C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN
Alphonse de Jardine steered us all into the opera house and Ralston scratched a lucifer and lit the lamp in his cramped office backstage.
“We’ll do a little planning,” Jardine said, eyeing Rusty and me. “That is, if you wish to join us. If not, we’ll bid you a pleasant evening.”
I peered at Rusty. The flame in that lamp was tossing so little light around that I could hardly make him out. “I’m in,” Rusty said.
“Likewise,” I said. “But we ain’t got much to offer. No badges, no weapons inside city limits.”
“You’ll do,” Jardine said.
I was sort of offended. I’d do? Maybe there were others who’d do better. But Jardine had an odd little smirk in his odd little face, and I quieted down.
“These contretemps happen,” he said.
“Contra what?”
“Difficulties,” Jardine said.
“Are you fellers gonna pack up and get out of here in the morning?” I asked.
“No, the show’ll go on. And we’re adding matinees Wednesday and Saturday.”
“And you’ll get your box office took away each time?”
“We’ll see,” Jardine said.
“My ma, she always said I’m slow, but now I’m feeling slower.”
“Your mother, my dear Pickens, was a genius.”
“Quit pickin’ on her!”
Jardine didn’t reply, Instead, he sprang up to Ralston’s desk and sat on it, which gave him a little height and he didn’t need to stare uphill at me.
“Is there trouble in this world?” he asked.
“I imagine.”
“Ah! You have arrived at wisdom.”
I was starting to get annoyed at this feller and just wanted to get to my room at Belle’s and think about that naked redhead in his show. Maybe I could steal her.
“There is always trouble,” the man said. He had not removed his silk stovepipe hat, and that made him seem like he was two feet taller than me. “The Grand Luxemburg Follies were born to trouble. We have played in countless towns, and never been without trouble. There is no place in this republic that has allowed the Follies to play, keep its earnings, and depart in peace. We are the most sinned-against road show in North America. The ways that the towns on the circuit show their displeasure are endless, devious, cruel, harsh, and cunning. How do you think a show like this survives, Pickens? We survive and prosper. How can that be? Every town has its Watch and Ward Society. Every town has its politicians on the take. But here we are. Have you given it any thought? This miracle of survival, eh?”
“How’m I supposed to think surrounded by naked women?” I asked. “You put me in an opera house with naked women and I cease to think. I don’t have even a pipsqueak of a thought between my ears.”
Jardine, he was smiling at me like I just rung a bell.
“Ah, that is how we all are in the presence of the divine. You have eyes for Ambrosia, and that fries your brain.”
“Who’s Ambrosia?”
“She of the auburn hair.”
“My brain got fried before she showed up, Jardine.”
He smiled benevolently. “The ways of the local enforcers are endless,” he said. “That black box containing the evening’s cash is a magnet to politicians and peace officers. It is so simple, really. They want a percent. Usually fifty. Give them half of each night’s collections, and they won’t harass us. Or, sometimes, they’ll only make a show of harassing us, for public consumption. Hand out the greenbacks and we can stage our shows. Quite ordinary, my friend.”
“But they took your whole wad,” I said.
“But they didn’t close us down.”
“I guess I ain’t following this,” I said.
“Ah, my friends, let us reconstruct how it is here. On the one hand, you have the moralists, the Watch and Ward people, led by the banker and his wife, Hubert and Delphinium Sanders. They really are a small minority in a frontier town like Doubtful, and powerless. Indeed, there’s not even a city ordinance governing anything that happens in this opera house.”
“No law that I ever did read,” I said, “but I guess Lawyer Stokes could invent one or find one under a rock somewheres.”
“Ah, yes,” said Jardine. “Now then, you have other factions in Doubtful. The politicians, the county supervisors. The mayor. Judge Rampart. Now for them, the Grand Luxemburg Follies is a fine chance to fill county coffers, as well as to line their own pockets, wouldn’t you say so?”
“Oh, they’re not all that bad, I’d say. They only do that when they know they won’t get caught. I guess that puts them above most politicians.”
“There, Pickens, your mother’s son absorbed some of her wisdom after all.”
“You insulting her again, are you?”
