Chasing Schrödinger’s Cat - A Steampunk Novel (15 page)

Chapter
XXXXI:

Sharpshooting
 
– A
Purdey
Side-By-Side

A
nd that is
how I became ‘Gentleman Bob
Liddel
, Gunslinger of the
Plains.’

“Why gentleman?” I asked Chisholm

“We don’t have any more western
outfits,” Chisholm said.
 
“And even if we
did, nobody would ever believe you were a cowboy.
 
We’ll get Aunt
Tsura
to whip up some dude clothes for you.
 
Get her to fix up a costume for your girl too.
 
Something Mexican I’m thinking.”

“For Sarah?
 
What’s she got to do with it?”

“You got to have an assistant,” he
said, looking at me like I was an imbecile.

Aunt
Tsura
turned out to be a toothless, stoop-shouldered crone who appeared to have
stepped from the pages of a Grimm’s Fairy Tale.
 
Her idea of taking measurements involved hitting me with a long wooden
ruler while shifting my limbs into impossible positions.
 
But she knew how to sew, I’ll give her that.
 
She came up with a kind of Bat Masterson outfit
for me, complete with frock coat, bowler hat, floppy necktie and a gold lame
vest so shiny you could use it to signal passing spaceships.

Sarah ended up as a Latina
vaquera
with a sombrero, knee-high red boots and a fringed
skirt with matching vest.

“Now what?” I asked Chisholm after
he had given his approval to our new costumes.
 
“I have no idea what we’re supposed to do next.
 
And where does Sarah fit in?
 
It only takes one person to fast draw, unless
you want us to shoot each other.”

“You don’t start with the fast
draw,” he said.
 
“That’s your peace
dee
resistance.
 
You
start by shooting glass balls with a little four-ten shotgun.
 
I got a little Remington pump-action that
should do the trick.
 
Sarah throws the
balls up and you hit ‘
em
.
 
Trick is to wait ‘til the ball is at the top
of the arc.
 
That’s where it’s slowest.”

“Hang on,” I said.
 
“You never said anything about shotguns.
 
I’ve never fired one in my life.”

“Is that a fact?” Chisholm
said.
 
Sarah cleared her throat and was
about to say something when Chisholm butted in.
 
“Well, you best start practicing,” he said.

S
o I spent
the next two days by the garbage pile shooting at miscellaneous objects Sarah
threw into the air.
 
We used whatever we
could find.
 
Old dishes, broken toys,
once even a pair of false teeth.
 
The two
things I most remember about those sessions are the smell, a mixture of
decaying refuse and burnt gunpowder and Sarah’s look of exasperation as I
missed one easy shot after another.

“You might at least have hit the Toby
Jug,” she said after one particularly egregious failure.
 
“It had big flappy ears, just like your own.”

“Think you can do better?”

“Well since you ask,” she began to
say but she was interrupted by Chisholm who had come to see how things were
going.

“Not something most people would
pay to see,” he said, after watching me miss three targets in a row.

“Maybe we should forget the shotgun
and just stick to the Colt,” I said.

“It’s like I told you, people
expect both.”

“
If
I might intrude on your weighty discussions,” Sarah said, with
the air of a woman who has finally managed to get a word in edgewise.
 
“I am an excellent markswoman with a
Purdey
side by side.”

“What’s a
Purdey
side by side?” Chisholm asked.

“It is the finest shotgun in the
world.
 
My father has a matching
pair.
 
I once hit a pheasant at two
hundred yards.
 
We measured.”

“Was the pheasant standing still or
walking?” Chisholm asked.

“It was flying,” Sarah said in a
horrified tone.
 
“One never shoots
sitting birds.”

“I know some people who aren’t so
particular,” Chisholm said.
 
“Ok, let’s
see what you can do.”

What Sarah could do was impressive.
 
She missed only one of the various objects I
threw, a bust of Stanley Baldwin she claimed to have spared on the grounds that
its subject was a friend of her father’s.

I may be the first performer in the
history of show business ever to lose top billing without first appearing on
stage.
 
Chisholm decreed we would be
known as “Bonita and Bob, the Deadeye Duo.”
 
He said his decision was based on the ladies’ first principle but I
think he was beginning to have doubts about my star qualities.
 
That made two of us.

Chapter
XXXXII:

Sarah’s
Popularity
 
– The Honeymoon Ends

I
f you are
like me, you think of appearing in public as an unpleasant duty, something to be
gotten over with as quickly as possible.
 
It was different with Sarah.

I began to realize that her earlier
incarnation as a suffragette had been nothing more than an outlet for a
suppressed streak of exhibitionism.
 
For
Sarah, the spectators’ attention and admiration were like sunlight and water to
a wildflower.
 
She would skip into the
ring blowing kisses and finish her entrance with a few steps from an Irish
jig.
 
Nobody ever asked or cared why
someone billed as Bonita Valdez would perform a Celtic folk dance.
 
The people loved her.

Some people loved her a little too
much.
 
One of her fans was a middle aged
man we took to calling ‘Prince Albert’ owing to his luxuriant sideburns.
 
He would bribe the Roma to deliver letters in
which he offered to leave his family and take Sarah to the Lake District where
they would enjoy ‘a life of bliss frolicking along primrose-bordered byways.’
 
His attentions ceased only after Sarah sent
him a reply in which she agreed to go with him on the condition that he legally
adopt her mentally-handicapped son.

Her act was deceptively simple. I
would kneel down behind two stacked bales of straw whose ostensible purpose was
to protect me from stray shots.
 
Really,
they were just there to inject a note of suspense into the act.
  
