by Steve Vernon
Medicine Ass buried the Jesuit deep in the dirt of Toes-Up Rising many years before that first mule was ever buried there. Then – in a fit of pent-up and pissed-upon – Medicine Ass tried to burn down the adobe shanty.
Only adobe did not burn very well.
Medicine Ass burned up his last mule and his last blanket and then he sat down in the ashes to wait out what fate might have in store for him next.
Which was a very fancy of saying that he parked his not-so-sacred ass atop the burned mule and just sat there farting around until he petrified himself in the after-odor of his brown runny farts – which is sadly something of a habit with Karankawa holy men.
After a time his eyes sanded shut and his thoughts turned inwards and he wondered to himself just how a man’s farts could smell so very sweet to his own nose and so very god-awful awful to anyone else’s nostrils which was right about the time that crazy one-armed white man had crawled out of the desert dragging a coffin behind himself.
Chapter 8 – The Difference Between On and In
It was the biggest and ugliest-looking hearse that Bass had ever seen – painted a dirty shade of black and built from a combination of dried-out wood, sheet canvas and buffalo bones.
“Is that where you live?” he asked.
“It is a lot more comfortable than you might think,” Grimes explained.
“It looks a little too much like the wrong side of tomorrow,” Bass said. “I would rather sleep under a bar stool and get pissed upon by the saloon cat than bunk down in the back of a coffin hauler like this.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Grimes pointed out. “I won the bone wagon in a poker game with an out-of-work undertaker.”
“Did you cheat?”
“It is only cheating if they catch you at it.”
“So where did the bones come from?”
“The undertaker I won it from told me that it was once owned by a couple of artistically inclined buffalo hunters. They had traded it to him for a horse burial. I guess that they were awfully fond of that there horse.”
Bass looked the hearse over.
The rig had definitely seen better days.
The paint had run and faded and there were more than just a few knotholes that looked suspiciously like they had been bored out by a few badly-aimed bullets.
“What in the hell were you thinking about?” he asked. “Betting on winning a slightly-used hearse?”
Grimes just shrugged.
“It was a game,” he said. “And I hated to break it up when he was having so much fun at winning so badly.”
“Yes, but a hearse?”
“It’s comfortable.”
“So what else were you doing between winning at cards and looking for me?” Bass asked.
“I already told you that I wasn’t looking for you.”
“So you say.”
Grimes let it lay right where it had fallen – but Bass couldn’t let it be.
“Admit it,” Bass prodded. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
“Right about what?”
“Right that you were looking for me,” Bass said. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
Grimes gave up.
“All right,” Grimes said. “So the truth was it took me two whole years to learn how to shoot left-handed with any sort of style or grace. Why in the hell couldn’t you have blasted me in the other arm?”
“I wasn’t exactly aiming at the time.”
“Maybe that was your problem,” Grimes suggested. “Piss poor aim.”
Bass shook his head stubbornly.
“Your lost arm sure isn’t my problem,” Bass said. “You are the one who is missing it – not me.”
Grimes shrugged and shifted from one foot to another.
“Have you got to piss again?” Bass asked sarcastically. “Or do you just have a rock in your boot?”
“You say that you don’t have a problem,” Grimes said. “Then I suppose you have been squatting on that bar stool, pickling your liver while you contemplate your next move.”
“What can I tell you?” Bass asked. “I’m a slow study.”
Bass took a peek inside the hearse.
He saw a long box, painted green, with tarnished green handles and a crucifix carved between each of the handles.
“Damn,” Bass swore.
“What are you damning about?” Grimes asked.
“There’s a coffin in there,” Bass said. “Have you been driving all this time carrying a dead body?”
“The coffin is empty,” Grimes said. “It came with the hearse. I just keep my gear in it.”
Bass looked unconvinced.
“Tell me you don’t sleep in that pine box.”
Grimes spat noisily.
“Of course I don’t,” he said. “That’d be inhuman.”
“Are you fucking with me?” Bass asked.
“Probably.”
Bass kept on staring.
“You still haven’t answered my question.”
“What kind of a fool would sleep in a coffin?” Grimes asked.
Bass looked a little bit more relieved.
“I keep my gear in it,” Grimes repeated. “Come the night time I sleep on top of the coffin lid. It’s great support for my aching back.”
“On it, in it – is there REALLY that much of a difference?” Bass asked.
“There’s a world of difference between choosing to lie on a coffin lid and HAVING to lie inside one,” Grimes said.
“You’ve got a point,” Bass admitted. “But that still doesn’t answer why you came looking for me?”
“Who said I was looking for YOU?” Grimes asked.
Bass kept on staring.
Grimes would not relent.
“You aren’t going to tell me, are you?” Bass asked.
Grimes just stared back at the man and did not say a single thing.
Chapter 9 – Some Kind of Soft Yellow Rope
Bass was a little nervous walking up to Sally Jezebel’s window-ten like this in broad daylight when people were still wide awake and watching.