“No, I’m insulting you, not madame. You need a daily dose of insult. Now then, my friend. Another faction is the merchants who see the opera house as rivals. For them, any money a touring company earns is that much money taken out of their pockets. It doesn’t work that way, but they think it does. If the cowboys aren’t buying tickets to shows at the opera house, then they could buy longjohns and boots from the merchants.”
“Makes sense to me,” I said.
“I wouldn’t suppose otherwise,” Jardine said. “Now then, there’s another faction in town that profits with every show: the bartenders, the madams, the gamblers, Turk’s Livery Barn, the sporting crowd. They support the opera house. They supported you as sheriff because you kept the lid on the sporting district, but didn’t shut it down. Doubtful was safe, and they made money, eh?”
“You got her figured out,” said Rusty. “You must be talkin’ to Ralston there.”
“Even long before the show arrived. I was talking to their advance man, Pinky Pearl.”
The thought of the murdered man quieted everyone for a moment.
“Then we’ve got Ike Berg showing up, sheriff down in Medicine Bow, and we’ve got the supervisors deciding to get rid of you and your deputies, like Rusty here,” Ralston said. “And they succeeded. The one thing we know about Berg is that he’s a Puritan.”
“Ah, Ralston, you insult the Puritans!” Jardine said. “Puritans aren’t against sin, they’re against not profiting from it. The New Englanders made fortunes in the rum trade, and the slavery trade, too. No, Iceberg isn’t a Puritan, he’s worse. He’s a Messenger of Death. He’s murdered Medicine City, and now he’s out to murder Doubtful. And after he’s murdered Doubtful, he’ll get bored and find some other town to gut. When Doubtful’s so quiet that a dog crossing Main Street is the only life in sight, then Berg’ll arrest the dog, execute it for trespass, and move on.”
I guess I never did think of Iceberg as a feller like that. It gave me the chills.
“He doesn’t want money,” Ralston said. “He doesn’t want fame. He doesn’t want women. He doesn’t want wine and song and cigars. He doesn’t want anything but to murder the town where he’s the law, and then find himself another. He’s arrested boys for playing marbles. He’s arrested old ladies who light up a pipe—and there are a few. He’s arrested women for hanging their undies on a clothesline. He’s arrested county clerks. He’s arrested justices of the peace. After he’s strangled a town to death he gets bored and finds another town.”
“Holy cats,” I said. “You fellers sure got notions about Ike Berg.”
“It’s there, it’s in the record. Before Medicine City, Berg was sheriff at Red Rock, and he murdered that town too. And before that he murdered Rock Springs. And before that he strangled Dogwood. That’s all he wants. That’s all he’ll do when he gets to the next town.”
“Who’s that deputy of his?” Rusty asked.
“He’s known as the Butcher. He usually shows up a few days after Iceberg, and gets hired on,” Jardine said.
“How come you know so much?” I asked.
“He is a person of interest. He was sheriff in three towns we’ve played in.”
“You know the feller?”
“We’re well acquainted, let me say.”
That sure was a lot of stuff no one ever told me about Iceberg. I just thought he was the usual sort of lawman. He should change his name to Grim Reaper. I’d never heard of a lawman who was sort of a one-man town-killer.
“Well, that’s all news, but now tell me how you fellers are going to make money when they just take away every cent and stuff it in the bank.”
Ralston and Jardine glanced at each other, and eventually Ralston spoke.
“The first show, we find out what the city wants. If it wants to shut down the show, it does so. There’s not much we can do. The show pulls out and everyone loses. But that didn’t happen here. They went for the money. And hope to make more money if we open again. That’s important to us.”
“Beats me how to get around it,” I said.
“Oh, there are ways, Pickens. One is to pay our people as fast as the cash comes in; as fast as the box office takes in cash, it’s going out to our cast and crew and suppliers. By the time the show’s over and we’re being booked, there’s not a dime in the cashbox. But that has drawbacks. If we’re fined, we’re still liable, and the local pirates attach our wagons and goods,” Jardine said.
“So, what then?”
“We cover up. The next show will be, shall we say, fully gowned. If we’re still hauled in, we’ll be forced to take measures. And that’s as much as I can reveal to you.”
“Why have you got Rusty and me hanging around? What have we got to offer you?”
