Hell's Angel (3 page)

3

AT THE SAME
time but fifty miles north of the Rio Grande, the dwarf Mordecai Moon sat back in his child-sized wicker rocking chair on the porch of his big, gaudy saloon called Moon's House of a Thousand Delights and stared out at the broad, dusty street of the town that was formerly known as Chisos Springs but which the dwarf himself had renamed in his own honor—Moon's Well.

Moon had renamed the town when he'd purchased the saloon from the old trader and prospector, Chisos La Grange. La Grange had been a half-mad prospector who'd haunted the Chisos Mountains to the west for nearly thirty years. Around his precious well, which offered the only steady supply of water in a hundred square miles, a small town had gradually grown after La Grange himself had built a saloon fifty feet from the well. Suffering from multiple afflictions in his later years, La Grange later sold the land grant as well as the well and the saloon to the dwarf Mordecai Moon. Moon razed the saloon and built another, far grander affair than La Grange's humble little watering hole, and named it with the dwarf's own personal flair and unabashed aplomb.

Now La Grange's diminutive successor, Mordecai Moon, sitting on Moon's House of a Thousand Delights's broad front gallery, poked his black bowler hat off his round head and hauled a folding barlow knife from a side pocket of his black clawhammer coat. He ran the razor-edged blade along the edge of his left thumbnail and pooched out his thin, chapped lips in concentration.

With his beak-like, bulb-tipped, bright red nose, his deep-set, cobalt blue eyes ringed with sickly yellow whites, and a knobby chin fringed with colorless goat whiskers, the dwarf was considered by most to be the ugliest specimen—man or beast—to be found within all of West Texas. “And that took in account,” so the saying went, “a good many rattlesnakes and wild shoats!”

No one ever said this to Moon's face, however. At least they didn't and live to laugh about it . . .

The dwarf shaved off a narrow bit of the grime-encrusted nail, let the shaving drop to the floor of the broad wooden veranda painted lime green, then closed the knife and shoved it back down into the pocket of his frock coat, which he'd had specially made to fit his diminutive frame. Usually, the clothes of a six – or seven-year-old child would fit Mordecai Moon, but no one seemed to make frock coats for small boys, so Moon had them made by a Russian tailor in El Paso. He had three—black, burgundy, and Irish green, but he had only the one black bowler hat that he trimmed with a red feather from a hawk's tail.

The hat was actually more copper than black, owing to its age and the ground-in desert dust. Moon might have been a wealthy man, but he was far from a well-heeled one.

Mordecai Moon sat back in his chair, which he'd pulled up close enough to the gallery's front edge that he could extend his stubby, bowed, two-foot-long legs and hike his little boy's black boots atop the rail, and cross them, which was what he did. Moon was fixing to take a midmorning nap so he'd be well rested for the night's business when he spied movement on the sun-blasted, rock – and cacti-tufted desert to the north, just beyond the town.

Two riders were following the old Chihuahua Trail, which was the only trail through Moon's Well and which became the town's broad main drag and remained so for a hundred yards before it slithered off into the desert once more—a floury pale line twisting and turning and rising and falling through one watery mirage after another, all the way to the Rio Grande and beyond.

Boots clomped behind Moon, issuing from inside the saloon, the two broad front doors of which had been propped open with rocks. No common batwings for Moon's place but grand oak doors carved in the ornate Spanish style and hauled in from an old Mexican church to the west.

The clomping grew louder and stopped. In the corner of his right eye, Moon spied movement, and he raked his eyes from the two oncoming riders to see his girl, Griselda May, leaning against the door frame, her long, dark brown hair dancing in the hot, dry breeze.

The girl yawned. “Anything happening out here yet, Mordecai? I'm bored.”

Griselda pooched her lips out in a pout. Mordecai smiled, his little, dark blue eyes turning shiny and round, his thick lips stretching back from his large, tobacco-crusted teeth—teeth too large for his mouth. “You just hold on, Griselda. Things'll be hoppin' soon. George Montgomery's bull train is due through here in a couple hours, and then we'll wake the band.”

Mordecai clapped his oversized hands twice, loudly, and cackled in his eager way that appalled and horrified most folks, his eyes swelling and nearly popping out of their sockets. The dwarf repelled most people, but in Griselda May he evoked nothing but a lusty flush.

