The Pistoleer (10 page)

Somebody raised his head up over the windowsill and somebody else poked his around the edge of the door, and they both fired wild shots in our direction. Wes fired back and the window shattered and somebody inside yelled, “Son of a
bitch!
” Those drunk fools finally thought to blow out the lamps and have darkness on their side—but by the time they did that and all of them started shooting at us, Wes was already back to the horses and mounting up. We got out of there at a gallop, with bullets buzzing by us like hornets.

After we’d put some distance between us and Boles and slowed the horses to a trot, he apologized for not getting me back my old Walker. Hell, I said, never mind
that.
He told me Bradley had been pretending to be hurt worse than he was, and had pulled a derringer and tried to shoot him when he got close up. That’s a lot more like the truth than what Davis and them said. Listen, I knew Wes. He had to have a damn good reason to do like I saw and shoot Bradley one more time. Right point-blank in the head.

T
hat fracas pretty well put an end to the Reverend Hardin’s plans to have Wes living with him at home in Mount Calm. In the next few days the whole region would be crawling with Yankee troops and vigilante gangs hunting for Wes Hardin. I was right there when Wes told his daddy what happened at Towash, and the Reverend looked to age ten years as he listened. An hour later Wes lit out for Brenham, heading for the farm of some Hardin kin.

O
nce Momma had taught me all she could, she finally said could take care of a customer all on my own, and he was the next one to walk through the door. I later found out he wasn’t but a couple of years older than me. He was devilish good-looking—and just as bold as you please with those blue eyes. Momma certainly wouldn’t have let me tend to him if she’d been in front when he came in, but she was out in back, dealing with the dry goods man.

I’d never done an alteration like the one he wanted, never even heard of such a thing. I told him maybe I ought to go get Momma, but he just smiled real warm and said he knew I could do it and would be honored if I would. He took off the vest and spread it on the table, then placed his pistol on it to show me exactly what he had in mind. He explained how drawing a pistol out of a hip holster required three different movements—down and up and out. But how if he had holsters in his vest he’d only need to make two—in and out. He demonstrated the movements on me with his two pointing fingers, and I flinched each time like he was throwing snakes at me. But I couldn’t help smiling back.

I had to use a couple of large patches of softened leather and do some careful cutting and lots of close stitching with the strongest thread I had. Then I had to cover over part of the outside of the vest so the heavy thread wouldn’t show.

I was nearly done when Momma came back inside and saw what I was doing. She didn’t say a word. She just nodded when he said, “Good day to you, ma’am,” and she sat and watched me finish up.

The whole thing didn’t take me even an hour. He put it on and tried it out right there. Momma and I jumped at the way those big pistols seemed to pop out into his hands. He was so pleased with it he paid me an extra dollar more than what we’d agreed on. And then, as he was leaving, he gave me a big bold wink—right there in front of Momma! I felt my face catch fire and thought sure I’d catch something even hotter from Momma for my shameless blushing. I didn’t care. I’d never before felt anything like what I felt run through me when he gave me that wicked wink.

Momma didn’t light into me, though. She just sat there staring at the door for a minute after he’d gone. Finally, she said, “Did you see how happy you made that boy?” She didn’t ask in a way that wanted an answer. “Snatching out those things as quick as the devil can spit. Right under our own roof. He can’t wait to put them to use.” She looked at me all accusing, but I didn’t feel like I’d done anything to be accused of.

“The world’s full of handsome, well-mannered evils with pretty eyes, girl, “ she said to me. “You best start keeping that in mind.”

The truth is, you couldn’t have got that thought out of my mind with dynamite. But it didn’t much matter, since I never again even came close to meeting anybody in the way of dangerous men. Two years later I married a storekeeper named Walter. He said his prayers every night before getting into bed with me, as if he was embarking on a perilous mission. I do believe his seed was as timid as he was, and that’s why I never conceived. I don’t even blush to say it anymore. His notion of a high time was to join in the singing at tent meetings. The biggest excitement of his life was when he sold a full wagonload of goods to a party of army engineers that passed through one day. If the smallpox hadn’t taken him at the age of thirty-nine, he likely would have bored himself to death and never even known what it was he died of.

I never bothered to remarry, but for a long time I didn’t stop yearning for an excitement to match what I felt in that one hour I spent making those holsters and feeling his eyes on me the whole time. I can’t count the nights I laid awake and wished some man would step up to me and say or do a thing to make my heart jump the way it did when he gave me that wink. Then I got old and quit my foolish wishing.

But I never did feel guilty about those holsters, not even years later when I come to find out who he was. I felt just the opposite. If I hadn’t made them, he’d of found somebody else to do it. But deep in my heart I just know nobody else could have made them as good.

E
ddie Joe was cool and fancy. Wore ruby cuff links and a fat pearl stickpin. He was handsome as sin and twice as mean when the mood was on him, but I did so good with him I didn’t really mind the meanness much. It was him taught me the Murphy game—which some called the badger—and on a good night we made more money with it than I had ever made in a month of flatbacking on my own. We worked the Murphy all over North Texas till we had it down just right, then headed for Houston, where there was plenty of railroad money just waiting for us.

