The Last Kind Words Saloon: A Novel (6 page)

“Maybe, but even now, late as it is, I might appreciate a visit.”

“Do what?”

“A conjugal or connubial visit. If you remember what that is . . . I barely can.”

“I don’t want to talk all night, Mary.”

“I wasn’t inviting you to talk,” Mary said.

Stumped and somewhat annoyed, Goodnight rolled onto Mary’s cot and mounted her—he was surprised by her readiness to be mounted. She was not silent during the mating, either, emitting a screech at the end that must have carried far over the still prairie. Goodnight felt a little embarrassed but Mary at once went to sleep.

At the lots, on his blanket, Bose did hear something coming from the Goodnight tent.

“Miss Molly,” he said, smiling to himself.

A young cowboy named Tim heard the sound too—he was sleeping near Bose because he had heard that rattlesnakes wouldn’t come near a black man.

“Are they murdering one another?” Tim asked.

“No, and it’s none of our business,” Bose said.

Two other young cowboys, Willy and John, slept within a circle of lariat ropes because they had heard that a snake would not cross a rope.

Bose knew better. Snakes went where they wanted to go: they didn’t care about white or black and they didn’t care about ropes. He himself let snakes be—remove snakes, good and bad, the whole prairie would belong to prairie dogs and pack rats. And resident rattlesnakes rarely struck. Bose often found a snake in his saddle in the morning, and yet he had never been struck.

The moon was full that night—it was the color of a pumpkin—it was almost close enough to touch—that was just how it seemed.

Around five in the morning Bose heard the crunch of boot heels and knew Boss Goodnight was up. He was always up at five—even earlier if he had something important to do.

“I hope those carpenters get here soon—I mean my carpenters, not Lord Ernle’s. Mary’s not going to tolerate cots much longer, and I don’t blame her. I’ve got a crick in my back from sleeping on a damn cot as it is.”

“Lady like Miss Mary needs a house of her own,” Bose said.

“She ain’t a Miss,” Goodnight said. “And you can call her Molly—I can’t seem to.”

“Sometimes a lady don’t want to be a lady,” he said, mainly to himself.

“Do you care, boss?” Bose asked.

“No,” Goodnight admitted. “The damn expense of a fulltime lady would soon leave me busted.”

Bose picked up the rope and went to catch the horses, though it was barely light enough for him to throw a loop.

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21
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Goodnight was stepping off
a patch of prairie where he meant to build his principal cattle pens when he saw a familiar figure riding in from the south.

“Here comes Chief Quanah,” Bose said. “Looks like he’s found another buffalo calf for your missus.”

“I’m trying to count,” Goodnight insisted. “The less I’m interrupted the fewer mistakes I’ll make.”

“Besides,” he added, “I see Quanah everywhere. I can’t line up at a bank without he’s there ahead of me, putting in money.”

But he was polite when Quanah arrived with the calf.

“You might take that calf on to Mrs. Goodnight,” he said. “She’s in the buffalo business, thanks to you. I’m busy with the cattle business.”

“That was after you washed out as Indian fighters,” Quanah said. “All of you except Mackenzie.”

Goodnight was remembering that his wife had said more than once that she thought Quanah was probably the best-looking man in America. It didn’t mean Quanah
was
the best-looking man in America; it just meant that Mary Goodnight was prone to rash statements.

“Tell me again what happened on the Pease River,” Quanah asked. “Because of that I had to do without a mother for the rest of my life.”

“I suppose you can’t help dwelling on it,” Goodnight said. “I was a Ranger then—we hit a camp that was mostly women and children. The Comanche women were running for their lives. A cowboy was about to shoot your mother when I looked close and saw that she was blue-eyed—I yelled and nobody shot.”

“I wish you’d left her—she was happy with the People.”

“She was the most famous white captive in Texas—we couldn’t leave her,” Goodnight said. “Her family—your family too, I guess—had been looking for her for twenty years almost.”

Bose came walking over.

“Morning, chief,” Bose said. He reached to take the buffalo calf, but Quanah drew back.

“I want to give it to Miss Molly myself,” he said.

“And she ain’t Miss anything, she’s my wife,” Goodnight said.

“Everybody but you call her Molly,” Quanah said. “What have you got against the name?”

Goodnight didn’t answer. He went and saddled his horse.

“He’s hard to get along with in the morning,” Quanah observed.

“Little grouchy sometimes,” Bose admitted.

To the north, two miles, was the emerging shell of Lord Ernle’s castle. Quanah had heard about it in Washington, from Lord Ernle himself, at a big reception to announce the big international partnership. Still, he hadn’t expected it to be so big. He was skeptical of the notion of a big cattle empire, himself. Cattle were too slow to grow and couldn’t handle the severe plains winters, as had been demonstrated a few winters back when fifty million dollars’ worth of cattle froze to death on the northern plains. If anybody could make cattle work, it would probably be Goodnight, but Quanah remained skeptical.

Quanah himself was more interested in the social possibilities, as represented by the vast castle going up. He had never been in a castle before and looked forward to visiting Lord Ernle.

“I hear Lord Ernle has a fine-looking woman with him . . . know anything about her?”

“She’s tall,” Bose said. “That about all I know about her.”

“I like tall women,” Quanah said. “Most of my wives are stocky. I hear Lord Ernle is bringing greyhounds . . . I’m hoping to take Lord Ernle on a wolf hunt. Do you know when he’s expected?”