“Is this Friday, Mordecai?” she said in her lazy, Texas drawl, her brown eyes coming alive.

She'd been born to a saddle maker and part-time sheriff's deputy in Tularosa but had left home when she was only twelve, hitching her star to a trail herd heading to Kansas. While all agreed that Griselda was one of the most beautiful women within a thousand square Texas miles, the joke was that she smelled like a thirty-and-found cow waddie, though that wasn't true.

They only said that because of how she dressed—in rugged trail gear complete with matched Colts. She hadn't punched cows in several years, since she'd thrown in with Mordecai Moon. Now she was Moon's girl as well as his business partner, and while she outshone him in looks, her soul was just as rotten.

Like Mordecai Moon, Griselda May was a cold-blooded killer. They were two peas of the same pod.

“It is that, Griselda. It's Friday!” The dwarf cackled again, rubbing his hands together in eager anticipation. He loved dancing to his own four-man mariachi band comprised of Mexicans who were of the Spanish grant's original tenant families. Moon also loved to gamble, though he was terrible at it, and no one wanted to gamble with him and risk incurring his wrath and a .36-caliber bullet fired from point-blank range between their eyes.

“Ah, shucks. Now I'm really bored. Bored and anxious. I'm so hot . . . so tired of the sun, Mordecai. I want it to be
night.
” Griselda sauntered over in her undershot stockmen's boots, swinging her hips inside her skin-tight, black denims behind brush-scarred, red-stitched, black leather leggings, and cuffed the dwarf's hat off his forehead.

She planted a wet kiss his on his freckled cheek. “What do you say we go upstairs and tussle till dark?”

Griselda ran her hand up and down his short, willowy thigh clad in orange-and-black-checked broadcloth with patched knees. Moon winced and brushed her hand away.

“Oh, no, you git. Don't you go gittin' me worked up again, Griselda. I ain't as young as you. I'm liable to turn into old Frank Rose over yonder.” He chuckled at that, glancing at the saloon sitting a ways west and on the other side of the street from Moon's place.

The Rose Hotel and Saloon was far less grand than Moon's place. It was an old, mud-brick affair with two stories and a brush roof. Originally, the Mexican tenants had built it with Chisos La Grange's blessing—he'd had more business than he knew what to do with—and then abandoned it for unknown reasons. The saloon was now owned by Frank and Ruth Rose, who'd bought it from Moon. They were now his tenants, as was everyone else in the town of Moon's Well, though their dream of prospering here in Moon's Well along the old Chihuahua Trail had withered the day, nearly a year ago, Frank Rose was cut down and bedridden by a brain stroke.

“Please, now, Griselda. I'm gonna end up like Frank Rose, and you'll be feedin' me mush with a spoon, you keep workin' my tired old bones like you been,” Moon said.

“Sure couldn't tell that by this mornin',” Griselda said, sticking the tip of her tongue in the dwarf's ear. “You performed right well, Mr. Mordecai Moooon. . . .”

Moon chuckled and shuddered at the sensation of the girl's, soft, warm, wet tongue. “No . . . now, you stop or you're gonna git the old snake stirrin' in its hole!”

“I want it to stir. I like your snake, Mordecai.”

Moon cackled in delight, basking in the girl's obvious adoration and desire for him, which was so unexplainable to so many. “Look there—we got someone comin'!”

He pointed toward the riders just now swimming up out of a brassy mirage and entering the outskirts of Moon's Well. Long, tan dusters flapped out around them as their horses loped past the town's original mud shacks and stock pens and corrals constructed of brush and ocotillo stalks. They both wore Stetsons and string ties, and pistols were tied down on their thighs. Badges of some sort flashed silver whenever their flapping dusters exposed the lapels of their wool vests to the sun.

The lawmen slowed their horses and came on toward the saloon. Moon sat up straight in his chair, boots still crossed on the porch rail before him. Griselda kept her hand on his left shoulder, and he held his hand over hers, vacantly returning the affection though the dwarf's interest was mainly on the newcomers now.

“Want me to wake Manco and Loot?” Griselda asked in her lazy drawl, pitching her voice at the end of the question with vague menace.

