Читать книгу Dawn in Damnation - Clark Casey - Страница 8

Chapter 2

Jack

I slept in the day he first arrived. Sal’s giant halfwit barback came round to fetch me at the rooming house. We called him Stumpy because his hand had gotten mangled in a threshing machine. The stump proved useful for washing out narrow glasses that Sal’s swollen knuckles couldn’t reach inside. He still had the other good hand to pull a trigger and back up Sal, but the stump was the main reason why he’d gotten the job. Stumpy could sooner explain the mysteries of the universe than tell you why he’d ended up in Damnation. Might’ve pulled the arms off a man thinking he was just a bug. For his part, he was just happy to no longer have a nickname relating to his unusual height after all those years of being called Stretch and whatnot. He was so tall he couldn’t tell when his feet were cold. As I opened my eyes, his long skinny frame was lurching over my cot. Though he measured over six and a half feet tall, he didn’t weigh any more than me at two heads shorter. Admittedly, I could’ve stood to lose a pound or ten.

“Please get up now, Mr. Thomas,” he pleaded weakly, his pointy stump nudging me like a dull cattle prod. “There’s someone real important at the Foggy Dew. Sal says you should interview him for the newspaper right away.”

It was hardly a newspaper really, just a one-page leaflet I printed in the back of the general store on an old woodblock press. Rearranging the letters was tiresome work, so I kept the news short. Strictly kept track of who came and left with a few words about what they’d done when they were alive. Called it The Crapper on account of that was where folks read it.

“Hurry up!” Stumpy hollered as I slowly roused.

“Why?” I barked back. “Ain’t like he’s gonna get any deader.”

“That ain’t it. I don’t think. Sal says the man ain’t gonna last long the way he’s boasting. You know how Mr. Finney feels about blowhards.”

“Is Jack there?” I looked at my watch.

“Nah, but Sal says you’ll need time to get his story straight before he comes.”

“Hell, it ain’t even noon yet. Jack never comes in before three.”

“The new man’s real thirsty. Drank up two pints of whiskey already. Sal don’t think he’ll make much sense if you don’t talk to him soon.”

I slid on my trousers and grabbed my cane. The dozen or so cots on the top floor of the rooming house were only half filled with soiled men, but the whole building stank to high hell of whiskey and decade-old boot sweat. It was enough to drive a man to drink ten minutes after he woke—and most did. Some nights I slept on the floor in the back of the general store just to avoid the mingling of so many bad odors under one roof.

“One of you bastards got gangrene?” I called out.

“Red probably yanked his pecker off in the night,” Fat Wally cracked. “Left it rottin’ beneath the sheets.”

Covering my mouth with a handkerchief, I hobbled to the door. Stumpy shadowed me down the steps one at a time, knowing Sal’d scold him if he came back alone.

“If I’d a known it was gonna come to this…” I grumbled. “Racing to interview some dead man before he drinks too much and gets himself sent to hell… Well, shit! I’d a stayed alive!”

“Really?” Stumpy said in his childlike way, as if it was just a simple matter of choice. “But then who’d write the paper?” he asked.

Even with a limp, it was barely a two-minute walk from the rooming house to the Foggy Dew. Damnation consisted of two long roads bisected by three short roads, making twelve blocks of rickety wood buildings. You could see the whole town from end to end in the time it took to smoke a pipe. Each structure was more lopsided and rotted out than the last. The roofs were shedding shingles like a lamb’s coat in the springtime. A narrow boardwalk lined the storefronts, but it was more of a hazard than a convenience. With all the missing and broken planks, you had a better chance of tripping and getting a splinter in your face than reaching your destination unharmed. The only use for it would be keeping folks out of the mud, and there wasn’t any rain to make mud. Nobody remained from the time of Damnation’s construction to tell why it was even there. The builders must’ve been a peculiar lot. Some reckoned they had special powers, for they somehow managed to construct the entire town without a single level surface. Every windowsill, doorjamb, and floorboard was as crooked as a dog’s hind leg.