“Your presence is very valuable to us,” Ralston said. “You were, and maybe still are, the sheriff and deputy.”
“I don’t know what’s boiling in your noggins, but there’s nothing an ex-sheriff can do for you,” I said. “I can’t even carry a sidearm in Doubtful. If you’re arrested I can’t unarrest you. If you go before Judge Rampart, I can’t change what he does. I’m not on the county payroll, so get that straight.”
“Just be present and stay close. Tonight there’ll be two front-center seats for you two,” Jardine said.
This sure was beyond my fathoming, but if I got a chance to see that redhead, Ambrosia, dressed or not, I’d go for it. “Count us in,” I said, and Rusty agreed.
“Do I get to meet Ambrosia?” I asked.
“Keep your pants on,” Jardine said.
“Not if we can help it,” Rusty said.
It ended like that. Ralston turned down the wick, and we worked our way into the starlit June night. I knew what I’d be doing the next day. I’d get back on the trail of whoever stole my horse and killed him; whoever rifled my room at Belle’s; whoever held me up; whoever killed that advance man, Pinky Pearl, in front of the Last Chance Saloon. I might not be in office, but I had some sheriff work to finish up, and that’s what I’d do.
I stopped in there and found Sammy winding up the night, rinsing out some tumblers. All but one lamp had been turned down, and the saloon seemed full of gloom.
“We’re closed,” he said, his back to me.
“Yeah, so we can talk. You know anything about this new deputy of Iceberg’s?”
“I don’t even know his name.”
“He looks like the holdup man that caught me a few weeks ago.”
“You saw him well enough?”
“No, but wide and short and built like a box.”
Sammy just shook his head. “You think Iceberg’s playing two sides of the law?”
“Someone had to start up a crime wave to push me out the door.”
“I’ll ask a few questions, and get a name.”
“I think he’s called the Butcher.”
“He looks like one.”
“Critter, he died from a cut throat, a single clean cut from one side to the other. One swipe of a sharp knife. Isn’t that how butchers slaughter beeve?”
“It is.”
“If I find out he done it, I’ll cut his throat from ear to ear.”
Sammy stopped arranging his glassware. “You’re not the law anymore, Cotton.”
“That’s right, and it gives a man a little more freedom.”
Sammy smiled. “I’ll ask a few questions and let you know.”
I left there and walked to Belle’s half hoping I’d get stuck up again so I could pound the hell out of someone.
C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN
I decided to have some java at the Beanery and spend a nickel from my dwindling pile of coins. I woke up blue; life sure wasn’t getting any better. I was missing Critter like a lusty widower misses all six of his wives. I hadn’t a job and no prospects. I was mad and mystified by all the stuff going on in Doubtful.
I thought maybe I should ask Ambrosia to marry me, but she didn’t know my name yet, and I was not about to tell her because I never did like Cotton, the one my folks hung on me. Cotton Pickens was their idea of a good joke, but it didn’t seem like a joke to me. So unless I got up more courage than I could muster, I wasn’t going to turn Ambrosia into Mrs. Pickens. But I sure liked what I saw of her, and I saw a lot. Without even a sheriff salary, my chances of lassoing her weren’t very good.
So it was time for a cup of coffee. I indulge once in a while. Coffee gets my blood running and clears the cobwebs out of my mind. There’s some that say I don’t have a mind for there to be cobwebs inside of, but I pay them no never mind. I got dressed, remembering to match up the socks, like Belle always wanted me to do, so I wouldn’t have blue on one foot and white on the other. Once I tried to boil up my old white longjohns I’d worn a month with a new red shirt, and the result was pink longjohns, so I went out and burned them before I got into serious trouble around Doubtful. I don’t seem to learn fast. I got into my boots, which were down at the heels, and finally meandered into a fine June morning and made it to the Beanery, the foremost eatery in Doubtful, Wyoming. I sat down at the counter, staying two seats away from that supervisor Ziggy Camp, who I didn’t want to talk to.
I laid a nickel on the counter and Pedro Perkins filled a mug and clapped it down hard, slopping some over the counter. I never tip, and he remembers it and tries to spill a little coffee and burn me in the crotch, but I ignore it.