But Eddie Joe was greedy was his problem. He couldn’t wait till we got to Houston before working the Murphy again. He was twitchy to do it, and we no sooner checked into a hotel in Kosse, this little town in Limestone where we stopped for the night, than he went out to scout for a galoot. Shortly after dark he came back and said he’d found one. Said he was barely more than a kid and looked like a cleaned-up cowboy. Eddie Joe watched him playing cards in the barroom off the hotel lobby and win hand after hand, mostly by blind luck, but the other players all quit on him before his crazy luck cleaned them out. Eddie Joe was dead sure the kid hadn’t paid him any mind and wouldn’t recognize him later. He said he was still down in the barroom and drinking by himself, looking lonely and plumb ripe for the picking.

We quick went over the plan, then he went out the window and I went down to the bar. Sure enough, he was still drinking at the counter, but he wasn’t by himself anymore. Some overpainted buck-toothed gal who likely had some arrangement with the bartender was trying to work up his interest. But it was me he gave the eye. I sat at a table and ordered a seltzer, and in less than a minute shooed away a drummer who smelled like he’d been drowned in rosewater and a red-faced young farmer in a suit too small for him. In between, I gave the kid at the bar The Look—just once, and real quick, but it was enough. He wasn’t shy. When he came over and asked if he might sit with me, I figured the thing was on rails.

He introduced himself as Jeb Bishop and said he was on his way to Austin to help his daddy with his hardware store. He was truly handsome up-close—in a taller and leaner and slower-burning way than Eddie Joe.

“Jenny Borgnine,” I said, extending a cautious hand and putting on a face of being skittish but under distress too. Sure enough, his blue eyes darkened with concern under the brim of his black hat. He was proud to make my acquaintance—but say now, miss, was something the matter? I quick dabbed at my eye with my hankie, took a deep breath, and started in with my sad tale.

I told him all about having run off from home in Houston with my fella Robert. My poppa, who couldn’t abide him, had forbid me to see him anymore, so we’d run off to Kosse because Robert said he had friends here who could give him work in their farm implements industry. But here it was nearly two weeks later and he still didn’t have work and we were still living in this hotel and practically penniless and he’d taken to leaving me all alone for most of every day. And then, when he’d finally return in the evenings, he’d get terribly cross with me if I so much as asked him where he’d been.

I kept averting the boy’s eyes to convey the shame I was feeling in my predicament. He pulled his chair over beside mine and put his hand on my shoulder in a brotherly fashion. “It’s some men could use a good lesson,” he said sympathetically, “in the proper way to treat a fine lady.”

I told him how in the last two evenings Robert had come back later than ever before—and with the smell of women’s perfume on his clothes! And he’d gone straight to bed as though I wasn’t even in the room. Then early this morning he’d told me he was going out for cigars and I hadn’t seen him since.

By now my eyes were brimming with tears, and I put the hankie to my mouth to keep check on my sobs. I was a betrayed but plucky girl doing her level best not to make a public spectacle of her distress. The boy patted my shoulder gently and shook his head in disgust at Robert’s mistreatment of me. Listen, I was
good
at this.

I regained composure and pressed on with my story. This evening the hotel room had been just too lonely to bear, I said, and so, no matter how bad it might look for me to be in such a place, I’d come down to sit in here, where at least there were other people. I just didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t bear to go back upstairs to that empty old room by myself. Oh, I just
knew
Robert was right this minute with some other woman somewhere and … oh, I was so mad! At Robert
and
at myself, for being such a silly stupid danged fool!

Miss Jenny, the boy says, if there’s anything he can do to be of help, he’d be honored to do it. His voice all of a sudden had honey in it—and his hand quit being so brotherly and slid down to my waist. I remember thinking how all galoots were the same, all of them easy as pie. I sniffled a few more times into my hankie before saying, real soft and still a little choky, “Would you be so kind as to … please just … escort me to my door?”

There was hankering in the look he gave me, but something else too. A kind of devilment. I should’ve known he was nobody’s fool—but I was too wrapped up in my big act at the moment to think about much of anything else. Anyhow, he gave me a big smile and stood up and crooked his arm to receive mine. On our way up the stairs my hip bumped the gun tied down on his leg and the both of us giggled like schoolchildren.

It wasn’t supposed to get as far as it did, but that boy was no lollygagger. I started to ask him at the door if he’d mind coming in for a minute, but only got as far as “Would you like to—” and wham-bam, he had me in the room, shutting the door with one hand and working the buttons of my dress with the other. In half a minute he had us both bare as chickens on a spit. Then we were a-tumble on that big old bed and for the next few minutes neither of us said much of anything, we were that busy.

I didn’t usually get so caught up in my work. And I’ve never been one to talk about the particulars, but I have to say this about the boy: he surely did know the female geography. Take it from me, a lot of men couldn’t find their way around on a woman’s body even if you gave them a map, a compass, and a full set of directions. But him!—he roamed over me like I was some ranch he’d growed up on. Had me frisking like a filly in spring pasture.
Me
—who’d been whoring for three years already. I was so taken up with what we were doing I was damn near as surprised as he was when Eddie Joe came through the door.

He was holding a bunch of flowers and stood there with his mouth open and his eyes big as coffee saucers, looking shocked as a man can be. Me and the kid froze on our knees. We must of been a picture, joined like we were at that moment in what is commonly called the dog fashion.