“Nah, hell. Let 'em sleep. They're gonna need to be in top form when the bull teams pull in, watchin' the gamblin' tables and makin' sure the girls get paid.”

The lawmen trotted their horses from Moon's left, their horses' hooves clomping, their tack squawking and rattling. Tan dust, a good six inches deep in the street, puffed up around the mounts' hocks.

The men stared straight ahead from beneath their low-canted hat brims, mustache-mantled mouths moving as they conversed. They and their horses were covered beneath a golden sheen of trail dust. Drawing up to the well that sat directly in front of Moon's saloon, they swung heavily down from their saddles, giving weary grunts as though they'd ridden hard and far.

The taller man was looking at one of the two signs mounted on posts abutting the well on which Moon had written the cost for water, and he turned to the other one and said, “Dick, look at this.”

The other one slapped his hat against his leg, causing dust to puff thickly around him, and hitched his big Colt pistol high on his right hip. He came around to stare up at the sign. “What in the
hell
? Chisos never charged for water.”

“And I'll be goddamned if I'll pay for it!” said Dick.

They both snickered in disgust, shaking their heads, while the taller lawman took the bucket off the hook under the peaked, shake-shingled roof over the well that was rimmed with stones forming a wall four feet high. The well itself was about as big around as the trough of an average windmill—maybe eight feet in diameter. Chisos La Grange had dug it fifty feet deep, tapping into an aquifer that flowed out from under the Chisos Mountains to the west.

The taller lawman turned the handle on the winch, which went
sheep!-sheep!-sheep!
as the bucket dropped down into the dank, humid depths of the well that sent the refreshing smell of cool mushrooms and the iodine odor of minerals upward, and which set the taller lawman's throat to aching with thirst.

Mordecai Moon said from his perch on the porch of his gaudy saloon, in a voice soft with casual menace, “I'll say you
will
pay for it. Ten cents for a bucket, just like the sign says.”

Griselda said in her saucy way, fists on her hips, thrusting her breasts out beneath her calico blouse, “Don't matter how much you drink, neither. You winch up a bucket, you pay for a bucket.”

Both men turned to him while the taller one continued to winch the bucket into the well. Their eyes slid up and down the saloon's three stories, the whipsawed lumber painted purple while the doors and window casings and the floor of the gallery were painted lime green. The Rangers looked at Moon, and their scowls deepened.

“Who the hell are you?” asked Dick, poking a finger out at the dwarf with an expression of incredulity and revulsion. He flicked his eyes to the sprawling, gaudy saloon once more. “And what the fuck is
that
?”

“Read the sign.” Moon climbed up out of his little, toy-sized chair, muttered, “Let me handle this, darlin',” to Griselda, and then walked in his sway-shouldered, bandy-legged fashion to the top of the gallery steps. “Even Rangers can read, can't they?”

He'd been able to tell by their five-pointed silver stars that they were Texas Rangers.

Moon hiked up his pants and his cartridge belt and holstered six-shooter—an 1877 Sheriff's Model Colt Lightning with a nickel finish, ivory grips, and a four-and-a-half-inch barrel—that hung relatively well on his spindly left hip, in the cross-draw position. He dropped heavily, grunting, down the steps.

As the taller Ranger winched the bucket back up out of the well, his partner pointed out the words on the grand sign over the front gallery and read them aloud: “Moon's House of a Thousand Delights.” He offered a half smile in amazement and then looked at the little creature in a clawhammer coat and age-coppered bowler hat ambling toward him, the creature's head looking inordinately large on his otherwise childish, little, bow-legged body. His hands hung nearly to his knees.

“And you—don't tell me—you're Mr. Moon!” Dick said, chuckling. “And you think you own this here well and you can charge for water out here in the middle of nowhere where they ain't none around for a hundred miles in any direction, unless you count the Rio Grande.”

“That's about the size of it, yes,” Moon said, stopping about ten feet away from the dusty Rangers and their dusty, sweat-silvered horses. “And if you don't go ahead and pay the box for the bucket you pulled up”—he dipped his chin to indicate the wooden payment box attached to the sign flanking Dick—“I'm gonna blow you both to the Devil so fast you'll think you was swallowed up by a hell-breathin' cyclone.”