“Keeps ‘
em
guessing,” Chisholm said.
 
“Maybe one day
they’ll see you get shot.”

“Kind of like going to NASCAR to
watch the crashes,” I said.

“Where’s
Nascar
?”
Chisholm asked.

I would throw glass balls into the
air and Sarah would shoot them.
 
We would
start with one, then two at a time, then three.
 
Sarah would hold up the appropriate number of fingers to show how many
balls were in the current sequence.
 
I
wore a green celluloid eyeshade while she was shooting to keep glass fragments out
of my eyes.

When we got to five balls she would
deliberately miss one.
 
This was her cue
to turn to the crowd with an elaborate pout on her face which usually earned
her a sympathetic ‘
Awww
.’

Then she would hold up six fingers
and crouch down as though getting ready to charge up San Juan Hill.
 
I would throw six balls, two at a time and
she would hit all six in the air.
 
Then,
while the crowd was still applauding, I would start throwing balls as fast as I
could and she would shoot them down in a continuous stream “bam, bam, bam, bam
bam
” like a snare drum.
 
She would then curtsey to the crowd and exit to loud cheers and
whistles.

My part of the act was a variation
of the traditional carnival wrestling challenge.
 
The Roma would set up a wall of straw bales where
they would attach two balloons at chest height.
 
Would-be gunslingers would pay a shilling a shot to try to beat my fast
draw.
 
I and my challenger would stand
side-by-side facing the balloons.
 
We
would each draw at the sound of a whistle and try to be the first to burst our
respective balloons.
 
I never lost for
reasons you will see in a moment.

O
ur days
settled into a pleasant routine of travel, shows and excellent Romani
cooking.
 
The Roma seemed to accept us as
fellow vagabonds, and I began to recognize some of them as individuals, rather
than passing faces in a crowd.
 
There
were
Milosh
, Marko and
Stephane
,
the musicians,
Tentpeg
Tibor
who brewed wickedly-
overproof
plum brandy and Aunt
Tsura
and her wall-eyed daughter Drina.
 
Even Max the Cat seemed to feel at home.
 
True, he was unwelcome in the other
caravans.
 
The Roma dislike cats because
they lick themselves.
 
Their dislike was
of little concern to Max.
 
You could
almost see a thought balloon over his head saying “lick this.”
 
What was important to him was the abundance
of rodent life in the garbage dumps where we usually set up camp.
 
We were woken more than once by the sounds of
loud meowing outside the door of Schrödinger’s van where Max would be waiting in
triumph with the bloodied corpse of yet another unfortunate rat.
 
On Sarah’s insistence, I would take Max’s
offering and place it in a sealed container next to our food while she
scratched his ears and praised him.
 
The
next morning, when Max was sleeping, I would throw the dead rat to the top of
the garbage heap.

Those few weeks we spent with Joe
Chisholm were the closest Sarah and I ever got to a honeymoon, but even
honeymoons have to end sometime.
 
I knew
something had changed when Sarah started nagging me about trivialities.
 
Do you
really have to switch your fork from one hand to the other?
 
It is so much easier to keep one’s fork in
the left hand.
 
No, it’s not pronounced
Woorsester
sauce.
 
It’s Wooster.
 
Must you say gotten?
 
It sounds so Colonial.

Matters came to a head one evening when
we were listing to Marko strumming his guitar after the evening meal.
 
I was especially tired for some reason and hadn’t
eaten much although my lack of appetite might have had something to do with the
fact that someone had left a dead horse at the nearby landfill site while we
were away doing the show.
 
I hadn’t even
changed out of my gunslinger costume and my holster kept digging into my
side.
 
I thought about taking it off but
decided it would be too much trouble to carry it to the van.

I was almost asleep when Marko played
the opening chords of a tune I recognized.
 
I sat up and started to sing along.

As
I went out walking one morning for pleasure

As
I wandered out in Laredo one day

I
spied a young cowpoke all wrapped in white linen

All
wrapped in white linen as cold as the clay

"I
see by your outfit that you are a cowboy"

He
called to me boldly as I walked on by

"Come
sit down beside me and hear my sad story

For
I'm mortally wounded and know I must die

"
'Twas
once in the saddle I used to go riding

"
'Twas
once in the saddle I used to be gay

Then
I began drinking, and started card-playing

Now
I'm shot in the breast and I lie here today

"Let
six jolly cowboys come carry my coffin

Let
six pretty gals come to carry my pall

Throw
bunches of roses all over my gravesite

Throw
roses to deaden the clods as they fall

"Oh,
bang the drum slowly, and play the fife lowly

And
sound the dead march as you bear me along

In
heaven’s green valley just lay the earth o'er me

For
I'm a poor cowboy that knows he done wrong"

Everyone clapped when I had
finished and I was feeling pleased with myself until I noticed the smug look on
Sarah’s face.

“You realize, of course, that song
isn’t American,” she said.
 
“It is, in
fact, an English ballad titled ‘A Young Sailor Cut Down in His Prime.’”

I had just about had enough.
 
“Listen Miss High and Mighty,” I said.
 
“I don’t care if you people call it ‘The
Queen’s Farts Smell Like Roses.’
 
It’s an
American song and always has been.” I stood up and began brushing the dirt off
my pants.
 
“And just where do you get off
criticizing me anyway?
 
You’re not the
Lady of the Manor anymore.
 
You’re just a
two-bit carnie like everyone else at this dump.”

“Where are you going?” she said, as
I turned to leave.

“Going to see
TentPeg
Tibor
.
 
See if
he has any of that brandy left.”