Rueful Regret

by Steve Vernon

  Chapter 3 – Pig Riding Triple Damn

  “Giddy up mud bucket,” Newt hollered, crashing through the swinging bat wing doors while remaining glued to the back of Pritcher Targate’s prize sow.

  Newt was never exactly the sharpest tool on any given day of the week but this was definitely one of the stupidest tricks that he had ever tried. Pigs just don’t like to be ridden and Pritcher Targate’s sow was renowned for both her spectacular size and her utter lack of a sense of humor.

  Now, riding a sow wasn’t the stupidest thing that Newt Gallagher had ever done but it sure ranked up there in the all-time dick-sticking-in-a-hive-full-of-peeved-off-bee folly. Mind you, climbing into Sally Jezebel’s bunk without at least TRYING to poke her awake beforehand was a pretty foolish thing to do besides that.

  Sally Jezebel was one of the town’s most successful whores.

  In fact, she was the only one in town.

  Sally lived in a wagon that she had rigged out the back way with a canopy tent stitched from the remains of a baker’s dozen bridal gowns. Sally had sewed the tent up all by herself and she had windowed it with three tall stained glass windows staked into the dirt.

  The gowns were a trade that Sally had made with a travelling salesman who had been a little short on where-with-all – but long on bawdy desire.

  No one knows exactly where the stained glass windows had come from. Some folks claim that a holy man of some unspecified denomination had tried to build himself a chapel directly where Sally had pitched her tent. It was believed that he had fallen into the ways of sinning and had left the three tall stained glass windows behind as a landmark to mark the spot where he had let it all go.

  Mind you – some folks believe a slightly different story.

  Some folks claim that holy man had raise up his church and once the almighty God got himself one clear look at Sally he had gone Sodom and Gomorrah on that church-to-be – for fear of Sally tainting the angels with her evil ways.

  No one knows for certain.

  There is a flag made out of a pair of slightly soiled blood red bloomers flapping in the dirty wind that blows from the swampy part of the river, letting folks know that Sally was open for business.

  Mind you, as far as Willy Jake knew, those blood red bloomers were ALWAYS flying high and proud.

  Now, given time and inclination, you could take this whole chain of events and regress it link by link back to when Newt Gallagher’s daddy first thought about making wet noises with his youngest Aunt Emily but in point of truth the very first domino in question began to topple when Sally Jezebel dumped the chamber pot onto Newt Gallagher’s snoring head.

  The fanny bucket was chock full at the time of the dumping – both liquid and not.

  The honest-to-chamber-ot was, Newt Gallagher was pretty well the dumbest man in these here parts but Sally Jezebel wasn’t about to throw ANY man out of bed for being dumb or eating crackers between the sheet. Two feet and a heart beat and something worth hanging onto in the middle fork were pretty well all of the prerequisites that Sally needed for a good time in the hay.

  It was the snoring that did it.

  “Goddamn it,” Newt swore. “There’s pee in this pot.”

  “There generally is pee in a chamber pot,” Sally said. “It being just a little too small to keep an actual-sized chamber in.”

  “Well why did you pour it on me for?” Newt asked.

  “You were snoring.”

  “Damn it, lots of men snore.”

  “Not while they’re in the middle of diddling me,” Sally Jezebel said.

  “Damn it,” Newt replied. “I wasn’t diddling you.”

  Sally Jezebel cracked Newt’s skull with the side of the chamber pot – which was likewise cracked.

  “That’s the point,” she said. “You were supposed to be diddling me.”

  “Damn it,” Newt complained. “I was trying to sleep. Why else do you think that I crawled into bed beside you?”

  “Most men who crawl into bed with me are aiming to diddle,” Sally Jezebel pointed out. “Why should you figure on being any different?”

  Now the truth of the matter was most nearly every man in the town of Rueful Regret had diddled Sally Jezebel or at the very least had aimed to but had been too drunk or too stupid or too old to hit the mark. Sally wasn’t exactly what you would call discerning in her tastes in men so long as their pockets ran long and deep and jingly – and sometimes even when they didn’t.

