Black Hat Jack (2 page)

We come to Adobe Walls after another day, late in the afternoon, and it wasn’t much. It was some adobe walls, as its name suggested, and they was falling down, and there was one dirt street, if you could call it that, a blacksmith shop and a store, and a hole of a room with broad doors that Jack said was a saloon. All of this was surrounded by wagons, stacks of hides, plank-walled outhouses, and out a piece beyond this ruined encampment was deep buffalo wallows where those critters had rolled about tossing dust onto their hides to fight the fleas, which on a buffalo, as well as their hunters, could be considerable. Some attempt had been paid to put up some high posts for fortification, making a kind of wall of them. But the builder had gotten lazy and had quit the job, so there was plenty of open spaces. It really wasn’t much protection against man nor beast.

There was a rise beyond the place, about a mile away, and there was a couple of creeks, one thick with trees of all sorts on either side of it, if you can call a West Texas tree a tree. Back where I’m from, East Texas, we call them bushes. Once Kit Carson had fought some Comanches at this place, and on the prairie near about, and got his ass handed to him, though it was called a victory by the whites and he got all kinds of commendation for it. That’s the way whites worked. You slaughtered an Indian, it was a victory. They slaughtered you, it was a massacre. In this case it was mostly Kit and his men running and the Comanche chasing.

There was horses tied, and there was some grass bundled for them, for a fee, and there was grain for a bigger fee. This was all handled by the blacksmith who looked too small to shoe a horse, but he made up for that by being skinny and having a small head.

We settled in our horses and unsaddled them, got them paid up, and Jack carrying his Sharps and me my Winchester, our pistols on us, we headed into the saloon, which was next to a store we passed. Store’s doors was wide open, and its shelves was visible and there was stuff on them, but all I remember seeing was cans of peaches. When we come inside the saloon it was near dark, or seemed that way at first after us being out in the strong sunlight, and the stink of all them buffalo hunters and skinners met us as we come in and gave us a greeting we wouldn’t never forget. Every stinking underarm, crotch, every lice-infested head with greasy hair that had gathered up buffalo blood, every un-wiped butt, burp, fart, and assorted smells that could stick the pages of a book together, was there to say howdy. I tell you, I almost swooned, and it being dark to the eyes was making it worse, because it was like some kind of rotten giant was standing over us and we couldn’t see him.

Then the cracks of light that shone through the gaps in the walls and through the windows, which had greasy oil cloth pulled down mostly over them, was clearer and seemed to grow because our eyes had gotten used to things, and we could see who was in there.

There was a bunch of men standing or sitting about in rough-built chairs, and they was festooned with pistols and knives. Rows of Sharps rifles in all calibers you could imagine was leaned up against the wall. There was a bar full of splinters from men sticking their knives into it, and it was made of planks and crates and looked as if it might tumble over with a sneeze. The place was held up with poles, and the pole in the middle looked strained and the roof, which was coated with sticks and dirt, appeared ready to tumble down on things. The center pole especially made me nervous as it was bowed a bit.

We was about six feet in when one of the men said, “Hey, now. No niggers in here.”

It was a Southern voice, and I seen him moving away from the bar then, pushing his wide-brimmed hat up a tad. He had left a Sharps rifling leaning on the ramshackle bar, but I could see he had a pistol in his belt. I had pistols too. A Colt on my left hip, and a LeMatt revolver on my right. Those LeMatts are pretty well forgotten now, but mine was given to me by a Mr. Loving, who was after my Pa a kind of mentor. It fires nine rounds, and if you thumb a little baffle on the trigger guard, another trigger can be worked, and that fires the under barrel load, which is a 4/10 round. It’s for close up work. I was also carrying my Winchester, which has a loop cock and a baffle on it, so I can fire it just by cocking it and closing the lever. It’s hard to hit anything that way, but it’ll sure cause folks to jump, and if they’re close enough you just might put a round through them. I say that because that’s how it is with most men. Me, I can hit things with it. If it sounds like I’m bragging, forgive me. But it’s true. I can shoot a shot up a gnat’s ass and knock out its teeth, make them line up like piano keys in front of the little bastard’s corpse.

That’s a bit of an exaggeration, I admit. Gnats don’t have teeth.

The man was swaggering toward me. I said, “Hello to you too, you goddamn peckerwood, shit-eating bastard.”