Camp eyed me dourly and decided to talk anyway, even though I halfway turned a shoulder against him.
“Town ain’t the same since you quit, Pickens.”
That’s what he said, and it made me mad. “I didn’t quit. You kicked my ass out of office.”
“You quit,” he said. “It’s in the minutes.”
“I didn’t quit, and stop trying to cover your behind,” I snarled. The coffee hadn’t started to improve my attitude any, but it would in a while. “If you don’t like Doubtful now, you got what you deserve.”
I sipped, burned my tongue and had to wait a while, which annoyed me as much as Camp did.
Ziggy Camp wouldn’t quit. “Ike Berg told us you quit and handed the badge to him,” he said. “We didn’t axe you. We were looking at it, with all the crime around here all of a sudden, but we were waiting to see what happened.”
I started to feel even worse. “Iceberg, he told me to fork over my badge because I was no longer sheriff of Puma County and the supervisors said for him to take over. So I done what I was ordered to do by you politicians.”
Ziggy set down his fork and stared at me. “Is that how it happened? You’re saying you didn’t resign?”
“Why would I quit? I like being sheriff here and I was doing a dandy job, too.”
“Well, that’s debatable, Pickens. The town was becoming unsafe.”
I wasn’t going to debate that fool. The only unsafe person in town was me, because someone was robbing me and killing off my family, namely Critter. So I turned my back on the idiot and nothing was said for a bit, which was just as well because other of the regulars in there, the fellers that spent half the morning nursing one five-cent cup of java, were listening.
Camp finished up his three scrambled eggs, his strips of side pork, his bowl of grits, his glass of prune juice, and his four slices of toast, and the last of his coffee. Them supervisors could afford anything and their big bellies proved it.
“Come with me,” he said.
I drank up and followed, and he took me over to the Puma courthouse and into the county clerk’s office, and dug into the supervisor’s minutes. Then he pointed, but I couldn’t read that script, where all them letters bleed into the next, and he took pity on me.
“It says here that Berg, of Medicine Bow County, said you quit and handed him your badge, and the supervisors accepted your resignation and appointed Berg to you office and agreed on a wage of seventy-five a month.”
“I got forty!”
“We had no sheriff except Berg, so we went along with him.”
“Well, ain’t that a piece of cake.”
“Yes it is, and it looks like Berg was not being square with us.”
“That’s no help to me.”
“I’ll talk to the others. I’ve been hearing a few things about Iceberg, how he slowly strangles a town to death. And how bad things happen in his towns.”
“That don’t help me any.”
“The county’s making money with Berg,” Camp said. “So it’s going to be hard to change things. But even so, things ain’t right. I’ll get back to you, Pickens.”
“I’ll starve before then.”
“Give me one day.”
“I’ll starve by this noon.”
“Then starve.” The supervisor gestured me out, so I quit the place.
It sure was a fine morning, bright and sunny, in a town where a feller snookered me out of office. I sure felt dumb. I wondered what them supervisors would do. Put me back in, when they were fixing to get rid of me anyway? Maybe they’d get rid of Iceberg, like they should if he tricked them, but hire someone else since they weren’t too happy with me.
The other possibility was that Ike Berg would scare them into keeping quiet. He was a rattler, all right. He never had a feeling, as far as I could tell. His inside was all dry and parched and dust, with no life going on in there. If that was true about his strangling every town he worked in, then his only pleasure was to bring a town down to dust and watch the stores fold and the people leave and the whole place die up because he was the man with the guns.
I sure didn’t know what would happen. I glanced over there at the sheriff’s office, on the square, and it looked real quiet. I sure wanted my job back. I guess I’d have to wait a day and find out if them three supervisors had the same idea. It was like a good shot of coffee working through my blood, just thinking about that.
I headed over to Turk’s Livery Barn to talk to Turk, who knew a lot more than he let on. People are always talking in front of hostlers like they don’t exist, and Turk always passed along things that might help me keep the peace when I wore the badge. I found him cleaning out a stall, his scoop shovel full of fresh horse apples, browning on the outside and green straight through.
“You got a minute?” I asked.
“Grab a shovel,” he said.