  “Men come in all shapes and sizes and colors,” Sally once philosophized. “And sooner or later most of them are bound to come in me.”

  Sally Jezebel was an open-minded floozy but she took Newt’s wanton snoring straight to her well-diddled heart. It was a bit of a blow to her pride, you understand, not to have him ripping and tearing at whatever undergarment she wasn’t wearing at the time.

  “Get out of here you cold hearted bastard,” Sally said, cocking what was left of that chamber pot for one more swing. “I am cheap enough to want to hang onto this here chamber pot, cracked or not, but if you push me to it I will break it over your head bone and feed you the pieces one shard at a time.”

  Then she flung the chamber pot, forgetting what she had just said about her being so cheap. Newt took three fast steps backward, which was a damn shame given that the middle stained glass window was only two steps behind him. He lost his balance, flailed back wildly and crashed ass-over-chamber-pot straight into the street.

  He made one hell of a wonderful spectacle, caterwauling towards the street in a rain of blue and red and yellow window glass, blood and pee drops and broken shit-stained thunder pot.

  Newt hugged the dirt just as hard as he could.

  He kept his head buried down until the next splash of flying china crashed about three fingers from his forehead. The projectile looked like it had once been a water pitcher but the fact was Newt only caught a brief glimpse of it before it shattered upon the ground and devolved into nothing more than a sharded scatter of crockery.

  While Sally was winding up and taking aim with her bedside basin Newt jumped like he had fallen face first into a nest full of upset scorpions. He ran in the absolute straightest direction possible and launched himself over the hog yard fence.

  That suited Sally just fine.

  “You stay there in that hog yard and see if you can find yourself some kin-folk,” Sally hollered lustily. “You’re paying for this window.”

  In the first place, Newt Gallagher did not have the necessary financial where-with-all to pay for Sally’s pane because, in the second place, he was too damn busy trying to hang onto the back of Pritcher Targate’s prize razorback sow – which he had landed upon after vaulting blindly over the hog yard fence.

  Newt was always just a little too exuberant in his athletic attempts and this ill-planned escape was no exception.

  Pritcher Targate had been raising this sow since it was knee-high to a silk purse, feeding it sour apples and leftover liquor mash and all of the chestnuts that he could find. In return the sow gave Pritcher a rake of good-sized piglets every year and all of the undying love and attention that she could offer.

  Old Pritcher would sneak out to the hog pen on moonless nights and blandish a little more than mere affection upon the rump of said sown, figuring he was coming out ahead on all of that money he saved by not dickering around with Sally Jezebel.

  Besides – there was just something undeniably pleasurable about the feeling of hard grunting pig hide and bristles rubbing soft against his scrotum that purely ecstasied Pritcher Targate beyond all sense of belief.

  Given that bit of knowledge you would figure that the sow would not kick all that much over Newt Gallagher’s attempt at mounting her, only Newt smelled a whole lot worse than Pritcher Targate – even before Sally Jezebel got done anointing him with her chamber pot.

  Old sows are way worse than mean on account of them having to be so damn tough when it comes to defending their piglets from boars that get a taste for meat bo
rn way too soon. The sow threw Newt into the dirt and banged him with the side of her head.

  Newt spit out a couple of bristles and clambered over the railing.

  Then Newt Gallagher did something stupid – or at the very least something more stupid than Newt’s usually brand of stupidity.

  Newt found a pair of silver-plated spurs that belonged to the fellow by the name of Mike Tulligan who happening to be wearing them spurs on his boots. Now, I’m not quite sure how he managed to do it – but he managed to remove Mike Tulligan’s spurs without waking Mike up – on account of the three pints of hard liquor Mike had drunk earlier that evening.

  Newt strapped the spurs on and came back to the sow for another try.

  “This’ll show her,” Newt said.

  You see, Newt had the mistaken notion that proving his manhood to Sally Jezebel would somehow alter her feelings about him mistakenly snoozing in Sally’s bedroll and subsequently breaking her stained glass window – for which he did not have the money to pay for.

  Unbeknownst to a lot of townsfolk there was a strong and stubborn streak of Quixote-stupidity running deep in the yellowed-out veins of Newt Gallagher.

