The Pistoleer (9 page)

But by damn, he was some rider. I swear I thought we were going to lose that first race right up to the last twenty yards—and then Jerome eased Copperhead up by Honey Boy and crossed the finish first by a neck. He came trotting back to us over by the corrals and leaned down in the saddle to whisper to Wes, “That be close enough, cap’n?” Besides the two-hundred-dollar stake we won from McIntyre, we pulled in nearly three hundred in side bets.

Because we’d barely beat Honey Boy, but Andy Jack had beat him by three lengths in their race the month before, the odds were heavy on Andy Jack over Copperhead—just the way Wes planned. Hornpiper put up a stake of four hundred dollars against our two hundred, and we laid out about two hundred more in side bets at good odds. Then Jerome brought Copperhead home a half length ahead of Andy Jack and, by God, we were
rich.

We kept slapping each other on the back and laughing like hell as fellas kept coming over to pay us off. When you win big, everything’s funny. We’d both nearly choke to death every time one or the other of us said, “With a
minister’s
horse!”

We figured we’d go over to Towash and enjoy some of our winnings, but first we got Copperhead tended to. Wes gave a track boy two dollars to scrub and curry the horse. He wanted to be sure his daddy never suspected his own horse had been used as “an instrument of the soul’s perdition,” as Wes put it, imitating the Reverend’s tone and way with words and tickling me some more. We bought a bottle off a fella and shared it as the last few losers paid us and hurried off to bet on the next race.

One of the fellas who lost money on Andy Jack was Jim Bradley. A track buzzard named Bobby Cue—one of those jaspers who fancied himself a big-time gambler but wasn’t and never would be—introduced him to Wes when they came over to pay off. Hell, I already knew Bradley—or rather knew
of
him. He was a big black-bearded stomper who’d as soon cut your throat as tell you the time of day. With him was a hard case named Hamp Davis, a tall honker with a mustache like a squirrel tail. It was common knowledge they were both wanted for murder back in Arkansas.

They were all smiles and good buddy with Wes, paying off their bet and telling him what a damn fine horse he had. Wes stood there palavering with them like they were old pals and passing our bottle to them. When Bradley mentions a poker game they’re getting up, Wes was all ears. “It’s Judge Moore’s game,” Bradley tells him. “He asked me and Hamp here to sit down with him, but he prefers four hands. If you’re interested, I reckon he’d be proud to have you join us.”

Judge Moore was a white-whiskered old gent who loved to gamble. He lived in a big two-story house on the Towash road, near a cotton gin within sight of the track. There was a stable and a grocery just this side of the gin, then the judge’s house, and then a little farther down the road, a wooden shed where they were holding the game. Wes asked how come they weren’t playing in the judge’s house, which was bound to be more comfortable, and Bradley laughed and said the judge didn’t think it looked right for a guardian of the law to have gambling going on in his own home.

So Wes goes off with Bradley and Davis while I put our horses up in the stable. It was late in the day now, and getting colder. When I finally headed over to the shed, the sun was down and a wind had picked up and was pushing the trees around.

Bradley wasn’t lying when he said the only ones in the game would be him and Davis and Wes and the judge, but he hadn’t mentioned the bunch of his friends gathered around in front of the grocery, drinking and carrying on. It was maybe seven or eight of them, and as I passed by on my way to the shed I glanced over and saw they were all armed.

The shed was small and had a low narrow door, so you had to bend down and squeeze your way through. They were sitting on the floor and playing on an old horse blanket. Hamp Davis introduced me to the judge, and the old man nodded and went on puffing his big cigar. What with the cigar smoke and the black fumes from the two oil lamps hanging on opposite walls, the air in the little room was hazy as swamp mist and the walls were streaked with soot. It didn’t help the smell a bit that they’d all taken off their boots to be more comfortable and piled them in a corner—together with everybody’s gunbelts. I gave Wes a look, but he didn’t seem the least concerned that he was sitting unarmed among strangers and the biggest pile of money on the blanket was his.

Cards never were my game, but nobody objected to me sitting down between Hamp and the judge and just watching. For the next hour or so the steadiest sounds in the room were the card shuffles, the bets and raises and calls, the hawking and spitting, farting and coughing. Jim Bradley cussed under his breath every time he lost a hand, and he was cussing a lot.

