Episode 21

Liquored Up

The space under the tent had gone silent. The drinkers stopped their hoorahing and joshing to listen to the exchange with keen interest.

“Bear can keep the place settled down,” Bratt said, jerking his head to the sullen shotgun man.

“Not so long as he sits his ass on that stool all day and night. Maybe your Bear needs some help,” Joe said, turning to lean back with his elbows atop the bar plank.

“Like I said, marshal, the Paradise is my look-in,” Bratt said, his squint narrowing, lips drawn tight over teeth that looked like kernels of dried corn.

“You can make my job harder or easier. You make this place troublesome enough and I’ll shut you down.” Joe flicked out a hand to slide the shot of whiskey away. It tumbled to the sand. He pushed off the bar and walked to the door, every eye on his back.

Out in the cool night air, Joe walked back along the boardwalk, now completed on the north side of the main drag all the way from the post office to The Double Eagle. The night was only started and looked to be a long one. The saloons, a half dozen, were full now with rowdies spilling out onto the street. A banjo playing Stephen Foster at The Patriot competed with a Mexican guitar at the Casa Blanco. The tent brothels would be just as packed later. Both enterprises were sources of fights, vandalism and deviltry. Drunken and horny cowboys, rail workers and drifters all liquored up and on the prod. He’d be walking this street until the sky turned rosy with morning light. For that he’d need coffee and he knew MacDougal would keep a pot steaming for him in the lobby of the Prairie. He’d head there and get a mug down him to hold him upright and eyes open.

Two riders cantering down the drag had to pull rein in front of The Busted Steer to avoid something laying out there in a wagon rut. One of the cowboys wheeled around to spit a stream of chaw at the shadowy shape before heading on his way. They rode away laughing.

Joe stepped down from the planks to walk out to where the humped shape lay unmoving in the dark roadway. It was a man lying prone. The stink of stale booze fought with the lemony smell of piss for supremacy. Joe put a boot sole on the man’s ribs and gave a shove.

“You alive?”

The drunk snorted like a rutting pig in response.

“Do you know you’re likely to get your head stove in by a wagon wheel laying here in the right of way?” Joe said, rocking the man once more. The only answer he received was a trumpeting fart.

“Come on, you damned souse,” Joe said, lifting the man from the street by the collar and launching him stumbling for the boardwalk.

Joe stooped to snatch up the man’s hat, a sombrero with a crushed crown. The marshal followed the drunk’s weaving gait to where the man stopped, hugging a lantern pole as though afraid he’d slide off the planet and into the cosmos. Under the light of the guttering oil lamp, Joe could see the man’s face. A broad mouth set in a shovel-flat face marked by a long vertical scar running from temple to jaw on the left side of his face. The bottom of the lobe of his left ear ended in a puckered scar. Lank black hair worn long to the collar. Most striking was the angle of the man’s eyes, a pronounced slant over cheekbones set high, giving the man the look of a Mongol khan.

“Damn.” Joe stared at him in a mix of disgust and building anger.

Coolie Taylor dropped to his knees and vomited over Joe’s boots.