His Ragged Company Read online

  “You some kind of bloody moron,” he asked.

  Miss Garland knew two angry boys when she saw them. She peeled me back like a bit of bread and squeezed her way between us. “No reason to start fires. You want to owe me a week’s wages, Faust?”

  “Not at all, Miss Garland.”

  “Then the only time you shoot a man in my Café is when I tell you to. And you,” she said, jamming a finger against the broad fellow’s collarbone. “You do not demand to speak to me. You wait your turn. You ask permission. I grant you the opportunity.”

  “She always like this?” he asked me.

  “Lion’s a lion. You accept her how she is, or she tears you apart.”

  The people around us started to realize that there was a bit of a commotion. With beer still on his forearms, the shirtless victor snapped his chin in the air and said, “That fellow pissing you off, Miss Garland?”

  “He’s just fine, Jolly,” she said. “Isn’t that right, Englishman? Aren’t you fine.”

  He kept his lips clamped shut.

  “Permission granted,” Miss Garland said.

  “I’m just fine,” the Englishman said.

  Good. We all got to be friends. Sure, I had a gun, but the whole town loved Miss Garland, and if anything disrupted her or her fine chaos, we’d all be held accountable. The man deflated instantly. His shoulders shrunk. He took off his bowler. “I’d like to fight,” he said.

  “Well, look at you, polite as shit,” she said. She flapped her hand. “Look here, Mister—”

  “M…” The lump in his throat bounced. “Grady. Grady Cicero.”

  “Look here, Mister Cicero. While this looks like a simple amusement on the outside, this is a machine: the bets were placed well before today, and the line-up already determined. I refuse to run an enterprise that is anything but my absolute best. You are an unknown quantity, and you’ve already offended me.”

  “I have money to bet,” he said.

  “For as much as I’d like to see an Englishman lose – and would I – I can’t simply upend the day’s roster to shove you in like an afterthought.”

  He exchanged weight between his feet. “I have quite a bit of money to bet.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Please,” he said.

  She drummed her fingers on her upper arms. “I’ve made my decision.”

  The crowd began to disperse.

  You look close enough at a man, you can see the thoughts happen. They grow up fast, but unless you feed them with reason, they’re bound to be lawless little shits. I witnessed his thoughts come to life, witnessed as he gave birth to this particular son-of-a-bitch—

  With a rattle of a belt-buckle, Grady Cicero dropped his trousers right there in Miss Garland’s Café. His pants and longjohns fell to the sand. He dangled in the breeze, his fists planted on his hips.

  It only took one gasp and one surprised, “What the fuck,” before everyone – including Jolly, who cracked his knuckles – had their eyes on Cicero like he was the center of the world. A bead of sweat dripped down from underneath his bowler. He thrust his hand in the air, clutching a wad of crumpled dollars. “I have four-hundred dollars. Four-hundred-and-twenty-two dollars, to be exact, right here in my palm. A sum that, if I win, gets redistributed to the whole town. To every one of you men and women right here,” he swallowed. “Fair and square.”

  Miss Garland didn’t like it when the rules weren’t her own. Her fist tightened in a ball. “And if you lose?”

  “Then it goes all to you, Miss. To be given to the winner, or whoever else you deem fit to receive it. I just want to fight.”

  Sometimes it’s hard to not listen to a man with money in his hand. But it’s especially hard to listen to a man with that much money and his pecker flapping in the wind. Miss Garland took the money and thumbed through it. Her lips darted through a series of additions. “Dollar’s missing,” she said.

  Cicero said, “Bought some beans and a beer at the brothel this morning. Thought you wouldn’t notice.”

  “You want me to chop off your dick?”

  “No, ma’—…Miss. No, Miss Garland.”

  “You owe me a dollar,” she said. “You good for it?”

  The Englishman uncoiled like a wound-up spring. “Legal exchange?”

  “Legal exchange. You can fight.”

  “Do I get a receipt?”

  “Excuse me, boy?”

  "You run a business. You run a legitimate business, so I should get a receipt.”

  I leaned in. “Would it please you if I shot him, Miss Garland?”