Still and all he was pleased to notice that Sally Jezebel’s flagpole bloomers were indeed flying at half-mast – just as she had promised.
“It’s a cozy little spot,” Bass said, trying his best to be nice to the lady who was providing him with so much free whiskey.
Sally just shrugged.
“It isn’t all that much as far as independent living goes,” Sally said. “But I figure that it is a whole lot better than any of the alternatives you might actually care to mention.”
“That’s an awful lot of wedding dresses you’ve got sewn up into the walls of this tent,” Bass said. “Did you ever give any thought towards opening up your very own millinery shop?”
Sally just grinned.
“Some of them wedding dresses are mine,” she admitted. “A half dozen of them – but some of them dresses were given to me by women who caught their would-be grooms in bed with me.”
“What about them rings?” Bass asked.
Sally was wearing a necklace of six golden wedding rings, tied together with a twist of bright copper wire and strands of her own carefully braided hair.
“They were given to me,” she told Bass, showing him a plain golden ring. “This was the first one.”
“Special, is it?”
She looked away hastily.
“Naw,” she said. “It’s just a ring. A cheap one at that. It turned my finger green every time that I wore it.”
Bass looked at her carefully.
“Bullshit,” he decided.
“It did to,” she protested. “Turned it green every time.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Bass said. “That ring is wrapped up in a special kind of special. Even a boob like me can see that same kind of special burning in your eyes like a far off campfire, no matter how hard you try and tell me that it ain’t so.”
He let her sit and simmer for awhile.
Finally she spoke, la
ying out her words soft and careful.
“It WAS special,” she said. “When he gave me that ring my heart just up and fluttered like a duck in a mud puddle.”
She looked away.
Bass let her look for just as long as she needed to.
Some feelings were meant to be savored.
Some moments should never be rushed.
Finally she shook her head and cleared her heart with a rueful chuckle.
“They all brought them for me out of their own volition,” she said. “They offered them up to me like they figured a little gold ring was going to change what I really am.”
“They ought to know better,” Bass said. “You’re just a whore, is all. There’s nothing wrong with being one. You just got to know where you sitting in this life which we all got to live in.”
“I ain’t JUST anything,” Sally argued. “There’s no JUST in me what so ever. Not one little bit. What I am is my own woman – and I’d like to keep it that way, thank you very much.”
“I hear you talking, Sally,” Bass said. “And I ain’t arguing one little bit.”
Only she wasn’t done talking.
“Do you see each one of these here wedding rings?” she asked.
Bass couldn’t help but see them – the way that she waved them in his face.
“If you string them all together like this and they look a hell of a lot like a set of fancy leg irons, now don’t they?” Sally asked.
Bass had to admit she was right.
“Each one of them fellows knelt down before me and took aim at my heart like they were foing to bag me like a prize elk,” she said. “I took the ring and the wedding dress and then I went back to my whoring ways, every time.”
“You like the whoring that much, Sally?” Bass asked.
“Like doesn’t come into it,” Sally said. “I need the whoring, is all. It’s a little like a picture frame hung on an empty wall. It lets me know just where I am at.”
“Come again?”
“A fellow might buy you when you’re a whore, but it’s nothing more than a temporary kind of rent. A wedding ring – now that’s a whoring job forever – the way that I see it. Forever and amen with damn little payoff at the end of the road.”
“Amen,” Bass echoed.
“Come right down to it, a body doesn’t need anybody else to hold itself on up,” Sally said. “Two good legs and one smooth back, that’s all I’ll ever need.”
Up until recently Bass might have actually agreed with her. However, lately he wasn’t all that sure of what he needed to call himself whatever he chose to call himself.
“What about love?” he asked. “I hear tell there are some folks who put some stock in that particular notion.”
Sally just laughed.
“Love is good enough for greasing the chute but so is a good cuddle and a nuzzle or even two honest bits when it comes down to it. Love is nothing special, no matter what they tell you. People feel it all the time – love – kind of like the rain coming down.”
She smiled and shook her head sadly.
“Tears and water, wind and rain,” she finished up. “It all washes away soon enough.”
Bass stared at her sitting there with the moonlight and the lantern glow glinting softly through the stained glass and the whiskey. He thought he saw something else in her eyes.
Was she laughing at him?
Even if she was it didn’t really matter.
Talking to this woman refreshed Bass in a way that no bottle of whiskey ever did.
“Speaking of which,” Bass said.
He reached for the bottle.
He shook it.
“The first bottle is empty,” he said.
“So it is.”
“We ought to uncork that second bottle.”
“Are you afraid that somebody is going to steal it on you if you don’t drink it down fast enough?”
“Well, what else is there for us?” he asked.
Sally just looked at him.
Bass looked back at Sally.
Finally she spoke.
“If I hadn’t already broken my chamber pot over Newt Gallagher’s head you’d most likely be wearing it on your own,” she said.
“What did I do?”
