Chapter 5
“He’s going to need a bigger gun, and we’re going to need a better man!” intoned the Widow Kotzwinkle. “Look at him. Just look at him. He’s half-naked and drunk in the middle of the day!”
She closed her white-gloved hands over the back of the seat in front of her, to either side of the tall, slender Reverend Elmwood, who clucked and shook his head at Catfish distastefully. “Good Lord, Catfish! You’ve really let yourself go, man!”
He pulled his mouth corners down and wagged his craggy head.
The dandified mayor, Derwood Booth, held his right hand up, palm out. He wore prissy-looking black gloves. “Don’t judge him too harshly, good people. Besides,” the bearded man added, making a sour expression, “we’re desperate.”
“We are, we are desperate,” said the lovely Julia Claire in her haunting British accent. She turned her doe-eyed brown gaze on Catfish and beseeched, “Oh, won’t you help us, Catfish? After the demise of Marshal Wilkes and Bushwhack Aimes, Wolfwater has regressed to its old lawless ways. The way it was before you tamed it almost ten years ago!”
Feeling more than a little self-conscious, clad in only his longhandles, battered hat, and unloaded gun, Catfish scowled incredulously at his uninvited guests. He’d been called Catfish ever since he was a kid, who had, as he still did now, snuck off with his cane pole to his favorite catfish hole every chance he got. Now that he was retired, he had a whole lot more chances.
There was just something so soothing about being alone at some quiet little catfish hole—just him and his pole and chicken or frog guts for bait, and, these days, a stone jug of his home-brewed mustang grape wine. It would have been more soothing, however, if he could ever catch the biggest catfish in his current hole in the backwater pond here on Wolfwater Creek, instead of being outfoxed by the fish Bubba Jones at every turn!
Oh, well, he still caught plenty of catfish. Nothing better than a pan of the mud bulls and fried potatoes and a few—well, maybe more than a few—slugs from his jug while sitting out on his porch and watching the West Texas sun drop slowly into the prickly West Texas desert.
“Hold on, hold on,” Catfish said now, ignoring the insults fired at him by his uninvited guests. “What’s this about the ‘demise’ of Abel Wilkes and Bushwhack Aimes? Are you tellin’ me those fellas are dead?”
All four just stared at him, blank-faced.
They exchanged dubious looks before returning their gazes to Catfish once more. The mayor said, “You mean . . . you haven’t heard?”
“No, hell—er, heck, I mean,” Catfish added for the benefit of the reverend and the widow. “I haven’t heard anything.”
He felt suddenly disoriented and out of sorts. He had a queasy feeling in his guts. Part alcohol. Part shock at the news that the alcohol was making it hard for him to wrap his mind around.
He and Abel Wilkes had been friends. Best friends at one time. He and Abel had fought in the war together, and Wilkes had been his deputy. This was when Catfish, having been forced to retire from the Texas Rangers because of the precarious position of a bullet in his back, had taken the town marshal’s job in Wolfwater, back when Wolfwater had been a hellish place still attacked a few times every month by renegade Comanche. The bullet had been placed there—too close to his spine to remove without the risk of making him a cripple—by a regulator known as “Black” Taggart.
A man whom Catfish had seen neither hide nor hair of ever since.
Between Comanche attacks, Wolfwater had been overrun by border toughs of every stripe—gringos, Mexicans, and everything in between. Hide hunters as well, of course, back in those wild postwar days on the Texas frontier. Even with that bullet in his back that often caused violent spasms—sometimes for hours or days at a time—Catfish Charlie had cleaned up the town.
With the help of his old pal Abel Wilkes and Brazos McQueen, of course. Yeah, ol’ Brazos was there, too. Good ol’ Brazos. Catfish and Abel and Brazos had been the three amigos back in those wild old days—days with the bark on, for sure!
Catfish had no idea where the former old buffalo soldier was now. He hadn’t seen Brazos since . . . well, since . . .
No, don’t think about that tragedy now, too, on top of Abel Wilkes’s demise. Stay focused, Catfish!
“It happened over a week ago,” Mayor Booth said, his voice reaching through Catfish’s cluttered mind, like the words of someone speaking at the end of a long, dark tunnel. “I thought for sure you would have heard.”
Suddenly unsteady on his feet, Catfish took one stumbling step backward. He got both feet beneath him again and felt the burn of embarrassment in his bearded cheeks.
“You should come to town more often, Catfish,” Julia Claire said, a concerned expression on her nearly flawlessly beautiful china doll’s face. She had to be pushing forty, but she didn’t look a day over thirty. That was part of the mystery about her. No one knew where she’d come from before she’d arrived in Wolfwater with three steamer trunks and two carpetbags, one of which, it was said, had been stuffed to brimming with cold, hard cash.
She’d used the money, as mysterious as the lovely, obviously educated and cultivated lady herself, to buy “Beaver” Thorn’s tumbledown saloon, the Buffalo Wallow, and turn it into Miss Julia Claire’s Lone Star Outpost—a house of liquor, gambling, fine music, and the charms of her dozen or so well-trained doves.
Yeah, there were many mysteries surrounding Miss Julia Claire, none more than her seemingly ageless beauty. Some said she wasn’t human, but a ghost. Some said she was “teched,” likely by some Comanche shaman who’d been part of a band of warriors who’d attacked Miss Claire’s wagon train from back east—if such a wagon train there had been, that was. All speculation, of course. The shaman, according to the possibly entirely made-up story, had fallen in love with her and gifted her with eternal beauty.
