Twenty-four
Gillom slept fitfully that night. After a first hour of turning on his feather mattress, the darkness was rent by gunfire, shots echoing up Tombstone Canyon, cowboy yips in the night and clattering hooves from up near the livery stable. A stray bullet busted one of his neighbor’s glass windows and he quickly rolled out to hit the floor. Gillom groped for his holstered pistols and pants on the floorboards.
Peering warily through his one front window, Rogers could see coal oil lamps being blown out in shacks in Chihuahua Town atop the denuded hillside across the canyon, so they wouldn’t become targets of these wild cowboys on a midweek toot. His landlady, Mrs. Blair, had forewarned him this was a regular midnight interruption; that the sideboards of these miners’ shacks were so thin that gunwise residents hit the floor when sport-shooting forays erupted. But he couldn’t spot any shooters in the dark below, so Gillom crawled back into his built-in bed with his jeans and pistols still on, ready for trouble. With a nervous shiver, nature’s sweet restorer finally overtook him and he slept well past dawn.
* * *
Walking to work, Gillom watched a water train climbing uphill, the short-legged, stout little burros each rigged with an iron frame and a ridge pole from which hung a heavy canvas sack on either side, twitched along by Mexican muleteers. Each sack held seven gallons of water from the wells up Brewery Gulch and sold for twenty-five cents, to be poured into the barrel outside the back door of every dwelling.
He paused to watch the Mexican women gathered at the narrow, polluted river in the canyon to beat their clothes clean by hand on the wet rocks. The women gossiped with their friends while smoking hand-rolled cigarillos. Naked babies splashed happily in the gurgling waters at the ladies’ bare feet. It was a soothing scene after a restless weekend, and the young man drank it in for a long moment before trudging on to his bank. Today is gonna be a warm one, he realized. Luckily it rarely hits a hundred at this high elevation, Ease said.
Lucky his boss, Mr. Pinkham, hadn’t heard about his run-in with the big gambler in the dance hall, so it was an untroubled day. Near closing time, before 3:00 P.M., Anel Romero dropped in.
“Anel! Nice to see you.”
She was wearing a shawl over her head, although it was too warm for that this late spring day, trying not to attract attention in her flashy dress, but she recognized him.
“Oh, sí, Mister bank guard.”
“It’s Gillom. Gillom Rogers.”
“Sí, Gillom. Putting mi monies safe, from last weekend.”
“Good. Are you on your way to work? Tonight?”
“Sí.” The Mexican miss looked about, unwilling to discuss her place of employment in public.
He smiled. “I’ll walk you there.”
“No necessario.”
“Bank’s just closing. I’ll get permission.”
While Miss Romero made her deposit, Gillom wheedled an okay to escort one of its good customers to work.
“Which good customer?” M. J. Cunningham looked up from his ledger and scanned the bank’s floor. “Oh. One of those dance hall girls.”
“Hey, they make good money entertaining. Miss Romero’s dollars spend just as well as anybody else’s.”
The young banker hesitated. “Don’t make a habit of escorting young dollies all over town. You were hired to attend our better customers.”
“Yes, sir. But certainly none prettier.”
* * *
Next they were strolling Main Street where workers were bricking to pave the entrance to the dirt acreage that was to become the Copper Queen Hotel, still in blueprints. With seventy-five rooms, it was intended to become the territory’s biggest and most luxurious. A knot of miners standing about the empty lot smoking and passing a bottle watched the young couple pass. They knew she wasn’t one of the town’s respectable ladies, not someone dressed that sexy in daylight. Gillom ignored the wolf whistles she was causing.
“Starting to warm up. I heard Bisbee gets more rain in the summers due to its higher elevation. An oasis above these dry valleys around here.”
“Summer rains heavy, yes. Floods.”
“Si. Muy malo.” He essayed a little Spanish to impress her.
She smiled. “Por supuesto.” (For sure.)
They were climbing the steps to a two-story brick building with a façade of plastered arches. It was at the south end of Brewery Gulch, where its posters and hanging signs could be seen by everybody. The Orpheum was Bisbee’s opera house, erected in 1897 and containing one of the biggest dance floors. Its main attractions were the traveling shows which arrived several times a month for four-day runs, sometimes held over depending upon ticket sales. Frush’s Oriental Circus from San Francisco had just been there, and the couple paused to admire its colorful posters plastered on billboards outside. Shakespeare’s plays, minstrel shows, wrestling, and boxing matches had all played to good crowds at the Orpheum.
“Anel, look. Another show coming. Wanna go?”
“I work.”
“Aww, you can get a weeknight off. Opens Thursday. I’ll buy tickets. The Raymond Teal Musical Revue from Chicago. Sounds like fun.”
“Thursday. Hokay, I try.”
“Bueno.”
They were soon at the Red Light’s front door.
“Thank you, Mister Gillom.”
Gillom’s excitement over their first date was contagious. “Drop by the bank tomorrow, Anel. Tell me you’ve got the night off, so I can buy those tickets. And tell me where you live, so I can pick you up Thursday evening. For dinner first.”
“Hokay, mister. Bank, tomorrow.”
“Swell!”
His reward was a kiss on his smiling cheek.
* * *
When he returned to his miner’s cottage that night, Gillom got his rags and wire brush and gun oil out and cleaned his Remingtons. Reholstering but not reloading, the young gunslinger retrieved poker chips from his warbag and placed one of them upon the back of his right hand, which he held out waist-high. His holster was still on, hung low on his waist with the leather tie-downs tight around his thighs. He let the chip drop. Before it hit the floor, Gillom had his revolver in his right hand, its sightless, nickel-plated barrel thrust forward, as he cocked and dry-fired the single-action .44 twice. Click-click.
Hell. Harvey Logan of Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch could supposedly cock and fire three times before his poker chip dropped. “Hafta practice,” he grunted.
And so Gillom Rogers did, right hand, left hand, both together under poker chips, cross-draws, midair exchanges, forward spins, backward, over-the-shoulder tosses, thumb-cocking and dry-firing at the end of each trick. Click-click-click. By the glowing lamplight, as the night slowed to a lonely crawl, he practiced his gunplay. Click-click. Until his arms were too tired to pull iron anymore. Click.
* * *
Anel dropped by the Bank of Bisbee next day to tell him she’d gotten Thursday night off. She would meet him at the theater instead, so he wouldn’t have to pick her up. Maybe she doesn’t want me to see where she lives? he thought.
Gillom also dropped by Sheriff White’s office to pick up his reward. “Hard Luck” Harrison’s photograph had been identified in Tombstone, so a money order worth $250 was all his now, although the sheriff wasn’t in to congratulate him on his killing.