everything clearly in the flicker of the oil wick light.

  Grimes leaned against the far wall, his ass planted on the edge of an unmade bed. He was naked and his pecker pole was sticking out and dangling. Grimes breathed slowly, his face a pain-painted shade of white. His right sleeve hung a little funny on account of Bass’s buckshot blast had nearly torn his arm off.

  The woman who had been lying in the bed with Grimes was in a lot worse shape, being dead like she was. The blast had torn her up good and proper. She hadn’t stood a chance. Bass felt a little sick at heart. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone else up here with Grimes.

  He tried not to look too closely at what the shotgun blast had done to the woman – but it sure wasn’t pretty.

  “Well, you’ve disarmed me and de-livered her so I guess you’ve earned yourself a reward, bounty killer,” Grimes said. “Only she didn’t have all that much on her, least as far as I could tell.”

  Bass stood there and stared at the piece of meat that used to be a living, breathing woman.

  He didn’t say a damned thing.

  Grimes just sat and waited.

  Finally, Bass dropped his shotgun right there on the floor.

  “I believe I’m done,” he said.

  He turned his back and he walked away. There was nothing else to do about it. Grimes could have just as easily blown his brains out from behind.

  It didn’t matter.

  Bass just kept on walking.

  When he got to his horse he climbed up on it, said git and the horse got.

  Bass didn’t look back.

  Not once.

  Chapter 2 – A Coffin Full Of Memories

  One road will often lead to another, good or bad, right or wrong – and depending on how you set out there is just no telling where you will wind up, come the end of days.

  Two years slid on past and Bass Clayton did his best to just ride away from the memory of Silver Grimes. He left the bounty killing business behind him and he took up the trade of professional drinking. The drinking took a little working up to but Bass had never minded hard practice. It passed the time nicely and it almost doused out the memory that the dead woman had left behind, burned brand deep into the forever slate of his brain-hole. The memory never really went away but with time and a lot of whiskey he learned how to squint it nearly away.

  He still didn’t even know just what her name had been. She’d been a whore or a squaw or someone else’s wife – depending on who you talked to. Bass hadn’t ever bothered asking, except when he forgot that he was actually trying to forget.

  He figured a name would only make things worse.

  Knowing or not, worse was exactly what it got to.

  There were nights when he saw her face looming up in front of his eyes like a screaming moon and there were nights when the thunder sounded like the blast of a poorly-aimed shotgun and there were nights when he would dream of nothing but spoiled meat and bitter ashes.

  And those were the good nights.

  ***

  DIRECTLY AFTER THE shooting Bass had ridden straight on out, not even bothering to try and pick up his bounty pay. He rode that horse until its legs gave out. Then a put a single pistol shot into its skull.

  It died without a whinny.

  Bass stared at the brains and the blood bleeding out of the dead horse.

  He wondered briefly if the horse’s memories were somehow passing out along with the passing of that slow red river.r />
  He took a needle and thread from his saddlebags and he stitched his own plug hole up. He supposed he ought to take the time to dig Grimes bullet out of his belly but he just did not want to bother.

  He figured that there bullet could just sit in there and fester – or not.

  “If it kills me,” he said to the dead horse, who was not much good at listening. “Then I guess I’ll die walking.”

  Bass walked to the first town that he came to.

  The shot up sign that dangled from the farthest-reaching dead tree branch said that the town’s name was Rueful Regret – but Bass wasn’t all that certain about believing in signs.

  “Right now regret sounds just fine to me,” Bass croaked to the clouds – which didn’t have much more than his dead horse had to say in reply. Bass thought about maybe shooting one of the clouds to teach it a lesson but he did not figure that he could hit either cloud, sky or his own fool skull – given the sorry shape that he was in at this time.

  He must have made quite a sight, stumbling in out of the desert like he was doing – what with one boot walked clean through and the other dangling by just the shadow of a sole.

  His feet hurt.