Yeah, lots of mysteries, lots of stories.
Regarding Catfish now, she winced and shook her head. Her lustrous brown eyes, with their long, even darker brown lashes, contrasting the fine ivory of her complexion, traveled Catfish’s six-foot-four-inch body from the top of his long-haired head and tangled beard down past his fat belly stretching out his threadbare longhandle top, to his knock-kneed legs and grimy, bare feet with one swollen toe with its yellow-colored nail.
“Come to town on occasion, Catfish. You need to . . . to get away from here. You’re too isolated. Not good for a man. Stop by the Lone Star. A hot, sudsy bath and the prettiest girl in the house on me.”
“Really, Miss Claire!” intoned the widow, her craggy, fleshy face mottling red with exasperation beneath the broad brim of her red velvet picture hat. “We did not ride all the way out here to this . . . this”—the widow looked around at the pond and the fat, ragged man before her and the less than humble cabin slouched in the clearing behind her, and said, “perdition for you to further despoil this . . . this . . . catfish-fishing drunkard!”
Catfish flinched again, this time at the widow’s attack. He took another stumbling step backward, shook his head again to clarify his thoughts, and turned to the mayor. “What happened? To Abel, I mean. Who . . . who killed him?”
He felt anger rise in him at the thought of his dear friend’s demise. At the same time, he felt helpless to do anything about it. The ladies had told him that, in so many words, if he hadn’t known it already.
Still, he needed to know who . . .
“Frank Thorson,” the reverend said. “Abel and Bushwhack had his kid brother, Skinny, locked up for killing a whore.”
“Threw the poor girl out a window,” Mayor Booth added, his little, round spectacles glinting in the sunlight that was acquiring a softer edge now as the afternoon drew on.
“My God,” Julia Claire said, shaking her head. “Animals. The filth. The evil!”
“Purely, purely,” agreed Reverend Elmwood, turning his mouth corners down and shaking his head.
“Well, we all get what comes to us—don’t we?” the widow said, turning her pious, judgmental gaze to the beautiful woman sitting beside her. “That wouldn’t have happened, and we wouldn’t have felt we had to drive out here—on a wasted mission, it turns out,” she snapped in disgust at Catfish Charlie, “if, as my organization has been calling for, we’d banned the sins of drink, gambling, and—”
“All right, all right,” said Julia Claire, raising her hands to her temples. “Let’s save that conversation for the council meetings—shall we, Widow?”
“Harrumph!” said the widow, settling herself in her seat and turning her face away from them all in profound disgust, not only at her fellow townsfolk and Catfish, but at all humanity.
The mayor looked at the former lawman. “We thought we’d let you know, anyway, Catfish. Knew you’d want to know. Thought maybe . . . thought maybe . . . well . . .”
“That I had it in me to do anything about it,” Catfish finished for him wearily.
“Yes,” the reverend replied, halfheartedly, dropping his gaze to the tips of his polished brogans and opening and closing his clawlike hands around the handle of his walking stick. “Yes. Be that as it may, it’s obvious we made a mistake.”
Catfish looked away then, too, stretching his lips back from his teeth in deep shame and frustration. He’d never felt as low as he did right here, right now in his life. He used the barrel of his empty Colt to scratch the back of his head, then turned back to the four townsfolk sitting before him in the dusty black carriage. “Where’s Thorson now? He still in town?”
“No,” the mayor said, shaking his head. “He rode up into the Stalwarts. They say he has a hideout up there. He took . . .”
The mayor stopped, then tried to continue again, but before he could get any more words out, Julia Claire continued for him: “He and his bunch took Bethany Wilkes with them. After they killed her father, they took her . . .”
She didn’t bother finishing. Her pursed lips and pain-racked eyes said the rest.
The unspeakable rest.
Bethany Wilkes, Abel’s daughter. The town’s teacher.
For God’s sake . . .
“Without law,” the reverend said with a deep, fateful sigh, turning again to Catfish, “well, you can imagine what Wolfwater has become.”
“Lawless,” the widow said, flaring her nostrils. “Just lawless!” She turned her castigating glare to the mayor. “And the railroad hasn’t helped a bit. Why, the devils are flocking in droves to stomp with their tails raised high!”
Derwood Booth flinched. Of course, as a city booster and businessman himself—he owned a brickyard at the edge of Wolfwater—he was one of those responsible for bringing the iron horse to their fair city.
“All right, all right, gentlemen . . . ladies,” he said with a grim air of finality and futility, releasing the carriage’s brake and casting a grim, pitying look at Catfish once more. “I think we’ve done about all we can for Wolfwater out here. We’ll be on our way.” He reined the Morgan around, clucked to the horse, and turned to glance over his shoulder as he called back to the former town marshal, “Good day to you, Catfish. Do take care of yourself!”
He clucked louder and tossed the reins against the Morgan’s back, urging the horse into a lope back toward Catfish Charlie’s humble cabin, which slouched in the afternoon heat as much as Catfish himself slouched here on the shore of the backwater pond and the home of Bubba Jones, who’d skunked him once more.
And bit his consarned toe.
Catfish gave a deep, ragged sigh, then holstered his empty Colt.
He stooped to pick up his jug. He sloshed it around. Or tried to. There was nothing in it to slosh.
He cussed, glanced at the backwater pond once more, then began his slouching, barefoot trek back to his shack, feeling as low-down as a pig’s belly in a mud wallow.