“It’s what you didn’t do,” she said. “You have never tried to poke me – not even once. Don’t you like girls?”
“I like girls just fine,” Bass said.
“Don’t you like me?”
“I don’t know.”
She grabbed for the empty bottle but Bass was a little faster.
“I can hit you with the full one,” she warned, reaching for the other bottle.
“That would be an awful waste,” Bass pointed out.
“The whiskey is mine to waste,” Sally said. “It washes away just as fast as tears and water.”
Bass was getting exasperated at Sally’s stubbornness.
“Will you let me talk?” he asked.
“Talking is easy,” Sally said. “Just let the words fall out of your mouth. I’ll listen, for now.”
“I like you just fine, Sally,” Bass said. “I’ve never liked a whore so much before now – anymore than I might like a particular rope or hat.”
“Nice to feel special,” she said.
“I guess you are special at that,” he said. “You are special, because I don’t know any other word for it. I just like being with you, the same way that I like breathing. You make me feel comfortable. You calm me in a way that a drink or the devil never did. I sleep better, lying next to you – even when you stink of your after-business.”
“You say the sweetest things,” Sally said.
“I have my moments,” Bass admitted.
She sat there, staring at him like he was some new species of animal.
“Let’s just wait a while before opening the second bottle,” she said, unfastening her blouse. “We might want to work up a bit more of a thirst, if you are interested.”
He reached up and tangled his hand in her long soft hair.
He always did love to feel her hair – even if he didn’t poke her. He usually liked to tangle his fingers into it just before he went to sleep – like it was some sort of a soft yellow rope that he could hang onto while he slipped away.
Bass didn’t really know it but that tangling was damned near the last pleasant thing he would do in this lifetime.
“Is that a professional interest?” he asked.
“No sir,” Sally said. “This is just because I want to.”
After they had done it – after the moaning and the sweating and the sighs – after the pink snake had wormed down and popped from her cork hole and after the always-embarrassing after-fuck pussy farts Bass lay back down and fell asleep.
He snored softly, not feeling a thing as she tied him hand and foot and waited for Silver Grimes to come and get exactly what he had paid her for.
Sally Jezebel was all for business – every time.
Chapter 10 – The rut of memory, the dance of regret
Pritcher Targate sat in the darkness of the pig stall, cradling his chicken as he picked a small greasy bit of pig gristle and a single half-chewed shotgun pellet out from a gap between his pine-yellow teeth.
“I loved that pig,” Targate mournfully told the chicken. “I would have married it last summer if that damned traveling preacher had only been a little bit drunker at the time.”
The bird nuzzled his arm, trying to stir up a little spontaneous affection.
Out in the street the townsfolk were leaning against the walls of their homes and the tavern and their places of work. Their bellies were crammed full of slow cooked pork and for a brief moment in time life was fat and easy.
Later on they would moan with the drizzle runs and they would gallop for a comfortable spot in the privy but for now there just wasn’t any sort of room for regrets.
Pritcher Targate, on the other hand, felt like rat shit.
He leaned against the walls of memory
and despair with bitter tears streaming down his grease-stained moustache like a rain of slow wet snails.
The hen clucked hopefully.
Targate looked down at the capon in his arms. He had raised the bird since it was nothing more than a cuddle of feathers in his hand. He had always aimed to eat the bird one day but something always pulled him up short whenever he got anywhere handy to the stewing pot.
“Well bird,” he said. “What are we going to do now?”
He had never bothered naming the bird. That entire concept seemed just a little bit too personal for a chicken who might eventually wind up blanketed in sweet dumplings.
“I’m sorry that the pig was murdered,” he apologized to the chicken.
He could still taste the warm afterglow of barbecued pork on his breath. The meat had tasted so damn good and he had felt so damn bad while he was eating that meat that he did not know just exactly how he felt about the whole situation. It was a little like the time when he had done the chicken that way and he had felt so damn guilty and ashamed about it afterward but it had felt so damn good that he kept on feeling ashamed right up until the moment that he did it all over again.
“Why do you think that is?” he asked the bird. “Why is it we are so damned good at screwing up the good things in our life any damn chance we get?”
The bird stared at him impassively.
If there were any signs of an answer in those beady carnelian eyes, Targate sure could not see it.
“Fuck it,” Targate said profoundly.
He unbuttoned his coveralls.
He missed his pig and right now he figured the only thing handy was going to have to do.
“Bird,” he said. “Prepare to be screwed.”
Only it just isn’t all that easy of a trick to screw a chicken.
Targate imagined that he would slide the chicken over his nubbin-stick just as easily as a man might draw a tight boot up over his foot. Only the chicken would not cooperate, no matter how sweetly Targate wooed it.
“Goddamn you bird,” Targate love-talked. “Hold the fuck still, would you?”
The chicken twisted around and hooked its beak into the open slit of Targate’s hog-eye. A tear of blood and unmistakable ooze welled up and slid down the knob end of Targate’s cock.