  The blisters in what was left of his boots sure didn’t hurt any.

  The only thing worse might have been if he had been dragging a coffin in behind his own self.

  In a way he guessed that he was dragging a coffin.

  A coffin full of memories.

  He walked into the saloon, trying not to stumble.

  He pushed through the bat-flap swingers and he found himself a seat at the bar.

  “Whiskey,” he said to the bartender.

  “Are you sure you don’t want any water, mister?” the bartender, whose name was Willy Jake, asked – eyeing Bass’s parched lips and his sunburned hide. “A drink will probably just dry you out.”

  “Am I stuttering?” Bass asked. “I said whiskey, didn’t I?”

  “Excuse me,” Willy Jake apologized, lining up a glass and a bottle in front of Bass. “I must have misheard.”

  Bass filled the glass and he tipped it back, swallowing it down.

  His eyes glazed over and lit up.

  He skinned his lips back and he showed his teeth and he let out a small satisfied sigh of relief.

  Willy Jake smiled.

  If the stranger wanted to drink he had certainly come to the right place. There was nothing else left to do in Rueful Regret but to sit and drink and to forget until you were too drunk to remember just what it was you were trying to forget.

  Besides, Willy Jake knew a paying customer when he saw one.

  And he left it at that.

  ***

  THE TOWN OF RUEFUL Regret wasn’t all that much to speak of, drunk or sober. The name was nothing more than something that somebody had half-heartedly painted on the shot-up sign outside of town that was too damn faded away to read anymore. Some folks argued about what the town used to be called before that anonymous wandering Van Gogh had gone and painted the name “Rueful Regret” over whatever was there before – but most folks did not really give much more than a fiddler’s flying fuck over the matter – if they thought about it at all.

  The town had sprouted up in the wilderness like a lot of other towns before it. Somebody had staked a claim and laid out a cabin and the next thing you knew somebody else had moved on in and figured out a way to work themselves into the situation. It was just a matter of making yourself useful in some manner or another. A blacksmith could set up shop pretty nearly anywhere he cared to. A good ranch, a sawbones, a carpenter or a tinker – all were made welcome.

  That’s just how it was.

  Towns shot up across the West like pox shooting through a whorehouse. After the essential few self-starting pioneers took root the weeds set in and thickened. The folks too lazy to follow their own lead much further than the echo of their asshole’s finest toot. They milled about like cattle following after a few lone lead bulls. The barkeepers, the gamblers, the saloon girls – they were all nothing more than cattle looking for a place to light down and feed.

  That’s all a town really was when you came right down to it.

  A town was nothing more than a campfire – built out of timber and tar paper and a half of a peach can full of hope. Settlers would hunker down around each other like bawling cattle huddled in a lonesome cold midnight field. Maybe they’d huddle for body heat, maybe they’d huddle for protection – but most likely they would huddle for a little mutual confirmation that reminded themselves that no matter how big of a fool they had been in planting themselves out here in the middle of this godforsaken wilderness that it was good to know that there were other folks handy close to being nearly twice as much a fool as they had originally been.

  Life was funny, that way.

  * * *

  WILLY JAKE WAS A BARTENDER and he was pretty good at it as far as he reckoned. He kept the whiskey poured and the beer just as cold as it could get without ice. He kept the peace if he had to with a beating stick of dogwood root that the kept tucked behind the bar – directly next to the shotgun that he kept for the folks who were too damn stubborn to take that dogwood for a hint.

  He had seen an awful lot of folks and he had heard an awful lot of stories and he had learned to ignore the most of them but he had NEVER seen ANYONE drink for as long and straight and hard as Bass Clayton did.

  Yes sir – the man was a dedicated drunkard.

  Willy Jake liked that just fine.

  Bass Clayton’s single-minded dedication was an inspiration to Willy Jake’s other customers.

  Some tried to keep up with Bass – and that was good.

  Others thought to buy Bass drinks – and that was good too.