After a while the pile of money in front of Wes was more than twice as big as it’d been at the start. The judge looked to be a little ahead and Davis had lost about half what he started with. But Bradley was taking an awful beating. His stake was down to a few dollars in silver. There was a bottle of Kentucky whiskey we’d all been sharing, but nobody’d been drinking seriously, just now and then sipping from it to warm ourselves against the cold. Now Bradley turned the bottle up and made it bubble with the long pull he took off it. Maybe it was a signal to Davis, maybe not—all I know is things turned ugly on the very next hand.

Wes raised the pot ten dollars and Davis and the judge folded, but Bradley said, “I’ll see you,” and showed Wes two pair. “Not good enough,” Wes says, and turns over three nines. Bradley cusses and smacks down his cards and takes another big drink.

Wes pulls in the pot and says, “That’s ten dollars more you owe me.”

Bradley says what the hell is he talking about, and Wes tells him he didn’t put in the ten-dollar raise he called on. Bradley says bullshit, he sure enough did, and what’s Wes trying to pull here?

While they’re arguing, the judge scoops up his money and yanks on his boots. He says, “That’s it for me, gentlemen, we really must do it again sometime”—and he goes out the door in a flash.

For a second Bradley and Wes just glared at each other—then everybody moved at the same time. Bradley whipped out a huge Bowie and took a wild cut at Wes just as Hamp Davis grabbed for the old Walker Colt on my hip. We wrestled for it, his rotten breath full in my face, and he wrenched it out of my hand and gave me elbow in the mouth, knocking me on my ass. I heard Bradley holler, “Shoot him,
shoot
him!” and saw Wes going out the door on his hands and knees as quick as a kicked cat.

“You stupid shit!” Bradley yells at Davis. “Why didn’t you shoot him?”

“Who you calling stupid, you Ozark hillbilly!” Davis yells back. “We got the bastard’s money, so what’s the need of killing him? You want more law on our ass?”

Then Bradley takes notice of me and I figure he’s for sure going to stick that Arkansas toothpick in me just so he can have the pleasure of sticking
somebody.
But Davis waves the Walker at me and says, “You! Get the hell out of here! Tell your peckerwood partner we ever see him again we’ll cut his balls off.”

“Same goes for you, dogshit,” Bradley says to me as I scrabble by them on all fours, headed for the door, expecting to get the Bowie in my ribs as I go by, but all he did was spit on me.

As soon as I cleared the door I straightened up and started running. The road was lit up nearly bright as day under a full moon and the air was cold enough to make my teeth ache. I ran about fifty yards before I thought to cut over into the trees alongside the road where the shadows were long and deep. Once I got into the dark, I leaned up against a tree to catch my breath and let my heart slow down some.

“John,” somebody whispers right behind me, and I give such a start I bump my head on a low limb. Wes puts his hand on my arm and says, “Easy.” I could barely make him out, it was so dark in among the trees.

“Christ sake, Wes,” I say, “let’s get the hell out of here.” I don’t mind saying I was scared.

“Not yet,” he says. “It’s my fault they got my money, but I ain’t about to go home barefoot and without my gun. Lend me yours.”

I told him Davis had it. “They take your money too?” he asks me, and that’s the first I realize they didn’t. I reckon they were too taken with him to think of robbing me.

Then we hear Bradley and Davis coming up the road and we hunched deeper into the shadows. They were laughing and passing the bottle back and forth. They went by within fifteen feet of us, their breath steaming in the bright moonlight. I saw my Walker in Davis’s pants, and Bradley had Wes’s gunbelt and Colt slung over his shoulder. Bradley was saying he knew a whore in Dallas who could smoke a cigar with her cunt. “I know one in New Orleans can do that too,” Davis said. “Even blows smoke rings with it.”

“Oh,
bullshit,
” Bradley says, and Davis laughs. “You’ll say any damn thing to go somebody better. That’s why you got no friends, you damned peckerwood.”

As soon as they were around the bend in the road, Wes says, “Looks like they left my boots. I’m gonna go back and see. Follow along behind them till they’re past the judge’s house, then see if you can borrow a gun from him.” Before I could argue about it, he vanished into the dark.