Across from the Foggy Dew, the vampire was sitting on a rocking chair up on his balcony, looking bored as usual. He had the whole third story of the hotel to himself. It was the tallest structure in town, but didn’t offer much of a view on account of the brown dust cloud around the perimeter of Damnation. Dead men and animals came in on a single road that vanished into the dust. If you tried walking out, you just came back again from the other direction.

Most days, he sat looking down in quiet disgust. Could’ve wiped the lot of us out any time he wanted, but then it’d be just him and the wolves and the dust. The men often brought their arguments out in the road and that offered a little entertainment. There wasn’t much to do except drink, play cards, and watch the occasional gunfight. The vampire hawkeyed me, probably wondering how a cripple managed to last so long. Truth was I had a better chance than most of making it a year without getting caught up in a gunfight. I didn’t have many personal ties that’d draw me into conflict. It was my nature to watch from the sidelines and listen. And sooner or later, every sorry bastard wanted someone to tell their stories to.

Stumpy noticed the vampire glaring at me. “Don’t mind him, Mr. Thomas. He’s just jealous. Knows he could never last as long as you without tearing someone up.”

“Some folks got a taste for killing that never goes away,” I said. “No matter what’s at stake.”

“How long’s it been now?” Stumpy asked.

“About two and a half months. Kinda feel like I got a target on my back these days.”

“Ah, nobody’d shoot you, Mr. Thomas. If they did, wouldn’t be nothin’ for them to read,” he said simply. Of course, the wolves weren’t fans of my writing, but there had been a relative peace between us and them—so far.

In the Foggy Dew, the new fella was sitting at the bar drinking whiskey with a tequila chaser. Had a mess of dark curly hair like a buffalo hide and the sallow skin of a longtime drinker. A round table muscle sagged over his belt. His eyes were just bloodshot slivers between swollen lids. Most of his scarred cheeks were covered by a patchy beard, except a trail of pockmarks that crept toward his temples.

“Came through the dust an hour ago, and he’s already stinking drunk,” Sal complained. “Figured you’d wanna make a record of him before Jack shoots him. Claims to be kinda famous.”

“Kinda?”

“You’ll see.”

Rope marks wrapped the fella’s neck, and he was gasbagging about how he’d been hanged for robbing a stagecoach then killing a posse of men. Got caught near the Mexican border coming out of an outhouse. I dipped my pen in ink and started scribbling a few notes. Some folks got shot before they said anything of much interest. Left me trying to recall their name and where they came from. Others kept repeating the same nonsense over and over, so I didn’t write anything down, thinking they’d never shut up. When they got sent to hell, I forgot what they were going on about. So I found it best to collect whatever facts I could up front, then clean it up later. I ordered a beer and restricted myself to one sip for each sentence I wrote, which proved a fair incentive.

“If I didn’t have the backdoor trots from eatin’ so many dang Mexican strawberries, they never woulda got me,” the newbie chuckled loudly. He might’ve been uglier than a new-sheared sheep, but it didn’t bother him none. He was a jolly killer. “They gave me a proper Texas catwalk,” he continued. “I tell you this. The best thing about being hung is I ain’t never gotta go back to Fort Worth!” He broke into a fit of knee-slapping laughter.

“Hey, ain’t you Buddy Baker?” one of the newer boys asked him. “I hearda you. You shot Jared Nichols in Kansas City—he was fast.”

“Not fast enough.” Buddy scoffed. “I bet you didn’t know I shot more men than William Bonney. And that’s a fact!”

“I ain’t never heard that.”

“That’s ’cause there weren’t no witnesses to a mess of ’em. Damn journalist got in the way, so nobody recorded it. Ain’t my fault a man can’t hold a pistol and a pencil at the same time.”

“You boys hear that?” Stumpy said. “Buddy here shot more men than Billy the Kid!”

“Lemme get some more of that pork belly and a splash of that there bug juice,” Buddy said to Sal. “You say I don’t have to eat no more now that I’m dead?”

“Ain’t gonna die of starvation.” Sal raked his fingers over the ends of his handlebar mustache and filled Buddy’s glass. The lamplight glimmered eerily on his bald head. Sal looked more like a mortician than a bartender. “You’ll still get hungry something awful. More outta habit, I ’spose.”

“Ain’t you got nothin’ ’sides pork?” Buddy asked.