  Some just came to watch the whole entire catastrophe and to sit and to listen to the sound of whiskey swilling down – and that was good too – because sooner or later they’d get tired of just sitting and listening and they’d buy themselves a drink, too.

  Yes sir – misery sure loved company and there wasn’t a place more miserable nor company-ridden than Willy Jake’s bar.

  Plainly put, Bass Clayton was good for business. There was nothing better for good economic growth than to have a serious diehard drinking man like Bass Clayton taking up full-time residence in Willy Jake’s saloon. Even the whiskey-soaked drunkards who had always hung around the saloon needed some kind of role model and Bass Clayton certainly fit the bill.

  Bass had settled into Willy Jake’s saloon just as easy and as natural as water poured downhill. Bass set himself down upon the crankiest chair in the bar and he proceeded to grow himself the closest thing to roots on an ass bone that Willy Jake had ever seen.

  Bass Clayton was there the first thing every morning when Willy opened up.

  He had his dinner at one o’clock every afternoon – a meal of fried eggs and corn cakes.

  As far as Willy Jake knew those eggs and corn cakes were the only solid food that Bass put away through the whole long swallow of the day.

  There were a lot of kinds of drinking men on this old world.

  Willy Jake figured that he had seen them all.

  Some of them came at it all hard and serious – their gravestone eyes focused on nothing but the glass and the ever-emptying bottle. Tilting it up and slamming it down hard and regular.

  Others sort of played at it – drinking for shits and giggles, daring themselves and taunting themselves and making damn jackasses of themselves for no other reason than that they simply could not stand themselves any other way but drunk.

  And then there was Bass.

  Bass Clayton didn’t get up or fall down. He just sort of poured himself into a state of relaxation that was absolutely unimaginable to Willy Jack’s all too extensive range of deliberate inebriated experience. Bass would just sit there over a drink for nearly an hour, staring at the glass like it was talking to him.

  He’d sit there like he was seeing some kind of a story playing out in the oily mirror of
the whiskey.

  Then – when it seemed as if he had stared himself blind he grabbed at the shot glass and tipped it back, sliding the liquid intoxication down his throat. Then he would sigh a long and lonely gusted-out sigh that seemed to carry every single ounce of loneliness, grief and despair that could ever be imagined.

  Willy Jake had the feeling that no drink on earth would ever be strong enough to blot out whatever story that glass of whiskey was telling Bass Clayton – over and over and over again.

  And then Bass would give that emptied-out glass a little waggle and Willy Jack would dutifully refill it and the entire process would begin again.

  Bass paid his bill like clockwork, every night before heading back home to the shed behind the livery stable where he paid old Pritcher Targate a dollar a week for a place to hide himself from the moon and any other wandering eye that might be accidentally looking down.

  Some folks claimed that Bass Clayton sometimes spent time with the local whore, Sally Jezebel, but as far as Willy Jake knew that was nothing more than loose-lipped talk. Besides – there WASN’T all that many men in Rueful Regret who HADN’T spent some time or other with Sally Jezebel. In fact Willy Jake made himself a regular monthly habit out of spending at least four or five good quality minutes in Sally Jezebel’s tent – after which he would most likely head for the nearest horse trough to wash off the spoils of his purchase.

  Most likely.

  In fact, as far as Willy Jake was concerned Bass Clayton was an ideal customer. He kept to himself and he made very little trouble and he always paid his bills on time.

  Yes sir, the man made a fine financial fishing hole for the likes of Willy Jake.

  But if Willy Jake had bothered to ask he would have discovered that as far as Bass Clayton was concerned the town of Rueful Regret was nothing more than an ideal spot as any to pickle himself into a grey amnesiac funk. Nobody asked him too many fool questions and folks just generally allowed him to drink in peace – which was just fine with Willy Jake.

  Peace was awfully good for the drinking business.

  However – the peace ended right after Newt Gallagher rode Pritcher Targate’s prize pig straight into the bar room.