That’s how he was. If I was going to waste his time asking questions, then I could shovel right alongside of him. So I found an old scoop shovel and got into the stall where there were piles of apples. He had a wheelbarrow in there. So I scooped up a shovelful and another, and pretty soon we got that barrow loaded up.
“Draft horse in here,” I said.
“The show,” he said.
There was one of them big Belgians in the next stall, where Critter had lived. I hardly wanted to look there, knowing how bad I felt about Critter.
“This new deputy, the blocky one. He been around?”
Turk lifted a heavy load and dropped it into the barrow, and we began cleaning around the edges of the stall, where there was a lot of wet, stinking straw.
“He came awhile before Iceberg, and hung around here all the time, like he was memorizing who owned what.”
“He ask questions of you?”
“Hardly said a word. Kept to himself. But he’d sit on that bench out front with a stick and a knife and whittle sticks. I knew he was looking hard, but I didn’t know the what of it.”
“He interested in Critter?”
“Not as far as I could see. He was just another loafer.”
“He ask for a job?”
“Nah. He had some cash. He’d quit whittling and go over to the Beanery and eat when he felt like it.”
“Where’d he stay?”
“He’d give me two bits and sleep in the hayloft.”
“He ever say what he did?”
“Butcher. He said he was thinking of starting a butcher shop in Doubtful. I told him we could use one. I never thought he’d end up Berg’s deputy.”
“He ever start some new routine?”
“Yeah, when Berg showed up from Medicine Bow, the two sometimes ate at the Beanery. They knew each other.”
The stall was cleaned out, so I lifted the wheelbarrow and took it out to the manure pile at the back of the livery. It was getting to be a mountain back there. Turk tried to sell it for gardens, but mostly people just helped themselves, and Turk didn’t mind. He had more manure than he knew what to do with.
When I got back, Turk had moved the Belgian to the cleaned stall and we started in on Critter’s stall. I didn’t like that much. Critter sometimes chewed wood, and I could see where he’d mauled a post or two, gnawing at it. That made me feel bad.
We started loading the wheelbarrow again.
“He ever say where he was from?”
“Medicine City. He never said it to me but when Berg showed up they talked about Medicine City.”
“He ever ask questions about people here?”
“You. He wanted to know about the sheriff.”
“Like what?”
“Were you a good man? He said maybe he’d apply for work.”
That big draft horse had left mountains in there. He made Critter look like an amateur when it came to dropping apples. So we scooped up a lot of apples and straw. I always liked the smell. Horse apples and horse piss were real pleasant to be around, but city folks wouldn’t know that. When I was a boy and my ma and pa couldn’t afford to keep me in shoes, I’d walk around barefoot, and there never was anything nicer than stepping into a hot steaming pile of horse apples to warm my frozen feet.
“That time I got held up. Was he around then?”
Turk hesitated. “Cotton, I can’t squarely say for sure. I don’t want to nail that down when I’m not sure. But I think so.”
“Did anyone call him a name?”
“Luke. Berg called him Luke once, when Luke was whittling sticks, and I was harnessing up a trotter right there.”
“A butcher named Luke from Medicine City.”
“You could get his name off the county payroll,” Turk said.
“Anything else you remember about him?”
“Yeah, there was one thing that made me pretty near spit. That was when Mrs. Sanders showed up and asked him to help her.”
“With what?”
“I don’t know. Just help her.”
“What did she say?”
“She said ‘You man there. Will you help me, my good man? There’s a bit in it for you if you are the one I’ve heard about.’ Then the woman, Delphinium, dressed in purple as she often does, and the whittler on my bench, they wandered off by themselves.”
“That don’t make no sense,” I said.
“I never saw them together after that. Just that one time. They didn’t go toward the bank. They went down that alley.”
“One last one. Was this Luke the Butcher around when that stranger got stabbed in front of the Last Chance Saloon?”
“I can’t say for sure. He’d come and go,” Turk said. “Some days I wouldn’t see him at all.”
I sure couldn’t make anything of it, but maybe if I worked at it some, I’d come up with an idea. I set the shovel aside and thanked Turk, and headed for my boardinghouse. I’d have to scrape myself clean if I was going to watch Ambrosia on that stage again.