  Four-hundred-and-twenty-one dollars was a lot of dollars. Miss Garland lifted her left arm and dug around inside the edge of her sleeve. From it she produced a sweat-browned handkerchief. She shook it out in front of his nose. Purple lilies had been stitched into it. She spit into it. She tucked it down into his jacket collar. “Jolly?”

  “Yes, Miss Garland?”

  “Break him,” she said.

  “My pleasure,” he said.

  So that was how I met Grady Cicero, who stumbled toward the packed dirt ring as he tugged his pants up to his waist. Nobody liked him, but they certainly liked the prospect of his money, so they cheered him on and they hoped their beloved Jolly wouldn’t last a breath against this Englishman that had come out of the nothing like a wafting bit of smoke.

  As they started to fight, I noticed a one-armed man nudge his way toward the edge of the pit. He didn’t smile. He didn’t cheer. He just watched, and I watched him. Live in Blackpeak long enough – hell, live anywhere long enough – and you recognize faces, even without names. This guy was a blind spot.

  The Englishman had brought a friend along with him.

  Cicero barely managed to rid himself of his glasses before Jolly’s fist busted the Englishman’s nose like an overripe fruit. Cicero made a sound that I could only describe as “Geckt,” while the crowd flinched as one. Cartilage popped. His knees trembled like wind-blown scaffolds, but he didn’t relent. In the next instant, he surged up, threw a flurry of hard strikes into Jolly’s abdomen, and blew the reigning champion back.

  “You know there’s word about you,” Miss Garland said to me out of the corner of her mouth, “spreading like brushfire.”

  “Just part of the job,” I said. “What kind of word?”

  Jolly threw a right hook. Cicero bobbed underneath it and punctuated the sentence Jolly had begun with a sharp jab.

  “That you did Billy Gregdon in when he was helpless.”

  “Do they want to see the hole? I’d be glad to show them the hole,” I countered. “Who’s talking that kind of lie?”

  “No one person in particular. Sparrow-talk and shadow-talk never comes from a particular source. It just drifts in like a sandstorm. You don’t hear it because you’re the one it’s about.”

  Jolly charged Cicero like a steam-engine. He scooped the Englishman up entirely off the ground, then threw him down into the dirt with an earth-shaking clatter. Jolly was quick, but Cicero proved quicker: he flicked a hand up and clapped it across Jolly’s left ear.

  “Sparrows say you blew Billy out a window,” she said.

  “He was standing next to it.”

  “Sparrows say you left Curtis Gregdon there to die something long and slow and painful.”

  The two men in the pit were starting to get dirty in the mud and the blood. Cicero preferred close, quick flurries, the kind of boxer who whittled down stone like long-running water. Jolly, however, was a shotgun: he loaded up powerful, heavy blasts, unleashed them, and left himself open.

  Cicero was on Jolly. But the bigger man had the earth at his back. He bucked a heel against Cicero’s belly and threw him off. As Cicero skidded to a halt, he scooped up a handful of sand and dashed it in Jolly’s eyes. It sprayed across everyone downwind.

  Miss Garland snapped, “No sand, you cheating shit,” as the crowd gave out a pulse of confused excitement: cheating, bad; Cicero winning, good.

  Cicero thre
w his hands in the air. “How the hell was I supposed to know? It’s not like you said there were rules.”

  “I took you for a dandy, not a coward.”

  The two men danced around one another some more, trading careful blows that ranged from sharp and precise to swinging and desperate. I had to hand it to him: Grady Cicero was surprisingly light on his feet. He looked for the right openings and poured into them like beer into a cup, letting Jolly overswing to expose tender ribs or the side of his neck.

  The only person who seemed none too pleased with the Englishman’s progress was the fellow across the way. He donned a summer linen suit with only a hint of perspiration moistening the collar. His left arm was only half there, cut off perfectly at the elbow. So precise was the edge that you could have mistaken it for being folded behind him. The jacket was tied off in a bow just beneath. In the heat, his face looked more like clay than skin. I tapped my hat toward him. He tapped his. “You know him?” I asked Miss Garland.

  “Never seen him in my life.”