“Don’t know,” Bose said. He himself had not been in the fight on the Pease River when Quanah’s mother, Cynthia Ann Parker, had been retaken by the Rangers, but he had seen her several times around Austin and he had never seen a sadder woman. Her eyes held no life, no hope. When, one day, he heard she had died, he felt sure it must have been a relief.

“If San Saba is as tall as they say she is I might ask her to be my wife. I’ve only got three,” Quanah said.

“Three more than I’ve got,” Bose thought.

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22
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Flo had always wondered
about something but had never got up her nerve to ask about it, and that was that San Saba always wore a sock on her right foot—a thick sock that she pulled halfway up her calf. She even wore it in the bath, and she bathed every day—at least she did when the water supply permitted.

San Saba never took off her sock. Otherwise she was careless about her body.

The day they were supposed to leave for the great new ranch in Texas, San Saba noticed Flo looking at her sock. She was just stepping out of her bath. The sock, of course, was wet. The girl Flo was special to her, so without hesitation San Saba stooped and peeled off the sock.

There were red markings low on San Saba’s right ankle. Flo was disturbed, without knowing exactly what she was seeing.

“It’s a brand,” San Saba explained. “I very rarely show it.”

“Who branded you?”

“The eunuchs, when I was six.”

“I guess it hurt.”

San Saba smiled.

“It still hurts,” she said. “But now you know my darkest secret. Could you bring me another sock?”

Lord Ernle, meanwhile, was directing the departure of his large, complicated entourage, which filled a number of wagons, buggies, and other conveyances. There were his pipers, of course, and a fowler and a falconer, and a man to handle the greyhounds. There were two blacksmiths, two cooks, three Irish laundresses, and even an electrician: it was clear to Lord Ernle that electricity was the coming thing and he wanted to see to it that his Texas establishment was absolutely state-of-the-art.

“No half measures,” he muttered several times. It was his personal motto; he intended to have it latinized and put on a crest.

San Saba watched it all from her balcony: beyond the tiny town there was the vastness of the plains: colorless, gloomy, vast: the sea of grass, Lord Ernle called it.

Benny Ernle kept looking at her hopefully, at the dinner table. For years she had summoned her gaiety to enliven Benny Ernle’s meals. The food was excellent: pheasant again, and rabbit, fresh killed. She chose the rabbit, and ate in silence.

“What? Not off your feed?” Lord Ernle asked.

“We’ve a hard journey ahead of us—I would be foolish to overeat,” she said.

Her mood alarmed him—it was a change he hadn’t ordered.

“Bosh, I overeat every night,” he told her. “Where’s your smile? Your laughter?”

San Saba looked at him directly; perhaps as directly as her mother had looked at the sultan, when she refused him.

Lord Ernle made an excuse and left the table.

It would not be the end of it, San Saba knew. Lord Ernle must not be thwarted, ever. San Saba felt sure there would be punishment, just as there had been for her mother, the Rose Concubine.

DENVER

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23
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The gunfighter skit involving
Wyatt and Doc did not, at first, go well at all. For one thing the pair had not bothered to practice—both despised practice, on the whole.

“Pull a pistol out of a dern holster and shoot it—why would that require practice?” Wyatt wondered.

“Everything about show business requires practice,” Cody told him, but he didn’t press the point; these moody men would find out soon enough about the practicalities of show business.

Sure enough, on the very first draw, Wyatt yanked his gun out so vigorously that it somehow flew out of his hand and landed twenty feet in front of him with the barrel in the dirt.

Doc, meanwhile, had the opposite problem: he had jammed his pistol in its holster so tight that it wouldn’t come out. This behavior annoyed Doc so much that he ripped off the holster and threw it at a bronc, which happened to be loose in the arena.

The crowd was largely silent: this was not what they had expected; many members of the audience were eager to get on to the dramatic reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand.

Some bronc riders and a cowboy or two snickered, which did not improve Wyatt’s mood, or Doc’s—or Bill Cody’s.

“They’ve made it into a comedy routine,” he said to Frank, Annie Oakley’s husband, who happened to be nearby.

“It was not meant to be a comedy routine.”

The second night went little better. Some prop man filled Doc’s gun with blanks but forgot to do the same with Wyatt’s. Doc then shot Wyatt six times while Wyatt snapped his useless pistol six times.

The third night they finally got it right, firing a crescendo of blanks; but the crowd showed little interest. Some called for Wyatt to toss his pistol again.

By the fifth night they were getting fairly good at the fast draw, but on the sixth night Cody came in with a desperate look on his face; he told them that Harry Tammen, the magnate who owned the show and most of Colorado, had concluded that public interest was waning, and the show closed down.

“Closed it down—you mean we’re out of work?” Wyatt asked.

“You’re out of work and I’m out of everything except the clothes on my back,” Cody said.

“He’s running a sheriff’s sale tomorrow. I think he even plans to sell my horse.”

“Why the son of a bitch,” Doc said. “What if I go shoot him?”

Cody merely looked doleful.

Wyatt and Doc had developed a fondness for the old showman.

“Why Bill, that’s rotten,” Wyatt said. “What will you do?”

“Go home and quarrel with Lulu,” Cody said. “That’s my wife, who lives in Buffalo, in the state of New York.”

“As for you gunfighters, there are other shows.” Cody said. “Texas Jack might hire you, and there’s plenty of gambling dens here in Denver.”

“No, I guess we’ll amble down the road,” Wyatt said. “Jessie’s getting nosebleeds from the altitude.”

Cody gave a little wave and turned away.