The dead animals appeared from the dust with blackened eyes and ice-cold blood in their veins. Sal cooked up the pigs for us. Indians got the chickens since they had the fewest to feed. Werewolves took the cows on account they had the biggest appetites. The vampire could eat whatever he wanted, but he wasn’t hungry for anything in Damnation—that we knew of.

The divvying up of the animals had been decided long ago by the werewolf pack leader, Argus. In wolf form, he stood as tall as a Shetland pony and was quick as a jackrabbit. Could tell him from the others by his white coat with specks of gray. Argus reckoned it was better to give us the smaller animals than to worry about us picking off any of his pack. He told Sal and the chief so. The chief was the oldest dead Indian. Kind of a grumpy fella. He wasn’t too happy about getting stuck with the chickens, but he was used to not getting his way. Some joked that the chief was at the very first Thanksgiving in Plymouth and didn’t get nothing but the gizzard. Others said he was the one who traded Manhattan away for a handful of beads, and that’s why he was so bitter. When the chief got stuck with the chickens, he told Sal and Argus that next time he’d barter with a tomahawk. Sal said there wasn’t no need to worry though—unless a whole mess of Indians came to Damnation in a hurry.

“Just pork,” Sal told Buddy. “They serve beef down the road, but I don’t expect you’d be welcome there.”

“Do I still need money here?” he asked.

“More of a formality,” Sal explained. “But an important one. I’ll run you a tab, and you can pay it when you win in cards. Eventually everybody gives their money to the blacksmith for bullets, and he’s lousy at cards so he redistributes it back a hand at a time.”

Buddy didn’t seem to mind being dead since he’d probably be doing the same thing if he was still alive: drinking, telling stories, and teasing the younger fellas. He couldn’t figure out why he ended up shy of hell.

“Thought for sure I’d done enough killin’ to earn a nonstop ticket.” he smiled. “But I don’t mind hanging out with you boys while they stoke the furnaces for me.”

He was knocking back the whiskey at a furious pace. A lot of fellas hit the bottle hard to wash away the sting of those final fears of death. Buddy might’ve been mourning something else though, some simpler life he never got a chance to live. Every rotten son of a bitch figured he’d get a chance to repent and go straight before he died. Then they ended up in Damnation, never getting the pretty wife and the house with a picket fence and a yard full of youngins.

Sal didn’t usually extend so much credit, but he couldn’t cut the man off without causing a fuss. The boys crowded around to hear how Buddy had robbed a stagecoach dressed as an Indian, then joined the posse to hunt down the thief. He could spin a good yarn, but his speech was slurring some, and the gap between fact and fantasy was getting too large for anyone to swallow.

At half past two, Jack Finney sauntered into the saloon. It was easier for him to sleep in since he didn’t bunk at the noisy stinking rooming house with everyone else. Had his own room in the hotel, just below the vampire’s. He wasn’t donning the big hat today. He wore all black except for the colorful stitching on his fancy lizard-skin boots, which he had taken off a tinhorn he shot for having an uppity look. Jack rubbed a hand over his smooth chin, wondering what to make of the new fella. For once, Sal was relieved to see Jack, figuring he’d send Buddy to hell before he ran up too big of a tab. Sal was a frugal man. Some said he’d died just to avoid further taxes.

Jack sat alone at the end of the bar eyeing up Buddy. Judging by his sourpuss, the fat man didn’t rank very high in his estimation.

“One time, I took on four men in San Antonio,” Buddy boasted. “Only had a single-shot derringer, and they was all heeled with fancy Remington six shooters. Had to reload after every dang shot!”

“Did you get ’em all, Mr. Baker?” Stumpy asked.

“I’m still standing, ain’t I? Well, I guess I’m not anymore!” he cackled. “But them boys ain’t the ones that got me. Hey, maybe they’re here. Seen any shot-up Texans with stained shorts ’round here?”

Jack stood, and the room silenced. He wasn’t the sort to put off shooting a man. On the way to the latrine, he ambled by the chubby newbie and knocked against his sipping arm. Some whiskey spilled over Buddy’s hand, but he didn’t make a big to-do of it, like most would. Barely pausing in his storytelling, he licked his knuckle so as not to waste any gut-warmer.