Well now, that caused the air to thin. The other men was silent for a moment, and then a young one laughed out loud, a fellow that was probably no more than a teenager, maybe twenty if you gave him an edge, but walked and talked like a grown man. The young one said, “He knows you, Jimmy,” and then the others laughed.

When the laughter died down Jack bowed up and went into a kind of monologue that caused him to sway, way a spreading adder snake will stand on its tail and swing its body above the grass, flaring its head to look scary. “You all know me, the one and only goddamn Black Hat Jack, called such on account of my hat is black and my name is Jack. Nat, standing right here black as the Ace of Spades, is my partner, and due to his shooting prowess in Deadwood, is also known as Deadwood Dick. Paint on the skin don’t matter. You lift a hand to him, I will kill you and skin you and pack you with buffalo shit, and kick you till you are alive and can stand. Then I will kill you again, and if I’ve got the need, I will fuck your corpse. Is that understood, you bunch of ignorant, buffalo hunting, dog-fucking, shit-sucking, dick-kissing, ass licking excuses for grown men that ain’t even dropped your balls or got hair above your peckers?”

These words hung in the air along with the stink for a while, and then the young man stepped forward, said, “Well, I think that pretty well names us, and there is plenty of buffalo shit out there, and I for one don’t want to be skinned, and the thought of Jack’s pecker in my ass is enough to frighten me off most anything. Hello, Nat. Step up to the bar and I’ll buy your black ass one.”

With that everyone laughed, including the Southerner, and he said, “Damn right. You’re a friend of Jack’s, you’re a friend of mine, and your black skin is just as white to me as any white man’s.”

“Thanks,” I said. “That is damn white of you.”

“That’s my take,” he said.

There was more laughing, and me and Jack stepped up to the bar, and a jug came out and the young man who had lightened the mood, who I could now see was dressed as dapper as if he was going to a ball somewhere, his mustache waxed and his hair greased and parted down the middle, said, “Let’s knock them back.”

His clothes looked clean and he smelled pretty enough to live in France, or some place where the light was bright, the water was pure, and the children and women didn’t ever fart.

He stuck out his hand to me, said, “Bat Masterson.”

I shook his hand.

“Glad to meet you,” I said. “I’m glad you had you a sense of humor.”

“It has served me well. Sometimes, when nothing is going my way, I tell myself jokes. It lightens the mood. Let’s have a jug, barkeep.”

The cup set in front of me looked like it had been used to dip that buffalo shit Jack was talking about, but when the whisky was poured, I lifted it to my lips. Now, you got to understand I never was a man to drink liquor or beer. I always preferred sarsaparilla, which often got me some laughs and some kidding, but considering the circumstances of where I was and who I was with, and the way things had started, I thought it best to suck me a cup and seem sociable. I did that from time to time, though I can’t say I ever built me a taste for whisky, and this horror from the jug was worse than anything I had ever put in my mouth. Only thing I could come close to thinking it reminded me of was once, when I didn’t have no place to sleep, I slipped under a porch in Abilene and was awakened by a yellow cur pissing on my face, and right into my open mouth. This wasn’t quite that tasty, but it was similar.

“What the hell is this?” Jack said, having downed a cup himself. Remember, I told you Jack wasn’t a complainer, so this should give you some idea of the rankness of this libation.

“Well,” Bat said. “They call it whisky, but it’s only a touch of that. It is boiled with snake heads and a squirt of horse piss and some twists of already chewed tobacco by men without teeth.”

“Oh, don’t tell me that.” I said. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope, he’s not,” another man said.

I turned to that fellow. He was a tall man with dark hair, a little beard and mustache. Like Bat, he was dressed pretty snappy as far as his type of clothes was concerned, but it was a snappy that had gone dusty and dirty, and he had the smell of skinned buffalo about him.

“Say he ain’t?” I said to him.

“He isn’t lying,” the man said. “I only take a snort of this when I have to, and right now, I have to. Set me up, bartender, and don’t hold the horses. To the lip and don’t get a match near it.”

A cup was poured for the man, and he pushed up between Masterson and myself, said, “By the way, I’m Billy Dixon.”

“I know of you through Jack,” I said.

Billy turned and looked at Jack. “Why, me and Jack have shared many a buffalo wallow and the fine roof of trees and sky, and we once shared a whore who was so fat you had to take survival supplies and a detailed map with you just to get around her ass.”