  “Cicero’s pal. He’s wearing a gun.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Doesn’t everybody wear one,” I said.

  Miss Lachrimé Garland touched the thigh of her skirt, where a patchwork pocket refused to crumple under her touch. A just-in-case, I called it. A pocket special. “How presumptuous of you, Faust.”

  The fight progressed as fights do: with a hell of a lot of grunting and scuffling and two grown men scraping their boots on the ground and trying to press one another into the dirt.

  So it was a bit of a surprise to me when, at an opportune moment, Cicero turned his back away from Jolly and fidgeted with his fingers. I saw a winking bit of brass glinting in the sunlight.

  “Jolly,” I shouted.

  Cicero hauled around and threw a violent, all-or-nothing blow toward Jolly. The brass knuckles gleamed like a crown across the top of his fist. The Englishman made a show of it: a roar, a wide-open swing, the kind that could have murdered a man if it landed.

  But it didn’t.

  Jolly slipped to the side and responded in kind. The heel of his palm landed in a thunderclap against the side of Cicero’s jaw. I’d never seen a man turn into liquid before. His hands shot out one way. The rest of his body went in another direction entirely. A swath of mouth-blood cut a spattered arc across the knees of nearby spectators. The brass knuckles fell to the dirt.

  He kept his footing though. At least for a minute. Long enough to spin around toward me, grab me by the lapel, and drag me close. Bile and blood swam on his breath.

  “Help me,” he whispered against my ear.

  Suddenly, his striking English accent had entirely vanished.

  “I need you to save my life.”

  He trickled down to the ground, limp in my arms, and collapsed into the sand.

  The crowd fell silent.

  Miss Garland, limiting the width of her smile within professional courtesy, clutched tight to her purse.

  When I looked up, the one-armed man was gone.

  6

  Whoever imagined this was the place to build a town up from nothing, right here in the midst of the Texas drylands, must have been drunk. Or worse. But Blackpeak had its charms. Mayor Kallum’s dream had fizzled up and farted out, and what we had left was dirt, sweat, and sand. Blackpeak was easy to forget, and living in it, even easier to forget the rest of the world.

  Thing I’ve noticed about Blackpeak, though, is when you want something, it provides. Of course I don’t mean things – and believe-you-me, I’ve spent hours wishing – but needs. Can’t help but give you what you need. That’s the advantage of Blackpeak being the tiny hole in the bottom of this whole bucket of a world: everything drains this way. Wait long enough and your desires will just wash right by.

  So instead of going after the one-armed curiosity, I refreshed my smokes and limped to the most popular place in town other than the Crooked Cocoon Saloon: the Horseshoe Junction Inn.

  When Grady Cicero had called it a brothel, he’d taken his damn life in his hands. If its owner Aremeda De Santos had her druthers, it’d only ever be an inn, a reputable place where one could eat, rest, and just by pure coincidence, lay with a man or woman if the price happened to be met. The beds certainly were some of the best in Blackpeak long as you didn’t mind paying. As long as you didn’t mind the noises.

  From the Horseshoe’s porch I saw the sky wash itself over with orange, then red, then darkness. Candles flicked to life in the windows along the main avenue. Inside the Horseshoe, girls in rustling dresses and ceramic pearls floated by the windows, their fans fluttering, their long cigarette-holders burning bright.

  Wasn’t too long after when the night lit up with activity down the street.

  Doctor Levinworth’s door flew open. A broad beam of light spilled out. The man in linens stomped out, kicked his boots with a furious sweep in the dirt, and then started down the street.

  Right toward me. Hole in the bucket, like I said.

  “Evening,” I said as he marched up the stairs to the Horseshoe Junction Inn. This close, he carried the smell of woodsmoke and canvas-oil. A few specks of dried skin peppered his mustache. He gnawed an old bone toothpick.

  “This the whorehouse?” he rasped.

  “She won’t like it you call it that,” I said.

  “Uh-huh. This where you pay for whores?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I take it your friend wasn’t awake after the ass-beating he got tossed earlier. It was a fine scuffle while it lasted. In Mr. Cicero’s defense, Miss Garland didn’t exactly identify the standards of the rules. Name’s Elias Faust, town marshal.”