The lights in the judge’s house were all out, but once Bradley and Davis were on up the road, I knocked and knocked on the door until I heard the judge calling down the stairs and asking what in thunder’s going on, and then I knocked all the harder. By the time he showed up at the door with a candle in one hand and a pistol in the other, here comes Wes trotting across the yard and clumping up onto the porch in his boots.

The judge leans out the door with his candle held up high to throw more light on us and says, “Hey,
you
boys …” his face full of surprise as he recognizes us. Wes steps up and snatches the gun out of his hand just as slick as you please.

“What the
hell
…” the judge starts to bluster, and Wes says, “Excuse my bad manners, Judge, but I got an awful bad need of this hogleg right now.”

It was a big Remington .45. Wes broke it open to check the loads, then hopped off the porch and headed off up the road. Before I could follow along, the judge grabbed me by the arm and says, “Listen, son, I didn’t hand it over willingly, you just remember that if we all end up in court.” Then he slammed the door shut and blew out the light.

I ran to catch up to Wes as he moved along in the shadows of the trees. We eased by the darkened cotton gin and closed in on the lights of the grocery. We could hear Bradley’s bunch laughing and swearing before we got close enough to make them out clearly. Three of them were out in front, talking and smoking. One of them was Bradley. The others were all inside.

Wes motioned for me to follow him deeper into the woods. We made our way around the grocery in the dark and came out of the trees at the stable. There was a dim light burning inside, but when we peeked, all we saw were the animals and the sleeping stable boy. I was surprised our horses were still there. Bradley must’ve figured we had come straight here, saddled up, and hauled hindquarters. “Get them ready,” Wes said. “I’ll be up there a ways where I can keep an eye on things.”

I woke the boy up and helped him saddle the animals, then led the horses up to where Wes was standing in the shadow of a large oak, watching the grocery, about forty yards away. “Mount up,” he tells me. “If this doesn’t go right, get the hell out of here and take Copperhead with you. Be sure Daddy gets him back.”

Holding the Remington down at his side, he starts heading toward the three men in front of the grocery. They don’t notice him till he stops about halfway to them and hollers, “Bradley! You, Jim Bradley!”

I could see everything plain as day from where I sat on Rollo. Bradley looked over at him and yelled, “Who’s that?”

“Me, you Arkansas slop bucket!” Wes yells. “I want the money you stole from me! I want my gun!”

Bradley steps out into the road and says, “Well, God damn, looka here. I thought I’d seen the last of this skinny bigmouthed son of a bitch.”

“My money!” Wes hollers. “And my gun!
Now!
”

“Well, sure,” Bradley yells back, taking a few steps toward Wes. His two buddies moved up alongside of him. “So happens I got your money here in my pocket. And right here’s your gun.” He pulls a revolver out of his belt. “Come on over and get it.” The other two laugh.

“You got the sand to meet me straight up?” Wes says. “Just you and me? Or you too damn yellow?” Now he’s walking slow toward Bradley again.

Bradley says something to the other two and they laugh again, but they hold back as he starts heading toward Wes.

They were about thirty feet apart when Bradley jerked up the Colt and fired. The ball cracked into a low branch of the big oak I was next to, and the horses shied. I hunkered down in the saddle as Wes fired and Bradley jerked backward and dropped the gun. He grabbed at his belly and yelled, “Oh, Jesus shit!” and fell down.

Wes fired at the other two as he ran up to Bradley. One yelped and started limping fast back toward the grocery, hollering, “I’m hit, Jody, help me, I’m hit!” But old Jody didn’t even look at his friend as he ran past him and around the side of the store and out of sight.

The door of the grocery banged open and Hamp Davis and the others crowded out on the narrow porch, laughing and shouting and wanting to know what the hell was going on. They were four or five, all of them drunk and bumping into each other. Wes fired and one of them screamed and fell off the porch and started crying like a child. The others jammed up in the door, fighting each other to get back inside. Wes fired again and they all went tumbling in, swearing and kicking at each other.

Wes retrieved his gun and flung Bradley’s into the weeds, then went through Bradley’s pockets. Bradley was curled up on his side with his hands on his belly. I could hear him whimpering and saying something to Wes but I couldn’t make it out. Later, Hamp Davis and a couple of others who’d been in the grocery that night would claim they heard Bradley begging for his life, but
I
say they were lying their heads off. Wes Hardin wasn’t one to shoot a defenseless man, not even one who robbed him and tried to kill him twice in the same night.