“What’s he, yella?” Sal whispered. “Thought he was supposed to be some kinda big-shot gunfighter.”

“Maybe gun fighting ain’t as important to him as telling tales and drinkin’ prairie dew,” Fat Wally said.

On his way out of the latrine, Jack lingered by the faro table, though he wasn’t the gambling sort. He stood beside the banker, watching the cards come out of the shoe and glancing over a punter’s shoulder toward the bar. After a short while, Buddy stood, hiked up his pants, and staggered lazily to the latrine. Jack made a beeline for the bar to intercept him in his path. Buddy was nearly twice his size but Jack hardly gave him a foot to squeeze by. As they passed each other, Jack stiffened his elbow at the last moment and bumped hard against Buddy’s gut.

“Watch where you’re going!” Jack hollered.

“I was watching just fine,” Buddy replied. “Better learn some manners, son.”

There were a few gasps of surprise around the room. Nobody would ever dare to address Jack that way. He still looked seventeen, because that’s how old he was when he died, but he’d sent hundreds of men to hell in the ten years since he’d arrived. It stuck in his craw to be called son, but he didn’t show it.

“If you’re gonna address a man like that in Damnation, I expect you’re ready to draw,” Jack said calmly.

Buddy was in his mid-forties—old by outlaw standards—and he showed his age, but he acted like a goofy kid and thought everything was a game. “Shit, boy!” He looked down at Jack. “I wanted to draw, I’d a got me some pencils instead of pistols.” He laughed good-naturedly, but Jack kept eyeballing him without so much as a blink.

“Ah, you’ll understand when you’re older, sonny.”

“Quit your jawing and pull!” Jack showed a rare flash of anger.

“All right, if you’re set on getting yourself shot, how ’bout high noon tomorrow?” Buddy suggested.

“Ain’t no such thing as noon here,” Jack said. “It’s always dusk.”

“Oh yeah?” Buddy shrugged and took a gulp of his drink. “Guess we might as well settle it now then.” He seemed more put out by the interruption of his drinking than anything else.

“How about you boys settle this outside.” Sal tried to sound stern, but he wasn’t. Jack must’ve been in the mood for some fresh air though, because he obliged him.

Buddy staggered drunkenly toward the door, knocking over a spittoon on the way. He cursed at it for jumping in front of him, but then went back to give it a heartfelt apology.

The whole saloon emptied into the road to watch, except Sneaky Jim. The greasy weasel liked to steal sips from other men’s drinks while they were in the commode. After a good gunfight, you could expect every glass in the room to be lessened by two sips, and for Jim to be lying in the corner with a bellyache.

“We ain’t seen anyone semi-famous get shot in quite some time,” Red remarked.

“I reckon the fat man won’t even clear leather.” Fat Wally waved a five-dollar bill to wager.

“Ain’t that the pot calling the kettle black,” Red said.

“All right, boys!” Sal interrupted, “I got two-to-one odds that the new man heads south without showing metal.”

“I’ll take some of that action,” I said, having a suspicion Buddy might show some gumption. “He might not win, but I reckon he’ll get sent to hell with a gun in his hand.”

The vampire was up on his balcony across the road, smoking a pipe with his feet propped up on the banister. He surely enjoyed himself a gunfight. Seemed the only time a smile crossed his pale face was when some loudmouth got a lead plumb in the gut. Looked on it like a type of vaudeville.

As the two men lined up back to back in the center of the road, Buddy’s large round body shadowed Jack’s lean figure like a carnival tent beside a stake in the ground. The heft on his hips looked like it might hinder him from lifting a sidearm, whereas Jack’s trim waist gave no such obstruction, and his arms were coiled tight as a spring.

At Sal’s signal, they each began walking in opposite directions. At the count of ten, they turned and stood for a moment. Jack locked Buddy in a cold glare. He could look at a fella like there wasn’t nothing else in the world, but at the same time he was aware of everything going on around him—always ready in case some upstart in the crowd decided to pull.