  Newt jumped back into the stall and landed atop of that sow with the alacritous straddling technique of a skinny-shanked fence post outrider trying to mount himself between the legs of a fat grass widow. Newt landed astride of the sow’s back and instinctively squeezed his thighs for purchase – which was too bad being as how he was wearing himself a set of stolen silver-plated spurs.

  Pritcher Targate’s sow squealed and crashed through the fence rails of the hog pen and went tearing down the center of the street, aimed roughly in the direction of Willy Jake’s saloon. Maybe she figured a cold drink might be a nice way to warm up to Newt Gallagher’s unexpected display of spurious foreplay.

  Panic-stricken, Newt caught onto the sow’s ears, further digging his stolen silver-plated spurs into the sow’s ample back bacon. He had never seen the ground move by so goddamn fast. A bit of grit blew into his widened eye or maybe it was a chunk of stained glass or possibly even a molecule of second-thought-thinking – but either way he commenced to yodel in blind pain until the two of them, man and sow, crashed straight through Willy Jake’s swinging bat wing doors.

  The bat wings fell to the dirt and Newt Gallagher and his trusty pig steed crashed into Bass Clayton’s favorite bar table and spilled Bass’s fourth drink of the evening.

  “Goddamn it,” Bass swore, leaping from the path of the oncoming sow.

  Now being as he was leaping away from a run amok pig he didn’t particularly give all of that much thought as to exactly where he was leaping - meaning that Bass sprawled atop of Willy Jake’s bar, spilling three other drinks.

  Now ordinarily this drink-spilling might have started a ruckus all by its own self, but most folks were either too busy giggling or too busy trying to get out of the path of Pritcher Targate’s pissed-off pig.

  The pig crashed against the bar, nearly fracturing Bass’s badly dangled right leg – which she bit.

  Then – having nothing better to vent her considerable wrath upon – the book took a bite out of Bass’s other leg.

  “Damn you pork chop!” Bass swore, simultaneously reaching down over the bar and catching hold of Willy Jake’s hidden shotgun – which wasn’t hidden all that well when you REALLY came to think about it – while attempting to yank his leg free from a snout full of gnarly pig teeth.

  That old sow was built stubborn.

  She just would not let go of Bass’s leg no matter how hard he yanked.

  Bass adapted quickly.

  He rolled across the bar, dropped to the dirt floor beside the pig jamming the purloined shotgun hard against the side of the pig and letting fire with both barrels – blasting Targate’s sow into the land of back bacon and chitlins – which ended the pig riding.

  Bass tried to use the shotgun’s barrel to pry his leg from out of the pig’s mouth. Newt rose up with a pistol in his hand – that he had grabbed from a drunkard’s gaping pocket, having never owned a pistol, pig or spurs in his entire life – determined to defend himself from Bass’s imagined threat.

  “God damn you to hell, you Jezebel,” Newt swore, still thinking of Sally’s thunder pot.

  Bass didn’t have time to do much more than stare.

  He saw the pistol.

  He saw the snouts of the unfired bullets poked out like a sextet of little blunt-nosed hard-ons.

  The hammer clicked back.

  Newt’s head exploded.

  An eyeball that might have been Newt’s left or his right, rolled to the floor and landed directly in front of Bass’s pig-stained boot.

  “An eye of Newt and a bat wing door,” someone said from just outside of Bass’s eye-shot. “It seems that we’ve got ourselves the making of a mighty fine spell!”

  Bass looked up to see just who had fired the shot.

  A one-armed man stood in the broken down bat-winged doorway of Willy Jake’s bar, holding a smoking hawg leg in his one good hand.

  Damn.

  The one-armed man was Silver Grimes – the man who Bass had last seen sitting in that bed in that cabin beside that shotgunned whore – looking more than a little silvered around the edges since Bass had last set eyes upon the man.

  “Shooting sows instead of women,” Grimes said. “You have come down in the world, haven’t you Bass?”

  Bass just stared blindly.

  Damn.

  He didn’t know what to say.

  He figured that Grimes had come to kill him and he wondered just how long it would take to die.

  He wondered if he would even care.