  I thrust out my right hand to him. He scrubbed his hand off on his lapel, then shook mine. “Keswick Everett.”

  "Fine night to meet you.”

  He withdrew his hand after we shook. Wiped it off again.

  “Uh-huh,” he said.

  “Where’d you all come in from?”

  That toothpick rattled around against his teeth. “Pickens County, Alabama.” When he talked, he sucked in air through the gap in his front teeth. His eyes danced past me. “Been a long two weeks’ ride, Sheriff Faust—”

  “Marshal,” I said. “Appointed.”

  “Uh-huh. Be that as it may, my bones are tired, and try as I might to have a meaningful conversation...”

  “I take it I’m not the companionship you want.” I reached down and opened the door for him. The murmur of voices and the cloying scent of sugary perfume and body odor filtered out into the world.

  With my open invitation to all the wonders of the Horseshoe Junction Inn before him, the one-armed man drifted inside. But before the carnal promises could magnetize him too greatly, Everett turned in the doorway. “Faust. Elias Faust, is it?”

  “Unless it’s easier to be something else,” I said.

  “That lass, the one that runs the fights. Miss Garland? It occurs to me it might do me a bit of good to have a talk with her, if it pleases her. Would you happen to know the right way a fellow could do that?”

  “You want to talk to Miss Garland, I can surely make sure she gets word. Keep in mind, Miss Garland ain’t much of one to do anything she doesn’t choose, so it’s no guarantee. You understand,” I said.

  The toothpick stopped clicking. He smiled, his teeth the color of cork. “Uh-huh, I do, I do. Of course, being a man of keen ambition that also happens to be working within the confines of a very finite amount of time, I’ve got no mind to be held up by a woman’s particulars. You know what they say about us Alabamians.”

  Frankly, I didn’t give a rat’s ass. “Sure don’t,” I said.

  “We get whatever we pin our mind to.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  His eyes fell. “You a gimp?” he said.

  “Leg’s in a state.”

  Then he went inside to get laid. ​Bit big for his britches, that one. He’d be out of them soon enough in the Horsehsoe, which at least gave me a little bit of time to reaso
n my way through the handful of shit these two newcomers had already tossed on my plate. In the flickering porchlight, I lit another smoke. As I put my matches back into my pocket, I remembered the folded piece of paper I’d stuffed there, marked with three fingerprints of old, browning blood.

  I unfolded it. I turned it back and forth, examined it, squinted at it, the way I did every night.

  Then I crammed it in my breast pocket and hobbled off to Doctor Levinworth’s abode, fighting off one hell of a bad mood.

  7

  When I asked a raccoon-eyed, bloody-mouthed Grady Cicero why he and Keswick Everett had wandered their way into Blackpeak, at least he didn’t lie. He was sucking on a glass of Levinworth’s gin when he said, “I stole a lot of money from him,” and shrugged his shoulders like that’s that.

  “What in the hell is the fascination with stealing people’s shit around these parts,” I asked, flicking my cigarette in an old bottle. “You know him, then, this Everett?”

  “Well enough to know that keeping myself ahead of him is probably the most intelligent choice I can make.”

  “Did you intend to steal anything from him?”

  “No,” he said. “A hearty sum of his money just happened to appear in my satchel. Please tell me you weren’t the only candidate for this position. Is he for real—” a thick finger flicked in my direction as Doctor Levinworth appeared in the doorway with a clean glass cupped in his palm. “Doc, is this the town marshal?”

  “One and only,” Levinworth said. “Evening, Elias.”

  “Well, he’s about as sharp as a bell-end,” Cicero said. “Yes, I intended it, and yes, I would do it again. And no, I have absolutely no regrets whatsoever for liberating an absolutely sinful amount of money from that human bit of foreskin.”

  Doctor Levinworth said, “Gin, Faust?”

  “If you please. He been this ornery since he came?”

  “Not so much. He was unconscious when they dragged him here.”

  “Small blessings,” I said.

  Cicero rolled his eyes behind the wire frames of his glasses. “Like you’re a real wonder to behold.”