Normally, Jack’d wait till his opponent made the first move. Then he’d gun him down so it looked like it was the other fella’s idea and he was just finishing it. Only this time it was taking too long. Buddy didn’t see any reason to pull, or maybe he’d forgotten why he came out into the road to begin with. He swayed drunkenly in the wind, covering one eye with his left hand to keep from seeing double.

“Looks like your money’s as good as gone,” Sal whispered.

Finally, Jack got fed up. His right shoulder popped forward in its socket as his wiry arm collected the pistol in one swift motion. Buddy must’ve woke from his stupor at that particular moment, because he had the good sense to draw as well. And he was surprisingly fast.

They say steady is more important than fast, because then you only have to shoot once. But when you’re steady and fast, there’s no wasted motion and everything else seems to stand still. Jack’s gun slid out of its holster, and the shine of the metal brightened. He cleared leather with a whip of his wrist and leveled the barrel. Jack always looked as though he moved in slow motion because he was so calm, even though he was really moving quicker than runaway mustangs.

This time though, Jack looked even slower on account of how quick Buddy really was moving. Drunk as he was, Buddy cleared leather and squeezed off three shots before Jack could pull the trigger once. One bullet hit the ground between them, another ricocheted off a rock into a horse. The third caught Jack Finney in the face, just below his left eye. A drape of blood spread across his smooth cheeks. There was a loud braying in the distance, then the horse and Jack both dropped at once.

The crowd was stunned to silence. Then the vampire laughed from his balcony above.

“Shit!” Sal cussed. “Guess you gotta be fast when you drink too much to aim properly.”

The Chinaman came and lugged away both bodies. Jack was hardly a speck of man, all bone and muscle, and the Chinaman hauled him off by the ankles. Then he hitched the pony carcass to the back of a two-horse carriage and hauled it to the pigpen. Its heft, along with Jack’s bit of sinewy muscle, would later be appreciated as thick white stripes in the bacon. That evening, Buddy moved into Jack’s room in the hotel, just below the vampire, and Damnation had a new top gunman. The paper was a little longer than usual that week, but I suppose it was good practice so my hand wouldn’t cramp up later on when the bodies really started piling up.

The Crapper

Comings: Buddy Baker, originally of Louisville, Kentucky, was orphaned at the age of eight by a fire that took his mother, father, and baby sister. In order to keep himself alive, he took to thievery. At the age of ten, he murdered a man who tried to deprive him of his take in a pick-pocketing, which he makes no apologies for. From then, the list of crimes goes on and on, but Buddy prides himself on having stolen only what others could get along without and never killing anyone without trying real hard not to. In all, twenty-three men were sent to their graves by Buddy’s swift arm and discerning trigger finger. He does not regret a one of them neither, unless any member of the posse he gunned down included orphans, like himself, who never had anyone to teach them right from wrong. When I questioned him about his remarkable speed with a sidearm, Buddy replied, “I had to shoot real fast if I wanted to swallow another breath. Guess I was just hungrier for air than them others.”

Goings: Many will sigh with relief on hearing that Jack Finney of Topeka, Kansas, left town yesterday by the hand of Buddy Baker (his first beyond the grave and just four hours after his arrival). Jack had been the fastest gun in town for a decade. He came to Damnation at the age of seventeen, after losing his first and last earthly gunfight to a man who had called him yellow. When questioned throughout the years on his (until now) unmatchable speed, Jack always responded, “Fuck off, pencil pusher.” Since Jack only had the one gunfight before he came to Damnation, some reckoned his hankering for killing was fueled by his anger at never getting a chance to grow up or, as Red phrased it, “’cause he died with no hair on his balls.”

Before he left, Jack finally got around to shooting the preacher in the throat. The old coot had been a little too vociferous in sharing his latest vision of fiery skies, a muddy earth that sprouts weeds, and the son of the devil himself being born here to vanquish us all, after the town grows some. Though the preacher was a tiresome man, his colorful banter did help to pass the time. It’s been rumored that he hailed from New Hampshire, where he had succumbed to frostbite while being a Peeping Tom.

Oh, and some newbie got his hand taken off by the vampire, so Sal put him out of his misery with his scattergun. I didn’t get a chance to find out where he was from, but his name started with the letters F-R-E. He had the sadness.