  Grimes tossed the shotgun onto Bass’s table.

  “You dropped your shotgun,” Grimes said to Bass, who still did not know what to say.

  Bass stared at the shotgun for a full half a moment before finally recognizing the gun as his own.

  Damn.

  It was the very same double barreled ten gauge Greener shotgun that he had unsuccessfully attempted to use on Grimes two years ago.

  “Her name was Helen,” Grimes went on. “You ought to remember that.”

  “The pig was named Helen?” Grimes weakly answered, still trying to put the pieces all back together in his mind.

  Grimes snorted at the man’s answer in obvious disgust.

  “We’ll talk when you sober up some,” Grimes said.

  And then Silver Grimes turned and left the saloon so damned abruptly that Bass had to wonder if he hadn’t gone and dreamed the whole thing up halfway through some half-forgotten whiskey bottle.

  Chapter 4 – A Breath Taking View and Quiet Neighbors

  Bass Clayton did not care much for jailhouses.

  They were generally built way too damned tight and confining, fencing off all hope of possibility in a way that only the barbed wire and slide rule mentality of the human civilized brain could conceive of.

  He hated them.

  The locks on the doors spoke of noose knots and shackles and the wall-to-wall iron bars seemed to slice up a man’s vision and just get in the way of EVERYTHING that ought to be important in this here life.

  He sure hoped that he was just visiting this jailhouse for a very temporary stay.

  “Don’t we even get to see a judge?” Bass Clayton asked the sheriff.

  “Why?” Silver Grimes asked. “You figure the situation is going to improve judiciously?”

  Sheriff Joe Partridge stared flatly at the two men in his jail.

  The sheriff was a stout little pudding of a man with a mouth that had the appearance of having recently tasted curdled milk. He used to grin once in a while just for practice but as of late he had fallen out of the habit. There just wasn’t all that much to grin about, living in a jailhouse like he did.

  Not many people knew it but those locks and bars worked in both directions.

  “Well that is about as pretty a though as I have ever heard,” Joe Partridge said. “Too bad fairy ta
les never come true.”

  “Well, we’ve got a right, don’t we?” Bass Clayton went on.

  Mind you, Joe Partridge didn’t always have to live in a jailhouse. He used to spend his time with a sweet little lady named Magdelena Montressor who got tired of his farting ways and kicked him out. Joe Partridge stole Magdelena’s favorite pillowcase before he left her residence and he kept it upon his own pillow. He hadn’t washed that particular pillowcase since he had first stolen it but he still believed that he could smell the memory of Magdelena in those greying mildewed cotton fibers.

  In the six years that Joe Partridge had served the town of Rueful Regret as a sheriff he had never had to pronounce sentence before over the murder of a bar-crashing sow – but he guessed that there was a first time for everything.

  “Yep,” Joe Partridge said. “You have got a right and a left, which is maybe twice as much as your buddy Silver Grimes over here can say. Mind you though, you still don’t get to see anyone if I say that you are guilty.”

  “I think I ought to see a judge,” Bass maintained.

  “The judge is indisposed.”

  “He’s in where?” Bass asked.

  “He’s home drunk and I am not waking him up for no sorry-assed unmeditated case of sudden sow-icide.”

  Grimes snickered.

  As far as Bass could tell the man was enjoying himself – which didn’t make much sense at all.

  Jail time – as far as Bass was concerned – was serious business.

  “You seem to be in good spirits,” Bass said.

  “I have my moments,” Bass replied.

  “And I have mine,” the sheriff said. “I’m not charging either of you for murder but I am charging you both for burial expenses.”

  “For the pig?”

  “For Newt. You two shot him. You two pay to get him buried. Or else the two of you can bury him yourself up on Toes-up Rising. I figure that’s a fair deal.”

  “But I didn’t shoot him,” Bass protested.

  “You shot the pig,” the sheriff said. “That’s an instigating circumstance in my book – which makes you an accessory to the act. It is a clear-cut case of habeas corpus hambone. That’s Latin for you two got to pay to get Newt Gallagher buried on account of the county is stone cold broke at this particular moment in time. Either that or the two of you can dig a grave.”