Billy turned to Jack. “To Fat Ass Willamena, as good a screw as a pretty girl. And I wish she was here right now.”

They drank to that, lifting their cups first in a toast, then downing the contents with one mighty gulp. Me, I didn’t drink with them, just pretended to, touching the rim of the cup to my lips and putting it down.

We was standing there in that strained light, and in comes a woman and a man, and Jack, who had taken to the far end of the bar next to Bat, leans beyond him to me, says, “That there is Mrs. Olds and her husband. She ain’t available. They run the store.”

He said this as if I was planning on asking her for a dance and a possible visit to a hay pile later. She wasn’t much to look at, thick and big-boned, and though I wouldn’t call her ugly, she was as plain as homemade soap with a wad of hair in it. My take was she could have used a bar of it on herself, with or without the hair, and not just because it was a rough living out where we was. When she come up to the bar with her husband, she said, “Give me the straight stuff, and wipe out the goddamn cup first, and not with your fingers.”

Her cup would be the cleanest thing about her. She was six feet from me, and had a smell that was whupping the hell out of that that was already nesting in the room, the one collected from all them men. It was the kind of smell that doesn’t come from a sweaty afternoon, but from years of not washing unless she was caught in a rain, and I was certain if she was, she’d run from it to shelter as fast as she could. If she had been available to me, I wouldn’t have wanted to venture what kind of stink was under them dark, dirty skirts she wore. She was about the nastiest looking and smelling thing I had ever seen, and considering some company I’d kept, that was some kind of thing to say.

Mrs. Olds downed her cup of poison, yelled out, “Oh good goddamn, that is the shit, there. God-a-mighty, piss up a rope.”

Her husband, a stout man with a hound dog face and maybe three strands of hair on his head, had quietly ordered his cup, and now he sipped at it, looked at her as if hoping she might ask for another cup and that a fresh drought of it might strangle her. She did have another, but she didn’t strangle. That was when she looked down the bar and her eyes having adjusted good, settled them on me and said, “Is that a nigger?”

“Yes, m’am, I suppose I am.” It wasn’t any use trying to fight being called that. It wasn’t worth the stirring.

“Well, how the hell are you?” she said.

“Fine,” I said. “How are you?”

“I got a twitch between my legs, and my old man here has a razor strop for a dick. Loose and floppy, but not as long. A good sized cigar laid next to it would make it look like the nub of a near used-up pencil.”

“That is more knowledge than we all need,” Bat said. “Charlie, I think your wife might be deep in her cups.”

“I ain’t had but them two,” she said.

“Here,” Charlie said. “But you drank a jug-full at the store.”

She rocked her head back like that sort of talk was revolting, said, “Well, goddamn you, trying to tell me how to drink and how much of it, and keeping up with it like you’re measuring out milk for biscuits. Mind your own dick-jerking business.”

She pulled a knife from somewhere then, a slit in her dress, I think. It wasn’t long, but in the weak light from outside it shimmered a little and made me believe it was sharp. To Charlie, she said, “I’ll cut you from ball-sack to eyeballs, you needle-peckered excuse for a grown man.”

Charlie had his right arm on the bar, and he kind of heaved his shoulder and his fist came up and hit her solid on the jaw, knocking her backwards against Jack, who caught her. The knife fell on the floor.

Charlie slipped in then and got his arms around her and hoisted her up like a sack of potatoes over his shoulder. “The lady’s sleepy,” the weight of her bowing his legs.

Normally, striking a woman wouldn’t have settled right with me, but for the first and only time in my life it seemed like a good choice had been made, and my guess was that was to her the same as a goodnight kiss.

Charlie opened the door, carried her out, and slammed it shut.

Billy said, “She cut him up a little not long ago. When she sobered up, she stitched him with a needle and gut-string, kissed him and told him what a lover he was. Next day when he was able to stand, she got drunk again, got into with him over something or another, ripping out his stitches. She told him after that if she ever acted up, just to slug her. I don’t think she meant it, but he took her at her word, I see.”

“I think someone asks something of you nicely,” Jack said, “you should be ripe for doing it.”

“I have to agree with that,” Bat said.

Several other men had leant an ear to the conversation, and they agreed that a good punch in the mouth if asked for should be delivered, be it man or woman, horse or dog. Jack backed off on the dog part. He could see the others, but a dog he wouldn’t buy into. Dogs were all right with Jack.

I don’t guess I have to mention that this was a particularly rough crowd.